What is the social-proof v. popularity twitter ratio like? - is a question I've been asking myself. I have the world's most elite human capital followed twitter account (as a ratio of my total follows) because of my substack articles, but I really haven't posted much on twitter. At the moment the list of my X followers gets me into all the important parties, but that's a function of their being easy to find.
Assuming I decide to invest in getting more X followers through threads or whatever, how many followers does one need to equal having my followers?
Oh come on, it's actually quite impressive that he's gotten 355 followers and 3.2k subscribers in such a short amount of time, especially given his... rhetoric. It's not like those subscribers are just casual viewers either; it takes very, uh... spirited belief, to be able to appreciate his articles. And there's a chance that some of those people are very important people! And maybe some of those people have suddenly found themselves in positions of power due to recent events, if you catch my drift.
I've never heard of you but if any of these parties are scheduled for anywhere in Egypt this month, I'd be willing to consider making your acquaintance.
That really depends on how much mileage you can get out of your current connections. If I'm correctly guessing what those connections are... well, they're going to be far more valuable than any amount of money.
All the money in the world isn't going to protect you against an angry populace that wants you dead. It's always just better to be on the winning side.
It's pretty hard to have all the money in the world and not have other people on your side though, even if they're more opportunists than ideological allies.
That's a good point. The Bourbons and Romanovs both were institutionally impoverished before their respective revolutions. Russia had soldiers going unpaid. The Romanovs were personally tremendously wealthy, but their wealth was rather illiquid.
People act as if revolutions happen because the poor are oppressed. More often, they seem to happen because the middle classes are strong and the elites, by comparison, are poorly organized, suffer military losses and government incapacity, etc.
Perhaps that's a bit afield from what's being discussed.
If I recall my reading of Citizens correctly, the best among the French aristocracy - contra the usual narrative - were starting businesses and getting involved in decidedly middle class activities prior to the revolution.
One may see that the aristocracy was not exactly ascendant.
Ayako Fujitani, Steven Seagal's daughter with the Japanese woman, grew up to be an actress. She starred in "Gamera Guardian of the Universe" and it's two sequels ("Attack of the Legion" and "Revenge of Iris") in the Nineties. This trilogy among the greatest kaiju-eiga films ever made and I really recommend them. Since then she has starred in many other films, but I haven't seen any of those because Gamera isn't in them.
That is interesting, I have only seen the old Gamera films and the serialized ones that got cannibalized (by Sandy Frank or somebody like him) and ended up on MST3k. There has been some buzz in America around recent Godzilla films, but I never hear these newer Gamera films mentioned.
The trilogy of Gamera films that was made in the 1990s has epic plots and absolutely fantastic special effects. Watching them after seeing the old ones is like watching Christopher Nolan's Batman movies after seeing the Adam West Batman TV show. Amazon Prime Video is streaming them all.
There is also another Gamera movie, "Gamera the Brave," which was made in the 2000s and is targeted for a younger audience again, but still has impressive special effects. Netflix also released an animated Gamera TV series last year. It has a good storyline, but the animation is done in that creepy style where they try to make 3-D CGI models look like 2-D hand-drawn animation.
>I’d always thought that Christianity beat paganism because it was inherently more attractive. Yet the Mexican youth are turning away from the stodgy boring Catholic Church en masse to worship Santa Muerte. Why?
For what it's worth, the more stereotypically pagan elements within Catholicism, like saint veneration seem particularly popular in Latin America, where demand for saints to venerate exceeds the supply, leading to folk saints: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_saint#Local_character.
The Catholic Church should be co-opting Santa Muerte rather than condemning her. Co-option of local beliefs and deities into Christianity was one of the reasons it became succesfull(This is not a gotcha against Christianity, its something I genuinly like about Catholic/Orthodox Churches).
Well, the only problem with that is the piddling little detail that it's heresy and possibly blasphemy but definitely occultism. "Santa Muerte" is not a saint, it's a personification of death and specifically invoked for bad purposes like murder. It's magic, not religion. Sure, folk religion teeters on that verge all the time, but there's a difference between "turning a prayer to a local saint into a charm" and "invoking a genuine demonic spirit to help you get away with literal murder and crime".
Yeah, I know Protestants think there's no difference there between Catholicism and witchcraft, but we do have *some* rules.
EDIT: Anyway, if you want to venerate skeletal figures, there are the Catacomb Saints:
And the commercialisation of Santa Muerte may in fact soften the image. That there are variants and that the "tarot, crystals, candles" set are getting in on the act means that the imagery and practice will probably move away from its roots in crime, the underworld, and remnants of pre-Christian beliefs and become something more rootless and commodified.
I do not mean to suggest that this is the church's doing, and nor do I have direct experience culturally - but can testify an Anglo living in a Mexican area 150 miles from the border could be forgiven for thinking that out of the richness, at least style-wise (which I've always been drawn to), that is Mexican/Spanish-Mexican heritage - the most significant thing, the thing that will last the most and that people are most desirous of sharing via commercialization, is - tediously - Dia de Los Muertos. (My local grocery store had an appropriately grotesque Dia de Los Muertos Barbie for sale.) Now without having enough interest in it to so much as watch "Coco", I realize Dia de Los Muertos has not the sinister element that Santa Muerte does. Still, the iconography seems to be a through-line, and the focus on death over life.
And it's perhaps not a coincidence that it's not uncommon even to see police cruisers with skulls decorating them. Everyone is driving around with skulls and roses.
Well, Day of the Dead is easy to cross-pollinate with Hallowe'en and the commercialised version of American Hallowe'en has now made its way across the Atlantic to replace the traditional Irish customs.
So if you want to sell Mexican heritage that makes the easiest impact and widest spread to a non-Mexican culture, anything that is "This is our version of thing you already celebrate" is the best pick. And Dia de Los Muertos Barbie sounds like the perfect hellscape result of commercial interest, cultural appropriation, rowing back on that appropriation by a new 'diverse, inclusive' form of appropriation, and the old reliable selling tat to kids.
I can't speak for the Mexican version, but traditional Hallowe'en was not so much about the focus on death *over* life, but rather death as *part* of life, particularly when it cross-pollinated with the Christian feasts of All Saints and All Souls Days. The dead are not gone (as much as you might think), they are there and still part of our family. Death is the inevitable end of life, we will all die one day. The dark of the year is the time for spirits and reflections on mortality. You can fear it, try to placate it - or accept it and celebrate it.
The American version was completely free of association with one's own dead. Had more of a harvest festival aspect perhaps. And a bit of a ritual allowing children more freedom one night a year.
I like there to be different customs. I used to love those "Christmas Around the World" type books, or those children's books about different countries (they never questioned the "nation" framework :-)) and what their celebrations are and their favorite foods and their "dress".
I might not love Day of the Dead stuff personally, on aesthetic grounds - but would appreciate it as an interesting custom and not think about it otherwise if it were not seemingly rising to pre-eminence, possibly over Christmas, eventually.
I've tried to read this comment like three times, and each time I fail to parse it. I can't tell what the object of the second sentence is, nor what "that" means in 'thinking that out of richness'. is it a referrant to what the person you're replying to thought? "you only think that out of richness" kind of thing? This is the way my brain keeps trying to parse it but it doesn't work
Ah, yes. The people who make it almost impossible to get a good deck of cards for playing French Tarot in this country.
I used to help run a traditional card gaming group, and the main host told me one day he wanted to change the name, or promote the event more. I told him that if we posted an event on Meetup titled "Tarot at the Botanical Gardens", we'd end up with a lot of very confused women with crystals.
>[...] It's magic, not religion. Sure, folk religion teeters on that verge all the time, but there's a difference between "turning a prayer to a local saint into a charm" and "invoking a genuine demonic spirit to help you get away with literal murder and crime".
I find the difference to be a purely practical one.
Sure, praying cost much less MP, but the results are unpredictable. I can never be sure what my deity of choice will do. Summons, albeit much more costly, have not once failed me.
You joke, Shinji, but there's a kernel of truth. Contra Christian copers, I claim that one of the contemporarily unacknowledged reasons Christianity beat paganism was that its god was a more effective prayer-answerer and miracle-deliverer than the older pantheon. Sadly, this is no longer the case, and if the local crossroads god or spirit of a folk hero or guardian of the dead answers prayers and provides real aid, why waste your time and attention?
(And I have found conjuration to provide somewhat unpredictable results compared to e.g. old hoodoo standbys or prayer to the deathless gods. FWIW.)
The Orthodox Church doesn't and never did co-opt local beliefs and deities, it's the same as it was 2000 years ago. Unlike the Catholic Church who "adapts to the modern times". Good luck with that
Ah, I see you have managed to avoid or be unaware of the Orthodox version of "it was all pagan anyway" that Catholicism has got; didn't you know that all the local Greek saints are just thinly-disguised Classical deities that the peasants and ordinary folk continued to worship under the noses of the clergy? 😁
"The legend of Barlaam and Josaphat was derived, via Arabic and Georgian versions, from the life story of Siddartha Gautama, known as the Buddha. The king-turned-monk Joasaphat (Arabic Yūdhasaf or Būdhasaf; Georgian Iodasaph) also gets his name from the Sanskrit Bodhisattva, the term traditionally used to refer to Gautama before his awakening. Barlaam and Ioasaph were placed in the Orthodox calendar of saints on 26 August, and in the Roman martyrology they were canonized (as "Barlaam and Josaphat") and assigned 27 November. The story was translated into Hebrew in the Middle Ages as Ben-HaMelekh ve HaNazir ("The King's Son and the Nazirite"). Thus the Buddhist story was turned into a Christian and Jewish legend."
"Barlaam and Josaphat were entered into the Greek Orthodox liturgical calendar on 26 August Julian (8 September Gregorian), and into liturgical calendar of the Slavic tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church, on 19 November Julian (2 December Gregorian)."
Sorry, friend: like the Protestants, every sword you pick up to use against us Romans turns in your hand to attack your own beliefs.
I have no Barlaam or Josaphat in my Romanian calendar and this is from the link you gave:
Barlaam and Josaphat, also known as Bilawhar and Budhasaf, are Christian saints. Their life story was not based on the life of the Gautama Buddha,[1] who may have lived several centuries before Jesus. Their story tells of the conversion of Josaphat to Christianity.
Depending on which national church where, there are variant calendars in Orthodoxy. One calendar online gives me this:
"This month, on the thirtieth day, the commemoration of our venerable Isaac the Confessor, abbot of the Dalmatian Monastery in Constantinople.
...Also on this day, the memory of the holy martyr Natalie, who was killed by the sword.
Also on this day, the memory of the venerable Varlaam, who died peacefully.
Also on this day, the commemoration of the holy martyrs Romano and Teletie, who were killed by the sword, was celebrated.
Also on this day, the commemoration of the holy martyr Evplu, who died wrapped in ox hide and exposed to the scorching sun.
Through their holy prayers, O Lord, have mercy on us and save us. Amen."
Wikipedia gives me this:
"Varlaam is a variant of the saint's name Barlaam, used in the Orthodox churches due to the Byzantine sound shift from /b/ to /v/. A shortened form is Varlam."
Varlaam is the Romanian version of the name Barlaam. Not the same Barlaam as in the legend, but it's clear that even for the Romanians, the name was being used as a saint's name to give in christening.
So the greater point is that if you are trying to maintain the Orthodox "never co-opted local deities and beliefs", you're going to run up against the same questioning and the same secular correlations drawn up since Enlightenment times (and before). You can't escape it, except by work like that done by Tim O'Neill and others, about how the origins of the great Christian feasts were not pagan.
The Orthodox slide under the radar in the West because they're not known enough or big enough to be important. Catholicism is the main church that gets attacked, and then the various Protestant ones in turn. But because Catholicism is the biggest and most monolithic, as it were, a lot of people have an interest in "well actually those Christian festivals are really not Christian" type of work. If they knew about your Romanian Orthodox claims, they'd be happy to do the same demolition job on you.
So saying "oh well the Catholics were contaminated by heresy and secularism and paganism, but not us" is not going to work there. They don't care about the Great Schism, or even that the Protestants were making the same claims in regard to Catholicism, because it's Christianity in general (as the religion that influenced them and which they left or feel is trying to impose its morality on them) that they are fighting, so they're happy to go on about 'the saints are re-purposed gods and spirits' and the like.
"Folk Orthodoxy (Russian: народное православие, romanized: narodnoe pravoslavie; Bulgarian: народно православие, romanized: narodno pravoslavie; Serbian: народно православље, naradno pravoslavlje; Latvian: narodno pravoslavlje) refers to the folk religion and syncretic elements present in the Eastern Orthodox communities. It is a subgroup of folk Christianity, similar to Folk Catholicism. Peasants incorporated many pre-Christian (pagan) beliefs and observances, including coordinating feast days with agricultural life."
See the same thing about Hallowe'en, which superficially looks correct - until you realise that the geographical areas which celebrated Hallowe'en weren't converted to Christianity until a few centuries later, and the veneration of All Saints' Day had already been established before contact was made.
"Elements of dual faith inhere in several Christian cultures. One example is All Souls' Day and All Hallow's Eve (better known as Halloween). Halloween is an ancient Celtic pagan holiday commemorating ancestors, similar to the Christian feast-day All Saints' Day. A number of Christian cultures celebrate Carnival before Great Lent, which preserves pre-Christian customs, thus combining pagan and Christian customs."
Folk *traditions* were incorporated, or better said, kept as part of the overall celebration, but were never part of the religious practice and it's not true to say that 'the church took over Hallowe'en from the pagans so as to persuade the peasant to switch over'.
The degree of syncretism in Christianity and Islam is really vastly overrated- if you want to see a *genuinely* syncretic religious tradition that actually does co-opt local deities, Hinduism or Buddhism would be much closer to the mark.
European Christians today don't have any genuine, serious theological content inherited from Slavic or Nordic paganism, just like modern African Christians (in my experience, anyway), are really much closer to what a 17th or 18th century European Christian believed than to what their animist kin of a generation or two ago believed.
See also: Voodoo, where the Loa basically result from a syncretism of Catholic saint veneration and West African religions.
In a way, it is just the logical conclusion of saint veneration. If you believe that saints are supernatural entities with specific domains (like curing specific illnesses) who can be enticed to intercede in the natural world on your behalf in the natural world, then it is also reasonable to be on the lookout for other supernatural entities the church does not want you to know about.
By contrast, a strong monotheism where the only entity allowed to enact changes on the natural world is God, and the correct way to entice them is to pray to them directly is likely less vulnerable to that failure mode. Of course, a deist world view where even God does not meddle with the universe would be even safer, but would be also hamstrung in cultural evolution, as "you can make supernatural entities intervene on your behalf" likely has a huge mass appeal.
"By contrast, a strong monotheism where the only entity allowed to enact changes on the natural world is God, and the correct way to entice them is to pray to them directly is likely less vulnerable to that failure mode."
Ah, that explains why the staunchly Puritan New England was wracked by witchcraft crazes and fears of the Devil 😀
In such a condition, the failure mode is a form of Zoroastrianism or Manicheanism - God and the Devil as equals and opposites, where the Devil is just as strong and is more inclined to intervene or be accessible to mortals who can invoke demons to do for and give to them what God won't do for or give to them.
When you strip away the layers of saints etc . you have the stark God and Devil scenario, and unless your faith is very secure and you are very confident, it's easy to be haunted by fear of the enemy which goeth about like a roaring lion - God is far away but the Devil is all too eager to get involved with and mess up humans. Placating the powers of darkness is thus one temptation as to how to cope with that message.
> In such a condition, the failure mode is a form of Zoroastrianism or Manicheanism - God and the Devil as equals and opposites
That can be fixed easily by going naturalistic about the good/evil polarity.
You don't need a counterpart to the primordial being of God, to explain why evil happens; once you have a multiplicity of beings, then evolution and game theory dynamics alone is enough to make sure they develop the structures of good and evil, and explore the whole range of possibilities. No need for interventionist or battling supernatural powers for that.
"5 days later 13 bodies were found Strung up from bridges in West Virginia, Florida, and Tennessee. Each showed signs of torture, the women showing signs of the worst sexual abuse before being shot, and the men covered in hammer blows having finally died of brain trauma and fractured skulls."
Okay, so the Steven Segal lesson is: "Make a lot of money as a bad ass movie star for a few years and then you can do whatever you want forever and ever thereafter".
Obviously this is just anecdotal but I get the feeling that other "one-time bad ass movie stars" are generally having a fun go of it long after their glory days.
Comedy stars though....well, Robin Williams of course and... I don't know, is there any way to quantify this?
And does the action star actually have to have been fit at any given point, or can Saul Goodman marry the 19 princesses of Siam because of his silly beat-em-up-on-the-bus movie?
If only there were a system of interconnected computers that one could use to find out, quickly and easily, whether an extremely famous person had a terminal illness!
I would generalize that to "Make a lot of money for a few years and then you can do whatever you want forever and ever thereafter, if you can do basic money management."
Steven Seagal ostensibly had mob connections predating and to some degree causative of his movie stardom. I think his results probably don't generalize.
Vague impression I have is that the 1980s comedy scene was a very hard world from the perspective of drug use (akin the earlier 70s music scene), and if you were big in it, you went pretty hard. There's a tax to be paid for that lifestyle. Conversely, the big action stars seemed to avoid hard drugs, generally speaking, so they have aged somewhat better (and if you had problems with hard drugs, you probably never made it to being "big"-Jan Michael Vincent would be the example here, although not an action star per se).
Some in the 1980s comedy scene went hard with their drug use, many went less hard, a few didn't go at all. Like quite literally any other corner of show business (Source: family member was in that scene, wasn't big but knew the big ones personally pre- and post-fame). Would be absolutely shocked if the same weren't true of the 1980s action-movie scene.
For 23, I would say high-rise buildings for family are pretty common in Hanoi, Vietnam. This is one of the biggest real estate tycoon in Vietnam: https://vinhomes.vn/en. And they are all about high rise buildings for family.
The best apartment dwellings from a noise perspective tend to be conversions from outdated usages. Former warehouses converted into lofts or apartments, etc. You get heavy frame construction and/or thick masonry walls. I've known several couples over the years who lived in those with new children and everybody in the house slept like a baby.
An extreme example is, for some years a fellow pro-am musician I knew was living in what had been Chicago's main "film repository" (regional distribution hub for Hollywood product). It was built in the era of nitrate film reels having a high tendency to burst into flame. This Art Deco-style building, which some years back was converted into rather great apartments, has walls that were designed to contain the occasional exploding film canisters. We used to have rehearsals/songwriting sessions at his place, he on electric bass and me on electric piano, and he never once heard a complaint from anybody. He figured we could have had the whole group in there, drums and all, and been at most a distant rumble to any neighbors.
I am genuinely happy for you and the rest of the .000001% of US residents living in an extremely specific kind of adaptively reused building stock. However, I think you'll agree that this doesn't say much about the state of noise insulation in the overwhelming majority of multifamily dwellings in the US.
Didn't offer any opinions about the state of noise insulation in the overwhelming majority of multifamily dwellings in the US, and don't plan to. I will suggest that your pedantic exasperation doesn't add value to this or any other discussion.
I can't really say for sure. But in Vietnam, most of the wall are concrete, so they are very sound-proof. Like you cannot hear the noise between the living room and bedroom. But when I lived in Japan, it was rare to find house that have concrete walls. They were usually drywall and wood. So noise was a big problem.
I'm not convinced that the counterfactual world where there is no sports gambling is notably better. If you ban sports gambling, you still have a large population of humans with addictive personalities who still get addicted to things and still waste their money on things that are probably bad for them.
If you want to address the problem, I think you need to address the root of it, which is that we have a notable population of people with addiction problems and available treatments/therapies have limited effect, and as a society we don't have better outlets available for people to get addicted to.
Banning sports betting, IMO, is just another paternalistic regulation that doesn't actually address the underlying problem.
Counterpoint: we had all those people with latent addiction problems before, but it didn't become a problem until we put casinos in everyone's pockets and let companies with giant war chests buy advertising blitzes. Putting up barriers to easily addictive behavors seems to cut down on those addictive behavors, much like how putting up barriers to impulsive suicides cuts down on impulsive suicides.
Another point: we have all these incredibly sophisticated computers in our pockets, all of them feeding utterly amoral companies with masses of data to use against us. Perhaps "paternalistic regulations" are needed just to level the playing field.
While a reasonable hypothesis, I would want some incredibly strong evidence of efficacy before taking away people's freedom to choose what content they consume.
To be convinced enough to consider taking away freedom of choice I think I would want to see two very similar jurisdictions compared over a 10 year period after one jurisdiction put up the barriers you mentioned and the other didn't (and otherwise remain similar to each other), and I would want to see a very large effect size, on the order of 30% or more difference in some significant metric chosen in advance of the experiment.
I recognize that proving such regulations are actually effective is incredibly hard, which is why I generally just default to "give people the freedom to make mistakes" because I know that gathering the data necessary to convince me that limiting freedom is acceptable is unrealistically difficult. 😖
The reason I would want to see something like the above is because I have seen *way* too many good intentioned regulations end up being completely ineffective at solving the underlying problem they set out to solve, and often they cause more harm as side effects than good. So even just trying out a regulation comes with non-trivial costs, not to mention complexity of everyone staying up to date on all of the current regulations so they don't end up in prison or fined due to not being aware.
I think when we protect people from the consequences of their own mistakes, it greatly slows down and sometimes halts the rate we as individuals/society/species learn from those mistakes.
I have made a *lot* of mistakes in my life, and most of my learning comes from the consequences of those failures. Not everyone will learn as quickly, but learning does occur when you (or someone you know) suffer the consequences of those failures, and I think is generally a bad idea to interfere with that learning process.
Since I don't care about being cancelled, I'll openly state that yes, I am okay with people suffering all of the consequences of their own choices, including the really bad/sad ones. This is the trade for allowing humans to fully explore the choice landscape, including choices that many of us probably agree are obviously bad choices. Essentially, I'm not sufficiently confident that I know for certain what is best for humanity, so I prefer to keep the search space as wide open as possible, and allow people to make what I consider to be very bad life choices.
That being said, I am *also* okay with people having local/voluntary support groups/charities to address these problems. I don't think we should stop people from helping each other, I just don't think we should be nationalizing such assistance.
What you stated in your first paragraph is a good point, and I think somewhat core to why people who start going a little bit libertarian tend to end up going all the way eventually. The inverse is also true for people who dip their toe into socialism, you kinda have to go all the way. Trying to play in the middle where the state exercises partial control over people's lives is a slippery slope in both directions, as the introduction of regulations often requires the introduction of more regulations to deal with the problems created, and the removal of regulations requires the removal of more regulations to remove the problems that the regulation was patching up.
Which jurisdictions, exactly, do you want to see used for this comparison? In order to compare one with regulations to one without, you need to let somebody use the regulations in the first place.
I'm generally a fan of testing proposed regulations on a small scale for an extended period of time before trying to scale up to larger populations. In an ideal world, we would first test regulations at a local level, then county/province, then state, then national. Each step verifying that the regulation achieved metrics agreed on in advance of implementation, when compared to some similar jurisdiction.
What I dislike is jumping straight to regulating things at the national level without strong evidence that the proposed solution actually works.
Drifting offtopic, but over and over again I encounter a pattern:
* I read newspaper reports about some policy being trialled at a local level
* a few months later I read newspaper reports about how everyone involved loved the new policy and the trial was a resounding success on all metrics
* everyone involved goes back to doing things the old way
* nothing ever happens about the policy until eventually the whole pattern repeats - may be a long or short amount of time, but in any case no sooner than the next election cycle
I've seen this pattern with things like homelessness / unemployment initiatives, four-day working weeks etc.
Meanwhile other proposals are pushed over and over with no trial or evidence that they make things better more than worse or indeed at all, until eventually the resistance doesn't resist quite hard enough and the proposal rolls out nationwide; cf. various Internet censorship /surveillance "protect the children" acts coming into force in assorted jurisdictions over the next few months.
Why does this keep happening? How do we make things actually scale up when the trial outcome suggests they should, instead of everyone involved just quietly pretending the trial never happened?
As it is, I have come to believe that the only way we can ever see actual nationwide change is to roll out the proposal nationwide - as quickly as possible, so the rollout can complete within one election cycle - then hope the next administration rolls it back if it turns out to have been a terrible idea. This is terrible and I wish it were otherwise, but that seems to be the price of being able to change anything at all in the world we live in.
>To be convinced enough to consider taking away freedom of choice I think I would want to see two very similar jurisdictions compared over a 10 year period after one jurisdiction put up the barriers you mentioned and the other didn't (and otherwise remain similar to each other), and I would want to see a very large effect size, on the order of 30% or more difference in some significant metric chosen in advance of the experiment.
