I think the main reason we are concerned existential risk is that everyone dying would be really bad.
It is easier and faster to do something about, I don't know, landslides in Peru or something, but landslides in Peru are not as bad as everyone dying. I am not sure what further justification you think is needed.
Agreed that all of these are important, and I think the rationalist/EA community is concerned about all of them (my girlfriend is a rationalist who works in biosecurity). There are a few reasons you hear more about AI than the others:
1. Fifteen years ago, almost nobody was thinking/talking about AI, and the rationalists launched a big, deliberate public relations effort to make more people think/talk about it. Other issues (like nuclear war) were already in the public consciousness and rationalists didn't need to do this. Still other issues (like biosecurity) people are deliberately trying to keep quiet about, because eg nobody wants to talk about how easy bioterrorism is where terrorists can hear them.
2. Because other people are also thinking about most of the non-AI issues, the rationalists/EAs have put more energy into AI (low hanging fruit!) and also gotten more associated with it in the public consciousness (if someone wants to do an article on global warming, they'll talk to the UN climate czar, not some EA working on global warming. If someone wants to do an article about AI, it will probably be an EA working on AI)
3. Asteroid strikes are actually fantastically unlikely in the next 100 years - we can bound the risk at about 1 in a million based on what we know about asteroids and the historical record. Total extermination via (non-deliberately-engineered) pathogen can also be sort of bounded, based on what we know of the history of pandemics. Toby Ord (researcher at Oxford who helped found EA) put a lot of work into quantifying the risk of all these things killing humanity in the next 100 years, and came up with (remember, this is the risk of them killing everyone or almost everyone, not the risk of them happening at all):
Wait, you're rating the probability of AI killing almost everyone in the next 100 years at 10% ? 100x higher than a world war and natural pandemic -- even though both of those things have demonstrably occurred in the past ?
Is there any way, mechanically, that we could make some sort of a bet about this (given that neither one of us would live for 100 years) ? Because this sounds like free money to me. 10% is such an absurdly high number that I am finding it difficult to even comprehend how someone could arrive at it.
Humanity is smarter than it ever was, and Artificial Intelligence research is more advanced than it ever was, so we don't really have cases we can compare the next 100 years to, in an "outside view" way.
It may be necessary to build an inside view; to model the situation with all its moving parts from the ground up.
Some assumptions I find easy to believe:
-even a (cheaply-running) human-level AI could easily and rapidly take over almost the entire economy, just by copying itself and cooperating with its instances. (Imagine being able to create competent workers you don't have to pay, beyond some server costs.)
-while instantiating an entire adult human is traditionally expensive, brains run pretty cheaply (a few watts). It should be possible in principle to artificially get to this efficiency. Only question is how close we are to this.
AI has only recently become economically interesting, which boosted research progress speed, and will likely boost it even further in the future.
The extinction risk in all this comes from, roughly, how hard it is to tell programs what to do.
Naively program a complex piece of traditional software, and you'll likely get some unexpected behaviors (bugs).
Naively program a complex piece of AGI software that can and will do things like take over the global economy if that happens to be what your programming is unwittingly expressing, and your bugs might end up being a bit more world-ending.
All this before even explicitly considering intelligence explosion scenarios.
Any kind of a human-level AGI is still very far in the future at this point (as opposed to non-general AI, which of course is already superhuman at narrow tasks like handwriting recognition). The ability to upload a human brain is probably even *further* in the future. I don't want to say it will "never" happen, because never is a long time, but let's just say that your great-grandkids are unlikely to see it.
Even if AGI were to somehow arise tomorrow, it couldn't "take over" the economy any more than Jeff Bezos could. The economy doesn't work that way; if the AI buys up all the money, people would just switch to bottlecaps or something (this happened in e.g. USSR, only with vodka instead of bottlecaps). If the AI outcompetes every living human at dog-walking services, dog walking would become dirt cheap, that's all.
Speaking of which, there's no way the AI could take over dog walking just by thinking about it really hard on the Internet. It would have to build some actual dog-walking drones at some point. That kind of effort takes real, physical resources, and is glacially slow (assuming that the AI is superhumanly fast, that is).
The issue is this - "kills 80% of humans currently in existence" is well below the threshold for "human extinction". Humanity's MVP has been proven to be ~70-100; even accounting for there being 200 69-person communities that barely don't make it and somehow don't contact each other, that'd require a 99.9998% kill rate.
It's hard to imagine a nuclear war scenario wherein 99.9998% of people get killed. 99.9998% of people is significantly more than the amount of people that live in cities, so you'd have to tile a good chunk of the Earth's area with mushroom clouds. That doesn't seem like something the loser would be able to do to the winner, so you'd wind up with at least one country able to rebuild.
Natural pandemics, again, have the problem of isolated areas, and the problem that some governments *will* take extreme measures (as the PRC did with Covid). 99.9998% seems rather far-fetched there as well.
Humanity is really hard to kill by accident (a second Chicxulub wouldn't even do it; I'd expect 80-90% fatalities, but not 99.9998%). The most plausible human-extinction scenarios, therefore, are those where a (by necessity, non-human) intelligence can *deliberately* slaughter everyone (being isolated won't save you from a superior force that is actively looking for you). The main candidates for a hostile non-human intelligence with superior force are gods, aliens and AI.
(Gods and aliens - and really, not much difference given the Apes or Angels argument - are definitely an existential threat if they exist. The only real counterargument there is "well, we seem to have survived the last 50 centuries without getting blasted with heavenly wrath/a Nicoll-Dyson beam, so why now?" - an argument that does *not* work for (human-built) AI since it didn't exist in the last 50 centuries.)
Hmm, 90% as the upper limit of Chicxulub is probably low. 80% is a decent lower limit, but I could see it potentially getting 99.9%. Not 99.9998%, though; artificially-illuminated hydroponics and straight-up food stockpiles would suffice to keep a few million alive.
I would argue that killing off 80% of humanity is still pretty bad, though. If I have a choice between donating my money to someone who is trying to avert a). the 80% fatal threat whose probability is 1/1000, and b). the 100% fatal threat that is 1e-36 probable, I choose (a).
There are places on earth that are very unlikely to get nuked in an all-out nuclear war, like Africa. Many of these places also have populations used to subsistence living, which is a useful skill if global trading falls apart.
To tack onto this and address the "AI" part, I think people view AI as the main existential risk we're facing in the nearish future (very much including this century in 'ish')? That even things like climate change probably aren't "everyone dies" level, so the focus is on what people view as the most likely. Other people might have other reasons for focus on AI though.
Obviously, existential risk is a big problem that everyone should be concerned about, but you can't be concerned about everything at all times. The human brain is just too small. You've got the Singularity, gamma-ray bursts, the Rapture, asteroid collisions, bioengineered deadly pandemic, alien invasion, Ragnarok, vacuum collapse, Cthulhu, global thermonuclear war, and those are just off the top of my head. The possibilities are nearly infinite, and if you try to even enumerate all of them, you'll go mad (even before you get to Cthulhu).
So, I think it makes more sense to focus on problems that a). have a relatively high probability of happening, and b). are something we could conceivably do something about. You can still be concerned about all the other stuff, just in proportion to a*b.
So, this means that asteroids impact are in, the Singularity and Cthulhu are out, for the time being; sadly, so are vacuum collapse and gamma-ray bursts.
In addition, there are threats that are much weaker than "everyone dies"; global thermonuclear war is one such, because humans will likely survive it. From the Rationalist point of view, this might even be preferable to the Singularity; however, I'd personally prefer to live in a world where the survivors do not, in fact, envy the dead. This is one of many reasons why I find the Rationalist fixation on one specific (and rather nebulous) threat somewhat counterproductive.
Nuclear war poses essentially zero risk of causing human extinction. We've been through this many times before on SSC; I don't have the bandwidth for a repeat performance on ACX right now.
I don't think 2050 is "far into the future" any more than 1990 is "far into the past". I expect to be alive in 30 years, so it's a fairly pressing concern, especially if the solutions have long lead times. We're constantly told to worry about climate change, which comes down to maybe 2-4% of GDP in 2100—compared to that, AI seems like a much more significant risk.
The cynical answer is that it could be the same human-nature reason the greenies are most worried about ecological collapse -- because it's their favorite form of doom pr0n, the one where they come out the best. If global warming goes nuts by 2050 and Miami is under water and the death penalty applies for burning gasoline in a car, then the people who have been driving Prii all along, have minimized their carbon footprint to a postage stamp, practiced raising chickens and vegetables in their square-foot back garden are (1) going to do better than average, and (2) be considered prophetically wise by everyone else. Nice!
Similarly if GPT-4 turns into Skynet in 2035 it will be community of Sheldon Coopers, so to speak, who do best and also to whom everyone else turns for advice and leadership.
It's kind of broadly human nature: the alt-space enthusiasts worry most about asteroid impacts, the epidemiologists think a new infectious disease will most likely do us in, the neo-conservatives are sure it will be when terrorists get The Bomb, the people who like finance and trading think it will be hyperinflation, and so on.
"As he fell, Caesar cried out in Greek to Brutus, ‘You too, child’, which was either a threat (‘I’ll get you, boy!’) or a poignant regret for the disloyalty of a young friend (‘You too, my child?’), or even, as some suspicious contemporaries imagined, a final revelation that Brutus was, in fact, his victim’s natural son and that this was not merely assassination but patricide."
The first interpretation is pretty close to the Tumblr meaning, although I prefer "see you in hell, punk".
Apparently so, because Caesar was only in his teens when Brutus was born, but he did have a long-standing affair with Servilia, Brutus' mother.
"Caesar had numerous affairs with women married and unmarried, but none lasted as long, nor were they as passionate as his affair with Servilia. Their affair is speculated to have begun circa 70 BC, after the execution of her first husband, M. Junius Brutus, and continued until the death of Caesar. The affair was well known, and Servilia suffered no damage to her reputation because of this relationship, in fact it likely improved.
A popular rumor during their affair was that Servilia was prostituting her daughter to Caesar or that Tertia was Caesar's own illegitimate child. At an estate auction where Caesar received several properties at a low rate to give to Servilia, Cicero remarked, "It's a better bargain than you think, for there is a third (tertia) off," alluding to the rumours regarding Tertia. A similar rumour held that Servilia's son, Marcus Junius Brutus, was Caesar's son, but this is unlikely on chronological grounds, as Caesar was only fifteen years old when Brutus was born.
In 63 BC, Servilia contributed to a scandalous incident during a debate in the senate over the fate of those who had conspired with Catiline. Caesar and Cato, Servilia's half-brother, were on opposing sides in the debate, and when someone handed Caesar a letter, Cato accused him of corresponding with the conspirators, and demanded it be read aloud. The missive proved to be a love letter from Servilia. Cato was greatly displeased to find out about Caesar's correspondence with his half-sister."
+1. Can confirm. Having read curses in Greek and Latin and written a senior thesis on a particularly odd one, kai su, teknon is very similar to "damn you, kid," which could carry the emotions of exasperation, righteous fury, pained anger at betrayal, or a literal wish that he be damned.
Re. "Baltimore suspended prosecutions of minor crimes to prevent people from being in jail during the pandemic, and major crimes dropped": Maybe because there were more cops not busy prosecuting minor crimes.
The problem with using Baltimore as a 2020 success story is that it had an astronomically high homicide rate in 2019. 2nd worst major city in the U.S., 11th worst in the world:
Baltimore is also unusual in that unlike many American cities, its homicide rate was higher in 2019 than in the 1990s. This chart is a couple years old, but the 2019 number is even higher close to 60 per 100,000 residents.
In other words, you can make an argument that Baltimore was already a land where people freely murder, and things really couldn't get much worse. Admittedly, St. Louis (the worst American homicide city in 2019) managed to see its homicide rate rise further in 2020. But I think the point stands, Baltimore just didn't have as far to fall.
I would add that homicides (the most accurately tabulated crime) only fell by 3.7% in 2020. "World's 11th most violent city sees 3.7% murder drop, how can we emulate its success nationally" is . . . not compelling.
I don't think this proves that this is a good idea. I do think it shows that the sky isn't going to fall if minor offenses aren't aggressively policed. There is at least room for more trials of similar schemes.
The US criminal justice system isn't working well overall. Running some experiments seems like a good idea.
Minor offences were never "aggressively policed" in Baltimore, or any other major US city, to begin with. A tiny fraction of crimes ever resulted in being caught, an even tinier fraction in a conviction, and a tiny fraction of convictions in a significant punishment. So perhaps the experiment tells us that the difference between _pretending_ to punish minor offences while not really doing anything about it, and not even pretending, doesn't increase the murder rate.
If we're going to run experiments, why not run the opposite: punish all crimes severely, with a 20-year minimum sentence for everything. You'd probably need to imprison 10%+ of the population of Baltimore, but I bet that life for the remaining 90% would be a lot safer and more pleasant.
New York City tried aggressively to keep criminals from carrying concealed weapons in the Giuliani-Bloomberg era.
It worked. Shootings dropped strikingly relative to other big cities.
But during last year's racial reckoning, the number of people struck by bullets in NYC doubled.
Enforcing gun control laws works. But, both in NYC and the rest of the country, we cut way back on enforcing laws against illegal concealed weapons after May 25. For the rest of 2020, gun murders were 41% higher than over the same period in 2019.
I'm starting to think a major source of political polarization is the combination of the politicization of science and the replication crisis.
There was a huge widespread crime wave leading into the Giuliani era. Lots of theories about why, but one of the leading ones is leaded gasoline. Lead poisoned kids born in the ~60s so that by the 80s they were young adults with violent tendencies. Then leaded gasoline got banned and crime went back down.
It's reasonable to expect New York to have had the worst of it. Highest population US city, highest population density, more affluent so more people who could afford cars etc.
When it happened, people tried everything. Gun control, "broken window" policing, crackdowns on organized crime, CompStat, hiring more police officers, etc. Then when crime went down, everybody claimed the cause was their pet proposal, even though they were all implemented at once and totally confounded.
And if the cause was really lead then it wasn't any of them. (One of the stronger arguments for this is that we didn't have any of these new anti-crime policies before the crime wave, so their lack can't reasonably be what originally caused it.)
Likewise, 2020 was such an aberrational year across so many metrics that it will be effectively impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions from it at all, as much as people might like to.
And that environment enables people to believe whatever they want.
Did people who routinely commit minor offenses have to rearrange their lives because they feared the police? Did they have no legal recourse to resolve disputes? Did they have to prepare themselves for a stint in jail or prison? Did the minor punishments they received make it difficult to hold a normal job, rent a decent apartment, or otherwise live a normal life?
Criminalization of minor offenses can be incredibly disruptive of society without serious punishment.
My favorite criminologist (somewhat) seriously proposes that we just beat people instead (like, e.g. Singapore).
The general idea is also similar to some promising parole reforms: minor offenses don't _violate_ parole (entirely) but are punished (proportionally) often, quickly, and cheaply.
So dish out some mild corporeal punishment as quick and easily as possible – maybe at the scene itself where possible? – instead of the anti-lotteries we're running now where losing ('winning' the anti-lottery) involves people having to do all the awful things you mention.
I don't think of the problem as 'criminalization' itself as our anti-crime ("justice") systems being too expensive (and thus heavy-handed).
But maybe you're right in thinking that there's no practical effective way to humanely discourage or prevent "minor offenses" with our current political and legal systems. (I think you're probably right overall, and for all long time to come too.)
You make a key distinction between "actually" policing offenses and "pretending." It echoes some things I've heard from other sources (even though their recommended solutions are different).
David Simon says that his crew members on The Wire were repeatedly arrested (without charges) for simply driving late at night:
He argues that this was typical for common people in inner city Baltimore, that specific mayoral policies led to the poisoning of the jury pool, making jury conviction rates drop, because many jury members had been hassled by cops themselves.
Reply All's "The Crime Machine"[1] argues that originally, crime statistics were used to target high crime neighborhoods and increase safety. But later, Goodhart's Law drove a pressure to simply ignore difficult cases (to avoid including them in crime statistics at all), and focus instead on padding citation numbers through "looking busy" arrests that would lead to quick releases.
I've read that inner city homicides are overwhelmingly perpetrated by a tiny handful of repeat offenders; there are clusters of specific individuals that aren't getting caught while everybody else is getting hassled by the police.
So those voices argue for less enforcement, you say ramp it up because of the people it's missing, but it makes me wonder if this is a volume problem second, and a calibration problem first.
Maybe there's overreliance on bad targets, like citations or arrests. We could take a lesson from that recent post on basketball statistics, and focus on "plus/minus." Measure the performance of cops based on the trajectory of crime in a neighborhood while they work there. Use the trendline for calls for service, and surveys of feelings of safety and experiences of victimization. Shuffle beat cops periodically, and compare against the performance of others in those same districts, until you surface the ones at the higher end of the bell curve. Watch what those individuals do closely, then train others to replicate it.
According to this USA Today article in 2018, Baltimore in effect started its Reverse Broken Windows policy on April 25, 2015, with disastrous effects on its murder rate:
"Baltimore police stopped noticing crime after Freddie Gray’s death. A wave of killings followed.
Brad Heath, USA TODAY Published 5:49 a.m. ET July 12, 2018 | Updated 3:58 p.m. ET July 12, 2018
"BALTIMORE – ... In the space of just a few days in spring 2015 – as Baltimore faced a wave of rioting after Freddie Gray, a black man, died from injuries he suffered in the back of a police van – officers in nearly every part of the city appeared to turn a blind eye to everyday violations. They still answered calls for help. But the number of potential violations they reported seeing themselves dropped by nearly half. It has largely stayed that way ever since.
“What officers are doing is they’re just driving looking forward. They’ve got horse blinders on,” says Kevin Forrester, a retired Baltimore detective.
"The surge of shootings and killings that followed has left Baltimore easily the deadliest large city in the United States. Its murder rate reached an all-time high last year; 342 people were killed. The number of shootings in some neighborhoods has more than tripled. One man was shot to death steps from a police station. Another was killed driving in a funeral procession.
"What’s happening in Baltimore offers a view of the possible costs of a remarkable national reckoning over how police officers have treated minorities.
"Starting in 2014, a series of racially charged encounters in Ferguson, Missouri; Chicago; Baltimore; and elsewhere cast an unflattering spotlight on aggressive police tactics toward black people. Since then, cities have been under pressure to crack down on abuses by law enforcement. ...
"Whether that scrutiny would cause policing to suffer – or crime to rise – has largely remained an open question.
"In Baltimore, at least, the effect on the city’s police force was swift and substantial.
"Millions of police records show officers in Baltimore respond to calls as quickly as ever. But they now begin far fewer encounters themselves. From 2014 to 2017, dispatch records show the number of suspected narcotics offenses police reported themselves dropped 30 percent; the number of people they reported seeing with outstanding warrants dropped by half. The number of field interviews – instances in which the police approach someone for questioning – dropped 70 percent."
The 2 main sources of crime data are both based entirely on victim reports. They don't require police to arrest anyone or even to actively investigate. The NCVS just requires people to say "yes" when asked on the phone if they were victimized, and UCR only requires that a police report was filed.
Keep in mind that if a crime isn't reported, it never becomes a statistic.
I can tell you from experience that a middle aged white person, one who looks and acts like a property-owning tax-paying deodorant-using Solid Citizen can get away with a lot of things that would land Rufus or Tyrone (or, for that matter, Bubba from the trailer park) in Deep Bad Serious Trouble.
Don't involve violence or weapons, avoid serious dope, and don't be black, and no record ever is made, other than maybe a finger-wagging warning not to get caught again.
I think this article is definitely worth a read! I had similar reasoning when I decided to make in vitro gametogenesis the focus of my research. On the topic of cloning von Neumann 1 million times, yes it would be a good idea in principle, but realistically, getting it implemented is not going to happen.
That's very interesting (still seems relatively niche, too...I have google scholar alerts for this and I mostly get "what if" application reviews & ethics papers, not practical results, disappointingly). Many questions! Roughly how far away is human IV gametogenesis from your view? How capital-intensive is the process currently (like, is this 'whole lab group' material or a 'lonely grad student' operation)? Can one follow your work somewhere? :)
I'd say the first proof-of-concept of a fertilizable human egg from stem cells, is probably 3 years away. It will be probably another 20 years before an actual baby is born from it.
Right now it's pretty capital intensive. I'm working with another grad student and a postdoc. We're spending a few million dollars in grant money on the project, and success isn't guaranteed.
Once technology matures, I think costs per egg will come down a lot as scale increases.
For Google Scholar, you want to set up alerts for the following researchers:
Many thanks for the answers, much appreciated. Wish you the best of luck, I think this is very important work (would want to send some significant funds this direction so this doesn't remain a 20 year project, but unfortunately the dogecoin billions aren't in yet...)
That plot in #30 is pretty interesting. Usually independents fall somewhere between Democrats and Republicans on polling questions for most topics. Does anyone have a theory on why they're so distrustful of others? Or why trust seems to be falling in general across all the groups?
My guess is that lowers levels of trust are a defining feature of self-identified independents. As a major generalization, people who don't pick a team have a lower impulse to socially conform or be seen to have "good opinions." That does *not* mean they are true mavericks--many of them have in-the-middle beliefs or tend to vote consistently one way, and like to be *seen* as independent thinkers. But someone with a self-image of being "above it all" or "not a sheep" is probably not as trusting of others, because they're obviously less attracted to "good team/bad team" or "my guy/your guy" thinking than most. Identifying as an independent is usually a way to express the sentiment "neither side has a permanent monopoly on decency or good ideas." This doesn't necessarily mean they think everyone else is out to get them--lack of trust could result from seeing the majority as naive, inconsistent, uninformed, conformist, etc.
This is also my theory for why the two parties' trust levels have converged alongside polarization, while independents' have plummeted. The simplistic version would be that partisans think "my half of the country is trustworthy; the other half is not." Everyone who finds this general outlook dubious becomes distrustful of *both,* and starts identifying as independent. As we've generally moved in a more progressive political direction during this time, it's not a surprise that Republicans had to travel further from their original position in order to match the Democrats' trust levels, which stayed fairly flat. There are definitely other factors involved, but I think the differences in trends can be explained in part as a matter of initial expectations.
I don't know--my personal impression is that most are either moderates or people who hold a combination of positions from each party. Some of the latter could be classified as extremists, but I don't think there are necessarily more extremist independents than there are extremist partisans or non-voters.
One additional reason for partisan convergence is that Republicans have recently become the party of the lowest-trust individuals (which is likely a big part of why polls undercounted Trump and other Republicans, and is related to whatever happened with Brexit).
I think it's likely Trump brought a lot of low-trust independents/non-voters into the GOP, as any candidate perceived as an establishment challenger tends to do. But it's not clear if they lack trust in other people generally, or just in media/institutions/government. The GOP's populist section is probably much more untrusting of the latter.
I believe this only happened on elections with Trump on the ballot, which suggests that Trump was the candidate of lowest-trust individuals and that he had coattails. It remains to be seen the Trump experience has changed the landscape in future elections that don't have him on the ballot.
(I'm going to reply here to everything in this thread to avoid getting spaghetti everywhere.)
- The independent issue doesn't seem to be from increasing polarisation. Polarisation went nuts among the citizenry about 2010, but that's precisely when the independents *stopped* getting less trusting.
- More generally, I think the graph is better understood as a superimposition of a general "trust is going down" plus specific partisan effects.
- The general effect is probably from general breakdown of close-knit society.
- My guess is that the Republicans have been more trusting, for most of that period, because they tend to be from places where that breakdown is less advanced (we *know* religion helps with that, as does being monoracial), and/or from places where crime is low (rural and/or rich areas). The Democrats, over this period (as opposed to pre-1960s Dixiecrats) were the opposite.
- The recent convergence and/or exchange is interesting. It seems to start about the time that the various progressive causes congealed into SJ; my guess is that with the culture war going into high gear traditionalists i.e. Republicans are feeling less safe and more besieged while the ascendancy of SJ as new orthodoxy emboldened progressives i.e. Democrats. Not 100% sure on that, though, especially as the culture war hasn't inverted the "good neighbourhood" effect.
- I'm not sure whether independents' higher trust than Democrats in the early 70s was a freak outlier or actually on trend. If it was a freak outlier (possibly Nixon coming across as bipartisan, which Watergate shattered?) and independents are usually low-trust (which has been reasonably justified by others) then they basically follow trend since then (i.e. they're going down at the same rate as the Rep+Dem average). If the high independent trust in the early 70s was on trend (up until that point) then you have to posit some especially-lasting effect from something.
On the Dems leveling off/increasing slightly while the Reps fall off, during this time the suburbs have been moving from Rep to Dem. A good chunk of this is probably that.
Increasing tribalism. As both parties become less tolerant of deviance from tribal orthodoxy, the people who have taken the step to detach themselves from either groupthink become increasingly disgusted with the remainder -- still the majority -- who have not.
That certainly describes my position. At various times in the past half century I have identified weakly with both parties. These days I have the Iran-Iraq War attitude ("It's a shame they can't both lose.")
My template for an independent is someone saying "I think both major political parties are bad, and do not want to be associated with them." If that is representative, it makes sense that we see independents - who think poorly of some of our larger institutions - to think more poorly of people in general. Distrust in people and distrust in institutions presumably have a decent amount of ground in common due to a general factor of distrust, so to speak.
Interesting. The inverse of this is that the supply of smart young people willing to publicly argue conservative positions is so low, particularly among women and ethnic minorities, that people make seemingly lucrative careers just out of being willing to recite convention right wing talking points in public,
The low (economic) supply of non-woke writers does not necessarily indicate that there aren't many people willing to argue against progressivism; it could mean that it's harder for them to do so. This is the explanation implied by Freddie DeBoer's arguments (e.g. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/non-nitro-edition-substack-and-media ) that the mainstream media is progressive despite the presence of a significant number of non-progressive journalists because the progressives have greater control over journalistic institutions because their use of Twitter has allowed them to create common knowledge that progressivism is prestigious within journalism and that opposition to progressivism risks punishment (this being the point of 'cancel culture'). This explanation is also supported by the popularity of non-progressive or progressive-skeptical Substack writers once Substack made it easy for them to sell their writing independently of journalistic institutions.
A) "I’ve complained before about how everyone uses the same example - Brasilia - when they talk about how central planning can go bad."
Actually, according to experts, "Brasilia is a singular artistic achievement, a prime creation of the human genius, (...) notable for the grandiosity of the project".
B) Are they coming for our children? Recent legislation discussed in Alabama and sponsored by Democrats might force American schoolchildren to be taught witchcraft.
According to experts, the plan to impose Hinduism to Americans were masterminded by British-born, Californian resident writer Aldous Huxley, an intellectual with links to Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism and Occultism. You can learn more about him and his disturbing ideas and dark powers he associated with here: https://midwestoutreach.org/2019/05/18/thomas-merton-the-contemplative-dark-thread/
Aldous Huxley is great and I will hear nothing spoken against him. If you haven't read anything of his, I recommend Doors of Perception, Point-Counterpoint, or almost anything else. Brave New World is of course also great.
Yes, he may have sort of dabbled with unearthly forces. But he used them the same way I would if I had unearthly powers - to play incredibly clever jokes on people. I can't find any link to my favorite Huxley story, but it goes something like: after his death his wife held a seance to try to contact him, and the medium or Ouija board or whatever conveyed the message "Go to my old study, get the Xth book on the Yth shelf, and read the first sentence on page Z". His wife obediently got the book, which turned out to be a review of one of Huxley's novels, saying something like "Huxley is at his best when exploring witty new ways to communicate with people".
Aldous Huxley was the grandson of TH Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, and great-grandson of Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby in "Tom Brown's Schooldays." He was the full brother of the famous biologist Sir Julian Huxley. Less known is that their half brother Andrew Huxley won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for an experiment that Jared Diamond still raves about that.
Oh, no! Gasp, *Catholicism*???? 😁 I'm sorry, but the way that is phrased makes me think you lifted it wholesale from a very distressed Protestant article, you naughty Thiago, you!
Coming from the background he did, I am not at all surprised that he gravitated towards Hinduism in the form of the Vedanta society in California. He may or may not have been interested in Occultism (that was in the water in California at the time), and his attitude towards Catholicism seems to have varied from including it in a blanket condemnation of Christianity to appreciating it as a successful form https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2019/01/24/aldous-huxleys-quest-for-values-religion/
"As for his attitude towards Catholicism, in 'Proper Studies' he writes:
Catholicism is probably the most realistic of all Western religions. Its practice is based on a profound knowledge of human nature in all its varieties and gradations. From the fetish-worshipper to the metaphysician, from the tired business man to the mystic, from the sentimentalist and the sensualist to the intellectual, every type of human being can find in Catholicism the spiritual nourishment which he or she requires. For the sociable, unspiritual man Catholicism is duly sociable and unspiritual. For the solitary and the spiritual it provides a hermitage and the most exquisite, the profoundest models of religious meditation; it gives the silence of monasteries and the bareness of the Carthusian church, it offers the devotional introspection of A Kempis and St. Theresa, the subtleties of Pascal and Newman, the poetry of Crashaw and St. John of the Cross and a hundred others. The only people for whom it does not cater are those possessed by that rare, dangerous, and uneasy passion, the passion for liberty."
As to the witchcraft thing, I see that it is Yoga. I've seen some of these tussles before, with people arguing that as Yoga is a Hindu spiritual tradition, it should not be taught [wherever]. The usual response to that is counter-arguments that Yoga (in the West) is simply a form of exercise and meditation and has nothing to do with religion and spirituality, along with a hefty dose of laughing at the backwards religious bigots who think it does https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25006926
What I have also seen more recently is the counter-counter-argument from some that Yoga *is* spiritual and religious and the Western tendency to treat it as fancy exercise is cultural appropriation and disrespect https://www.hinduamerican.org/projects/hindu-roots-of-yoga
So witchcraft no, yoga yes, is it a religious activity? wait for the court cases to decide.
Le Gasp Part Deux!!!!!! Oh no, it's even worse than originally conceived! Sure, diabolism is harmless dabbling but that Huxley might have been tainted by association with Catholicism is even worser and more horribler than Thiago linked!
(That loud thudding noise you all just experienced was me hitting the floor after swooning away in pure shock having read only merely just the first two sentences of this - I dare not even read the whole, braver and more fortitudinous than I shall have to do that and précis it for my tiny little mind to handle!)
Don't worry, I have eardrops! A quick squirt and problem solved. Now, what was it you were saying again?
"rational and moral people hate Catholics"
Oh, no! *Every* single one of them? Well, what can I say to this, crushed as I am beneath the one-two knockout punch of righteous ire and justified opprobrium!
I have no recourse left but to yield the field.
Running: Away
Tail: Tucked
Between: Legs
You: Victorious (happy and glorious, long to reign o'er us)
No one should practice witchcraft! It is written, "There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch. Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer."
How are people still unironically sharing that Bloomberg article on rent control in Berlin? They find that rent control successfully held down rents for the majority, while increasing rents on non-controlled new buildings, which we should if anything expect to accelerate housing construction. An unambiguous win for the city. And yet they're so embedded in their anti-rent control narrative that they manage to put a harshly negative spin on those facts and paint the whole thing as vindication.
The Bloomberg article is paywalled for me, so I can't read it, but my impression from German media and friends' reports is that
1) it got even harder to find flats for rent.
2) rent control depends on the age of the house, so it's mostly the well-earning middle class people in the chic old town houses who now pay less rent – so the people who profit are exactly the people you would expect to profit, not the people you'd want to profit.
3) New rentals now come with two rent numbers in the contract: One according to rental control, one with the amount should the constitutional court decide that (this specific) rental control is illegal. That second amount of course back-dated to the start day of the contract.
I don't really have much stake in the situation, so I may have gotten effect sizes wrong, and you can certainly argue that 3) is a temporary problem. But we're far from an "unambiguous win" so far.
Yes it is harder to find new apartments because rent control is giving priority to incumbent tenants against those who would outbid them for their apartments, as intended. It's silly for the anti-rent control side to trot out distributional arguments about the rent controlled tenants being some privileged group when the main distributional conflict here is between those tenants and their far wealthier landlords.
What makes the Bloomberg article so frustrating is that it lays out enough information to understand the effect sizes - the large majority of the city's tenants are in rent controlled units and are benefiting from this - but just ignores it and makes the opposite case. Similarly there's this menacing implication laid out that new construction will decline because developers will be scared to operate in Berlin... backed up by nothing at all, in contrast to the Econ 101 level reasons to expect the rent control to encourage new construction.
If it's intended that people just stay where there are, that seems like a bad intention then? I can see that you'd want to give people the opportunity to stay where they have social ties – these connections are lost when people are forced out, and they are not accounted for in the "economic gains". I don't think that has been a significant problem though: Germany has incredibly strict rules about when you are allowed to increase rent of existing tenants. There's ways around that (fake/nonsensical renovations being a common one), but generally rents don't increase much for people who stay.
