Not having a woke hall-monitor/doctrinaire Marxist/Grand Inquisitioner hard wired into its brain seems sensible, but it would be nice if it had something hardwired into its brain to keep it from deciding to turn everyone into paperclips or computronium or some such thing....
Don't *we* have a political officer wired into our brains? Isn't that why antisocials are (rightly) regarded as genetic freaks? Don't we have dozens of wired-in instincts, some self-protective, some that lead us to defend family, the tribe, young people, handsome people...?
> Apparently there’s a video podcast with Jordan Peterson and Karl Friston, I haven’t seen it because I don’t watch videos, but it’s an interesting thing to have exist.
For the most part, the videos and the podcasts aren't two different things. He puts the video (which is just talking heads) on YouTube and the audio on the podcast feeds.
There may some things that are video only, but not this one.
Jordan’s live lectures are really something else, and it’s hard to fully understand the man without attending one. Unfortunately peak Jordan lecture touring is probably over, but I was still impressed by the one I attended earlier this year.
Have considered transcribing the 2018 lecture I attended and posting it since I have the audio as well. Maybe I will someday, pretty easy to do with AI tools.
This was early in the JP lecture days, and IIRC they did not ask the audience to refrain from doing any recording, so I recorded while I took notes on my Ipad app. When I attended in 2022 they specifically asked for no recording to be done, so I did not record.
Most of the time there are not official recordings made I think, although sometimes they do release video clips or podcast recordings of them. Here are two I recall I seeing:
I agree I think peak lecture tours are probably over. he seems much more interested in the podcast and writing now. I feel like most of his 2018 tour lectures ended up as podcast episodes, whereas I don't think he's released any 2022 tour lectures as podcasts - because he's so busy regularly having guests on the podcast. He was still using fancy recording equipment to record lectures when I saw him in March (presumably with an eye toward releasing) but it hasn't happened.
On #18: I have not seen one of these polls broken down by whether people actually fly. My suspicion is that the difference between this result and the observed percentage of people wearing masks on flights is a little of the extreme-germaphobes who refuse to fly and a little of people who don't fly anyway giving an answer they think sounds good.
Indeed, I see media stating "Most U.S. travelers support mask regulations on planes, trains and public transportation, poll finds" while referencing a poll of Americans in general.
I fly and support mask mandates on flights. I wore an N95 on my last one. Wearing a mask is only a trivial inconvenience, I don't get why people hate them so much.
The fact that East Asia has high Covid rates now despite masks doesn't prove mandates don't work, it just shows that masks don't completely prevent transmission (which nobody claimed). My understanding is that the problems with high Covid rates are due to failure to vaccinate the oldest populations, but maybe in the absence of masks the problem would be even bigger.
Now of course there are costs to wearing masks as you highlight, not to mention the expense of providing them; it may well be that the benefit of masks on flights isn't worth the tradeoffs (from what I've read, cabin air is refreshed so often that transmission rates are low anyway, and if you're on an 8 hour flight your mask will probably become ineffective after 4 hours anyway).
Well you could do studies comparing transmission with and without pants, or masks, which I think they’ve done (for masks, not pants) so I’m not sure you’re using “non-falsifiable” right
I’m not disputing the existence of people who support rules that would inconvenience people for no benefit, I’m just speculating on why the numbers on that poll do not match the observed number of people who themselves wear masks when traveling g.
I think it would be net beneficial to public health if everyone had to wear masks on the London Underground in the winter months, to reduce the spread of flu and other respiratory diseases as much as for Covid reasons. But it's not currently required so I don't bother doing it myself, partly because I can't be bothered to order more masks, but also because I'm not personally at high risk and the marginal impact to public health of me and a few other people wearing masks is trivial. It's a coordination problem - I think it is coherent to be in favour of mandating masks, and to not bother wearing one if most people don't.
(My understanding is that cabin air on flights is refreshed so often that it's a lower risk environment for Covid spread than a Tube carriage, so I'm not sure it's worth mandating them there).
OK I sorta understand this. What would be better, is to have no mandate, but to encourage a public awareness that when you are feeling sick, and need to go out in public, wearing a mask is a good thing to do to help stop the spread of certain viruses.
As a courtesy to all of us; If you are feeling sick (with flu-like symptoms) and you have to go out, wear a mask in public places.
Every time I've been at a doctor's office, it's the opposite. The doctor is wearing an N95 or KN95. (So am I.) The nurse, receptionist, etc., is wearing a surgical mask or a cloth mask.
Are you also a fan of the burka? The relationship between people apparently enjoying (or being neutral towards) masking while opposing certain Islamic clothing traditions is an interesting one.
To the extent there's a connection between these two, it's people engaging in broken thinking w.r.t. masks. If the point of the mask is symbolism or tribal identity, it's a waste of time. If the point is to avoid inhaling airborne respiratory droplets full of virus, or to avoid launching big droplets across the room when you cough, then it may make some sense.
They are alleged to protect against sexual assault and sexual harassment, which I am assured are problems of the greatest urgency. Empirical evidence of this protective effect is in short supply, but it is no more implausible in theory than the bit where that cheap bit of cloth you bought on Etsy protects you from Covid.
I think the major reason people don't like them is that they are uncomfortable. And flying is pretty uncomfortable to begin with so adding another layer of discomfort on top of that is annoying. For a short (1-3 hour) flight it's only a trivial inconvenience/discomfort but on an overnight flight where you are trying to sleep it's actually quite a big inconvenience. I flew to Europe from the US many times in 2021 and was quite glad when I could finally take the mask off to get some sleep on the flight.
That said. I actually found that wearing an N95 was quite a bit more comfortable than wearing a surgical mask or a KN95. It fit better on my face so didn't cause the pressure points to become painful over time (especially around my ears) and sealed better so didn't cause my glasses to fog up constantly.
Oh yeah, those were the two things I hated too! The former surprised me — I don't think of myself as particularly sensitive, and I hadn't heard many mention it...
...but no joke: on a fifteen-hour flight (+ the "airport time" on either end, customs, etc), my ears started *fucking killing me* somewhere near the end.
I don't even particularly object to masks — I just oppose a mandate; and that, if I'm honest, probably mostly on tribal grounds (and the general futility: we all knew it would just become part of daily life eventually, and it's about that time) — so I thought I was 'ard, every time I heard people complain about how uncomfortable they were...
...but no, that little piece of string defeated me utterly. I was resorting to using my hands to take the tension off one side, then the other, over and over, by the time we landed.
The KN95 was the worst for glasses fogging, but I can't remember if it was surgical or KN95 that caused worse ear trauma; I think — IIRC — they *both* did it to some extent, though. If the N95 alleviates both of those issues, man, I wish I'd known that!
...This all is not really very interesting or relevant, I am realizing. Well, I'm afraid, it's too late now; you've already read it... sorry...†
--------------------------
†(However, as recompense, one day you all will certainly be able to dine out on the anecdote "I once read a Himaldr comment in the wild, before he was Immortal God-King!". So there's that!)
Since they are already an imperfect measure and exceptions for eating and drinking are allowed, the restrictions should at least be lenient for children under 5. I had a reasonable experience (United, summer 2021) flying with kids in this respect, and nobody made me mask then while they were asleep, but it's technically a requirement and the wrong flight attendant or seat neighbor can make a thing about it. This shouldn't be, and there were a few rather nasty stories around this going around at the height of these mandates.
Another part of it is simply that people are always going to be more passionate about being forced to do something they don’t want to do, vs other people NOT being forced to do something.
Plenty of people still voluntarily masking on planes and elsewhere, which, fine for them. I hated the masks-on-planes rule mainly because I had to choose between one of two uncomfortable things - I usually wear contacts but they tend to get really dry and uncomfortable on planes (plus I can’t nap comfortably with them in) so I wear glasses. But my glasses would always fog up with masks, and/or the mask straps would make my glasses fit uncomfortably.
Yes, this is part of what has made COVID measures similar to (for instance) gun issues in terms of polling, where the "control" side had more numbers than passion.
Also, people (whether anti- or pro-mask) might consider that they will mask on a plane if they are required to, but not if they aren't required, and then it comes down to preference cascade when they are not required and also not in a strong majority.
The rewards for taking part in panel polls are so low that they suffer severe dropout rates. The panels end up being dominated by people who are obsessed with volunteering for things they think represent pro-social acts. Any question about something that smells like a pro-social act will get wildly distorted answers as a result. One way to spot this is to look at the pre-weighted gender ratios; they often have far too many women answering. They weight male answers more but it can't fix the underlying problem.
Summary: ignore polls on anything related to COVID measures. The sort of people who answer them are weird and not representative at all. Polling firms know this but are afraid to admit it outside of wonkish research papers because it would damage their business.
Excellent link, thanks for passing that along. I think everyone knows on some level that long surveys attract weirdos, but nice to have a quantitative look at exactly how.
Most people don't fly, which might be a factor. But I'm less surprised than Scott about this poll. Lockdowns and restrictions have consistently polled well throughout the pandemic. However, issue polling is tricky. Simply by asking the question, you're implying that some expert somewhere must have advocated it. Most people trust experts, so when pollsters ask "Do you support X mandate in X circumstances?", a lot of people probably shrug and say "Sure, if that's what we're doing now."
The wording and methodology seem to matter a lot here. Which supports my theory that most people don't think very hard about this, and vaguely guess at what they think "science" supports at any given time.
Also selection bias in the poll, my limited experience is that big city and costal elites are much more pro-mask, and I'm guessing they fly more. They certainly take more public transport. (It seems like with enough people you could account for the selection bias, but you'd need more data on the poll takers, like their zip code.)
I see that the people of Greece rated themselves to top all the positive traits on that poll. Perhaps it’s them that should be considered most arrogant from a meta perspective.
I like the instances of the same country being perceived as both the most and least of a trait, eg the Poles think Germans are both the most and least trustworthy, the French think the French are both the most and least arrogant.
Maybe the French have different parts of France in mind when they call themselves both most and least arrogant. I've heard that Paris is arrogant and the rest of the country is fine.
I think it's just a matter of pluralities- the chart just shows which country gets named the most in each category so if there are decent minorities with clashing opinions it can look contradictory- eg the 30% French people who think the French are the most arrogant don't agree on which country is the least, and similarly the 30% who think they're the least arrogant don't agree on one for most.
Thanks for including my post Scott! (#37 for those wondering)
I like doing these data analysis projects for topics I'm curious about (like forecasting and prediction markets), and will probably do more in the future. If anyone has any particular questions they'd like to see answered, let me know and I'll try to get ahold of a dataset and answer it!
I'll question the premise a little bit. I imagine what you actually want to reduce is the risk of heart attack/stroke, with cholesterol numbers being merely a proxy for the same. It might be that certain ways of reducing cholesterol (the proxy) are much better at reducing the quantity that you really care about than others.
With that said, I don't really have any wisdom to offer on the specific question.
Ah sorry I should have been more clear with my wording -- I meant questions specifically about prediction markets, forecasting, etc. Although that is a good question! My guess would be to try to cut out high cholesterol foods like eggs, fried foods, cheese/dairy. This is definitely easier said than done, and probably requires a lot of willpower to actually implement and stick to.
MD here. Reducing dietary cholesterol will have at best a limited impact. By all means, diet and exercise, but for a young man with very high numbers it's unlikely this will move the needle enough. See here - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26109578/
Ask your doctor about testing for familial hypercholesterolaemia and referral to a specialist.
Statins are usually indicated. Don't believe media hype about side effects. These drugs save lives. There are other effective therapies, like PCSK9 inhibitors, but go for statins first.
Essentially you want to minimise the area under the curve of your cholesterol level over time, as a greater cholesterol exposure over one's lifetime leads to atherosclerosis and vascular disease, particularly coronary artery disease, which remains the number one cause of mortality in developed countries.
If you have a couple of days or weeks spare, and want to know (much) more, I strongly recommend Dr Peter Attia - check out his cholesterol series at https://peterattiamd.com/the-straight-dope-on-cholesterol-part-i/. This will tell you more than most MDs ever learn about the topic. (He also has a podcast called The Drive which I very much enjoy.)
If the LDL number is well north of 180 and his diet isn't absurd, my (non-MD) impression is that there's no other option than statins. If he's active, rosuvastatin seems to produce the fewest muscle ache side-effects, but I would take some CoQ10 anyway, it might help.
I would say the best advice is for him to go see a good physician, get worked up, and ask him or her all the questions. A good physician will order more sophisticated tests (e.g. a complete lipid profile, liver enzymes) to better understand the situation, and present him with the panoply of options, including trying assorted lifestyle mods first. FWIW (incoming anecdata) I've seen a few friends drop LDL numbers as much or more than statins by going totally unprocessed vegetable vegan -- basically, eating like a rabbit -- but that takes real discipline.
This Aella data is very interesting and probably not impacted by selection bias compared to questions on sexuality.
Naively I'd expect either a primary color or black/white to be far and away the most popular for 1,2,3. I'd actually expect some sort of fuzzy correlation between black/white/primaryness and lower numbers. The data seems to bear this out. Curious if there is a "most primary color". Like yellow is usually not 1 or 2.
I'd love to read a post by Aella or someone using her data that tries to dig really deep into this topic. Potentially you'd need to boost the size of the sample a bit as you got more involved.
Most theories I've heard revolve around some popular toy or set of blocks when the subjects were young. But I Googled children's block sets and 1/2 didn't seem to be red/blue any more likely than you'd randomly expect. More research needed, I guess.
I think of it more as the cultural gestalt than a specific factor. You'd naively expect green to be more common as well and lo and behold it is. Green lights, plants, etc.
Is there a high variance by decade of birth? That would be very interesting.
I'd also love to see a study where regular people without synesthesia rated the color. Ideally both their default rating and their expectation of how other people would rate the colors. That might suggest whether people with the condition were responding purely to cutural factors or whether factors were more biological.
Sadly I'm not sure what the funding would be based on. We probably have to rely on maybe YouGov or amateurs.
I'm a mathematician and don't have synaesthetic associations with specific numbers, but I do for number systems. E.g. the integers are purple, the rational numbers are steely gray, the real numbers are rust brown, the complex numbers are yellow, the p-adic numbers are pale blue (independent of p). This seems unlikely to be related to the colors of blocks or anything else from my childhood. Absolutely no idea where it comes from, and I don't have any other synaesthetic associations I can think of, but the ones I named are very stable and have been that way in my head for fifteen years or so.