Well...good luck with that. In the real world, you're going to have to be content with what we actually have, which is a comparison between the welfare of gambling addicts in the world pre-ubiquitous-online-gambling and the welfare of gambling addicts in the world post-ubiquitous-online-gambling. Yes, there are confounders, yes, they will have to be accounted for. Doesn't seem insurmountable.
Incidentally, "taking away people's freedom to choose what content they consume" sounds more like a description of the government banning an edgy Twitter account than the government forbidding online casinos from accepting cash bets on sporting events. Is there a reason you worded it that way?
I think it is important to differentiate between paternalistic regulations (victimless crimes) and regulations that prevent direct harm to others. Gambling is a victimless crime, so it is the government taking away freedom of choice from people without giving any direct protection to other people within society. Same as laws against drug use and basically every regulation one might label as paternalistic.
While one can argue that victimless crimes have downstream consequences on others in society (e.g., a drug user that resorts to theft to feed their drug habit), I think we should address the actual crime with a victim rather than reducing the freedom of choice of everyone in society because some people make bad choices that lead to more bad choices that are then crimes with victims.
I also worry that if we allow people to use the argument of "drug users resort to theft to get their fix, so we should ban drug use" as a valid argument for introducing victimless crime regulations to protect the broader society, clever people will be able to find a path between anything they dislike and some downstream consequence. For example:
People are allowed to freely engage in employment and sometimes people make bad choices and take jobs with horrible bosses. They then end up with a lot of pent up rage and take that out violently on other members of society. We should not allow people to choose their own employment in order to protect society from bad decisions made by a subset of the population when selecting a job.
> it didn't become a problem until we put casinos in everyone's pockets and let companies with giant war chests buy advertising blitzes.
Maybe unpopular opinion but: I've been thinking more and more that targeted digital advertising (and other forms of adversary algorithmic feeds) are just too socially deleterious and should probably be banned globally.
It's just too easy for ruthless companies to target your weaknesses in a way that side steps our social mechanisms of collective validation. Since the messages are tailored to you, and shown privately, you don't get to see your friends or wider society criticizing or dismissing or doubting them.
I feel like we should search for better solutions than just "ban X". Perhaps future generations will become inoculated to advertising, or perhaps we can figure out ways to inoculate people against advertising at a young age (e.g., parents teaching their children how to spot advertisements, and how to recognize that those advertisements are designed to exploit you).
Historically, the solution to problems was parents teaching children how to deal with insults from the world, and I feel like these days we are too quick to just kick the can to government to fix our problems.
Advertising itself is fine, we've had it for a few generations and we can deal with it, as long as it's *public*. Companies put their reputation in line for the ads they show us, and it can absolutely backfire if they're seen as excessively manipulative or whatever. That mechanism works fine as long as ads are publicly visible, on the street or on screens, but we all see them. They have the power of their dark psychologists and manipulation experts, but we have the power of numbers and social coherence among the lay public. It more or less balances out.
This all breaks down when they are allowed to first track our behavior and weaknesses, and then target us individually using fine-grained criteria. At that point the power differential becomes unbridgeable, so I don't think there's any other solution than a collective decision to use government power. It's not about asking the govt to fix our problems, as if they were some weird entity out there with its own agendas; it's about us together using what's left of our democratic powers to coordinate fixing them through the mechanisms of government.
It's fine to ban entire business models when they are deemed deletorious to society in ways that cannot be fixed. I think it's time to start recognizing that most of Meta's model is unfixable in this way.
I would say you're making too much of advertising. I don't think I was much less likely to ignore advertising on the interwebs in the olden days of untargeted ads than I am now. These weaknesses you're speaking of...I don't think most people actually have them.
It's weird. I feel like targeted advertising has relatively little negative impact on me and I'm capable of dealing with it critically or just ignoring everything which is not subject to the social review you allude to. But it seems like there are a significant number of people who are deeply impacted by targeted ads. And I wonder what the difference between us is, that gives us such radically different life experiences. From what you say, you seem to rely a lot on social criticism and you're much less critical when that criticism is absent and also don't actively seek such social review if you need it, i.e. "Bob, what do you think of this ad. I'm thinking of buying the product...") That summary is probably at least a little off base, but where do you think it falls short?
OK it's a bit off-topic and late, but let me explain myself a bit. I'm certainly not worried about Joe Rando buying an extra toaster he doesn't really need. I'm worried about the impact of targeted messages of many kinds: pushing addictive things like gambling or get-rich-quick schemes while targeting those who are most likely to be vulnerable to those messages. Pushing culty and crazy ideas that the wider population would laugh at, specifically at those who are likely to fall for them. It's yet another way in which community is lost; in a well-functioning society we're all together part of the wider culture's immune system, which is part of the feedback loop where new ideas are tried out, "out there" stuff gets initial traction, but then things that turn out to be bad ideas are naturally weeded out.
But when anyone with money or clout can push their chosen messages at targeted groups without the rest of society even noticing, the salutary feedback loop is no longer there, and you get what we're seeing more and more of since the algorithmic feed took off: craziness spinning out of control, fueled by a mix of large-system effects among the larger well-meaning population, to which you can certainly add a whole lot of hostile actors and foreign powers who have everything to win by weakening Western countries, and whom we have just handed an easy and cheap way to sow discord.
And the generic tool that is allowing these things to happen is the algorithmic feed. Social media feeds present themselves as a combination of ads and "organic" content, but both of them are hostile algorithmic feeds, optimized against the user's best interest, and that can be manipulated for shockingly low money.
I think this is right. As gambling crept back into repute as a way to enrich state coffers, prelude to the lottery it was salivating for, my state legalized pari-mutuel racing in the 80s, and I recall going to a track with my parents. I was looking forward to it. Somehow the result was super-boring. There weren't many people there. Anyway, my father wasn't especially interested in horses*, outside of Dick Francis novels anyway - he'd just gone along with some friends in investing in a quarter horse. (That was his kind of betting, and I'm sure it turned out much like his investment in something rather pathetically called "Club Dallas" lol.)
Anyway, the track just gave off this vibe of utter loser-dom which was uncomfortable in that perspective-shaking way for a kid dragged along to something with her parents.
The lameness of it served as a kind of barrier, I imagine, and the track went out of business - as, basically, did the even lamer greyhound racing track in another city. Which remains, to this day, a giant dystopian hole in the urban fabric.
*Though as a child in that urban/semi-rural fringe, he liked to find a horse or a cow and lead it home with him, my grandmother then discovering it tied up in the yard.**
**He once went on a week-long winter hunting trip in the Bob Marshall Wilderness - as someone who had scarcely ever sat a horse since childhood, I imagine - on horseback, and I believe he didn't much enjoy it. I'm pretty sure it would have been the greatest week of my life, horses or no.
If sports gambling had been observed to lead addictive personalities away from more self-destructive forms of behavior (like, leading to fewer opioid overdoses), you'd have a point, but it hasn't. As it stands, it's just an additional very low-threshold, legal way of ruining one's life on top of many less-convenient, less-legal ways.
Also, refusing to tackle a specific problem using well-understood steps because that wouldn't fix the broader underlying issue that no one has an idea how to fix (let alone fix without intrusive paternalistic measures) is not very helpful.
I would argue that gambling isn't a "specific problem". There are plenty of people in the world who engage in casual gambling (e.g., poker with friends once a week, or a trip to Las Vegas once a year) without deleterious negative effects and many times there are positive effects (socialization, stress release, entertainment, etc.). IIUC, the proposal here is to take away some types of gambling from everyone because a subset of people have a problem (addiction) that we don't know how to solve.
I'm generally quite wary of removing a freedom from an entire population because a small subpopulation doesn't do well with that freedom of choice. This feels like one of those situations where we recognize a problem (addiction), we don't have a good solution, so we are left implementing solutions we know have negative externalities so we can at least say we tried to do something. I would rather live in a society where some degenerate gamblers ruin their own lives because they don't do well with free choice, than a society where freedom of choice is removed to protect a handful of people from themselves.
It is also worth mentioning that there are *many* ways to gamble besides sports betting, including lotteries (which are run by the same governments that ban sports betting), many mobile games, uninformed stock trading, etc. and many of these alternatives are just as predatory. However, taking away people's ability to trade stocks has even greater negative externalities, so at best we are just redirecting from sports to something else.
Zvi's post is specifically about basically unrestricted access to sports gambling, which was illegal not so long ago, was made legal by specific legislation, and had measurable negative impact, as explained in the post. I don't see the big issue with making something that was illegal ten years ago illegal again.
Also, sure, there are many forms of gambling, and many of them are more or less harmful. But there is a qualitative difference in having to travel to a specific place and going to a specific building in order to gamble vs. just betting anywhere, anytime, with one click. IMO, it is the duty of society to find the right level of gatekeeping for vices like this, and "but Freedom! Freedom, I tell you!" is a lazy way of shirking that responsibility.
(BTW, I'm not convinced that everyone should have the right to "trade" in stocks - meaning, opportunistic buying and selling at the drop of a hat, rather than long-term investment - including people who have never heard of the efficient market hypothesis.)
Every single one of Zvi's arguments would apply to legal prediction markets, despite his afterthought-like three-sentence paragraph saying "no, prediction markets are different (but I offer no rationale why)".
Does this mean that opening prediction markets was followed by an observable spike in bad outcomes? Because that seems to be the crux of his argument. He didn't oppose sports betting before taking in that data.
Prediction markets don't currently have enough of an audience to make a measurable spike in anything. But if prediction markets were widely used, there's no reason to expect different social effects. Sports gambling is literally a prediction market on sports.
Prediction market bets don't lend themselves to the impulsive short time horizons or spectator excitement aspects of sports betting. There's no shared culture that has been exploited for prediction markets like there is for sports betting, except maybe around election results, but aside from the presidential election every four years nobody cares.
The people who oppose legalized prediction markets make exactly this argument. The fact that they're illegal prevents them from being part of popular culture.
If you want legal prediction markets, you need to accept that a sportsbetting-like culture will grow up around it. You don't get to choose "this is only going to be for policy wonks and bay area technologists".
Sports gambling piggybacks on a popular, commonplace social activity (watching sports)
I'm not sure prediction markets do so, except for predicting election results, and elections are a heck of a lot less common than sporting events.
That said, I do not share the general fondness here for prediction markets, and wouldn't at all mind if they (or just gambling on election results) were banned too.
> IMO, it is the duty of society to find the right level of gatekeeping for vices like this, and "but Freedom! Freedom, I tell you!" is a lazy way of shirking that responsibility.
My belief in maximizing liberty isn't because I'm too lazy to formulate an argument against paternalism, but rather because we can look at history and see that paternalism often causes more harm than good, governments often exploit their population rather than protect it (see lotteries run by states while they simultaneously ban gambling), and in general more liberal societies tend to make more progress (something I like) than more paternalistic societies.
Also, as I mentioned in the OP I'm not convinced that this specific solution actually solves the real problem, which is that some people struggle to function in modern society.
I don't know about that. Lotteries and scratch tickets are pretty bad. Of course, you can't buy those tickets from an app that sends you push notifications every hour (afaik, yet)
That's probably only due to many years of lobbying and dirty tricks from the tobacco industry. If tobacco was arriving now for the first time into the wider world, but we still knew all we currently know about its negative effects on health and highly addictive nature (e.g b/c some small third world country had a full cigarette culture), it would probably be made illegal in a jiffy.
Yes, I have no doubt you are right about tobacco being made illegal immediately if it were to come up now. But gambling hasn’t just come up now, it has been around for a long time. This is a bump in availability and marketing.
Note that Zvi is specifically not at all proposing banning sports gambling altogether - They're saying that the reduced friction increases compulsive behaviour, which vice versa means more friction may be good.
And as someone with a problem with compulsive-addictive behaviour - although at least not as destructively as gambling, namely gaming and extreme reading habits - I couldn't agree more. People don't spring into existence already addicted, they become addicted through easy access to addictive goods, and some people have a personality type that makes it easier to get addicted to certain things. Even worse, this is more a difference of degree than kind - somebody who might have had no trouble resisting addictive gambling when he has to go to a physical casino may have great trouble when it's always available on a phone.
You're line of argument is imo equivalent to saying that, instead of helping people with nut allergy to avoid nuts, we should just give them better nuts.
What is being proposed isn't "help people with nut allergies avoid nuts", it is "make it so no one is allowed to eat nuts". We should not restrict the freedom of all members of society because a small fraction struggle to manage that particular freedom well.
I’m not sure that’s a fair analogy. Sports betting would still exist, it just couldn’t be done as casually. Even when you buy a case of beer there’s friction in the form of an ID check and extra taxes and laws about where exactly you can drink it and what you’re allowed to do while you’re lit.
No, if you want to phrase it more negatively you could say this is like "make nuts more cumbersome to get for everyone". But sports betting will continue to exist just fine.
I understand your concern, and I'm strongly against outlawing almost anything, but imo you underestimate the value of appropriate friction. There's an extremely wide range of convenience for different things, and moving generally destructive things to high-friction is not at all like making it illegal.
There's also some great country-based initiatives mentioned in the comments to Zvi's article where you can sign up by your own volition and they make it so that you can't gamble anymore. This wouldn't give any trouble to responsible gamblers (or even irresponsible gamblers who just don't sign up). Imo there's many things you can try that disproportionally help people with addiction but minimally impact people without.
I think it's worth recognizing here that the companies involved in the types of sports betting discussed here will outright kick people off their sites if they seem too canny and effective with their betting. So it's kind of like if some portion of people have nut allergies which cause them to pass out insensate but not die, and companies are taking advantage of that to specifically serve nuts to those people to make them pass out and rob them, and they have no interest in serving nuts to the rest of the population. Should their freedom to preserve their business model of serving nuts specifically to allergic people so they can rob them be preserved because some people are able to eat nuts safely?
I *would* like to see a solution to what feels a lot like fraud, where betting establishments don't let people win (essentially). But I feel like solving that is unlikely to address the addiction side of the problem in a meaningful way.
I agree that we as a society still struggle to address the root cause of addictive behaviors.
Regarding the broken bone analogy, I think banning gambling is akin to telling everyone they aren't allowed to ride bicycles anymore because some subset of people break bones when riding them. I know there are some helicopter parents out there who would support this, but I don't think it is a good solution to implement society wide restrictions because a subset of the population struggle to be effective in an unrestricted society.
That doesn't apply here. The question isn't banning gambling, it's about banning specific types of gambling that are particularly likely to suck in addicts. There's no bicycle analogy because there's no such thing as being addiucted to bicycles. Furthermore, bicycle manufacturers don't make most of their money from customers who break bones by orders of magnitude more than regular customers.
Modern sports gambling isn't "spend $2000 on the World Series, your team lost, now you can't go on vacation."
It's "spend $5 on whether the next pitch is a ball or strike, repeated 100x a night, 7 nights a week" and if you are any good at it they close your account.
I do feel like the whole "close your account if you are good" feels like it is getting close to fraud, but I'm not sure exactly how to address it using existing laws. I don't think banning sports gambling altogether, or all online sports betting, is the right solution though as it is too much of a blunt solution to a pretty narrow problem.
I recognize that solving the "looks like fraud" problem doesn't address the addiction problem, but perhaps the solution will help dissuade people from participating in the first place if such policies were more clear and widely known.
I agree that it's a problem if winning at sports betting gets you banned. However, I'm not sure how many Americans (in the modern age of online betting) are making actual profits on betting, or were just trying to wring every drop out of all the promos, special offers, etc. offered by various companies. There's a fantasy that a whole bunch of us are smart enough the beat the bookies at their own game, but realistically, that's just not very likely. If the companies lose too much, the odds they offer just get worse and worse for the player.
I'm almost always sympathetic to libertarian arguments, so I don't necessarily want to see things banned just because some people can't use them responsibly. But I think there's a lot that could be done short of banning online sports betting--you could ban all the sports betting TV commercials, for one.
I've dabbled in sports betting, but at this point I rarely bother. Besides, even if I did make any money, it would probably be a tax nightmare. I'd happily trade away legal online sports betting if we could get legal online poker back.
I'm not sure winning more than you lose is a fantasy. I think it's more that the bookies are rarely wrong, and so to take advantage of their occasional screw-up you need to have a lot of liquidity sitting around idle, and then you need to keep putting up bets with a tiny little edge until the odds even out. If you're just motivated to make money then you'd be better off sticking that wealth in an ETF and getting a job.
So in the sense that you're playing a game against them, you can "win" a pyrrhic victory.
The way that the sites justify the policy of banning winners is that the TOS says that it's a site for "recreational bettors". The other people are "professional bettors". If you are a winner, you could be trying to be a professional bettor, so they now have the right to cut you off.
It's only 90% as explicit as that, but that's how they do it.
There's a pattern where companies get to try to self regulate for a while, and if a subset go really beyond the pale, the whole field gets beaten down with badly written, borderline vindictive regulation. For example, the FDA and 1920s radium medicine, or the GDPR cookie banner hell coming out of Zuckerberg's "They trusted us, the dumb fucks."
I would be shocked if the current crop of gambling apps can behave themselves well enough to avoid this fate.
This doesn't really depend on what threshold of harm the government picks for giving up on principle and rolling out the endlessly snowballing draconian regulation: once doing harm is exponentially profitable, the harm will just double every 18 months or whatever until it meets the threshold. Even if we don't set any threshold, that just puts the threshold at when the people riot in the streets, kill the libertarians in charge, and drag everyone into communist famine. A high bar, but exponential growth can get there fast! We recently got a hint of how close we are to that level with regard to healthcare.
For clarity, are you trying to describe "what is" here, or "what should be"? I think you are just describing the way the world works to which I don't really have any reasonable rebuttal other than "I think we should strive to build and live in a world that doesn't work like that.
Unfortunately there is precedent in *some* jurisdictions for casinos being able to refuse your action if you're any good. Brick-and-mortar casinos routinely ban blackjack players who engage in card counting, a practice that involves no actual cheating whatsoever but rather consists of paying attention to which cards of what value have been dealt from the pack(s) so far and adjusting your betting strategy, which therefore rounds out simply to "being really really good at blackjack."
(Note that in some jurisdictions, casinos are in fact banned from banning card counters. So there's precedent in both directions.)
I would like to see a solution to the problem of bookies kicking people out when they are profitable. This feels like fraud to me because they implicitly advertise to users that they can make money if they are good (particularly in sports betting), and then prevent them from actually achieving that implicit commitment. I'm not sure exactly how to deal with this situation though without some curve fitted or overly prescriptive solution that leaves us in an even worse spot.
I think the bigger issue is not gambling per se, but gambling via smartphone apps. It's much harder to control one's gambling when all it requires is pulling your phone out of your pocket and tapping on the screen a few times rather than physically traveling to a casino. I don't know if I want to tell people they can't ever use these apps, but I wouldn't argue with some paternalistic regulation that required each app to send you a message periodically saying "are you sure you want to keep these gambling apps on your phone? Do you realize how dumb that is?" Maybe they should have an algorithm that makes fun of you when you lose, too. "Putting Will Levis' team in a parlay? Are you drunk, or just a moron?" Stuff like that. Make it fun.
Consider the case of Vietnam veterans who were addicted to opiates, but who then were no longer addicted when in a new context (home) where it was hard to get the drug, and where there was less environmental/ social temptation to do so.
Sounds like he means what we would hear as Gibberish. He seems to be claiming it's meaningful. Paul in the Bible says that speaking in tongues is worthless unless you have an interpreter, so even if he's speaking in another language I'm not sure how meaningful that is unless someone can interpret what he's saying.
I believe the conceit is that the language he's speaking is a real one, but one that's ancient and now forgotten. So it SOUNDS like Gibberish, but it's actually more analogous to your Icelandic example.
(I'm not sure if anyone has ever claimed to speak a language that's incomprehensible because it's from the far FUTURE.)
You could also look at things like "is he using only phonemes that appear in English" (plus maybe one or two extras that he'd have heard of). I don't think people who speak in tongues use many Xhosa clicks.
They actually have done statistical analysis on speaking in tongues. The results don't look like real language, but also don't look like someone deliberately producing gibberish.
"Speaking in tongues" is a common thing in certain types of Christianity. No one understands the words, so, to a skeptic, it's gibberish. But the speaker probably sincerely believes they're saying something, even if they don't know what.
2: Criminally missed opportunity to fine them 1 googol dollars.
16: I think the causality is reversed here, the Nazis appropriated a bunch of their symbolism from other cultures. Eg the swastika was used in a lot of Hindu/Buddhist cultures, eagles were a big part of Germanic pagan (Norse) culture, etc.
33: gallons/mile being (length^3)/length = length^2 is pretty mind bending.
34: This seems like a much higher caliber of conspiracy theory than we get here in the US. If aliens had the whole universe to pick as a destination to fly their UFOs, would they go to New Jersey? I mean come on.
54: Re my comment on 34, of all the lame things to come up with.
> 16: I think the causality is reversed here, the Nazis appropriated a bunch of their symbolism from other cultures.
The combination of the color scheme, the angular emblem, and the eagle all at once seems like an awfully big coincidence for reverse causality to be plausible. If you have evidence of Inca iconography using those elements from before the 1930s I suppose I can be convinced but otherwise c'mon.
The angular emblem is a chakana, which predates Nazi Germany by quite a few centuries. If a red/white color scheme on a flag and eagle symbolism are Nazism, then the US trivially qualifies. Again, the Nazi symbols show up everywhere because they just took stuff from a bunch of other mythologies and threw it together.
ETA: The founder of the movement, the father of the guy in the picture, was a member of the Peru Communist Party and also a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist group.
US color scheme red white blue. Nazis use red-white-black. Also with that particular arangement (black symbol in white circle on red background). Also use by the Russian National Bolsheviks party (aka "Nazbols")
Also amusingly, the military gear they are using is American (which makes sense for the region); if they'd wanted to go with Nazi-inspired elements, they probably could have found some, as the stahlhelm was widely used in Latin America.
33. My answer: suppose your car has no gas tank, and there's a gasoline filled trough along the road that you drive along, and the car slurps up the gas that it passes. The cross sectional area of the trough needs to be at least your car's gallons per mile to sustain the car's speed.
I also donated a kidney this past June thanks to Scott's article. It was such an inspiring, funny, and informative post! I really think it goes down as one of his best.
I'm going to jump on this thread to remind everyone that, according to Scott, one of the three takeaways you should have from the article is that we should modify NOTA to allow compensation for organ donation.
The Coalition to Modify NOTA has made huge strides since Scott wrote about it. Elaine Perlman, after receiving an ACX grant to work on this full time, has been an absolute powerhouse, organizing a very effective campaign. We now have a bill in the house (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/9275/text) and need every bit of help we can to get it passed. Mostly we're just looking for constituents in every state to reach out to their congresspeople. You can get looped into the emails/monthly zoom meetings by signing up at modifynota.org.
> I think the best path from here is to cut losses and try to figure out how to restrict online sports betting without collateral damage to potentially positive-sum things like investments, financial innovation, and prediction markets.
In the US, online gamblers already have to declare their identity. The IRS is already notified of wins over a certain threshold. Building on those, one potential compromise would be letting gamblers wager up to 10% of their previous year's income (as declared in taxes) per year.
Positives I see
-creates an incentive for gamblers to earn more income
-isn't as coercive as banning online/all gambling
-less illegal gambling than in the gambling-banned scenario
I would exempt foreign visitors. But this means US dual citizens could evade the limit by using their other passport(s).
> If you read the Iliad, it either speaks to you and transforms your soul, or it doesn’t. Nobody says “I just finished the Iliad - give me a second to check whether it was novel for its time or not, so I can decide whether my soul should be transformed.”
For me, art appreciation *is* coupled with my understanding of the social context of the work. And at the same time, understanding how art and aesthetics have progressed adds a rich texture to my understanding of history — for example, the decline of Christian symbolism in European art documents a real shift in consciousness.
The fact that different social, economic, political, and cultural circumstances led to the formation of different movements and genres is crucial to understanding why contemporary aesthetics are the way they are.
For instance, Suprematism only makes sense in the context of the Russian revolution; Dadaism requires post-WWI malaise; the Blues exists in the context of slavery and segregation.
And just as you can't really understand Rock 'n Roll if you don't get the Blues, the biggest name in contemporary architecture, Zaha Hadid, is only understandable in context of Suprematism.
I disagree, about music, at least. Blues and rock'n'roll are quite good without any context. The tunes are fun, danceable and light on lyrics. You miss a lot of undertones if you don't dig the jive, but this doesn't lessen the enjoyment of songs. I consider myself to be quite a lover of both of these styles, yet I care only very little about their social context, even though now - many years after I began listening to this music - I know enough about it.