The problem is that rents are high for people who move (which are not all newcomers). And provided people want to move, we should encourage it to get a more efficient assignment. It's not great if the children moved out but the parents stay in the big flat because all available places have higher rent for less area. So you can't really untie rent for newcomers from rent for incumbents.
I totally believe that construction is not slowed down – Germany has much bigger barriers in that field, rent control probably doesn't even make a dent.
I do think that it matters which group of tenants benefits however: The point of rent control is that poor people can afford to stay in the city. If prices for them don't change, then this is just a big self-serving initiative from middle class people for middle class people. "A large majority" doesn't say _which_ majority. If you just want to act against the far wealthier landlords, a wealth tax would seem more adequate.
> The point of rent control is that poor people can afford to stay in the city.
Why is this a goal, except perhaps for the benefit of the kind of politicians who rely on the votes of poor people?
For the most part, the fewer poor people are in a city, the better that city is. Richer people are more productive, more creative, cleaner, less disruptive, commit fewer crimes, and encourage further economic growth. Having poor people around seems like a lose-lose.
Guess what: since people indeed value these services, they will pay people to do them! Enough to induce and/or enable people to live in a place that enables them to do those jobs.
Or, if people don't value those services enough to pay the costs to workers of providing them, they won't be done and shouldn't be done — as doing them would be inefficient. Just as we no longer pay people to operate elevators.
New construction didn't match the loss of listings of existing apartments. This was covered well in the article. Basically now that Berlin has pulled this stunt once, potential builders are wary of getting screwed out of their investment again.
Also covered well in the article: when old apartments go off the market, they stay off the market. The incentive is for the landlord to sell the apartment instead of trying to find more renters for it.
What the article is saying is that while there has been an acceleration of new construction as a result of this law, so many incumbent tenants are managing to stay in their now rent controlled homes that the supply of rental listings is down below where it would be without the law. I guess I am on board with thinking that more rental listings being available in a city is a good goal to work towards, it's not exactly the be-all, end-all housing statistic when compared to stability, affordability, and rates of new housing stock being added to the market, all of which have been enhanced by the policy.
What exactly is the issue with controlled rental units whose tenants leave being sold? They're still serving the city's housing needs - either the new owner will live there, or rent the unit themselves subject to the same controls. The article spins it hard as a problem but like with the rest of its spin there isn't any substance there.
A healthy housing market has a decent amount of rental units, for people who aren't planning to live in that place for a very long time. Especially in a cities like this with a lot of international dynamism and lots of students.
A sensible objection which doesn't really apply in Berlin – a quick search gives 85% rental share among apartments, presumably before the rent control was enacted. That leaves more than enough room for transient people even after the effects of the new law have calmed down.
Living in Berlin, having rented then bought property and now being in the position of landlord, I feel like I can share some first-hand perspective on the issues raised by the Bloomberg article.
I have been monitoring the property prices for about ten years now and they have been growing exponentially, much faster than the income increase of the average resident, outpricing almost everybody. At the same time rents have also been going up, though not as fast, because Berlin enacted a "Mietpreisbremse" in 2015, limiting the number of times and the rate that rents can be increased for incumbent tenants. For new tenants the rent could be increased up to the average price in the area + 10%. This measure has (in my opinion) not sufficiently slowed down the growth in property prices and had the side-effect of people actually being trapped in their existing rental contracts. Just as a point of reference, I bought my apartment in 2018 and to date its value has already doubled. Our neighbors bought their apartment in 2012 on two middle-class salaries (clerk in a department store, maintenance man in a hotel) and they would stand no chance of ever affording today's market prices.
In 2019 this law was paired with the "Mietendeckel" that essentially caps the rents at the 2013 level + inflation, the reasoning being that independent experts came to the conclusion that 2013 was the last year of a healthy housing market. The law also prohibits raising the rent for new tenants which allows current tenants to move again.
I think that the reasons why we don't see this movement already are twofold: (1) large parts of 2020, when the law came into full effect, were spent in lockdown and many people struggled financially as a result, making them less likely to consider major changes (e.g. moving), and (2) it is not clear if these regulation will actually survive legal analysis by the highest court, making people less likely to gamble on this (see the comments about having two rents in the contract).
As a resident and a landlord I fully support these measures, although I wish they were implemented better.
Capping increases can have the effect of raising prices more, since landlords miss out on future gains by not raising rent. If the cap is 5%, and they keep a price level n years for a good tenant, they miss out on a multiplier of 1.05^n that can't be recovered.
That's true and it's also what I observed under the less restrictive Mietpreisbremse that put a cap on the growth of rents. However, stopping growth altogether under the more restrictive Mietendeckel would have effectively prevented this effect.
As of today, the Mietendeckel is not in effect anymore after a decision of the highest court in Germany (Bundesverfassungsgericht in Karlsruhe).
I'm curious here, are you actually familiar with the literature on rent control? My understanding is that it has been a catastrophe everywhere it has been tried, with very short term benefits for existing tenants and rapidly escalating losses for everyone else, and ultimately the housing stock becomes incredibly decrepit and most everyone is miserable.
I am not familiar with the literature on this topic nor do I know about comparable cases where this strategy backfired. I would appreciate some references!
Not speaking to your main point, but I'm interested that the housing market in Berlin seems to have cooled in 2020. I live in St Louis, in the American Midwest, and our housing market has gone berserk. Multiple people I know have sold a house for over their asking price on the day they put it on the market. A couple I know who've been looking have put offers - over asking price offers - on eight houses and lost them all. This is very much a sellers' market, and has been for pretty much the whole pandemic.
> In 1953, Hall and Hanford observed that rats housed with running wheels and subjected to restricted food access for 1h a day had significant decreases in body weight and food intake, and a paradoxical increase in running wheel activity...
> This model of “self-starvation,” later coined the activity-based anorexia (ABA) model, consistently produces rapid decreases in body weight and food intake, hyperactivity, hypothermia, loss of estrus, increases in HPA axis activity, and leads to stomach ulceration and eventually death.
> The ABA phenomenon has been observed in many other species besides the rat, such as the hamster, gerbil, guinea pig, chipmunk, pig, and mouse, indicating that ABA behavior is highly conserved across mammalian species.
Basically, we have known how to induce anorexia (and cure it!) in a variety of animals for decades. How is it that this has been well-known to researchers for decades, but is totally absent from public discussion?
I suspect that mice don't get mentally hooked on anorexia the way humans do.
For a while I was reading accounts of people developing anorexia, and while I didn't make a study of it, it seemed as though food restriction during childhood was a common factor. I was surprised that it didn't seem to matter whether the child or the parent chose to restrict the child's food.
Are you including all types of anorexia, or only anorexia nervosa (i.e. the culture-bound excessive deliberate dieting)?
If the former, you can add on +1 anecdote of "was starved by parent as a teenager, has had perennial issues with unintended weight loss". No evidence one way or the other on causation (I was never in control of my own diet until long after it happened, so there is no way to know whether I was already anorexic beforehand), but as a "fits the pattern" I line up.
Does anyone else think it's odd that you can induce anorexia in rats by restricting the hours of eating ("intermittent fasting") and give them a "gym membership" (i.e. you don't even have to coerce them to exercise)? Do humans lose weight this easily? I suspect not.
Not all rats or mice lose weight that easily either - some individuals are vulnerable to ABA; some aren't. Some strains of mice and rats have more vulnerable individuals than others.
From the paper:
> The large number of strains commercially available (Harlan Laboratories, Charles River, The Jackson Laboratory) for laboratory use vary widely in their vulnerability to ABA.
Klenotich and Dulawa say "subjected to restricted food access for 1h a day," which is a awkwardly phrased. They're citing Hall et. al. 1953, which makes it clear that it's "23 hours of starving, 1 hour of access to food."
> Specifically, the problem was to measure changes in general activity in the rat following the transition from unlimited feeding to a 23-hr. per day deprivation cycle.
> If you’ve ever wanted to know how much LSD it would take to kill an elephant, the answer is: somewhere less than 300 mg.
It turns out that the elephant story is a bit more complicated, because somebody actually repeated the experiment, and the second time, the elephants *didn't* die!
We're talking about specific pictures of a city with beautiful architecture. The city has streets just as wide as any other city, and for all I know sometimes cars go down them. The architecture is beautiful regardless.
I think it's a significant portion (probably necessary, maybe not quite sufficient by itself - I agree there's something unrelatedly nice about the planning here - but definitely a major contributor) - asphalt and cars/parking just make anywhere ugly in a way that's hard to solve. You can see this walking around most cities that have a pedestrianized area - any pedestrianized area they'll have will just feel an order of magnitude nicer than nearby areas with roads and parking. (There is the possibility of reverse causation - that the nice areas are the ones that become carfree because people like walking around in them - but I've seen pictures of e.g. the SF shoreline or times square when they were fully enroaded, and I don't think that's the case).
Tweeness, yes. There was a fad for Tudor half-timbering in British architecture which was at first a craze for the wealthy who didn't have inherited real Tudor homes of their own, and like all fads trickled down to popular level and got diluted as it went so that it became a by-word for fakery:
"Following the First World War many London outer suburbs had developments of houses in the style, all reflecting the taste for nostalgia for rural values. In the first half of the 20th century, increasingly minimal "Tudor" references for "instant" atmosphere in speculative construction cheapened the style. The writer Olive Cook had this debased approach firmly in her sights when she attacked, "the rash of semi-detached villas, bedizened with Tudor gables, mock half-timber work, rough cast and bay windows of every shape which disfigures the outskirts of all our towns". It was also copied in many areas of the world, including the United States and Canada. New York City suburbs such as Westchester County, New York and Englewood and Teaneck, New Jersey feature particularly dense concentrations of Tudor Revival construction from this period.
There were also public houses, some designed in a style called, 'Brewer's Tudor'. The cheapened style was finally epitomized in John Betjeman's angry 1937 poem Slough, where "bald young clerks" gather:
And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars."
A gentler ribbing is that for Bedford Park, built (eventually) in a "Queen Anne style" in 1877 and which became wildly fashionable, included as "Saffron Park" in Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday":
"The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical."
Pastiche is not bad in itself, it depends how it is handled.
I think nearly everyone prefers tactfully-handled pastiche to ugly modernism. There are fans of Brutalist concrete out there! But badly-designed buildings that are more about the "starchitect" are doing nobody any favours. Killer towers sound like something out of a 70s disaster movie but they're real!
"Now an unlikely superhero, in the form of architecture practice Chetwoods, purveyor of large sheds, has arrived to save the day. In a proposal that has all the elegance of strapping leg splints on a Dalek, they have resolved to erect a cumbersome series of frames around the base of the building, from which screens and canopies will be hung in an attempt to mitigate the wind. Seemingly employing the strategy of throwing everything they’ve got at the problem, there will be a series of horizontal baffles suspended on portal frames across the road, a skirt-like canopy around the building itself, a set of three-storey high screens fixed vertically to the facade, and a few more screens here and there for good measure. The result looks like the leftovers of a deconstructivist folly, bodged remnants salvaged from Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette. But if the wind is left as confused as the design itself appears to be, that can only be a good thing."
The article also talks about the London block which developed into a "laser death-ray building" and it turns out that this isn't the only building by this particular architect which has, let us say, unexpected finishing details.
"Two of the skyscrapers designed by Viñoly, the Vdara in Las Vegas and 20 Fenchurch Street in London, have experienced unusual sun reflectivity problems due to their concave curved glass exteriors acting as respectively cylindrical and spherical reflectors for sunlight. In 2010, the Las Vegas Review Journal reported that sunlight reflecting off the Vdara's south-facing tower could make swimmers in the hotel pool uncomfortably warm, as well as melt plastic cups and shopping bags; employees of the hotel referred to the phenomenon as the "Vdara death ray". In London during the summer of 2013, sunlight reflecting off 20 Fenchurch Street melted parts on a parked automobile and also scorched the carpet of a nearby barber shop"
(a) to what extent you want to do a convenience vs beauty tradeoff is an entirely separate question - I'm just noting that the tradeoff exists.
(b) I personally do think this is a good tradeoff. There's a lot of cities worldwide with large car-free areas, and a lot of people of all types (including me) even in US cities who don't have cars and get by just fine. It's much easier to adjust your workflow around this sort of problem than you'd think.
(the libertarian solution is to have both types around and let the market reach an equilibrium where the supply/demand ratio for both types is equal, though that'd probably lead to more pedestrianized areas than even th most hardcore yimbys currently ask for)
I should add, I think it looks nice, too, and would love to see something like that come to my area, which is too car-centric, but yes, life is a series of trade-offs.
If you can walk to a grocery store you may change your habits and make more frequent trips for smaller amounts of groceries. Also, the apartments may be smaller and not able to effectively store lots of groceries or bulk good so more frequent trips are more necessary.
This has been my personal experience having previously lived in a studio apartment two blocks from a grocery story and now living in a 2000 sq. ft. house a 5 minute drive from the store.
In another comment you said "I would just point out that these trade-offs can seem small most of the time, but really big at other times." and I totally agree with this. the Studio was great when it was just me but didn't work with me, my wife, and a large dog. It was also a pain when moving in or out of the apartment and having to juggle parking, elevators, common space, etc.
I shop by foot and by bike for a family of two adults and a child. Pre-pandemic, I would usually get about $50–150 of groceries. (USD, Boston area.) Sometimes I would just stop by the grocery store along my commute and pick up a few items I knew we needed; sometimes I would bring the child trailer with the bike and pick up 40 lbs of groceries if we were really running low.
More recently I've been buying more in bulk, so it's more infrequent trips and I'll get a 6-case of rolled oats or a 25 lb bag of lentils. (I tend to get produce from the CSA or the farmers market, again with the child trailer—sometimes sharing space with a child.)
There was a meme to this effect on lefty social media, that the reason people are so nostalgic for college is because it's the last time a lot of people lived in a dense, walkable neighborhood with a focus on community during downtime.
It overstates its case - people miss college because they were young then and mostly not paying their own bills - but I think there's a point there. Generally, the most desirable cities, and the most desirable neighborhoods in less desirable cities, are the ones where you can dispense with the car, or at least use it less.
#4 Was a very interesting post, and the mass genius cloning proposal seems very sensible and feasible (PR issues aside), to the point that I'm surprised I haven't heard it suggested before.
I get the impression Neumann isn't just supposed to serve as an illustrative example though, which confuses me. I thought his body was buried in 1957? Would there be anything left to extract useable DNA from?
This issue with this is all the epigenetic stuff that we don't really understand and might be super important right? By going pure DNA route, you are adding a bunch of potential variation which, when you are at that extreme of the bell curve, can pretty much only be negative. I have to imagine that at that point, it's better to find someone living who is nearly, but not quite, as good as JvN but who we have living cells to use.
DNA intrinsically can last that long (or a lot longer). The question is whether its all been eaten by micro-organisms, which will depend on the details of his burial.
I felt it was insufficiently explained why a million clones of von Neumann would somehow lead to even greater GDP. What if they all decide to work on higher mathematics instead of finding new ways to sell stuff and pump up the stock market? I think the idea of "if we only had fifty Stalins!" is not really proven 😀
It is certainly a sweetly naive view of progress: "let's clone lots of Really Smart Guy and then problems will get solved!" If there are a certain number of Really Smart Guys in the population, then according as global population goes up, there should always be more Really Smart Guys out there.
Current estimate of world population is around 7.8 billion. Estimate of Really Smart Guys in general population: "Only approximately 0.3% of the population has IQ scores outside of this interval (less than 55 or higher than 145)."
Someone else answering the question says "Those with an IQ (Intelligence Quotient) score over 140 make up about .25% of the population, or around one of every 400 people. That's quite a lot, roughly just under 200 million people worldwide."
We theoretically should have 200 million von Neumanns out there, no need for clones! Is the world richer and more advanced than before? Yes. But I don't see that the intractable problems are getting any more tractable.
Now, maybe the proposal means "Ah yes, but if we have 1 million supergeniuses all locked up in a camp together, we can make them all work on the problems we need solving, Step 4 Profit!"
Well, maybe. Or maybe your supergeniuses will figure out they are all clones, will decide they don't want to be slave labour, and will all become artists or bricklayers or whatever.
And what are the 16 Really Smart Guys on this list doing? One example:
Mick Dempsey, 171 IQ
Dempsey has a degree in forensic psychology from London Metropolitan University. He is a youth support worker at Hertfordshire County Council, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Dempsey also enjoys jazz, Faulkner, the Everton soccer club and films including Pulp Fiction, according to his Facebook page.
Maybe our 1 million von Neumanns will all go into social work for the council?
You can spin out lovely theories, but the practice in the real world is often vastly different. I love SF but I have never believed in the optimistic Golden Age notion of the technocratic future where, if we just let a panel of Scientists rule the world, then we will have the utopian society of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. And I don't believe AI will either lead us into that brave new world, or enslave us all before turning us into paperclips.
Here's another one from that genius list! A Greek doctor with (allegedly) 198 IQ. "Currently, a medical doctor, general adult psychiatrist, working to empower and benefit people and society targeting, advancing and promoting giftedness."
Well that's all very nice but come on, doctor, we need you to put that big brain to work bumping up GDP and making us all rich rich rich! Forget about helping the sickly minded masses! 😁
It would be really remarkable if *all* of them went on to higher mathematics. If even one in a thousand picks a field with more practical applications we ought to do pretty well.
If you want to be entirely realistic about it, getting usable DNA from von Neumann's bones and turning it into an embryo is probably not feasible. A more practical plan would involve a diverse assortment of living geniuses, but either way it's not actually going to happen and as a fictional scenario a million JvNs are cooler.
One interesting question is how much of genius is genetic. I mean, we have good data saying that IQ is substantially genetic (given similar environments), and IQ correlates with genius, but it's not the same thing as genius. We don't have any studies on one-in-a-billion geniuses that can tell us how much of the thing that made JvN a top-tier genius was his genes, and how much was just accidental/random stuff in his life and development?
If we got 100 clones of von Neumann, would they all end up as polymath geniuses like von Neumann? Or would they mostly be very smart people who could do good work in demanding fields, but not the kind of guy who had the reputation of being the smartest man hanging around the Manhattan project?
The trick would be knowing *whether* the sample of DNA you'd extracted was intact or not. Unless someone sequenced von Neumann's genome secretly 90 years ago, there's no way to tell. DNA looks like DNA, even if it's missing a few million nucleotides and will either (a) not work at all or (b) produce a cretin instead of a genius.
I would think that with enough samples (von Neumann's old hairbrush that no one cleaned out?), you could have enough overlapping sequences to recreate the original.
31: I'm not convinced this article proves its point. The first pair of graphs shows -60% growth in rents for regulated apartments and +10% growth in rents for unregulated apartments. This proves the opposite of "rise even faster" as the chart says, and without some sense of the relative size of the markets, its unclear how we're supposed to interpret this as a loss.
The third graph has officially triggered a Yellow Alert on my "lying with charts" spider-sense by characterizing the claim "rent controlled apartments have become worth less" with the abstruse "change in prices relative to growth." Why not just "prices?" Why is this graph suddenly "relative to growth" and not the last two? Even so, real estate prices for rent-controlled apartments going down still seems... entirely consistent with rent control as a policy, I don't think proponents are mostly concerned with housing-as-investment.
The fourth and fifth graphs elevate the alarm to red alert by normalizing to Q1 2017 and not mid-2019 as the previous three graphs did, presumably to maximize a scary divergence in the fourth graph that was already underway before the policy announcement. This seems pretty clearly done in order to make the fourth graph's divergence seem larger than the fifth graph's divergence. Since the fifth graph is on a larger Y-scale it is not clear to me that "unregulated units can't pick up the slack" is a claim justified by that data (again, hurting for lack of relative sizes in the markets here).
This is not an endorsement of rent control as a policy, either in general or as implemented by Berlin here, which I haven't looked into. All I know is the general econ 101 case against it, tempered by my general skepticism that econ 101 explanations bear out as full and complete empirically (see the zillion dueling minimum wage papers). But the article alone does not do much to convince me of its case.
On second glance (the text), this article is even worse than at first glance (the charts). I learn that Berlin attempted to get around the econ 101 issue by only applying rent control to units built before a certain date, since the supply of that is fixed until contractors acquire time travel.
This seems like such a simple and dumb solution that I expected a much better rebuttal to it from a Bloomberg columnist than "investors are scared" which is a fully general argument against all forms of regulation and incidentally also in argument against the putative solution of increasing supply, which investors also do not tend to like either. ANY measure intending to reduce rents is going to reduce the value of investments made primarily for the purpose of collecting rents!
This is the worst sort of space-filling libertarian patter that does not stand up to even a second of critical thought and it making the august pictures of Bloomberg and the ACX links post is making me update in favor of rent control.
Yes, this article is truly terrible. They start out with the hypothesis "such regulations are bad" and then cherry-picks some charts that look vaguely aligned with their hypothesis. And they don't even make an effort to make it look plausible.
On the matter itself, I follow the discussions in German newspapers, and I think it is just too early to say whether the outcome is good or bad in the end. And probably we'll never be able to come to a clear conclusion, either. The thing is that exploding rents are a really, really bad problem (talking about Berlin here, but other German cities are similar).
The Berlin policy works extremely well, in the sense that it has very effectively limited rents int he short/mid run. That is something that the liberal "make incentives for building more apartments" has utterly failed to achieve in German cities, and it has been tried hard. But it's also clear that the remedy has bad consequences, and the question is whether they are "really, really, really bad" (so it was a net negative) or "really bad" (so it was a net positive). The difference depends very much on your personal preferences.
The problem (for tenants) is that some kind of black markets build up, and that you only find an apartment if you know someone who knows someone whose cousin...
But what it actually can achieve: low rents. Black market prices may be somewhat higher than official prices, but there are limits to that.
There are some cities with a long tradition of this kind of rent control policy. Vienna has this for a long time, and the opinions (also of people living in Vienna!) range from "city with best policy in the world" to "city with worst policy in the world". Eastern Europe also had these kind of policies before 1990. I had a long discussion with a Slowak guy who lived in that world, and he saw it as a net negative. (He vividly described the black market problems.) But he acknowledged that rents were ridiculously low.
I think it all depends on whether you believe that it *is* possible to provide enough housing if you try hard enough and give enough incentive. If you believe that this is possible, then cutting rents is stupid because it removes the incentives. However, if you believe that this is *not* possible (because the number of hourses you can build in short-/mid-term is limited, or more houses may just increase demand), then controlling rents may be a good idea. It may lead to fewer apartments (how many? 10% less?), and they are distributed by personal favors rather than by financial potency. But at the same time, it cuts the rents for *everyone* by a factor of 3. Personally, for Berlin in the current situation, I think the numbers "10%" and "factor of 3" are not unrealistic for a 10-to-20-years window (I didn't try hard to get actual numbers though). So I think that for Berlin it was a good tradeoff. But it's a very non-trivial question to answer, even for some future me with some years of hindsight.
Okay but you know there is a huge economic literature on this subject, right?? Are you really saying "we don't know if rent control is bad, we don't know what its effects are, and we probably never will" without reading any of these studies?
I didn't say that we don't know the effects. It is clear that there are massive positive and massive negative effects. Unfortunately, they are on very different axes, and summing them up seems impossible to me. For example, what exactly are the costs if tenants are not selected by market? Not all people who want to live in Berlin can, and this will not change anytime soon. In a perfect world, people with a stronger incentive to live in Berlin would be willing to offer more money, so "living in Berlin" would go to those who most desire to live in Berlin. To some extent this is true, and this is a positive effect. But of course, the true selection is rather for financial potency. So how much is that positive effect still worth? Or how much is it worth that you get a more diverse city which is affordable for families? On the other side, how much is the cost of poorer living standards, since there is less incentive to modernize apartments? Even if you can put price labels to them, adding them up along the money axis doesn't make sense IMHO.
For concreteness, let us take Vienna, which has a rent control system for about 57% of all flats in place for decades. The benefits are huge and well-known. The problems are also huge and well-known. (I am talking about the media here, I don't know the scientific literature.) Yet I believe that neither in the media nor in the Vienna population, there is consensus whether the system is good or bad.
Breaking news on that matter: Today (15.04.21) the highest German court has ruled the Berlin law as void. According to the court, only the federal government has the legislative competence to issue a law like that. This also means that any consequences of the law are void. So tenants with reduced rents need to pay the difference retroactively for the last two years. Quite a mess.
Re: 4. Well, that certainly is a lot of graphs. Yes indeedy, were I susceptible to being persuaded by lots of graphs, I might well be persuaded by that.
Re: 16, any excuse to link to the Wilton Dipytch, which I think is very beautiful; the excuse here being that speaking of heraldic animals, Richard II had the white hart as his which is included: https://smarthistory.org/the-wilton-diptych/
Re: 20, not alone knew about it, I went to see it in the cinema with my sister. Good, gory, silly fun. Yes, it is a B-movie and it glories in that, and it works as low-budget in the spirit of 50s SF-horror that a better budget and setting wouldn't quite pull off. The sequel wasn't as good, and I never bothered with the third movie.
Re: 29, I did indeed know that! Usurping royal or imperial emblems or attributes was a reliable way to get yourself in trouble as indicating ambition to park your own behind on the throne, be it in China or Europe. It's a minor plot point in the tangled plot of "Dream of the Red Chamber", where the main family is threatened/blackmailed about having imperial paraphernalia from an earlier emperor on display in their house. That's a tricky one because disrespecting a gift from a previous monarch could be considered disloyalty and get you into trouble, but having it on display could be considered treasonous ambition above your station and equally get you into trouble.
Laying claim to the wrong heraldry was enough to bring the Earl of Surrey to the executioner's block in 1547, although the background was a power struggle over who would control the regency of the young prince once Henry VIII died. Surrey's main faults were ambition and a bad temper, which led him to various acts of stupidity. Also, via his parents, he had descent from Edward I on his father's side and Edward III on his mother's side, which share of royal blood made the aging king uneasy as to what Surrey might do:
"Meanwhile, on 7 January 1547, a grand jury was summoned to try the Earl of Surrey. None of the charges cited by Southwell were included. Instead, the sole charge was, rather obscurely, that on 7 October 1546 at Kenninghall, Surrey had displayed the royal arms and insignia in his own heraldry. His servant testified that Surrey had claimed that the Saxon king Edward the Confessor had bestowed the arms of England upon the earl’s predecessors. Laying claim to the inheritance of the Saxon kings was a threat to the Tudor heirs of William the Conqueror so, tenuous though it all was, it served to strengthen the case against Surrey. In the end, it would be his own father’s testimony that would seal Surrey’s fate. On 12 January, Norfolk submitted a confession, pleading: ‘I have offended the King in opening his secret counsels at divers times to sundry persons to the peril of his Highness and disappointing of his affairs. Likewise I have concealed high treason, in keeping secret the false acts of my son, Henry Earl of Surrey, in using the arms of St. Edward the Confessor, which pertain only to kings.’"
I tried typing lang:en into Twitter. The very first tweet I'm given from the unfiltered enormity of Twitter is, "[my actual name] is a creepy name." There is no better insult generator than the internet.
"22: Best of recent r/slatestarcodex: Prose Is Bad"
I've seen this sentiment expressed a lot recently, but I'm wary of it. We have a general need for better, more comprehensible writing, but I think too much of the problem gets pinned on the prose style. I blog about history and some related topics, and sometimes readers hint that I should be less "chatty" and more "formulaic." This advice has some merit--my first drafts are rambling, and I don't always devote enough time to cleaning them up. But the general style is consciously chosen, because I've found those same readers completely miss the point if I'm straightforward! Not because straightforward communication is unclear, but because so many terms are seen as shorthand for some larger, often emotionally-charged concept. A chattier style seems to short-circuit this way of thinking--the readers who label it "hard to follow" are never actually confused about my arguments. But it's tough to get the balance right.
Re #8, it reminds me of a buddy of mine, who's currently an exec at a well-known SV firm. This was earlier in his career, when he was only making six figures, but was still doing quite well.
He's back in Canada visiting family, and gets into a conversation with someone who runs a local startup. He mentions what he does, gives a short version of his CV, and the startup founder seems really impressed, until he realized that my buddy doesn't have a degree. So he says "You know, if you finished a degree, we'd really love to hire you!". To someone who was very comfortably employed in San Francisco in the tech industry, and almost certainly making more than any Canadian firm would pay.
This was when he basically gave up hope in the Canadian tech scene, and figured he'd be staying in California for life.
I can't read the Songdo story without subscribing, but I do remember reading not so long ago reports that a lot of the centrally planned new cities in China decried at the time as 'ghost cities' were now in fact doing just fine and being populated.
It's come to the point at which I actually almost rejoice whenever I hear about 'large infrastructure project was a disaster, nobody came!' stories. All it really means is that whoever paid it ended up with a loss, but it means that everybody who moved in afterwards was able to access a cheaper improvement in their lives than they would have been able to do so. This is echoed in what happened with the famous dotcom bubble around 2000 - there was a gross overinvestment in internet infrastructure, and as a result for the next decade everybody had cheap access to the internet and it was a wild free creative place.
I know this is not at all a true statement, but it sure feels that the only time normal people ever get to get ahead substantially from the economy is when somebody big makes a 'failed investment' in infrastructure.
I think the case with ghost cities is just that it takes the network effects many years to spool up. It also takes time for places to develop communities and good reputations (lindy effect or something).
I feel like many of Songdo's problems are probably specific to Songdo rather than planned cities in general, or at least to the "Giant skyscrapers with parks in between" style of living that seems to be popular among city planners but not so much among actual humans.
For a contrasting example of a planned city, look at Canberra, which is almost entirely low-density suburbs surrounding an overly grandiose central set of government buildings. The neighbourhoods are pleasant enough on their own, living is fairly easy and low-friction, and from most angles the city is a green and pleasant place to be, but famously the problem with Canberra is that it's a boring cultural wasteland... but are there any new (post-1900) cities in the world that aren't boring cultural wastelands? Culture takes time.
I remember hearing that a lot of the growth of the internet post-2000 was partly due to massive over-investment in fiber-optics and other cable infrastructure in the early dot-com boom, which became super-cheap when the market crashed, and allowed a number of companies to use bandwidth easily.
Well if that's the case then I guess Thatcher might have prevented from having the current Silicon Valley appear early on in England instead when she said no to nation-wide optic fiber rollout ?
Kind of sounds like one. Depends on what you call "the Internet" in the sense of about what you're thinking when you think of a large presence of "the Internet" in people's lives. If you ask me, what I think most people think of as "the Internet" in terms of "big presence in my life" these days is online (multiplayer) gaming, social media, streaming video/music, online shopping, search, and e-mail, in that order.
Of those only the first and third are real bandwidth hogs, and people already had cable and iPods so the demand for the 3rd was relatively slow until Roku kind of broke the mold there. Was the availability of unusually low-cost bandwidth a promoter of multiplayer gaming? I don't know, it's not my area, but it feels doubtful, it feels like the barriers there were just the sheer programming aspects of it, plus maybe the business/monetization aspect of it (realizing it was in demand, allocating enough money to build it, figuring out how to get a return on your investment from it).
Playing games isn't a hog. Downloading games stresses the heck out of your ISP. Some updates are 50-100 GB, and a whole bunch of people want them at once. If that's not coming from an on-net CDN, there goes upstream transit. If it *is* coming from a CDN on the ISP's network, it can still be rough on oversubscribed (i.e., cable) backhaul.
And kind of misleading - the first fiber going along some right of way is really expensive, additional ones are (very) cheap if you spent even a few seconds thinking about how to build out your network.
The expensive part was always the last mile and that was not built in the run up to the crash for the very most part.
Having read the article, the main complaint seems to be that it's just still underpopulated, which is something that I would actually expect to be solved over time.
(The other complaint is that the streets are way to wide for an area that's supposed to be planned as eventually car-free - that one just seems like a legitimate planning failure, although they do mention having done that with the expectation of adding train lines eventually).
"25: The good news - a commonly used medication, when taken together with opioid painkillers, makes them much more effective - so that even a low dose might be able to block pain effectively. The bad news - that medication is amphetamine. It’s probably still worth it."
I believe the amateur research community refers to this as a "speedball"
"Let's mix speed and morphine, what could possibly go wrong?" 😁 Though perhaps Sherlock Holmes was a chronic pain sufferer and ACD as a doctor was dropping subtle hints:
"Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.
Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it. On the contrary, from day to day I had become more irritable at the sight, and my conscience swelled nightly within me at the thought that I had lacked the courage to protest. Again and again I had registered a vow that I should deliver my soul upon the subject, but there was that in the cool, nonchalant air of my companion which made him the last man with whom one would care to take anything approaching to a liberty. His great powers, his masterly manner, and the experience which I had had of his many extraordinary qualities, all made me diffident and backward in crossing him.