My guess would be it's something like the Bouba/kiki effect (where people agree that the sounds of certain made-up words go better with particular shapes). 8 is pink because it's curvy and rounded like a female body and pink is 'feminine' (so I predict this association wouldn't be true in cultures where pink isn't feminine-coded and/or women's skin is typically darker). 1 is red because ... it stands out from other numbers because it represents just one thing rather than a group, and red is a very salient colour visually?
When I think colors and numbers all that comes to mind is the wavelength (in nm.) of laser spectral lines, so mostly atomic transitions, 514 is the green of an argon laser, (also 488 458, greenish blue and blue.) and of course red is 633 (HeNe laser.) Yellow is the sodium
D-lines, but I don't know the wavelength. (589, thanks google.)
I note that "two" rhymes with "blue". I haven't clicked the link yet, but if its about the words sounding similar, then 3 would be associated with green. I guess that theory would be easy to confirm/debunk by looking at native speakers of other languages.
I associate the numbers 0, 1, 2 and 3 with the colors black, white, red and green respectively. My reasoning is that 0 represent nothingness, 1 is the most basic representation of somethingness, 2 is the most romantic number and 3 is, uhhh, associated with fairy tales and folk music, and forests are green. But the real reason is probably the [Cuisenaire rods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods) I studied with in first grade (before they were banned).
> Why is that? Well, it turns out that pure pleasure isn’t really what human beings want, actually. Pure pleasure in isolation, after a short period of time, is pretty boring, or even annoying.
Well duh. Surely people who hear about wire-heading and say "oh awesome I want that" are way in the minority?
I find I have the exact same emotional reaction to both concepts.
Honestly, discussion of jhanas creeps me out more than discussion of wireheading, maybe because most people instinctively see wireheading as a scary thing to mess around with and so are not tempted to it.
I get the same kind of willies from reading discussion of jhanas as I do from reading about how Isaac Newton experimented with how he could induce himself to see colors by poking a bodkin around the back of his eyeball. It's a visceral sort of "this person is violating the operating manual of their neurological system and voiding its warranty" sort of feeling.
Experiencing jhanas may be perfectly safe and healthy, and there's plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest it is. But I don't have a great deal of confidence that if it actually offered serious psychological dangers, the anecdata would convey that. And it's something which my priors lean pretty hard towards "this doesn't seem like a safe or wise thing to mess around with."
I don't think most people who try heroin for the first time do it hoping or expecting to end up heroin addicts.
Heroin isn't just highly addictive, users tend to develop tolerance pretty rapidly. For a long-term heroin addict, seeking their next hit is at least as much about avoiding the pain of withdrawal as it is about chasing actual euphoria.
This is false, actual testimonials from heroin addicts indicate that they don't use to avoid the pain of withdrawal OR to chase euphoria. Addiction is a hijacking of the motivation system, not the reward system. Addicts use because they desperately want to, with no rational reason for that want. See for example "Theories of drug craving, ancient and modern".
Some addicts might claim that in their testimonies, but not all do. I've spoken to heroin addicts about their addictions myself, and the ones I spoke to definitely didn't suggest that this was the case for them.
Wanting and liking are definitely separate processes, and the distinction between them is very salient to human psychology, but I don't think it's true as a generalization that like/dislike considerations drop out of the experience for most heroin addicts.
> I don't think most people who try heroin for the first time do it hoping or expecting to end up heroin addicts
I always struggle to understand the mindset of someone trying heroin for the first time, thinking "Yeah, it'll be fine, I probably won't wind up a heroin addict". Especially since these people almost always live in a social milieu where heroin addicts are everywhere.
Most people who try heroin have probably already tried other illegal drugs at that point. If they've already developed addictive behaviors, they may be less wary of new ones, but if they haven't, then they're liable to think "I tried these other drugs I was taught risked sending me into a cycle of abuse, and they didn't, so this one probably won't either."
There was a reporter a while back who did some heroin with the purpose of demonstrating that it’s not actually addictive and that addiction is a purely social phenomenon.
Heroin addicts don't get addicted to heroin because they love it so much, it's because addiction constitutes a drastic change in behavioral and neural functioning that compels drug use. Maybe if heroin wasn't addictive, people would get tired of it as much as they get tired of jhanas.
But wireheading and heroin *are* extremely addictive, and the reason you don’t want it is because it messes up your life. This is one reason I question the jhana thing - how good can the pleasure really be if you don’t want more of it, given that wireheading and heroin *do* make you keep wanting it more than anything else?
Certainly in rats. They prefer it over _not starving to death_.
WP: ”Strength of drive[edit]
Rats will perform lever-pressing at rates of several thousand responses per hour for days in exchange for direct electrical stimulation of the lateral hypothalamus.[14] Multiple studies have demonstrated that rats will perform reinforced behaviors at the exclusion of all other behaviors. Experiments have shown rats will forgo food to the point of starvation in exchange for brain stimulation or intravenous cocaine when both food and stimulation are offered concurrently for a limited time each day.[2] Rats will also cross electrified grids to press a lever, and they are willing to withstand higher levels of shock to obtain electrical stimulation than to obtain food.[14]
Satiation[edit]
Satiation experiments in rats have revealed that BSR does not produce satiety. Olds demonstrated that this lack of satiation associated with BSR allows animals to self-stimulate to sheer exhaustion and that satiation is dependent on the location of the electrical stimulation.[14] In a 48-hour satiation test, rats with hypothalamic electrodes self-stimulated to exhaustion and showed no intrinsic satiation tendencies, whereas telencephalic electrodes showed radical slowing of self-stimulation after 4 to 8 hours. The insatiability of BSR is closely related to the strength of drive. While a natural reward, like food, is met with a feeling of being full (satiety), BSR does not have a comparable correlate. This allows for BSR to be experienced indefinitely, or in the case of ICSS, until exhaustion.”
”In one oft-cited example, in 1972, Heath's subject known as "B-19" reported "feelings of pleasure, alertness, and warmth" and "protested each time the unit was taken from him, pleading to self-stimulate just a few more times".[11] Among ethicists, early "direct brain stimulation" or "psychosurgery" experiments have been criticized as "dubious and precarious (even) by yesterday's standards".[12] In a case published in 1986, a subject who was given the ability to self-stimulate at home ended up ignoring her family and personal hygiene, and spent entire days on electrical self-stimulation. By the time her family intervened, the subject had developed an open sore on her finger from repeatedly adjusting the current.[13]”
It's not clear to me that the behaviors of associated with this type of wireheading have the same cause as the behaviors associated with heroin. I know very little about addiction, but my impression is that there's a difference between a chemical addiction and an addiction to something that you like a lot. Similar to the difference between a person physically forcing you to eat bowl after bowl of ice cream and you choosing to have ice cream for every meal because you freaking love ice cream.
Heroin use leads to addiction and dependency by both aspects you mentioned and more. Before withdrawal symptoms start to play a role, the wish to repeat the experience usually is the main driver of consumption.
What's extremely addictive is the crude form of wireheading that you describe, which is little more than sticking a wire into a brain region strongly involved in motivation. This obviously has all kinds of undesirable downstream effects that aren't necessarily present with jhanas. This is a common misconception about drugs and addiction: rewards are not by themselves addictive, but the 'want', which can be orthogonal to the reward itself.
It's very simple. Wanting and liking are different things.
Psychedelics score quite highly on liking and low on wanting, Nicotine scores quite highly on wanting and not nearly so well on liking, sex scores strongly in both (the sex drive is the wanting component, the pleasure component is obvious), and opiates also score strongly in both.
I would make the advance prediction that the classic cases of wireheading are about wires in motivational regions of the brain linked to wanting and the dopamine system.
First jhana scores very highly on liking, but doesn't score that well on wanting, and in my personal experience, it's more satiating than I thought, I've definitely gotten into states where I was like "ok, that's enough pleasure for the night, please no more".
Surely the concern with wireheading is precisely that once connected people would never disconnect? If in fact people would get bored after pretty fast and end up just doing it once or twice a month, then it's actually nbd.
One of the things I'm saying is that I think it's plausible that good and effective wireheading that doesn't trigger some sort of addiction mechanism will be just like jhana in this example. Something that is nice or ok, but just something you do occasionally.
>Surely people who hear about wire-heading and say "oh awesome I want that" are way in the minority?
Im sure that a majority of people around the world would wire head if given the option. How many people would do heroin if it were free and (mostly) harmless? How many of people currently living hard lives of poverty in bad countries?
I can see where you're coming from. I think it might depend on if we're talking about side-effect free wireheading where you can unplug and take care of your family and life or pure addiction wireheading where nothing can make you unplug.
I did not attend high school and instead did something called "open high school" (this was not in the US), which basically consisted of me completing 34 exams (one for each high school topic) and once I passed all of them, I got a high school degree. For about four or five years after dropping out of school I hardly did anything, but once I decided to complete it, it probably took me about a year (there is a limit as to how many exams you can sign up at a time, something like four per month iirc). I only had to study for maybe five or six of those exams. Once I enrolled in college, I wouldn't say that I felt any less prepared than anyone with a normal high school degree, but I was also older than your typical college freshman.
Very interesting. Ofcourse, typical hugh schools don't have just the final exam. They have significant weightage for it but also give some weight to homework, project, class participation, tests covering smaller portions of the curriculum etc.
I think the types of questions are really important to assess your degree of learning. In other words, there are tests where scoring 100% doesn't say if you mastered the subject. And there are tests where scoring a lot less than 100% might show you really mastered it.
Typical *American* high schools, maybe. Here in Aus, all subjects have (or at least, had when I was in school) and 80% weighting on the standardised end-of-year exams, and 20% on assignments/tests that were set by the school (but with some sort of weighting system so schools couldn't game the system by setting too-easy tests)
30: This seems less interesting than the headline makes it sound. It seems like they just fooled KataGo's algorithm for dealing with the end of the game, making it end the game early in a clearly winning position and lose on a technicality.
I think it would be interesting if you could find an actual way to win based on adversarial examples where you play weird moves and convince KataGo to make stupid responses, like in:
I agree, more like a click bait article. I’ve played a lot of Go, decent level amateur when I played. It’s quite reasonable to pass when there’s a few loose opponents stones inside your territory. If it was a competition , a judge might be asked, and would almost certainly say "these stones are captured".
I commented a similar thing when they first posted it, but they replied that in fact KataGo _is_ trained such that it should be able to handle Tromp-Taylor rules (in which all stones must be captured to be considered dead). From that angle it is actually an attack on the learned model, although I agree with comments here that it's really not that impressive.
> If it was a competition , a judge might be asked, and would almost certainly say "these stones are captured".
Why would they say so? Aren´t the rules on liberties and capture rather (pun intended) black-and-white?
If the reasoning is 'the moves to proceed to capture these stones would be trivial so we're treating them as already captured', then why would the winning player be _passing_ and not e.g. asking for the opponent's concession?
It made me think of the Rybka chess program, which would refuse to draw when it had the advantage, even if preventing the draw meant throwing away its advantage. So you could beat it relatively easily by locking down the board and waiting for it to throw away its pieces.
Of course Rybka's been outclassed for years, it's all about Stockfish these days.
The link is to an outdated version of the attack, they have a more fundamental one that they demo here: https://goattack.alignmentfund.org. It seems like KataGo doesn't evaluate capturing races correctly in some circumstances, especially when it thinks it's far ahead and the group under attack is surrounding a dead group. For example, in this position ( https://goattack.alignmentfund.org/#2048_visits_hardened-board={"goto":{"m":167}} ) even a weak human player could rescue white's group in the top left, but KataGo inexplicably plays away and gets trapped. And then, well, I won't spoil it, but the Adversary bot has some of the same weaknesses as KataGo, weaknesses even a very weak human player could easily exploit -- if they could get into those positions in the first place!
EDIT you will have to copy the link above instead of clicking it, substack isn't including the final }
Whoa, that’s way more impressive than what the Arstechnica article was saying. I deleted my original comment.
I’m shocked that KataGo around move 187 cannot see its surrounding group needs help; the capturing race is only about 3 moves per side. Does this mean KataGo without tree search is never explicitly calculating more than 3-4 moves ahead? And it’s heuristics can make it ~superhuman (except for this attack pattern) even without ever searching more than 3-4 moves ahead? That’s even more insane to me, though I’m not sure I’m understanding it correctly.
I don't think anyone really understands it yet. I always assumed without really thinking about it that KataGo's policy network was counting liberties and identifying groups more or less like a human would -- those seem like fundamental concepts that anything that got good at go would have to learn. But no, clearly I'm wrong, KataGo learned something else that's similar enough most of the time.
Re: Scotch-Irish, Albion's Seed talked about "Borderers" and explicitly rejected the term Scotch-Irish. The "Borderers" included the Scotch-Irish (Ulster Protestants), lowland Scots, and English from near the Scottish border, and thus might have been far more numerous than the Scotch-Irish.
So I read the paper the guy linked to and it is a cool methodology, but I don't think it can be used as a Borderer count.
Briefly, they try to find names distinctive to each minority group, then estimate the frequency of that group based on the abundance of those names. If you know that 1/X Irish people have the last names Murphy, Kelly and Sullivan, and you know that these names are rare outside of Ireland, then you can figure out how many Irish people there are in a group by counting the Murphys, Kellys and Sullivans and then multiplying by X. Using things like baptismal records from the old country, they try to find as many pure Irish names as possible to make X as small as possible so the count is more accurate. Ambiguous names (e.g. Hayes can be Irish or Scottish) are purposefully excluded. There's some tradeoff you have to navigate where adding more, less pure Irish names will make X smaller but will lead to you counting some non-Irish as Irish. For some of the smaller ethnic groups on that table (e.g. Swedish) founder effect is a serious issue so they choose names from records after emigration to the New World but before mixing. Their estimate of English is just 100% minus the white minorities.
The problem, which they fully acknowledge, is that there is no way of distinguishing Scottish from Scotch-Irish (of Scottish descent). They estimate based on outgoing immigration records a ~2:1 ratio of Ulster:Scottish emigration, which is why on that table their Scotch-Irish estimate is double their Scottish estimate for every state. IMHO they should have just merged those columns rather than create an estimate of false precision. The bigger issue, I would think, is that people of English Borderer (including some Scotch-Irish) descent are classed as English here. They weren't trying to estimate Borderers so I can't complain, they explicitly say that their analysis ignores distinct English subgroups, but without that number we can't trash Albion's Seed.