Compare and contrast literature: I get that "War and Peace" and "Crime and Punishment" were big hits in its time, but I can't find even an iota of enjoyment in either of them, even though I had their social context drilled into my head at school (I didn't even finish the later, because it was so atrociously miserable, yet I wrote A+ graded essay, which was mentioned to the whole class by our teacher).
I also happen to enjoy country music (of various sub-styles and periods) a lot, even though I'm as far removed from a cowboy or a redneck farmer or a truck driver as can be, and probably know very little about life of one, aside from stereotypes I learned from those same songs.
For what it's worth, I enjoyed War and Peace quite a lot, although I am something of a military/history buff (not really possible to understand one without the other).
I agree with your general point, though. I enjoy music for what it is. I enjoyed classical music long before getting into history--and, on the flip side, all the historical context in the world isn't going to make me appreciate Cubism or whatever.
Music is a weird one. I heard 100s of Rock and Roll songs before my first Blues song, and I don’t think I only understood them after I listened to the Blues. Maybe I gained a little more appreciation, but Rock is still enjoyable on its own.
Of course rock is enjoyable on its own. But to fully *appreciate* art requires knowledge of its lineage, I contend. Beyond the question of valence (do I like the work?) is a question of understanding (why is the work the way that it is?).
Lots of people like songs without understanding the lyrics or having any sense of its musical structure. But to really love a song, you should inquire into what it means.
“Banks are unaccountable, amoral actors…” I don’t think it’s that simple. Here’s JP Koning:
“Hard-core privacy advocates and civil libertarians would probably describe me as a sell-out or a wishy-washy centrist because I'm willing to compromise on financial privacy. Fair enough. But I do wonder how many privacy advocates would go so far as to call for an all-out decriminalization of money laundering. Doing so would maximize privacy, but surely no privacy advocate thinks that bankers who clean money for the mob should by allowed to walk free. We are probably closer than they think.”
> Doing so would maximize privacy, but surely no privacy advocate thinks that bankers who clean money for the mob should by allowed to walk free. We are probably closer than they think.
I'll bite - this is me, I don't care about money laundering. KYC laws have manifestly done nothing to stop cartels, Mafia, drug dealers, or other criminals from pursuing their trades and amassing money and power, in every country in the world.
On the other hand they definitely HAVE led to colossal pains in the asses, unbanking, and tons of bureaucracy for regular law abiding people.
This might be true, but it's hard to compare how much criminal activity we'd see in the counterfactual of no measures against money laundering without getting to run the experiment. We can't expect any measure to stop all organized crime, the question is how much difference it makes.
> KYC laws have manifestly done nothing to stop cartels, Mafia, drug dealers, or other criminals from pursuing their trades
They've not reduced these things to zero, but few non-draconian measures will. The optimal amount of fraud, as Patrick McKenzie famously discusses at length, is not zero. What they've done is made things harder and more expensive for the criminals. As someone with a window into risk management from the bank's side, I can tell you right now that we would have a /lot/ more of all of this stuff without KYC, SARs etc etc. (EDIT: admittedly not in the US; perhaps things are erring the wrong way there, I wouldn't know - though the McKenzie article suggests, for crypto in particular, otherwise).
"KYC laws have manifestly done nothing to stop cartels, Mafia, drug dealers, or other criminals from pursuing their trades and amassing money and power, in every country in the world."
There is a big gap between "have done nothing, in every country of the world" and "do not work perfectly". Just two weeks ago Didier Reynders, the former Belgian EU Commissioner for Justice (of all things) was caught laundering money. He was caught because a lotto company followed the law and reported him for placing suspicious amounts of money on bets.
Obviously, money laundering laws can not stop money laundering in all cases, especially against super-powerful organizations. They can definitely not stop a mafia which controls judges and has already amassed enough power to be immune to law. But they do work sometimes.
Because organized crime is cancerous to society in a way people knowing it only through the Sopranos cannot even phantom.
Alas, we are at the point where significant swathes of the country are demanding the head of doctors prescribing opioids, do you really think "yeah this guy was taking money from the cartels selling fent walked free, but who cares, paperwork is annoying" is going to fly?
This is too strong, but directionally correct. The more defensible claim, one I believe strongly, is that it is actually worth tolerating nontrivially more organized criminals getting away with money laundering in order to spare innocent people these stupid, capricious, despotic hassles. It's not our fault as ordinary money-transferring citizens that money launderers exist, and we are being shat on for standard concentrated benefit/diffuse cost Mancur Olson reasons.
Patrick McKenzie has convinced me that, to the extent they do "work" (and that's rather debatable), the existing KYC and AML regimes are increasingly just backdoor ways for finance to plausibly-deniably cosplay as a government enforcement arm for unrelated policies/political jockeying. The charge might not be accurate with this particular crypto* case, but having seen the same sort of scenario actually play out several times in the past...well, skepticism is certainly the proper approach. The optimal amount of money laundering is not zero.
*I know it's not what the term actually means, but is the increasing right-wing embrace of non-fiat currency...crypto-fascism?
I think an obvious counterargument here would be that financial crimes are going to grow in sophistication, particularly as technology makes this much, much easier. The pre-9/11 era was much less online, people didn't have access to nearly as good computers, there were no cryptocurrencies, etc.
It's entirely plausible that if you went back to a pre-2001 enforcement regime that it would make it trivial for everybody to do all the money-laundering they wanted.
Whether the current regulations are cost-effective is hard to say, though, since it's probably mostly a question of how much it deters actions in the first place.
It is possible to hurt people in ways that do not involve physically walking up to them and punching them. Indeed, less direct approaches are generally more efficient.
You punch a person once, you have blood on your hands and one person suffers for a little while. You siphon trillions of dollars from an economy, you make a whole population suffer while your own hands are clean; you've not directly caused them harm - the market did it on your behalf!
Banks have people whose full time job it is to look at the subset of their customers who are "politically connected persons" and work out whether they're the sort of person who will make the bank end up in newspaper headlines when the disgruntled populace finally can't take it any more, raid their private palace and find the bank statements. They're far from perfect, as evidenced by banks ending up in newspaper headlines for being enablers in this sort of scenario on a somewhat regular basis, but they learn and get a little better at what they do every time.
See also funding terrorism, etc etc. Often it is the same people complaining about banks being too risk averse and about banks allowing too much money to get siphoned to nasty ends.
Sadly, the most intelligent of the bad actors are much better at looking like regular folk than the weirder regular folk are at not looking like bad actors, and therefore past a certain point you cannot bring false negatives down without the false positives going up. The best you can do is find some kind of balance between the volume of complaints about one vs the other. For the bank, getting this balance too wrong in either direction is potentially an existential problem; they cannot afford to ignore it.
* regulators have done all sorts of *complete fucking bullshit* such that they deserve no expectation of good faith
* no, really, there's a lot of bullshit, enough I need two bullets points, because the regulators lie while extra-judicially debanking people for political reasons
* CFPB is full of many kinds of bullshit, but not *debanking* bullshit
* while the CFPB is nominally anti-debanking, if you just read their press releases you would have no idea about this since they spend all their energy on other things
* even without shenanigans, crypto firms often ended up doing things that set off alarm bells even for the most fair-minded regulators
>"But I do wonder how many privacy advocates would go so far as to call for an all-out decriminalization of money laundering."
If you can explain how money laundering per se deprives a specific person of life, liberty, or property through force or fraud, then I could be convinced to oppose decriminalization. Without that it appears victimless and therefore calling it a "crime" is nonsense.
Consider a gang of thieves. One guy goes into a building and steals stuff. One guy keeps a lookout. One guy drives the getaway car.
Only the one that actually went in and took things directly deprived anyone of property. However, the crime would not have succeeded without the others. It is a cooperative effort, and therefore all the gang members are culpable.
Now we have a fourth person involved: the launderer. Their job is to hide the origin of the money so the gang can use it; because if this is not done properly, investigations will reveal what happened, whatever is left of the money will be returned and the gang tried, just as in the case where the lookout or the getaway driver fail at their respective tasks.
They are a key part of what is happening, and carry responsibility. Without their involvement, the property will return to its rightful owner. They are to stolen money what a fence is to stolen goods.
Same pattern with fraud, contract killings etc etc
If the launderer is a member of the conspiracy, then you get them when you get the actual thief and offer him a year off his sentence for every co-conspirator he rats out. If the "launderer" is just a banker who respects his customer's privacy, then he's not the problem. Either way, try going after the actual thief if you want to stop the thefts.
Yes, this is exactly what the people investigating financial transactions are doing. A banker who fails to cooperate is either negligent or malicious, and is punished accordingly. Also, note how far the goalposts have now moved from “money laundering is a victimless crime”.
I checked the USC for money laundering (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1956) and was surprised to discover that every branch includes elements of knowing and specific unlawful activity so I will concede that, as codified, money laundering is not victimless.
That said, in practice KYC laws undermine that by criminalizing passively not meeting the knowing element. So it's really the crime of "declining to surveil your customers" (is often rounded off to "money laundering" in casual conversation) that's victimless. It's an end run around the Fourth Amendment, akin to criminalizing phone companies for *not* monitoring every text & call.
Note that KYC and AML are different, separate, independent sets of requirements. One is about checking whether e.g. a potential customer is a sanctioned Russian, the other is about looking for suspicious patterns in transaction flows.
I'll call for an all-out decriminalization of money laundering, at least until we can find a way to combat money laundering without hurting innocent bystanders, Bankers who clean money for the mob are no different than grocery-store owners who sell food to mobsters; are we next going to have know-your-customer laws for the grocery and restaurant industry so as to starve out the mob? And anyone who is mistaken for a mobster?
If there's a problem, it's the mob, so fight the damn mob already. If the mob is hurting innocent people, then you can have them tell you when and where that happens and now you know where to look for the mob. If the mob is just satisfying people's desires for what society declares to be illicit vices, such that nobody is willing to complain, then maybe the mob isn't the problem.
…no, money launderers are like grocery-store owners who sell food *for* mobsters. You know that bodega that never seems to have any customers or refresh its stock but also never quite seems to go bankrupt? That’s… that’s literally a money launderer. Their purpose is to make the other crimes succeed, they are part of the criminal system and their activity is criminal.
> so fight the damn mob already
We’re trying, despite libertarians who keep defending them for some reason.
I once heard a statistic that the UK anti-fraud regulations cost regular customers about 30x the amount of actual fraud prevented. If you have dealt a UK bank, and I have dealt with several, you will understand how absolutely kafka-esque they are to deal with (Barclay's being by far the worst). The economic losses are enormous.
I am based in the UK, bank there and have literally never had a problem with KYC/AML; and neither has anyone else I know. What on earth do you do to get on their radar?
30: It seems to me that, to the extent that the Coinbase/law firm blacklisting thing has teeth, there would be a market dynamic that could moderate it. Just like when investors avoid certain stocks for ESG reasons, they make those stocks more attractive to other investors by improving their expected returns. I guess this is one way that markets can help to promote cooperation even in a large world with a wide diversity of opinions.
It's more simply understood as Death Worship. I've investigated the matter up close in Tijuana, Mexico City and Culiacan (those who know, know).
Without getting into why religion-shaped holes exist, in certain environments it's "nice" to have a simple faith that regards murder as not just *good*, but rewarded.
The psychosis that arises from environmentally-imposed superegos at war with evolutionary necessities (not to mention the id) may be the greatest madness to beset man since the invention of monotheism.
Santa Muerta beautifully frees devotees from such morality without ridiculously demanding they become Nietzscheans -- something silly ole Friedrich himself couldn't pull off.
Some cunning? and evil? Catholic could turn these people into modern Crusaders fighting for persecuted Christians in the Middle East or something. A violent strain exemplified by the Crusaders and Conquistadors existed in Western Christianity but has more or less died out in the past few centuries, but it is possible someone could ressurect it back. Islamists pulled it off bringing Jihad back into the popular conscisouness of Muslims in the past few decades resulting in Indonesians and Nigerians for example fighting for some faction in Syria (However, I do think its easier for Muslims, as the violent strain was there from the beggining. For Christians it took 3 centuries to gain any temporal power and thus waging any religious warfare) .
It isn't about giving you license to do evil for no reason whtsoever, it's specifically tailored to the realities of Mexico's horrifying drug murder world.
Re: A violent strain exemplified by the Crusaders and Conquistadors existed in Western Christianity but has more or less died out in the past few centuries, but it is possible someone could ressurect it back.
Why? Christendom did not cover itself with glory when it slaughtered unbelievers indiscriminately and even sacked Orthodox Constantinople. And in a world where nukes exist do we really want to resurrect a violent strain?
I have never looked carefully into it, but I was still living in Mexico in the 2000's, when it started to be a thing. It is not a coincidence that it began gaining popularity in Tepito, which is the largest criminal hub in Mexico City.
I left about fifteen years ago and haven't really kept track, but I will go out on a limb and say that the quite excellent imagery is to be thanked for a big part of its popularity.
55: (From Wikipedia) the majority of Santa Muerte followers are young women; this makes me think of the vast number of young Western women who've come to think of themselves as witches in recent years. In both cases, it doesn't matter that at a societal level Christianity outperforms paganism; the new pagans are rejecting an establishment that is perceived (perhaps correctly?) as marginalising them. If the establishment were pagan presumably they'd instead be turning to Christianity as a way to get their spiritual fix without getting it from the establishment they mistrust - and in fact isn't this basically how Christianity originally gained its foothold?
Learning about Santa Muerta by the eunichs who write for wikipedia about persecuted lady believers is about as fruitful as learning about Judaism by watching that lady rabbi Che wheels onto Weekend Update as part of his joke on Colin.
I read Scott's write-up on the matter and wondered what the hell he was talking about.
Trust me, the lady rabbi on SNL is the most apt analogy here.
The first major EA conspiracy theory was that we were just hyping up the threat of catastrophic AI to make money. The theory goes that we make a big fuss about the dangers posed by AI, this propagates the idea that frontier AI systems are extremely capable and economically lucrative, which drives up tech stock prices and accelerates adoption of AI, which makes the AI tech companies more valuable. It's extremely dumb and will reliably get you a chorus of hardy agreement in many corners of the Internet that consider themselves conspiracy-theory-proof.
Ya, I'm on Hacker News way more than anywhere else, but there this accusation is thrown far more than the reality on the ground. That place really dropped the ball. They used to be at the forefront of AI, web dev, and societal issues (early to FB problems), but collectively haven't much realized they're not top-tier for any of those anymore.
On the topic of 17, can this be explained by the rational primary hypothesis? If the primary selects for Skill At Winning Elections, and height is one non-determinitive component, wouldn't you therefore expect taller candidates going up against shorter candidates to mean (say) less eloquent candidates going up against more eloquent candidates?
I have a few responses to Scott's discussion of #28 and #29:
1. First, I want to push back at the idea that people find lowbrow art to be deep and transformative, because none of the examples that Scott gives (Harry Potter, Marvel, and anime) seem especially lowbrow to me. They are all smart, complex works of art with interesting characters and deep themes (anime is a wide category, but I would say that that statement is true of a great many popular anime). I might call them midbrow since they have wide popular appeal, but also have some of the qualities we associate with highbrow art.
2. The response to Scott on taste that really "clicked" with me was from Ozy on "Thing of Things" (open.substack.com/pub/thingofthings/p/in-defense-of-the-reality-of-good), in particular the section "Art Appreciation is a Skill," which draws an analogy between art appreciation and learning to read speculative fiction. Reading speculative fiction is a skill that I have acquired that allows me to notice and appreciate things about speculative fiction that people without that skill cannot. It seems plausible to me that other people might develop similar skills for other art forms.
3. In general I think that "highbrow" art can be defined as art that can only be appreciated by someone who has developed skill in art appreciation, whereas "lowbrow art" can be appreciated without skill, although a skilled person might be able to appreciate it in new and different ways ("midbrow" art would be art that doesn't require skill to appreciate, but is substantially more rewarding to someone with skill).
4. Where status signaling and snobbery comes in is when people claim that highbrow art is better than other types because it takes skill to appreciate it. This seems like an instance of the more general trend of someone who has honed a skill acting like they are better than other people for doing so. It seems similar to someone running a marathon or climbing a mountain acting like that is a special experience that sets them apart from other people. It is simultaneously true that they have developed a skill that they have a right to be proud of, but also that they shouldn't be snobs about it.
Developing taste gives you more ways to love and hate art. This may ruin some "lowbrow" art, but it doesn't have to. Mr. Bean sketches for example are really simple and don't require "taste" to be appreciated. But if you do have "taste" they're still just as funny! Developing taste only ruins art where there is some critical flaw that you only notice when you have "taste". On the other hands, if art works on multiple levels, the amount of enjoyment may be multiplied. Because you can enjoy both the basic and the advanced qualities of the art.
Mr. Bean isn't bad comedy, it's just silly. The analogy would be to something like Big Bang Theory, which to anyone with a modicum of comedy taste is not funny.
If we are talking about the Marvel movies specifically, they are generally a cut above the average action movie. Compare them to, for example, the live action Transformer movies (except Bumblebee), or the Asylum's "mockbuster" series of films. I will say that the recent series of movies that Sony made based on the Marvel comics, but not set in the same universe as the main Marvel series, are pretty lowbrow.
The actually Marvel comics started out as simple mass children's entertainment that was maybe slightly more sophisticated than your average comic, but they grew up with their audience. The modern ones are generally targeted towards intelligent adults.
Similarly, the Harry Potter series is one of the more intelligent and sophisticated series of YA books out there. There are far worse, more lowbrow YA series like "The Mortal Instruments" or "Lorien Legacies."
Anime runs the gamut. Some of it is genuine high art (Memories), some of it is ludicrously lowbrow (Eiken), some is in the middle somewhere (Gundam). It's just a term for animated stuff made in Japan, so talking about whether it is highbrow or lowbrow is like talking about if "American movies" or "British novels" are highbrow or lowbrow.
The Gundam franchise is a large collection of very different shows made by different teams for different audiences with different goals. I'd say it runs the entire gamut in itself.
That doesn't follow. Children and young adults are fully capable of developing artistic taste and skill in art appreciation. Additionally, most creators of work directed at children nowadays are skilled at adding additional layers of complexity and meaning that go over the heads of many children, but that adults appreciate. That way the parents don't get bored when they are watching something with their children or reading it to them.
By adding the constraint "the book/movie needs to be entertaining to children," you're necessarily capping the complexity and depth (or at least making it much more difficult to achieve).
For a food example, the "best meal made from convenience store ingredients" is an entirely different scale than "best meal." You can't take a 90th percentile meal from the former group and assume it's a 90th percentile meal in the latter. There's a limit to what you can do flavor-wise when you're dealing with all prepackaged ingredients.
That constraint is why I have a hard time placing Harry Potter on the spectrum of literature quality. I think they're fantastic books (easily one of the top YA books of all time if not the top). I don't think they compare favorably to what a lot of people consider the pinnacle of literature more generally. You're just limited in what you can do with plot and style when writing for a YA audience.
Whatever happened to great art being born from simplicity and constraint?
Taking your example of food: to a first approximation, all today’s most high status cuisines have their roots in poor common fare. Who in their right mind would be the first to try eating mouldy cheese, or sea cockroaches, or weird looking field grass, unless it was that or starve?
It is easy to get confused when 99 percent of everything is rubbish. Some process must filter the gems; otherwise, you find yourself drinking from the firehose, encounter a bunch of awful things - unless you get incredibly lucky - and assume everything from that source must be that way.
You can look to experts to filter for you, but their culture then forms part of the filter. You can look to time to filter for you - Shakespeare was common entertainment in his day! - each of his plays is at least a quarter puns and innuendo! Many of the classics would be in the YA section if they were written today! - but then you’re limited to old things; there are more brilliant artists creating today than in all of history (but this is also true of the rubbish, of course).
…or you can put away the pride and the status games, stop following the herd, drink from the firehose and pick out what speaks to you for yourself.
Yeah I also enjoyed Ozy's article, I think Scott should read it. It's a pretty clear case of how we can hardly notice when we're missing an entire dimension of experience.
> If I understand correctly, her thesis is that taste doesn’t just make you hate bad art - it also gives you the ability to love good art more deeply, which can be a transformative experience.
That's 100% right. I can (somewhat) tell because I have deep appreciation for music, but not for the visual arts. So when I hear some run-of-the-mill pseudo classical music with plain chords and progressions that were already cliché by the end of the 19th century, I cringe, but I can understand that most people just find it nice, because that's exactly how plain and unsophisticated I am in front of a painting.
Pardon me for asking, but what's your opinion on the Final Fantasy VI soundtrack? I can't tell if I love it because it's actually good in the way music experts would appreciate or because of nostalgia and the emotional hooks that came from playing the game itself.
Sure, why not... I haven't much explored the genre of video game soundtracks. The first tracks sound to me like pretty well-crafted "genre music", quite cinematic, in a pop-classical kind of idiom. The synthetic instruments sound a bit shrill, but it's good enough that I'd probably enjoy it if I heard it live by an actual orchestra.
Oops, just go to tracks 4 and 5 (Locke's theme, Battle) and the musical quality just took a deep nosedive, just as the sounds became even shriller. Have to skip ahead... Shadow's theme is nice instrumental pop. Stopping here, this thing is way too long, but I'm sure someone could extract a decent 25-minute suite out of it.
To elaborate further, this music sounds honest to me, in that it's not trying to be what it's not.
The sorts of things I had in mind above are, for example, the kind of piano music that classical playlists on Spotify tend to devolve to, when you leave auto-play on, and that sound like a third-rate clone of Satie having drunken musical sex with Einaudi. And then there's a rich asshole out there, whose name I forgot, who could easily be a top soundtrack composer, or a pop-classical celebrity, but instead is trying to buy his way into the Western Musical Canon, when his glitzy faux-romantic music is nowhere anywhere near good enough for that.
These days I get much of my musical info by the man Ted Gioia, if you want to open your ears, you could do worse than following him.
It is, but not from all people. There are many other mountaineers and marathon runners. Similarly, there are many other people who are skilled at art appreciation, but it isn't universal.
I didn't say *all* other people, and nobody who runs marathons or climbs mountains is unaware of the existence of the rest of the small handful of exceptional people who do the same. Surely this is so obvious as not to need mention?
I like Ozy's post, too. I was thinking you could articulate it this way:
No-one is obliged to develop taste. But if you do, through deliberate effort, as a result of lots of exposure, or any other way, then you're empirically likely to find that your taste moves you in particular directions. Like, lots of people go from thinking Harry Potter is good to thinking Shakespeare is good. But almost no-one goes in the other direction. Lots of people start with an appreciation of classical art, and move on to an appreciation of cubism. I think the reverse is rarer (I'm less sure about this one, but I think it still holds.) And I don't think that anyone brought up with an appreciation for Schoenberg ends up thinking that Taylor Swift is superior music.
So, without making any claims about objective quality, we can still make an empirical observation about common directions of travel, and derive non-arbitrary hierarchies of taste in that way.
Re. 7 intrasexual competition: I'm willing to believe it. Has anyone else noticed a pattern of successful 40ish actresses advising aspiring young actresses that it's a terrible, exploitative business and that they shouldn't let themselves be sexualized?
28. I buy the thesis that good taste is a function of a capacity for enjoying art and that those who enjoy it more will consume it more and continue to acquire better taste. This should hold true, generally, regardless of what art is consumed as long as the goal is to enjoy it. The 40-year-old who reads 100 novels a year probably has good taste in novels. If such a person declares Harry Potter the pinnacle of Western Literature, perhaps Harry Potter is pretty great. The art-lover who visits museums and galleries every week for decades probably has good taste in art. If they claim Thomas Kinkade to be the greatest artist of the century, maybe he is. But the odds are that such people won't claim those things.
What about a 40-years-old who reads 100 trashy novels a year? Like, bodice-rippers, or "former SEAL fight Evil of the Week"? I have a feeling this is more wide-spread than one might think initially. Especially for TV shows. My grandma used to watch TV almost all day, so she probably developed a great appreciation for very shitty daytime soap operas, but I wouldn't trust her opinion of a different genre.