Yet upon that afternoon, whether it was the Beaune which I had taken with my lunch, or the additional exasperation produced by the extreme deliberation of his manner, I suddenly felt that I could hold out no longer.
“Which is it to-day?” I asked, —“morphine or cocaine?”
He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. “It is cocaine,” he said ,—“a seven-per-cent. solution. Would you care to try it?”
“No, indeed,” I answered, brusquely. “My constitution has not got over the Afghan campaign yet. I cannot afford to throw any extra strain upon it.”
He smiled at my vehemence. “Perhaps you are right, Watson,” he said. “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.”
“But consider!” I said, earnestly. “Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process, which involves increased tissue-change and may at last leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed? Remember that I speak not only as one comrade to another, but as a medical man to one for whose constitution he is to some extent answerable.”
He did not seem offended. On the contrary, he put his finger-tips together and leaned his elbows on the arms of his chair, like one who has a relish for conversation.
“My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession,— or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”
8. The minor crimes are misdemeanors and so forth. Not prosecuting some of those sounds like a good idea (a lot of minor drug charges, prostitution, etc). But stuff like trespassing seems more dubious to me.
31. It depends on where you sit. The tenants in Berlin's rent-controlled apartments got a massive reduction in rents and stability, with a relative decrease in rent growth of nearly 60% versus a growth in rent increase in non-regulated apartments of only about 10%. That sounds like a net win, honestly - the only real problem is that rents in non-regulated apartments are likely to keep going up and up because of fears that the rent control reductions will get extended again.
In general, rent control depends on where you live. If you are a long-term tenant with stable income and no plan of moving anytime soon, then rent control can be very good for you. If you are one of the children of said person, or a spouse or family member moving out, or somebody trying to move into the city for the job . . . . not so good.
People can't be interpreting this graph correctly as a drop of 60% in rents, can they? Isn't it a 60% reduction in the rate of growth compared to similar cities? Which is quite a different thing...
Regarding elite colleges in India, the reason (I think) there's such a stark discontinuity is that the high-paying companies (the Googles and Amazons) don't even bother conducting interviews in non-elite colleges. Most hiring of fresh graduates happens in college campuses, and they only visit the campuses of a certain small set of colleges. The only way someone from a "non-elite" college could get in is in the open market competing against experienced people and other fresh graduates, and there too there's network effects and biases that make them less likely to get hired.
I'm curious (not having read the paper) how they measure the "exit scores" though. Different colleges, especially the "elite" ones, often have different syllabuses and exams altogether, so that might not be an apples-to-apples comparison after all.
The paper compares private versus public colleges within the same university. My understanding is that a "university" is a somewhat different kind of animal in India, effectively a degree-granting entity rather than an organization that directly provides instruction. (In a similar vein, the London School of Economics is technically part of the "University of London.") According to the paper, exit exams are identical across public and private colleges within the same university for a given field of study. If this is right, then the comparison is apples-to-apples.
Many other people I've talked to about this paper agree with your suggested explanation involving recruiting practices. Similar things happen in the US as well. I remember a UPenn undergrad referring to my own alma mater (a highly-ranked liberal arts college) as a "non-target school," i.e. not one of the ten or fifteen schools where top investment banks recruit. Apparently there was an "outreach program" to help students from such institutions! I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry when I heard this.
> My understanding is that a "university" is a somewhat different kind of animal in India, effectively a degree-granting entity rather than an organization that directly provides instruction.
True, a university here is a central organization that sets the syllabus, conducts exams (as in sets the dates, provides question papers, etc.), and grants degrees. Some colleges are also "deemed universities", as in they get to set their own syllabus etc., but those are relatively rare.
> exit exams are identical across public and private colleges within the same university for a given field of study. If this is right, then the comparison is apples-to-apples.
That makes sense, thanks for the information. I was thinking of the top tier colleges (the IITs and NITs) which don't share syllabus or exams with any other colleges afaik and so would be hard to fairly compare with, but there do exist other institutions which have had the label "elite" applied and that do share a syllabus with "non-elite" colleges, so it's a plausible and sensible comparison.
My first instinct when seeing the Baltimore broken windows thing is to speculate that a sufficiently robust police presence and harassment of minor criminals is probably good enough to get the good effects, but actually putting people in prison just turns them into real criminals.
My second instinct is, if every other study in psychology and sociology fails to replicate, why would this be any different? We may as well govern by random policy.
> HumanIPO isn’t exactly the thing, because it just sells hours of people’s time instead of a percent of their earnings
Doesn't this sound *more* like slavery, not less? (as much as either of these does.)
The original idea of "shares in future earnings" sounds similar to loans paid back in installments, with maybe looser rules around it? Whereas literally getting to constrain and claim your time sounds more intrusive and slavery-ish.
I think my original intuition was something like that anybody can claim your time (eg your boss, somewhere you volunteer for), but someone taking a share of your money is unusual, and part of the way to working without pay and all your money goes to someone else (slavery). But on further thought your interpretation makes at least as much sense.
Both have existing examples. Countries that have a military draft can demand your time. And most income taxes are based on a percentage of income.
I'm libertarian and fine with calling those things slavery, but that doesn't seem like a leap most people are willing to make, so I'm surprised these companies got accused of slavery.
The government will also throw you in jail for non payment, and paying taxes is not a voluntary agreement you sign up for, so this private scheme is at minimum better than government on those dimensions.
Yeah, that was my first reaction as well. A company calling itself HumanIPO (as in, "a public market of humans") is clearly not one that spent a decent amount of time worrying about parallels to slavery.
#9: There are a few accounts of Caesar's death. Suetonius, Plutarch, Cassius Dio are the normal ones. They mostly say that Caesar's last words were "Ista quidem vis est!" which means "This is definitely violence!" Ista has a hostile tone to it so inserting curse words would get the feeling across. If so, he was pointing out that they were violating sacred prohibitions against violence. The historians say he had no further chance to speak after that since he was being, you know, stabbed.
Suetonius and Cassius Dio report, in some cases with open doubt, that other people claim he said "καὶ σύ τέκνον." Kai su teknon. So he spoke Greek and didn't directly address Brutus. The phrase is perfectly normal in Greek. It is part of a Greek curse formula ("You too, my child, will have a taste of this.") But it's also a perfectly normal phrase and could not be a reference to anything. The traditional interpretation, including by the Romans, is that he was addressing either Brutus or a lesser known man named Albinus. And that he was expressing his upset with men he had treated so well betraying him. So, the "standard" intrepretation.
Plutarch says his last words were, "μιαρώτατε Κάσκα, τί ποιεῖς." Which means, "Most impure Casca what are you doing?" Except 'most impure' was a normal insult so replace it with a strong insult of choice to get the sense. And that nothing else could be understood over the noise of him being repeatedly stabbed, though he allows he might have cursed or otherwise cried out.
There is, as always, something of politics in which interpretation you take. Plutarch is taking the anti-Caesar position, showing him as a surprised man who cried out as he was stabbed, vainly struggling to get away or live. Suetonius and Cassius Dio take the pro-Caesar position: that he died bravely and silently and if he said anything at all it was a brave, poetic quote. So the debate in interpretations between "bravely and stoicly meeting his fate," and "cursing everyone out" actually has pretty old roots.
#16: This was a common process in the age of exploration. Europeans believed these animals really existed and that they were finding live examples. The issue being they'd often made them up. There's all kinds of behaviors they reported as confirmed which were actually made up and entirely spurious. The famous example is that rhinos were supposed to be armored and Europeans reported on plated rhinos into the 19th century. But there is no such thing.
#32: You could also rent pineapples for parties. Pineapples were so valuable there were significant advances in greenhouse technology because it became profitable to use them to grow pineapples. This in turn eventually had positive downstream effects on agricultural science by getting the rich interested in them and funding them for status and practical reasons, reaching its apex with a Prime Minister of Great Britain who was (in)famous for droning on about the benefits of turnips and exotic fruits and all that in farming.
Nope: Turnip Townsend, who was around a few decades before George III was born. I slightly mistook his position: was actually Lord President and not PM (but was brother in law to the PM). Farmer George was more of a physiocrat, iirc, a mix of agricultural science and economics.
> Getting into an elite college in India... 1. Doesn't improve your college exit-exam scores. 2. But does massively increase your salary.
The smartest Indians do not care about grades and especially not college-exit exam grades. The exams are purely a test of verbatim-memorization and the smartest kids quickly learn to engage themselves in more productive pursuits.
I went to one of India's best institutes and the highest scoring students were a perfect combination of the hardest working, docile in the face of authority and above a moderate threshold of intelligence.
This is more an indictment of the incompetent exam based education system, rather than companies overvaluing elite colleges. This is because elite colleges use Olympiad / SAT / IQ test style exams for entry, which are usually better indicators of intelligence.
The linked article advocates transhumanism as the best defense against human extinction at the hands of machines. That still doesn't do much for the non-upgraded humans, who not only are at the mercy of both camps but probably would compete more with transhumans for niches.
Machines could be better at empathy than we are, just like they will be better at everything than we are. I don't think empathetic transhuman protectors is the answer.
Inspired by the link about the new town in Guatemala, I can't help but think it's possible for competition to be dialed down with coordination and shared values. The coexistence of human and machine intelligence is possible, but we need to treat others as we would be treated.
The machines won't be dumb and will pick up on our own behaviors. I'm pretty confident we will be outmatched by them eventually, but it won't matter because they will find more niches beyond earth, to which we are adapted, than us. So no need to compete except for a short while.
Just like the town in Guatemala, we will live on a human scale planet under the oversight of machines. So what if it's a zoo? Would you prefer competition to the death?
Link posts like these are an example of where the ability to comment on specific paragraphs would be extremely useful (a la webnovel: (in phone app) paragraphs with comments have little circles at the end of the paragraph containing the total number of comments on that paragraph (paragraph, paragraph paragraph), long-press opens pop-up with the comments in reddit tree format, sorted by most recent, and clicking a comment lets you respond.)
"Before Europeans applied the word “panther” to the big cat found in Asia / the Americas, it was a mythical animal akin to the chimera or pegasus (its name comes from pan+therion, “all animals”"
Therion has the connotation of a *beast* or wild animal, as opposed to the more general and neutral *zoon*. Zoon is, of course, the root of zoology, and so on. Therion is part of the phrase *To mega therion*, translated as "The Great Beast" from the book of revelations, and used as a sobriquet by the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. Another way of translating *therion* into English would be "brute", which gets us back to Shakespeare's rendition of Caesar's Greek...
Isn't a better way to translate "therion" into modern English, as "mammal"? "Therion" is cognate with latinate "feral", and with German "Tier" and English "deer".
I did a lot of working memory training and stopped at least seven years ago. I have a poor working memory and remember doing much worse with the forward digit span than what I remember the average being of 7. I significantly raised my forward digit span during my training. Five minutes ago I took a forward digit span test and three times was able to remember seven digits. So while working memory training might not have raised my IQ, it did seem to have permanently increased my working memory, at least in this narrow domain. I'm of an age where you would have expected my working memory to fall over the last seven years.
#19 I saw DeepNostalgia applied to a photo of myself, and found the effect so disturbing that I couldn't stand to look at it. It was my face, but not my expressions or movements, and the effect for me was spine-tinglingly disturbing.
I was talking to an uber driver recently from Brasilia. I asked how he liked it in Orlando, FL, where we were -- he, said, "Oh, it's actually very similar".
"why not let people sell shares of their future earnings to fund eg college tuition or other self-improvement programs?"
Because that would be peonage. Peonage is illegal and invaild under the 13th Amendment and 42 U.S. Code §1994. Peonage is a felony under 18 U.S.C. §1581 that will get you 20 years as a guest of Uncle Sam.
These proposals always come from college professors. I have a better idea, how about controlling the cost of college with wage and price controls. Tuition for a four college education should not exceed the price of a nice SUV. College Presidents should not be paid more than the President of the United States. Deans should not make more than the Secretary of State. Professors should be on the GS pay scale.
They would not be happy with the goldman sachs workload. Compare them to high school teachers, they don't look so good. GS is very generous these days.
Couldn't begin to tell you. Although like many of these deals, it was done in the Dominican Republic between citizens thereof. If they tried to enforce it in a US Court, it should be rejected.
"The company said it has withdrawn a November filing it made with the Securities and Exchange Commission proposing to have an initial public offering of Fantex Sports Portfolio 1 Units that would have been tied to the earnings of 10 players in two sports."
so perhaps they pulled it because it was illegal? but they were at least considering offering them in US. i don't know.
I mean, the real problem here is that the President of the United States and Secretary of State are paid a scandalously low amount given the importance of their competence and the marginal value of attracting more competent candidates.
"The rise, fall, and rise of the status [of the] pineapple. Pineapples [sp] used to be so desirable that they were worth £10,000+ (inflation-adjusted)."
There are few foods I detest more. Maybe kidney beans. I like raw oysters. But pineapple. Gag me with a spoon.
#6. Baltimore: Indeed, Baltimore was one of very few big cities not to suffer an increase in murders in 2020 over 2019, which is good. On the other hand, Baltimore's murder rate exploded back during the First BLM Era in the wake of the Freddie Gray riot of April 25, 2015, propelling Baltimore to the worst murder rate among the 50 biggest cities (St. Louis, which adjoins Ferguson, is even worse, but St. Louis, which was the 4th biggest city in the country at the time of the 1904 World's Fair, is no longer in the top 50.)
So, while it could be that this Reverse Broken Windows strategy was the cause, it might also have been that sometimes when you say, "Well, at least things can't get any worse," that turns out to be true.
When I see the alternatives "Most people can be trusted" vs. "You can't be too careful dealing with people", I think "Both are true!" Most people can be trusted, but the single-digit percentage who can't be trusted will take complete advantage of you and wreck your life if you aren't careful, and you won't be able to tell they can't be trusted until it's too late.
Trustworthiness is also not a binary and involves morals, so anyone with different morals cannot be trusted to do what I would like them to do, sometimes.
> We evaluated 848 models, including logistic regression as per the original paper, plus linear regression and twoforms of propensity score analysis. Only 166 models (19.6%) yielded a statistically significant relationship between early TV exposure and later attention problems, with most of these employing problematic analytic choices.
Now is 166 models out of 848 statistically significant? I'd expect that even in the absence of a relationship, if you investigate 848 models, a few of them will yield a statistically significant relationship...
24. I'm always surprised that Walter Mischel didn't get canceled: he invented his marshmallow test in Trinidad in the 1950s to understand why Asian Indians outperformed blacks economically on that island:
If you like panthers, you should learn about pards. A pard was a hypothetical animal extrapolated from the assumption that a leopard must be a cross between a lion and a pard. The folk etymology pan+ther came later and may have influenced the interpretation.
In fact, I had thought that "panther" was an Greek inflection of "pard," but looking now, they both existed in Sanskrit. At least that makes clear that the pan+ther etymology is false.
I should go to bed instead of looking it up, but I think I read that a "panther" in Greek was a real animal, probably an African leopard, and the weird monster panther came later. I guess the polka dots come from the leopard's spots.
Multiverse analysis is a great idea for beating the whole garden of forking paths thing. Hope to see it more. People in machine learning have been doing that sort of thing for a long time with good results -- they call it 'ensembling', and it's difficult to win a machine learning competition without it.
Whenever I've seen ensemble modeling used, it's been premised on choosing a number of reasonable models. Or taking models built by different teams.
I'm not sure a 'kitchen sink' approach is a good idea. How do you choose what models to include? Literally anything that converges? Seems like a bad plan. At some point, the marginal model is just adding noise.
Indeed, this is the failure mode I most commonly see with "AI/ML". Instead of actually thinking about the data, its structure, how its generated, etc., and posing a useful model, they just choose a technique they like and throw it at the data. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but most of the time you end up with something more complicated and less explainable than needed. In the worst cases, your predictions are worse, too.
Well, the "kitchen sink" approach is more or less what random forests and boosting do, and those techniques work quite well.
There's also the analogy with full posterior inference in Bayesian ML. Probably the ideal setup would weight each model according to some estimate of its credibility.
In my mind, we got ourselves into this replication crisis situation in the first place because researchers can't be trusted to pick a good model. If you give them "degrees of freedom", they will just fiddle with them until they get the result they wanted. So if someone writes an R package to do multiverse analysis, I would suggest they DON'T include optional arguments that let you tweak its behavior -- researchers will abuse those. (Or alternatively, someone can write a multimultiverse package that runs the multiverse package with every possible combination of options!)
Anyway I don't think my concern applies to data scientists working in industry because they face a different set of incentives.
"7: Very large long-term study: working memory training definitely does not increase IQ. Sorry, people who spent years playing dual-n-back games."
Could increasing working memory be useful anyways? Like, I frequently feel that more working memory would be useful, e.g. while working with a large codebase.
I wrote the post "The supply and demand of political takes" and the Reddit moderators took it down for being too culture war heavy. I tried keeping it as apolitical as I could, but the mods disagreed I guess. Glad you liked it though!
That rent control article is a bit odd--not sure it makes the point it thinks it's making. Rents in controlled apt are down by 60% while uncontrolled apt are up by 10%. Seems like pretty good in net?
That's not what those graphs are saying. they don't show rent growth, but rent growth in Berlin compared to rent growth in 13 other German cities. Rents in controlled apartments aren't down by 60% (the idea is to keep them stable), rents in uncontrolled apartments are growing 10% more than in other cities (hope I get this right).
But the rents are down 60% in the controlled apartments. Unless you're saying "Rents Plummet in Berlin’s Regulated Apartments..." means something other than rents plummeting in the regulated apartments?
"Probably the best of the most recent million or so anti-journalist essays, but most relevant to me was the discussion of the recent trend of journalists “exposing” private citizens:"
But wasn't your name already public? I'm not sure why you're saying what the NYT wrote was an "expose" like it was some ultra-secret information. One could very easily make the case that NYT didn't dig _deep enough_ on this story.
It was not public in the sense that you could just discover it easily. It was certainly not part of a media story.
In the media's own framework, this counts as a 'scoop.'
And you are falsely applying a single metric to the reporting, as if simply publishing more information is the same as 'digging deep.' Yet by that metric, gossip mags do the best reporting...
I am a casual reader of Scott's blog and I already knew his real name. The idea that a journalist with even the most cursory ability to investigate the facts wouldn't be able to find out Scott's real name is... well, let's just say I find it naive at best
It's hard to imagine how this counts as an "expose" unless Scott also considers every other named person in the NYT to be also exposed.
You are clearly not casual and you are rebutting a claim that wasn't made. The issue is not how hard it was for the reporter to find the name, but whether there was sufficient justification to have the Eye of Sauron gaze upon him.
I am a casual reader and I already knew his name. One wonder how "private" Scott was being if that's the case. I wasn't even investigating like a journalist would be, yet I still came across it.
The "sufficient justification" is that a journalist found it interesting enough to write a piece. Journalists don't have to ask your permission to write about you, nor should they.
I think there's ethical considerations involved in not writing a sufficiently critical story, which is what the NYT article ended up being - kind of a half-hearted analysis. But that's a problem with the entire structure of the bourgeois press.
Since it's irrelevant now: SSC links back to the squid314 LiveJournal in several places, and at least one of the posts linked to (or one of the posts the linked posts themselves link to; I'm not 100% sure) has Scott's name at the bottom in the form of a "Scott Siskind" email address. It did require the Wayback Machine, since obviously the LiveJournal got burned (still, following a dead link's trail that way is hardly an arcane skill).
I'm not making any moral claims here - just a fact-check.
Nobody was arguing that a "passerby" would know his name, I was saying that it was public information (made public by Scott himself at various times) and that any journalist could easily find it.
The issue wasn't whether someone could find out Scott Alexander's legal name. The issue was whether someone checking out Scott Siskind the psychiatrist could find out that he was writing a controversial blog.
Firstly; I typed "Scott Siskind psychiatrist" into google and the New York Times article is not on the front page of results (at least for me, I don't know how google's results work). However you get links like this:
Where people say that the cat was already out of the bag and people like Robin Hanson had already written Scott Alexander's/Siskind's name in full on his blog many years ago. This is starting to look less like an actual principled position and more like Scott Alexander being upset because someone has written an article that is not hagiographical enough for his tastes.
Many times people have discussed that Scott Alexander was less-than-cautious about his actual name, the NYT article states that he had previously published SSC content under his real name. Of course, the whole matter was not helped by Scott's Streisand-like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect) attempt to censor the printing of his name, which, extremely predictably, lead to further publicity of his name.
Lastly, we can consider this entire event from the "YP, not MP" perspective. The association of Scott Alexander's writing with his psychiatry work sounds like his problem, not the New York Time's problem. If he doesn't want to two associated with each other, then he shouldn't have connected the two together with his entire internet existence up to that point. Even if had kept his name a secret (and we've already established that he didn't) then the NYT is under no obligation to keep it a secret. They can publish whatever they like (within reason) - and if Scott Alexander felt he had a case he could sue them, right?
This is really a case of the free-market in action. Scott Alexander's patients will google his name, and if they don't like his "controversial views" then they will seek treatment elsewhere. The New York times, if they write an interesting enough articles, will generate more revenue. Everybody wins.
Can't be Scott being upset at the article's content. The article wasn't published until the row was mostly over, and if Scott had thought the article was going to be bad there doesn't seem to be any obvious reason for his many statements that he thought it was going to be a puff piece.
WRT free market - there are psychiatric ethics codes regarding a psychiatrist having a public face at all. It wasn't Scott's views that were the issue there, but the fact that he had a blog at all (which is why squid314 got burned). The views getting a mob after him were a separate issue.
Scott was definitely perturbed by the lack of fawning in the article. Just look at this statement:
"The actual article was very negative; I feel this was as retaliation for writing this post, but I can’t prove it."
He _feels_ that this must be "retaliation" although he cannot prove anything. Very rational, I'm sure.
"The views getting a mob after him were a separate issue."
What "mob" are you talking about? Are you talking about consumers deciding how to best spend their time in the free market of ideas?
Like I've already said, if Scott Alexander wasn't supposed to be blogging at all as part of the terms of his chosen career I can't really sympathise when he voluntarily breaks the ethics of his chosen profession and news of his rule-breaking becomes slightly more public.
I think you're missing something there. Scott made a lot of objections to his name being released while *specifically* saying he didn't think the article was a hit piece. Then there was the public row, then there was the article, *then* he said that it was negative. My point is that his problem with being doxxed can't be due to the article doxxing him being negative, as he specifically didn't think it was negative when he deleted the blog in protest at being doxxed.
By "mob" I mean the people calling his workplace falsely claiming to be abused former patients of Scott's. My point is that this is not related to the reason Scott went pseudonymous with SSC (i.e. employers saying "you have a blog, this is unethical", without regard to the content).
All I'm doing here is teasing apart some misapprehensions; I haven't opined here on the central question i.e. "was it wrong to dox Scott".
"Scott made a lot of objections to his name being released while *specifically* saying he didn't think the article was a hit piece."
That's not what he said, he said that he had been told by the writer that it would be a positive piece. He didn't say anything about if _he_ thought it was a positive piece.
In any case, he had already been self-"doxxed" (and his name also mentioned by Robin Hanson). Again, this seems less like a principled stand and more like a desperate need to control his own public persona. What we're really talking about when we're talking about "doxxing" is that Scott Siskind is being talked about in the press just like they would talk about almost anyone else, and he doesn't get special favours.
"By "mob" I mean the people calling his workplace falsely claiming to be abused former patients of Scott's."
Was there:
1. Ever any evidence that this ever happened?
2. Any evidence that it _wasn't_ actually a disgruntled former patient?
3. Any evidence that it was more than one person? (I think a "mob" should probably be more than like 10 people but whatever)
Robin Hanson's article doesn't connect Scott's real name to Slate Star Codex, but to his old blog, that he took down exactly because he didn't want his writing to be so easily connected with his real name.
Just reading the single article that Robin Hanson links to, requires people to have the skill and take the effort to use archiving sites to find that content. Finding other articles then requires even more effort. This skill/effort requirement is presumably a huge barrier for most.
And actually figuring out that Robin Hanson is referring to the writer of Slate Star Codex requires information that he doesn't present, so it's hard to see how all but a tiny minority of readers would figure that out.
What you and most critics are doing is the same kind of 20/20 hindsight that happens after terrorist attacks and the like, where it is completely ignored that it is way easier to see a connection if you already know what to look for and are motivated to connect those two things. And even then you have to misrepresent the evidence...
"Requires people to have the skill" - searching around the internet for a few minutes takes minimal skills, and any journalist spending hours interviewing and writing an article is going to find what was already public but not widely disseminated.
Saying that a "tiny minority" would find out his name is irrelevant. Even with the NYT article a tiny minority will know his name - most people will have read the article and already forgotten about it.
My argument is simply that this information was already public, many people already knew it, it was made public by Scott himself, and that any journalist would easily find it. Not only would they easily find it, but they are well-within their rights (and even their ethics) to write about it.
This kind of mandatory politeness that is enforced in the Rationalist community is not enforced within journalism, nor should it be.
The journalist was searching in the other direction (alias -> real name), which was far easier, but you keep ignoring the difference.
The claim was never that it was hard for a determined journalist to find the information. And the argument against the article wasn't that people would remember, but that they would find it while googling.
You keep insisting on defending a position that I'm not objecting to, nor was Scott, while pretending that you are debating the actual objections. You are not. You keep debating the same straw man over and over.
I'm unsure what mechanism you are proposing that would ensure one direction will remain easy but the other direction will remain difficult. Once his name is out there in the public domain it seems inevitable that the two would become linked and easily found. I mean, the entire purpose of google is to find and promote relevant information based on certain search terms.
There are two directions. Readers of the blog could easily find his name. Patients couldn't easily his blog. It's this direction he cared about, and that caused the kerfuffle.
Again, that seems like Scott Alexander's problem, not the New York Times' problem. Once one direction is easy and has been established the other direction will quickly become easy.
Running a """multiverse analysis""" and calling it a failure if only 20% of models show a correlation is wrong. But if the effect size is small enough for this to happen, it might not matter, howver the effect might be large and the authors just fitting models very badly.
Does anyone know of any more recent stories about Songo? I happened to visit in summer 2018, when that article was written, because my partner was going there for a conference. It was more active than any American city outside the densest few downtowns, but definitely still felt sleepy because the buildings were 2/3 empty, and a whole forest of a dozen more skyscrapers was just finishing construction and about to open. But it's been three years since then, and that was only four years after the neighborhood began to open, so I would assume there's been a lot more going on there (particularly if people in Seoul got interested in moving out to more spacious places during the pandemic).
Multiverse analysis: I teach propensity score matching to my students. Usually, I tell them, please make your assumptions/idelogy explicit, and based on this, please select your covariates for adjustment. If you consider it fair that engineers earn more money than nurses, then adjust your gender pay gap analysis by profession. Otherwise, don't. The important thing is to think and to make it explicit.
Multiverse analysis is the opposite: I don't want to think myself, instead I let the computer run the analysis through all combinations of covariates, and then count the number of significant results.
"There is always an even darker spot at the end of the tunnel."
I teach propensity score matching to my students too and totally agree with your first point: it's crucial to be transparent. I also agree with your second point, namely that there's a strong temptation to let the computer do our thinking for us. But I'm not sure that this is really a critique of multiverse analysis. We can contrast two practices:
1. Let the computer churn through 1,000,000 models and report the ones that "look good" and conform to your prior.
2. Construct a set of assumptions and specifications based on prior knowledge. Picking up on your example, this set could include both specifications that do and do not adjust for occupation when estimating a gender pay gap if this is a contentious point that you hope to explore. You will probably not end up with a million models, but you will end up with many, because there are many decisions to be made throughout the data analysis process. Every time you have to make such a modeling decision, make a list of all reasonable decisions you could have made, and use this list to generate a universe of "reasonable models." Finally, summarize the results of all the "reasonable models."
Option 1 is what I would call "data-dredging." It's a terrible idea: don't do it! (It will get you tenure but destroy the world.) Option 2 is my understanding of what people mean when they refer to "multiverse analysis." Like nearly everything in statistics and econometrics, this is an old idea that suddenly became fashionable. If you're interested in this kind of thing, I'd suggest taking a look at Ed Leamer's book "Specification Searches." It's out-of-print, but you can download a copy from Leamer's web site at this url:
To over-simplify somewhat, Leamer is a Bayesian who doesn't believe that we can actually specify a prior in practice. The best we can do is to specify sets of priors. Leamer's mantra is: "the mapping is the message." In other words, the task of data analysis is to convey how different assumptions map into different conclusions. Of course we should focus on the "interesting" or "plausible" assumptions, but there are many different combinations! If they all tell the same story, we've learned something that is both useful and reliable. If they don't, we have still learned something useful: we now know how different beliefs about the world map into conclusions. These beliefs, in turn, could be informed by data from other sources so learning becomes possible even with ambiguous results.
To me, Leamer's approach is almost identical to the multiverse idea. As computers have gotten faster and cheaper, it's easy to accidentally end up data-dredging when you thought you weren't. A decision here, another there, another there, and suddenly you've implicitly explored hundreds of models. Presumably you didn't try anything that struck you as a priori crazy, but you also didn't keep track of everything that you did try. The multiverse idea, as I understand it, is to make this transparent rather than to encourage data-dredging.
So far all I've discovered that almost nobody just _tweets_ any more in English. 90% of English language tweets have a picture, or more commonly a video. In Russian it's only about 10%.
Re #26, if voluntary income tax is kinda slavery, wouldn't that make actual income tax kinda worse than slavery? I'd say pledging parts of future income is far less bad than taxation, which in turn is far less bad than slavery. Obviously politicians wouldn't like that type of competition, though. Even regular employment has a slavery-like component to it, in that one is forced to work during one's notice period, which can be many months, depending on the jurisdiction and contract.
The Bloomberg article is paywalled for me, but I don't think its conclusion holds up. The only studies I could find are from the government-financed and left-leaning think-tank DIW (Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung): [This one](https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.578092.de/18-7-1.pdf) contrasts different implementations of rent control in the German states and finds most of them ineffective (but not Berlins!). This is not a huge surprise because (a) most state governments were not really committed to this policy and (b) most places have rent increases that are below the threshold of the law; except for Berlin which had huge increases before the policy and has pioneered this approach because of it. [This evaluation](https://www.bmjv.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Ministerium/ForschungUndWissenschaft/MPB_Gutachten_DIW.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=1) is largely positive and also gives some evidence that this may actually increase the number of newly built houses since it limits the profits investors can make with existing housing. They remark though that this may have bad effects on modernisation of existing housing. [This recent one](https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.811443.de/21-8-3.pdf) finds that the number of flats on the market has drastically declined (but they only look at one month of data in chart 3 which means that seasonality and maybe even Covid might have an effect here) and prices have risen on the outskirts of Berlin. Also, they see small reductions in the number of new housing projects. So (a) rent control can actually keep rents down if laws are well-written (b) it probably doesn't impact the creation of new housing and may even benefit it (c) It leads to some economical suboptimal choices (eg. make rents in central locations and on the outskirts more similar which is bad for poor people) and can fix others (eg. lock-in: the inability to move to a smaller flat because the rents everywhere else have risen much faster than the rent on your contract).
#8: A key point the author makes is that potential Canadian startup founders can move to California and found startups there. As someone familar with the US immigration system, I can say that this is not at all true. Canadians have it easier than most other nationalities, but even they can't get the right to work in the US without jumping through an insane number of bureaucratic hoops and spending thousands of dollars.
5. (Twitter) I've scrolled for a while and haven't seen anything overtly terrible. Not even insults. Overall this bird-eye view of Twitter seems much less like a wretched hive than, say, comments on news articles.
12. (MMAcevedo) Good piece, obviously SCP-inspired (red motivation, brrr...). Killing yourself when the technology emerges would be a bit of a Pascalesque overreaction. Abstaining from mind-uploading for the first 40 years seems like a wise choice though.
16. (Panther) As a Hebrew and Russian speaker, I had the same reaction when I discovered that "behemoth" and "leviathan" have other meanings beyond "hippo" and "whale" respectively.
35. (Gothic) Am I the only one feeling slight revulsion looking at these redesigns? A bit like seeing buildings reimagined as insectoid organisms. I think the reverse version, redesigning classical buildings as modern ones, would be butt ugly but not gross. (I generally love gothic architecture.)
The re-imagined 'Gothic' examples don't look too great (that airforce chapel is odd) and some of it is Romanesque, anyway. You can't just slap one style on top of another, you do have to think about it.
#34 is probably a good paper because if you ignore the statistics and p-values and confidence intervals and just look at the data, it is a very convincing argument.
Amusingly, the ‘classic’ Latin translation of Caesar's last words in France is not “Et tu, Brute?” but “To quoque, filie?” ("You too, my son.") This version is frequently parodied in ‘Asterix’ comics, for example.