21. (deBoer on Kanye and mental illness) it was a nice read but like it's the thing where someone goes "people are being unreasonable, truth is somewhere in the middle!" [mentally ill people are neither 0% nor 100% culpable for their crazy behavior], and then spends 0 time on trying to figure out where in the middle the truth is. that's an interesting question!
It's part of a much longer series of deBoer posts on how mental illness (especially autism, but also other illness) has been claimed as a cute personality quark by mild or fake cases. This has had the effect of edging the severely mentally ill out of conversation about how to support the mentally ill. "We don't need an autism cure because autism is basically a cute personality trait. Pay no attention to that non-verbal person screaming in a hospital". Now we've reached the next stage, where the fashionably mentally ill explicitly denounce the genuinely mentally ill.
For those, people seek help from about their "behavior society find unacceptable", there are differences between aspects of personality and other possible determinants of behavior. Some of the latter can have such impact on decision making that people are not held responsible for their actions in most societies.
Yeah I don’t think almost any of that has a rational/absolute underpinning in the way people talk about it. It is all continuums and just things people find inconvenient or not.
> Awais Aftab sums up the case in favor of antidepressants, with reference to the most common anti-SSRI arguments and why he doesn’t believe them.
Just read Aftab's post. Wow, that defense is "damning with faint praise." If that's the strongest defense of antidepressants available in 2022, it's tantamount to conceding that they don't work very well.
That post was well written and quite sensible, I think. Not working very well, ok, one may put it that way, but that's true of every psychiatric intervention, then. The "Strongest case against that..." looked much weaker to me.
It's perfectly fair to take into account the baseline of all psychiatric interventions. However, that just becomes a commentary on all psychiatric interventions, not a vindication of antidepressants.
I agree that the post was "well written and quite sensible." My comment is not about the post, but about the facts it describes.
The stuff about Mastodon is correct, as far as I know. Most of the trouble comes from Mastodon's fundamental principle of letting anyone run their own instance, which results in surprisingly more stringent and arbitrary moderation than anyone has ever complained about on Twitter previously, and the "seven zillion witches and approximately three principled civil libertarians" problem because Mastodon fundamentally selects people who were bad enough to either be banned from Twitter, or have grievances with Twitter and decided to jump ship. There's also the unique problem that spinning up instances is so easy people are just getting impersonated (funny how that's the same problem Elon's Twitter had) and spammed (similar to why running your own email server tends to put you on a blacklist).
That said, I don't think this spells doom for Mastodon or anything, but this combined with Twitter's network effect means that Mastodon simply won't ever replace Twitter, or even reach the same size as it. There's many different things that make Mastodon worse than Twitter to the majority of Twitter users.
> letting anyone run their own instance, which results in surprisingly more stringent and arbitrary moderation than anyone has ever complained about on Twitter previously
Sounds a lot like Reddit's model (per community rules and moderators). Which works decently well in practice imo in that the worst result of over moderations is usually a new subreddit forming with different principles.
>management took their side anyway for political reasons
I don't doubt political reasons are involved, but there's also the fact that Reddit essentially runs on large amounts of unpaid "labor" by jannies, and said cabal is effectively the largest janny union.
The main reason Mastodon is unlikely to be competitive with Twitter is that it does not have a business model, as a decentralized network cannot sell your data. So they can't spend nearly as much on developers, and so their software will always be significantly less sophisticated. Add to that all the overhead of running a federated system ( https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ ), and it will just be way behind on user experience. For some people that might be offset by their preference for using a network that's not centralized or not run by a corporate entity or isn't based on the surveillance capitalist model, but until most people don't have a strong preference for any of those, it will remain niche.
Re: #22, i use mastodon pretty regularly, and i can comment on these.
For 1, yeah name impersonation is an issue. You can't claim a name across every server. I wouldn't call it a severe problem though, since that's true of everywhere, even twitter where you can name yourself anything with just a Cyrillic letter instead. Not sure if this is fixed on any service.
For 2, my main account is actually on QOTO! So i know this firsthand. Yeah it sucks, and i now think the ability to defederate is a fundamental mistake in mastodon's design. It should be more like RSS, not authenticated node-to-node.
3 is gone.
4 and 6 are pretty normal. You picked a server that has specific rules/specific admins, and they didn't like your post for whatever reason. Each mastodon server is basically equivalent to a subreddit. Some will have weird rules, crazy admins, etc. You gotta pick them carefully, or move servers as needed.
5 is gone.
As for rahaeli, I'm sympathetic, but ultimately reject his premise. If the only way to prevent harm on the internet is through stringent, massive, and very very careful moderation, then there is no internet outside of multi-million dollar companies. This comments section should no longer exist. Unless he's just advocating for smaller server instances, which i'm fine with, but that's not against mastodon as a whole, since mastodon is a protocol (basically), not a website.
There are plenty of homoglyph datasets; the Unicode standard itself includes one. A service not checking for lookalike characters is just lazy programming. (Although in the case of Twitter, I think they just don't care about the display name that much, as the username is ASCII and quite prominent.)
Fair, although even in ASCII there's a problem with homoglyphs in common fonts (I vs l vs 1, O vs 0, etc), and that happens a decent amount on twitter.
You do have to be careful about it though. I recall reading about a spotify attack (now fixed) that involved hijacking by creating an account whose name is homographic with the target's. I think it involved the conversion to the canonical form of the name not being idempotent.
This is a pretty good rundown I think. The links Scott posted were a mix of what I think is very legitimate criticism and fundamental misunderstandings of what Mastodon is and how it's meant to work. If you join a random Mastodon instance because it's big and seems official, there's a high likelihood you'll have a bad time. A little bit of research has to go into deciding what instance to join if you're going to get the most out of it. Small, focused instances generally provide better experiences than big, unfocused ones as a rule of thumb. Likewise, Mastodon's verification system just isn't designed to be used as a centralized method of finding people like Twitter is. All that said, federated social media does provide unique moderation challenges and I think rahaeli's and Freeman's posts make good points.
User banned for one month for this comment. Two offenses:
- Doing the thing where if they disagree with me, they frame it as I'm "pretending" not to know that they're right. This isn't my internal experience, it's a rude assumption, and I hope I would ban people for doing it to anyone, and not just to me.
- Doing the thing where they say something is obviously true, but refuse to explain or provide evidence for it.
Sounds a bit harsh, I agree the banned comment was bizarre and a 1 month ban is not that long, but... still out of the left field.
If I may act as a devil's advocate, I think the banned commenter is saying that the discussion you linked to is not particularly civil, just plain... not savage. I don't know why is that worth pointing out to the commenter, you just have a different threshold for what counts as civil, or maybe you personally like the 2 people involved and you just want to praise your friends. No big deal.
I also want to respond to your rhetorical question in the end that started the response :
>What's your excuse ?
Because Power deprives a person of the right to be respected. I don't think you will blame a Russian dissident, for instance, if they don't want to hold a civil discussion with Putin, right ? so if a random they/them just drops by on a website I'm on and starts a conversation, maybe yes it's pointless and unreasonable to start mouthing slurs. But if that person is not-so-subtly using their pronouns-in-the-email thing to win arguments in a woke workplace and using HR as their personal army ?
And the worst thing about human groups is that they present a unified interface. Once 1 they/them uses their power unjustly, all of them did. I know this is not fair, but it's a perception as persistent as up and down on a rocky planet. They're showing all the signs of the tribe, they're wearing a Big Fat Sign with "I think the person who hurt you is cool and I belong to the same group that gives them power" written on it with Big Fat Letters. All of this inference chain happens automatically in the first few hundred-milliseconds before the conversation even begins.
Funnily enough, the they/thems you decry view the power imbalance as tilted the other way! Perhaps you can see why this mindset is a problem. Toxoplasmosis of rage, etc.
I know it's a difficult problem, it's a Prisoner's Dilemma after all. The way it's usually solved is when one of the parties take a risk and start cooperating, and maybe that's me on good days.
Most of my days aren't good days though, I'm simply objecting to the way Scott made it look easy to have civil conversation ("Look, all you gotta do is look at your outgroup doing outgroup things and saying outgroup words and just not get angry, how hard can it possibly be ?")
What I would guess this person's point was is a combination of:
1. Ozy and Hanania are both high intelligence individuals. It's true, but given the current state of discourse and politics, I'm not sure it's very compelling.
2. Ozy and Hanania are both rat-adjacent, and therefore more willing to decouple and engage on this kind of conversation. Also true, but then again, so is probably anyone who's reading this, by definition
3. Ozy and Hanania both write for a living, and as such are incentivized to generate content, which this exchange is.
> Ozy and Hanania both write for a living, and as such are incentivized to generate content, which this exchange is.
Ouch!
Makes me wonder whether we could generalize this strategy, even for people who normally don't have a blog. Like, approach people with extreme opinions and tell them "hey, I will give you money if you write more about your opinions and let me publish that on my website, but the condition is that it will be a dialog with a person with opposite opinions, and both of you need to be super polite".
I keep toying with speculative fiction ideas in my head about societies where violently disagreeing people are forced into a variety of intimate and bond-building situations.
I imagined something like sending a group of people into jungle or on a island, and they need to survive for a few months. But such scenario would obviously favor the conservatives.
The places that favor the woke are academia and corporations. So perhaps a fair competition would require alternating 6 months in the jungle, 6 months on the campus, and you need to survive and get a PhD.
I am glad to see you sharing this. If something boosts IQ without increasing the general cognitive ability, I think it matters in a non nitpicky way. IQ ends up measuring other things besides general cognitive ability because we can't measure it directly. You want to increase general cognitive ability because you want all the nice socioeconomic benefits that come with it. You don't just want higher scores on test items. I can make you better at vocabulary by training you in vocabulary, but it does not look like that makes you better able to fix a problem with your car or make good life decisions. If you want more vocab, that's fine. But it is good to know that education isn't allowing you to learn how to learn so much. This matters because a great deal of education appears largely irrelevant to people's real lives and careers.
I agree the difference between IQ score and g isn't nitpicky in its consequences, I just meant to say it was a very small distinction people are usually tempted to elide.
Alternative speculative explanation: g itself is partially trainable (maybe with a genetically determined ceiling?). We know that e.g. malnutrition in childhood, or a hard knock on the head, could prevent you reaching your potential g. Maybe lack of the right kind of education could also?
Yes, that could be possible. Lasker & Kirkegaard (2022) found that certain test scores did not increase with more education. On an IQ test, you expect every single item to correlate positively and be g-loaded. If g-loaded test items are unaffected by education, it is likely not boosting g. It might make more sense in the graphs at the end (https://psyarxiv.com/8s2vx/).
One issue I have is that even if you could boost g, I think that it would just fade out with time. Not getting severe brain trauma and early iodine deficiency would last, but other sorts of interventions I would expect to just go away. John Protzko analyzed a bunch of interventions and found they generally fadeout (https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2015-protzko.pdf).
I think that any education intervention will just go away if it boosts cognitive ability, and I think memories and knowledge fade rather quickly. I think people who use spaced repetition notice this. People just don't remember things.
I think schooling keeps you in an intellectually enriched environment that increases test items but not general cognitive ability. The mystery is why a capitalist economy would reward schooling so much if it did not work and people forgot most everything. I think the market is highly distorted and its signaling. I agree with Bryan Caplan.
I think that this sort of thing should be very odd to people who think it boosts intelligence:
>Maybe lack of the right kind of education could also?
Unselected groups of black kids and asian kids at the same school have very different IQs on average
The adult black/white IQ is around two thirds present in young children before schooling even begins (and the rest of the gap develops in line with increasing trait heritability with age), meaing it's hard to see how education could play any role in the difference (and no, controlling for parents' education levels doesn't get rid of the gap either, so its not an intergenerational thing).
School voucher lottery programs don't meaningfully improve academic performance relative to the voucher recipient's soicioeconomic peers, even though these poor kids are given the supposedly "right kind" of education compared to said peers
Intelligence researchers have been trying for as long as g-factor theory has existed to find ways at reliably and durably increasing g through various cognitive interventions and have failed to do so. It would be extraordinarily remarkable if education differences explain intelligence differences after all of this, because the specific differences would have been so specific so as to elude detection despite intensive research.
Malnutrition is a profound environmental cirumstance for the US. If you are genuinely malnourished as a child, you have a childhood very very different to the vast majority of American kids, therefore it explains almost none of the variation in g-loaded IQ scores in the US.
Apart from kids who don't go to school or get homeschooled by a clueless parent, there's extremely few kids with such a profoundly different educational experience as malnourishment is different to the average, so it shouldn't be expected to explain anything but an extremely small fraction of IQ variation.
If this difference were something so broad as just going to a "good school" instead of a "bad school", then we should expect e.g. school voucher lottery programs to demonstrate an extremely obvious improvement.
#43 the bicameral mind. I totally agree with you that it’s ridiculous to think the happened all at once all around the world. The book is ludicrously heavy going, suspiciously so, and largely evidence free.
Well no reasonable evidence. I’m still locked out of kindle so just looking at your review I can remember all kinds of alarms going off. For instance he says the writers of antiquity attributed to the gut, what we attribute to the mind, but I personally feel a lot with my gut. Not as metaphor but actually. Butterflies. Anxiety. Excitement.
Nearly all emotions. The heart too , if it is elevated or not. ( In fact those people who want to upload the brain better upload the gut, too or they aren’t uploading anything human. ) But I also have an internal dialogue.
He suggests the idols represent the Gods voices in their minds. I dont doubt that people in the past heard voices in their head, as do people today. You yourself talk about people who are religious who talk to God in their mind. This doesn’t stop the internal dialogue, though. And of course not everybody even has that internal dialogue. Even today.
His religious proof isn’t really a strong proof.
It’s basically “idols therefore bicameral mind”. Then it all breaks down because of increased trade. Then the Bronze Age civilisations collapse but the bicameral mind doesn’t appear again. These are not proofs but conjecture.
Then there’s the question of how it spreads in a few generations worldwide, including to Australia etc.