Maybe. But I’d guess the person who’s determined to read The 100 Greatest Novels Ever Written is even more detached from the material. At least the romance reader is choosing his/her material based on their preferences for the content and not somebody else’s. It’s not like the romance reader receives any reputational capital for being well versed in the work.
well, most people reading most books are clearly not paying attention. you can super see this in jane austen readers--most are just there for the regency vibe & read p&p & come away literally saying like "gosh i wish courtship was still like this & i could find a polute old fashioned man"
but also the 100 greatest novels are actually better & you can tell because some people exist who will actually pay attention to them in a way that the most prolific romance readers just dont do. stuff doesnt just get status totally out of nowhere--people want to read the 100 best novels basically bc of enjoyment
I’m sympathetic to most of what you’re saying but don’t agree that stuff doesn’t get status out of nowhere and that status usually signifies greater worth. Designer handbags don’t hold more stuff, luxury watches don’t tell time better, small portions at fancy restaurants, ripped jeans, the list goes on.
oh i certainly dont think status perfectly correlates w worth--just that there has to be some kind of seed to the pearl---altho the other way round bc i think status is not as good as what it builds on
Anecdotally, myself and a sibling of mine are both well read.
So I was gobsmacked to learn she is MAGA.
As someone who generally does not subscribe to any politician or political faction, I wondered how someone who reads even more than I do, could believe in any politicult, especially one even more absurd than most.
Then it dawned on me. I have not been able to enjoy reading fiction for decades, so I read faction only. She reads almost exclusively fiction books.
And I never got the impression she reads classics and critically acclaimed novels, which tend to impart higher ideals via fictional entertainment.
I have started and partly read over a hundred trashy Royal Road web serials in the past year, but exactly three real novels.
I would argue this gives me next to zero taste when it comes to deciding whether War and Peace is better than Notes from Underground. However, I can give you a detailed explanation of why Sexy Steampunk Babes is a gripping well-paced narrative in a world of political intrigue despite its puerile fanservice, yet Fantasy Arms Dealer is a one-dimensional and derivative take on the LitRPG genre that lets down its imaginative premise with stale characters and an edgy MC whose inner life is boring.
How can we tell whether Notes from Underground is tastier than the internationally acclaimed literary juggernaut that is Sexy Steampunk Babes, I hear you ask? I'd say that if most people whose revealed preference is for steampunk elf harems will admit that writing like Dostoevsky takes more skill, then perhaps we can assume that the most skilful writer has the most tasteful output.
I note that this doesn't measure quality but instead finds the author who can settle on the most contorted way of writing, and further note that James Joyce is regarded as /very/ tasteful. It is a family tradition of mine to give each young adult a copy of Finnegan's Wake upon turning 18 and not tell them anything about it, for the purpose of comedy.
Some trash is very good at what it tries to do, and some isn't. My late wife was a big fan of Janet Evanovich's "Stephanie Plum" novels and liked listening to me read them out loud to her. They don't have much of the "depth" that I often like in the SF&F epics I like to read, but I found them funny and they're very good at being light entertainment.
Will look at the other links later but for now, just know the Russian jokes are fantastic and I legitimately cannot imagine anyone who seriously reads and loves the Illiad not also spending a lot of time contextualizing it.
> He converted to Tibetan Buddhism, where a lama declared him to be the reincarnation of 16th century saint Chungdrag Dorje.
I just love this because no matter what, it's meaningless. Either the Tibetan Buddhists are right, in which case sainthood is meaningless, the Catholics are right, in which case reincarnation isn't even a thing, or both are wrong and it's doubly pointless.
You might have missed the part where Chungdrag Dorje's name is clearly Tibetan. He was a "saint" (i.e a notable spiritual figure) in Tibetan Buddhism; nothing to do with the Catholic Church's list of saints.
> ... ordinary anti-money-laundering laws which predate cryptocurrency tell banks to be on the watch for certain dangerous transaction patterns, and crypto companies have those patterns ...
Scott, you say this as if this is innocent, but it's not. The transactions patterns in question are defined formally, without reference to any underlying crime (e.g., drug dealing, weapons dealing, etc.) So a perfectly innocent party can fall under those patterns, with the violation being strictly technical, not related to anything that is intuitively a crime. THAT'S NOT OK! That's not somehow a defense of what the banks did to those crypto companies.
Scott says like one sentence later that he doesn't think it's okay. He's specifically arguing against Andreesen's unsubstantiated claim that the reason this happened is because someone in the government made a specific effort to shut down crypto companies' access to banks for ideological reasons.
The Jesse Singal piece on this made no sense. It's just a complaint that Andreessen attributed a debanking effort to the CFPB and the CFPB wasn't doing it. But since malevolent ideological debanking by the government is routine ... as is touched on in Singal's piece ... it means almost nothing to point out that the CFPB wasn't doing it.
It means a lot of you think somebody is going to try to get rid of the CFPB and you think they're a rare example of a government regulator that actually does generally good stuff and isn't captured by industry.
Because if you think debanking is a problem that should be fixed, and you *don't* think that you're going to be able to pull this off by smashing the state and abolishing all government, then it seems rather important to correctly identify which particular part of the government is causing the problem.
I'd recommend reading or skimming the linked post. This summary leaves out too much imo. For one, it is not just specific transaction patterns that banks need to look out for, the government directed them to keep their crypto exposure below some threshold. Now, the government was reacting to bank failures caused by over-exposure to crypto so this is in some sense standard practice for them but of course it ruffles my more libertarian sensibilities.
...if people are going to ask to be bailed out with government funds when their crypto experiments go wrong, it does not seem unreasonable for the government to try to limit the risks.
If we want completely unregulated banks, we should be prepared to let them (and, by extension, their customers) go under when the decisions they make backfire.
It turns out that when push comes to shove, the people who begged to be allowed to take the risk beg to be rescued from the consequences, over and over again.
Yes that’s true. I merely meant to communicate that my instinct is to complain about the government dictating what risks businesses can take. In this case since the government is explicitly insuring customer deposits we can’t expect it not to interfere but I still instinctively resent it.
The discussions re: taste all remind me of https://xkcd.com/915/ - i.e. people more exposed to a particular genre of thing will form opinions and preferences about it. Also see "Ambijectivity" - some of these preferences will diverge in "random" ways (i.e. Beethoven vs Mozart) and some will tend to align for various reasons (i.e. getting bored of common tropes in the "entry-level" art, narratives and subtext getting increasingly meta in ways they wouldn't have recognized before, and also status signalling), creating a class of "highbrow" connoisseurs with predictable patterns of taste.
I think this explanation is equally charitable to lowbrow-enjoyers and highbrow-enjoyers. Highbrows will say that lowbrows simply haven't "acquired the taste" or "learned to recognize good art" because they've only been exposed to a few popular things and so can't tell the difference, and this is basically true. Lowbrows will say that the highbrows are obsessing over trivial and possibly imagined subtext, and using taste as a means of status signaling and need to touch some grass, and this is also basically true.
This is in the ballpark with what CS Lewis proposes in "An Experiment in Criticism." He goes into a a much deeper discussion, of course. For instance, it is not merely a matter of passive "exposure" in his theory, but of active concentration borne of fascination with a particular art. He also emphasizes the "democratization" that such a theory brings, and dismisses such concepts as "low" or "high" art, or "guilty pleasures" or "boring classics."
omg another "experiment in criticism" enjoyer--can i ask if you first read it recently & if so where you might have heard about it? it seems like a lot of people read it for some reason like last year
I think I first read it ... 5-7 years ago? Then reread sometime in the last 2 years. I had known of it for a long time and had always been curious to read it, and finally got around to it. I liked it immensely, though it surprised me that Lewis of all people! should have developed a theory so ... Logical Postivistic ... in spirit. (Had Quine written it, it might have emerged under the title "Aesthetics Naturalized.")
FWIW, I am currently trying to make a go of the OHEL. It is very dry, but the introduction ("New Learning and New Ignorance") is very interesting, and in spots (such as his discussion of John Knox) Lewis has some wicked sport with his subjects.
Yes, that's the one I mean. I can't resist calling it the "OHEL" after learning that Lewis himself called it the "O Hell" in his correspondence.
I am finding it dry because it is very allusively written, offering for the most part snappy judgements with only rare supporting illustrations. Not that I am criticizing the book. Given its breadth, depth, and the physical limitations imposed by the size of the spine (as it is, the covers may already be slightly too far apart) it could not be otherwise. I am reading to learn what I can, and enjoying it on the same basis that I enjoy David Thomson's "A Biographical Dictionary of Film" -- the wit and style the author displays even when talking of people and books I am otherwise lost with.
> Andreesen might have a grudge against them because of a time they shut down one of his companies for repeatedly deceiving its customers.
I assume that's about LendUp, which is one of companies a16z invested in (among other investors such as Google, Y Combinator, Victory Park Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Yuri Milner, etc.) - the list, according to ChatGPT (yeah, I know, I'm lazy, so it may be not the full list even) is:
Google Ventures (GV), Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, PayPal Ventures, QED Investors, Y Combinator, Kapor Capital, Susa Ventures, Data Collective (DCVC), Thomvest Ventures, Victory Park Capital.
I assume every single person associated with these companies is from now on forever disqualified from criticizing CFPB because they all "have a grudge".
Now, how big of a grudge does Andreessen have? Looking up on Crunchbase, they raised $361.5M, but a16z is not listed to participate anywhere but the seed round. Seed rounds, as I understand, are usually around $1-2M or so, and there were also Kleiner Perkins and GV there, maybe others. But let's not split hairs - assume the whole $2M is a16z, and they lost it all because of CFPB. That's a very painful loss of about 0.00476% of their portfolio (not taking into account present value since I am lazy).
While I understand that the relationship between size of the loss and the size of the grudge does not have to be linear, I think this line of argument is not very strong. And calling a company in which his fund contributed a (relatively) tiny amount into the seed round (while others contributed $350M+) "one of his companies" sounds to me a little bit misleading. It's only fitting that this is happening in the section where other people are criticized for being misleading, isn't it?
Stark made the observation/definition that sects, rather than cults, tend to represent a call to traditionalist roots. They are based on “weeding out corruption” and attract the lower rungs of society. Cults, on the other hand, offer something completely new and tend to attract the more erudite and upper crust. Given this, perhaps we should look at Santa Muerte devotion, in the context of Mexican Catholicism, as a sect.
Mexican Catholicism can still trace some of its traditions, offerings, and obsessions (particularly around death and sacrifice) to pre-Columbian practices which were incorporated into the Mex-Cath hegemony. Mexican Catholicism has a tradition of strong devotion to their own personal “Mary/divine feminine/divine but also truly mortal” figure alongside their “Jesus/divine masculine/mortal but also truly divine”. Yes, the Virgin of Guadalupe is Mother Mary, but she is also distinctly a Mexican figure with her own set of domains and symbols).
The problem with modern Mexican Catholicism is that there are too many saints to pray to for intercession. There are hundreds of them, everywhere, with very few performing miracles. It’s practically polytheism. Santa Muerte, on the other hand, is a one stop shop. Tales of miracles from her abound in urban and rural legends. You don’t need to split your time between a bunch of low level saints.
From the article:
“Most importantly, the Mexican folk saint of death has quickly developed a reputation for being the speediest and most efficacious miracle-worker on the Mexican religious landscape, not to mention in the U.S. and Central America as well,” he said. “Unlike Catholic saints who tend to specialize in one or two types of miracles, Santa Muerte is a considered a powerful multi-tasker who delivers on petition of all sorts, but mostly related to health, wealth, and love.”
By rejecting the plethora of saints that have become too expansive, the Santa Muerte devotees can return to “traditional” Mexican Catholicism dualism with Christ representing Life and Santa Muerte representing Death. Both figures garner provenance based strictly on miracles/divine feats they are able to perform.
Another element of this “dualism”: Santa Muerte seems to be more associated with the material world. Unlike Christ, she prefers real offerings and real goods; her powers are tied to the material world, waxing and waning with the moon, getting stronger at night, being stronger in the winter, etc.
You thought the old troll critique "anyone who disagrees with me is Hitler" was cool, but it's johnny-come-lately compared to the far more traditional "every god but mine is actually demons".
The bad-faith(heh) dunk would be to respond with "let's not hear squeamish moral critiques from the religion which ritualistically eats its god's flesh and drinks his blood on a monthly basis". But that would be bad-faith because consuming the divine being is often right and proper. Instead, it's the idea that there are evil/opposed-to-God spiritual beings out there which is wrong, and indeed laughable. There are dangerous and harmful spirits, just like there are dangerous and harmful material beings; and there are chthonic and underworld spirits. Both of these "classes" of creatures serve the ultimate transcendent Deity.
I’m skeptical of claims of the form “if only we didn’t have this great and wonderful thing, we could have used the money to make the poor better off.” These claims never really seem to pan out. Leftists are fond of claims like: “Each mission to Jupiter costs a billion dollars! Ending homelessness in California costs a billion dollars! If we cancelled just one Jupiter mission, we could end homelessness in California forever!” This sounds compelling until you realize that California has spent $24 billion on stopping homelessness over the last 5 years and homelessness is worse than ever.
As an aside, a related question:
“If there was a button which would obliterate all human art (and all knowledge about that art) created before 1800 AD but give every human the quality of life of an average American, would you push it?”
My gut instinct is no. I value a lot of different goods: beauty, truth, happiness, virtue, etc. I really want there to be some of each good in the world. As the quantity of a particular good approaches zero, the value I place on a marginal unit of that good becomes large.
I would be happy to sacrifice 99% of all pre-1800s art to end world poverty. That would be enough to give us a dim view of what pre-modern cultures were like, leave us with a handful of masterpieces to enjoy. But that last 1%? That’s a big ask.
There's a deeper thing here about the great wonderful things maybe having a long term cultural effect that makes us more likely to care about other humans, and thus have the political will to fix poverty.
I think there are several differences between EAs claiming donating more to effective charities would save lives and progressives claiming we could end homelessness in CA. Namely:
2. The claim is more plausible because EAs are not claiming they'll get rid of death or bring life expectancy in the poorest countries in line with rich or middle income countries. They are simply claiming that they can improve outcomes somewhat. Contrast to eradicating homelessness which has never been accomplished in a large society afaik.
Note that if someone promised they could implement the last scenario you describe would similarly be untrustworthy because the magnitude of intervention they need and the promised outcome are both much much larger than what EAs are suggesting.
EAs are more open (mostly) and more accurate (mostly), but this does come with disadvantages. Like, precisely this example!
If your argument is "this money could *solve homelessness*, that's better than cathedrals" some number of people will think that's great and donate. Describing the problem in hilariously inaccurate ways may well net them more support.
If your argument is "this money is being poured into a bottomless pit of suffering (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/27/bottomless-pits-of-suffering/), that's better than cathedrals," I suspect more people will go for the cathedral than if they'd lied. The cathedral is a bounded problem. The endpoint is realistic and visible.
A lot of EA problems are bottomless pits of suffering and in general they do not communicate such tradeoffs in normie-sensible ways. Scott being a rare exception who, as much as he wishes so, does not make up for the rest of the movement.
I think this is fair and part of why mainstream EA critiques are so frustrating. They feel like they’re gesturing at this or other potentially-sensible arguments like “focusing my philanthropy on causes near and dear to my heart is better for me so I do it as a compromise between fully selfish spending and fully altruistic philanthropy” but they avoid saying these things explicitly.
The selfish benefit of this philanthropy is mainly that it makes you look (to yourself and others) like a good person who does things altruistically. If you acknowledge that your motivation is largely selfish, you no longer get that benefit.
Bounded vs. unbounded seems to hinge around the question of 'solving' a problem versus alleviating one. In that, I think people have an intuitive sense that solutions are much more valuable than ongoing alleviation of suffering. It's just that solutions are rare, or don't work like we expected (sometimes creating more problems), while alleviation is an omnipresent and nigh-oppressive demand.
Many altruism discussions tacitly conflate ongoing alleviation campaigns with true solutions. Yes, alleviation is desirable, but since it's an endless pit of suffering it seems to have a different impetus for moral action than a solution does.
"This sounds compelling until you realize that California has spent $24 billion on stopping homelessness over the last 5 years and homelessness is worse than ever."
I agree that $1 billion would not end homelessness forever, but it seems undeniable that if you spent that money on homelessness, there would be more money to fight homelessness in some sense (even if that money was spent inefficiently or didn't go infinitely far). "Money is fungible" is an easier sell than "homelessness is an easy problem to solve", so I think we need a better counterargument.
Empirically, “we can spend X amount of money to alleviate Y amount of suffering” seems to be a relatively hard claim to get right, even for the best of us (and EAs are definitely the best of us). This is partially because social problems are complicated. Well-intended policies like “let’s solve homelessness by giving everyone an apartment to anyone who asks” run into complications like “desperate and mentally ill people have a hard time dealing with bureaucrats.” This is partially because there are so many ways for humans to suffer. Cure cholera in an area, and people die of malaria instead. Cure all disease, and a horrible civil war breaks out.
Scientific and artistic projects, on the other hand, usually do what they say on the tin. They even sometimes come in under budget! The restoration of Notre Dame, for example, was €140 million under budget, and it looks pretty good. CERN confirmed the Higgs boson, Kepler detected a ton of exoplanets, etc.
The EA movement is brilliant, intellectually honest, and morally unimpeachable. Nonetheless, the number of QALYs that even the best intervention buys is always somewhat uncertain and ultimately the project of relieving human suffering is probably 95% developmental economics and 5% charity.
Given this uncertainty, at a certain point, the expected number of QALYs that giving a marginal dollar to EA generates is less valuable than the expected amount of beauty or truth that giving to the arts and sciences generates.
This point is high! It might be around 80% or 90% of all charitable dollars.But it’s not literally 100%, and that’s what arguments like Singer’s seem to demand.
(I take back that last bit if Singer has published something like “repairing Notre Dame is worth 1,000 lives but not 250,000”. Finding a conversion factor between QALYs and beauty seems like something that an EA would do but I haven’t actually read an analysis like that.)
Isn't this an isolated demand for rigor? Why are the EA charities penalized for uncertainty, but not Notre Dame? Or, are you saying that giving to Notre Dame has less uncertainty regarding what you get for your money? If so, why?
Yes, scientific and artistic projects have a great deal less uncertainty than sociological projects.
This is because sociological projects are affected by complex second and third order effects. Messing around with human systems is very complicated. Technological projects are much simpler.
For example, missions to the outer planets have a 100% success rate in hitting their scientific goals! Federal funding of research has huge economic multipliers. The Notre Dame project came in under budget!
Scrolling through the EA forums, the rate of success on their projects seems to be much lower. The most recent accountability study (from Farmed Animal Protection Hungary) reports setting up meetings with 3/16 of its corporate lobbying targets (for cage-free eggs).
This is not a criticism of EA. Lobbying is hard and it needs to be done! Its just that "restoring a building" or "building a telescope which will provide useful scientific data" is a much simpler task that "reducing homelessness in California" (let alone "lobbying for animal rights" or "reducing AGI x-risk").
Happy to talk more/collaborate on gathering evidence which you'd find convincing.
It's almost certainly the case that the *first* dollar spent on homelessness, will do real good. Low-hanging fruit is easy to pick, and if your entire fight-the-homeless budget is sixty bucks, you can't come up with clever schemes to squander it and you're stuck with just putting up some homeless dude in a Motel 6 for the night.
But it's quite possible that the 24,000,000,001st dollar spent fighting homelessness in California, has crossed beyond the point of diminishing marginal returns and into actual negative returns. If for example it goes to hiring one more bureaucrat who now has a motive to ensure that homelessness is never abolished or even substantially diminished so as not to cut off his personal gravy train.
I would think one of the central lessons of EA is that you can't just assume that throwing money at [X] results in significant positive change; you have to actually do the math and show your work. Or get an Effective Altruist to do the math for you, but then I'm going to want to see their work.
Imagine a society with no surplus. Everybody has to be a farmer since food is essential. Farmers might trade a bit if they specialise but mostly they consume their own produce. This is the ultimate subsistence society.
Now imagine the farmers can produce a surplus, so they could sell on the market if there was a market. However they need people to buy. In a simplified local economy where there’s a church taking a tithe from the farmers, paying the cathedral builders and suppliers, who then buy the surplus food the economy can maintain a steady state, or even grow. The farmer loses money on the tithe, but gains on the market.
Since the cathedral can attract pilgrims (and later tourists) it will also pay for itself. For a long time.
I agree. It's sort of a ridiculous claim that the money spent on Notre Dame should have been spent on solving other problems, since all transactions, not only charitable donations, are fungible.
We could theoretically all live in smaller homes, with less electricity, less heating and A/C in the winter, less eating out, less quality of life in general, while still having a better quality of life than our grandparents. So long as we don't take it to the point we are starving, and limit it to inconveniences, multiple trillions of dollars could easily be liberated for effective charitable purposes.
But the real world doesn't work like that. The real underlying currency is not dollars but motivation to do things. Removing much of the quality of life risks impoverishing us all.
EA seems perpetually vulnerable to various "value bait" scenarios: Batkid, burning building with paintings worth $50 million in one room and ten orphans in the other, rebuilding Notre Dame, buying a castle. This vulnerability suggests to me that EA needs a better framework for obligation vs. opportunity, and how to interface with emotionally-driven moral arguments. Also EA probably needs to be better at not engaging impulsively when academics (e.g. Singer) fall into the usual pattern of "capitalize on issue in the news to cause controversy that draws attention to the cause I care about" -- a pattern in human behavior that is not at all unique to EA.
I recently looked into this for a post. As many of you probably know, the ILA held basically the entire US economy hostage so that already ridiculously compensated dockworkers could make even more. They make ~$40 an hour now, and were outraged that management had proposed a MERE 50% wage increase over the next 7 years, so they went on strike on Oct 1, 2024, and that's what this Trump thing was about.
What you may not know is that Longshoremen have a centuries long history of doing this, and that they have ALWAYS been the biggest brake on productivity and shipping economics overall.
Some choice examples:
1. Shipping interests in Liverpool tried repeatedly to eliminate a practice known as "the welt," under which half of each longshore gang left the docks, often for a nearby pub, while the other half worked; after an hour or two, the absentees would return and those who had been working would take a prolonged break.
2. In Los Angeles, labor productivity dropped 75 percent between 1928 and 1954.
3. West Coast ports handled 9 percent less cargo per work-hour in 1954 than in 1952.
4. The Port of New York needed 1.9 man-hours to handle a ton of cargo in 1950, but 2.5 by 1956.
5. In Britain, tonnage per man-year was nearly flat from 1948 to 1952, leaped by one-third thanks to a surge of cargo in 1953, and then sank again under the weight of stringent work rules.
Longshoremen have always been among the most strike happy of any workers:
“An eleven-nation study found that dockworkers, along with miners and seafarers, lost more workdays to labor disputes than any other professions. In Britain alone, dock strikes resulted in the loss of nearly 1 million man-days of labor from 1948 through 1951 and another 1.3 million in 1954.”
Theft is also absolutely IMMENSE when longshoremen were involved in packing and transporting goods. To give an idea, judging by insurance premiums, something like 20-30% of *everything* was subject to “shrinkage,” with even more intense concentration and essential uninsurability in categories like whiskey, watches, and precious metals when they were packed and placed by longshoremen.
All these dates are in the 50's because starting in the late fifties, shipping containers started being used. The advent of the container reduced shipping costs by frankly absurd amounts - it literally drove prices down to 3% of what it cost with longshoremen packing ships, it drove shipping losses down by 95%, legible theft down by ~30%, and time in port from 6 days to 8 hours for a given volume.
And here Trump is, rewarding the ILA, the biggest brake on progress and efficiency ever involved in shipping and logistics, and keeping them in place so they can keep holding our entire economy hostage anytime they want more in the future.
Longshoremen must have some unique advantage over other workers when it comes to striking. Perhaps it is the fact that the value they destroy by striking is so great compared to their own productivity. But why don't Amazon logistic workers have the same advantage? Is it just the strike-happy culture among longshoremen that is working towards their advantage?
> Longshoremen must have some unique advantage over other workers when it comes to striking.
Most of the advantage is that ports are very limited resources in terms of throughput, but they are literally our connection to the global economy. They're a choke point.
Despite undertaking heroic efforts to reduce longshoremen in the ports when containerization took off (achieved via methods like literally guaranteeing every single longshoreman's career for life - they were such an immense drag on productivity and operational efficiency that literally paying every single one of them to do nothing for the entire extent of their remaining career, as long as we could automate, was strongly net positive), we still kept longshoremen in the remaining sliver of jobs operating the cranes to unload the ships.
We actually start off at a large disadvantage because our port capabilities in terms of expeditious unloading and loading are quite slow and shoddy compared to most other country's ports. Ports like Shanghai, Singapore, Rotterdam, and Hong Kong routinely handle 2-5x the cargo volume of US ports, largely via automation.
That slowness and low capability is thanks to the ILA, by the way. But we're one of the biggest markets in the world in terms of being an international trade destination, so we're like a tiny straw trying to drink a big milkshake. It's very easy to block things.