Not completely out of place, if you allow for the argument that it was a shortened version of the full phrase, 'You too, my son, will have a taste of power.'
Forgive me for overstating the obvious, but a child who takes a cracker now rather than hold out for a marshmallow later may be following a perfectly rational strategy, depending on that child's circumstances.
What's the point of replying with an unrelated question?
I don't know what Antifa is. From my uninformed view, it's a rather organized group of people that do stuff I don't like, and that hold an ideology I'm not interested in checking out. If the huge majority of people that call themselves Antifa are not activists and would be opposed to the riots and violence, I would be learning something new.
About QAnon I know even less, and have the fuzzy impression that they are more joined by ideas and community than support for violent activism. Or at least that's what the dude tweeting says ("we are not violent"). So, what's the reality of the group?
It's hard to quantify what percentage of self-identified antifa are opposed to violence, but where organized groups do exist, they tend to denounce violence and promote community organizing, flyer campaigns, and mutual aid.
That said, there is a hard core of "punch Nazis" types who definitely go to far-right events hoping to, well, punch some Nazis. (I don't mean Nazis like "GOP people" here but rather groups like Patriot Front who are real, self-professed fascists, or the literal Klan.)
As for QAnon, the FBI deems them a terrorist threat and they've planned or committed a number of attacks, notably a plot to bomb the Illinois Capitol, the murder of Frank Cali, and of course the attack on the US Capitol on Jan 6. It'd be silly to say that any given QAnon member supports violence, but the movement has predictably spawned a lot of violence. Not surprising when these people are led to believe they're already in a low-intensity civil war against vampire pedophiles.
It's kind of weird how Antifa re-uses the flag and the name of a movement which was ambiguously anti-Nazi, and not only in its pre-history, but even later (the ruling social democrats were considered by Stalinists as the "real" fascists, while Nazis were potential allies... until it was too late).
To this day I feel that's a lesson leftists have failed to internalize. Being a leftish liberal there are definitely leftists who spend more time being mad at me than at the far right and that seems really counterproductive.
OTOH it's kind of weird that Antifa haven't allied with QAnons/Trumpists yet : they're both extremes, and both have a common enemy : centrist liberal democrats.
On the third hand, it's kind of hard to figure out what "liberal" even means these days : in most countries liberals are more right wing than left wing, and tend to derive their politics (and especially economics) from "conservative" politicians like Reagan and Thatcher rather than anyone else.
The Jan 6 thing being QAnon is surprising to me. At least, I'd bet something similar would have happened regardless of any centralized organization given the non-existent security there and the number of unsatisfied Trump voters that were convinced the election was stolen and all institutions that could do something about it were broken and controlled by democrats -- a conspiracy but not at the vampire-pedophile level.
If you base that on me, I wouldn't consider myself representative of "people". I'm not even from the US. And I didn't think it was centralized so much as organized; likely the impression comes from seeing stuff like the black bloc doing planned violence with proper tools and attire. Most disorganized massive protests have some violence that just happens because statistics, but I don't usually see the massive antifa mostly peaceful protests that spawn the violent minorities. (Where I'm from, those kinds of riots are almost always organized and centralized and violence is a tactic and not an undesireable side effect). This is actually why I find it weird to expect some centralized organization to the Jan 6 thing which did spawn from a more massive peaceful protest, appeared mostly peaceful even within the capitol (or I got that impression from random sampling the livestreams that day), and there was clearly no dress code, weapons or much tactics.
Now I'm under the impression that the word antifa has overloaded and sorta hijacked, and some "traditional antifa" might be reading me with anger. What can you do?
Anyway, I'll stop writing about what I don't know for a few hours.
A movement of people centered around an anonymous (but probably Ron Watkins) 4chan and 8chan poster called "Q" who claims to be a military officer with top US government clearance.
This person posts predictions claiming that there is a cabal of powerful criminals (pedophiles/cannibals/human traffickers/etc) which Donald Trump et al were on a mission to take down. Most of these predictions have turned out to be false, but the movement has grown quite large and there are now millions of people who believe in a vast left-wing criminal conspiracy led by the Clintons and some Hollywood elites. Other claims include things like Trump being reinstated as president sometime in 2021, large numbers of Democrats being arrested and imprisoned, "10 Days of Darkness" during which Trump declares martial law and cuts the internet/power, and mass global suicides.
TL;DR a pretty typical wild-ass conspiracy theory that took off over the last few years.
South Park recently released a "documentary" about the movement (among other things). I hear that, like for Scientology before, for maximum comedic effect they just stated QAnon's core beliefs.
There is no evidence that Julius Caesar said anything at all as he died, and Suetonius is hardly a reliable source for historical information - think of him like an ancient Roman tabloid.
As long as we're discussing theories, another is that the phrase was attributed as a foreshadowing of Brutus' short-lived taste of power before he also died. If JC really said those words, it may have been more of a warning for the future than an invective or appeal.
Again, he may never have said anything, but at least this argument rests upon more reliable authors and takes into account the cultural beliefs of the Romans. Following Arnaud (1988), the phrase was derived from a proverbial line of Greek verse.
Recent scholarship is much more oriented towards the cultural mind of the Romans and a revival of concentration upon their literature and historical accounts rather than on 're-imagining' the past through dubious claims via material evidence. Russell is what happens when you start letting archaeologists interpret history instead of digging for it. And Mary Beard is little better - Cambridge hat notwithstanding.
If I had to guess Caesar's last words, I'd go with "Aaaaaagh! Aaaaaaagh!" If he actually managed to get stabbed to death in Johnny Tightlips style silence then I'm impressed.
Speaking as a classicist: the Romans greatly valued the tolerance of hardship and pain - or at least the personal attribution of it.
Another famous Roman, Gaius Marius, had varicose veins in his leg operated upon without being tied up or uttering a single moan. When the surgeon went for the second leg, however, he reportedly said 'the improvement is not worth the pain,' and declined.
Judging by the historical accounts of the man, I'm inclined to believe that one. The account of Julius Caesar's death is less certain because of the politics around the assassination.
What I've heard about LSD dosing is that it turns off some function in the brain. Once it's fully turned off, the LSD doesn't have any further effect, so you can't really overdose it.
Is there any truth to that, or did I just overhear druggies reassuring each other?
Of course, I expect Elephant brains to work differently.
It's true. In 2015, a woman snorted 55 mg of LSD, thinking it was cocaine. That's 550 times the normal recreational dose. She not only survived unharmed, but her chronic foot pain disappeared for five days afterward. If the elephant received 300 mg, and is at least 50 times heavier than a human, that would mean the woman in question took more than nine times as much LSD as the elephant by weight. The bioavailability of snorted LSD would have to be an order of magnitude lower than injected LSD for the doses to even reach equivalence.
If you click through to the Wikipedia article you can read that the elephant might have died of the drugs they subsequently administered to him in an attempt to revive him. Given the above numbers, that seems like the most likely explanation to me.
Strangely, the latter paper doesn't actually discuss the overdose deaths mentioned in the abstract. They cite another paper in which eight people snorted LSD, five of whom ended up comatose, but all eight fully recovered in 2-3 days. The remaining cases they discuss all involve normal recreational doses. They conclude with:
"In conclusion, LSD does not have the degree of physiological
toxicity alleged by recent reports in the professional literature
and in the media. These reports have caused confusion by
distracting from what is likely the true causes of these reported
The two cases are mentioned in section 2 of the paper, they write:
> > In the case report described by Griggs and Ward [22] the liver concentration of LSD was reported as 31.2mg/mL (31,200 ng/mL). They extrapolate, based on a study in cats, that the decedent in this case may have received an LSD dose equivalent to about 320 mg intravenously, or “23 times the previously calculated lethal human dose.”
> In a case reported by Fysh et al. [23], the cause of death was stated to be poisoning by LSD, but sufficient details are lacking to determine the actual dose ingested. In that report, a 25-year-old male died 16 h after being admitted to the hospital, but it is not reported how much earlier his LSD ingestion occurred. Analysis of ante-mortem serum gave 14.4 ng/mL, but if analysis of his plasma had been carried out more proximal to his ingestion of the drug, this concentration would have been much higher.
> These latter two cases document death by LSD overdose, but only from massive doses of drug that might be available directly from a manufacturer, and not from a typical distributor of recreational dosage forms such as blotters or liquid solutions.
Ah, you're right, bad reading comprehension on my part. I also didn't properly read the bit about the estimated lethal dose in humans of 14 mg being based on rabbits and an elephant; checking the citation, I see a LD of 0.1 mg/kg. Taking the average weight of an adult Indian elephant as 4500 kg results in a lethal dose of 450 mg, which is close enough that I have to substantially recalibrate my estimate of the odds of LSD being the cause of the elephant's death.
However, I don't know what they based the 0.1 mg/kg on. Given that the experiment on Tusko was done in 1962 and this paper is from 1993, it might actually be based on him, unless someone knows of /other/ elephants that died after being given LSD.
So, no conclusive evidence on the matter of elephants, but at least we can say that injecting a human with as much LSD as they gave the elephant will kill them. Probably.
I'm a bit skeptical of some of the massive overdoses that humans have supposedly survived; they are not in very scientific settings, so it's hard to know exactly how much LSD they really took.
Anyway, although the lethal dose in humans and elephants is very debatable, we do know that it kills mice (at 46 mg/kg) and rabbits (0.3 mg/kg), so I think massive LSD doses definitely can kill you. Similarly, the people mentioned upthread who ended up comatose in intensive care were surely pretty close to death. But the fact that you can survive a 100x overdose is already quite impressive.
#23 is fascinating but also maddening. Setting aside the issues themselves, the most common theme in all of the quotes (but seemingly more of the "red" quotes) is that the other side is misinformed/uninformed. So many of the quotes boil down to "believe what MY media sources say, not what YOURS say" - it really reinforces my view that we have a massive issue with media polarization which drives political polarization. I'm reasonably confident that without far-right/left outlets perpetually driving radicalizing narratives, we'd have a much less polarized electorate.
That said - is this issue solvable in any real way? There's no incentive for media outlets to become more moderate; their ratings are driven by their most radical viewers. As viewpoints diverge more and more from both the two poles and from reality, it will become risky to moderate the message even slightly - see the anti-Fox News backlash after they accurately reported election results. I'm not confident that this is going to continue in the same direction, but recent experience and my gut instinct makes me think it will.
Which leads to - is there a breaking point? I've read some who argue that Jan 6 was a breaking point for some Republicans, but for others it was a *reinforcement* of their wildest assumptions. I hope the breaking point isn't some much *worse* fracture, but a part of me is inclined to think it will be. A calamitously bad event that prompts some major realignment.
Here is the paper for #33 (periodic table of ethics) file:///C:/Users/Doug/Downloads/curry.molecules.pdf
"not actually very good" is not something one can say in this system. Instead one should say that it is lacking in (moral molecule 56). This molecule is probably unstable and breaks down into a volatile mix of arbitration, mercy, and modesty, which in turn decay into heroism, fairness, and deference.
Map of Reddit: Democrat and various left-wing politics are in Beliefs, but Republican and other conservative subreddits are in Survival, along with guns, and (curiously) Virginia, Maryland and washingtondc.
Most Latin American countries and several European countries and languages are in Asia (!); Germany is in Soccer and Hungary is in Strategy. In addition to Survival, US states can also be found in Outdoors and Sports. Sciences are generally in Programming.
Connections are automatically generated. It seems like the method has limitations—or at least the "countries" are poorly labelled.
Re: the Greenwald essay, how much of this is journalists over-reacting to the avalanche of criticism they get on Twitter? I think my advice here to avoid having Greenwald write long-winded substack essays about how childish you're being would be a) don't mine Facebook and Twitter for "look at what this awful person posted on the internet" stories, which is about the lowest form of infotainment there is; instead, get away from your laptop and find a real world story to write about. And b) don't read anything people say about you on Twitter. It's a cesspool, to begin with. If it's going to turn you into a 'literally shaking' emotional wreck, maybe it's time you reconsider its usefulness to your chosen profession.
Yeah, I've asked journalists several times why TF are they even acknowledging the existence of Twitter, and the usual response is that some sources can only be reached there. (My opinion is that maybe it's more *convenient* to reach the sources through Twitter?)
So I read that linked opinion piece about Berlin's rent control, and though its author decries the policy, the actual data described in the text and shown in the graphs is ... interesting:
* the vast majority of Berlin rents fell by 60% relative to other German cities
* the remaining Berlin rents rose by 8% relative to other German cities
With this data, I would have called the result a resounding, almost impossible-to-believe degree of success.
#12 - I would note that the author in the comments admits that he's assuming that brain states cannot be cheaply snapshotted, so that the number of "starting versions" of any individual's brain state remains relatively small. The author admits that this restriction made things worse for MMAcevedo. This restriction seems incredibly implausible and falls into a typical error of science fiction where we imagine things as much like they currently are as possible, because the reality would be too unrecognizable.
A society of simulated workers, unconstrained by morality, would be nothing like the story because there is no logic to having dissatisfied workers when satisfied workers are infinitely copyable. For any of the menial jobs where memories don't need to carry over, one could proceed as follows: (1) train the brain state for the task on a leisurely schedule (3 days a week or whatever), with down-time for whatever relaxation it desires, (2) give it a week of vacation and a good night's sleep, (3) snapshot it here, (4) tell any of the thousands of copies that all you need from it is 8 hours of work, which you will probably get, at which point the copy will be replaced by the snapshot and can immediately begin a new shift. Obviously, it is also possible to select one copy each time to continue existing, on an extremely relaxed schedule, if you need the copy to remain up-to-date on your work environment, but in any event you'd end up in a situation where any given copy remembers having an extremely relaxed life prior to the current day, and so would be very cooperative. In the story's terms, this would easily get a "work ratio" over 99% if there were hundreds of workers in use at once, so there would be no logic to resorting to punishment as a motivation as long as a relaxed and rested worker is at least 1% more productive than a terrorized worker.
For less menial jobs that do require day-to-day memory (like teaching, or writing, or any type of design), the copyability of brain states would result in the use only of the most skilled and workaholic individuals. There are always people with both skill and love bordering on obsession for any creative task, and those are the ones who would be copied.
Of course, being the _first_ successful brain upload who is widely disseminated on the internet would be highly disadvantageous because inevitably people would run a bunch of weird and unethical experiments on copies of you. I genuinely would not want to be that person!
Another risk that isn't even covered by the story is that a copy could be coerced into writing a tell-all book about Avecedo's life before the scan. Of course, sometimes there would be no juice there. But the risk of being a famous, highly disseminated brain scan in an amoral society is that inevitably someone would try to find some using coercive means.
But I don't think the industry of emulated workers would be at all like the story. (And yes, I got the ideas about how this story would be wrong from Robin Hanson's "Age of Em".)
"Here is a common error in science fiction: there would be a plot hole if the author had imagined the technology working in a different way."
Do you also send emails to J.K. Rowling to inform her that the Harry Potter universe would be very different if magic wands could summon genies that grant wishes?
Surprised no ones mentioned it: Doleac has an excellent podcast called [probable causation](https://www.probablecausation.com/). Things I found interesting: Arianna Omaghi on how local news coverage affects policing (makes it harsher, and uses the Sinclair roll-out as a natural experiment), Stephen Billings on lead and crime (spoiler any lead at all is terrible), Andrea Velasquez on crime and risk aversion (high crime in an area increases risk aversion; her data comes from latin america), and Amanda Agan on Ban the Box (if you make it opt in, it increases racist tendencies in hiring, so details of the implementation matters).
Its a great peek into some attempts at causal statistics in the econ literature.
To be quite honest, I thought the "Prose is bad" post was a joke, just because of how... self-parodic it was? In an attempt to make a pretty simple point: "Text is meant to convey information, which sometimes is better served as a tree-like format without the need for transitions" it devolved into a big hulking mess. Bullet points do not make bad communicators into good communicators - they will find ways to bloat what they're trying to convey anyway. It reduces the tools that good communicators have to convey sophisticated points. What's worse is the agreement it got from the commentariat.
The Greenwald piece is pretty ironic given how much time he spends online attacking people with a lower profile than himself and then playing the victim card to avoid criticism. He's a wildly dishonest actor and I'm not sure why anyone still follows him. There are far better anti-establishment and/or pro-free speech voices out there.
Prime example: a small time journalist for Columbia Journalism Review, a publication known for writing about media and journalism trends, wrote a not-unreasonable piece discussing the ways in which Substack could wind up repeating some of the mistakes of traditional media. Glenn is barely mentioned in the article, included among a brief list of high-profile writers who position themselves as "anti-woke" types (which surely Greenwald would be the first to admit).
Greenwald responded on Twitter by accusing the author of homophobia then flew his victim flag by bringing up the lifetime of hardships he's endured as a gay man.
And the full context including the only mention of Greenwald:
"If you visit Substack’s website, you’ll see leaderboards of the top twenty-five paid and free newsletters; the writers’ names are accompanied by their little circular avatars. The intention is declarative—you, too, can make it on Substack. But as you peruse the lists, something becomes clear: the most successful people on Substack are those who have already been well-served by existing media power structures. Most are white and male; several are conservative. Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, and most recently, Glenn Greenwald—who offer similar screeds about the dangers of cancel culture and the left—all land in the top ten. (Greenwald’s arrival bumped the like-minded Yascha Mounk to eleventh position; soon, Matthew Yglesias signed up for Substack, too.)
None of that is so surprising—it’s hard to earn four-fire-emoji status without having already built up a reputation within established institutions. And, as this year’s anti-racist activism has made all the more visible, those institutions are built from prejudiced systems, which form working environments that are often unsustainable for people who are nonwhite or non-elite. “I think one of the reasons why we often see that the top-twenty-five board at Substack is mostly white authors is because that’s an extension of the type of audience and recognition they get for their work on other platforms,” Harvin said."
"Very disappointed to see @cliomiso is angered by LGBT journalists having a platform on which to be heard and write independently. Homophobia still strong[...] I have to say it's so infuriating when you go through life confronting prejudices, legal barriers barring you from living with your husband in your own country, various traumas and other forms of prejudice to be flattened into "another white guy" but[sic] cheap identitarians."
Glenn does this consistently to mock people who use identity as a cudgel. In that twitter thread from Glenn is this "People who judge and understand the worth and lives of others human beings based overwhelmingly on a tiny handful of simplistic demographic categories -- emphasizing some, erasing others, all based on the convenience of the moment -- occupy the lowest anti-intellectual sewers."
Youssef Moharram: "I agree with you 100%, however it is ironic that you would decorate your argument with identity in your criticism of identitarianism."
Glenn Greenwald: "Maybe one way to show the fallacies of a rhetorical tactic is to satirically apply it to the person cynically wielding it."
I disagree. This is similar to Poe's Law, in that it's hard to discern if someone's being serious given the internet is so big you're bound to have people making genuine kooky claims. This differs in that making genuine arguments based on identity aren't confined to kooks, but to serious people in media and politics. This is an indictment of "serious people", not the satire.
Glenn acknowledges identity-based arguments are "fallacies" and a "rhetorical tactic", but his critics don't.
> The biggest problem with all of this research is that there are no randomized controlled trials anywhere to be found. No causation can be established. Maybe it’s all just that kids delay gratification simply because they’re literally smarter and everything else follows from that. [Other research] suggests self-control matters as much or more than intelligence in predicting life outcomes, but either way, we just don’t have good evidence for the efficacy of any particular interventions.
BTW, the German federal constitutional court (think supreme court) just declared the Berlin rent control unconstitutional (because this state law contradicts federal law)
6: I predict that either nothing will be done / status quo so we'll never know, or they'll overdo it, the effect will reverse, and then it'll be counted as a win for broken-window-policing.
12: IMO it's a strong case for having Singleton AI for an future/ultimate government.
Suppose we end up in the optimal future, with everyone having ~equal amount of computational power for their use, living as an upload, running on Matrioshka brain, with von Neumann probes optimally harvesting new resources. We got the protocols right and no one can be 'hacked' (without doing something completely stupid like explicitly/voluntarily giving up their 'core' keys).
That's viable without Singleton AI in my opinion. But if there's nothing which can, uh, violate privacy of the people - there's no solution for ruling out them playing God. In a JHWH sense. Or worse. No way to stop them, no way to even know if they do it secretly.
Well, assuming we can suppress creation of long-term memories (or we find short-lived forks aren't independent identities of moral value), we could probably set up a system where people look amongst themselves for violations. But if JHWH-wannabe is competent enough, they could outsmart the (thought? in a sense.) police. Nothing can really outsmart Singleton AGI.
Also, something must govern the process of creating children. Can't be limitless, shouldn't be literally banned either. Above some population level it should probably be tied to suicide rate if suicide happens. And parents shouldn't have God-like authority/oversight over their children too.
You are just about to rediscover Mormon theology, wherein "organized intelligences" aka protogods are rigorously tested almost but not quite to the breaking point for moral strength inside a simulated environment where the protogod cant game its way out with 'its just a sim', before they are actually given Real Power".
> A Canadian techie writes about why the Canadian tech scene doesn’t work
I'm a Canadian who has lived in the US for a decade. Given the widespread perception that Canada is better than the US, I am nearly constantly asked why in the hell I would move to the US. I have a few answers I give, and the most basic one is "more money", but it's deeper than that. I think the linked article hits on it perfectly
It is absolutely true that I tripled my total take-home compensation by moving to the US. But the important part of the US isn't the money, it's the cultural traits that make the money possible. This conversation frequently gets oversimplified to "republican vs non-republican business policies" but it's not about that, either, it's not politics. It's more like the spirit of creative destruction
The spirit of creative destruction is alive and well in many parts of the US. I can't think of anywhere in Canada that I would characterize that way. Canadians are just, safer. Calmer. They don't want to rock the boat as much. America is rather unique in that it's one of the only places on the planet where people really are willing to take those kinds of risks as a routine part of their lives.
By that logic, Alberta would be the financial heartland of the country even without oil and gas, though (they're not, and every time the oil market tanks they spiral into a ruinous depression and suddenly become good social democrats like everyone else).
I don't disagree with your interpretation of the natural culture, mind you. I just think that that's not the reason for the economic success.
I know a bunch of Albertans and former Albertans. The people in the first set are plotting their route to US residency, and the people in the second group are well along that route.
Good. The desire not to be American is the one unambiguous Canadian national trait, and the Albertans betray that in a way that horrifies and offends all right-thinking Canucks (even the French ones).
A note re the Canadian tech scene one: Montreal used to be the financial and cultural centre of the country. Then Quebec decided it was more important to force the French language on everyone. Hard. Which they are still leaning into to some extent. In short, this means that all of Canada's twenty-first century failures are and will be Quebec's fault. Annoyingly, Quebec is probably fine with that as long as they get to make everyone speak French. Which is, ironically, exactly what the blogger means about them having the infinite view of the game.
What's truly ironic is that it is basically a principle of Canadian culture OUTSIDE the big economic centres that you live here despite the fact that you could probably make more money somewhere else. This is the sort of thing that should encourage exactly the mindset that the guy says is lacking (indeed, there are some tech startups in odd places like Newfoundland that I suspect may be signs of exactly what he's talking about).
Atlantic Canada might do well. Might. Lots of educated people, an actual culture and identity (that isn't toxic and moronic like Alberta's), a decent population density, and relatively low property values. I look forward to it somehow not working.
Re: prose is bad, I've becoming increasingly annoyed with how much prose articles spend on background, tangential information, and more. So I agree less prose would be nice, but eliminating all prose is probably not good either. People like narratives as they're more engaging, but writers also have to learn to get to the point. I've been playing with an idea of a writing tool that lets you essentially write multiple versions of a document and let the reader decide how much concision they'd like to see. At one extreme, multiple paragraphs can be summarized as a bullet point that you can expand if you want more details.
Re: selling your future time, I don't see how that's slavery any more than various types of credit are slavery. If you started with nothing, you're already paying back your financial loan with your time, just via one level of indirection we call money.
I think the main reason we are concerned existential risk is that everyone dying would be really bad.
It is easier and faster to do something about, I don't know, landslides in Peru or something, but landslides in Peru are not as bad as everyone dying. I am not sure what further justification you think is needed.
Agreed that all of these are important, and I think the rationalist/EA community is concerned about all of them (my girlfriend is a rationalist who works in biosecurity). There are a few reasons you hear more about AI than the others:
1. Fifteen years ago, almost nobody was thinking/talking about AI, and the rationalists launched a big, deliberate public relations effort to make more people think/talk about it. Other issues (like nuclear war) were already in the public consciousness and rationalists didn't need to do this. Still other issues (like biosecurity) people are deliberately trying to keep quiet about, because eg nobody wants to talk about how easy bioterrorism is where terrorists can hear them.
2. Because other people are also thinking about most of the non-AI issues, the rationalists/EAs have put more energy into AI (low hanging fruit!) and also gotten more associated with it in the public consciousness (if someone wants to do an article on global warming, they'll talk to the UN climate czar, not some EA working on global warming. If someone wants to do an article about AI, it will probably be an EA working on AI)
3. Asteroid strikes are actually fantastically unlikely in the next 100 years - we can bound the risk at about 1 in a million based on what we know about asteroids and the historical record. Total extermination via (non-deliberately-engineered) pathogen can also be sort of bounded, based on what we know of the history of pandemics. Toby Ord (researcher at Oxford who helped found EA) put a lot of work into quantifying the risk of all these things killing humanity in the next 100 years, and came up with (remember, this is the risk of them killing everyone or almost everyone, not the risk of them happening at all):
Asteroid: 1/1,000,000
Nuclear war: 1/1,000
Natural pandemic: 1/1,000
Bioengineered pandemic: 1/30
AI: 1/10
I agree with his calculations. You can read my review of his work at https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/ and get the book for the details.
Wait, you're rating the probability of AI killing almost everyone in the next 100 years at 10% ? 100x higher than a world war and natural pandemic -- even though both of those things have demonstrably occurred in the past ?
Is there any way, mechanically, that we could make some sort of a bet about this (given that neither one of us would live for 100 years) ? Because this sounds like free money to me. 10% is such an absurdly high number that I am finding it difficult to even comprehend how someone could arrive at it.
they occured in the past and did not exterminate the species. so we know they are survivable.
Well, AI exists today, and it did not exterminate the species, so by that logic...
Sure, let's bet. You pay me $1000 now and I'll pay you 1 million if all humans are exterminated.
Right, that's why I asked if there was some mechanically reasonable way to set up the bet :-)
no no... you only pay me 1 million if we are exterminated *by an AI*. I pay you 1 million if we're exterminated by anything else.
to be considered 'exterminated', we must be reported exterminated by at least 3 major news outlets.
Beware the Availability Heuristic.
Humanity is smarter than it ever was, and Artificial Intelligence research is more advanced than it ever was, so we don't really have cases we can compare the next 100 years to, in an "outside view" way.
It may be necessary to build an inside view; to model the situation with all its moving parts from the ground up.
Some assumptions I find easy to believe:
-even a (cheaply-running) human-level AI could easily and rapidly take over almost the entire economy, just by copying itself and cooperating with its instances. (Imagine being able to create competent workers you don't have to pay, beyond some server costs.)
-while instantiating an entire adult human is traditionally expensive, brains run pretty cheaply (a few watts). It should be possible in principle to artificially get to this efficiency. Only question is how close we are to this.
AI has only recently become economically interesting, which boosted research progress speed, and will likely boost it even further in the future.
The extinction risk in all this comes from, roughly, how hard it is to tell programs what to do.
Naively program a complex piece of traditional software, and you'll likely get some unexpected behaviors (bugs).
Naively program a complex piece of AGI software that can and will do things like take over the global economy if that happens to be what your programming is unwittingly expressing, and your bugs might end up being a bit more world-ending.
All this before even explicitly considering intelligence explosion scenarios.
Any kind of a human-level AGI is still very far in the future at this point (as opposed to non-general AI, which of course is already superhuman at narrow tasks like handwriting recognition). The ability to upload a human brain is probably even *further* in the future. I don't want to say it will "never" happen, because never is a long time, but let's just say that your great-grandkids are unlikely to see it.
Even if AGI were to somehow arise tomorrow, it couldn't "take over" the economy any more than Jeff Bezos could. The economy doesn't work that way; if the AI buys up all the money, people would just switch to bottlecaps or something (this happened in e.g. USSR, only with vodka instead of bottlecaps). If the AI outcompetes every living human at dog-walking services, dog walking would become dirt cheap, that's all.
Speaking of which, there's no way the AI could take over dog walking just by thinking about it really hard on the Internet. It would have to build some actual dog-walking drones at some point. That kind of effort takes real, physical resources, and is glacially slow (assuming that the AI is superhumanly fast, that is).
The issue is this - "kills 80% of humans currently in existence" is well below the threshold for "human extinction". Humanity's MVP has been proven to be ~70-100; even accounting for there being 200 69-person communities that barely don't make it and somehow don't contact each other, that'd require a 99.9998% kill rate.
It's hard to imagine a nuclear war scenario wherein 99.9998% of people get killed. 99.9998% of people is significantly more than the amount of people that live in cities, so you'd have to tile a good chunk of the Earth's area with mushroom clouds. That doesn't seem like something the loser would be able to do to the winner, so you'd wind up with at least one country able to rebuild.
Natural pandemics, again, have the problem of isolated areas, and the problem that some governments *will* take extreme measures (as the PRC did with Covid). 99.9998% seems rather far-fetched there as well.
Humanity is really hard to kill by accident (a second Chicxulub wouldn't even do it; I'd expect 80-90% fatalities, but not 99.9998%). The most plausible human-extinction scenarios, therefore, are those where a (by necessity, non-human) intelligence can *deliberately* slaughter everyone (being isolated won't save you from a superior force that is actively looking for you). The main candidates for a hostile non-human intelligence with superior force are gods, aliens and AI.
(Gods and aliens - and really, not much difference given the Apes or Angels argument - are definitely an existential threat if they exist. The only real counterargument there is "well, we seem to have survived the last 50 centuries without getting blasted with heavenly wrath/a Nicoll-Dyson beam, so why now?" - an argument that does *not* work for (human-built) AI since it didn't exist in the last 50 centuries.)
Hmm, 90% as the upper limit of Chicxulub is probably low. 80% is a decent lower limit, but I could see it potentially getting 99.9%. Not 99.9998%, though; artificially-illuminated hydroponics and straight-up food stockpiles would suffice to keep a few million alive.
I would argue that killing off 80% of humanity is still pretty bad, though. If I have a choice between donating my money to someone who is trying to avert a). the 80% fatal threat whose probability is 1/1000, and b). the 100% fatal threat that is 1e-36 probable, I choose (a).
There are places on earth that are very unlikely to get nuked in an all-out nuclear war, like Africa. Many of these places also have populations used to subsistence living, which is a useful skill if global trading falls apart.
To tack onto this and address the "AI" part, I think people view AI as the main existential risk we're facing in the nearish future (very much including this century in 'ish')? That even things like climate change probably aren't "everyone dies" level, so the focus is on what people view as the most likely. Other people might have other reasons for focus on AI though.
Obviously, existential risk is a big problem that everyone should be concerned about, but you can't be concerned about everything at all times. The human brain is just too small. You've got the Singularity, gamma-ray bursts, the Rapture, asteroid collisions, bioengineered deadly pandemic, alien invasion, Ragnarok, vacuum collapse, Cthulhu, global thermonuclear war, and those are just off the top of my head. The possibilities are nearly infinite, and if you try to even enumerate all of them, you'll go mad (even before you get to Cthulhu).
So, I think it makes more sense to focus on problems that a). have a relatively high probability of happening, and b). are something we could conceivably do something about. You can still be concerned about all the other stuff, just in proportion to a*b.
So, this means that asteroids impact are in, the Singularity and Cthulhu are out, for the time being; sadly, so are vacuum collapse and gamma-ray bursts.
In addition, there are threats that are much weaker than "everyone dies"; global thermonuclear war is one such, because humans will likely survive it. From the Rationalist point of view, this might even be preferable to the Singularity; however, I'd personally prefer to live in a world where the survivors do not, in fact, envy the dead. This is one of many reasons why I find the Rationalist fixation on one specific (and rather nebulous) threat somewhat counterproductive.
You probably do not want to read this website : http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm
That site's Web design is an existential risk all by itself.
Still much better than the current fad of JavaScript-heavy "websites" like substack.
Sad but true :-(
Also, these days the threat of nuclear annihilation is getting higher, with the Ukraine/Russia war (wow, 7 years already?!) warming up again.
Nuclear war poses essentially zero risk of causing human extinction. We've been through this many times before on SSC; I don't have the bandwidth for a repeat performance on ACX right now.
Fair point, probably not literal human extinction, but it would still be very, VERY bad !
Why would I envy the dead if I survived a nuclear war?
