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.
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.