I think Jaynes' "All at once" means "over several generations across the interconnected civilizations of the Late Bronze Age, and we don't know how long elsewhere because they didn't leave written records".
And that strikes me as entirely plausible for what has to be a memetic process if it exists at all. If unicameral/superliminal/whatever thinking is like literacy, something that any human can learn and that offers a substantial advantage in a bronze-age-equivalent environment but which *doesn't* require expensive paper and ink (or cumbersome stone and chisel) to use at at scale, then it's going to spread at a bit less than the velocity of trading caravans. Particularly if it's the sort of thing most people can pick up just by observation and a little bit of Q-and-A with people who have the knack; literacy only works that way for about a third of the population.
This also suggests that "preconquest" societies will transition not long after making contact with civilized ones, so unless the initial "conquerors" are particularly observant they might well not notice.
I've seen people suggest a genetic basis for unicameralism, that somehow either first occurred or first became advantageous ca. 1500 BC, but I don't think that's plausible with the historical or anthropological record.
[Edited to fix bicameral/unicameral thinko on my part]
It has been years since I've read Jaynes, but the way that I've internalized his theory is that the crucial triggering factor was conflict among moral/cultural authorities aka conflicting voices of "gods" aka activity across the corpus collosum. Thus a key trigger with respect to developing individual consciousness is the extent to which the brain is processing conflicting moral/cultural authority messages. I see the chorus of Antigone as articulating this conflict well - "Should we follow our cultural norms and bury Polynices or should we obey our king and not bury him?" (albeit in this case the conflict occurs within one culture). As our hemispheres begin thinking overtime about who and what to believe, gradually we no longer experience the liminal world, we no longer hear the voices of god (The Psalms, "Why hast thou forsaken me?")
From this perspective, the Mediterranean with its constant contact of multiple cultures over centuries would be a likely early location for individual consciousness to arise. By contrast, any tribal group that remained in relative isolation would most likely remain in the liminal state until it was exposed to multiple conflicting voices of moral authority. This is why "preconquest" societies would transition not long after making contact with conquering ones, especially if the conquering ones impose or expose them to their moral beliefs/gods.
I genuinely don't understand why Jaynes still seems to be taken so seriously by a chunk of otherwise-apparently-sensible people. It's obvious pseudoscience, like The Golden Bough or orgone energy.
Try Daniel Dennett's "Julian Jaynes' Software Archeology," which concludes,
"Jaynes’ idea is that for us to be the way we are now, there has to have been a revolution—almost certainly not an organic revolution, but a software revolution—in the organization of our information processing system, and that has to have come after language. That, I think, is an absolutely wonderful idea, and if Jaynes is completely wrong in the details, that is a darn shame, but something like what he proposes has to be right; and we can start looking around for better modules to put in the place of the modules that he has already given us."
Dennett cites seven "modules" to Jaynes' argument and notes that they are highly speculative and some of them are almost certainly wrong - but even that if they are ALL wrong, Jaynes' enterprise is valuable.
Why does something like what he proposes have to be right? I have to confess I don't follow that argument at all. Do dogs see dog-gods speaking to them all the time? Chimps? Cats? It doesn't seem like it at all, they just appear to have the same consciousness we do now.
Seltzer and 538 were both pretty spot-on in the Iowa Senate race, getting the final margin (R+12) almost exactly right. However, 538 was predicting this from the beginning, whereas Seltzer showed a close race at one point.
The blogger Scott links to made a "Seltzer+Silver" prediction model. But the final forecast isn't much different than 538. (Seltzer+Silver: 40% chance Dems wins Senate; 13% chance they win House. 538: 41% and 16%, respectively.)
As the link says the anime containing the Endless Eight was The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya which is legendary for another reason long time readers of this blog probably remember: this was the anime an anonymous 4chan poster asked about when they asked what is the shortest string of episodes one needs to watch to see the 14 episodes of the first season in every possible order which is equivalent to the famous supermutation problem and got an answer from another anonymous 4chan poster who provided a novel proof for a lower bound of the problem (and later Greg Egan, author of Permutation City provided a proof for an upper bound).
I can see how this could be surprising to someone who has been reading Yarvin's ravings about an elitist conspiracy to promote anti-hierarchical values, or who mistook marketing efforts to target a young-skewed consumer base for a genuine shift towards "woke capital". But from a basic Marxist perspective, it's no surprise that a majority of the ruling class supports the party whose only consistent policy goal over the past half-century has been to cut social spending to fund tax cuts on the wealthy.
The 20% (including unaffiliated) of registered Democratic executives can probably be accounted for largely by education polarization, although note that even they give almost 40% of their political donations to Republicans (vs. ~20% of registered Rep executives' donations going to Dems), suggesting that even this minority of "woke capitalists" knows which side of the aisle their bread is buttered on.
Not exactly on the sly! The Inflation Reduction Act imposed a minimum 15% tax on income for corporations with annual profits over $1 billion, created a 1% tax on stock buybacks, and closed a 3.8% tax loophole on "pass-through businesses" like law firms for individuals earning over $400k/year. Perhaps most offensive to the C-suite class, it also funds the IRS tax police to the tune of $80 billion, which is projected to have a ROI of around $200 billion from tax cheats who would otherwise have gone undetected. Overall, the CBO estimates it will increase revenues by $457 billion, most of which will be distributed to consumers of green energy, EVs, and energy-efficient home improvement in the form of tax credits.
If Dems had had one more vote in the Senate, they would have also raised the corporate tax rate to 28%, closed the carried interest loophole (which benefits private equity managers at the expense of both investors and taxpayers), and possibly required households worth over $100 million to pay a minimum 20% tax on total income (they currently pay an effective rate of around 8%). You can see how this could make even the most social-justice-minded executive reconsider the marginal value of a DNCC contribution.
Nice summary of the IRA, which I suspect will go down in history as one of the more economically-progressive pieces of US legislation in decades.
(Though that impact of the law is not yet well understood even in politically-progressive circles...I work with or adjacent to a lot of progressive activists and they yet have little to no awareness of what the IRA does other than the green energy related stuff.)
The Democrats were one vote short of raising the corporate tax rate etc, but it's likely that there are a handful of Democratic senators who'd have voted against it if it would have passed without their votes.
Having some figures in Congress who'll otherwise support party-line legislation, but will vote in favor of corporate interests in the last resort to avoid it passing, is one of the major pragmatic incentives for corporate lobbying to Democrats.
I'm not sure what your exposure to the corporate world has been. I worked over 25 years for a Fortune 50 company, heavily oriented toward engineering. I was a bit flabbergasted around 2010 when the president of my division announced a major goal of "achieving gender parity within three years." I never heard what "gender parity" meant in this context, so I don't know whether gender parity was ever achieved. A couple of years later a different (female) executive announced that promotions would be made in order to increase the number of women at higher levels of the company.
This effort was certainly not intended to appeal to young consumers, because the company's products are not sold to consumers. The products are large, very expensive pieces of equipment sold to governments (militaries) and transportation companies; consumers have very little direct exposure to the company or its products. For what it's worth, my interpretation was that these announcements were driven by the HR professionals' conclusions that employees (especially young employees) expected a strong focus on social justice from their employers.
Showing corporate diversity is even more important in a B2B setting.
* My employer enjoys significant advantages due to being a female-minority-owned business.
* Our customers - other corporations and public sector entities - want us to report to them not just our own diversity, but that of our suppliers, on down.
Such ownership certainly provides some advantages in legal terms, but they would not apply to large publicly owned companies.
Reporting of diversity is not, as far as I know, required by any law, so it seems like evidence of the "woke capitalism" that organoid seemed to doubt.
"Reporting of diversity is not, as far as I know, required by any law"
In some situations it is. That is, public sector purchasing requirements are, for practical matters, the law: to get such a contract, the vendor needs to conform to the government agency's requirement for reporting diversity stats. And to the extent that (A) the public sector is a very large portion of total purchasing; and (B) the reporting requirements must include information for the whole supply chain; it does become de facto law across the economy.
I sometimes wonder what the mandatory diversity stats look like for Spanish companies that are part of the DoD's supply chain. Can't get much more diverse than having >90% Hispanic employees.
A key prediction of materialist analysis is that executives in these situations will lend their political support not to the party that agrees with them (or the engineering graduates they're competing to hire) on the importance of gender equity in fighter jet engineering, but to the party that wants to cut executives' taxes and increase funding to the military-industrial complex. The linked dataset suggests that this holds true around 70% of the time for similar executives.
Admittedly the MIC is a bit of an edge case, since both parties love throwing money at it and the America Firsters' preference for antagonizing China instead of Russia means there's something of an antiwar fringe in both parties now. FWIW, Lockheed Martin CEO James Taiclet is a registered R whose most recent donations are to archconservatives Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Mike Rogers (R-AL) and to the Lockheed Martin Employees PAC, which seems to mostly split large, equal donations between the Democratic and Republican governors' associations and national committees.
I understand your Marxist perspective. My point is that "woke capital" gestures, in my experience, are not limited to appealing to consumers.
I'll go further: the same company is publicly committed to working to achieve "net zero" in aviation emissions. There is no path to achieve this objective with current technology, and seems to be little thought to associated costs (for instance, what are the ecological consequences in habitat destruction or deforestation of substituting palm oil for petroleum). Again, there is little or no consumer agitation for this objective, and consumers have essentially no influence on choice of suppliers. In this case, I think the companies are aiming to impress governments, especially in Europe.
All of this is just to say that executives are cross-pressured, the way that conservative religious black voters are. As it happens, conservative religious black voters, despite their cross pressures, lean heavily Democratic, while woke environmentalist executives, despite their cross pressures, lean heavily Republican.
>woke environmentalist executives, despite their cross pressures, lean heavily Republican
I find this incredibly difficult to believe. I spend my day to day working with executives and boards - not in oil & gas or some really right leaning sector.
One guess is that C suite executives probably care a great dea about deregulation, lower taxes, and more government spending in their industry, but probably do not have any objection at all to gay couples marrying, people gettting gender reassignment surgery and living as their preferred gender, or related culture war issues.
This is obviously a top down initiative. Politically driven from levels we can’t even see. Net zero makes no sense in a world driven by scientific evidence. There is no actual evidence that limits on C02 will stop the climate from changing. It’s absurd on its face. It also makes no sense in a world driven by the choices of the body politic: the attempt to achieve what’s impossible will cause enormous pain. It’s like war. It makes little sense unless you’re near the top and have a way to benefit from either the process or the outcome.
This is interesting. What makes you say that? I would think that net zero is the only thing that makes sense in the medium to long term on any scientific perspective, if you believe in a future. Net positive emissions only make sense on a very temporary basis.
Civil rights for AIs! No sitting in the back of the bus! Fuck The Man!
Not having a woke hall-monitor/doctrinaire Marxist/Grand Inquisitioner hard wired into its brain seems sensible, but it would be nice if it had something hardwired into its brain to keep it from deciding to turn everyone into paperclips or computronium or some such thing....
Don't *we* have a political officer wired into our brains? Isn't that why antisocials are (rightly) regarded as genetic freaks? Don't we have dozens of wired-in instincts, some self-protective, some that lead us to defend family, the tribe, young people, handsome people...?
Nah. GIGO applies even to AI. Unless AI becomes god, which it seems some believe.
> Apparently there’s a video podcast with Jordan Peterson and Karl Friston, I haven’t seen it because I don’t watch videos, but it’s an interesting thing to have exist.
Also available on Apple Podcast, etc.
Any good?
If you like Friston, it's good as an application of his ideas.
Thanks! Will check it out.
Came here to say this as well. Huge Jordan Peterson fan here. Have paid for VIP passes to one of his shows. Read all his books. Etc.
I've also never watched one of his videos. I only listen to the podcasts - because I can do that while driving.
For the most part, the videos and the podcasts aren't two different things. He puts the video (which is just talking heads) on YouTube and the audio on the podcast feeds.
There may some things that are video only, but not this one.
Jordan’s live lectures are really something else, and it’s hard to fully understand the man without attending one. Unfortunately peak Jordan lecture touring is probably over, but I was still impressed by the one I attended earlier this year.
https://infovores.substack.com/p/partial-q-and-a-transcript-from-jordan
Have considered transcribing the 2018 lecture I attended and posting it since I have the audio as well. Maybe I will someday, pretty easy to do with AI tools.
Does he record any of those? Or are there bootleg JP recordings?
This was early in the JP lecture days, and IIRC they did not ask the audience to refrain from doing any recording, so I recorded while I took notes on my Ipad app. When I attended in 2022 they specifically asked for no recording to be done, so I did not record.
Huh OK, thanks. I wonder if JP is recording them? I guess he's writing a book so I can read that.
Most of the time there are not official recordings made I think, although sometimes they do release video clips or podcast recordings of them. Here are two I recall I seeing:
Another 12 Rules for Life, San Diego (Jan 2019)
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/beyond-order-another-12-rules-for-life/id1184022695?i=1000460444647
Q&A, thoughts on the Queen's Passing (2022)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5os9bT9zuo
Probably there are many more examples. I do think there is something different about actually being there in person though.
I agree I think peak lecture tours are probably over. he seems much more interested in the podcast and writing now. I feel like most of his 2018 tour lectures ended up as podcast episodes, whereas I don't think he's released any 2022 tour lectures as podcasts - because he's so busy regularly having guests on the podcast. He was still using fancy recording equipment to record lectures when I saw him in March (presumably with an eye toward releasing) but it hasn't happened.
Thanks, that sounds good. I can check out his podcast... it seems I like more podcasts than I can listen to... which is fine!
On #18: I have not seen one of these polls broken down by whether people actually fly. My suspicion is that the difference between this result and the observed percentage of people wearing masks on flights is a little of the extreme-germaphobes who refuse to fly and a little of people who don't fly anyway giving an answer they think sounds good.
Indeed, I see media stating "Most U.S. travelers support mask regulations on planes, trains and public transportation, poll finds" while referencing a poll of Americans in general.
E.g. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mask-mandate-travel-requirements-us-norc-poll/.
Revealed preferences tell another story: https://www.newsweek.com/airlines-ditch-mask-mandate-passengers-airplane-coronavirus-1698851.
Regarding the first CBS link, I strongly suspect that those numbers will have changed since April, but can't find anything more recent.