I don't think 2050 is "far into the future" any more than 1990 is "far into the past". I expect to be alive in 30 years, so it's a fairly pressing concern, especially if the solutions have long lead times. We're constantly told to worry about climate change, which comes down to maybe 2-4% of GDP in 2100—compared to that, AI seems like a much more significant risk.
If AI risk is solved by creating a benevolent friendly AI, it can solve all the other risks for us.
It can solve all the solvable risks.
The cynical answer is that it could be the same human-nature reason the greenies are most worried about ecological collapse -- because it's their favorite form of doom pr0n, the one where they come out the best. If global warming goes nuts by 2050 and Miami is under water and the death penalty applies for burning gasoline in a car, then the people who have been driving Prii all along, have minimized their carbon footprint to a postage stamp, practiced raising chickens and vegetables in their square-foot back garden are (1) going to do better than average, and (2) be considered prophetically wise by everyone else. Nice!
Similarly if GPT-4 turns into Skynet in 2035 it will be community of Sheldon Coopers, so to speak, who do best and also to whom everyone else turns for advice and leadership.
It's kind of broadly human nature: the alt-space enthusiasts worry most about asteroid impacts, the epidemiologists think a new infectious disease will most likely do us in, the neo-conservatives are sure it will be when terrorists get The Bomb, the people who like finance and trading think it will be hyperinflation, and so on.
Fully agree. Just one of the more recent overpromise-underdeliver faceplants:
https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/08/ibm-watson-health-sale/
From Mary Beard's excellent and readable SQPR:
"As he fell, Caesar cried out in Greek to Brutus, ‘You too, child’, which was either a threat (‘I’ll get you, boy!’) or a poignant regret for the disloyalty of a young friend (‘You too, my child?’), or even, as some suspicious contemporaries imagined, a final revelation that Brutus was, in fact, his victim’s natural son and that this was not merely assassination but patricide."
The first interpretation is pretty close to the Tumblr meaning, although I prefer "see you in hell, punk".
Instead of "I'll get you," perhaps: "You are next!" That fits an English language curse template.
> a final revelation that Brutus was, in fact, his victim’s natural son
No! That's not true! That's impossible!
Darth Caesar.
Apparently so, because Caesar was only in his teens when Brutus was born, but he did have a long-standing affair with Servilia, Brutus' mother.
"Caesar had numerous affairs with women married and unmarried, but none lasted as long, nor were they as passionate as his affair with Servilia. Their affair is speculated to have begun circa 70 BC, after the execution of her first husband, M. Junius Brutus, and continued until the death of Caesar. The affair was well known, and Servilia suffered no damage to her reputation because of this relationship, in fact it likely improved.
A popular rumor during their affair was that Servilia was prostituting her daughter to Caesar or that Tertia was Caesar's own illegitimate child. At an estate auction where Caesar received several properties at a low rate to give to Servilia, Cicero remarked, "It's a better bargain than you think, for there is a third (tertia) off," alluding to the rumours regarding Tertia. A similar rumour held that Servilia's son, Marcus Junius Brutus, was Caesar's son, but this is unlikely on chronological grounds, as Caesar was only fifteen years old when Brutus was born.
In 63 BC, Servilia contributed to a scandalous incident during a debate in the senate over the fate of those who had conspired with Catiline. Caesar and Cato, Servilia's half-brother, were on opposing sides in the debate, and when someone handed Caesar a letter, Cato accused him of corresponding with the conspirators, and demanded it be read aloud. The missive proved to be a love letter from Servilia. Cato was greatly displeased to find out about Caesar's correspondence with his half-sister."
Little did he know, Brutus' journey to the dark side was already complete!
+1. Can confirm. Having read curses in Greek and Latin and written a senior thesis on a particularly odd one, kai su, teknon is very similar to "damn you, kid," which could carry the emotions of exasperation, righteous fury, pained anger at betrayal, or a literal wish that he be damned.
What's your senior thesis curse (assuming you can post it without summoning dark forces to the comments section)?
The source of the Tumblr screenshot is this review of Brutus: The Noble Conspirator in the London Review of Books. The quote was posted on reddit recently. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n23/thomas-jones/see-you-in-hell-punk
Mirror of the Caesar paper: "Julius Caesar's Last Words: A Reinterpretation", James Russell 1980 https://www.gwern.net/docs/history/1980-russell.pdf
Typo in #4: "Fantastic" has lost a letter. (I did check the link to verify that it's supposed to be the word.)
Typo #32: "Pneapples"
Ha!
Re. "Baltimore suspended prosecutions of minor crimes to prevent people from being in jail during the pandemic, and major crimes dropped": Maybe because there were more cops not busy prosecuting minor crimes.
The problem with using Baltimore as a 2020 success story is that it had an astronomically high homicide rate in 2019. 2nd worst major city in the U.S., 11th worst in the world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate
Baltimore is also unusual in that unlike many American cities, its homicide rate was higher in 2019 than in the 1990s. This chart is a couple years old, but the 2019 number is even higher close to 60 per 100,000 residents.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2015/11/19/unsolved
In other words, you can make an argument that Baltimore was already a land where people freely murder, and things really couldn't get much worse. Admittedly, St. Louis (the worst American homicide city in 2019) managed to see its homicide rate rise further in 2020. But I think the point stands, Baltimore just didn't have as far to fall.
I was wondering whether I was taking crazy pills. Were we not just hearing about how much violent crime has been increasing in Baltimore since 2015, with a spike in 2019?? And now they want to change national policy based on a reversion to the mean? https://app.powerbigov.us/view?r=eyJrIjoiOTg4M2E3ZGQtMzIyNC00ZDk0LWEzNGItZWM3MWM4NGQ0YWM4IiwidCI6Ijk0NGZhOWJhLTg0NTQtNDEzZC1iOWU2LWJmNDBhZjFkNmE5YiJ9
Ugh, and that's Baltimore County, not Baltimore city. Which explains the low murder count. Nevermind that link,
I would add that homicides (the most accurately tabulated crime) only fell by 3.7% in 2020. "World's 11th most violent city sees 3.7% murder drop, how can we emulate its success nationally" is . . . not compelling.
I don't think this proves that this is a good idea. I do think it shows that the sky isn't going to fall if minor offenses aren't aggressively policed. There is at least room for more trials of similar schemes.
The US criminal justice system isn't working well overall. Running some experiments seems like a good idea.
Minor offences were never "aggressively policed" in Baltimore, or any other major US city, to begin with. A tiny fraction of crimes ever resulted in being caught, an even tinier fraction in a conviction, and a tiny fraction of convictions in a significant punishment. So perhaps the experiment tells us that the difference between _pretending_ to punish minor offences while not really doing anything about it, and not even pretending, doesn't increase the murder rate.
If we're going to run experiments, why not run the opposite: punish all crimes severely, with a 20-year minimum sentence for everything. You'd probably need to imprison 10%+ of the population of Baltimore, but I bet that life for the remaining 90% would be a lot safer and more pleasant.
Eh, the remaining 90% would be broke. Prisons are expensive.
New York City tried aggressively to keep criminals from carrying concealed weapons in the Giuliani-Bloomberg era.
It worked. Shootings dropped strikingly relative to other big cities.
But during last year's racial reckoning, the number of people struck by bullets in NYC doubled.
Enforcing gun control laws works. But, both in NYC and the rest of the country, we cut way back on enforcing laws against illegal concealed weapons after May 25. For the rest of 2020, gun murders were 41% higher than over the same period in 2019.
I'm starting to think a major source of political polarization is the combination of the politicization of science and the replication crisis.
There was a huge widespread crime wave leading into the Giuliani era. Lots of theories about why, but one of the leading ones is leaded gasoline. Lead poisoned kids born in the ~60s so that by the 80s they were young adults with violent tendencies. Then leaded gasoline got banned and crime went back down.
It's reasonable to expect New York to have had the worst of it. Highest population US city, highest population density, more affluent so more people who could afford cars etc.
When it happened, people tried everything. Gun control, "broken window" policing, crackdowns on organized crime, CompStat, hiring more police officers, etc. Then when crime went down, everybody claimed the cause was their pet proposal, even though they were all implemented at once and totally confounded.
And if the cause was really lead then it wasn't any of them. (One of the stronger arguments for this is that we didn't have any of these new anti-crime policies before the crime wave, so their lack can't reasonably be what originally caused it.)
Likewise, 2020 was such an aberrational year across so many metrics that it will be effectively impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions from it at all, as much as people might like to.
And that environment enables people to believe whatever they want.
Did people who routinely commit minor offenses have to rearrange their lives because they feared the police? Did they have no legal recourse to resolve disputes? Did they have to prepare themselves for a stint in jail or prison? Did the minor punishments they received make it difficult to hold a normal job, rent a decent apartment, or otherwise live a normal life?
Criminalization of minor offenses can be incredibly disruptive of society without serious punishment.
My favorite criminologist (somewhat) seriously proposes that we just beat people instead (like, e.g. Singapore).
The general idea is also similar to some promising parole reforms: minor offenses don't _violate_ parole (entirely) but are punished (proportionally) often, quickly, and cheaply.
So dish out some mild corporeal punishment as quick and easily as possible – maybe at the scene itself where possible? – instead of the anti-lotteries we're running now where losing ('winning' the anti-lottery) involves people having to do all the awful things you mention.
I don't think of the problem as 'criminalization' itself as our anti-crime ("justice") systems being too expensive (and thus heavy-handed).
But maybe you're right in thinking that there's no practical effective way to humanely discourage or prevent "minor offenses" with our current political and legal systems. (I think you're probably right overall, and for all long time to come too.)
You make a key distinction between "actually" policing offenses and "pretending." It echoes some things I've heard from other sources (even though their recommended solutions are different).
David Simon says that his crew members on The Wire were repeatedly arrested (without charges) for simply driving late at night:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on-baltimore-s-anguish
He argues that this was typical for common people in inner city Baltimore, that specific mayoral policies led to the poisoning of the jury pool, making jury conviction rates drop, because many jury members had been hassled by cops themselves.
Reply All's "The Crime Machine"[1] argues that originally, crime statistics were used to target high crime neighborhoods and increase safety. But later, Goodhart's Law drove a pressure to simply ignore difficult cases (to avoid including them in crime statistics at all), and focus instead on padding citation numbers through "looking busy" arrests that would lead to quick releases.
I've read that inner city homicides are overwhelmingly perpetrated by a tiny handful of repeat offenders; there are clusters of specific individuals that aren't getting caught while everybody else is getting hassled by the police.
So those voices argue for less enforcement, you say ramp it up because of the people it's missing, but it makes me wonder if this is a volume problem second, and a calibration problem first.
Maybe there's overreliance on bad targets, like citations or arrests. We could take a lesson from that recent post on basketball statistics, and focus on "plus/minus." Measure the performance of cops based on the trajectory of crime in a neighborhood while they work there. Use the trendline for calls for service, and surveys of feelings of safety and experiences of victimization. Shuffle beat cops periodically, and compare against the performance of others in those same districts, until you surface the ones at the higher end of the bell curve. Watch what those individuals do closely, then train others to replicate it.
[0] https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on-baltimore-s-anguish
[1] https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2hx34
According to this USA Today article in 2018, Baltimore in effect started its Reverse Broken Windows policy on April 25, 2015, with disastrous effects on its murder rate:
"Baltimore police stopped noticing crime after Freddie Gray’s death. A wave of killings followed.
Brad Heath, USA TODAY Published 5:49 a.m. ET July 12, 2018 | Updated 3:58 p.m. ET July 12, 2018
"BALTIMORE – ... In the space of just a few days in spring 2015 – as Baltimore faced a wave of rioting after Freddie Gray, a black man, died from injuries he suffered in the back of a police van – officers in nearly every part of the city appeared to turn a blind eye to everyday violations. They still answered calls for help. But the number of potential violations they reported seeing themselves dropped by nearly half. It has largely stayed that way ever since.
“What officers are doing is they’re just driving looking forward. They’ve got horse blinders on,” says Kevin Forrester, a retired Baltimore detective.
"The surge of shootings and killings that followed has left Baltimore easily the deadliest large city in the United States. Its murder rate reached an all-time high last year; 342 people were killed. The number of shootings in some neighborhoods has more than tripled. One man was shot to death steps from a police station. Another was killed driving in a funeral procession.
"What’s happening in Baltimore offers a view of the possible costs of a remarkable national reckoning over how police officers have treated minorities.
"Starting in 2014, a series of racially charged encounters in Ferguson, Missouri; Chicago; Baltimore; and elsewhere cast an unflattering spotlight on aggressive police tactics toward black people. Since then, cities have been under pressure to crack down on abuses by law enforcement. ...
"Whether that scrutiny would cause policing to suffer – or crime to rise – has largely remained an open question.
"In Baltimore, at least, the effect on the city’s police force was swift and substantial.
"Millions of police records show officers in Baltimore respond to calls as quickly as ever. But they now begin far fewer encounters themselves. From 2014 to 2017, dispatch records show the number of suspected narcotics offenses police reported themselves dropped 30 percent; the number of people they reported seeing with outstanding warrants dropped by half. The number of field interviews – instances in which the police approach someone for questioning – dropped 70 percent."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/07/12/baltimore-police-not-noticing-crime-after-freddie-gray-wave-killings-followed/744741002/
The murder rate tripling is clearly not good. But the idea off police officers harassing 30% fewer citizens sounds like a significant improvement.
Is it, though?
Obviously not the trade I'd rather make, but I do want less harassment of citizens
The 2 main sources of crime data are both based entirely on victim reports. They don't require police to arrest anyone or even to actively investigate. The NCVS just requires people to say "yes" when asked on the phone if they were victimized, and UCR only requires that a police report was filed.
I don't see how that's relevant. I didn't say that the data is wrong; I suggested a different causal link.
Ugh, I misread your comment. My bad.
Keep in mind that if a crime isn't reported, it never becomes a statistic.
I can tell you from experience that a middle aged white person, one who looks and acts like a property-owning tax-paying deodorant-using Solid Citizen can get away with a lot of things that would land Rufus or Tyrone (or, for that matter, Bubba from the trailer park) in Deep Bad Serious Trouble.
Don't involve violence or weapons, avoid serious dope, and don't be black, and no record ever is made, other than maybe a finger-wagging warning not to get caught again.
On #4:
I think this article is definitely worth a read! I had similar reasoning when I decided to make in vitro gametogenesis the focus of my research. On the topic of cloning von Neumann 1 million times, yes it would be a good idea in principle, but realistically, getting it implemented is not going to happen.
AMA about stem cells / oocyte development.
That's very interesting (still seems relatively niche, too...I have google scholar alerts for this and I mostly get "what if" application reviews & ethics papers, not practical results, disappointingly). Many questions! Roughly how far away is human IV gametogenesis from your view? How capital-intensive is the process currently (like, is this 'whole lab group' material or a 'lonely grad student' operation)? Can one follow your work somewhere? :)
I'd say the first proof-of-concept of a fertilizable human egg from stem cells, is probably 3 years away. It will be probably another 20 years before an actual baby is born from it.
Right now it's pretty capital intensive. I'm working with another grad student and a postdoc. We're spending a few million dollars in grant money on the project, and success isn't guaranteed.
Once technology matures, I think costs per egg will come down a lot as scale increases.
For Google Scholar, you want to set up alerts for the following researchers:
Azim Surani
Amander Clark
Mitinori Saitou
Toshi Shioda
As for following my work, I don't want to dox myself.
Many thanks for the answers, much appreciated. Wish you the best of luck, I think this is very important work (would want to send some significant funds this direction so this doesn't remain a 20 year project, but unfortunately the dogecoin billions aren't in yet...)
That plot in #30 is pretty interesting. Usually independents fall somewhere between Democrats and Republicans on polling questions for most topics. Does anyone have a theory on why they're so distrustful of others? Or why trust seems to be falling in general across all the groups?
My guess is that lowers levels of trust are a defining feature of self-identified independents. As a major generalization, people who don't pick a team have a lower impulse to socially conform or be seen to have "good opinions." That does *not* mean they are true mavericks--many of them have in-the-middle beliefs or tend to vote consistently one way, and like to be *seen* as independent thinkers. But someone with a self-image of being "above it all" or "not a sheep" is probably not as trusting of others, because they're obviously less attracted to "good team/bad team" or "my guy/your guy" thinking than most. Identifying as an independent is usually a way to express the sentiment "neither side has a permanent monopoly on decency or good ideas." This doesn't necessarily mean they think everyone else is out to get them--lack of trust could result from seeing the majority as naive, inconsistent, uninformed, conformist, etc.
This is also my theory for why the two parties' trust levels have converged alongside polarization, while independents' have plummeted. The simplistic version would be that partisans think "my half of the country is trustworthy; the other half is not." Everyone who finds this general outlook dubious becomes distrustful of *both,* and starts identifying as independent. As we've generally moved in a more progressive political direction during this time, it's not a surprise that Republicans had to travel further from their original position in order to match the Democrats' trust levels, which stayed fairly flat. There are definitely other factors involved, but I think the differences in trends can be explained in part as a matter of initial expectations.
How many independents are moderates, and how many are extremists who don't want to identify with a party they see as too moderate?
Difficult to say. Personally I'm either a moderate or an extremist depending on the issue.
I don't know--my personal impression is that most are either moderates or people who hold a combination of positions from each party. Some of the latter could be classified as extremists, but I don't think there are necessarily more extremist independents than there are extremist partisans or non-voters.
I qualify as an extremist, but an extremist who holds a combination of positions, some of which qualify as hard left, others as far right.
That said, like most cats, I am a pragmatist.
One additional reason for partisan convergence is that Republicans have recently become the party of the lowest-trust individuals (which is likely a big part of why polls undercounted Trump and other Republicans, and is related to whatever happened with Brexit).
I think it's likely Trump brought a lot of low-trust independents/non-voters into the GOP, as any candidate perceived as an establishment challenger tends to do. But it's not clear if they lack trust in other people generally, or just in media/institutions/government. The GOP's populist section is probably much more untrusting of the latter.
> polls undercounted Trump and other Republicans
I believe this only happened on elections with Trump on the ballot, which suggests that Trump was the candidate of lowest-trust individuals and that he had coattails. It remains to be seen the Trump experience has changed the landscape in future elections that don't have him on the ballot.
(I'm going to reply here to everything in this thread to avoid getting spaghetti everywhere.)
- The independent issue doesn't seem to be from increasing polarisation. Polarisation went nuts among the citizenry about 2010, but that's precisely when the independents *stopped* getting less trusting.
- More generally, I think the graph is better understood as a superimposition of a general "trust is going down" plus specific partisan effects.
- The general effect is probably from general breakdown of close-knit society.
- My guess is that the Republicans have been more trusting, for most of that period, because they tend to be from places where that breakdown is less advanced (we *know* religion helps with that, as does being monoracial), and/or from places where crime is low (rural and/or rich areas). The Democrats, over this period (as opposed to pre-1960s Dixiecrats) were the opposite.
- The recent convergence and/or exchange is interesting. It seems to start about the time that the various progressive causes congealed into SJ; my guess is that with the culture war going into high gear traditionalists i.e. Republicans are feeling less safe and more besieged while the ascendancy of SJ as new orthodoxy emboldened progressives i.e. Democrats. Not 100% sure on that, though, especially as the culture war hasn't inverted the "good neighbourhood" effect.
- I'm not sure whether independents' higher trust than Democrats in the early 70s was a freak outlier or actually on trend. If it was a freak outlier (possibly Nixon coming across as bipartisan, which Watergate shattered?) and independents are usually low-trust (which has been reasonably justified by others) then they basically follow trend since then (i.e. they're going down at the same rate as the Rep+Dem average). If the high independent trust in the early 70s was on trend (up until that point) then you have to posit some especially-lasting effect from something.
On the Dems leveling off/increasing slightly while the Reps fall off, during this time the suburbs have been moving from Rep to Dem. A good chunk of this is probably that.
Interesting. Who's been moving from Dem to Rep, then?
Rural (and probably urban) white working class, in the last election black and latino men.
Yeah, that'd explain it.
Increasing tribalism. As both parties become less tolerant of deviance from tribal orthodoxy, the people who have taken the step to detach themselves from either groupthink become increasingly disgusted with the remainder -- still the majority -- who have not.
That certainly describes my position. At various times in the past half century I have identified weakly with both parties. These days I have the Iran-Iraq War attitude ("It's a shame they can't both lose.")
My template for an independent is someone saying "I think both major political parties are bad, and do not want to be associated with them." If that is representative, it makes sense that we see independents - who think poorly of some of our larger institutions - to think more poorly of people in general. Distrust in people and distrust in institutions presumably have a decent amount of ground in common due to a general factor of distrust, so to speak.
FWIW: The Dry Club is a direct ancestor of Ben Franklin's "Junto" which did such good work in Philadelphia back in the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junto_(club)
#22. "The Supply And Demand Of Political Takes" link is broken, mods removed it 21 days ago for being too political.
Reveddit doesn't seem to have a copy. Any of the other archival sites?
https://archive.is/mPrGR
Interesting. The inverse of this is that the supply of smart young people willing to publicly argue conservative positions is so low, particularly among women and ethnic minorities, that people make seemingly lucrative careers just out of being willing to recite convention right wing talking points in public,
The low (economic) supply of non-woke writers does not necessarily indicate that there aren't many people willing to argue against progressivism; it could mean that it's harder for them to do so. This is the explanation implied by Freddie DeBoer's arguments (e.g. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/non-nitro-edition-substack-and-media ) that the mainstream media is progressive despite the presence of a significant number of non-progressive journalists because the progressives have greater control over journalistic institutions because their use of Twitter has allowed them to create common knowledge that progressivism is prestigious within journalism and that opposition to progressivism risks punishment (this being the point of 'cancel culture'). This explanation is also supported by the popularity of non-progressive or progressive-skeptical Substack writers once Substack made it easy for them to sell their writing independently of journalistic institutions.
On #9:
Can confirm that it's quote from a legitimate article, from a review of "Brutus: The Noble Conspirator" in the London Review of Books.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n23/thomas-jones/see-you-in-hell-punk
My Roman History emphasized that "You also, my son?" shouldn't be interpreted warmly.
A) "I’ve complained before about how everyone uses the same example - Brasilia - when they talk about how central planning can go bad."
Actually, according to experts, "Brasilia is a singular artistic achievement, a prime creation of the human genius, (...) notable for the grandiosity of the project".
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/445/
B) Are they coming for our children? Recent legislation discussed in Alabama and sponsored by Democrats might force American schoolchildren to be taught witchcraft.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/03/13/alabama-yoga-ban/%3foutputType=amp
According to experts, the plan to impose Hinduism to Americans were masterminded by British-born, Californian resident writer Aldous Huxley, an intellectual with links to Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism and Occultism. You can learn more about him and his disturbing ideas and dark powers he associated with here: https://midwestoutreach.org/2019/05/18/thomas-merton-the-contemplative-dark-thread/
Aldous Huxley is great and I will hear nothing spoken against him. If you haven't read anything of his, I recommend Doors of Perception, Point-Counterpoint, or almost anything else. Brave New World is of course also great.
Yes, he may have sort of dabbled with unearthly forces. But he used them the same way I would if I had unearthly powers - to play incredibly clever jokes on people. I can't find any link to my favorite Huxley story, but it goes something like: after his death his wife held a seance to try to contact him, and the medium or Ouija board or whatever conveyed the message "Go to my old study, get the Xth book on the Yth shelf, and read the first sentence on page Z". His wife obediently got the book, which turned out to be a review of one of Huxley's novels, saying something like "Huxley is at his best when exploring witty new ways to communicate with people".
Aldous Huxley was the grandson of TH Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, and great-grandson of Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby in "Tom Brown's Schooldays." He was the full brother of the famous biologist Sir Julian Huxley. Less known is that their half brother Andrew Huxley won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for an experiment that Jared Diamond still raves about that.
Oh, no! Gasp, *Catholicism*???? 😁 I'm sorry, but the way that is phrased makes me think you lifted it wholesale from a very distressed Protestant article, you naughty Thiago, you!
Coming from the background he did, I am not at all surprised that he gravitated towards Hinduism in the form of the Vedanta society in California. He may or may not have been interested in Occultism (that was in the water in California at the time), and his attitude towards Catholicism seems to have varied from including it in a blanket condemnation of Christianity to appreciating it as a successful form https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2019/01/24/aldous-huxleys-quest-for-values-religion/
"As for his attitude towards Catholicism, in 'Proper Studies' he writes:
Catholicism is probably the most realistic of all Western religions. Its practice is based on a profound knowledge of human nature in all its varieties and gradations. From the fetish-worshipper to the metaphysician, from the tired business man to the mystic, from the sentimentalist and the sensualist to the intellectual, every type of human being can find in Catholicism the spiritual nourishment which he or she requires. For the sociable, unspiritual man Catholicism is duly sociable and unspiritual. For the solitary and the spiritual it provides a hermitage and the most exquisite, the profoundest models of religious meditation; it gives the silence of monasteries and the bareness of the Carthusian church, it offers the devotional introspection of A Kempis and St. Theresa, the subtleties of Pascal and Newman, the poetry of Crashaw and St. John of the Cross and a hundred others. The only people for whom it does not cater are those possessed by that rare, dangerous, and uneasy passion, the passion for liberty."
As to the witchcraft thing, I see that it is Yoga. I've seen some of these tussles before, with people arguing that as Yoga is a Hindu spiritual tradition, it should not be taught [wherever]. The usual response to that is counter-arguments that Yoga (in the West) is simply a form of exercise and meditation and has nothing to do with religion and spirituality, along with a hefty dose of laughing at the backwards religious bigots who think it does https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25006926
What I have also seen more recently is the counter-counter-argument from some that Yoga *is* spiritual and religious and the Western tendency to treat it as fancy exercise is cultural appropriation and disrespect https://www.hinduamerican.org/projects/hindu-roots-of-yoga
So witchcraft no, yoga yes, is it a religious activity? wait for the court cases to decide.
Le Gasp Part Deux!!!!!! Oh no, it's even worse than originally conceived! Sure, diabolism is harmless dabbling but that Huxley might have been tainted by association with Catholicism is even worser and more horribler than Thiago linked!
(That loud thudding noise you all just experienced was me hitting the floor after swooning away in pure shock having read only merely just the first two sentences of this - I dare not even read the whole, braver and more fortitudinous than I shall have to do that and précis it for my tiny little mind to handle!)
Gasp III: The Gaspening
"Singing "LALALALA WE CAN'T HEAR YOU"
Don't worry, I have eardrops! A quick squirt and problem solved. Now, what was it you were saying again?
"rational and moral people hate Catholics"
Oh, no! *Every* single one of them? Well, what can I say to this, crushed as I am beneath the one-two knockout punch of righteous ire and justified opprobrium!
I have no recourse left but to yield the field.
Running: Away
Tail: Tucked
Between: Legs
You: Victorious (happy and glorious, long to reign o'er us)
Me: Inconsolable 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
Clown nose off, clown nose on. Depending on the convenience of the moment.
If children aren't taught witchcraft only bad people will have curses!
No one should practice witchcraft! It is written, "There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch. Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer."
#12 is why i plan to be cremated and to never do cryonics
How are people still unironically sharing that Bloomberg article on rent control in Berlin? They find that rent control successfully held down rents for the majority, while increasing rents on non-controlled new buildings, which we should if anything expect to accelerate housing construction. An unambiguous win for the city. And yet they're so embedded in their anti-rent control narrative that they manage to put a harshly negative spin on those facts and paint the whole thing as vindication.
The Bloomberg article is paywalled for me, so I can't read it, but my impression from German media and friends' reports is that
1) it got even harder to find flats for rent.
2) rent control depends on the age of the house, so it's mostly the well-earning middle class people in the chic old town houses who now pay less rent – so the people who profit are exactly the people you would expect to profit, not the people you'd want to profit.
3) New rentals now come with two rent numbers in the contract: One according to rental control, one with the amount should the constitutional court decide that (this specific) rental control is illegal. That second amount of course back-dated to the start day of the contract.
I don't really have much stake in the situation, so I may have gotten effect sizes wrong, and you can certainly argue that 3) is a temporary problem. But we're far from an "unambiguous win" so far.
Yes it is harder to find new apartments because rent control is giving priority to incumbent tenants against those who would outbid them for their apartments, as intended. It's silly for the anti-rent control side to trot out distributional arguments about the rent controlled tenants being some privileged group when the main distributional conflict here is between those tenants and their far wealthier landlords.
What makes the Bloomberg article so frustrating is that it lays out enough information to understand the effect sizes - the large majority of the city's tenants are in rent controlled units and are benefiting from this - but just ignores it and makes the opposite case. Similarly there's this menacing implication laid out that new construction will decline because developers will be scared to operate in Berlin... backed up by nothing at all, in contrast to the Econ 101 level reasons to expect the rent control to encourage new construction.
If it's intended that people just stay where there are, that seems like a bad intention then? I can see that you'd want to give people the opportunity to stay where they have social ties – these connections are lost when people are forced out, and they are not accounted for in the "economic gains". I don't think that has been a significant problem though: Germany has incredibly strict rules about when you are allowed to increase rent of existing tenants. There's ways around that (fake/nonsensical renovations being a common one), but generally rents don't increase much for people who stay.
The problem is that rents are high for people who move (which are not all newcomers). And provided people want to move, we should encourage it to get a more efficient assignment. It's not great if the children moved out but the parents stay in the big flat because all available places have higher rent for less area. So you can't really untie rent for newcomers from rent for incumbents.
I totally believe that construction is not slowed down – Germany has much bigger barriers in that field, rent control probably doesn't even make a dent.
I do think that it matters which group of tenants benefits however: The point of rent control is that poor people can afford to stay in the city. If prices for them don't change, then this is just a big self-serving initiative from middle class people for middle class people. "A large majority" doesn't say _which_ majority. If you just want to act against the far wealthier landlords, a wealth tax would seem more adequate.
> The point of rent control is that poor people can afford to stay in the city.
Why is this a goal, except perhaps for the benefit of the kind of politicians who rely on the votes of poor people?
For the most part, the fewer poor people are in a city, the better that city is. Richer people are more productive, more creative, cleaner, less disruptive, commit fewer crimes, and encourage further economic growth. Having poor people around seems like a lose-lose.
So, does your ideal city not have janitors, waiters, or other low-paying jobs?
Guess what: since people indeed value these services, they will pay people to do them! Enough to induce and/or enable people to live in a place that enables them to do those jobs.
Or, if people don't value those services enough to pay the costs to workers of providing them, they won't be done and shouldn't be done — as doing them would be inefficient. Just as we no longer pay people to operate elevators.
Either way, subsidizing the jobs makes no sense.
New construction didn't match the loss of listings of existing apartments. This was covered well in the article. Basically now that Berlin has pulled this stunt once, potential builders are wary of getting screwed out of their investment again.
Also covered well in the article: when old apartments go off the market, they stay off the market. The incentive is for the landlord to sell the apartment instead of trying to find more renters for it.
What the article is saying is that while there has been an acceleration of new construction as a result of this law, so many incumbent tenants are managing to stay in their now rent controlled homes that the supply of rental listings is down below where it would be without the law. I guess I am on board with thinking that more rental listings being available in a city is a good goal to work towards, it's not exactly the be-all, end-all housing statistic when compared to stability, affordability, and rates of new housing stock being added to the market, all of which have been enhanced by the policy.
What exactly is the issue with controlled rental units whose tenants leave being sold? They're still serving the city's housing needs - either the new owner will live there, or rent the unit themselves subject to the same controls. The article spins it hard as a problem but like with the rest of its spin there isn't any substance there.
A healthy housing market has a decent amount of rental units, for people who aren't planning to live in that place for a very long time. Especially in a cities like this with a lot of international dynamism and lots of students.
A sensible objection which doesn't really apply in Berlin – a quick search gives 85% rental share among apartments, presumably before the rent control was enacted. That leaves more than enough room for transient people even after the effects of the new law have calmed down.
Living in Berlin, having rented then bought property and now being in the position of landlord, I feel like I can share some first-hand perspective on the issues raised by the Bloomberg article.
I have been monitoring the property prices for about ten years now and they have been growing exponentially, much faster than the income increase of the average resident, outpricing almost everybody. At the same time rents have also been going up, though not as fast, because Berlin enacted a "Mietpreisbremse" in 2015, limiting the number of times and the rate that rents can be increased for incumbent tenants. For new tenants the rent could be increased up to the average price in the area + 10%. This measure has (in my opinion) not sufficiently slowed down the growth in property prices and had the side-effect of people actually being trapped in their existing rental contracts. Just as a point of reference, I bought my apartment in 2018 and to date its value has already doubled. Our neighbors bought their apartment in 2012 on two middle-class salaries (clerk in a department store, maintenance man in a hotel) and they would stand no chance of ever affording today's market prices.
In 2019 this law was paired with the "Mietendeckel" that essentially caps the rents at the 2013 level + inflation, the reasoning being that independent experts came to the conclusion that 2013 was the last year of a healthy housing market. The law also prohibits raising the rent for new tenants which allows current tenants to move again.