When a ship pulls up to be unloaded, there's a lot of other ships waiting. Every single container ship has goods worth between $400-$800M, and as long as they're waiting, they're costing somebody money, and given the value of the cargo, they're collectively costing these somebodies lot of money.
Then you get into overall logistics impacts - remember all the shortages during COVID? A lot of those were caused by backups and logistics problems at the ports, and those backups are prone to happening because of our low port volume capabilities.
Bottom line, that tiny sliver of ILA crane operators can now hold appreciable chunks of the entire economy hostage, because ports are a choke point for all international trade and economic activity.
And yes, to Melvin's point, they are historically associated with organized crime (along with the Teamsters union).
> Aren't fulfillment centers choke points in the same way?
It's less of an issue, because Amazon has a lot of redundancy, and generally has many fulfillment centers near large metros, usually with quite a bit of inventory overlap.
Any given fulfillment center could strike, and Amazon could still easily fulfill from the other nearby ones.
Of course if ALL Amazon workers went on strike at once, it would be a severe problem for Amazon, and would undoubtedly cost them hundreds of millions per day, and that's probably why Bezos and Amazon are so militantly anti-union and anti-organization attempts.
And for consumers, there's no problem. Even if Amazon was striking, there's still Target or Walmart or whatever.
But those overseas container ships are what fuels EVERY retailer and business that buys or uses goods produced overseas, which is basically everyone by now. Amazon AND Walmart AND Target AND everyone else, AND a lot of businesses. It's a much bigger deal.
A competitor could build a new fulfillment center three blocks away and hire non-unionized workers, whereas building a whole new port...little but more expensive.
You can't just put a port anyplace on a given coast you need to be starting from a certain degree of deep-water geography. Meanwhile the most economically efficient ships keep getting bigger. This gradually reduces the number of places at which it is practical to have a top-level port no matter how much you'd be willing to spend to create one.
So while fulfillment centers' redundancy keeps increasing (in fact I know where there are several million-square-foot empty ones sitting under huge for-sale signs), the redundancy of top-level container ports gradually declines. Hence the longshoremens' ability to plausibly threaten to freeze up a continental-scale economy.
> Is there something to be said for expanding ports in Canada and Mexico and loading onto trains to bypass US ports entirely?
Mexico is probably your best bet, because Canadian port workers are unionized and strike-happy to a similar degree as US ones (see Vancouver).
Unfortunately, the biggest port in Mexico (Manzanillo) is ~6x smaller in volume than the biggest US ports. In fact, the entire annual volume of ALL ports in Mexico are equivalent to just one of any of the top 4 or 5 ports in the US. I’m not acquainted enough with the particulars to know if Manzanillo or other ports are ~20x expandable, geographically or politically, but it sounds like that might be tough. I imagine there’d be smuggling concerns too, if a much larger volume of US port container traffic started originating in Mexico.
There are only 5,000 longshoremen in the US, compared to 1.1 million Amazon employees. Admittedly, that includes management and admin, but it’s still much easier to coordinate a small group in a handful of port cities.
> In Los Angeles, labor productivity dropped 75 percent between 1928 and 1954.
This is a particularly interesting example, because Long Beach was constructed as an automated port, specifically because the longshoremen of the then-thriving port of San Francisco blocked automation. The result was that the automation happened anyway and the port of San Francisco completely died. This is on the whole a good result, though it would make *more* sense for the longshoremen to die away and the port of San Francisco to revive without them.
How did longshoremen get control of Long Beach? How is the ILA stopping us from building a modern port today, the same way we did then?
>Long Beach was constructed as an automated port, specifically because the longshoremen of the then-thriving port of San Francisco blocked automation. The result was that the automation happened anyway and the port of San Francisco completely died.
What on God's green earth are you talking about? The contents of these two sentences border on an AI-hallucination level of Not Even Wrongness. Every fact stated, with the exception of "the port of San Francisco completely died" is ludicrously incorrect, and the port of San Francisco died because containerized shipping terminals--automated or not--require far more real estate than is realistically available in geographically small, hilly San Francisco. Thus the move for Bay Area ports to Oakland and Alameda--which are, and always were, under the jurisdiction of the exact same longshore locals that had jurisdiction in San Fransisco.
The Port of Long Beach--which I must point out is hundreds of miles away from San Francisco and services an entirely different region--was constructed in the early twentieth century, many decades before cargo-handling automation was a gleam in the eye of shareholders; its construction had absolutely nothing to do with San Francisco longshoremen's imaginary response to (at the time) imaginary automation; and it slowly-then-rapidly became containerized (not automated; the two things are not even remotely the same) decades later in the 1960s, around the same time that the ports of Los Angeles and Oakland became containerized. During every minute of all this time, the longshoremen of all the ports mentioned in your/my post were members of the exact same union: ILA until 1937, and ILWU thereafter. At no point in history since the coastwise organization of West Coast longshoremen have longshoremen from Long Beach been in a different union from those in San Francisco.
>How did longshoremen get control of Long Beach?
The exact same way they got "control" of San Francisco, as a result of the exact same strike, in the exact same year, culminating in them all, along with the rest of the west coast dockworkers, becoming members of the exact same union (and soon thereafter forming a separate one from the ILA).
>How is the ILA stopping us from building a modern port today, the same way we did then?
On the west coast, which seems to be the area of your concern, the ILA isn't stopping anybody from doing anything. The ILA hasn't had jurisdiction over a single west coast port since 1937.
Just...good grief. The internet exists. You're on it, right now! You can look this stuff up!
> Andreessen’s claim never made sense. The point of the CFPB is to protect consumers against potentially rapacious financial institutions with far more power than them. Whatever you think of the Bureau, it’s very hard to imagine a situation in which it would team with financial institutions to help them kick off individual consumers. Hence the organization’s actual, anti-debanking stance.
I am frankly astonished by the stupendous naiveness of this argument. It's like saying "the point of the police to prosecute crime, so it is preposterous to assume it could ever be itself involved in any criminal activity or that a policeman could do anything against the law". The author seems to be an adult and working in journalism, which means he must have heard at least some news from the last 500 years. If he did, he must know government agencies - and people working for those agencies - regularly become corrupt, violate their mandates and do exactly the opposite of what they are supposed to do, and often exactly the thing they were supposed to protect the citizens from. It is not "hard to imagine", it has happened and still is happening, many times over, right in front of our eyes.
Now, of course, this is not a proof a particular agency, CFPB, did a particular instance of corrupt behavior (debanking crypto bros). That remains to be seen, and maybe it is true that they indeed are a staunch opponents of it and were accused unjustly. But presenting it as if the mere fact that their official mission is "to protect consumers" ipso facto makes them immune to corruption, and it alone makes Andreessen’s claim nonsensical, is just bizarre. And reading such an argument from a person who must know it is absolutely false only confirms my worst stereotypes about journalists.
If you read the essay, which can be a long task as it's written by patio11 so 3x as long as it should be, he calls out a number of explicit abuses by agencies and bureaucrats.
*EDIT* Whoops you were talking about Jesse Singal and not Patrick McKenzie. Yeah, more skepticism on Jesse's part is warranted.
Re: Bitcoin in the rubbish dump, this is a *long*-running saga. This idea that the council is just being difficult is what the plaintiff is putting out there. The council's actual arguments are a lot stronger:
* When it went into the landfill, the laptop became the council's property, so it isn't *his* laptop to retrieve, it's the council's laptop.
* Digging through the rubbish costs money and causes environmental harm. These costs are surprisingly high (millions last I saw). The plaintiff isn't going to pay for any of that, the council will have to. The plaintiff says don't worry, you'll be compensated by your 10%! But...
* We don't actually know if the laptop is there. If it's there, we don't know if the data can be restored. Who's to say there's anything to find?
Ultimately this guy wants taxpayers to spend vast sums looking for a needle in a haystack, when it's not even his own needle, and pay us back on the never-never. No wonder the council says no.
Huh, briefly skimming article headlines didn't inform me of that. Unless he's willing to take on a loan or whatever, he obviously has no ground to stand on.
I remain confused on this. I've seen people claim (as you seem to be saying) that the plaintiff is demanding the council dig through the landfill for him. But Scott seems to be saying the plaintiff just wants permission to do it himself. This seems like it should be an answerable question.
It seems like an answerable question with the answer "no".
I'm sure he's not the only guy in history who has ever chucked something out by accident and wanted to search the dump. These requests probably happen all the damn time and "no" is the default answer.
I'm most interested in knowing why digging through the rubbish will cause millions of dollars worth of environmental harm, which seems to be the only strong point here.
We are talking about shifting about a large fraction of the dump. While most of it will be basic rubbish, there will be quite a lot of stuff that's not supposed to be there, like asbestos, chemicals, old now -decaying electronics. It won't a large fraction of the dump but it will be a large amount in absolute terms. Searching in such a way that is safe and doesn't release this stuff could be pretty expensive.
It's quite likely that one reason they are refusing is that they simply don't have the capacity even to evaluate how to do it safely. Newport is one of the poorest towns in the UK . And that's not a responsibility that can just hand over to him.
Honestly, I suspect a large part of it is because the council doesn't want to, and so have come up a huge number of costs to do with environmental impact. It really shouldn't cost millions to search a section of a rubbish dump. But the civil service does this with everything they don't want to do - and they spend the money too. Given the UK's very limited state capacity, this man's quest doesn't seem like the highest priority for cut-through.
Modern landfills are not just piles of garbage. They are carefully engineered depending on the environment, and not easy to search through. I’d wager they are actually incredibly difficult or dangerous to search through. This is a good intro: https://youtu.be/HRx_dZawN44?si=axfrjbJmhgiTOh7O
It wouldn’t cause millions of dollars worth of environmental harm, but that’s not generally how environmental regulations are written. I don’t know about in the UK, but in the US facilities have effluent limits. Staying under the limits is not (supposed to be) optional. If the government finds an internal e-mail that says, “hey, this project will probably put us over our effluent limit, but the fine is only $10,000, and the upside is millions,” that is grounds for a willful violation and possibly (though still quite unlikely) criminal penalties for the personnel involved.
According to the linked article, the hard drive went into the dump in 2013. So it's been sitting out in all weathers in a steaming, stewing heap of rotting rubbish for eleven years.
Good luck hoping it'll be recoverable after *that*.
And he doesn't even know where it is - the claim is that he has narrowed it down to a certain area, and wants the council to let him go fossicking through that.
Okay, suppose they do, and he doesn't find the Hard Drive O'Riches. Then what? "Oh, sorry, I meant the for-sure-this-time location is three metres west of this spot, lemme dig that up"?
If they let this guy do this, then they've created a precedent to allow any random person to go strolling through the dump looking for treasure. And that's going to hammer their public liability insurance, since if the random treasure seeker breaks his leg or cuts himself on rusty metal and contracts tetanus, that's a law suit for damages.
Which, from what I've seen in my limited experience in local government, judges will be all too happy to pay out*.
So the good citizens of Newport will now face either a drastic rise in rates to pay for all this, or public services will be cut back to pay for all this. Yeah, that's a winning proposition!
In short, when I read stories like this, I know that the full story is not being told, and that the council is bound by regulations and legal considerations from going "Look, here's the real facts of the matter". So whatever Scott Aaronson says about "blankfaces", there's a reason for the "sorry we can't comment on particular cases, here is our canned answer".
* I'm sure I've regaled all on here with tales of ambulance-chasing local lawyers, who coincidentally just the other day had an ad on the radio shilling for business, and the mysterious string of unfortunate accidents that happened to one family in one particular spot with regard to a loose part of the pavement and they all fell over on that, one after another, where the courts awarded pay-outs to them based on the council being negligent. Or the guy who got an award of €10,000 to help him find private rented accommodation, adjudged on him being not permitted to go on the social housing list when he was eighteen and so the judge decided that ten years of not getting a council house was worth that much. Needless to say, first the solicitors took a big chomp out of that for fees, and with what was left, did he go looking for private rented accommodation? I give you three guesses and the first two don't count. Once he'd blown through whatever was left of his win on fun party times and fun party substances, he went back on teh social housing list and is no better off than he started. Well, apart from whatever fun memories he acquired, but he certainly did *not* improve his living conditions, which was the reasoning behind the judicial decision to give him that money in the first place.
Digging around (ha!) a bit, it looks like Newport did start recycling collections in the 2000s but by the sound of it, the Hard Drive O'Riches was chucked into the general rubbish collection.
I don't know if, for example, it ended up in this landfill - okay, according to the "Guardian" of 2013 it did, and they even let him have a quick look round back then, but this is the kind of thing we're talking about when we say "just dig through the landfill":
"We helped restore the site, formally a ‘dilute and disperse’ municipal landfill, to include a new fully contained landfill at the same location, largely sited on a former river meander.
For the new containment landfill, our first task was to establish baseline environmental data and build up evidence for risk assessments. Newport City Council required us to prepare two pollution prevention and control permits (PPCs) for different areas at the same time. We then provided design and support services to the council and devised a novel technique for soil strengthening. This used cement columns to transform the porridge-like alluvium into a surface on which the containment layer could be constructed. We continue to provide quality assurance for construction and contract management support."
"Landfill (and landraise) has been the principal method of waste disposal in the UK for the last 120 years. In the early 1970s, landfill sites were typically just large holes in the ground in which rubbish was squashed and buried with little regard for the consequences.
Landfills were designed on the “dilute and disperse” principle, which assumes that pollutants are generated slowly and migrate into the surrounding environment via chemical, physical, biological and microbiological processes that render them less concentrated until they become harmless.
This approach did not work well, with landfills causing considerable air, water and soil pollution and adverse social impacts. A combination of regulation and research required that the best landfill sites should become highly engineered containment vessels in which the deposited wastes have stabilised physically, chemically and biologically to a state in which the undisturbed contents are unlikely to pose a pollution risk – so-called “completion”."
"Buried somewhere under four feet of mud and rubbish, in the Docksway landfill site near Newport, Wales, in a space about the size of a football pitch is a computer hard drive worth more than £4m.
...He even went down to the landfill site itself. "I had a word with one of the guys down there, explained the situation. And he actually took me out in his truck to where the landfill site is, the current ditch they're working on. It's about the size of a football field, and he said something from three or four months ago would be about three or four feet down."
...Howells considered retrieving the hard drive himself, but was told that "even for the police to find something, they need a team of 15 guys, two diggers, and all the personal protection equipment. So for me to fund that, it's not possible without the guarantee of money at the end." As such, he's resigned to never getting the virtual money back."
That was back in 2013. Add on eleven years of weather and more activity, and this isn't even a needle in a haystack. The story reminds me of the people pouring money into the Money Pit on Oak Island in pursuit of phantom riches. Never gonna happen.
The fact that he and his backers are only willing to pay the council if they find the bitcoin, not upfront, seems like a pretty big tell that the expected costs won't meet its expenses.
Do you have a source? I had a quick look and didn't find anything other than him offering a percentage. For example "The court heard Howells was being backed by data recovery engineers and legal teams working pro bono on the basis that they get a share of the bitcoin profits if successful."[1]
If he were in a position to offer ready money, he could simply offer to buy the land and the council would be pretty much obliged to consider that. From [2] I estimate the area of Cell 2 to be about 11 acres. It's currently a landfill and seems unlikely to qualify for the highest value uses . 11 acres of Ag land would be <£1M. It's next to an industrial estate, maybe permission for that use could be obtained, in which case it might be worth £20M although discounted for the remediation due to having to deal with the landfill. If there were a realistic prospect, I'd think this kind of amount could be raised as a speculation (especially bearing in mind that you would still anyway have the land to sell later)
Not sure about the non-Inca influences: There's that Mexican-American trade union (United Farm Workers) whose flag has the same color scheme and arrangement as the Nazi flag, with a pixelated Naziesque eagle in the place of the swastika, and AFAIUI they are a leftist bunch with nothing to do with Nazism.
EDIT: Apparently the Peruvian movement in question is called "ethnocacerism", and it's a mixture of hard indigenous ethnic nationalism and economic leftism. Idk if their flag is inspired by the Nazi one.
Not hiring lawyers who have argued against your position is pretty standard in many contexts actually, because their words can be used against them. If you say the opposite of what you used to say on an issue with any degree of interpretation, opposing counsel might use it against you or the judge will be more skeptical. [Haven't clicked through, no idea if is relevant in this case, just sharing in case some don't know]
No, because you are required to offer arguments in good faith.
If you have an interpretation of the law that hasn't been fully settled, you will offer certain analogies as valid, certain precedents as more relevant, etc.
And over time you build a reputation as being capable of defending and arguing persuasively for certain things.
Another example in the public context, the government often reinterprets statues because of a new administration and needs to make the opposite argument, even though the law didn't change. It gets very awkward if the same lawyer has to explain to the same judge why they now argue for the opposite, and usually they find someone else, otherwise the government usually loses because the court infers they are abusing discretion of statute interpretation to get the policy outcomes they want.
My favorite one was 'infinite chain of think of a concept, and realize that your thought about it was actually a meta level up also an example of that, and proceed like this constantly amazed how many levels up you go'
I would (based on extremely small sample size) suggest to throw away anything during the middle of an experience, but 'learn from' the edge of stretched mind and normal self as you come down.
If there was a cultural effective altruism conspiracy at work, say a fifth of open AI employees being ready to smash the servers with a sledgehammer on command, or something. Would we know?
What amusing hypothetical would you enjoy discovering in the morning post?
On the blackface phenomena: So much of what people are is what their mind lingers on, not fixates on. This determines what accumulates over the years, not just whether they focus on the personalities and the challenge to their authority ('oh, so you think you're better than me, huh?) when they end up in a novel situation that an outsider has a solution to. Long years of light lingering on certain types of elements (like social power and drama), and sufficient avoidance of other elements (like consequentialism or whether the future will contain enough historians for their life in particular to be deeply evaluated) affects behavior much more than the smaller number of strong tendencies unusually powerful enough to be thought of as fixations or aversions.
13 "If you ask a cluster patient to rate their pain, they’ll almost always say 10/10. Does that mean the headaches are twice as painful as a 5/10 condition? There are some philosophical reasons to expect pain to be logarithmic, so plausibly cluster headaches could be orders of magnitude more painful than the average condition."
It seems problematic that people are asked to rate things, but afterwards there is debate about what their rating means. If you want to solve the 5/10 vs. 10/10 problem, you should probably tell people "where 10/10 is twice as bad than 5/10", or however you want to interpret it afterwards while still making sure that people understand it.
However, ratings of whatever always have the problem that they are bounded, so if people experienced some level of pain for the first time, their previous answers and the answers of other people to the same question may be meaningless or distorted.
The conventional 1-10 pain scale is in no way linear. Numbers are typically given descriptions, like "1: Barely noticeable pain" or "5: You can't ignore it for more than a few minutes but with some effort you can still do other things" or "10: Worst pain imaginable".
If it were linear, then ten minutes of a 1/10 pain would be just as bad as one minute of the worst pain imaginable, which doesn't seem right at all.
I don't think it's even logarithmic. The worst pain I've ever experienced (from appendicitis) I rated as 8/10 at the time. It was bad, but quite finitely worse than other pains -- I'd rather have a minute of 8/10 than an hour of 6/10.
But I feel like a 10/10 pain, the literal worst pain you can ever possibly experience, must be many many many times worse than an 8/10. It terrifies me to think about what that must be like. I'd rather suffer an hour of 8/10 than a single minute of 10/10.
Well, "worst pain imaginable (by you)" and "worst pain you can possibly experience" could be very different, depending on the strength of your imagination and/or experience.
I've seen some pain charts with a more objective wording, something like "it's painful but I'm still able to walk around with difficulty" vs "it's so painful I can't do anything but lie here in agony."
Scientifically speaking, there are two different pain scales: one scale for intensity, and one scale for unpleasantness. They are often, but not always, correlated.
Cluster headaches are notable because their unpleasantness is extremely high, this may be related to the effects of the cluster on the autonomic nervous system. If you have ever seen anyone have a cluster headache, you can observe them pacing restlessly, maybe swearing or pounding the wall. This is a dramatic contrast to migraine patients, who like to remain still in a dark quiet place.
I completely agree with Scott’s statement about the impact of cluster headache and the need for better treatment availability, and endorse his reference to the clusterbusters.
The proposal may be justified! However, if we accept the way to get to that conclusion, then such scales and the accumulated data based on them seem questionable. Do people who say some number know what it means, or is supposed to mean? This does not only change conclusions based on the 10/10 cases, but on all of them.
After many, many years, I figured out that I was miscommunicating with doctors, other people, and myself because while I don’t feel less pain than average, I perceive it as less urgent: my threshhold is average, but my tolerance is very high. This means that I assumed other people were in much more pain than me in equivalent situations, that I was in less pain than I was (and therefore that various situations were less serious than they were), and failed to get medical staff to take various situations seriously in a timely manner. Those screamy-face scales are useless.
So now I do the weird robot thing of explaining to the nurse that I’m not very good at knowing how much pain I’m in, and my face won’t reflect that I’m in pain, and yes you just watched me walk relatively normally into this room, but I do feel like crying all the time and I feel a little faint, so I suspect I am actually in a lot of pain (my toe was broken).
55. Christianity won partially because ordinary romans thought Jesus was a very powerful Harry Potter-like wizard that could help them with their problems.
We don't know much about the beliefs of ordinary early converts as literary sources focus on saints, martyrs and theologians but we do have some early Christian sarcophagi from the catacombs of Rome and the reliefs depict a youthful, round-faced Jesus performing miracles with a wand. It is only after Christianity won imperial support that we start to see depictions of more theologically important themes. In the beginning it was all about miracles.
44 I was talking to a police officer friend at the weekend and he made an arrest just before his night shift finished that morning and then had to stay working past the end of his shift for quite a long time to do all the paperwork. Police officers here in the UK are definitely de-incentivised to make arrests!
Hard to imagine a reasonable system where a police officer can arrest someone at 4:45, drop him off at the station at 4:58, and then go home at 5, leaving no written record of why the hell this person is now in the holding cells. What is the next shift supposed to do with this prisoner?
Solution I thought of just now (which is therefore probably flawed):
Mandate that the last hour of the officer's shift is spent at the desk. That way he *can't* make an arrest at the end of his shift and therefore doesn't have to worry about forcing himself to work late.
I guess it's a partly a question of how long the paperwork takes? If you're there for an extra hour say it's not wonderful but also not so bad perhaps, but if it's several hours work then that that you are going start wondering if you really need to make that arrest?
> Under his latest proposal, Mr Howells has secured £10m of funding from venture-capital money in Germany and Switzerland and says he will deploy robot dogs, drones and an AI machine to filter through 110,000 tons of waste.
Consider the amount of waste your household produces each week. Now multiply that by a million over decades. You need to manually sort through the waste for a tiny object. This either necessitates employing a bunch of people, or inventing a novel technological solution.
It is also likely underneath large amounts of other waste which you'll need the equivalent of earth movers or mining equipment to move, in such a way that wouldn't damage a tiny object. Which needs both the equipment and the expertise to move it.
This waste is probably not very healthy for people to be exposed to so you need some safety equipment and liability insurance.
Even if it's in usable condition it will probably need professional work to repair.
This object is also ridiculously valuable so you'll need security at all times to stop your employees or some random person stealing it, either during retrieval, transport or repair.
Also presumably this will disrupt the normal operations of the site so there are costs to doing that.
So yeah I could see it easily being way about 10 million
At what point will it be worthwhile? On the one hand, Bitcoin keeps going up in price. On the other hand, the more time that passes the less likely it will be that any recovered hard drive will have recoverable data on it. On the gripping hand, are they adding additional trash through which they would have to sort?
It's allegedly worth about $700 million now. Five years ago, it would have been worth perhaps $200 million. If Bitcoin hits $1M within five years, so about 10 times the current price, would it be worth a try?
He's been trying to recover this since 2013 and even back then, by the time he went to the dump, the likely spot had been covered four feet deep by assorted refuse. Eleven years on, imagine what it's like by now in this place:
"They have also vowed to help the council "modernise" the landfill which has repeatedly been in breach of its permit since 2020 over levels of arsenic, asbestos, methane and other substances. Pointing to damning reports from Natural Resources Wales the claim says: "These compliance reports call into question whether the [council] is a fit and competent landfill operator."
The guy sounds obsessed by "I lost a fortune and if I could only get the hard drive back I'd be rich as Croesus" and I imagine he's brooded on this over the years and has now convinced himself all he has to do is find the hard drive and recover the data, and this is going to be easy-peasy because he knows precisely where it is (he doesn't), and the platter will be whole (it won't) and his experts can decode it all (they can't).