I fly and support mask mandates on flights. I wore an N95 on my last one. Wearing a mask is only a trivial inconvenience, I don't get why people hate them so much.
The fact that East Asia has high Covid rates now despite masks doesn't prove mandates don't work, it just shows that masks don't completely prevent transmission (which nobody claimed). My understanding is that the problems with high Covid rates are due to failure to vaccinate the oldest populations, but maybe in the absence of masks the problem would be even bigger.
Now of course there are costs to wearing masks as you highlight, not to mention the expense of providing them; it may well be that the benefit of masks on flights isn't worth the tradeoffs (from what I've read, cabin air is refreshed so often that transmission rates are low anyway, and if you're on an 8 hour flight your mask will probably become ineffective after 4 hours anyway).
Well you could do studies comparing transmission with and without pants, or masks, which I think they’ve done (for masks, not pants) so I’m not sure you’re using “non-falsifiable” right
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
I’m not disputing the existence of people who support rules that would inconvenience people for no benefit, I’m just speculating on why the numbers on that poll do not match the observed number of people who themselves wear masks when traveling g.
I think it would be net beneficial to public health if everyone had to wear masks on the London Underground in the winter months, to reduce the spread of flu and other respiratory diseases as much as for Covid reasons. But it's not currently required so I don't bother doing it myself, partly because I can't be bothered to order more masks, but also because I'm not personally at high risk and the marginal impact to public health of me and a few other people wearing masks is trivial. It's a coordination problem - I think it is coherent to be in favour of mandating masks, and to not bother wearing one if most people don't.
(My understanding is that cabin air on flights is refreshed so often that it's a lower risk environment for Covid spread than a Tube carriage, so I'm not sure it's worth mandating them there).
OK I sorta understand this. What would be better, is to have no mandate, but to encourage a public awareness that when you are feeling sick, and need to go out in public, wearing a mask is a good thing to do to help stop the spread of certain viruses.
As a courtesy to all of us; If you are feeling sick (with flu-like symptoms) and you have to go out, wear a mask in public places.
An underrated reason, which I think has somewhat poisoned it in the public mind: it is a servant who wears a mask.
Every time I've been at a doctor's office, it's the opposite. The doctor is wearing an N95 or KN95. (So am I.) The nurse, receptionist, etc., is wearing a surgical mask or a cloth mask.
I don't mind you wearing one, I mind me being forced to wear one
Are you also a fan of the burka? The relationship between people apparently enjoying (or being neutral towards) masking while opposing certain Islamic clothing traditions is an interesting one.
To the extent there's a connection between these two, it's people engaging in broken thinking w.r.t. masks. If the point of the mask is symbolism or tribal identity, it's a waste of time. If the point is to avoid inhaling airborne respiratory droplets full of virus, or to avoid launching big droplets across the room when you cough, then it may make some sense.
I am neutral towards the burka itself, and against people being forced to wear them. Unlike masks, they don't protect from infection.
They are alleged to protect against sexual assault and sexual harassment, which I am assured are problems of the greatest urgency. Empirical evidence of this protective effect is in short supply, but it is no more implausible in theory than the bit where that cheap bit of cloth you bought on Etsy protects you from Covid.
I think the major reason people don't like them is that they are uncomfortable. And flying is pretty uncomfortable to begin with so adding another layer of discomfort on top of that is annoying. For a short (1-3 hour) flight it's only a trivial inconvenience/discomfort but on an overnight flight where you are trying to sleep it's actually quite a big inconvenience. I flew to Europe from the US many times in 2021 and was quite glad when I could finally take the mask off to get some sleep on the flight.
That said. I actually found that wearing an N95 was quite a bit more comfortable than wearing a surgical mask or a KN95. It fit better on my face so didn't cause the pressure points to become painful over time (especially around my ears) and sealed better so didn't cause my glasses to fog up constantly.
Oh yeah, those were the two things I hated too! The former surprised me — I don't think of myself as particularly sensitive, and I hadn't heard many mention it...
...but no joke: on a fifteen-hour flight (+ the "airport time" on either end, customs, etc), my ears started *fucking killing me* somewhere near the end.
I don't even particularly object to masks — I just oppose a mandate; and that, if I'm honest, probably mostly on tribal grounds (and the general futility: we all knew it would just become part of daily life eventually, and it's about that time) — so I thought I was 'ard, every time I heard people complain about how uncomfortable they were...
...but no, that little piece of string defeated me utterly. I was resorting to using my hands to take the tension off one side, then the other, over and over, by the time we landed.
The KN95 was the worst for glasses fogging, but I can't remember if it was surgical or KN95 that caused worse ear trauma; I think — IIRC — they *both* did it to some extent, though. If the N95 alleviates both of those issues, man, I wish I'd known that!
...This all is not really very interesting or relevant, I am realizing. Well, I'm afraid, it's too late now; you've already read it... sorry...†
--------------------------
†(However, as recompense, one day you all will certainly be able to dine out on the anecdote "I once read a Himaldr comment in the wild, before he was Immortal God-King!". So there's that!)
They are annoying and make it harder to breath and the risk of getting sick is not high and not that bad if you do get sick.
Since they are already an imperfect measure and exceptions for eating and drinking are allowed, the restrictions should at least be lenient for children under 5. I had a reasonable experience (United, summer 2021) flying with kids in this respect, and nobody made me mask then while they were asleep, but it's technically a requirement and the wrong flight attendant or seat neighbor can make a thing about it. This shouldn't be, and there were a few rather nasty stories around this going around at the height of these mandates.
I used to think the same, until I had my first panic attack, ever, on a 10 hour flight. Was super uncomfortable.
And my glasses fog up too, which is really annoying.
And no real evidence of SARS-cov2 spreading on flights.
Another part of it is simply that people are always going to be more passionate about being forced to do something they don’t want to do, vs other people NOT being forced to do something.
Plenty of people still voluntarily masking on planes and elsewhere, which, fine for them. I hated the masks-on-planes rule mainly because I had to choose between one of two uncomfortable things - I usually wear contacts but they tend to get really dry and uncomfortable on planes (plus I can’t nap comfortably with them in) so I wear glasses. But my glasses would always fog up with masks, and/or the mask straps would make my glasses fit uncomfortably.
Yes, this is part of what has made COVID measures similar to (for instance) gun issues in terms of polling, where the "control" side had more numbers than passion.
Also, people (whether anti- or pro-mask) might consider that they will mask on a plane if they are required to, but not if they aren't required, and then it comes down to preference cascade when they are not required and also not in a strong majority.
The problem is panel polls like YouGov are horribly unrepresentative in fundamental ways that can't be fixed by weighting.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19824303/
The rewards for taking part in panel polls are so low that they suffer severe dropout rates. The panels end up being dominated by people who are obsessed with volunteering for things they think represent pro-social acts. Any question about something that smells like a pro-social act will get wildly distorted answers as a result. One way to spot this is to look at the pre-weighted gender ratios; they often have far too many women answering. They weight male answers more but it can't fix the underlying problem.
Summary: ignore polls on anything related to COVID measures. The sort of people who answer them are weird and not representative at all. Polling firms know this but are afraid to admit it outside of wonkish research papers because it would damage their business.
Excellent link, thanks for passing that along. I think everyone knows on some level that long surveys attract weirdos, but nice to have a quantitative look at exactly how.
Most people don't fly, which might be a factor. But I'm less surprised than Scott about this poll. Lockdowns and restrictions have consistently polled well throughout the pandemic. However, issue polling is tricky. Simply by asking the question, you're implying that some expert somewhere must have advocated it. Most people trust experts, so when pollsters ask "Do you support X mandate in X circumstances?", a lot of people probably shrug and say "Sure, if that's what we're doing now."
...Also, I just found this poll from April with a different result (51-46 against mask mandate on planes). https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3844
...In another poll from April, however, mask mandates win 56-20 (for "airplanes, trains, and other types of public transportation"). https://apnorc.org/projects/support-for-mask-requirements-in-public-persists-although-worries-about-infection-continue-to-decline/
Finally, this poll from May asks about "instituting, or reinstituting, face mask and social distancing guidelines in your state at the current time". Opponents win 65-32. https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_051822/
The wording and methodology seem to matter a lot here. Which supports my theory that most people don't think very hard about this, and vaguely guess at what they think "science" supports at any given time.
Also selection bias in the poll, my limited experience is that big city and costal elites are much more pro-mask, and I'm guessing they fly more. They certainly take more public transport. (It seems like with enough people you could account for the selection bias, but you'd need more data on the poll takers, like their zip code.)
I see that the people of Greece rated themselves to top all the positive traits on that poll. Perhaps it’s them that should be considered most arrogant from a meta perspective.
So did Germany, unless I'm misreading the thing.
The interesting thing about Greece is that voted themselves most trustworthy while much of Europe voted the Greeks the less trustworthy.
I like the instances of the same country being perceived as both the most and least of a trait, eg the Poles think Germans are both the most and least trustworthy, the French think the French are both the most and least arrogant.
I think with the French it's just that France is the only country they know the name of.
Like the beginning of ``Au Service de la France!" Which I highly recommend. On Netflix (I think) as ``A very secret service."
You may be confusing the French with the US.
Can't be - my mental image had clothesdryers.
Maybe the French have different parts of France in mind when they call themselves both most and least arrogant. I've heard that Paris is arrogant and the rest of the country is fine.
I think it's just a matter of pluralities- the chart just shows which country gets named the most in each category so if there are decent minorities with clashing opinions it can look contradictory- eg the 30% French people who think the French are the most arrogant don't agree on which country is the least, and similarly the 30% who think they're the least arrogant don't agree on one for most.
I like how almost everyone names their own country as "Least Arrogant"...except the Czechs, who name Slovakia. Still friends after all this time!
The other exception being Italy, who seem a bit down on themselves. (Least Trustworthy: Italy.)
Thanks for including my post Scott! (#37 for those wondering)
I like doing these data analysis projects for topics I'm curious about (like forecasting and prediction markets), and will probably do more in the future. If anyone has any particular questions they'd like to see answered, let me know and I'll try to get ahold of a dataset and answer it!
How do you reduce very high cholesterol numbers? I am looking for customized advice for a young male family member.
There's so much advice out there. Is it any good?
I'll question the premise a little bit. I imagine what you actually want to reduce is the risk of heart attack/stroke, with cholesterol numbers being merely a proxy for the same. It might be that certain ways of reducing cholesterol (the proxy) are much better at reducing the quantity that you really care about than others.
With that said, I don't really have any wisdom to offer on the specific question.
Yes! Good point.
Ah sorry I should have been more clear with my wording -- I meant questions specifically about prediction markets, forecasting, etc. Although that is a good question! My guess would be to try to cut out high cholesterol foods like eggs, fried foods, cheese/dairy. This is definitely easier said than done, and probably requires a lot of willpower to actually implement and stick to.
Plant sterols, iirc, have pretty strong clinical evidence supporting. Don't have time now but maybe someone else can link a study or smth.
Here's an amazon link to an OTC product that I use: https://a.co/d/cXZlAT3
MD here. Reducing dietary cholesterol will have at best a limited impact. By all means, diet and exercise, but for a young man with very high numbers it's unlikely this will move the needle enough. See here - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26109578/
Ask your doctor about testing for familial hypercholesterolaemia and referral to a specialist.
Statins are usually indicated. Don't believe media hype about side effects. These drugs save lives. There are other effective therapies, like PCSK9 inhibitors, but go for statins first.
Essentially you want to minimise the area under the curve of your cholesterol level over time, as a greater cholesterol exposure over one's lifetime leads to atherosclerosis and vascular disease, particularly coronary artery disease, which remains the number one cause of mortality in developed countries.
If you have a couple of days or weeks spare, and want to know (much) more, I strongly recommend Dr Peter Attia - check out his cholesterol series at https://peterattiamd.com/the-straight-dope-on-cholesterol-part-i/. This will tell you more than most MDs ever learn about the topic. (He also has a podcast called The Drive which I very much enjoy.)
Learn to cook and prepare your meals from scratch.
If the LDL number is well north of 180 and his diet isn't absurd, my (non-MD) impression is that there's no other option than statins. If he's active, rosuvastatin seems to produce the fewest muscle ache side-effects, but I would take some CoQ10 anyway, it might help.
I would say the best advice is for him to go see a good physician, get worked up, and ask him or her all the questions. A good physician will order more sophisticated tests (e.g. a complete lipid profile, liver enzymes) to better understand the situation, and present him with the panoply of options, including trying assorted lifestyle mods first. FWIW (incoming anecdata) I've seen a few friends drop LDL numbers as much or more than statins by going totally unprocessed vegetable vegan -- basically, eating like a rabbit -- but that takes real discipline.
This Aella data is very interesting and probably not impacted by selection bias compared to questions on sexuality.
Naively I'd expect either a primary color or black/white to be far and away the most popular for 1,2,3. I'd actually expect some sort of fuzzy correlation between black/white/primaryness and lower numbers. The data seems to bear this out. Curious if there is a "most primary color". Like yellow is usually not 1 or 2.
I'd love to read a post by Aella or someone using her data that tries to dig really deep into this topic. Potentially you'd need to boost the size of the sample a bit as you got more involved.
Most theories I've heard revolve around some popular toy or set of blocks when the subjects were young. But I Googled children's block sets and 1/2 didn't seem to be red/blue any more likely than you'd randomly expect. More research needed, I guess.
I think of it more as the cultural gestalt than a specific factor. You'd naively expect green to be more common as well and lo and behold it is. Green lights, plants, etc.
Is there a high variance by decade of birth? That would be very interesting.
I'd also love to see a study where regular people without synesthesia rated the color. Ideally both their default rating and their expectation of how other people would rate the colors. That might suggest whether people with the condition were responding purely to cutural factors or whether factors were more biological.
Sadly I'm not sure what the funding would be based on. We probably have to rely on maybe YouGov or amateurs.
Fridge magnets?
I'm a mathematician and don't have synaesthetic associations with specific numbers, but I do for number systems. E.g. the integers are purple, the rational numbers are steely gray, the real numbers are rust brown, the complex numbers are yellow, the p-adic numbers are pale blue (independent of p). This seems unlikely to be related to the colors of blocks or anything else from my childhood. Absolutely no idea where it comes from, and I don't have any other synaesthetic associations I can think of, but the ones I named are very stable and have been that way in my head for fifteen years or so.