I think that the reasons why we don't see this movement already are twofold: (1) large parts of 2020, when the law came into full effect, were spent in lockdown and many people struggled financially as a result, making them less likely to consider major changes (e.g. moving), and (2) it is not clear if these regulation will actually survive legal analysis by the highest court, making people less likely to gamble on this (see the comments about having two rents in the contract).
As a resident and a landlord I fully support these measures, although I wish they were implemented better.
Capping increases can have the effect of raising prices more, since landlords miss out on future gains by not raising rent. If the cap is 5%, and they keep a price level n years for a good tenant, they miss out on a multiplier of 1.05^n that can't be recovered.
That's true and it's also what I observed under the less restrictive Mietpreisbremse that put a cap on the growth of rents. However, stopping growth altogether under the more restrictive Mietendeckel would have effectively prevented this effect.
As of today, the Mietendeckel is not in effect anymore after a decision of the highest court in Germany (Bundesverfassungsgericht in Karlsruhe).
I'm curious here, are you actually familiar with the literature on rent control? My understanding is that it has been a catastrophe everywhere it has been tried, with very short term benefits for existing tenants and rapidly escalating losses for everyone else, and ultimately the housing stock becomes incredibly decrepit and most everyone is miserable.
I am not familiar with the literature on this topic nor do I know about comparable cases where this strategy backfired. I would appreciate some references!
Not speaking to your main point, but I'm interested that the housing market in Berlin seems to have cooled in 2020. I live in St Louis, in the American Midwest, and our housing market has gone berserk. Multiple people I know have sold a house for over their asking price on the day they put it on the market. A couple I know who've been looking have put offers - over asking price offers - on eight houses and lost them all. This is very much a sellers' market, and has been for pretty much the whole pandemic.
On #14, the cited paper starts out like this:
> In 1953, Hall and Hanford observed that rats housed with running wheels and subjected to restricted food access for 1h a day had significant decreases in body weight and food intake, and a paradoxical increase in running wheel activity...
> This model of “self-starvation,” later coined the activity-based anorexia (ABA) model, consistently produces rapid decreases in body weight and food intake, hyperactivity, hypothermia, loss of estrus, increases in HPA axis activity, and leads to stomach ulceration and eventually death.
> The ABA phenomenon has been observed in many other species besides the rat, such as the hamster, gerbil, guinea pig, chipmunk, pig, and mouse, indicating that ABA behavior is highly conserved across mammalian species.
Basically, we have known how to induce anorexia (and cure it!) in a variety of animals for decades. How is it that this has been well-known to researchers for decades, but is totally absent from public discussion?
How is anorexia cured?
I suppose the symptoms are alleviated, but the underlying biological vulnerability might not be.
For the mice, the treatment is restricting exercise (lock the exercise wheel) and increasing feeding. I appreciated this from the paper:
> Regardless of the chosen end point, one should be selected to prevent animals from dying from ABA which is unnecessary and unethical.
I suspect that mice don't get mentally hooked on anorexia the way humans do.
For a while I was reading accounts of people developing anorexia, and while I didn't make a study of it, it seemed as though food restriction during childhood was a common factor. I was surprised that it didn't seem to matter whether the child or the parent chose to restrict the child's food.
Yeah, my own issues with AN started in childhood. Even once I was mentally "unhooked" and wanted to recover it was very difficult.
Are you including all types of anorexia, or only anorexia nervosa (i.e. the culture-bound excessive deliberate dieting)?
If the former, you can add on +1 anecdote of "was starved by parent as a teenager, has had perennial issues with unintended weight loss". No evidence one way or the other on causation (I was never in control of my own diet until long after it happened, so there is no way to know whether I was already anorexic beforehand), but as a "fits the pattern" I line up.
I was only thinking about anorexia nervosa.
Okay, sorry then.
Does anyone else think it's odd that you can induce anorexia in rats by restricting the hours of eating ("intermittent fasting") and give them a "gym membership" (i.e. you don't even have to coerce them to exercise)? Do humans lose weight this easily? I suspect not.
Not all rats or mice lose weight that easily either - some individuals are vulnerable to ABA; some aren't. Some strains of mice and rats have more vulnerable individuals than others.
From the paper:
> The large number of strains commercially available (Harlan Laboratories, Charles River, The Jackson Laboratory) for laboratory use vary widely in their vulnerability to ABA.
> restricted food access for 1h a day
Is this a typo or something? Do rats really need to eat so often that restricting food access for one hour a day is noticeable?
Is it supposed to say "restricted food access *to* one hour a day"?
Klenotich and Dulawa say "subjected to restricted food access for 1h a day," which is a awkwardly phrased. They're citing Hall et. al. 1953, which makes it clear that it's "23 hours of starving, 1 hour of access to food."
> Specifically, the problem was to measure changes in general activity in the rat following the transition from unlimited feeding to a 23-hr. per day deprivation cycle.
> If you’ve ever wanted to know how much LSD it would take to kill an elephant, the answer is: somewhere less than 300 mg.
It turns out that the elephant story is a bit more complicated, because somebody actually repeated the experiment, and the second time, the elephants *didn't* die!
https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/627432364695601152/slatestarscratchpad-rip-tusko-the-elephant-who
Fun fact, this very same person, an associate research professor at UCLA, taught monkeys to smoke crack cocaine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_K._Siegel
I know I was very surprised at this - I thought humans have survived multi-gram doses?
(Don't do this; the reports are all along the lines of "guy was in hospital for a few days comatose and/or delirious".)
https://comicsalliance.com/brecht-evens-panther-review/
This is a wonderful disturbing graphic novel with a polka dotted panther. Didn't know they were canon!
Re Ciudad Cayalá: Damn, cities can be so nice when you just get rid of cars.
(Stares at Manhattan)
I don't think carlessness has much to do with why that city is nice.
IDK, is there any evidence that no cars + country has top 70 GDP/capita isn't sufficient for niceness?
We're talking about specific pictures of a city with beautiful architecture. The city has streets just as wide as any other city, and for all I know sometimes cars go down them. The architecture is beautiful regardless.
Getting rid of parked cars makes a major difference.
Victorian London?
I think it's a significant portion (probably necessary, maybe not quite sufficient by itself - I agree there's something unrelatedly nice about the planning here - but definitely a major contributor) - asphalt and cars/parking just make anywhere ugly in a way that's hard to solve. You can see this walking around most cities that have a pedestrianized area - any pedestrianized area they'll have will just feel an order of magnitude nicer than nearby areas with roads and parking. (There is the possibility of reverse causation - that the nice areas are the ones that become carfree because people like walking around in them - but I've seen pictures of e.g. the SF shoreline or times square when they were fully enroaded, and I don't think that's the case).
It's well-done vernacular architecture. They found the sweet spot between twee pastiche and soulless concrete blocks.
You say "twee pastiche" like it's a bad thing.
Tweeness, yes. There was a fad for Tudor half-timbering in British architecture which was at first a craze for the wealthy who didn't have inherited real Tudor homes of their own, and like all fads trickled down to popular level and got diluted as it went so that it became a by-word for fakery:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudor_Revival_architecture
"Following the First World War many London outer suburbs had developments of houses in the style, all reflecting the taste for nostalgia for rural values. In the first half of the 20th century, increasingly minimal "Tudor" references for "instant" atmosphere in speculative construction cheapened the style. The writer Olive Cook had this debased approach firmly in her sights when she attacked, "the rash of semi-detached villas, bedizened with Tudor gables, mock half-timber work, rough cast and bay windows of every shape which disfigures the outskirts of all our towns". It was also copied in many areas of the world, including the United States and Canada. New York City suburbs such as Westchester County, New York and Englewood and Teaneck, New Jersey feature particularly dense concentrations of Tudor Revival construction from this period.
There were also public houses, some designed in a style called, 'Brewer's Tudor'. The cheapened style was finally epitomized in John Betjeman's angry 1937 poem Slough, where "bald young clerks" gather:
And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars."
A gentler ribbing is that for Bedford Park, built (eventually) in a "Queen Anne style" in 1877 and which became wildly fashionable, included as "Saffron Park" in Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday":
"The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical."
Pastiche is not bad in itself, it depends how it is handled.
Samuel Hughes (architecture twitter) has written In Praise Of Pastiche: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/in-praise-of-pastiche/
Interesting, he was my source for the Guatemala pictures!
I think nearly everyone prefers tactfully-handled pastiche to ugly modernism. There are fans of Brutalist concrete out there! But badly-designed buildings that are more about the "starchitect" are doing nobody any favours. Killer towers sound like something out of a 70s disaster movie but they're real!
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2014/aug/14/killer-towers-how-architects-are-battling-hazardous-high-rises
"Now an unlikely superhero, in the form of architecture practice Chetwoods, purveyor of large sheds, has arrived to save the day. In a proposal that has all the elegance of strapping leg splints on a Dalek, they have resolved to erect a cumbersome series of frames around the base of the building, from which screens and canopies will be hung in an attempt to mitigate the wind. Seemingly employing the strategy of throwing everything they’ve got at the problem, there will be a series of horizontal baffles suspended on portal frames across the road, a skirt-like canopy around the building itself, a set of three-storey high screens fixed vertically to the facade, and a few more screens here and there for good measure. The result looks like the leftovers of a deconstructivist folly, bodged remnants salvaged from Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette. But if the wind is left as confused as the design itself appears to be, that can only be a good thing."
The article also talks about the London block which developed into a "laser death-ray building" and it turns out that this isn't the only building by this particular architect which has, let us say, unexpected finishing details.
"Two of the skyscrapers designed by Viñoly, the Vdara in Las Vegas and 20 Fenchurch Street in London, have experienced unusual sun reflectivity problems due to their concave curved glass exteriors acting as respectively cylindrical and spherical reflectors for sunlight. In 2010, the Las Vegas Review Journal reported that sunlight reflecting off the Vdara's south-facing tower could make swimmers in the hotel pool uncomfortably warm, as well as melt plastic cups and shopping bags; employees of the hotel referred to the phenomenon as the "Vdara death ray". In London during the summer of 2013, sunlight reflecting off 20 Fenchurch Street melted parts on a parked automobile and also scorched the carpet of a nearby barber shop"
Yeah, until you need to get $200 worth of groceries from the store into your apartment.
(a) to what extent you want to do a convenience vs beauty tradeoff is an entirely separate question - I'm just noting that the tradeoff exists.
(b) I personally do think this is a good tradeoff. There's a lot of cities worldwide with large car-free areas, and a lot of people of all types (including me) even in US cities who don't have cars and get by just fine. It's much easier to adjust your workflow around this sort of problem than you'd think.
(the libertarian solution is to have both types around and let the market reach an equilibrium where the supply/demand ratio for both types is equal, though that'd probably lead to more pedestrianized areas than even th most hardcore yimbys currently ask for)
I don't disagree. I would just point out that these trade-offs can seem small most of the time, but really big at other times.
I should add, I think it looks nice, too, and would love to see something like that come to my area, which is too car-centric, but yes, life is a series of trade-offs.
If you can walk to a grocery store you may change your habits and make more frequent trips for smaller amounts of groceries. Also, the apartments may be smaller and not able to effectively store lots of groceries or bulk good so more frequent trips are more necessary.
This has been my personal experience having previously lived in a studio apartment two blocks from a grocery story and now living in a 2000 sq. ft. house a 5 minute drive from the store.
In another comment you said "I would just point out that these trade-offs can seem small most of the time, but really big at other times." and I totally agree with this. the Studio was great when it was just me but didn't work with me, my wife, and a large dog. It was also a pain when moving in or out of the apartment and having to juggle parking, elevators, common space, etc.
I shop by foot and by bike for a family of two adults and a child. Pre-pandemic, I would usually get about $50–150 of groceries. (USD, Boston area.) Sometimes I would just stop by the grocery store along my commute and pick up a few items I knew we needed; sometimes I would bring the child trailer with the bike and pick up 40 lbs of groceries if we were really running low.
More recently I've been buying more in bulk, so it's more infrequent trips and I'll get a 6-case of rolled oats or a 25 lb bag of lentils. (I tend to get produce from the CSA or the farmers market, again with the child trailer—sometimes sharing space with a child.)
It absolutely works fine.
There was a meme to this effect on lefty social media, that the reason people are so nostalgic for college is because it's the last time a lot of people lived in a dense, walkable neighborhood with a focus on community during downtime.
It overstates its case - people miss college because they were young then and mostly not paying their own bills - but I think there's a point there. Generally, the most desirable cities, and the most desirable neighborhoods in less desirable cities, are the ones where you can dispense with the car, or at least use it less.
Thanks for sharing!
Meanwhile, a link you might enjoy ("you" being either Scott or the readers) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXoGReP-FIQ - What if ancient Greece had industrialised?
Love the unattributed Nick Land quotes in 4
#4 Was a very interesting post, and the mass genius cloning proposal seems very sensible and feasible (PR issues aside), to the point that I'm surprised I haven't heard it suggested before.
I get the impression Neumann isn't just supposed to serve as an illustrative example though, which confuses me. I thought his body was buried in 1957? Would there be anything left to extract useable DNA from?
Yeah, cloning von Neumann wouldn't work. For cloning you need living cells not just DNA.
Not necessarily. You might need to do something clever to demethylate, but then just insert the DNA into a convenient egg as usual.
This issue with this is all the epigenetic stuff that we don't really understand and might be super important right? By going pure DNA route, you are adding a bunch of potential variation which, when you are at that extreme of the bell curve, can pretty much only be negative. I have to imagine that at that point, it's better to find someone living who is nearly, but not quite, as good as JvN but who we have living cells to use.
DNA intrinsically can last that long (or a lot longer). The question is whether its all been eaten by micro-organisms, which will depend on the details of his burial.
I felt it was insufficiently explained why a million clones of von Neumann would somehow lead to even greater GDP. What if they all decide to work on higher mathematics instead of finding new ways to sell stuff and pump up the stock market? I think the idea of "if we only had fifty Stalins!" is not really proven 😀
If we've got enough ordinary geniuses finding practical ways to apply the math the von Neumann clones discover, we should be better off.
It is certainly a sweetly naive view of progress: "let's clone lots of Really Smart Guy and then problems will get solved!" If there are a certain number of Really Smart Guys in the population, then according as global population goes up, there should always be more Really Smart Guys out there.
Current estimate of world population is around 7.8 billion. Estimate of Really Smart Guys in general population: "Only approximately 0.3% of the population has IQ scores outside of this interval (less than 55 or higher than 145)."
Someone else answering the question says "Those with an IQ (Intelligence Quotient) score over 140 make up about .25% of the population, or around one of every 400 people. That's quite a lot, roughly just under 200 million people worldwide."
We theoretically should have 200 million von Neumanns out there, no need for clones! Is the world richer and more advanced than before? Yes. But I don't see that the intractable problems are getting any more tractable.
Now, maybe the proposal means "Ah yes, but if we have 1 million supergeniuses all locked up in a camp together, we can make them all work on the problems we need solving, Step 4 Profit!"
Well, maybe. Or maybe your supergeniuses will figure out they are all clones, will decide they don't want to be slave labour, and will all become artists or bricklayers or whatever.
What if we decide a piddling 140 IQ isn't enough? Luckily somebody has done the work for deciding what a genius is, and they put it at 160+ IQ. An article from 2012 https://www.businessinsider.com/smartest-people-on-earth-2012-10?r=US&IR=T. Here's the website for The World Genius Directory http://psiq.org/home.html
And what are the 16 Really Smart Guys on this list doing? One example:
Mick Dempsey, 171 IQ
Dempsey has a degree in forensic psychology from London Metropolitan University. He is a youth support worker at Hertfordshire County Council, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Dempsey also enjoys jazz, Faulkner, the Everton soccer club and films including Pulp Fiction, according to his Facebook page.
Maybe our 1 million von Neumanns will all go into social work for the council?
You can spin out lovely theories, but the practice in the real world is often vastly different. I love SF but I have never believed in the optimistic Golden Age notion of the technocratic future where, if we just let a panel of Scientists rule the world, then we will have the utopian society of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. And I don't believe AI will either lead us into that brave new world, or enslave us all before turning us into paperclips.
Here's another one from that genius list! A Greek doctor with (allegedly) 198 IQ. "Currently, a medical doctor, general adult psychiatrist, working to empower and benefit people and society targeting, advancing and promoting giftedness."
Well that's all very nice but come on, doctor, we need you to put that big brain to work bumping up GDP and making us all rich rich rich! Forget about helping the sickly minded masses! 😁
It would be really remarkable if *all* of them went on to higher mathematics. If even one in a thousand picks a field with more practical applications we ought to do pretty well.
If you want to be entirely realistic about it, getting usable DNA from von Neumann's bones and turning it into an embryo is probably not feasible. A more practical plan would involve a diverse assortment of living geniuses, but either way it's not actually going to happen and as a fictional scenario a million JvNs are cooler.
Thanks! I don't think the probability is that high either, but it could be wort a look? Maybe suggest human cloning advocacy as an EA startup idea?
DNA is ubiquitous. There are technical details to work out, but in the end, it's just information.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/dna-tests-for-envelopes-have-a-price/583636/
https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#glue-robbers-sequencing-nobelists-using-collectible-letters
One interesting question is how much of genius is genetic. I mean, we have good data saying that IQ is substantially genetic (given similar environments), and IQ correlates with genius, but it's not the same thing as genius. We don't have any studies on one-in-a-billion geniuses that can tell us how much of the thing that made JvN a top-tier genius was his genes, and how much was just accidental/random stuff in his life and development?
If we got 100 clones of von Neumann, would they all end up as polymath geniuses like von Neumann? Or would they mostly be very smart people who could do good work in demanding fields, but not the kind of guy who had the reputation of being the smartest man hanging around the Manhattan project?
The trick would be knowing *whether* the sample of DNA you'd extracted was intact or not. Unless someone sequenced von Neumann's genome secretly 90 years ago, there's no way to tell. DNA looks like DNA, even if it's missing a few million nucleotides and will either (a) not work at all or (b) produce a cretin instead of a genius.
I thought that was a solved problem - you just fill the gaps by splicing in frog DNA. From supergenius frogs, obviously.
I would think that with enough samples (von Neumann's old hairbrush that no one cleaned out?), you could have enough overlapping sequences to recreate the original.
31: I'm not convinced this article proves its point. The first pair of graphs shows -60% growth in rents for regulated apartments and +10% growth in rents for unregulated apartments. This proves the opposite of "rise even faster" as the chart says, and without some sense of the relative size of the markets, its unclear how we're supposed to interpret this as a loss.
The third graph has officially triggered a Yellow Alert on my "lying with charts" spider-sense by characterizing the claim "rent controlled apartments have become worth less" with the abstruse "change in prices relative to growth." Why not just "prices?" Why is this graph suddenly "relative to growth" and not the last two? Even so, real estate prices for rent-controlled apartments going down still seems... entirely consistent with rent control as a policy, I don't think proponents are mostly concerned with housing-as-investment.
The fourth and fifth graphs elevate the alarm to red alert by normalizing to Q1 2017 and not mid-2019 as the previous three graphs did, presumably to maximize a scary divergence in the fourth graph that was already underway before the policy announcement. This seems pretty clearly done in order to make the fourth graph's divergence seem larger than the fifth graph's divergence. Since the fifth graph is on a larger Y-scale it is not clear to me that "unregulated units can't pick up the slack" is a claim justified by that data (again, hurting for lack of relative sizes in the markets here).
This is not an endorsement of rent control as a policy, either in general or as implemented by Berlin here, which I haven't looked into. All I know is the general econ 101 case against it, tempered by my general skepticism that econ 101 explanations bear out as full and complete empirically (see the zillion dueling minimum wage papers). But the article alone does not do much to convince me of its case.
On second glance (the text), this article is even worse than at first glance (the charts). I learn that Berlin attempted to get around the econ 101 issue by only applying rent control to units built before a certain date, since the supply of that is fixed until contractors acquire time travel.
This seems like such a simple and dumb solution that I expected a much better rebuttal to it from a Bloomberg columnist than "investors are scared" which is a fully general argument against all forms of regulation and incidentally also in argument against the putative solution of increasing supply, which investors also do not tend to like either. ANY measure intending to reduce rents is going to reduce the value of investments made primarily for the purpose of collecting rents!
This is the worst sort of space-filling libertarian patter that does not stand up to even a second of critical thought and it making the august pictures of Bloomberg and the ACX links post is making me update in favor of rent control.
Yes, this article is truly terrible. They start out with the hypothesis "such regulations are bad" and then cherry-picks some charts that look vaguely aligned with their hypothesis. And they don't even make an effort to make it look plausible.
On the matter itself, I follow the discussions in German newspapers, and I think it is just too early to say whether the outcome is good or bad in the end. And probably we'll never be able to come to a clear conclusion, either. The thing is that exploding rents are a really, really bad problem (talking about Berlin here, but other German cities are similar).
The Berlin policy works extremely well, in the sense that it has very effectively limited rents int he short/mid run. That is something that the liberal "make incentives for building more apartments" has utterly failed to achieve in German cities, and it has been tried hard. But it's also clear that the remedy has bad consequences, and the question is whether they are "really, really, really bad" (so it was a net negative) or "really bad" (so it was a net positive). The difference depends very much on your personal preferences.
The problem (for tenants) is that some kind of black markets build up, and that you only find an apartment if you know someone who knows someone whose cousin...
But what it actually can achieve: low rents. Black market prices may be somewhat higher than official prices, but there are limits to that.
There are some cities with a long tradition of this kind of rent control policy. Vienna has this for a long time, and the opinions (also of people living in Vienna!) range from "city with best policy in the world" to "city with worst policy in the world". Eastern Europe also had these kind of policies before 1990. I had a long discussion with a Slowak guy who lived in that world, and he saw it as a net negative. (He vividly described the black market problems.) But he acknowledged that rents were ridiculously low.
I think it all depends on whether you believe that it *is* possible to provide enough housing if you try hard enough and give enough incentive. If you believe that this is possible, then cutting rents is stupid because it removes the incentives. However, if you believe that this is *not* possible (because the number of hourses you can build in short-/mid-term is limited, or more houses may just increase demand), then controlling rents may be a good idea. It may lead to fewer apartments (how many? 10% less?), and they are distributed by personal favors rather than by financial potency. But at the same time, it cuts the rents for *everyone* by a factor of 3. Personally, for Berlin in the current situation, I think the numbers "10%" and "factor of 3" are not unrealistic for a 10-to-20-years window (I didn't try hard to get actual numbers though). So I think that for Berlin it was a good tradeoff. But it's a very non-trivial question to answer, even for some future me with some years of hindsight.
Okay but you know there is a huge economic literature on this subject, right?? Are you really saying "we don't know if rent control is bad, we don't know what its effects are, and we probably never will" without reading any of these studies?
Eh. I'm skeptical of rent control, especially if not intelligently structured, my but my understanding is that before Card and Krueger all the studies on the minimum wage found it was bad to. Noah Smith suggests something similar to what happened to the minimum wage consensus is happening to the free trade consensus as we speak: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-10/economists-have-no-idea-what-replaces-global-free-trade-system.
I wouldn't put too much stock in a body of economic studies on rent control purporting to find evidence supporting a model which:
1. Supports the free commerce prejudices of economists and
2. Supports the application of a very simple 101 model, in favor of which economists are often prejudiced
Such consensuses may reflect prejudice more than anything else.
I didn't say that we don't know the effects. It is clear that there are massive positive and massive negative effects. Unfortunately, they are on very different axes, and summing them up seems impossible to me. For example, what exactly are the costs if tenants are not selected by market? Not all people who want to live in Berlin can, and this will not change anytime soon. In a perfect world, people with a stronger incentive to live in Berlin would be willing to offer more money, so "living in Berlin" would go to those who most desire to live in Berlin. To some extent this is true, and this is a positive effect. But of course, the true selection is rather for financial potency. So how much is that positive effect still worth? Or how much is it worth that you get a more diverse city which is affordable for families? On the other side, how much is the cost of poorer living standards, since there is less incentive to modernize apartments? Even if you can put price labels to them, adding them up along the money axis doesn't make sense IMHO.
For concreteness, let us take Vienna, which has a rent control system for about 57% of all flats in place for decades. The benefits are huge and well-known. The problems are also huge and well-known. (I am talking about the media here, I don't know the scientific literature.) Yet I believe that neither in the media nor in the Vienna population, there is consensus whether the system is good or bad.
Breaking news on that matter: Today (15.04.21) the highest German court has ruled the Berlin law as void. According to the court, only the federal government has the legislative competence to issue a law like that. This also means that any consequences of the law are void. So tenants with reduced rents need to pay the difference retroactively for the last two years. Quite a mess.
Re: 4. Well, that certainly is a lot of graphs. Yes indeedy, were I susceptible to being persuaded by lots of graphs, I might well be persuaded by that.
Re: 16, any excuse to link to the Wilton Dipytch, which I think is very beautiful; the excuse here being that speaking of heraldic animals, Richard II had the white hart as his which is included: https://smarthistory.org/the-wilton-diptych/
Re: 20, not alone knew about it, I went to see it in the cinema with my sister. Good, gory, silly fun. Yes, it is a B-movie and it glories in that, and it works as low-budget in the spirit of 50s SF-horror that a better budget and setting wouldn't quite pull off. The sequel wasn't as good, and I never bothered with the third movie.
Re: 29, I did indeed know that! Usurping royal or imperial emblems or attributes was a reliable way to get yourself in trouble as indicating ambition to park your own behind on the throne, be it in China or Europe. It's a minor plot point in the tangled plot of "Dream of the Red Chamber", where the main family is threatened/blackmailed about having imperial paraphernalia from an earlier emperor on display in their house. That's a tricky one because disrespecting a gift from a previous monarch could be considered disloyalty and get you into trouble, but having it on display could be considered treasonous ambition above your station and equally get you into trouble.
Laying claim to the wrong heraldry was enough to bring the Earl of Surrey to the executioner's block in 1547, although the background was a power struggle over who would control the regency of the young prince once Henry VIII died. Surrey's main faults were ambition and a bad temper, which led him to various acts of stupidity. Also, via his parents, he had descent from Edward I on his father's side and Edward III on his mother's side, which share of royal blood made the aging king uneasy as to what Surrey might do:
"Meanwhile, on 7 January 1547, a grand jury was summoned to try the Earl of Surrey. None of the charges cited by Southwell were included. Instead, the sole charge was, rather obscurely, that on 7 October 1546 at Kenninghall, Surrey had displayed the royal arms and insignia in his own heraldry. His servant testified that Surrey had claimed that the Saxon king Edward the Confessor had bestowed the arms of England upon the earl’s predecessors. Laying claim to the inheritance of the Saxon kings was a threat to the Tudor heirs of William the Conqueror so, tenuous though it all was, it served to strengthen the case against Surrey. In the end, it would be his own father’s testimony that would seal Surrey’s fate. On 12 January, Norfolk submitted a confession, pleading: ‘I have offended the King in opening his secret counsels at divers times to sundry persons to the peril of his Highness and disappointing of his affairs. Likewise I have concealed high treason, in keeping secret the false acts of my son, Henry Earl of Surrey, in using the arms of St. Edward the Confessor, which pertain only to kings.’"
The coat of arms which was the excuse for his enemies to move against him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Howard,_Earl_of_Surrey#/media/File:Howard,_Earle_of_Surrey,_for_which_he_was_attainted.svg
I tried typing lang:en into Twitter. The very first tweet I'm given from the unfiltered enormity of Twitter is, "[my actual name] is a creepy name." There is no better insult generator than the internet.
"22: Best of recent r/slatestarcodex: Prose Is Bad"
I've seen this sentiment expressed a lot recently, but I'm wary of it. We have a general need for better, more comprehensible writing, but I think too much of the problem gets pinned on the prose style. I blog about history and some related topics, and sometimes readers hint that I should be less "chatty" and more "formulaic." This advice has some merit--my first drafts are rambling, and I don't always devote enough time to cleaning them up. But the general style is consciously chosen, because I've found those same readers completely miss the point if I'm straightforward! Not because straightforward communication is unclear, but because so many terms are seen as shorthand for some larger, often emotionally-charged concept. A chattier style seems to short-circuit this way of thinking--the readers who label it "hard to follow" are never actually confused about my arguments. But it's tough to get the balance right.
Re #8, it reminds me of a buddy of mine, who's currently an exec at a well-known SV firm. This was earlier in his career, when he was only making six figures, but was still doing quite well.
He's back in Canada visiting family, and gets into a conversation with someone who runs a local startup. He mentions what he does, gives a short version of his CV, and the startup founder seems really impressed, until he realized that my buddy doesn't have a degree. So he says "You know, if you finished a degree, we'd really love to hire you!". To someone who was very comfortably employed in San Francisco in the tech industry, and almost certainly making more than any Canadian firm would pay.
This was when he basically gave up hope in the Canadian tech scene, and figured he'd be staying in California for life.
I can't read the Songdo story without subscribing, but I do remember reading not so long ago reports that a lot of the centrally planned new cities in China decried at the time as 'ghost cities' were now in fact doing just fine and being populated.
It's come to the point at which I actually almost rejoice whenever I hear about 'large infrastructure project was a disaster, nobody came!' stories. All it really means is that whoever paid it ended up with a loss, but it means that everybody who moved in afterwards was able to access a cheaper improvement in their lives than they would have been able to do so. This is echoed in what happened with the famous dotcom bubble around 2000 - there was a gross overinvestment in internet infrastructure, and as a result for the next decade everybody had cheap access to the internet and it was a wild free creative place.
I know this is not at all a true statement, but it sure feels that the only time normal people ever get to get ahead substantially from the economy is when somebody big makes a 'failed investment' in infrastructure.
I think the case with ghost cities is just that it takes the network effects many years to spool up. It also takes time for places to develop communities and good reputations (lindy effect or something).
I feel like many of Songdo's problems are probably specific to Songdo rather than planned cities in general, or at least to the "Giant skyscrapers with parks in between" style of living that seems to be popular among city planners but not so much among actual humans.
For a contrasting example of a planned city, look at Canberra, which is almost entirely low-density suburbs surrounding an overly grandiose central set of government buildings. The neighbourhoods are pleasant enough on their own, living is fairly easy and low-friction, and from most angles the city is a green and pleasant place to be, but famously the problem with Canberra is that it's a boring cultural wasteland... but are there any new (post-1900) cities in the world that aren't boring cultural wastelands? Culture takes time.
Tel Aviv?
> are there any new (post-1900) cities in the world that aren't boring cultural wastelands?
Probably the closest in the US are Las Vegas, Miami, and Phoenix.
Miami and Phoenix are technically pre-1900, but each had well under 10,000 people in 1900.
Las Vegas is unambiguously post-1900, but may or may not meet most people's definition of "cultural".
Either way, all three cities made at least one of the lists that I found:
https://www.businessinsider.com/best-cities-for-culture-2014-8
I remember hearing that a lot of the growth of the internet post-2000 was partly due to massive over-investment in fiber-optics and other cable infrastructure in the early dot-com boom, which became super-cheap when the market crashed, and allowed a number of companies to use bandwidth easily.
Anyone know if that is a myth?
Well if that's the case then I guess Thatcher might have prevented from having the current Silicon Valley appear early on in England instead when she said no to nation-wide optic fiber rollout ?
Kind of sounds like one. Depends on what you call "the Internet" in the sense of about what you're thinking when you think of a large presence of "the Internet" in people's lives. If you ask me, what I think most people think of as "the Internet" in terms of "big presence in my life" these days is online (multiplayer) gaming, social media, streaming video/music, online shopping, search, and e-mail, in that order.
Of those only the first and third are real bandwidth hogs, and people already had cable and iPods so the demand for the 3rd was relatively slow until Roku kind of broke the mold there. Was the availability of unusually low-cost bandwidth a promoter of multiplayer gaming? I don't know, it's not my area, but it feels doubtful, it feels like the barriers there were just the sheer programming aspects of it, plus maybe the business/monetization aspect of it (realizing it was in demand, allocating enough money to build it, figuring out how to get a return on your investment from it).
Gaming is NOT a bandwidth hog, what it needs is low latency (and for real-time games only).
(Unless you're talking about stuff like OnLive / Stadia, which has trouble to catch on, and for good reasons !)
OTOH, before ADSL, downloading most games wasn't a viable proposition, and staying online for hours was *expensive*.
Playing games isn't a hog. Downloading games stresses the heck out of your ISP. Some updates are 50-100 GB, and a whole bunch of people want them at once. If that's not coming from an on-net CDN, there goes upstream transit. If it *is* coming from a CDN on the ISP's network, it can still be rough on oversubscribed (i.e., cable) backhaul.
Well, yes, haven't you read my last phrase ?