The guy wants the council to take responsibility for the costs of excavating the landfill on the promise of "if my magic money beans grow, I'll give you tens of millions". Now maybe it's worth swapping the cow for the bag of magic beans, but maybe it's not. If he can't find his Hard Drive O'Riches, or he does and it's a heap of rust and can't produce the goods, they're in the hole for millions because I feel like his team of experts will fade away like the morning dew if there is no fortune forthcoming, and he's just an ordinary guy with no money of his own to cover the costs.
If you want easy riches, just stick to playing the lotto. It was really hard luck but he was careless, now let go of the entire obsession and move on.
I'm kind of imagining the situation like someone accidentally threw away his original issue #1 of Superman, or a rookie Mickey Mantle baseball card, or something similar.
Hazimis are analogous to Donatists. I expect that the fate of this movement within ISIS will be much like that of Donatism within the early Church: some appeal to rigorists and local spread, but eventual condemnation since it's so hard to make and keep allies.
"30: Related: we talked before about various edge cases of cancel culture. Here’s a real-life one: crypto company Coinbase has said they’ll end their relationship with any law firm that hires lawyers who have previously opposed crypto."
Variation on an old joke:
God and Satan are arguing over the property line between Heaven and Hell. Eventually, God threatens to sue. Satan just laughs and responds "Go ahead. I have all the good lawyers."
Coinbase is making a mistake, IMO. Why exclude people experienced in exactly the kind of law you're looking to defend yourself against? If it were me, I'd be specifically targeting firms that were successful in crypto cases in the past, regardless of which side they were on. If they know the arguments that win in court, I want them on my side.
EDIT: And if I have the BEST on my side, I know they're not going to be representing the opposition!
"Andreesen accused a regulator called the CFPB of being behind the debanking conspiracy, but CFPB has nothing to do with crypto"
And banking regulators in the Bush and Obama admins had nothing to do with guns or porn, but you know who did? Banks. And who do banking regulators have authority over? Banks. A quiet note to the bank's risk division along the lines of:
"We're concerned about the potential risk profile of your bank. We may have to reassess your position in the banking industry if nothing changes.
To change the subject completely, and as a friendly heads-up, we believe [TARGET] represents a significant risk to banks in which they hold accounts. Obviously, we're not suggesting any kind of specific be taken on this issue, because we're not permitted."
Maybe, but it's dishonest to pretend that the gov't agency in charge of regulating banks and payment processors doesn't have influence over the crypto space.
Edit:
Oh COME ON.
"But this was a ridiculous claim on its face, given that the CFPB is specifically designed to protect consumers against rapacious companies against whom they have little recourse."
This is an incredibly stupid claim, given the entire world history of government. This isn't "Wet streets cause rain", this is "I sold our house for this one bean because the guy told me it was a special bean worth a billion dollars."
…I mean, if you start with the axiom that all government agencies are evil, I am not sure that concluding a government agency is evil adds anything new to the conversation.
I didn't. There's well over a century, just in the US, of agencies that are supposed to protect consumers getting captured and protecting the very interests the agencies were intended to constrain.
Not sure what you mean. Singer has publicly said he donates 40% of his regular income (and 100% of any special prizes he gets). That seems compatible to me with a company run by his family member spending $150K on an apartment in 1983.
Given the harshness of Singer’s moral philosophy as applied to others, 40% isn’t good enough. In fact if giving away that 40% doesn’t reduce him to below the median income he’s in no position to lecture anybody at the median income, if after the 40% he is on double the median he’s in no position to lecture anybody below twice the median income. And so on.
And clearly he should leave an estate of $0.
There are still drowning children and singer is in a better position to most to save them.
His thought experiment did convince me to spend considerably more on charity, albeit not to the self impoverishment he would demand, but then it hasn’t convinced him either.
You seem to be implying that Singer has claimed that everyone above median income is morally obligated to give away the excess. Has he ever actually said something like that? Or if not, what is the "harshness" that you are referring to, which would demand more than 40% of income be donated?
Median wage? No. People in the west would have to give away large percentages of their income way below that income.
His philosophy is often distilled to “we have a moral obligation to give significantly to help others in need if doing so does not cause us comparable harm” - quoting chatGPT there but it’s a good synopsis.
39. That tracks if professors are pattern-matching to compliance and standardized form, not actually evaluating the merits of the essay. And text AI is nothing but the standard form. It may just be a variation of the old concept describing the differences in who S/A class people hire, vs. B/C hire.
The article bizzarely reads this as an indictment of AI detection not the assignments and grading. Also surreal to write something advocating greater use of AI detection software without addressing the false-positive rate or the consequences of false positives. Forbes in general is more of a medium competitor than an actual journalism outfit these days.
I am a protestant. I thought our whole disagreement with catholic was that the fact that whatever the church authorities say, it is catholic by definition. If you can say that the pope isn't catholic, why couldn't Luther say that indulgences aren't catholic.
My understanding of the Catholic position was that understanding nontrivial theological truths is a difficult process that requires serious scholarly study and philosophical analysis. And the Church is the central institution within which that study and analysis takes place and its techniques and conclusions are taught and applied.
The Church is believed to have some divine inspiration to protect it against error, but its authority is mostly based on the idea that the consensus of the one big mainstream community of experts are much more likely to be right on any given question in their field than a clever individual who has come up with substantially different conclusions on his own.
Re: conspiracies: Effective altruism is obviously a front for the International Mosquito Net Manufacturers Association. Not much more needs to be said.
Re: Headaches: "plausibly cluster headaches could be orders of magnitude more painful than the average condition. Once you internalize that possibility, it throws a wrench into normal QALY ratings and suggests that, even though cluster headaches are pretty rare, they might cause a substantial portion of the global burden of disease (or even a substantial portion of the suffering in the world). "
Oh dear, that sounds very bad indeed. Orders of magnitude, my word. So where is this going?
"Some psychedelics, especially psilocybin and DMT, seem to treat cluster headaches very effectively"
3: The accusation of "conspiracy theory" doesn't depend on whether there's in fact a conspiracy. It's simply a convenient way to make a status claim about beliefs and attitudes that you think should be mocked and/or dismissed out of hand. A "superweapon", if you will.
My favorite Chess variant (to think about, not to play) is called Horde Chess and was invented by Lord Dunsany (one of the best fantasy authors before Tolkien). One side is normal, the other side is a giant swarm of pawns, and for the normal side to win it has to kill all the pawns. Given his title, you have to wonder how personally he took the game.
Hi! I wrote the linked post on cluster headaches. Let me know if you write that post!
A couple of related papers:
- Kang et al. (2024): Exercise as an abortive treatment for cluster headaches: Insights from a large patient registry (https://doi.org/10.1002/acn3.52263)
Congrats on your article, it is impressively thorough and informative
And thanks for the very relevant sport study! Squats, sprints and pushups are exactly what I would order.
It also fits with my assessment that I have a mild form of the condition.
Because of this cardio approach, it's been a while since I have had a full crisis, but I don't remember them as 10/10 bad. To be clear, I was unable to do any real task, and it did feel like getting repeatedly stabbed with a blunt stake above the eye and behind the ear, but I can imagine worse experiences.
Probably because most serious pains are accompanied by a high likelihood of long-term or permanent loss of function, and the fear mixes with the pain (*waves hands in predictive processing*). Whereas cluster headaches are purely "baseless" pain from a system 2 perspective. Of course this is compatible with your paragraph on pain and suffering.
Other characteristic that may be non-typical: for me the onset of the crisis can be quite a bit longer than 9 minutes. Staying in the predictive processing theme, I sometimes find it hard to differentiate between the anxious anticipation of a likely crisis and the emerging pain itself
Other than that, I do think my symptoms are pretty typical, at least enough so that conditions similar to mine would regularly be diagnosed as cluster headaches. I am really bad at keeping a journal but I would say the periods hover around 5 months, with about 1-3 crises every other day, one eye getting red puffy and teary, and so on
I tried intranasal triptans, but they didn't make any sensible difference
About the coping mechanisms, I feel like I can experience both extremes. I remember some crises where I just wanted to lay down and find some peace, and some where I tried hitting my forehead with the heel of my hand (ineffective). And when a crisis comes, I almost feel like I can choose whether to be sleepily annoyed by the pain, or outraged by the affront. Obviously the cardio thing motivates me to switch to the latter.
All that aside though, I feel like this duality between suffering and instinctive prediction of future suffering (or between happiness and instinctive prediction of future happiness) can be hard to deal with from a utilitarian perspective, because it leads to an infinite regress
It doesn't have to be a counter-argument to utilitarianism though, maybe utilitarianism just highlights the problem better
That's why the story of this lady that "doesn't feel pain" that Scott talked about in a previous links post seems so weird to me, although it's consistent with the fact that she " has no anxiety" either
55. ..."the Mexican youth are turning away from the stodgy boring Catholic Church en masse to worship Santa Muerte. Why?"
Christianity makes great demands on believers. Quid-pro-quo paganism lets you do whatever, as long as you pay up.
Christianity took off despite this because it offered more than it demanded: A taste of heaven on Earth amid a community of transformed believers, and promise of true heaven to come.
This lost credibility over time. The uniquely impressive character of the early Christian community could not be maintained once the Christian community extended to all of society. Christianity still kept spreading for centuries due to prestige, power, individual examples of spiritual transformation, and the innate attractiveness of the message. But then science and the Enlightenment came along, undermining people's faith in the hereafter.
If you don't believe in spiritual transformation because you don't see any in the Christians around you, and you don't believe in the afterlife, Christianity isn't very attractive at all. It's easy to see it as just a bunch of dour thou-shalt-nots and false promises.
Enter Santa Muerte. It offers a connection to the spirit world (materialism, though persuasive, is deeply unsatisfying to most people); provides immediately tangible results (or so it claims); and makes no limiting demands on believers. If you don't think Christianity can make good on its offers, and you're not bothered by human sacrifice, that's very attractive by comparison.
That being said, I would like to point out that Christianity is growing in Mexico as well. In the same period since 2001, the Protestant population in Mexico has exploded. Not to imply that Catholic Mexicans are not Christians, but mass conversions to forms of Christianity totally at odds with Mexican tradition must represent a genuine upwelling of religious fervor.
>Christianity makes great demands on believers. Quid-pro-quo paganism lets you do whatever, as long as you pay up.
Makes sense. My guess is that very few of the Santa Muerte believers are participating in anything like regular worship, allocating the equivalent of an hour at Mass. Of course, many self-identified Catholics in Mexico aren't doing this either, though my understanding is that Mass attendance in Mexico is relatively high.
>That being said, I would like to point out that Christianity is growing in Mexico as well. In the same period since 2001, the Protestant population in Mexico has exploded.
Yes -- and I would bet that new Protestants are attending church at much higher rates than the Roman Catholics, let alone the Santa Muerte cultists.
It's generally my belief that Roman Catholicism is incapable of remaining dominant in an open religious marketplace. Indeed, it's unlikely that any form of Christianity can remain dominant under such conditions, but the RCC, in places where its monopoly is long established and consequently sclerotic, is especially unsuited to competition against more dynamic alternatives.
33: "Gas mileage in gallons per mile has area of area", shouldn't that read "units of area"?
I think the XKCD gives a fairly good answer, and it shouldn't really be a surprise that a volume divided by a distance results in an area (at least I hope it isn't to anyone that thinks about it for more than a moment). Physically you could imagine that instead of carrying gas with you, you connect the car to a pipe filled with gas, and then "pump" that gas into your car by simply driving into it, kind of like a ramjet. Mileage would represent the (average) cross-sectional area of the pipe.
Yes, it is simply the minimum cross-section area a 'vein' of gasoline must have so that a car with a snorkel could follow it indefinitely.
Also, for EV, the efficiency given as energy per distance could be interpreted to be the force required to push the vehicle along, divided by the engine efficiency.
9. Has been rumbling on for ages, it seems to resurface every now and then when the bitcoin price spikes. On the council side, it appears they think the hard drive is buried amidst 15,000 tonnes of other waste (which might be the "small" area he talks about) and that digging it up will take months and cost millions. No guarantee of a payout either, since its been buried for more than a decade and who knows if they can even locate it.
Re 36: Tyler Alterman's looping psychospiritual delving...
Historically, I suspect most cultures where psychospiritual experiences were part of the mental health ecosystem were like Ancient Greece and Rome and employed them sparingly, either as one off initiations - Eleusis, Mithras - or as part of the yearly rhythm of communal experience.
The recursive delving was for full time mystics, magicians and saints, and not everybody can be that.
Regarding the Marxist takeover of institutions etc., I've read documents from/describing the Communist Party of Finland in the 1960s, when a lot of academics entered it (for the first time in basically, well, ever), and the general feeling was that while they welcomed the influx they were also quite suspicious of the new recruits and constantly worried that this would eventually draw the party away from the working-class base (the fears were correct, as it turns out to be).
Of course, this was specific to the fact that communism was a mass movement in Finland and the situation in Anglo countries, where it always seems to have had a more middle-class characteristic, seems to be different, but it's also this aspect which has meant communism has taken a more conspiratiorial aspect particularly in the US - the Soviets indeed seem to have led the CPUSA to take a more "subversive", secretive role, but less so to increase the levels of gayness or what have you, but simply to put operatives in levels of society where they can access secret data that Soviets could use, a la the Rosenbergs. This was hardly an universal main function for a communist party, though!
(Also, in many cases, there's a bit of a cause-and-effect confusion on the Right on the specific relation of communism and, say, anti-racist, feminist, environmentalist, pacifist movements and such; the communists in various countries were interested in such movements and often tried to enter them to turn them into Communist Party tools or, failing that, construct their own movements as imitation, but this is different from anti-racism, feminism, environmentalism or pacifism *specifically* being a communist idea as such, or movements advocating the same only existing due to communists specifically creating them.)
As I indicated in my book contest review (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QiotH3aGFgNLGqsIHTK_Plm_gem2E4l2C2ctyGJd0jY/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.fktwij6u8c98 - I probably really should get around to rehosting it), much of the rise of communism in the intellectual classes after WW2 was probably just aftereffects of secularization, and the perceived specific link between secularism and Marxism, not the least reinforced by right-wing Christians specifically going on about the threat of godless communism - one of the reasons why Ayn Rand was important was in strengthening the idea that one could simultaneously be an atheist and strong anticommunist, not all that common during the 50s or 60s in the West.
The specific strategy of orthodox Marxism has always been based specifically organizing the working class as working class, since the whole idea is that working class is specifically distinct from national or other identity groups by virtue of holding the power in its own hands *as* working class, concretized by strike; if the workers stop working, the entire society stops. Obviously there have been revisionist Marxists disagreeing with this thesis, but that's what makes them revisionist, ie. not orthodox.
Incidentally, as someone who was active in the university left around 2009-2011 and know a lot of people from it since then, I don't remember if I ever heard anyone refer to Marcuse as an actual point of reference, ie. something beyond a historical figure. It's not even that Frankfurt School in general has been forgotten, Adorno was a continuous point of reference and a topic for discussion. Some Marcuse was translated around 60s-70s, but it took until 2022 for anyone to bother to translate Eros and Civilization, for example. That's probably one of the main reasons why it has always seemed a bit strange to me that Marcuse, of all the Frankfurt School figures, is the constant bugaboo for right-wingers - I suspect they're more cognizant of his thought than the Left, these days.
Having read up on the Frankfurt School guys 8 or 9 years ago when the esteemed SSC right wing posters were very convinced they were dangerous, I was surprised to crack into Adorno and Marcuse and find it mostly amounted to "The proletarian revolution as imagined obviously isn't coming. Instead of watching TV and movies and letting your brain rot, form reading groups to bone up on your Aristotle and work to change groups you're in locally until we have a better idea of how to respond to how modernity has evolved"
Basically the most Jordan Peterson "clean your room first before changing the world" branch of leftism I ever heard about and it had people TERRIFIED. Totally baffling
Following up with the comment on your post, I've also had some interaction with the SWP (US variety, i live in America) in the past, and I would have voted for their candidate this year if she'd been on the ballot in my current state of residence. As you're aware, the US and UK SWPs are quite different ideologically.
The UK SWP is Trotskyist, as far as I know. The US SWP is more 'orthodox' Marxist, and since the fall of the Soviet Union is pretty strongly attached to Cuba.
Interestingly enough, they're one of the few far-left organizations in the US that's currently pro Israel as well as critical of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
"Here are some notable names leading communist countries and their professions before politics: Nikita Khrushchev was a metalworker, as was Władysław Gomułka, the general secretary of the Polish Communist Party. Walter Ulbricht of the German Democratic Republic was a joiner. Yugoslavia's longtime leader, Josip Broz Tito, was a machinist. The same applied to the Western communist parties. Maurice Thorez, the longtime leader of the Communist Party of France, was a miner, for example."
This is a really good point, and one I make to people all the time. One could extend the list much further, of course.
The one leader of a postwar Warsaw Pact country who comes to mind who genuinely was an upper middle class intellectual (maybe there are others that I'm not remembering) was Enver Hoxha in Albania, and probably not by accident, he was also the most ideologically extreme / wacky.
I think you're generally right about how communism was never a genuine mass movement in the Anglosphere countries (minus Grenada and Guyana, i guess, and maybe modern South Africa if you consider that Anglosphere), compared to what it was in much of continental Europe and the rest of the world.
That said, it's worth noting that the longtime leader of the Communist Party USA (a Finnish-American, interestingly enough, who grew up speaking Finnish) was genuinely working class, started his adult (well, mid-teen, actually) life out as a logger and miner and grew up in a literal log cabin in Minnesota.
Yes, CPUSA had pockets of working class support, such as famously among Finnish-Americans, but Gus Hall was nothing if not loyal to Soviet Union and as such followed the Soviet general strategy for Communist operations in America.
Re 23, yeah, this sounds like the kind of thing I live in. Chinese cities consist of lots of these walled high-rise complexes, with mainly pedestrianised space between the buildings, which is lovely, because you can just let your kids out to roam in a fairly safe space.
Most Chinese apartments are much too small for American tastes, I'm sure, but in some of the better complexes the flats can be pretty big. As for soundproofing... I dunno, I've never found it a problem. How quiet can you make a house anyway? How quiet do you want a house to be? In the city, there's usually some traffic noise. In the country, there's country noise. And lots of houses creak and gurgle at night... I'm not really convinced by the sound worry.
I think this is largely cultural. Anglosphere countries have a really, really high preference for total silence at home, and sharing walls with neighbours or living directly on a busy street is an unacceptable level of noise for the typical Anglosphere resident. When I first migrated to Australia I couldn't sleep because it was perpetually far too quiet for me. Even now, when I travel to remote regions for work, my colleagues often complain about the ore train noises - but I like the ambient noise personally.
The Chinese norm of being woken up by a yelling street vendor or other urban noises is unthinkable in the west.
Re 43: "all banks are like this in a correlated way, and it would be nice to have some means of financial system access which isn’t like this."
I'm not convinced by this at all. I don't see why the "financial system" should be set up so that anyone and everyone can use it. In part, this is just a numbers thing: in fact, out of 1,000 irregular users who get screened out by banks, 999 of them are doing crime. (And I have no problem with banks screening out people who do crime.) And for the other 1... it's not obvious to me why an entire complex global system should be set up to serve them.
Individuals deserve respect on a moral level, and they deserve political participation on a social level. I don't see that they deserve banks.
Do the crimes they're doing have anything to do with banking? Those are the crimes bankers should be trying to avoid. Let them work to their strengths.
Police, on the other hand, are approaching this incorrectly. They should instead let criminals try to legitimize their activities by banking, and investigate banking activities that can lead to evidence of their actual crimes, and prosecute those.
Tyler Alterman’s claim does sound plausible. It’s like a scientist who builds a computer model to understand some complex phenomenon in the world and then gets sidetracked exploring all the artifacts of the model, conflating them with the phenomenon in the world they originally set out to explore.
About an improved insulin which I hope is successfully sensitive to the amount of glucose in the blood so it turns itself on when there's too much and off when there's too little, but also about the intriguing idea that there isn't a good pipeline to get scientific discoveries to common use.
The universities are chasing breakthrough research, and development is boring. Venture capitalists want something better developed than a research paper to work with. So a lot of promising research doesn't become anything useful because no one wants to do the dull part.
Ben Miles is working on investing in development so he might be biased. Or he might be right.
I was surprised that sports betting might be more drastically damaging than other addictions. I'd like to think that MLMs do more damage, but I could be wrong.
Is small-scale sports betting (like office pools) legal?
According to my go-to legal source on gambling (the movie Molly's Game, lol) gambling is generally legal if all the bets get paid out to the players. That describes most casual/social gambling (home poker game, office pool, bingo, etc.).
You run into legal issues if you as the game operator try to turn a profit, which you'd do by charging people a flat fee or a share of the pot.
Online sports gambling is kind of uniquely terrible because it combines the addictive, at-your-fingertips-24/7 money wasting of freemium/loot-box mobile games with the near universal popularity (among straight guys, anyway) of sports.
You can squander your life savings on an MLM, but it takes time and hard work and there'll be clear warnings signs for your friends and family, like the garage full of junk and MLM Facebook posts.
Mobile gambling is more like alcoholism -- you can ruin your life in secret, 24 hours a day, without anyone around you being the wiser until your spouse notices her credit score has fallen off a cliff and the debt collectors come knocking.
>You run into legal issues if you as the game operator try to turn a profit, which you'd do by charging people a flat fee or a share of the pot.
Often, flat-fee arrangements have been determined to be legal. In Texas, at least, poker rooms that charge a flat fee per hour to sit at a table have been adjudicated to be legal, while taking a rake (a percent of each pot) is extremely illegal.
In the movie the make-a-profit-while-not-taking-a-rake thing is a legal grey area (in CA and NY, anyway). So she makes her money on tips and her lawyer basically tells her: don't break any _other_ laws while you're making a small fortune on tips because you won't be prosecuted for the tips in isolation, but if you break other laws they'll charge you with running an illegal casino plus the other stuff.
>I’m not usually a fan of accusations that cultural Marxism is a “conspiracy theory” - some leading leftists said they should take over institutions, leftists did take over institutions, you don’t have to be a Nazi to wonder if these two things are connected.
This is too charitable. I generally hear "Cultural Marxism" used as a snarl word - "I want to call my opponents communists, because everyone agrees that communists are evil, but they aren't proposing any actual communist policies so I'm going to say they're communists *in spirit.*" Most of the time it's not even used about economics, anything "woke" is presumptively communist.
Given how often you've reiterated that you shouldn't call Trump supporters "fascists" unless they're openly proposing "round people up and put them in camps"-tier policies, I think you should have a similar policy against calling people Marxists unless they're actually proposing to seize the means of production.
Cultural Marxism is just a convenient short-hand for the collection of political philosophies of Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and Marcuse (all of which are most definitely Communist in their political and philosopical leanings) that are quite often implemented today. Common phrases like "the Right side of History," "voting against their own [class] interests," "late stage capitalism," and the "Paradox of Tolerance" (the exact phrase may be Popper, but Marcuse explored the political implications) are all very much tent poles of Cultural Marxism as a philosophy. Specifically addressing your objection, Cultural Marxism does not require, and in some interpretations does not even advocate for, Marxist economic policies. The liberation it advocates comes through other means.
I would submit that Cultural Marxism combined with Neo-Liberal economics is the most accurate description for most of the Left as they exist in the Western world today. It is not a slur, it is an accurate description.
Calling Trump supporters "Fascists" is not the same thing, as it's not remotely close to accurate. Among other things, Fascism requires strong central state apparatuses, and Trump's commitments to cut or scale back many of those apparatuses flies in direct counter to charges of Fascism. One can argue endlessly whether they constitute good governance, but it's not really debatable that Mousilleni would be unimpressed.
> "people seem to obsess over (to the point of centering their lives around) various forms of lowbrow art from Harry Potter to Marvel to anime."
I think it's a mistake to assume that Harry Potter and (some) Marvel and (some) anime are "lowbrow."
Edit: I didn't make it clear that I meant "just yet." I suspect Rowling is going to follow the same trajectory as Dickens; wildly popular but considered to be mostly pulpy "trash" in her time, then regarded as great literature three to four generations later.
I know little of Marvel and anime, but I read the first three books of Harry Potter and found them pretty vacuous. It seemed like the world-building was ad hoc, and the books seemed to forget what happened in previous books, such as always starting in the tiny room under the stairs, despite the foster parents learning their guardian was a person of some import to other people. The sport of quidditch seemed designed to make the protagonist win, and the supporting players a little less than background.
Many of Rowlings choices are in the style of - if not a direct homage to - Dickens, specifically tropes like character names designed to sound like character traits and the exaggeration of protagonist / antagonist actions in relation to the protagonist (especially for secondary and tertiary characters). The Dursleys utter dedication to domestic villiany is thoroughly Dickensian, and intended to be enjoyed as such by adult literate readers.