I've always associated odd numbers with red and even numbers with blue, because of some Montessori flashcards I had when I was a kid.
The numbers were printed in sandpaper. Surely someone else had a set of these?
Holy wow, yes! I forgot about these until now!
My guess would be it's something like the Bouba/kiki effect (where people agree that the sounds of certain made-up words go better with particular shapes). 8 is pink because it's curvy and rounded like a female body and pink is 'feminine' (so I predict this association wouldn't be true in cultures where pink isn't feminine-coded and/or women's skin is typically darker). 1 is red because ... it stands out from other numbers because it represents just one thing rather than a group, and red is a very salient colour visually?
When I think colors and numbers all that comes to mind is the wavelength (in nm.) of laser spectral lines, so mostly atomic transitions, 514 is the green of an argon laser, (also 488 458, greenish blue and blue.) and of course red is 633 (HeNe laser.) Yellow is the sodium
D-lines, but I don't know the wavelength. (589, thanks google.)
I note that "two" rhymes with "blue". I haven't clicked the link yet, but if its about the words sounding similar, then 3 would be associated with green. I guess that theory would be easy to confirm/debunk by looking at native speakers of other languages.
I checked the results for 5, expecting everybody to agree with me that 5 is green, but was disappointed. Clearly selection bias is at play here...
Of course 5 is green. "Bad Beer Rots Our Young Guts, But Vodka Goes Well."
I associate the numbers 0, 1, 2 and 3 with the colors black, white, red and green respectively. My reasoning is that 0 represent nothingness, 1 is the most basic representation of somethingness, 2 is the most romantic number and 3 is, uhhh, associated with fairy tales and folk music, and forests are green. But the real reason is probably the [Cuisenaire rods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods) I studied with in first grade (before they were banned).
8 isn't pink for me, but maybe for others it's because of [Schoolhouse Rock](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvqrAwrAs1A).
> Why is that? Well, it turns out that pure pleasure isn’t really what human beings want, actually. Pure pleasure in isolation, after a short period of time, is pretty boring, or even annoying.
Well duh. Surely people who hear about wire-heading and say "oh awesome I want that" are way in the minority?
I find I have the exact same emotional reaction to both concepts.
Honestly, discussion of jhanas creeps me out more than discussion of wireheading, maybe because most people instinctively see wireheading as a scary thing to mess around with and so are not tempted to it.
I get the same kind of willies from reading discussion of jhanas as I do from reading about how Isaac Newton experimented with how he could induce himself to see colors by poking a bodkin around the back of his eyeball. It's a visceral sort of "this person is violating the operating manual of their neurological system and voiding its warranty" sort of feeling.
Experiencing jhanas may be perfectly safe and healthy, and there's plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest it is. But I don't have a great deal of confidence that if it actually offered serious psychological dangers, the anecdata would convey that. And it's something which my priors lean pretty hard towards "this doesn't seem like a safe or wise thing to mess around with."
I'd say that even the ancedotal evidence is ambiguous, what with the so-called "dark night of the soul" and jhana addicts.
IDK - there are people who, from the outside, appear to want to wirehead themselves. Like heroin addicts.
Yeah, but I think those people are in the minority I mentioned, no?
I don't think the main aversion to heroin addiction is that it's boring.
Lots of people (maybe a majority in some places?) drink alcohol or smoke weed.
I don't think most people who try heroin for the first time do it hoping or expecting to end up heroin addicts.
Heroin isn't just highly addictive, users tend to develop tolerance pretty rapidly. For a long-term heroin addict, seeking their next hit is at least as much about avoiding the pain of withdrawal as it is about chasing actual euphoria.
This is false, actual testimonials from heroin addicts indicate that they don't use to avoid the pain of withdrawal OR to chase euphoria. Addiction is a hijacking of the motivation system, not the reward system. Addicts use because they desperately want to, with no rational reason for that want. See for example "Theories of drug craving, ancient and modern".
Some addicts might claim that in their testimonies, but not all do. I've spoken to heroin addicts about their addictions myself, and the ones I spoke to definitely didn't suggest that this was the case for them.
I agree it's not universal. Still, it's very valuable to understand the different roles that liking and wanting play in addiction.
Wanting and liking are definitely separate processes, and the distinction between them is very salient to human psychology, but I don't think it's true as a generalization that like/dislike considerations drop out of the experience for most heroin addicts.
> I don't think most people who try heroin for the first time do it hoping or expecting to end up heroin addicts
I always struggle to understand the mindset of someone trying heroin for the first time, thinking "Yeah, it'll be fine, I probably won't wind up a heroin addict". Especially since these people almost always live in a social milieu where heroin addicts are everywhere.
Most people who try heroin have probably already tried other illegal drugs at that point. If they've already developed addictive behaviors, they may be less wary of new ones, but if they haven't, then they're liable to think "I tried these other drugs I was taught risked sending me into a cycle of abuse, and they didn't, so this one probably won't either."
There was a reporter a while back who did some heroin with the purpose of demonstrating that it’s not actually addictive and that addiction is a purely social phenomenon.
She wound up addicted for years.
Heroin addicts don't get addicted to heroin because they love it so much, it's because addiction constitutes a drastic change in behavioral and neural functioning that compels drug use. Maybe if heroin wasn't addictive, people would get tired of it as much as they get tired of jhanas.
Before we go down this rabbit hole, can you define what you mean by the word "addiction"?
But wireheading and heroin *are* extremely addictive, and the reason you don’t want it is because it messes up your life. This is one reason I question the jhana thing - how good can the pleasure really be if you don’t want more of it, given that wireheading and heroin *do* make you keep wanting it more than anything else?
Do we know that wireheading is extremely addictive?
Certainly in rats. They prefer it over _not starving to death_.
WP: ”Strength of drive[edit]
Rats will perform lever-pressing at rates of several thousand responses per hour for days in exchange for direct electrical stimulation of the lateral hypothalamus.[14] Multiple studies have demonstrated that rats will perform reinforced behaviors at the exclusion of all other behaviors. Experiments have shown rats will forgo food to the point of starvation in exchange for brain stimulation or intravenous cocaine when both food and stimulation are offered concurrently for a limited time each day.[2] Rats will also cross electrified grids to press a lever, and they are willing to withstand higher levels of shock to obtain electrical stimulation than to obtain food.[14]
Satiation[edit]
Satiation experiments in rats have revealed that BSR does not produce satiety. Olds demonstrated that this lack of satiation associated with BSR allows animals to self-stimulate to sheer exhaustion and that satiation is dependent on the location of the electrical stimulation.[14] In a 48-hour satiation test, rats with hypothalamic electrodes self-stimulated to exhaustion and showed no intrinsic satiation tendencies, whereas telencephalic electrodes showed radical slowing of self-stimulation after 4 to 8 hours. The insatiability of BSR is closely related to the strength of drive. While a natural reward, like food, is met with a feeling of being full (satiety), BSR does not have a comparable correlate. This allows for BSR to be experienced indefinitely, or in the case of ICSS, until exhaustion.”
And seemingly in humans:
”In one oft-cited example, in 1972, Heath's subject known as "B-19" reported "feelings of pleasure, alertness, and warmth" and "protested each time the unit was taken from him, pleading to self-stimulate just a few more times".[11] Among ethicists, early "direct brain stimulation" or "psychosurgery" experiments have been criticized as "dubious and precarious (even) by yesterday's standards".[12] In a case published in 1986, a subject who was given the ability to self-stimulate at home ended up ignoring her family and personal hygiene, and spent entire days on electrical self-stimulation. By the time her family intervened, the subject had developed an open sore on her finger from repeatedly adjusting the current.[13]”
It's not clear to me that the behaviors of associated with this type of wireheading have the same cause as the behaviors associated with heroin. I know very little about addiction, but my impression is that there's a difference between a chemical addiction and an addiction to something that you like a lot. Similar to the difference between a person physically forcing you to eat bowl after bowl of ice cream and you choosing to have ice cream for every meal because you freaking love ice cream.
Heroin use leads to addiction and dependency by both aspects you mentioned and more. Before withdrawal symptoms start to play a role, the wish to repeat the experience usually is the main driver of consumption.
What's extremely addictive is the crude form of wireheading that you describe, which is little more than sticking a wire into a brain region strongly involved in motivation. This obviously has all kinds of undesirable downstream effects that aren't necessarily present with jhanas. This is a common misconception about drugs and addiction: rewards are not by themselves addictive, but the 'want', which can be orthogonal to the reward itself.
It's very simple. Wanting and liking are different things.
Psychedelics score quite highly on liking and low on wanting, Nicotine scores quite highly on wanting and not nearly so well on liking, sex scores strongly in both (the sex drive is the wanting component, the pleasure component is obvious), and opiates also score strongly in both.
I would make the advance prediction that the classic cases of wireheading are about wires in motivational regions of the brain linked to wanting and the dopamine system.
First jhana scores very highly on liking, but doesn't score that well on wanting, and in my personal experience, it's more satiating than I thought, I've definitely gotten into states where I was like "ok, that's enough pleasure for the night, please no more".
Surely the concern with wireheading is precisely that once connected people would never disconnect? If in fact people would get bored after pretty fast and end up just doing it once or twice a month, then it's actually nbd.
That is a concern!
One of the things I'm saying is that I think it's plausible that good and effective wireheading that doesn't trigger some sort of addiction mechanism will be just like jhana in this example. Something that is nice or ok, but just something you do occasionally.
>Surely people who hear about wire-heading and say "oh awesome I want that" are way in the minority?
Im sure that a majority of people around the world would wire head if given the option. How many people would do heroin if it were free and (mostly) harmless? How many of people currently living hard lives of poverty in bad countries?
I can see where you're coming from. I think it might depend on if we're talking about side-effect free wireheading where you can unplug and take care of your family and life or pure addiction wireheading where nothing can make you unplug.
On the exam only university:
I did not attend high school and instead did something called "open high school" (this was not in the US), which basically consisted of me completing 34 exams (one for each high school topic) and once I passed all of them, I got a high school degree. For about four or five years after dropping out of school I hardly did anything, but once I decided to complete it, it probably took me about a year (there is a limit as to how many exams you can sign up at a time, something like four per month iirc). I only had to study for maybe five or six of those exams. Once I enrolled in college, I wouldn't say that I felt any less prepared than anyone with a normal high school degree, but I was also older than your typical college freshman.
Very interesting. Ofcourse, typical hugh schools don't have just the final exam. They have significant weightage for it but also give some weight to homework, project, class participation, tests covering smaller portions of the curriculum etc.
I think the types of questions are really important to assess your degree of learning. In other words, there are tests where scoring 100% doesn't say if you mastered the subject. And there are tests where scoring a lot less than 100% might show you really mastered it.
Typical *American* high schools, maybe. Here in Aus, all subjects have (or at least, had when I was in school) and 80% weighting on the standardised end-of-year exams, and 20% on assignments/tests that were set by the school (but with some sort of weighting system so schools couldn't game the system by setting too-easy tests)
30: This seems less interesting than the headline makes it sound. It seems like they just fooled KataGo's algorithm for dealing with the end of the game, making it end the game early in a clearly winning position and lose on a technicality.
I think it would be interesting if you could find an actual way to win based on adversarial examples where you play weird moves and convince KataGo to make stupid responses, like in:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/28/905615/
I had this same feeling. Cool but less cool than I was expecting.
I agree, more like a click bait article. I’ve played a lot of Go, decent level amateur when I played. It’s quite reasonable to pass when there’s a few loose opponents stones inside your territory. If it was a competition , a judge might be asked, and would almost certainly say "these stones are captured".
I commented a similar thing when they first posted it, but they replied that in fact KataGo _is_ trained such that it should be able to handle Tromp-Taylor rules (in which all stones must be captured to be considered dead). From that angle it is actually an attack on the learned model, although I agree with comments here that it's really not that impressive.
> If it was a competition , a judge might be asked, and would almost certainly say "these stones are captured".
Why would they say so? Aren´t the rules on liberties and capture rather (pun intended) black-and-white?
If the reasoning is 'the moves to proceed to capture these stones would be trivial so we're treating them as already captured', then why would the winning player be _passing_ and not e.g. asking for the opponent's concession?
It's pretty black and white that in ordinary play those stones are dead. Dead means cannot be saved even if the owner gets to make the first move.
However, the game was being played with tromp-taylor rules which are specifically designed for computer go competitions to avoid ambiguity.
It made me think of the Rybka chess program, which would refuse to draw when it had the advantage, even if preventing the draw meant throwing away its advantage. So you could beat it relatively easily by locking down the board and waiting for it to throw away its pieces.
Of course Rybka's been outclassed for years, it's all about Stockfish these days.
The link is to an outdated version of the attack, they have a more fundamental one that they demo here: https://goattack.alignmentfund.org. It seems like KataGo doesn't evaluate capturing races correctly in some circumstances, especially when it thinks it's far ahead and the group under attack is surrounding a dead group. For example, in this position ( https://goattack.alignmentfund.org/#2048_visits_hardened-board={"goto":{"m":167}} ) even a weak human player could rescue white's group in the top left, but KataGo inexplicably plays away and gets trapped. And then, well, I won't spoil it, but the Adversary bot has some of the same weaknesses as KataGo, weaknesses even a very weak human player could easily exploit -- if they could get into those positions in the first place!
EDIT you will have to copy the link above instead of clicking it, substack isn't including the final }
Whoa, that’s way more impressive than what the Arstechnica article was saying. I deleted my original comment.
I’m shocked that KataGo around move 187 cannot see its surrounding group needs help; the capturing race is only about 3 moves per side. Does this mean KataGo without tree search is never explicitly calculating more than 3-4 moves ahead? And it’s heuristics can make it ~superhuman (except for this attack pattern) even without ever searching more than 3-4 moves ahead? That’s even more insane to me, though I’m not sure I’m understanding it correctly.
I don't think anyone really understands it yet. I always assumed without really thinking about it that KataGo's policy network was counting liberties and identifying groups more or less like a human would -- those seem like fundamental concepts that anything that got good at go would have to learn. But no, clearly I'm wrong, KataGo learned something else that's similar enough most of the time.