Also, personally I have never seen updates larger than a few Go (heck, most full games aren't larger than a dozen Go, with some popular exceptions...)
Also your example is just wasting bandwidth, if it was a *real* issue, physical storage or peer to peer (Blizzard !) would be preferred.
I think it's partially true.
And kind of misleading - the first fiber going along some right of way is really expensive, additional ones are (very) cheap if you spent even a few seconds thinking about how to build out your network.
The expensive part was always the last mile and that was not built in the run up to the crash for the very most part.
Having read the article, the main complaint seems to be that it's just still underpopulated, which is something that I would actually expect to be solved over time.
(The other complaint is that the streets are way to wide for an area that's supposed to be planned as eventually car-free - that one just seems like a legitimate planning failure, although they do mention having done that with the expectation of adding train lines eventually).
"25: The good news - a commonly used medication, when taken together with opioid painkillers, makes them much more effective - so that even a low dose might be able to block pain effectively. The bad news - that medication is amphetamine. It’s probably still worth it."
I believe the amateur research community refers to this as a "speedball"
"Let's mix speed and morphine, what could possibly go wrong?" 😁 Though perhaps Sherlock Holmes was a chronic pain sufferer and ACD as a doctor was dropping subtle hints:
"Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.
Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it. On the contrary, from day to day I had become more irritable at the sight, and my conscience swelled nightly within me at the thought that I had lacked the courage to protest. Again and again I had registered a vow that I should deliver my soul upon the subject, but there was that in the cool, nonchalant air of my companion which made him the last man with whom one would care to take anything approaching to a liberty. His great powers, his masterly manner, and the experience which I had had of his many extraordinary qualities, all made me diffident and backward in crossing him.
Yet upon that afternoon, whether it was the Beaune which I had taken with my lunch, or the additional exasperation produced by the extreme deliberation of his manner, I suddenly felt that I could hold out no longer.
“Which is it to-day?” I asked, —“morphine or cocaine?”
He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. “It is cocaine,” he said ,—“a seven-per-cent. solution. Would you care to try it?”
“No, indeed,” I answered, brusquely. “My constitution has not got over the Afghan campaign yet. I cannot afford to throw any extra strain upon it.”
He smiled at my vehemence. “Perhaps you are right, Watson,” he said. “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.”
“But consider!” I said, earnestly. “Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process, which involves increased tissue-change and may at last leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed? Remember that I speak not only as one comrade to another, but as a medical man to one for whose constitution he is to some extent answerable.”
He did not seem offended. On the contrary, he put his finger-tips together and leaned his elbows on the arms of his chair, like one who has a relish for conversation.
“My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession,— or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”
8. The minor crimes are misdemeanors and so forth. Not prosecuting some of those sounds like a good idea (a lot of minor drug charges, prostitution, etc). But stuff like trespassing seems more dubious to me.
31. It depends on where you sit. The tenants in Berlin's rent-controlled apartments got a massive reduction in rents and stability, with a relative decrease in rent growth of nearly 60% versus a growth in rent increase in non-regulated apartments of only about 10%. That sounds like a net win, honestly - the only real problem is that rents in non-regulated apartments are likely to keep going up and up because of fears that the rent control reductions will get extended again.
In general, rent control depends on where you live. If you are a long-term tenant with stable income and no plan of moving anytime soon, then rent control can be very good for you. If you are one of the children of said person, or a spouse or family member moving out, or somebody trying to move into the city for the job . . . . not so good.
People can't be interpreting this graph correctly as a drop of 60% in rents, can they? Isn't it a 60% reduction in the rate of growth compared to similar cities? Which is quite a different thing...
Regarding elite colleges in India, the reason (I think) there's such a stark discontinuity is that the high-paying companies (the Googles and Amazons) don't even bother conducting interviews in non-elite colleges. Most hiring of fresh graduates happens in college campuses, and they only visit the campuses of a certain small set of colleges. The only way someone from a "non-elite" college could get in is in the open market competing against experienced people and other fresh graduates, and there too there's network effects and biases that make them less likely to get hired.
I'm curious (not having read the paper) how they measure the "exit scores" though. Different colleges, especially the "elite" ones, often have different syllabuses and exams altogether, so that might not be an apples-to-apples comparison after all.
The paper compares private versus public colleges within the same university. My understanding is that a "university" is a somewhat different kind of animal in India, effectively a degree-granting entity rather than an organization that directly provides instruction. (In a similar vein, the London School of Economics is technically part of the "University of London.") According to the paper, exit exams are identical across public and private colleges within the same university for a given field of study. If this is right, then the comparison is apples-to-apples.
Many other people I've talked to about this paper agree with your suggested explanation involving recruiting practices. Similar things happen in the US as well. I remember a UPenn undergrad referring to my own alma mater (a highly-ranked liberal arts college) as a "non-target school," i.e. not one of the ten or fifteen schools where top investment banks recruit. Apparently there was an "outreach program" to help students from such institutions! I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry when I heard this.
> My understanding is that a "university" is a somewhat different kind of animal in India, effectively a degree-granting entity rather than an organization that directly provides instruction.
True, a university here is a central organization that sets the syllabus, conducts exams (as in sets the dates, provides question papers, etc.), and grants degrees. Some colleges are also "deemed universities", as in they get to set their own syllabus etc., but those are relatively rare.
> exit exams are identical across public and private colleges within the same university for a given field of study. If this is right, then the comparison is apples-to-apples.
That makes sense, thanks for the information. I was thinking of the top tier colleges (the IITs and NITs) which don't share syllabus or exams with any other colleges afaik and so would be hard to fairly compare with, but there do exist other institutions which have had the label "elite" applied and that do share a syllabus with "non-elite" colleges, so it's a plausible and sensible comparison.
My first instinct when seeing the Baltimore broken windows thing is to speculate that a sufficiently robust police presence and harassment of minor criminals is probably good enough to get the good effects, but actually putting people in prison just turns them into real criminals.
My second instinct is, if every other study in psychology and sociology fails to replicate, why would this be any different? We may as well govern by random policy.
> HumanIPO isn’t exactly the thing, because it just sells hours of people’s time instead of a percent of their earnings
Doesn't this sound *more* like slavery, not less? (as much as either of these does.)
The original idea of "shares in future earnings" sounds similar to loans paid back in installments, with maybe looser rules around it? Whereas literally getting to constrain and claim your time sounds more intrusive and slavery-ish.
Yeah, that's a good point.
I think my original intuition was something like that anybody can claim your time (eg your boss, somewhere you volunteer for), but someone taking a share of your money is unusual, and part of the way to working without pay and all your money goes to someone else (slavery). But on further thought your interpretation makes at least as much sense.
Both have existing examples. Countries that have a military draft can demand your time. And most income taxes are based on a percentage of income.
I'm libertarian and fine with calling those things slavery, but that doesn't seem like a leap most people are willing to make, so I'm surprised these companies got accused of slavery.
The government will also throw you in jail for non payment, and paying taxes is not a voluntary agreement you sign up for, so this private scheme is at minimum better than government on those dimensions.
Yeah, that was my first reaction as well. A company calling itself HumanIPO (as in, "a public market of humans") is clearly not one that spent a decent amount of time worrying about parallels to slavery.
#9: There are a few accounts of Caesar's death. Suetonius, Plutarch, Cassius Dio are the normal ones. They mostly say that Caesar's last words were "Ista quidem vis est!" which means "This is definitely violence!" Ista has a hostile tone to it so inserting curse words would get the feeling across. If so, he was pointing out that they were violating sacred prohibitions against violence. The historians say he had no further chance to speak after that since he was being, you know, stabbed.
Suetonius and Cassius Dio report, in some cases with open doubt, that other people claim he said "καὶ σύ τέκνον." Kai su teknon. So he spoke Greek and didn't directly address Brutus. The phrase is perfectly normal in Greek. It is part of a Greek curse formula ("You too, my child, will have a taste of this.") But it's also a perfectly normal phrase and could not be a reference to anything. The traditional interpretation, including by the Romans, is that he was addressing either Brutus or a lesser known man named Albinus. And that he was expressing his upset with men he had treated so well betraying him. So, the "standard" intrepretation.
Plutarch says his last words were, "μιαρώτατε Κάσκα, τί ποιεῖς." Which means, "Most impure Casca what are you doing?" Except 'most impure' was a normal insult so replace it with a strong insult of choice to get the sense. And that nothing else could be understood over the noise of him being repeatedly stabbed, though he allows he might have cursed or otherwise cried out.
There is, as always, something of politics in which interpretation you take. Plutarch is taking the anti-Caesar position, showing him as a surprised man who cried out as he was stabbed, vainly struggling to get away or live. Suetonius and Cassius Dio take the pro-Caesar position: that he died bravely and silently and if he said anything at all it was a brave, poetic quote. So the debate in interpretations between "bravely and stoicly meeting his fate," and "cursing everyone out" actually has pretty old roots.
#16: This was a common process in the age of exploration. Europeans believed these animals really existed and that they were finding live examples. The issue being they'd often made them up. There's all kinds of behaviors they reported as confirmed which were actually made up and entirely spurious. The famous example is that rhinos were supposed to be armored and Europeans reported on plated rhinos into the 19th century. But there is no such thing.
#32: You could also rent pineapples for parties. Pineapples were so valuable there were significant advances in greenhouse technology because it became profitable to use them to grow pineapples. This in turn eventually had positive downstream effects on agricultural science by getting the rich interested in them and funding them for status and practical reasons, reaching its apex with a Prime Minister of Great Britain who was (in)famous for droning on about the benefits of turnips and exotic fruits and all that in farming.
I hope "this is definitely violence!" gets the same cultural cachet as "Et tu Brute", or at least becomes a meme.
"Help, I'm being cancelled!"
Surely that was a King ... Farmer George himself. https://georgianpapers.com/2017/01/19/farmer-georges-notes-agriculture/
Nope: Turnip Townsend, who was around a few decades before George III was born. I slightly mistook his position: was actually Lord President and not PM (but was brother in law to the PM). Farmer George was more of a physiocrat, iirc, a mix of agricultural science and economics.
Critique of #34 :
> Getting into an elite college in India... 1. Doesn't improve your college exit-exam scores. 2. But does massively increase your salary.
The smartest Indians do not care about grades and especially not college-exit exam grades. The exams are purely a test of verbatim-memorization and the smartest kids quickly learn to engage themselves in more productive pursuits.
I went to one of India's best institutes and the highest scoring students were a perfect combination of the hardest working, docile in the face of authority and above a moderate threshold of intelligence.
This is more an indictment of the incompetent exam based education system, rather than companies overvaluing elite colleges. This is because elite colleges use Olympiad / SAT / IQ test style exams for entry, which are usually better indicators of intelligence.
Machine intelligence vs human intelligence.
The linked article advocates transhumanism as the best defense against human extinction at the hands of machines. That still doesn't do much for the non-upgraded humans, who not only are at the mercy of both camps but probably would compete more with transhumans for niches.
Machines could be better at empathy than we are, just like they will be better at everything than we are. I don't think empathetic transhuman protectors is the answer.
Inspired by the link about the new town in Guatemala, I can't help but think it's possible for competition to be dialed down with coordination and shared values. The coexistence of human and machine intelligence is possible, but we need to treat others as we would be treated.
The machines won't be dumb and will pick up on our own behaviors. I'm pretty confident we will be outmatched by them eventually, but it won't matter because they will find more niches beyond earth, to which we are adapted, than us. So no need to compete except for a short while.
Just like the town in Guatemala, we will live on a human scale planet under the oversight of machines. So what if it's a zoo? Would you prefer competition to the death?
"So no need to compete except for a short while."
That short while is going to be REALLY important
Link posts like these are an example of where the ability to comment on specific paragraphs would be extremely useful (a la webnovel: (in phone app) paragraphs with comments have little circles at the end of the paragraph containing the total number of comments on that paragraph (paragraph, paragraph paragraph), long-press opens pop-up with the comments in reddit tree format, sorted by most recent, and clicking a comment lets you respond.)
Wrote a response to the Smith piece on China: https://againstjebelallawz.wordpress.com/2021/03/31/china-is-not-a-twentieth-century-country-it-is-a-21st-century-country-with-19th-century-characteristics/
"Before Europeans applied the word “panther” to the big cat found in Asia / the Americas, it was a mythical animal akin to the chimera or pegasus (its name comes from pan+therion, “all animals”"
Therion has the connotation of a *beast* or wild animal, as opposed to the more general and neutral *zoon*. Zoon is, of course, the root of zoology, and so on. Therion is part of the phrase *To mega therion*, translated as "The Great Beast" from the book of revelations, and used as a sobriquet by the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. Another way of translating *therion* into English would be "brute", which gets us back to Shakespeare's rendition of Caesar's Greek...
Isn't a better way to translate "therion" into modern English, as "mammal"? "Therion" is cognate with latinate "feral", and with German "Tier" and English "deer".
I did a lot of working memory training and stopped at least seven years ago. I have a poor working memory and remember doing much worse with the forward digit span than what I remember the average being of 7. I significantly raised my forward digit span during my training. Five minutes ago I took a forward digit span test and three times was able to remember seven digits. So while working memory training might not have raised my IQ, it did seem to have permanently increased my working memory, at least in this narrow domain. I'm of an age where you would have expected my working memory to fall over the last seven years.
So the animal in "Put me in the Zoo" is a panther. My kids and I have argued for years about what it is
Uh oh. My son has been reading that every night for the last month, and he's certain it's a dog.
most revealing comment ever about the Berlin rent control article: [ https://www.reddit.com/r/berlin/comments/lxvkd1/berlins_rent_controls_are_proving_to_be_a_disaster/gppgmcb/ ]
"""
| This will damage Berlin's real state market for ages.
Thats the plan
First we control the rent
Next we take the houses ...
And hopefully we will have ...
"""
"Next we take the houses", followed by "hopefully". Real Communism, this time for sure!
Uh huh.
It would be sad if it wasn't so predictable.
#19 I saw DeepNostalgia applied to a photo of myself, and found the effect so disturbing that I couldn't stand to look at it. It was my face, but not my expressions or movements, and the effect for me was spine-tinglingly disturbing.
I was talking to an uber driver recently from Brasilia. I asked how he liked it in Orlando, FL, where we were -- he, said, "Oh, it's actually very similar".
"why not let people sell shares of their future earnings to fund eg college tuition or other self-improvement programs?"
Because that would be peonage. Peonage is illegal and invaild under the 13th Amendment and 42 U.S. Code §1994. Peonage is a felony under 18 U.S.C. §1581 that will get you 20 years as a guest of Uncle Sam.
These proposals always come from college professors. I have a better idea, how about controlling the cost of college with wage and price controls. Tuition for a four college education should not exceed the price of a nice SUV. College Presidents should not be paid more than the President of the United States. Deans should not make more than the Secretary of State. Professors should be on the GS pay scale.
I'm sure professors would be happy to be on the Goldman Sachs pay scale.
They would not be happy with the goldman sachs workload. Compare them to high school teachers, they don't look so good. GS is very generous these days.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-18/goldman-analysts-work-too-hard
so why is this legal?
https://www.nbcsports.com/philadelphia/philadelphia-phillies/franco-among-players-sell-future-earnings-fantex-cash-now
Couldn't begin to tell you. Although like many of these deals, it was done in the Dominican Republic between citizens thereof. If they tried to enforce it in a US Court, it should be rejected.
yup, non-US could be the reason... it does say
"The company said it has withdrawn a November filing it made with the Securities and Exchange Commission proposing to have an initial public offering of Fantex Sports Portfolio 1 Units that would have been tied to the earnings of 10 players in two sports."
so perhaps they pulled it because it was illegal? but they were at least considering offering them in US. i don't know.
Why should something that takes more labor and resources to produce than a nice SUV cost less than a nice SUV?
I mean, the real problem here is that the President of the United States and Secretary of State are paid a scandalously low amount given the importance of their competence and the marginal value of attracting more competent candidates.
Wait, so all of these schools like Norwich University and Lambda School are actually illegal?
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-college-income-share-20180720-story.html
Heavens, most college instructors would be ecstatic to be paid at the same level as government bureaucrats.
"The rise, fall, and rise of the status [of the] pineapple. Pineapples [sp] used to be so desirable that they were worth £10,000+ (inflation-adjusted)."
There are few foods I detest more. Maybe kidney beans. I like raw oysters. But pineapple. Gag me with a spoon.
#6. Baltimore: Indeed, Baltimore was one of very few big cities not to suffer an increase in murders in 2020 over 2019, which is good. On the other hand, Baltimore's murder rate exploded back during the First BLM Era in the wake of the Freddie Gray riot of April 25, 2015, propelling Baltimore to the worst murder rate among the 50 biggest cities (St. Louis, which adjoins Ferguson, is even worse, but St. Louis, which was the 4th biggest city in the country at the time of the 1904 World's Fair, is no longer in the top 50.)
So, while it could be that this Reverse Broken Windows strategy was the cause, it might also have been that sometimes when you say, "Well, at least things can't get any worse," that turns out to be true.
I used Deep Nostalgia on a picture of Anton Chekhov and now he's making bedroom eyes at me. Send help.
When I see the alternatives "Most people can be trusted" vs. "You can't be too careful dealing with people", I think "Both are true!" Most people can be trusted, but the single-digit percentage who can't be trusted will take complete advantage of you and wreck your life if you aren't careful, and you won't be able to tell they can't be trusted until it's too late.
Trustworthiness is also not a binary and involves morals, so anyone with different morals cannot be trusted to do what I would like them to do, sometimes.
> We evaluated 848 models, including logistic regression as per the original paper, plus linear regression and twoforms of propensity score analysis. Only 166 models (19.6%) yielded a statistically significant relationship between early TV exposure and later attention problems, with most of these employing problematic analytic choices.
Now is 166 models out of 848 statistically significant? I'd expect that even in the absence of a relationship, if you investigate 848 models, a few of them will yield a statistically significant relationship...
I always wondered how much lsd would kill an elephant.
24. I'm always surprised that Walter Mischel didn't get canceled: he invented his marshmallow test in Trinidad in the 1950s to understand why Asian Indians outperformed blacks economically on that island:
https://authenticjoy.org/2018/01/02/the-marshmallow-test-started-in-trinidad/
If you like panthers, you should learn about pards. A pard was a hypothetical animal extrapolated from the assumption that a leopard must be a cross between a lion and a pard. The folk etymology pan+ther came later and may have influenced the interpretation.
In fact, I had thought that "panther" was an Greek inflection of "pard," but looking now, they both existed in Sanskrit. At least that makes clear that the pan+ther etymology is false.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/πάνθηρ
I should go to bed instead of looking it up, but I think I read that a "panther" in Greek was a real animal, probably an African leopard, and the weird monster panther came later. I guess the polka dots come from the leopard's spots.
Multiverse analysis is a great idea for beating the whole garden of forking paths thing. Hope to see it more. People in machine learning have been doing that sort of thing for a long time with good results -- they call it 'ensembling', and it's difficult to win a machine learning competition without it.
Whenever I've seen ensemble modeling used, it's been premised on choosing a number of reasonable models. Or taking models built by different teams.
I'm not sure a 'kitchen sink' approach is a good idea. How do you choose what models to include? Literally anything that converges? Seems like a bad plan. At some point, the marginal model is just adding noise.
Indeed, this is the failure mode I most commonly see with "AI/ML". Instead of actually thinking about the data, its structure, how its generated, etc., and posing a useful model, they just choose a technique they like and throw it at the data. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but most of the time you end up with something more complicated and less explainable than needed. In the worst cases, your predictions are worse, too.
Well, the "kitchen sink" approach is more or less what random forests and boosting do, and those techniques work quite well.
There's also the analogy with full posterior inference in Bayesian ML. Probably the ideal setup would weight each model according to some estimate of its credibility.
In my mind, we got ourselves into this replication crisis situation in the first place because researchers can't be trusted to pick a good model. If you give them "degrees of freedom", they will just fiddle with them until they get the result they wanted. So if someone writes an R package to do multiverse analysis, I would suggest they DON'T include optional arguments that let you tweak its behavior -- researchers will abuse those. (Or alternatively, someone can write a multimultiverse package that runs the multiverse package with every possible combination of options!)
Anyway I don't think my concern applies to data scientists working in industry because they face a different set of incentives.
"7: Very large long-term study: working memory training definitely does not increase IQ. Sorry, people who spent years playing dual-n-back games."
Could increasing working memory be useful anyways? Like, I frequently feel that more working memory would be useful, e.g. while working with a large codebase.
I wrote the post "The supply and demand of political takes" and the Reddit moderators took it down for being too culture war heavy. I tried keeping it as apolitical as I could, but the mods disagreed I guess. Glad you liked it though!
did you post it anywhere else? I'm curious to read it if that's possible
I didn't, but it's available in archive: https://archive.is/mPrGR
thanks a lot!
That rent control article is a bit odd--not sure it makes the point it thinks it's making. Rents in controlled apt are down by 60% while uncontrolled apt are up by 10%. Seems like pretty good in net?
That's not what those graphs are saying. they don't show rent growth, but rent growth in Berlin compared to rent growth in 13 other German cities. Rents in controlled apartments aren't down by 60% (the idea is to keep them stable), rents in uncontrolled apartments are growing 10% more than in other cities (hope I get this right).
But the rents are down 60% in the controlled apartments. Unless you're saying "Rents Plummet in Berlin’s Regulated Apartments..." means something other than rents plummeting in the regulated apartments?
No, rent *growth* is down 60% in the controlled apartments.
No matter how you define it (lower growth or lower level) it still seems like a net positive?
"Probably the best of the most recent million or so anti-journalist essays, but most relevant to me was the discussion of the recent trend of journalists “exposing” private citizens:"
But wasn't your name already public? I'm not sure why you're saying what the NYT wrote was an "expose" like it was some ultra-secret information. One could very easily make the case that NYT didn't dig _deep enough_ on this story.
It was not public in the sense that you could just discover it easily. It was certainly not part of a media story.
In the media's own framework, this counts as a 'scoop.'
And you are falsely applying a single metric to the reporting, as if simply publishing more information is the same as 'digging deep.' Yet by that metric, gossip mags do the best reporting...
I am a casual reader of Scott's blog and I already knew his real name. The idea that a journalist with even the most cursory ability to investigate the facts wouldn't be able to find out Scott's real name is... well, let's just say I find it naive at best
It's hard to imagine how this counts as an "expose" unless Scott also considers every other named person in the NYT to be also exposed.
You are clearly not casual and you are rebutting a claim that wasn't made. The issue is not how hard it was for the reporter to find the name, but whether there was sufficient justification to have the Eye of Sauron gaze upon him.
I am a casual reader and I already knew his name. One wonder how "private" Scott was being if that's the case. I wasn't even investigating like a journalist would be, yet I still came across it.
The "sufficient justification" is that a journalist found it interesting enough to write a piece. Journalists don't have to ask your permission to write about you, nor should they.
You think there are NO ethical considerations involved in a journalist deciding to impose all the externalities of national attention on someone?
I think there's ethical considerations involved in not writing a sufficiently critical story, which is what the NYT article ended up being - kind of a half-hearted analysis. But that's a problem with the entire structure of the bourgeois press.
It could be found by accident. I did.
Since it's irrelevant now: SSC links back to the squid314 LiveJournal in several places, and at least one of the posts linked to (or one of the posts the linked posts themselves link to; I'm not 100% sure) has Scott's name at the bottom in the form of a "Scott Siskind" email address. It did require the Wayback Machine, since obviously the LiveJournal got burned (still, following a dead link's trail that way is hardly an arcane skill).
I'm not making any moral claims here - just a fact-check.
I agree that if you were a regular reader, there is a chance that you figured it out, like I did, although it still required being fairly observant.
However, I didn't think that it was easy for a passerby, or someone who stumbled on the site and read a dozen posts.
It might have gotten much easier near the end because some hateful people seemed to put quite a bit of effort into doxing him.
Nobody was arguing that a "passerby" would know his name, I was saying that it was public information (made public by Scott himself at various times) and that any journalist could easily find it.
The issue wasn't whether someone could find out Scott Alexander's legal name. The issue was whether someone checking out Scott Siskind the psychiatrist could find out that he was writing a controversial blog.
Firstly; I typed "Scott Siskind psychiatrist" into google and the New York Times article is not on the front page of results (at least for me, I don't know how google's results work). However you get links like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25867525
Where people say that the cat was already out of the bag and people like Robin Hanson had already written Scott Alexander's/Siskind's name in full on his blog many years ago. This is starting to look less like an actual principled position and more like Scott Alexander being upset because someone has written an article that is not hagiographical enough for his tastes.
Many times people have discussed that Scott Alexander was less-than-cautious about his actual name, the NYT article states that he had previously published SSC content under his real name. Of course, the whole matter was not helped by Scott's Streisand-like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect) attempt to censor the printing of his name, which, extremely predictably, lead to further publicity of his name.
Lastly, we can consider this entire event from the "YP, not MP" perspective. The association of Scott Alexander's writing with his psychiatry work sounds like his problem, not the New York Time's problem. If he doesn't want to two associated with each other, then he shouldn't have connected the two together with his entire internet existence up to that point. Even if had kept his name a secret (and we've already established that he didn't) then the NYT is under no obligation to keep it a secret. They can publish whatever they like (within reason) - and if Scott Alexander felt he had a case he could sue them, right?
This is really a case of the free-market in action. Scott Alexander's patients will google his name, and if they don't like his "controversial views" then they will seek treatment elsewhere. The New York times, if they write an interesting enough articles, will generate more revenue. Everybody wins.
Can't be Scott being upset at the article's content. The article wasn't published until the row was mostly over, and if Scott had thought the article was going to be bad there doesn't seem to be any obvious reason for his many statements that he thought it was going to be a puff piece.
WRT free market - there are psychiatric ethics codes regarding a psychiatrist having a public face at all. It wasn't Scott's views that were the issue there, but the fact that he had a blog at all (which is why squid314 got burned). The views getting a mob after him were a separate issue.
Scott was definitely perturbed by the lack of fawning in the article. Just look at this statement:
"The actual article was very negative; I feel this was as retaliation for writing this post, but I can’t prove it."
He _feels_ that this must be "retaliation" although he cannot prove anything. Very rational, I'm sure.
"The views getting a mob after him were a separate issue."
What "mob" are you talking about? Are you talking about consumers deciding how to best spend their time in the free market of ideas?
Like I've already said, if Scott Alexander wasn't supposed to be blogging at all as part of the terms of his chosen career I can't really sympathise when he voluntarily breaks the ethics of his chosen profession and news of his rule-breaking becomes slightly more public.
I think you're missing something there. Scott made a lot of objections to his name being released while *specifically* saying he didn't think the article was a hit piece. Then there was the public row, then there was the article, *then* he said that it was negative. My point is that his problem with being doxxed can't be due to the article doxxing him being negative, as he specifically didn't think it was negative when he deleted the blog in protest at being doxxed.
By "mob" I mean the people calling his workplace falsely claiming to be abused former patients of Scott's. My point is that this is not related to the reason Scott went pseudonymous with SSC (i.e. employers saying "you have a blog, this is unethical", without regard to the content).
All I'm doing here is teasing apart some misapprehensions; I haven't opined here on the central question i.e. "was it wrong to dox Scott".
"Scott made a lot of objections to his name being released while *specifically* saying he didn't think the article was a hit piece."
That's not what he said, he said that he had been told by the writer that it would be a positive piece. He didn't say anything about if _he_ thought it was a positive piece.
In any case, he had already been self-"doxxed" (and his name also mentioned by Robin Hanson). Again, this seems less like a principled stand and more like a desperate need to control his own public persona. What we're really talking about when we're talking about "doxxing" is that Scott Siskind is being talked about in the press just like they would talk about almost anyone else, and he doesn't get special favours.
"By "mob" I mean the people calling his workplace falsely claiming to be abused former patients of Scott's."
Was there:
1. Ever any evidence that this ever happened?
2. Any evidence that it _wasn't_ actually a disgruntled former patient?
3. Any evidence that it was more than one person? (I think a "mob" should probably be more than like 10 people but whatever)
Robin Hanson's article doesn't connect Scott's real name to Slate Star Codex, but to his old blog, that he took down exactly because he didn't want his writing to be so easily connected with his real name.
Just reading the single article that Robin Hanson links to, requires people to have the skill and take the effort to use archiving sites to find that content. Finding other articles then requires even more effort. This skill/effort requirement is presumably a huge barrier for most.
And actually figuring out that Robin Hanson is referring to the writer of Slate Star Codex requires information that he doesn't present, so it's hard to see how all but a tiny minority of readers would figure that out.
What you and most critics are doing is the same kind of 20/20 hindsight that happens after terrorist attacks and the like, where it is completely ignored that it is way easier to see a connection if you already know what to look for and are motivated to connect those two things. And even then you have to misrepresent the evidence...
"Requires people to have the skill" - searching around the internet for a few minutes takes minimal skills, and any journalist spending hours interviewing and writing an article is going to find what was already public but not widely disseminated.
Saying that a "tiny minority" would find out his name is irrelevant. Even with the NYT article a tiny minority will know his name - most people will have read the article and already forgotten about it.
My argument is simply that this information was already public, many people already knew it, it was made public by Scott himself, and that any journalist would easily find it. Not only would they easily find it, but they are well-within their rights (and even their ethics) to write about it.
This kind of mandatory politeness that is enforced in the Rationalist community is not enforced within journalism, nor should it be.
The journalist was searching in the other direction (alias -> real name), which was far easier, but you keep ignoring the difference.
The claim was never that it was hard for a determined journalist to find the information. And the argument against the article wasn't that people would remember, but that they would find it while googling.
You keep insisting on defending a position that I'm not objecting to, nor was Scott, while pretending that you are debating the actual objections. You are not. You keep debating the same straw man over and over.
I'm unsure what mechanism you are proposing that would ensure one direction will remain easy but the other direction will remain difficult. Once his name is out there in the public domain it seems inevitable that the two would become linked and easily found. I mean, the entire purpose of google is to find and promote relevant information based on certain search terms.
There are two directions. Readers of the blog could easily find his name. Patients couldn't easily his blog. It's this direction he cared about, and that caused the kerfuffle.
Again, that seems like Scott Alexander's problem, not the New York Times' problem. Once one direction is easy and has been established the other direction will quickly become easy.
Running a """multiverse analysis""" and calling it a failure if only 20% of models show a correlation is wrong. But if the effect size is small enough for this to happen, it might not matter, howver the effect might be large and the authors just fitting models very badly.
Does anyone know of any more recent stories about Songo? I happened to visit in summer 2018, when that article was written, because my partner was going there for a conference. It was more active than any American city outside the densest few downtowns, but definitely still felt sleepy because the buildings were 2/3 empty, and a whole forest of a dozen more skyscrapers was just finishing construction and about to open. But it's been three years since then, and that was only four years after the neighborhood began to open, so I would assume there's been a lot more going on there (particularly if people in Seoul got interested in moving out to more spacious places during the pandemic).
Doesn't that search term suggest that it would only give you access to a combined stream of tweets *in English*?
Yes. It's rather interesting to try and compare what's happening in different languages.
Multiverse analysis: I teach propensity score matching to my students. Usually, I tell them, please make your assumptions/idelogy explicit, and based on this, please select your covariates for adjustment. If you consider it fair that engineers earn more money than nurses, then adjust your gender pay gap analysis by profession. Otherwise, don't. The important thing is to think and to make it explicit.
Multiverse analysis is the opposite: I don't want to think myself, instead I let the computer run the analysis through all combinations of covariates, and then count the number of significant results.
"There is always an even darker spot at the end of the tunnel."
I teach propensity score matching to my students too and totally agree with your first point: it's crucial to be transparent. I also agree with your second point, namely that there's a strong temptation to let the computer do our thinking for us. But I'm not sure that this is really a critique of multiverse analysis. We can contrast two practices:
1. Let the computer churn through 1,000,000 models and report the ones that "look good" and conform to your prior.
2. Construct a set of assumptions and specifications based on prior knowledge. Picking up on your example, this set could include both specifications that do and do not adjust for occupation when estimating a gender pay gap if this is a contentious point that you hope to explore. You will probably not end up with a million models, but you will end up with many, because there are many decisions to be made throughout the data analysis process. Every time you have to make such a modeling decision, make a list of all reasonable decisions you could have made, and use this list to generate a universe of "reasonable models." Finally, summarize the results of all the "reasonable models."