It'd be one thing if you noticed that intention and were complaining that Rowling was too derivative. There's a good argument that The Worst Witch + Dickens = Harry Potter.
But given your specific complaints here, it doesn't look like you actually understood Rowling.
Y'know, everyone talks about the similarity of motifs between Rowling's books and those of other fantasy writers. No one ever talks about how derivative its plot may be. Consider:
A young boy is living with his uncle and aunt because something awful has happened to his parents. The uncle dislikes the boy, and when an opportunity presents itself he happily packs his nephew off to a private school. On the trip to the school, the boy makes some friends, but also makes a bitter enemy of a wealthy and arrogant boy also on his way to the school, and during the year various plots and pranks are practiced between the cliques that form around the two boys. On arriving at the school, the boy also makes an enemy of a teacher who thereafter delights in embarrassing and punishing him, but the boy acquires a protector in the form of the wise and kindly headmaster who has for some reason taken a shine to him.
Halfway through the fall semester, the boy joins the school sports team (sports are very important at his school) and his skill on the field wins an important game, heightening his reputation.
Gradually, the boy and his friends realize that the teacher who hates him is executing some kind of evil plot. They investigate and frustrate it at the climax. During the denouement, the boy discovers that the father of his wealthy rival may be complicit in whatever awful thing it was that befell his father.
The match between the plot of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" and that of Edward Stratemeyer's "The Rovers Boys at School, or The Cadets of Putnam Hall" (published 1899) is not exact, but the books track so closely in structure and basic incident that it's impossible to read the two without suffering a very strong sense of deja vu.
Rowling was writing a parody of school stories, in a fantasy setting. So yes, it’s deliberately derivative of school stories. It’s also why so much of the language used by wizard characters has an Enid Blyton flavour.
It also has quite a lot of satirical content about British society, which I gather isn’t very visible to those outside Britain.
As I mentioned, there are some very good arguments that Harry Potter is highly derivative! I've never heard of The Rovers Boys at School, but The Worst Witch was an *extremely* popular children's book series about a British boarding school for magic. It was published in the mid-'70s to '80s (Rowling would have been 10 when the first book was published). It doesn't line up as exactly as The Rovers Boys at School apparently does, but it has a lot of magic boarding school elements in common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Witch
Personally, I don't mind if a work is derivative if it manages to significantly improve upon the work that went before it. That could be setting a story in a more compelling genre or focusing on a different point of view character or, or, or...the list is endless. "First" doesn't necessarily mean "best!"
I agree with the points about derivative works. I found The Sword of Shanarra to be a fairly blatant rip-off of The Lord of the Rings, with a powerful wizard character, a BBEG, a weak protagonist who turns out to be needed, etc. If you found enough original material to find Harry Potter entertaining, then more power to you.
But if it can only be properly appreciated by a timeslice of British people who can better understand the inside jokes, then I doubt it will stand the test of time. Shakespeare had lots of jokes that were current at the time and now need explanation, but it also had a lot of timeless content.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm not criticizing Rowling. There's nothing wrong with close modeling, even of plot, so long as the work itself is transformative, which (at least relative to the Rover Boys) Harry Potter certainly is.
BTW, the Rover Boys were parodied in a Merrie Melodies cartoon, "The Dover Boys", available here:
And to close the circle, in the comments you will find people blithely applying the infamous "Dumbledore said calmly" joke to one of the cartoon's trademark lines.
“If you don’t like it, it’s your fault for not understanding the genius of it” is, respectfully, kind of obnoxious.
FWIW the complaints noted above match what made me pretty lukewarm on Harry Potter. Some fun stuff to read on a beach or a rainy day, a whimsical aesthetic for kids to cosplay, but it doesn’t hold up that well to scrutiny.
But I also find Dickens wildly overrated so maybe I’m just a Scrooge.
Strawmanning people's comments with exaggerated and incorrect rephrasing is, respectfully, also kind of obnoxious.
I meant exactly what I said, not what you imagined. Arrk Mindmaster's *specific* objections appear to indicate literal ignorance about Dickensian tropes and Rowling's deliberate use of them.
With respect, you have given no examples of Dickensian tropes used in Harry Potter. I've read a little Dickens (which sounds awfully odd out of context), but it was long ago, and know of nothing that would make something sound like something Dickens may have written. It is not reasonable to expect me to now read the body of Dickens' work in order to understand Harry Potter better.
> "specifically tropes like character names designed to sound like character traits and the exaggeration of protagonist / antagonist actions in relation to the protagonist (especially for secondary and tertiary characters)."
With the arguable exception of my use of the word “genius”, I stand by my paraphrase. Your objection to Arrk is a specific example of the general form of argument trope where a critic’s fair objections, rooted in their own taste and experience of the work, are condescendingly dismissed because they failed to “understand” some obscure allusion or theme in the work. Intended or not, it comes off as a sneer, as if you are saying, “you just don’t get it because, unlike me, you are not well read enough to appreciate it”. No you didn’t actually say that exactly, and may not have meant it, but the subtext comes through loudly.
Especially since you haven’t even answered why any of these derivations or allusions actually mitigate Arrk’s complaints! If the ad hoc worldbuilding, Quidditch, and characterization of the Dursleys is an homage/rip-off of Dickens or a British book from the 70s, so what? It’s a genuinely interesting factoid and I’m glad you shared it, but why should it really change Arrk’s (or my, since I have similar issues with HP) experience of the novels?
With a few exceptions, a book (especially an adventure novel for kids!) should stand on its own, and, as Arrk has said, if understanding Harry Potter requires a comprehensive understanding of Dickens and the literary criticism around it, I’d say it’s rather failed. It’s a nice Easter egg for British book nerds, but it’s not a crutch for weak world building.
I think you've changed my mind; I'll actually go ahead and semi-embrace your strawman exaggeration as being essentially correct at its core.
I indeed don't consider Arrk (or you) to be qualified "critics" of Harry Potter, given your individual specific objections about world-building details which were *intended* to be whimsical, if not actually absurd. Cultural details like Quidditch rules arise from an alternative universe of cause and effect which is fundamentally based in the whimsical and the absurd (magic!). Of course wizards have weird rules for their weird flying broom game! They don't even have normal physics!
You can of course say that the work was not to your personal taste because you don't like whimsical or Dickensian stuff or whatever, no matter how well it's executed.
But that's different from declaring that something is bad because you misunderstood the author's intent and thus did not perceive when that intent was achieved. Personally, I'm actively annoyed by the entire "men engaging in black market crime to feel powerful" genre (Breaking Bad, Scorsese's organized crime movies, etc), but I would never argue against the objective high quality of those works merely because I, personally, think that operating in black markets to feed one's ego is inexcusably stupid. Breaking Bad is objectively successful at executing its intention, and so is Goodfellas. I don't *like* either of them and don't want to see either of them again, but I acknowledge their greatness. They achieved their objectives at an extremely high level. There's no rational argument otherwise.
Beyond that, there are entire categories of art on which I might express my personal taste, but would never attempt to defend as legitimate "criticism." I know almost nothing about music; I don't have anything much to say about what's objectively "good" or not. There are ethnic cuisines I don't know well enough to differentiate the mediocre from the excellent (or even if there's something about the foundational flavors of that cuisine that I'll never enjoy). I can't say anything intelligent about sports (if we want to consider pro sports a kind of performance). It goes on and on.
Dickens is an influential writer to this day because he had actually important things to say about his society.
Rowling may have started with important messages that she wanted to say, but a lot of it didn't go anywhere once she made her fortune and became hypocritical. She had interesting insights into class in the UK, in the form of the House system, but abandoned those themes in the later books. She maybe had interesting thoughts about activism (SPEW arc) but they didn't go anywhere. She might have had interesting subversive ideas about gender, but she ended her book with the extremely normative "happy ending" of getting hetero married and having kids and sending them to school. Whatever she had to say on the topic of school bullying is bizarre and unfocused (Snape's entire arc).
It's entertaining, but not particularly insightful, because Rowling is an entertaining but not particularly insightful author. She has a lot of things that seem like the beginning of an insight then completely fails to resolve them into a coherent message.
A lot of the deeper analyses of Harry Potter are done by people who bring so much of their analytical framework to the table that they might as well have written it themselves. There's reading between the lines and then there's bringing a microscope to do that.
Pratchett would be what I call an insightful author, and he doesn't need a microscope.
i think its less that the worldbuilding is ad hoc & more that like....now tolkien-style worldbuilding is in fashion, but in the past it was more like "in the land of faerie, where all the stories are true," & the more stories you knew the more richly you could populate your world. rowling is clearly more doing that. tolkien's worldbuilding is incredibly lovely but a lot of tolkien style worldbuilding is thin boring & uninspired even if internally consistent-- i think pretolkien-style worldbuilding is great too
Countless different authors have made anime or Marvel comics; let us not paint them all with the same brush.
Harry Potter, on the other hands, is one author's work, and I agree with Arrk Mindmaster here. I read the first book, and it was very banal, therefore I don't expect the sequels to be Shakespeare.
Feel free to see my response to Arrk Mindmaster; I think both of you perhaps failed to see the craft and authorial choices Rowling was making throughout her work.
Only time will tell if Rowling eventually ends up being regarded as highbrow and included on the same "classics" shelf as Dickens and Dostoevsky. I'm just saying it's a little too soon to tell.
It’s one of those things that’s cute on a very particular type of girl, but most people who end up trying that are not that type of girl.
Also “pixie cuts” proper don’t code that “tomboyish” to me. They seem equally likely to be something very femme girls go through a phase of trying out.
What does it actually mean when they claim that Santa Muerte has "29 million followers"? What's the definition of a follower, and what is even the source? The Wikipedia article gives zero sources for this particular number - it says the following: "Since 2001, there has been "meteoric growth" in Santa Muerte belief, largely due to her reputation for performing miracles.[29] She has roughly 12 million adherents, with the great majority of concentrated in Mexico, the US, and Central America. In the late 2000s, the founder of Mexico's first Santa Muerte church, David Romo, estimated that there were around 5 million devotees in Mexico, constituting approximately 5% of the country's population.[30]"
...but these numbers are obviously smaller than 29 million, and why should we trust Santa Muerte church official (who is apparently competing with other claimants) on face value, anyway? The article cited later in the Wikipedia entry (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mexicos-top-two-santa-mue_b_8253318) offers no sources, either.
Hey Scott, thanks for linking my discussion about Cobenfy! I was wondering if you would mind linking directly to the article on my blog instead/in addition too the repost on Seeds of Science - I can use all the exposure I can get.
Re. Dylan Matthews' claim that EA donations amount to <$1B/year. The NYT article mentions (and I had also heard) that Dustin Moskovitz pledged billions of dollars to EA causes. I assume this is over a long period but still, does it mean he personally accounts for >10% of all EA giving?
Oh definitely, I wouldn't be surprised if he and his wife account for more than half. It's not an optimal situation, but they have $20 billion and you need a *lot* of other people before that becomes less than half of your movement.
Here's to hoping we get there soon. I was also somewhat surprised in the opposite direction that there aren't a handful of billionaires or near billionaires driving down the Moskovitzes' share. Guess I was fooled by the "EA has captured the Silicon Valley Elite" narrative.
I think there is one other highly committed EA billionaire (Jaan Tallinn, though he might be high nine figures rather than low ten), but there's a big difference between $20 billion and $1 billion!
Supposedly some of the EAs at Anthropic might be really rich now, but if so they're doing a good job keeping quiet about it.
For the point about noise and high rises, I think this is mostly a solved problem.
Most high rises are built with concrete floor plates which isolate sound phenomenally. You’ll basically never hear “mouth vibrations” from above or below (stomping on the floor itself will still translate unfortunately).
So the bigger issue is internal walls and I think that with bigger floor plans and easiest thing to do would be to make each unit a corner unit and minimize the amount of wall space they share.
Ideally you’d design the building to have no shared walls, with the units always being separated by hallways.
This plays well with the courtyard idea. Basically have multiple separated towers joined by catwalks and or common spaces on some floors with the vast majority of units having no shared walls.
I live in one of the world's first high-rise residential buildings. It was built in the late 20's, the internal walls are made of gypsum blocks, and I have heard my neighbors speaking through the walls exactly once over the last four years. (That was a special case, with an angry man screaming at someone so loudly that I wondered if I should call the police.) Wikipedia says buildings in the USA haven't been built this way since the 20's, but buildings in Europe still are... I wonder if any Europeans can comment about their gypsum block experience.
I've lived in three high density housing situations in the US.
1. WW2 era military barracks converted to university dorms. Cinderblock walls, could not hear anything from the units on either side or above / below.
2. 2010s era "texas donut" university housing. Given what you said (and my impressions) I would expect this to be pretty poorly built, but I could also never hear any of the people I shared walls with or the people above / below me (expect for that one girl who did yoga at 8 am right above me, when I just heard lots of random thumps on the ceiling). However, the internal walls of the units were shit so I could totally hear my roommates conversations ... which leads to believe they were intentionally sound proofing the walls between units.
3. 1910s era Tenement / row house. Floors are not sound isolate so we can sometimes hear conversations / the TV from the unit below us. The walls are between 3 and 6 feet of brick so we've never heard anything from the unit we share a wall with.
I think a much bigger concern with urban noise is windows. In both the university housing and the row house most of our noise issues are people having parties / conversations outside which leaks in through our poorly noise isolated windows.
But this is also a solvable problem. I work in a modern "glass and steel" office building and you literally never hear anything from the outside even though its got floor to ceiling windows.
My place has had the original 1929 cast-iron single-pane casement windows replaced with modern "city windows" that resemble the originals (this is a historic building) but almost completely block out pretty much everything quieter than a siren. Actually I can hear a siren right now but even that is less loud (but more shrill) than a person speaking quietly. I like showing off to guests by opening one of the windows a tiny bit; instantly the fairly loud background noise of being near a busy road becomes audible.
I guess what I'm saying is that residential windows are a solved problem too (as long as you don't open them). With that said, window replacements like mine are expensive - thousands of dollars per window, although I presume that much of the cost is due to the the difficulty of retrofitting an old building.
18: my country is also currently being destroyed by online gambling (and its enabling cousin, online money lending). What's funny for me is that both are relatively unheard of before 2022, and it gives me hope. If it can grow exponentially for 2 years, it may be able to be utterly destroyed in next 2 years.
About the 2022 part, graphs I can find attribute the rise more to 2020 so maybe I was mistaken in seeing a graph from TV. But then again the rise is exponential so maybe the 2024 rise is so significant that 2020 rise is dwarfed? Even so it still looks like a fairly recent phenomenon.
Counterpoint: Bluesky is super duper cool. They did not just build a Twitter clone, they built a protocol which makes it hard to just thrive on a network affected prison population by giving a credible path towards another organization coming in and hosting the same posts, social graph, etc.
Now what's TBDIIC (to be determined if it's cool) is whether you can actually run a tech company without that moat
Happy to, the idea of “credible exit” (I heard it for the first time at Bluesky) boils down to: it must be feasible for another organisation with some resources (but not a crazy amount of resources) to spin up their own infrastructure and participate in/provide an alternative to the Bluesky network. Seemless account migration, without losing one’s contacts included! I’ve heard it also being described as the last network effect recently.
This is in contrast to the protocol behind Mastodon which instead optimizes for ease of spinning up any instance participating in the network, at the cost of not providing ease of migration or as “global” of an experience as Twitter or Bluesky.
Cool in theory. In practice it seems like it’s an echo chamber for a lot of the worst elements of Old Twitter. Jesse Singal’s foray there has been illuminating in a not good way.
I don’t have a lot of context with Singal but the posts I’ve seen of him felt like unproductive bait, milking replies for his Twitter audience. If there’s something substantive about him I should read I’d be interested
His actual writing is all worth reading. His Economist article, which he linked as his first BlueSky post and got him immediately made the most blocked person on BlueSky and accused of pedophilia, receiving death threats and piss fantasies, is well worth reading.
He gets into dumb Twitter fights, I’ll grant that. Twitter and its clones do not bring out the best in people. But blaming the reaction of BlueSky to him on him “baiting” them has a distinct air of “well look what she was wearing, she was asking for it”.
More to the point, if linking a piece of professional journalism in The Economist about a detransition lawsuit counts as “bait”, that rather proves my observation about the BlueSky population.
And my memory of him posting about some interaction with a sympathetic-to-him kiwifarmer (a site that boils down to abuse coordination).
So what I’ve been seeing of him had a “just asking questions” vibe to him, which with that background, feels pretty far from victim blaming.
From the little I know, he seems like a bad actor and I sumpathesize with my trans friends not wanting him around.
But yh again, I know little, if he or anyone else responded to the numerous GLAAD accusations in a reasonable way, I’d be interested in catching up more with that debate.
GLAAD is not a good faith actor on this topic, at all. He’s spent years doing professional, careful journalism about the science of youth gender medicine, and more recently defending NYT’s coverage of the same, which landed him on GLAAD’s shit list because it doesn’t support the GLAAD party line on the topic. He was also subject to more bad faith objections surrounding his reporting on a whistleblower from a gender clinic, largely related to (extremely and obviously false) claims that he published personal medical information in violation of HIPAA/HIPPA.
Dismissing this as “just asking questions” is extremely unfair, but I’ll excuse that as a product of your unfamiliarity. Anyway he’s written extensively on this and other controversies about himself on his Substack (which is partially paywalled, but I think he’s made some of the relevant ones public), and talked about it on his podcast (blocked and reported, which I’ll warn is a more freewheeling snarky thing than his more serious published work and substack).
If you need an endorsement, Scott clearly reads him as he links to one of his posts here. You can also of course read the Economist article and his 2018 piece on detransitioners in The Atlantic that made GLAAD et al decide he was untouchable, and judge for yourself.
Sorry busy week before the holidays, hence late reply:
What GLAAD talks about and what I cross checked with wiki that I found interesting is his Defense of Zucker. To me that reads pretty clear cut as aligning oneself with regressive values over health maximizing outcomes. But I guess now I’m just saying the same thing about him that he is saying about his detractors.
Ultimately this would require a literature review which would take a long time to do for me, so I’ll pray to the Scott’s of this world to do it instead.
Until then, I’m going to stick to the devils I know, friends and acquaintances working in the field, deeming practices like Zucker’s a danger to health.
I’ll try to get informed about the doxing next, but with him reposting Kiwifarms, I’m not hopeful I’ll find much sympathies for him there.
Scott quoting/linking to someone only makes me update to “can say interesting enough things”. Scott being a master of decoupling and all (vague memories of him arguing at length with some aristocratic neo reactionary pop into my mind).
Update: I read some more on the question of doxing. I agree that he didn’t dox in that instance he cites.
Critiques that I did find that I didn’t seem him address boil down to: he has a transphobic harassment friendly fanbase, his enthusiastic use of reposting other people puts targets on them (sth that’s more frowned upon in general on Bluesky than over at Twitter), and “them” are often an already marginalised group that already has too deal with enough random ass internet death threats. IMO there exists an obligation to think about how your followers act, and to culture them (sth Scott does a commendable job at).
My summary so far: probably not a doxer, most likely not well equipped enough to write and hyper engage on the topics he chooses (maybe he just got caught up in the social media frenzy of it all). Definitely can understand with trans friends seeing him as a danger. Not sure the evidence is tight enough to ban him as a harasser, I wouldn’t mind if the hammer comes down on anyone expressing the slightest of Kiwifarms sympathies (like he did)
Re: Saint Muerte, I think Christianity's advantage was almost entirely in the fact that it was evangelistic while paganism wasn't. Get people to try convincing other people of paganism over Christianity, a lot of them are going to succeed. Despite coming after paganism, Christianity effectively has a first mover advantage.
> The block of Tsargrad TV’s YouTube channel came [1] in 2020 after the US sanctioned its own Konstantin Maolfeyev, a Russian oligarch who the DOJ said [2] was instrumental in the country’s [...] 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
I'm pretty sure English grammar doesn't allow for this. To break the binding between "said [2]" and "came [1]", you need to change the tense of the verb. I'd suggest "who the DOJ has said".
That's an incredibly tiny detail of syntax, do you always read every line of text with this level of precision? Are you a linguist specializing in syntax, or a literary editor, by any chance?
No, in my reading the two verbs are not temporarily linked, and the DOJ would have said its thing later, after 2022. But I'm not a native speaker, so my intuition may not 100% track the finer points of English grammar.
Well, my description isn't quite complete - "said" might be linked to "came", or it might be linked to "sanctioned". But in either of those cases, the suggested sequence of events is impossible.
What it means as applied here is that the past tense of the sentence "the US [now] proposes to sanction Konstantin Maolfeyev, a Russian oligarch who the DOJ [now] says was instrumental in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine" is "the US proposed [in the past] to sanction Konstantin Maolfeyev, a Russian oligarch who the DOJ said [at the time] was instrumental in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine".
You could hypothetically mark an explicit time for "said" to refer to ("a Russian oligarch who the DOJ said, when we inquired, was instrumental in..."), but that hasn't been done here, so it's stuck referring to the time of the channel blocking or the sanctioning.
As I was saying, I think I detect a language geek! 👋👋
The wikipedia article only talks about the simple part where the tenses of quoted verbs shift towards the past ("he said he was going"). I didn't find an explanation for the binding of reference times between two verbs in the same quoted tense, but I trust you must have learned it somewhere.
From my non-prescriptivist point of view, the question I would ask is: do most native English speakers have this intuition? Does it hold in all English-speaking areas?
> I try to err on the side of liberty when it’s at all plausible, but I think Zvi makes a convincing case that this has destroyed too many lives for too little gain
I think, to make this argument, you'd need to show that the same system has the same effects elsewhere in the world. The US previously followed the unusual practice of banning sports gambling. Before we attribute current problems to the new policy, shouldn't we see whether those problems also exist in places where the same policy isn't new?
The fact that a transitional period causes problems isn't a good argument that we need to stop having policy transitions.
>Banks are unaccountable amoral actors who have no qualms about cutting you out of the global financial system if an algorithm says people vaguely like you have posed a regulatory risk in the past, all banks are like this in a correlated way, and it would be nice to have some means of financial system access which isn’t like this.
Sort of, but there's also some giant flashing signs of who they *can't* deny based on algorithmic analysis of risk. They can't deny *people* vaguely like you, no no no. *Businesses* vaguely like you, especially along somewhat-prudish lines, yes. Crypto will never be useful to the average person, though.
I think it was also Patrick Mackenzie that wrote about it being practically a rite of passage for young analysts to recognize the most direct way to credit scores being improved in accuracy is to use zip code, and then being taken aside for explanations of why they don't do that, along the lines of the government coming down on them in fire and blood.
"They can't deny people vaguely like you, no no no. *Businesses* vaguely like you, especially along somewhat-prudish lines, yes. Crypto will never be useful to the average person, though."
Isn't that disproven by them denying crypto founders as well as crypto businesses?
I haven't followed the crypto debanking story all that closely, so... unsure.
Probably depends on the demographics of crypto founders. I'm assuming they're mostly not from the demographics that the government goes out of its way to protect from banking's algorithmic bias.
I wonder if the deal with using zip codes would be changed now given recent legal precedent. There’s been a glut of cases about using zip codes for school admission as a proxy for race, which have seemingly all resulted in wins for the schools using them. I’d be happier with the converse though: if credit score companies started using zip codes, got shut down for that, and then that precedent was used to stop the schools.
49. You say you've learned that it's necessary to say "I'm not saying the horrible thing you're desperate to attribute to me" all the time. But sometimes, despite these fervent denials, they're saying it anyway.
I'm sorry I can't remember the specific incident, but not long ago you made exactly that accusation to someone else. You wrote that they believed something you found objectionable; they wrote to you that they didn't believe that; you apologized and retracted the accusation. Then you went and read the entirety of what they'd originally written and concluded that, no, they did believe the original thing after all, so you retracted the apology.
Maybe the program generating the labyrinth is not directly accessible, we can only see its output (the labyrinth) and from that extrapolate what is the program. One would hope it'll get repetitive after a while and stop going in there too often.
Also, Dylan Matthews response was notoriously *bad*, not good, and in my vague circles led to much more negative reaction than the NYT piece itself.
It (or perhaps, rather than this article alone, he?) practically is a caricature of the "evil and humorless" approach that you've spent so long pushing back against that looks at the repugnant conclusion, says "good, actually," and burns down everything beautiful. He is saying the horrible thing! There's no dodging that wrench.
> "The idea is: rich people may want to donate money to causes that appeal to them. A rich person whose child died of a rare pediatric cancer might be more interested in donating to cure rare pediatric cancers than to bednets or whatever."