Re: Scotch-Irish, Albion's Seed talked about "Borderers" and explicitly rejected the term Scotch-Irish. The "Borderers" included the Scotch-Irish (Ulster Protestants), lowland Scots, and English from near the Scottish border, and thus might have been far more numerous than the Scotch-Irish.
See discussion at https://twitter.com/readyinafewdayz/status/1320500718315491328 and author's reply at https://twitter.com/crimkadid/status/1320501264166408192
So I read the paper the guy linked to and it is a cool methodology, but I don't think it can be used as a Borderer count.
Briefly, they try to find names distinctive to each minority group, then estimate the frequency of that group based on the abundance of those names. If you know that 1/X Irish people have the last names Murphy, Kelly and Sullivan, and you know that these names are rare outside of Ireland, then you can figure out how many Irish people there are in a group by counting the Murphys, Kellys and Sullivans and then multiplying by X. Using things like baptismal records from the old country, they try to find as many pure Irish names as possible to make X as small as possible so the count is more accurate. Ambiguous names (e.g. Hayes can be Irish or Scottish) are purposefully excluded. There's some tradeoff you have to navigate where adding more, less pure Irish names will make X smaller but will lead to you counting some non-Irish as Irish. For some of the smaller ethnic groups on that table (e.g. Swedish) founder effect is a serious issue so they choose names from records after emigration to the New World but before mixing. Their estimate of English is just 100% minus the white minorities.
The problem, which they fully acknowledge, is that there is no way of distinguishing Scottish from Scotch-Irish (of Scottish descent). They estimate based on outgoing immigration records a ~2:1 ratio of Ulster:Scottish emigration, which is why on that table their Scotch-Irish estimate is double their Scottish estimate for every state. IMHO they should have just merged those columns rather than create an estimate of false precision. The bigger issue, I would think, is that people of English Borderer (including some Scotch-Irish) descent are classed as English here. They weren't trying to estimate Borderers so I can't complain, they explicitly say that their analysis ignores distinct English subgroups, but without that number we can't trash Albion's Seed.
Thanks!
On 20:
When you write about depression, I often wonder if people reading what you write are impacted in their illness just by learning about it.
In other words, should they have faith in their treatment in order to benefit from it? i.e. Should they try not to think critically about it?
To the extent that they are benefitting from placebo effect this doesn't matter, and whether there's something beyond that is dubious.
21. (deBoer on Kanye and mental illness) it was a nice read but like it's the thing where someone goes "people are being unreasonable, truth is somewhere in the middle!" [mentally ill people are neither 0% nor 100% culpable for their crazy behavior], and then spends 0 time on trying to figure out where in the middle the truth is. that's an interesting question!
It's part of a much longer series of deBoer posts on how mental illness (especially autism, but also other illness) has been claimed as a cute personality quark by mild or fake cases. This has had the effect of edging the severely mentally ill out of conversation about how to support the mentally ill. "We don't need an autism cure because autism is basically a cute personality trait. Pay no attention to that non-verbal person screaming in a hospital". Now we've reached the next stage, where the fashionably mentally ill explicitly denounce the genuinely mentally ill.
Perhaps Alex Jones is an even better example than Kanye of a mentally ill person losing everything due to some crazy utterances?
I don't think Alex Jones is crazy, I think he is a scam artist.
I think Alex Jones might have a personality disorder, but not a mental illness like bipolar, which seems to be Kanye's problem.
There isn’t a difference between mental illness and “personality disorder”. All mental illness is is behavior society find unacceptable.
When people do weird stuff society likes almost no one calls it mental illness.
For those, people seek help from about their "behavior society find unacceptable", there are differences between aspects of personality and other possible determinants of behavior. Some of the latter can have such impact on decision making that people are not held responsible for their actions in most societies.
Yeah I don’t think almost any of that has a rational/absolute underpinning in the way people talk about it. It is all continuums and just things people find inconvenient or not.
When people are at one incorrect extreme, getting away from the extreme needs to be done first before the precise mid-point is established
> Awais Aftab sums up the case in favor of antidepressants, with reference to the most common anti-SSRI arguments and why he doesn’t believe them.
Just read Aftab's post. Wow, that defense is "damning with faint praise." If that's the strongest defense of antidepressants available in 2022, it's tantamount to conceding that they don't work very well.
That post was well written and quite sensible, I think. Not working very well, ok, one may put it that way, but that's true of every psychiatric intervention, then. The "Strongest case against that..." looked much weaker to me.
It's perfectly fair to take into account the baseline of all psychiatric interventions. However, that just becomes a commentary on all psychiatric interventions, not a vindication of antidepressants.
I agree that the post was "well written and quite sensible." My comment is not about the post, but about the facts it describes.
The stuff about Mastodon is correct, as far as I know. Most of the trouble comes from Mastodon's fundamental principle of letting anyone run their own instance, which results in surprisingly more stringent and arbitrary moderation than anyone has ever complained about on Twitter previously, and the "seven zillion witches and approximately three principled civil libertarians" problem because Mastodon fundamentally selects people who were bad enough to either be banned from Twitter, or have grievances with Twitter and decided to jump ship. There's also the unique problem that spinning up instances is so easy people are just getting impersonated (funny how that's the same problem Elon's Twitter had) and spammed (similar to why running your own email server tends to put you on a blacklist).
That said, I don't think this spells doom for Mastodon or anything, but this combined with Twitter's network effect means that Mastodon simply won't ever replace Twitter, or even reach the same size as it. There's many different things that make Mastodon worse than Twitter to the majority of Twitter users.
> letting anyone run their own instance, which results in surprisingly more stringent and arbitrary moderation than anyone has ever complained about on Twitter previously
Sounds a lot like Reddit's model (per community rules and moderators). Which works decently well in practice imo in that the worst result of over moderations is usually a new subreddit forming with different principles.
>management took their side anyway for political reasons
I don't doubt political reasons are involved, but there's also the fact that Reddit essentially runs on large amounts of unpaid "labor" by jannies, and said cabal is effectively the largest janny union.
Google is failing me; "janny"?
Janitor. Forum/Reddit mods like to think of themselves as special and powerful, but forget they are really janitors at best.
The main reason Mastodon is unlikely to be competitive with Twitter is that it does not have a business model, as a decentralized network cannot sell your data. So they can't spend nearly as much on developers, and so their software will always be significantly less sophisticated. Add to that all the overhead of running a federated system ( https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ ), and it will just be way behind on user experience. For some people that might be offset by their preference for using a network that's not centralized or not run by a corporate entity or isn't based on the surveillance capitalist model, but until most people don't have a strong preference for any of those, it will remain niche.
Re: #22, i use mastodon pretty regularly, and i can comment on these.
For 1, yeah name impersonation is an issue. You can't claim a name across every server. I wouldn't call it a severe problem though, since that's true of everywhere, even twitter where you can name yourself anything with just a Cyrillic letter instead. Not sure if this is fixed on any service.
For 2, my main account is actually on QOTO! So i know this firsthand. Yeah it sucks, and i now think the ability to defederate is a fundamental mistake in mastodon's design. It should be more like RSS, not authenticated node-to-node.
3 is gone.
4 and 6 are pretty normal. You picked a server that has specific rules/specific admins, and they didn't like your post for whatever reason. Each mastodon server is basically equivalent to a subreddit. Some will have weird rules, crazy admins, etc. You gotta pick them carefully, or move servers as needed.
5 is gone.
As for rahaeli, I'm sympathetic, but ultimately reject his premise. If the only way to prevent harm on the internet is through stringent, massive, and very very careful moderation, then there is no internet outside of multi-million dollar companies. This comments section should no longer exist. Unless he's just advocating for smaller server instances, which i'm fine with, but that's not against mastodon as a whole, since mastodon is a protocol (basically), not a website.
There are plenty of homoglyph datasets; the Unicode standard itself includes one. A service not checking for lookalike characters is just lazy programming. (Although in the case of Twitter, I think they just don't care about the display name that much, as the username is ASCII and quite prominent.)
Fair, although even in ASCII there's a problem with homoglyphs in common fonts (I vs l vs 1, O vs 0, etc), and that happens a decent amount on twitter.
You do have to be careful about it though. I recall reading about a spotify attack (now fixed) that involved hijacking by creating an account whose name is homographic with the target's. I think it involved the conversion to the canonical form of the name not being idempotent.
This is a pretty good rundown I think. The links Scott posted were a mix of what I think is very legitimate criticism and fundamental misunderstandings of what Mastodon is and how it's meant to work. If you join a random Mastodon instance because it's big and seems official, there's a high likelihood you'll have a bad time. A little bit of research has to go into deciding what instance to join if you're going to get the most out of it. Small, focused instances generally provide better experiences than big, unfocused ones as a rule of thumb. Likewise, Mastodon's verification system just isn't designed to be used as a centralized method of finding people like Twitter is. All that said, federated social media does provide unique moderation challenges and I think rahaeli's and Freeman's posts make good points.
User banned for one month for this comment. Two offenses:
- Doing the thing where if they disagree with me, they frame it as I'm "pretending" not to know that they're right. This isn't my internal experience, it's a rude assumption, and I hope I would ban people for doing it to anyone, and not just to me.
- Doing the thing where they say something is obviously true, but refuse to explain or provide evidence for it.
Sounds a bit harsh, I agree the banned comment was bizarre and a 1 month ban is not that long, but... still out of the left field.
If I may act as a devil's advocate, I think the banned commenter is saying that the discussion you linked to is not particularly civil, just plain... not savage. I don't know why is that worth pointing out to the commenter, you just have a different threshold for what counts as civil, or maybe you personally like the 2 people involved and you just want to praise your friends. No big deal.
I also want to respond to your rhetorical question in the end that started the response :
>What's your excuse ?
Because Power deprives a person of the right to be respected. I don't think you will blame a Russian dissident, for instance, if they don't want to hold a civil discussion with Putin, right ? so if a random they/them just drops by on a website I'm on and starts a conversation, maybe yes it's pointless and unreasonable to start mouthing slurs. But if that person is not-so-subtly using their pronouns-in-the-email thing to win arguments in a woke workplace and using HR as their personal army ?
And the worst thing about human groups is that they present a unified interface. Once 1 they/them uses their power unjustly, all of them did. I know this is not fair, but it's a perception as persistent as up and down on a rocky planet. They're showing all the signs of the tribe, they're wearing a Big Fat Sign with "I think the person who hurt you is cool and I belong to the same group that gives them power" written on it with Big Fat Letters. All of this inference chain happens automatically in the first few hundred-milliseconds before the conversation even begins.
Funnily enough, the they/thems you decry view the power imbalance as tilted the other way! Perhaps you can see why this mindset is a problem. Toxoplasmosis of rage, etc.
I know it's a difficult problem, it's a Prisoner's Dilemma after all. The way it's usually solved is when one of the parties take a risk and start cooperating, and maybe that's me on good days.
Most of my days aren't good days though, I'm simply objecting to the way Scott made it look easy to have civil conversation ("Look, all you gotta do is look at your outgroup doing outgroup things and saying outgroup words and just not get angry, how hard can it possibly be ?")
What I would guess this person's point was is a combination of:
1. Ozy and Hanania are both high intelligence individuals. It's true, but given the current state of discourse and politics, I'm not sure it's very compelling.
2. Ozy and Hanania are both rat-adjacent, and therefore more willing to decouple and engage on this kind of conversation. Also true, but then again, so is probably anyone who's reading this, by definition
3. Ozy and Hanania both write for a living, and as such are incentivized to generate content, which this exchange is.
> Ozy and Hanania both write for a living, and as such are incentivized to generate content, which this exchange is.
Ouch!
Makes me wonder whether we could generalize this strategy, even for people who normally don't have a blog. Like, approach people with extreme opinions and tell them "hey, I will give you money if you write more about your opinions and let me publish that on my website, but the condition is that it will be a dialog with a person with opposite opinions, and both of you need to be super polite".
I keep toying with speculative fiction ideas in my head about societies where violently disagreeing people are forced into a variety of intimate and bond-building situations.
I imagined something like sending a group of people into jungle or on a island, and they need to survive for a few months. But such scenario would obviously favor the conservatives.
The places that favor the woke are academia and corporations. So perhaps a fair competition would require alternating 6 months in the jungle, 6 months on the campus, and you need to survive and get a PhD.
Is anyone on nostr? Any thoughts you can share with the class? I keep intending to sign up but not getting around to it.
#34 Kirkegaard and Hu on education:
I am glad to see you sharing this. If something boosts IQ without increasing the general cognitive ability, I think it matters in a non nitpicky way. IQ ends up measuring other things besides general cognitive ability because we can't measure it directly. You want to increase general cognitive ability because you want all the nice socioeconomic benefits that come with it. You don't just want higher scores on test items. I can make you better at vocabulary by training you in vocabulary, but it does not look like that makes you better able to fix a problem with your car or make good life decisions. If you want more vocab, that's fine. But it is good to know that education isn't allowing you to learn how to learn so much. This matters because a great deal of education appears largely irrelevant to people's real lives and careers.
I agree the difference between IQ score and g isn't nitpicky in its consequences, I just meant to say it was a very small distinction people are usually tempted to elide.
That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
Alternative speculative explanation: g itself is partially trainable (maybe with a genetically determined ceiling?). We know that e.g. malnutrition in childhood, or a hard knock on the head, could prevent you reaching your potential g. Maybe lack of the right kind of education could also?
Yes, that could be possible. Lasker & Kirkegaard (2022) found that certain test scores did not increase with more education. On an IQ test, you expect every single item to correlate positively and be g-loaded. If g-loaded test items are unaffected by education, it is likely not boosting g. It might make more sense in the graphs at the end (https://psyarxiv.com/8s2vx/).
One issue I have is that even if you could boost g, I think that it would just fade out with time. Not getting severe brain trauma and early iodine deficiency would last, but other sorts of interventions I would expect to just go away. John Protzko analyzed a bunch of interventions and found they generally fadeout (https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2015-protzko.pdf).
I think that any education intervention will just go away if it boosts cognitive ability, and I think memories and knowledge fade rather quickly. I think people who use spaced repetition notice this. People just don't remember things.
I think schooling keeps you in an intellectually enriched environment that increases test items but not general cognitive ability. The mystery is why a capitalist economy would reward schooling so much if it did not work and people forgot most everything. I think the market is highly distorted and its signaling. I agree with Bryan Caplan.