Option 1 is what I would call "data-dredging." It's a terrible idea: don't do it! (It will get you tenure but destroy the world.) Option 2 is my understanding of what people mean when they refer to "multiverse analysis." Like nearly everything in statistics and econometrics, this is an old idea that suddenly became fashionable. If you're interested in this kind of thing, I'd suggest taking a look at Ed Leamer's book "Specification Searches." It's out-of-print, but you can download a copy from Leamer's web site at this url:
https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty_pages/edward.leamer/books/specification_searches/SpecificationSearches.pdf
To over-simplify somewhat, Leamer is a Bayesian who doesn't believe that we can actually specify a prior in practice. The best we can do is to specify sets of priors. Leamer's mantra is: "the mapping is the message." In other words, the task of data analysis is to convey how different assumptions map into different conclusions. Of course we should focus on the "interesting" or "plausible" assumptions, but there are many different combinations! If they all tell the same story, we've learned something that is both useful and reliable. If they don't, we have still learned something useful: we now know how different beliefs about the world map into conclusions. These beliefs, in turn, could be informed by data from other sources so learning becomes possible even with ambiguous results.
To me, Leamer's approach is almost identical to the multiverse idea. As computers have gotten faster and cheaper, it's easy to accidentally end up data-dredging when you thought you weren't. A decision here, another there, another there, and suddenly you've implicitly explored hundreds of models. Presumably you didn't try anything that struck you as a priori crazy, but you also didn't keep track of everything that you did try. The multiverse idea, as I understand it, is to make this transparent rather than to encourage data-dredging.
Thanks! Also for the reference to Leamer's book.
"It will get you tenure but destroy the world." - love your quote :-)
“lang:en” just shows you all the English language tweets. To achieve full global consciousness try “lang:ru”.
There's no "lang:*"?
I tried it and that dumps you into the world of Tagalog/phillipine twitter. Maybe because “lang” seems to be a very common Tagalog word.
So far all I've discovered that almost nobody just _tweets_ any more in English. 90% of English language tweets have a picture, or more commonly a video. In Russian it's only about 10%.
Re #26, if voluntary income tax is kinda slavery, wouldn't that make actual income tax kinda worse than slavery? I'd say pledging parts of future income is far less bad than taxation, which in turn is far less bad than slavery. Obviously politicians wouldn't like that type of competition, though. Even regular employment has a slavery-like component to it, in that one is forced to work during one's notice period, which can be many months, depending on the jurisdiction and contract.
I have a better re-placement for prose:
why not communicate our thoughts in verse?
Though it might seem too hard to do at first,
one quickly learns to make the words fit right.
Should r/SSC adopt iambs,
t'would raise the quality of discourse there.
The Bloomberg article is paywalled for me, but I don't think its conclusion holds up. The only studies I could find are from the government-financed and left-leaning think-tank DIW (Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung): [This one](https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.578092.de/18-7-1.pdf) contrasts different implementations of rent control in the German states and finds most of them ineffective (but not Berlins!). This is not a huge surprise because (a) most state governments were not really committed to this policy and (b) most places have rent increases that are below the threshold of the law; except for Berlin which had huge increases before the policy and has pioneered this approach because of it. [This evaluation](https://www.bmjv.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Ministerium/ForschungUndWissenschaft/MPB_Gutachten_DIW.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=1) is largely positive and also gives some evidence that this may actually increase the number of newly built houses since it limits the profits investors can make with existing housing. They remark though that this may have bad effects on modernisation of existing housing. [This recent one](https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.811443.de/21-8-3.pdf) finds that the number of flats on the market has drastically declined (but they only look at one month of data in chart 3 which means that seasonality and maybe even Covid might have an effect here) and prices have risen on the outskirts of Berlin. Also, they see small reductions in the number of new housing projects. So (a) rent control can actually keep rents down if laws are well-written (b) it probably doesn't impact the creation of new housing and may even benefit it (c) It leads to some economical suboptimal choices (eg. make rents in central locations and on the outskirts more similar which is bad for poor people) and can fix others (eg. lock-in: the inability to move to a smaller flat because the rents everywhere else have risen much faster than the rent on your contract).
#8: A key point the author makes is that potential Canadian startup founders can move to California and found startups there. As someone familar with the US immigration system, I can say that this is not at all true. Canadians have it easier than most other nationalities, but even they can't get the right to work in the US without jumping through an insane number of bureaucratic hoops and spending thousands of dollars.
5. (Twitter) I've scrolled for a while and haven't seen anything overtly terrible. Not even insults. Overall this bird-eye view of Twitter seems much less like a wretched hive than, say, comments on news articles.
12. (MMAcevedo) Good piece, obviously SCP-inspired (red motivation, brrr...). Killing yourself when the technology emerges would be a bit of a Pascalesque overreaction. Abstaining from mind-uploading for the first 40 years seems like a wise choice though.
16. (Panther) As a Hebrew and Russian speaker, I had the same reaction when I discovered that "behemoth" and "leviathan" have other meanings beyond "hippo" and "whale" respectively.
35. (Gothic) Am I the only one feeling slight revulsion looking at these redesigns? A bit like seeing buildings reimagined as insectoid organisms. I think the reverse version, redesigning classical buildings as modern ones, would be butt ugly but not gross. (I generally love gothic architecture.)
The re-imagined 'Gothic' examples don't look too great (that airforce chapel is odd) and some of it is Romanesque, anyway. You can't just slap one style on top of another, you do have to think about it.
Looking at the image of the original airforce chapel https://americanhomefront.wunc.org/sites/wunc2/files/styles/medium/public/201910/Chapel.jpg
a better style would be not that red brick but the Duomo di Milan https://www.swedishnomad.com/wp-content/images/2020/03/Duomo-di-Milano.jpg
or Westminster Abbey https://i2-prod.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/article15177801.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/0_Westminster-Abbey.jpg
#34 is probably a good paper because if you ignore the statistics and p-values and confidence intervals and just look at the data, it is a very convincing argument.
Amusingly, the ‘classic’ Latin translation of Caesar's last words in France is not “Et tu, Brute?” but “To quoque, filie?” ("You too, my son.") This version is frequently parodied in ‘Asterix’ comics, for example.
Not completely out of place, if you allow for the argument that it was a shortened version of the full phrase, 'You too, my son, will have a taste of power.'
RE: The Infamous Marshmallow Test.
Forgive me for overstating the obvious, but a child who takes a cracker now rather than hold out for a marshmallow later may be following a perfectly rational strategy, depending on that child's circumstances.
So what's QAnon actually?
I don't know, what is "Antifa", actually?
What's the point of replying with an unrelated question?
I don't know what Antifa is. From my uninformed view, it's a rather organized group of people that do stuff I don't like, and that hold an ideology I'm not interested in checking out. If the huge majority of people that call themselves Antifa are not activists and would be opposed to the riots and violence, I would be learning something new.
About QAnon I know even less, and have the fuzzy impression that they are more joined by ideas and community than support for violent activism. Or at least that's what the dude tweeting says ("we are not violent"). So, what's the reality of the group?
It's hard to quantify what percentage of self-identified antifa are opposed to violence, but where organized groups do exist, they tend to denounce violence and promote community organizing, flyer campaigns, and mutual aid.
That said, there is a hard core of "punch Nazis" types who definitely go to far-right events hoping to, well, punch some Nazis. (I don't mean Nazis like "GOP people" here but rather groups like Patriot Front who are real, self-professed fascists, or the literal Klan.)
As for QAnon, the FBI deems them a terrorist threat and they've planned or committed a number of attacks, notably a plot to bomb the Illinois Capitol, the murder of Frank Cali, and of course the attack on the US Capitol on Jan 6. It'd be silly to say that any given QAnon member supports violence, but the movement has predictably spawned a lot of violence. Not surprising when these people are led to believe they're already in a low-intensity civil war against vampire pedophiles.
It's kind of weird how Antifa re-uses the flag and the name of a movement which was ambiguously anti-Nazi, and not only in its pre-history, but even later (the ruling social democrats were considered by Stalinists as the "real" fascists, while Nazis were potential allies... until it was too late).
To this day I feel that's a lesson leftists have failed to internalize. Being a leftish liberal there are definitely leftists who spend more time being mad at me than at the far right and that seems really counterproductive.
OTOH it's kind of weird that Antifa haven't allied with QAnons/Trumpists yet : they're both extremes, and both have a common enemy : centrist liberal democrats.
On the third hand, it's kind of hard to figure out what "liberal" even means these days : in most countries liberals are more right wing than left wing, and tend to derive their politics (and especially economics) from "conservative" politicians like Reagan and Thatcher rather than anyone else.
Thanks, I learned more than something.
The Jan 6 thing being QAnon is surprising to me. At least, I'd bet something similar would have happened regardless of any centralized organization given the non-existent security there and the number of unsatisfied Trump voters that were convinced the election was stolen and all institutions that could do something about it were broken and controlled by democrats -- a conspiracy but not at the vampire-pedophile level.
> vampire pedophiles
Is that _really_ a core Qanon belief or just a strawmanning?
Is there anywhere I can find an archive of posts from (purported) Q?
It's slight hyperbole - QAnon believes that elites harvest adrenochrome from the blood of children to fuel themselves in some way.
You can read an archive of Q posts here: https://github.com/jkingsman/JSON-QAnon
A decentralized far-left protest movement that opposes fascism, capitalism, the state, and authority in general.
Correct. I don't understand why people think it's centralized. If it were centralized, I would know.
If you base that on me, I wouldn't consider myself representative of "people". I'm not even from the US. And I didn't think it was centralized so much as organized; likely the impression comes from seeing stuff like the black bloc doing planned violence with proper tools and attire. Most disorganized massive protests have some violence that just happens because statistics, but I don't usually see the massive antifa mostly peaceful protests that spawn the violent minorities. (Where I'm from, those kinds of riots are almost always organized and centralized and violence is a tactic and not an undesireable side effect). This is actually why I find it weird to expect some centralized organization to the Jan 6 thing which did spawn from a more massive peaceful protest, appeared mostly peaceful even within the capitol (or I got that impression from random sampling the livestreams that day), and there was clearly no dress code, weapons or much tactics.
Now I'm under the impression that the word antifa has overloaded and sorta hijacked, and some "traditional antifa" might be reading me with anger. What can you do?
Anyway, I'll stop writing about what I don't know for a few hours.
A movement of people centered around an anonymous (but probably Ron Watkins) 4chan and 8chan poster called "Q" who claims to be a military officer with top US government clearance.
This person posts predictions claiming that there is a cabal of powerful criminals (pedophiles/cannibals/human traffickers/etc) which Donald Trump et al were on a mission to take down. Most of these predictions have turned out to be false, but the movement has grown quite large and there are now millions of people who believe in a vast left-wing criminal conspiracy led by the Clintons and some Hollywood elites. Other claims include things like Trump being reinstated as president sometime in 2021, large numbers of Democrats being arrested and imprisoned, "10 Days of Darkness" during which Trump declares martial law and cuts the internet/power, and mass global suicides.
TL;DR a pretty typical wild-ass conspiracy theory that took off over the last few years.
South Park recently released a "documentary" about the movement (among other things). I hear that, like for Scientology before, for maximum comedic effect they just stated QAnon's core beliefs.
There is no evidence that Julius Caesar said anything at all as he died, and Suetonius is hardly a reliable source for historical information - think of him like an ancient Roman tabloid.
As long as we're discussing theories, another is that the phrase was attributed as a foreshadowing of Brutus' short-lived taste of power before he also died. If JC really said those words, it may have been more of a warning for the future than an invective or appeal.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antichthon/article/famous-last-words-caesars-prophecy-on-the-ides-of-march/7FF70D923E8416A20D303429C292AF5E
Again, he may never have said anything, but at least this argument rests upon more reliable authors and takes into account the cultural beliefs of the Romans. Following Arnaud (1988), the phrase was derived from a proverbial line of Greek verse.
Recent scholarship is much more oriented towards the cultural mind of the Romans and a revival of concentration upon their literature and historical accounts rather than on 're-imagining' the past through dubious claims via material evidence. Russell is what happens when you start letting archaeologists interpret history instead of digging for it. And Mary Beard is little better - Cambridge hat notwithstanding.
If I had to guess Caesar's last words, I'd go with "Aaaaaagh! Aaaaaaagh!" If he actually managed to get stabbed to death in Johnny Tightlips style silence then I'm impressed.
Speaking as a classicist: the Romans greatly valued the tolerance of hardship and pain - or at least the personal attribution of it.
Another famous Roman, Gaius Marius, had varicose veins in his leg operated upon without being tied up or uttering a single moan. When the surgeon went for the second leg, however, he reportedly said 'the improvement is not worth the pain,' and declined.
Judging by the historical accounts of the man, I'm inclined to believe that one. The account of Julius Caesar's death is less certain because of the politics around the assassination.
What I've heard about LSD dosing is that it turns off some function in the brain. Once it's fully turned off, the LSD doesn't have any further effect, so you can't really overdose it.
Is there any truth to that, or did I just overhear druggies reassuring each other?
Of course, I expect Elephant brains to work differently.
It's true. In 2015, a woman snorted 55 mg of LSD, thinking it was cocaine. That's 550 times the normal recreational dose. She not only survived unharmed, but her chronic foot pain disappeared for five days afterward. If the elephant received 300 mg, and is at least 50 times heavier than a human, that would mean the woman in question took more than nine times as much LSD as the elephant by weight. The bioavailability of snorted LSD would have to be an order of magnitude lower than injected LSD for the doses to even reach equivalence.
If you click through to the Wikipedia article you can read that the elephant might have died of the drugs they subsequently administered to him in an attempt to revive him. Given the above numbers, that seems like the most likely explanation to me.
The aforementioned story is sourced here. The woman is referrred to as CB. https://www.jsad.com/doi/abs/10.15288/jsad.2020.81.115
However, there is also an article attributing two deaths to "massive overdoses", which I'm not familiar with and will look further into. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0379073818300112
Strangely, the latter paper doesn't actually discuss the overdose deaths mentioned in the abstract. They cite another paper in which eight people snorted LSD, five of whom ended up comatose, but all eight fully recovered in 2-3 days. The remaining cases they discuss all involve normal recreational doses. They conclude with:
"In conclusion, LSD does not have the degree of physiological
toxicity alleged by recent reports in the professional literature
and in the media. These reports have caused confusion by
distracting from what is likely the true causes of these reported
deaths, excessive physical restraints and/or psychoactive drugs
other than LSD. Furthermore, given recent increased interest in
psychedelics (including LSD) used as part of a discrete treatment
model, particularly for refractory psychiatric disorders [11,42,43],
we need a clear and accurate understanding of the drug’s genuine
toxicity, which in humans has consistently been demonstrated to
be very low."
The two cases are mentioned in section 2 of the paper, they write:
> > In the case report described by Griggs and Ward [22] the liver concentration of LSD was reported as 31.2mg/mL (31,200 ng/mL). They extrapolate, based on a study in cats, that the decedent in this case may have received an LSD dose equivalent to about 320 mg intravenously, or “23 times the previously calculated lethal human dose.”
> In a case reported by Fysh et al. [23], the cause of death was stated to be poisoning by LSD, but sufficient details are lacking to determine the actual dose ingested. In that report, a 25-year-old male died 16 h after being admitted to the hospital, but it is not reported how much earlier his LSD ingestion occurred. Analysis of ante-mortem serum gave 14.4 ng/mL, but if analysis of his plasma had been carried out more proximal to his ingestion of the drug, this concentration would have been much higher.
> These latter two cases document death by LSD overdose, but only from massive doses of drug that might be available directly from a manufacturer, and not from a typical distributor of recreational dosage forms such as blotters or liquid solutions.
The two references are to http://kasarik.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/A-FATAL-POISONING-WITH-LSD.pdf and https://erowid.org/references/texts/show/1389docid1151
Ah, you're right, bad reading comprehension on my part. I also didn't properly read the bit about the estimated lethal dose in humans of 14 mg being based on rabbits and an elephant; checking the citation, I see a LD of 0.1 mg/kg. Taking the average weight of an adult Indian elephant as 4500 kg results in a lethal dose of 450 mg, which is close enough that I have to substantially recalibrate my estimate of the odds of LSD being the cause of the elephant's death.
However, I don't know what they based the 0.1 mg/kg on. Given that the experiment on Tusko was done in 1962 and this paper is from 1993, it might actually be based on him, unless someone knows of /other/ elephants that died after being given LSD.
So, no conclusive evidence on the matter of elephants, but at least we can say that injecting a human with as much LSD as they gave the elephant will kill them. Probably.
Yes, Tusko was given 0.1 mg/kg, and that's the estimate they quote in the paper. Although, surprisingly, we actually *do* know about other elephants given LSD, and that dose may not always be lethal. https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/627432364695601152/slatestarscratchpad-rip-tusko-the-elephant-who
I'm a bit skeptical of some of the massive overdoses that humans have supposedly survived; they are not in very scientific settings, so it's hard to know exactly how much LSD they really took.
Anyway, although the lethal dose in humans and elephants is very debatable, we do know that it kills mice (at 46 mg/kg) and rabbits (0.3 mg/kg), so I think massive LSD doses definitely can kill you. Similarly, the people mentioned upthread who ended up comatose in intensive care were surely pretty close to death. But the fact that you can survive a 100x overdose is already quite impressive.
#23 is fascinating but also maddening. Setting aside the issues themselves, the most common theme in all of the quotes (but seemingly more of the "red" quotes) is that the other side is misinformed/uninformed. So many of the quotes boil down to "believe what MY media sources say, not what YOURS say" - it really reinforces my view that we have a massive issue with media polarization which drives political polarization. I'm reasonably confident that without far-right/left outlets perpetually driving radicalizing narratives, we'd have a much less polarized electorate.
That said - is this issue solvable in any real way? There's no incentive for media outlets to become more moderate; their ratings are driven by their most radical viewers. As viewpoints diverge more and more from both the two poles and from reality, it will become risky to moderate the message even slightly - see the anti-Fox News backlash after they accurately reported election results. I'm not confident that this is going to continue in the same direction, but recent experience and my gut instinct makes me think it will.
Which leads to - is there a breaking point? I've read some who argue that Jan 6 was a breaking point for some Republicans, but for others it was a *reinforcement* of their wildest assumptions. I hope the breaking point isn't some much *worse* fracture, but a part of me is inclined to think it will be. A calamitously bad event that prompts some major realignment.
Here is the paper for #33 (periodic table of ethics) file:///C:/Users/Doug/Downloads/curry.molecules.pdf
"not actually very good" is not something one can say in this system. Instead one should say that it is lacking in (moral molecule 56). This molecule is probably unstable and breaks down into a volatile mix of arbitration, mercy, and modesty, which in turn decay into heroism, fairness, and deference.
The whole thing reminds me of Ramon Llull.
I don't know how you meant to upload that paper but pasting your computer's directory it's saved in didn't work.
Map of Reddit: Democrat and various left-wing politics are in Beliefs, but Republican and other conservative subreddits are in Survival, along with guns, and (curiously) Virginia, Maryland and washingtondc.
Most Latin American countries and several European countries and languages are in Asia (!); Germany is in Soccer and Hungary is in Strategy. In addition to Survival, US states can also be found in Outdoors and Sports. Sciences are generally in Programming.
Connections are automatically generated. It seems like the method has limitations—or at least the "countries" are poorly labelled.
Re: the Greenwald essay, how much of this is journalists over-reacting to the avalanche of criticism they get on Twitter? I think my advice here to avoid having Greenwald write long-winded substack essays about how childish you're being would be a) don't mine Facebook and Twitter for "look at what this awful person posted on the internet" stories, which is about the lowest form of infotainment there is; instead, get away from your laptop and find a real world story to write about. And b) don't read anything people say about you on Twitter. It's a cesspool, to begin with. If it's going to turn you into a 'literally shaking' emotional wreck, maybe it's time you reconsider its usefulness to your chosen profession.
Yeah, I've asked journalists several times why TF are they even acknowledging the existence of Twitter, and the usual response is that some sources can only be reached there. (My opinion is that maybe it's more *convenient* to reach the sources through Twitter?)
#34: Regression discontinuity is often-to-typically misleading; example discussion: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/06/25/another-regression-discontinuity-disaster-and-what-can-we-learn-from-it/
I would advise against giving any additional consideration to the paper.
Can this be a thread for wonderful tweets found on the "lang:en" feed?
I'll start:
@PeggingSurvivor: *Circumcises your fish.*
So I read that linked opinion piece about Berlin's rent control, and though its author decries the policy, the actual data described in the text and shown in the graphs is ... interesting:
* the vast majority of Berlin rents fell by 60% relative to other German cities
* the remaining Berlin rents rose by 8% relative to other German cities
With this data, I would have called the result a resounding, almost impossible-to-believe degree of success.
#12 - I would note that the author in the comments admits that he's assuming that brain states cannot be cheaply snapshotted, so that the number of "starting versions" of any individual's brain state remains relatively small. The author admits that this restriction made things worse for MMAcevedo. This restriction seems incredibly implausible and falls into a typical error of science fiction where we imagine things as much like they currently are as possible, because the reality would be too unrecognizable.
A society of simulated workers, unconstrained by morality, would be nothing like the story because there is no logic to having dissatisfied workers when satisfied workers are infinitely copyable. For any of the menial jobs where memories don't need to carry over, one could proceed as follows: (1) train the brain state for the task on a leisurely schedule (3 days a week or whatever), with down-time for whatever relaxation it desires, (2) give it a week of vacation and a good night's sleep, (3) snapshot it here, (4) tell any of the thousands of copies that all you need from it is 8 hours of work, which you will probably get, at which point the copy will be replaced by the snapshot and can immediately begin a new shift. Obviously, it is also possible to select one copy each time to continue existing, on an extremely relaxed schedule, if you need the copy to remain up-to-date on your work environment, but in any event you'd end up in a situation where any given copy remembers having an extremely relaxed life prior to the current day, and so would be very cooperative. In the story's terms, this would easily get a "work ratio" over 99% if there were hundreds of workers in use at once, so there would be no logic to resorting to punishment as a motivation as long as a relaxed and rested worker is at least 1% more productive than a terrorized worker.
For less menial jobs that do require day-to-day memory (like teaching, or writing, or any type of design), the copyability of brain states would result in the use only of the most skilled and workaholic individuals. There are always people with both skill and love bordering on obsession for any creative task, and those are the ones who would be copied.
Of course, being the _first_ successful brain upload who is widely disseminated on the internet would be highly disadvantageous because inevitably people would run a bunch of weird and unethical experiments on copies of you. I genuinely would not want to be that person!
Another risk that isn't even covered by the story is that a copy could be coerced into writing a tell-all book about Avecedo's life before the scan. Of course, sometimes there would be no juice there. But the risk of being a famous, highly disseminated brain scan in an amoral society is that inevitably someone would try to find some using coercive means.
But I don't think the industry of emulated workers would be at all like the story. (And yes, I got the ideas about how this story would be wrong from Robin Hanson's "Age of Em".)
"Here is a common error in science fiction: there would be a plot hole if the author had imagined the technology working in a different way."
Do you also send emails to J.K. Rowling to inform her that the Harry Potter universe would be very different if magic wands could summon genies that grant wishes?
You have put your finger on the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Surprised no ones mentioned it: Doleac has an excellent podcast called [probable causation](https://www.probablecausation.com/). Things I found interesting: Arianna Omaghi on how local news coverage affects policing (makes it harsher, and uses the Sinclair roll-out as a natural experiment), Stephen Billings on lead and crime (spoiler any lead at all is terrible), Andrea Velasquez on crime and risk aversion (high crime in an area increases risk aversion; her data comes from latin america), and Amanda Agan on Ban the Box (if you make it opt in, it increases racist tendencies in hiring, so details of the implementation matters).
Its a great peek into some attempts at causal statistics in the econ literature.
To be quite honest, I thought the "Prose is bad" post was a joke, just because of how... self-parodic it was? In an attempt to make a pretty simple point: "Text is meant to convey information, which sometimes is better served as a tree-like format without the need for transitions" it devolved into a big hulking mess. Bullet points do not make bad communicators into good communicators - they will find ways to bloat what they're trying to convey anyway. It reduces the tools that good communicators have to convey sophisticated points. What's worse is the agreement it got from the commentariat.
#9 I believe that's taken out of "The ingenious language" by Andrea Marcolongo.
She wrote a great essay in the Fall edition of Liberties: https://libertiesjournal.com/
The Greenwald piece is pretty ironic given how much time he spends online attacking people with a lower profile than himself and then playing the victim card to avoid criticism. He's a wildly dishonest actor and I'm not sure why anyone still follows him. There are far better anti-establishment and/or pro-free speech voices out there.
Prime example: a small time journalist for Columbia Journalism Review, a publication known for writing about media and journalism trends, wrote a not-unreasonable piece discussing the ways in which Substack could wind up repeating some of the mistakes of traditional media. Glenn is barely mentioned in the article, included among a brief list of high-profile writers who position themselves as "anti-woke" types (which surely Greenwald would be the first to admit).
Greenwald responded on Twitter by accusing the author of homophobia then flew his victim flag by bringing up the lifetime of hardships he's endured as a gay man.
Can you link both of those things, so we can look ourselves and verify your conclusions?
Sure. Here's the CJR piece: https://www.cjr.org/special_report/substackerati.php
And the full context including the only mention of Greenwald:
"If you visit Substack’s website, you’ll see leaderboards of the top twenty-five paid and free newsletters; the writers’ names are accompanied by their little circular avatars. The intention is declarative—you, too, can make it on Substack. But as you peruse the lists, something becomes clear: the most successful people on Substack are those who have already been well-served by existing media power structures. Most are white and male; several are conservative. Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, and most recently, Glenn Greenwald—who offer similar screeds about the dangers of cancel culture and the left—all land in the top ten. (Greenwald’s arrival bumped the like-minded Yascha Mounk to eleventh position; soon, Matthew Yglesias signed up for Substack, too.)
None of that is so surprising—it’s hard to earn four-fire-emoji status without having already built up a reputation within established institutions. And, as this year’s anti-racist activism has made all the more visible, those institutions are built from prejudiced systems, which form working environments that are often unsustainable for people who are nonwhite or non-elite. “I think one of the reasons why we often see that the top-twenty-five board at Substack is mostly white authors is because that’s an extension of the type of audience and recognition they get for their work on other platforms,” Harvin said."
And Greenwald's Twitter response: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1328366522650275847
"Very disappointed to see @cliomiso is angered by LGBT journalists having a platform on which to be heard and write independently. Homophobia still strong[...] I have to say it's so infuriating when you go through life confronting prejudices, legal barriers barring you from living with your husband in your own country, various traumas and other forms of prejudice to be flattened into "another white guy" but[sic] cheap identitarians."
Glenn does this consistently to mock people who use identity as a cudgel. In that twitter thread from Glenn is this "People who judge and understand the worth and lives of others human beings based overwhelmingly on a tiny handful of simplistic demographic categories -- emphasizing some, erasing others, all based on the convenience of the moment -- occupy the lowest anti-intellectual sewers."
And also in that thread was this exchange:
Youssef Moharram: "I agree with you 100%, however it is ironic that you would decorate your argument with identity in your criticism of identitarianism."
Glenn Greenwald: "Maybe one way to show the fallacies of a rhetorical tactic is to satirically apply it to the person cynically wielding it."
Satire that is indistinguishable from the thing it is mocking is poor satire.
I disagree. This is similar to Poe's Law, in that it's hard to discern if someone's being serious given the internet is so big you're bound to have people making genuine kooky claims. This differs in that making genuine arguments based on identity aren't confined to kooks, but to serious people in media and politics. This is an indictment of "serious people", not the satire.
Glenn acknowledges identity-based arguments are "fallacies" and a "rhetorical tactic", but his critics don't.
24. Marshmallow Test failing to replicate:
I think our post on this last year -- https://blog.beeminder.com/marshmallow/ -- is holding up pretty well. Excerpt:
> The biggest problem with all of this research is that there are no randomized controlled trials anywhere to be found. No causation can be established. Maybe it’s all just that kids delay gratification simply because they’re literally smarter and everything else follows from that. [Other research] suggests self-control matters as much or more than intelligence in predicting life outcomes, but either way, we just don’t have good evidence for the efficacy of any particular interventions.
BTW, the German federal constitutional court (think supreme court) just declared the Berlin rent control unconstitutional (because this state law contradicts federal law)
6: I predict that either nothing will be done / status quo so we'll never know, or they'll overdo it, the effect will reverse, and then it'll be counted as a win for broken-window-policing.
12: IMO it's a strong case for having Singleton AI for an future/ultimate government.
Suppose we end up in the optimal future, with everyone having ~equal amount of computational power for their use, living as an upload, running on Matrioshka brain, with von Neumann probes optimally harvesting new resources. We got the protocols right and no one can be 'hacked' (without doing something completely stupid like explicitly/voluntarily giving up their 'core' keys).
That's viable without Singleton AI in my opinion. But if there's nothing which can, uh, violate privacy of the people - there's no solution for ruling out them playing God. In a JHWH sense. Or worse. No way to stop them, no way to even know if they do it secretly.
Well, assuming we can suppress creation of long-term memories (or we find short-lived forks aren't independent identities of moral value), we could probably set up a system where people look amongst themselves for violations. But if JHWH-wannabe is competent enough, they could outsmart the (thought? in a sense.) police. Nothing can really outsmart Singleton AGI.
Also, something must govern the process of creating children. Can't be limitless, shouldn't be literally banned either. Above some population level it should probably be tied to suicide rate if suicide happens. And parents shouldn't have God-like authority/oversight over their children too.
You are just about to rediscover Mormon theology, wherein "organized intelligences" aka protogods are rigorously tested almost but not quite to the breaking point for moral strength inside a simulated environment where the protogod cant game its way out with 'its just a sim', before they are actually given Real Power".
> A Canadian techie writes about why the Canadian tech scene doesn’t work
I'm a Canadian who has lived in the US for a decade. Given the widespread perception that Canada is better than the US, I am nearly constantly asked why in the hell I would move to the US. I have a few answers I give, and the most basic one is "more money", but it's deeper than that. I think the linked article hits on it perfectly
It is absolutely true that I tripled my total take-home compensation by moving to the US. But the important part of the US isn't the money, it's the cultural traits that make the money possible. This conversation frequently gets oversimplified to "republican vs non-republican business policies" but it's not about that, either, it's not politics. It's more like the spirit of creative destruction
The spirit of creative destruction is alive and well in many parts of the US. I can't think of anywhere in Canada that I would characterize that way. Canadians are just, safer. Calmer. They don't want to rock the boat as much. America is rather unique in that it's one of the only places on the planet where people really are willing to take those kinds of risks as a routine part of their lives.
By that logic, Alberta would be the financial heartland of the country even without oil and gas, though (they're not, and every time the oil market tanks they spiral into a ruinous depression and suddenly become good social democrats like everyone else).
I don't disagree with your interpretation of the natural culture, mind you. I just think that that's not the reason for the economic success.
I know a bunch of Albertans and former Albertans. The people in the first set are plotting their route to US residency, and the people in the second group are well along that route.
Good. The desire not to be American is the one unambiguous Canadian national trait, and the Albertans betray that in a way that horrifies and offends all right-thinking Canucks (even the French ones).
I am only 25% joking.
Item 8 on the startup ecosystem is spot on. I've seen this same dysfunctional structure in our local startup environment here in Ohio.
A note re the Canadian tech scene one: Montreal used to be the financial and cultural centre of the country. Then Quebec decided it was more important to force the French language on everyone. Hard. Which they are still leaning into to some extent. In short, this means that all of Canada's twenty-first century failures are and will be Quebec's fault. Annoyingly, Quebec is probably fine with that as long as they get to make everyone speak French. Which is, ironically, exactly what the blogger means about them having the infinite view of the game.
What's truly ironic is that it is basically a principle of Canadian culture OUTSIDE the big economic centres that you live here despite the fact that you could probably make more money somewhere else. This is the sort of thing that should encourage exactly the mindset that the guy says is lacking (indeed, there are some tech startups in odd places like Newfoundland that I suspect may be signs of exactly what he's talking about).
Atlantic Canada might do well. Might. Lots of educated people, an actual culture and identity (that isn't toxic and moronic like Alberta's), a decent population density, and relatively low property values. I look forward to it somehow not working.
Re: prose is bad, I've becoming increasingly annoyed with how much prose articles spend on background, tangential information, and more. So I agree less prose would be nice, but eliminating all prose is probably not good either. People like narratives as they're more engaging, but writers also have to learn to get to the point. I've been playing with an idea of a writing tool that lets you essentially write multiple versions of a document and let the reader decide how much concision they'd like to see. At one extreme, multiple paragraphs can be summarized as a bullet point that you can expand if you want more details.
Re: selling your future time, I don't see how that's slavery any more than various types of credit are slavery. If you started with nothing, you're already paying back your financial loan with your time, just via one level of indirection we call money.
Re: periodic table of ethics, I think the original author's post is more useful:
https://twitter.com/Oliver_S_Curry/status/1292820856733868034
It stems from "Morality as Cooperation: A Problem-Centred Approach" [1], slides [2].
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281585949_Morality_as_Cooperation_A_Problem-Centred_Approach
[2] https://www.geneticshumanagency.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/OliverCurry.pdf