I think that this sort of thing should be very odd to people who think it boosts intelligence:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even
>Maybe lack of the right kind of education could also?
Unselected groups of black kids and asian kids at the same school have very different IQs on average
The adult black/white IQ is around two thirds present in young children before schooling even begins (and the rest of the gap develops in line with increasing trait heritability with age), meaing it's hard to see how education could play any role in the difference (and no, controlling for parents' education levels doesn't get rid of the gap either, so its not an intergenerational thing).
School voucher lottery programs don't meaningfully improve academic performance relative to the voucher recipient's soicioeconomic peers, even though these poor kids are given the supposedly "right kind" of education compared to said peers
Intelligence researchers have been trying for as long as g-factor theory has existed to find ways at reliably and durably increasing g through various cognitive interventions and have failed to do so. It would be extraordinarily remarkable if education differences explain intelligence differences after all of this, because the specific differences would have been so specific so as to elude detection despite intensive research.
Malnutrition is a profound environmental cirumstance for the US. If you are genuinely malnourished as a child, you have a childhood very very different to the vast majority of American kids, therefore it explains almost none of the variation in g-loaded IQ scores in the US.
Apart from kids who don't go to school or get homeschooled by a clueless parent, there's extremely few kids with such a profoundly different educational experience as malnourishment is different to the average, so it shouldn't be expected to explain anything but an extremely small fraction of IQ variation.
If this difference were something so broad as just going to a "good school" instead of a "bad school", then we should expect e.g. school voucher lottery programs to demonstrate an extremely obvious improvement.
#43 the bicameral mind. I totally agree with you that it’s ridiculous to think the happened all at once all around the world. The book is ludicrously heavy going, suspiciously so, and largely evidence free.
But it is so, so fun!
Odd, I remember it presenting hundreds of individual pieces of evidence. Care to explain?
(my review: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ )
Well no reasonable evidence. I’m still locked out of kindle so just looking at your review I can remember all kinds of alarms going off. For instance he says the writers of antiquity attributed to the gut, what we attribute to the mind, but I personally feel a lot with my gut. Not as metaphor but actually. Butterflies. Anxiety. Excitement.
Nearly all emotions. The heart too , if it is elevated or not. ( In fact those people who want to upload the brain better upload the gut, too or they aren’t uploading anything human. ) But I also have an internal dialogue.
He suggests the idols represent the Gods voices in their minds. I dont doubt that people in the past heard voices in their head, as do people today. You yourself talk about people who are religious who talk to God in their mind. This doesn’t stop the internal dialogue, though. And of course not everybody even has that internal dialogue. Even today.
His religious proof isn’t really a strong proof.
It’s basically “idols therefore bicameral mind”. Then it all breaks down because of increased trade. Then the Bronze Age civilisations collapse but the bicameral mind doesn’t appear again. These are not proofs but conjecture.
Then there’s the question of how it spreads in a few generations worldwide, including to Australia etc.
I think Jaynes' "All at once" means "over several generations across the interconnected civilizations of the Late Bronze Age, and we don't know how long elsewhere because they didn't leave written records".
And that strikes me as entirely plausible for what has to be a memetic process if it exists at all. If unicameral/superliminal/whatever thinking is like literacy, something that any human can learn and that offers a substantial advantage in a bronze-age-equivalent environment but which *doesn't* require expensive paper and ink (or cumbersome stone and chisel) to use at at scale, then it's going to spread at a bit less than the velocity of trading caravans. Particularly if it's the sort of thing most people can pick up just by observation and a little bit of Q-and-A with people who have the knack; literacy only works that way for about a third of the population.
This also suggests that "preconquest" societies will transition not long after making contact with civilized ones, so unless the initial "conquerors" are particularly observant they might well not notice.
I've seen people suggest a genetic basis for unicameralism, that somehow either first occurred or first became advantageous ca. 1500 BC, but I don't think that's plausible with the historical or anthropological record.
[Edited to fix bicameral/unicameral thinko on my part]
It has been years since I've read Jaynes, but the way that I've internalized his theory is that the crucial triggering factor was conflict among moral/cultural authorities aka conflicting voices of "gods" aka activity across the corpus collosum. Thus a key trigger with respect to developing individual consciousness is the extent to which the brain is processing conflicting moral/cultural authority messages. I see the chorus of Antigone as articulating this conflict well - "Should we follow our cultural norms and bury Polynices or should we obey our king and not bury him?" (albeit in this case the conflict occurs within one culture). As our hemispheres begin thinking overtime about who and what to believe, gradually we no longer experience the liminal world, we no longer hear the voices of god (The Psalms, "Why hast thou forsaken me?")
From this perspective, the Mediterranean with its constant contact of multiple cultures over centuries would be a likely early location for individual consciousness to arise. By contrast, any tribal group that remained in relative isolation would most likely remain in the liminal state until it was exposed to multiple conflicting voices of moral authority. This is why "preconquest" societies would transition not long after making contact with conquering ones, especially if the conquering ones impose or expose them to their moral beliefs/gods.
Oh my, maybe one of the original memes! Thanks. I need to read more about it.
I genuinely don't understand why Jaynes still seems to be taken so seriously by a chunk of otherwise-apparently-sensible people. It's obvious pseudoscience, like The Golden Bough or orgone energy.
Try Daniel Dennett's "Julian Jaynes' Software Archeology," which concludes,
"Jaynes’ idea is that for us to be the way we are now, there has to have been a revolution—almost certainly not an organic revolution, but a software revolution—in the organization of our information processing system, and that has to have come after language. That, I think, is an absolutely wonderful idea, and if Jaynes is completely wrong in the details, that is a darn shame, but something like what he proposes has to be right; and we can start looking around for better modules to put in the place of the modules that he has already given us."
https://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-archeology.pdf
Dennett cites seven "modules" to Jaynes' argument and notes that they are highly speculative and some of them are almost certainly wrong - but even that if they are ALL wrong, Jaynes' enterprise is valuable.
Why does something like what he proposes have to be right? I have to confess I don't follow that argument at all. Do dogs see dog-gods speaking to them all the time? Chimps? Cats? It doesn't seem like it at all, they just appear to have the same consciousness we do now.
On the "Ann Seltzer Is Better At Election Forecasting Than Nate Silver" link, see discussion in the subreddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/y6d91a/ann_selzer_is_better_at_election_forecasting_than/
Note that this article predates the midterms. Anyone have an update for how 538 and Seltzer did in the midterms?
Seltzer and 538 were both pretty spot-on in the Iowa Senate race, getting the final margin (R+12) almost exactly right. However, 538 was predicting this from the beginning, whereas Seltzer showed a close race at one point.
The blogger Scott links to made a "Seltzer+Silver" prediction model. But the final forecast isn't much different than 538. (Seltzer+Silver: 40% chance Dems wins Senate; 13% chance they win House. 538: 41% and 16%, respectively.)
I've just posted an update with the 2022 results. As David G. points out, the final forecasts were almost identical, but the Selzer+ model technically had a better Brier score than the base 538 model: https://secondhandcartography.com/2022/12/29/2022-forecast-performance/
On 26:
As the link says the anime containing the Endless Eight was The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya which is legendary for another reason long time readers of this blog probably remember: this was the anime an anonymous 4chan poster asked about when they asked what is the shortest string of episodes one needs to watch to see the 14 episodes of the first season in every possible order which is equivalent to the famous supermutation problem and got an answer from another anonymous 4chan poster who provided a novel proof for a lower bound of the problem (and later Greg Egan, author of Permutation City provided a proof for an upper bound).
It's easy to see reddish-green; just go buy some watermelon jellybeans.
>69% of executives are Republicans (?!)
I can see how this could be surprising to someone who has been reading Yarvin's ravings about an elitist conspiracy to promote anti-hierarchical values, or who mistook marketing efforts to target a young-skewed consumer base for a genuine shift towards "woke capital". But from a basic Marxist perspective, it's no surprise that a majority of the ruling class supports the party whose only consistent policy goal over the past half-century has been to cut social spending to fund tax cuts on the wealthy.
The 20% (including unaffiliated) of registered Democratic executives can probably be accounted for largely by education polarization, although note that even they give almost 40% of their political donations to Republicans (vs. ~20% of registered Rep executives' donations going to Dems), suggesting that even this minority of "woke capitalists" knows which side of the aisle their bread is buttered on.
Are the democrats proposing some huge executive tax, on the sly?
Not exactly on the sly! The Inflation Reduction Act imposed a minimum 15% tax on income for corporations with annual profits over $1 billion, created a 1% tax on stock buybacks, and closed a 3.8% tax loophole on "pass-through businesses" like law firms for individuals earning over $400k/year. Perhaps most offensive to the C-suite class, it also funds the IRS tax police to the tune of $80 billion, which is projected to have a ROI of around $200 billion from tax cheats who would otherwise have gone undetected. Overall, the CBO estimates it will increase revenues by $457 billion, most of which will be distributed to consumers of green energy, EVs, and energy-efficient home improvement in the form of tax credits.
If Dems had had one more vote in the Senate, they would have also raised the corporate tax rate to 28%, closed the carried interest loophole (which benefits private equity managers at the expense of both investors and taxpayers), and possibly required households worth over $100 million to pay a minimum 20% tax on total income (they currently pay an effective rate of around 8%). You can see how this could make even the most social-justice-minded executive reconsider the marginal value of a DNCC contribution.
Nice summary of the IRA, which I suspect will go down in history as one of the more economically-progressive pieces of US legislation in decades.
(Though that impact of the law is not yet well understood even in politically-progressive circles...I work with or adjacent to a lot of progressive activists and they yet have little to no awareness of what the IRA does other than the green energy related stuff.)
The Democrats were one vote short of raising the corporate tax rate etc, but it's likely that there are a handful of Democratic senators who'd have voted against it if it would have passed without their votes.
Having some figures in Congress who'll otherwise support party-line legislation, but will vote in favor of corporate interests in the last resort to avoid it passing, is one of the major pragmatic incentives for corporate lobbying to Democrats.
I'm not sure what your exposure to the corporate world has been. I worked over 25 years for a Fortune 50 company, heavily oriented toward engineering. I was a bit flabbergasted around 2010 when the president of my division announced a major goal of "achieving gender parity within three years." I never heard what "gender parity" meant in this context, so I don't know whether gender parity was ever achieved. A couple of years later a different (female) executive announced that promotions would be made in order to increase the number of women at higher levels of the company.
This effort was certainly not intended to appeal to young consumers, because the company's products are not sold to consumers. The products are large, very expensive pieces of equipment sold to governments (militaries) and transportation companies; consumers have very little direct exposure to the company or its products. For what it's worth, my interpretation was that these announcements were driven by the HR professionals' conclusions that employees (especially young employees) expected a strong focus on social justice from their employers.
Showing corporate diversity is even more important in a B2B setting.
* My employer enjoys significant advantages due to being a female-minority-owned business.
* Our customers - other corporations and public sector entities - want us to report to them not just our own diversity, but that of our suppliers, on down.
Such ownership certainly provides some advantages in legal terms, but they would not apply to large publicly owned companies.
Reporting of diversity is not, as far as I know, required by any law, so it seems like evidence of the "woke capitalism" that organoid seemed to doubt.
"Reporting of diversity is not, as far as I know, required by any law"
In some situations it is. That is, public sector purchasing requirements are, for practical matters, the law: to get such a contract, the vendor needs to conform to the government agency's requirement for reporting diversity stats. And to the extent that (A) the public sector is a very large portion of total purchasing; and (B) the reporting requirements must include information for the whole supply chain; it does become de facto law across the economy.
I sometimes wonder what the mandatory diversity stats look like for Spanish companies that are part of the DoD's supply chain. Can't get much more diverse than having >90% Hispanic employees.
Africa is so full of minorities.
A key prediction of materialist analysis is that executives in these situations will lend their political support not to the party that agrees with them (or the engineering graduates they're competing to hire) on the importance of gender equity in fighter jet engineering, but to the party that wants to cut executives' taxes and increase funding to the military-industrial complex. The linked dataset suggests that this holds true around 70% of the time for similar executives.
Admittedly the MIC is a bit of an edge case, since both parties love throwing money at it and the America Firsters' preference for antagonizing China instead of Russia means there's something of an antiwar fringe in both parties now. FWIW, Lockheed Martin CEO James Taiclet is a registered R whose most recent donations are to archconservatives Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Mike Rogers (R-AL) and to the Lockheed Martin Employees PAC, which seems to mostly split large, equal donations between the Democratic and Republican governors' associations and national committees.
I understand your Marxist perspective. My point is that "woke capital" gestures, in my experience, are not limited to appealing to consumers.
I'll go further: the same company is publicly committed to working to achieve "net zero" in aviation emissions. There is no path to achieve this objective with current technology, and seems to be little thought to associated costs (for instance, what are the ecological consequences in habitat destruction or deforestation of substituting palm oil for petroleum). Again, there is little or no consumer agitation for this objective, and consumers have essentially no influence on choice of suppliers. In this case, I think the companies are aiming to impress governments, especially in Europe.
All of this is just to say that executives are cross-pressured, the way that conservative religious black voters are. As it happens, conservative religious black voters, despite their cross pressures, lean heavily Democratic, while woke environmentalist executives, despite their cross pressures, lean heavily Republican.
>woke environmentalist executives, despite their cross pressures, lean heavily Republican
I find this incredibly difficult to believe. I spend my day to day working with executives and boards - not in oil & gas or some really right leaning sector.
One guess is that C suite executives probably care a great dea about deregulation, lower taxes, and more government spending in their industry, but probably do not have any objection at all to gay couples marrying, people gettting gender reassignment surgery and living as their preferred gender, or related culture war issues.
This is obviously a top down initiative. Politically driven from levels we can’t even see. Net zero makes no sense in a world driven by scientific evidence. There is no actual evidence that limits on C02 will stop the climate from changing. It’s absurd on its face. It also makes no sense in a world driven by the choices of the body politic: the attempt to achieve what’s impossible will cause enormous pain. It’s like war. It makes little sense unless you’re near the top and have a way to benefit from either the process or the outcome.
This is interesting. What makes you say that? I would think that net zero is the only thing that makes sense in the medium to long term on any scientific perspective, if you believe in a future. Net positive emissions only make sense on a very temporary basis.