I thought the next sentence was going to be "and so we inject specially tailored miseries into the lives of these rich people to make them sympathetic to more high-impact causes"
I don't know the place, but it (kind of) reminds me of Antigone, a completely neoclassical neighbourhood also in southern France, filled with monstrous oversize quotes of classical architectural motifs :
42. A good, working use case for crypto is Lofty.ai,, which uses the Algorand blockchain to tokenize rental properties as legal Wyoming DAO LLCs. Having done a fair amount of real estate investing, I expect this model to become very popular over the next several years.
It's been very useful to me and my shareholders, which is what I said in the very beginning of this comment chain. Previously you called it "evading regulations" but now you've moved the goalpost to say I'm not finding it useful. Okay.
They have their own tokens, which are worthless without their involvement. Since you have to perform all your activities via lofty.ai, and trust them to actually give you whatever they claim they will when the blockchain records say they ought to, what does the accident of them using a blockchain instead of a traditional database actually add, other than hype and costs?
“Tokens” is just another word for shares or units. I also do conventional real estate syndications and these are materially no different, but a lot easier to move around in terms of custody.
Also, tokens are traded on a DEX via smart contracts. The income is collected by me, then passed through to shareholders as USDC. No different than any other syndication that pays dividends.
Regarding "blankface" we have a related term in British English: a "jobsworth" is someone who enforces pointless rules out of fear or a desire to feel powerful.
From the stereotypical phrase "I can't let you do that, it's more than my job's worth".
I like blankface though. It immediately reminds me of the face police do when you ask them a question. It's less "I'm personally motivated to obstruct you" and more "I am professionally trained to avoid accountability".
Re 18 (sports gambling): Last week's Economist had an article (paywalled link below) supporting online betting. If I recall right, among the reasons to support online gambling were that people clearly get joy out of it and that it's less regressive than other gambling (i.e., because it draws relatively more white-collar folks).
I was surprised by the Economist's take, and maybe disappointed. I don't know that the Economist's argument was faulty, and I wasn't reading it with an eye toward preparing a counterargument. But it left me with the (odd) impression that the Economist wanted to get on some sort of bandwagon.
Sports betting may be salvageable with some minor regulations, like limiting the number of distinct bets you can make, or requiring the bets to be made a certain amount of time is advance. Stopping the casino effect of rapidly pressing the slot machine button.
Re: 17, I usually hear this claim as being since the rise of mass media, which makes more sense because how many voters in 1800 knew whether Adams or Jefferson was taller? The presidents shorter than average were all from the 19th Century, and since JFK the shortest president was Carter at 5'9½ (who was the only one shorter than 5'11½). I also found the exceptions illustrative while looking at the list, because some people look taller than they are. For example, would you have guessed that Trump is three inches taller than Biden, or that Obama and Romney were the same height?
For 39, no not in college at least. We see chatgpt answers from students all the time, and in some ways it’s simply not a problem because chatgpt gives bad answers unless the question was incredibly simple. It just gives surface level answer in “AI”y prose, ie ideas don’t connect over distances and it mostly just gives lists.
#16 Inca. The Inca are absolutely fascinating. They attempted to not just rule an enormous territory from Modern Ecuador to Chile on the west coast of South America, but to socially re-engineer it it to a cultural and political unity. They did this without money, wheels, or writing. It is hard to know whether they could have succeeded because the Spanish showed up and destroyed it before it was 100 years old.
If you are interested I suggest reading: "The History of the Conquest of Peru" by William Hickling Prescott
It was originally published in1847, but is still substantially accurate.
Th closest modern analogies to the Inca are the 20th Century communist regimes such as Soviet union, Maoist China, and Pol Pot Cambodia. the fascist iconography is not that far off.
The whole Mesoamerican civilisation thing makes no sense to me. You've got a continent's worth of people sitting around for thousands of years being hunter-gatherers or farming the occasional proto-potato. But a couple of times a millenium a bunch of them in some random location independently decide to start up a civilisation, which inevitably winds up being all about pyramids and human sacrifices. Then they collapse after a few hundred years.
At least, that's my layman-level understanding of it, which is surely mostly bullshit.
you're conflating Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America, corn) and the Andes (Peru and Bolivia, potatoes - speaking broadly on food though, both plants spread) for one.
And empires/complexity rising and falling isn't just a Mesoamerican thing, look at the Dark Ages or the Bronze Age Collapse.
Yea I've only recently done some reading about the Bronze Age Collapse and it's pretty wild to think about. Seems deserving of more prominence in our basic-world-history type schoolbooks.
To be fair, the Aztec and Incan civilizations were going through serious crises, but only collapsed due to aggressive war waged by a technologically advanced outsider after a lengthy struggle.
they did it without private ownership or much in the way of markets, either, which is the most impressive thing to me. (And is one reason why the Latin American left has traditionally looked on the Inca Empire as a big source of inspiration).
Yes, it was probably the most complete approach to pure communism ever. Read Prescott linked above.
The conquistadors wanted to recreate medieval Spanish society with themselves as grandees and the indians as serfs. That does a lot to explain the subsequent course of south American politics.
Sports betting is genuinely fun and I think a high percentage of people enjoy dabbling in it (even if it’s just a low stakes NCAA pool at work). But it clearly creates a lot of addicts, in a way that’s more rapidly financially destructive than even, say, alcoholism.
I like the proposed compromise of making it legal but only in person. I’m not a gambler really, but the most fun I had gambling in Vegas was placing a few bets and hanging out in the MGM sports book on a big college football Saturday.
FWIW they're often owned / sponsored by sports gambling so discussion of gambling is basically product placement.
I don't mean that as a conspiratorial thing -- it's just good business. There's a symbiotic relationship between sports coverage (which mostly loses money, but keeps people engaged with sports) and sports gambling (which prints money if people are engaged with sports).
Now in principle the gambling sites could just pay for ad slots, but then you get in an ugly bidding war with the other sports gambling sites, and people often tune out paid ads anyway. The equilibrium is common ownership, where the sports coverage is tailored to drive business to the affiliated gambling site. See, e.g. ESPN and ESPNBet.
Concerning EA: I was in Palm Beach for a business project and deicded that I wanted to go to the library one evening.
The library itself was a grand new building, very shiny, very modern. But the selection of books was paltry.
My SWAG was that donating enough $$ for the building meant that you got to put your name on the lintel, while donating $$ for books was just as tax-deductible, but didn't get your name anywhere.
Libraries around me are increasingly removing all their books, because nobody actually looks at them any more. Libraries around here are used for groups of foreign students to study. (Which is an improvement over the US where I understand they're mostly used as homeless shelters.)
I've lived in parts of the US (Boston) with a large homeless population and the libraries still had books, in addition to computers and printers.
I'm sure that homeless people showed up, as its something to do which doesn't cost money, and I imagine if I fell on such times I too would spend much of my day in the library. But they were reading books or using computers just like everyone else; its not like libraries were downsizing to make room for homeless services.
16. As a Peruvian I know that man very well from local news: That's Antauro Humala, brother of former President Ollanta Humala. Antauro was in prison for 19 years for killing 4 police officers when he stormed a local police station on an Andean town (Andahuaylas). He is widely regarded as a crank in Peru but some people say they would vote for him.
He stormed a police station and killed _four_ of them and got out after 19 years?
Not even the most lenient police-defunding U.S. jurisdiction of MAGA fever dreams could allow that outcome under present laws. (And if it tried to the resulting outrage would be front-page national news sufficient to change election results.) Unless there were mitigating circumstances I guess....did those police officers open fire on him first or something?
He took the police station as a "political statement" to force then President Alejandro Toledo to resign, the police officers of course fought him and then his brother Ollanta interceded to get him to surrender.
Santa Muerte isn't replacing Christianity - my understanding is that it's an unofficial add-on to Catholicism, and most adherents continue to attend Catholic services also.
RE: the guy who wants to search the city dump for his lost hard drive, I'm with the Newport council on this.
First, the guy is an idiot. Or very unlucky. Or both. He has a snowball in Hell's chance of actually finding his damn hard drive. What's more likely is that he injures himself and then sues the council for letting him do something dangerous and forbidden, and given the kind of decisions I've seen judges make in such cases, he'll win even though he expressly sued to force them to do this. "Well you should have stopped him anyway!" will be the logic here.
Secondly, every chancer in ten miles is going to descend on the dump looking for the Hard Drive of Riches. They're going to get hurt and sue the council. Rinse and repeat.
Worse yet, laptops and hard drives really don't like being outside in the elements for long periods of time, especially in UK weather. Or crushed under hundreds to thousands of pounds of trash. Even if they find the Hard Drive of Riches, there's a very solid chance that the Bitcoin is unrecoverable.
Even worse, this is the dump for a large (by Welsh standards) city, and with the population contributing to it for some years, his will not be the only laptop of that brand in there, assuming it's even at all recognisable and not broken up into component parts. Even once they get through all the other hurdles, they'll have to cough up the data recovery fees for the clean room + forensic tech + magnetic force microscope platter scans on each piece of candidate hardware they find, in case it's what they're looking for.
On 33. and gallons, an insight not present in the twitter thread:
A disk's circumference (a circle) is the rate of change of its area as shown in this 1-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjmtmCT5N8Q. In other words, to increase the area of a disk you add more circles around it. Symbolically, if you differentiate the area formula (with respect to the radius) then you get the circumference formula.
Likewise, a ball's surface area (a sphere) is the rate of change of its volume. To increase the volume of a ball, you add more layers around it like an onion. Symbolically, if you differentiate the volume formula (with respect to the radius) then you get the surface area formula.
You could create a "gas solid" equal to the volume of consumed gas. If you set the length to the length of the car's path, then the cross-sectional area represents the instantaneous gas consumption (what MPG represents). If the car has constant MPG (like how my car assumes when it tells me what my mileage is each time I'm done driving it), then the solid is just a rectangular box.
In real life, a car's MPG is not constant and changes over your trip. A fully-detailed readout of your trip's MPG would be a "gas solid" that isn't a box. It would be a solid that has constantly changing cross-sectional area - some regions would be thick (spending much gas) and other regions would have thin area (spending little gas).
Somehow I had never considered differentiating the area formula as a mechanism for deriving the formula for circumference. What a fun comment, thank you!
I don't know. Probably they get some limited amount of funding, and their mandate is such that the funding doesn't go very far. The government doesn't fund them more because it doesn't immediately pay off in political capital, and although there are some complicated ways that companies can help fund the FDA, the easy route (a company pays all the costs for assessing its drug) might be too conflict-of-interest-y.
Seems like this is easily solved with a big "rapid review fee". Take a simple non-blockbuster drug that pulls in, say $365 million/year. That's worth $1 million/day on patent exclusivity. Plus they probably have competitors (I've been in this industry long enough to know most NME NDAs are looking over their shoulders at competitors) they're racing to market against.
Current slow-walk timeline is, what, 10 months? If you set a fee of $10 million to review in 3 months, companies would absolutely pay for that. Then pharma aren't paying to direct the process, just paying a higher fee for faster service.
(Why not faster? All those site audits take time, but if the money is there they could do it faster, I'm sure.)
Anecdotally, I've just had this exact feeling that you mocked. I'd just watched Fritz Lang's "M" and found it a bit underwhelming. But once I understood that it was the original source of a whole set of film conventions (which I absolutely love)... Well, my perception changed a lot, despite the fairly obvious fact that this (almost 100 years old) movie is certainly not that great nowadays.
If I had to describe it, I'd guess that this is how it must feel to read when you read something like the bible for the first time as an adult. Something like "A-ha! So that's what Nietzsche was referencing when he wrote that awesome book".
It seems to me that telling people shrimp feel pain is probably an infohazard, and may add some suffering on the human side that isn't being accounted for. Shrimp is a healthy, low calorie food that is desirable, reasonably affordable, and adds variety to the diet of people who carefully manage their weight. (There's only so much boneless, skinless chicken breast you can eat in a week, which is what these people are primarily told to eat for protein.) In light of the social cost and individual suffering caused by the obesity crisis in America, any information that might discourage the consumption of a healthy food has negative consequences that are hard to estimate but probably are big enough to factor in your equation. I'd also note that while humans and the animals we eat may both be able to feel pain, only humans are capable of future-oriented mental states, and so only we can experience the different sort of pain that comes from having our dreams and ambitions frustrated.
RE: Dock Automation
On a recent podcast, one of the guys at National Review (who is sort of a populist-leaner relative to the Buckleyite orthodoxy there) made the argument that dock automation is kind of a scam. Sure there are isolated things you can say "automating this clearly saves money", but when a dock automates they aren't only getting those processes that are obviously more efficient. They are instead buying a huge package of automation, put together by a company that wants to sell all these features. And given the nature of sales these days, I presume the automated features require constant maintenance and software upgrading by the company that created them, all the typical XaaS model nonsense that is designed to hook the buyer into paying forever for something he already bought. The NR commentator claimed a port in New Zealand was de-automating not for labor-friendly reasons but because it wasn't cost effective, and I assume this bloat is why. Maybe in a world where a profit-motivated dock manager could strategically target specific processes to automate, dock automation would work, but that won't be the case in a world where dock automation is almost certain to be a government-awarded contract to a company that cares more about getting you on the hook forever for a ton of services regardless of whether they actually improve the process. (And this may be the case even if you don't ascribe grubby motives to the automation company, probably there are lots of cases at a dock where if you automate X you have to automate Y and Z that are related to it, and when the automated version of Y breaks down neither X nor Z will work.)
Supposedly one of the automations the longshoremen refused at a port was literally a parking gate (as in, no you can’t have an unmanned gate that opens when somebody swipes a key card, you must have it manned 24/7 by a union employee). I can certainly understand not all automation being a panacea, but I think US ports are at basically “mandating buggy whip purchase” level of Luddism.
“Paying forever for something he already bought” doesn’t sound that bad actually when the alternative is “pay a guy 2024 wages for 1974 productivity, and then pay him a substantial fraction of that plus generous health bennies for the rest of his life after he retires in his fifties”.
just noticing the tension between these two sentences
> Approximately 1% of people have heard of effective altruism, and their opinion is mostly “I think it has something to do with charity, so I guess it sounds nice”.
> The world really wants to believe that effective altruists are evil humorless people who want to prevent every kind of good except raw life-saving and think you’re a moral monster for not agreeing.
The world mostly doesn't want to believe anything in particular about EA. they don't care!
Re: 16, Peruvian flags: that symbol is a Chakana, an Incan symbol supposedly representing the balance of the universe. New age types sometimes refer to it as an Incan compass. The red and white is the Peruvian flag. I guess there are only so many sacred symbols you can make using a few straight lines.
Re: 36, procedurally generated mental landscapes: a particularly fine and artistically valuable version of this is Carl Jung’s work in the “Red Book” where he plunged into his own psyche, met a tutelary spirit, and saw a bunch of really weird and psychedelic things Which touch up upon his interest in ancient history, religion, and psychopathology. Highly recommended.
Re 55: There is a Santa Muerte shrine open to the public in LA and it is absolutely metal, if you like that sort of thing. Not hard to see how the cult might catch on.
"There is a Santa Muerte shrine open to the public in LA and it is absolutely metal, if you like that sort of thing. Not hard to see how the cult might catch on."
Yes, as I said above, it is good imagery. No surprise there are lots of 'followers' especially since not much is expected from them.
Maybe we can think of it as a way of splitting the difference between Christianity and Satanism? You get the "badass" scary imagery and anti-authoritarian vibes, while still being ostensibly on the side of good.
It honestly does depend on what is meant by "Satanism". Some of the modern versions are just atheist-adjacent (if not actually atheist) "we effin' love SCIENCE!" who like to poke fun at conventional (American) Christianity and be edgy (insert eyeroll emoji here).
I don't mind Baphomet Christmas displays, as I find them funny more than enraging (mostly because they often get the original imagery slightly off and also because I have a sneaking suspicion based on nothing but feelings that a lot of the users have no idea where it came from and do think it's some original traditional pre-Christian symbolism) but I do blink at "Samuel Alito's Mom's Satanic Abortion Clinic". Yeah, that's a thigh-slapper guys, any other 14 year old teenage boy jokes to share?
Serious Satanists who believe in magic and the occult are a different matter. Again, some are on the Gnostic axis (what you call good is in fact evil, and what you call evil is in fact good) and a very small few are genuine devil-worshippers (though I imagine those are few and far between, and you get more of the Santa Muerte narco saint types than reasoned theology of the Crowleyan kind).
So if you want Edgelords who think dressing as Goths to pwn Grandma's non-denominational church are the way to go, eh. Scary imagery and anti-authoritarian (but you should really not be still doing this into your 30s and 40s) is not going to make me do more than sigh and go "okay, you do you". If Christianity really was overthrown in the morning, they'd have to rebel against cutting your hair/growing your hair/something else 'society' wants to force you to do but you're too cool for school.
Genuine devil-worship? Hard to put that one on the "side of good".
Though for those who hate compulsory schooling, good news! You may be eligible for a Satanic Temple scholarship!
"TST is pleased to present our Devil’s Advocate Scholarship to four students who have extraordinarily shown how compulsory schooling has dampened their creativity and inhibited their potential. Each recipient was awarded $666."
Who can not but be touched by this plaint from a middle-schooler in Texas whose mean ol' teacher made him write about animals:
"Here is something I hate: having to write whatever the teacher wants you to write. I like writing a lot but only when I can write what I want. For example, last year, my teacher wanted me to write about animals. I chose to write about penguins but I really wanted to write about ninjas. I had to do all this research about penguins instead. It’s not fair."
Ah, that makes me... long for the days of corporal punishment when this free-thinking little budding genius would have got a slap of the báta if he whinged about having to write essays. Clearly I am too mean to be a good Satanist!
> I have a sneaking suspicion based on nothing but feelings that a lot of the users have no idea where it came from and do think it's some original traditional pre-Christian symbolism
FWIW I donated to their original Baphomet Kickstarter, and IIRC they were pretty up-front about it being an artist's elaboration on a symbol invented by a medieval Templar-alchemist and then picked up by Alistair Crowley. However, they also took practical considerations into account; notably, their version of Baphomet has a flat lap that you can sit on, i.e. the statue can also serve as a park bench. I appreciate that sort of practicality in religious iconography :-)
> Genuine devil-worship? Hard to put that one on the "side of good".
True, but modern Satanists (at least the semi-popular ones) do not actually worship the Devil, as they don't believe he exists; TST certainly doesn't. Rather they espouse the moral/philosophical principles for which the literary character of Devil is (in their view) unfairly maligned, notably the rejection of blind obedience to tyrannical authority. By analogy, it is possible to say "we should all strive to be charitable yet just, like Santa Claus", without believing in a literal Santa Claus.
From what I can tell, Crowley-type Satanists believed in some muddled mystical mumbo-jumbo, but still not in a literal Satan.
Also, I should point out that atheists are often accused of worshiping the literal Satan, which I find rather amusing at times. "Yes but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist ?"
Re 31: It turns out Ashtar Galactic Command predates the 1977 broadcast by 25 years. People have been channeling Ashtar’s directives to humanity since 1952 when George Van Tassel first received telepathic messages from the Command’s interdimensional namesake. Since then dozens of other people have channeled similar messages, which usually involve begging the people of earth to lay down their WMDs and save themselves. Apocalyptic predictions were made and turned out to be false which hurt Ashtar’s credibility but did not extinguish it. These false predictions were largely chalked up to negative space beings who had rebelled against the Command. Little, loosely affiliated churches and religious groups happily and freely passed on Ashtar’s teachings for decades until the mid ‘90s when a new, more unified movement declared that no new channeled messages would be accepted unless they met 12 specific criteria established by the fledgling orthodoxy. This last development smells like a bullshit move to me.
> people seem to obsess over (to the point of centering their lives around) various forms of lowbrow art from Harry Potter to Marvel to anime. I think that distinguishing this from the deep love and transformation of highbrow art risks assuming the conclusion - the guy who says Harry Potter changed his life is deluded or irrelevant, but the guy who says Dostoyevsky did has correctly intuited a deep truth. But we believe this precisely because we know Dostoyevsky is tasteful and Rowling isn’t - I would prefer a defense of taste which is less tautological.
I think this can be rescued from tautology. There are (at least!) two paths here:
1) Harry Potter is in fact highly aesthetically valuable. Nobody centers their lives around any of the enormous volume of low-quality YA fiction that gets published each year. Many people are very devoted to their love of Harry Potter. This is significant evidence that Harry Potter is in fact a very valuable piece of art.
2) The *ways* that people love lowbrow art are different than the ways they love highbrow art. People who love Harry Potter appear very different than people who love Dostoyevsky. Harry Potter fans have merch, they see all the movies and play the video games and so on. It's a very acquisitive sort of experience, a kind of yearning for More Harry Potter. People who love Dostoyevsky have an intense experience while doing so, and talk about how profound and powerful and beautiful it was, but they don't end up _craving more_. I think this quality of causing-craving-for-more is an important one to notice.
One could easily argue that 2 is a matter of opportunity - if more people loved Dostoyevsky, someone would be motivated to sell _Crime and Punishment_ merch, and then Dostoyevsky lovers would buy it, and so their apparently different engagement pattern is contingent. Perhaps so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think many people will reflexively dismiss 1 but I think that's not fair. It's the most successful childrens/YA literature of all time! Surely it has some real artistic value! I think HP is of lower quality than Great Literature in a real if hard-to-convincingly-explain way, but I still think it is of pretty high quality especially compared to its reference class.
(I, personally, have read and enjoyed Brothers Karamazov, and was unable to finish the Harry potter series in either book or movie form, just for the record.)
I'd like to propose 3) People who enjoy Crime and Punishment on a deep, life-changing level are also actually more likely to enjoy Harry Potter on a deep, life-changing level.
That might seem to put the lie to the idea of taste altogether, but to be clear, I also think people who enjoy Crime and Punishment are also more likely to hate Harry Potter with unbridled rage.
If I go look at a picture in a museum, I glance at it, notice if the colors seem pleasing, notice the skill. I'll try to spend a lot of time taking in all the details. "Look at how realistic the tablecloth looks and the shadows of its wrinkles." "Wow, the glass actually bends the light." "Wow, they managed to capture the reflection of the table in this person's eye using nothing but paint. That's really cool, they must have worked really hard to do that."
I have to do that because after I've spent 5 minutes doing that, my wife is going to want to keep looking at it for another half hour. I'll ask her what the hell she's still looking at and it'll instantly become clear that she's operating on a different level than me. She's noticing which things in the painting are references to historical art movements. She's putting herself into the head of the painter, trying to understand why this or that detail was important enough to include. And she's emotionally engaging with the artist in a way I can't. They are having a conversation.
And she's more likely to enjoy a piece of "modern art" that doesn't feel skillful to me (though not very likely tbh), or strongly dislike a piece that's put together skillfully but doesn't really communicate anything meaningful to her. That doesn't mean she hates "non-museum" art though! In fact she likes a lot of it, and dislikes a lot of it depending on whether it's meaningful to her. It's just that she's experiencing meaning on a second level that goes beyond "technically competent."
Likewise, a lot of people watch a movie and go "yup that was a movie, what's for lunch." I do not. I am constantly questioning why they shot it this way, why the character said this line, etc. And often there is a whole second layer or more underneath the technical competence and storytelling of a movie or novel. Being able to find that makes me more likely to deeply enjoy *both* Harry Potter and Cervantes. It's not an either/or. I think the reason it's mistaken for being either/or is that this tendency does mean that I'm likely to strongly dislike things that execute well on popular tropes without having that strong second layer.
Adding on to this with regard to Harry Potter, I find that it excels in a different way than (for example) the Iliad, which excels in different ways than Orwell. This is why fans of each work enjoy and react to them in different ways.
Harry Potter has excellent world building, wonderful characters, and a great plot. This lends itself well to things like fan fiction, discussions about the magic system, etc.
Something like the Iliad rewards a closer attention to things like meter, historical context, and translational choice. This lends itself to things like reading alternate translations, learning about the history surrounding the Iliad, etc.
Point being that excellence comes in different forms, some of which highbrow taste seems to like and some that aren't as highly valued.
…you can say many nice things about HP, but that one seems a stretch. The world is paper-thin.
> Something like the Iliad rewards a closer attention to things like meter, historical context, and translational choice. This lends itself to things like reading alternate translations, learning about the history surrounding the Iliad, etc.
What do any of those things have to do with the Iliad? Someone encountering it in its day, as we encounter Harry Potter now, would have none of these things except the meter. They are not an inherent part of the work. They are complications that come from the time and culture gap between then and now. They are the cruft of age and distance, getting between you and the work; if a definition of highbrow focuses on these things instead of the work, it is also cruft.
>…you can say many nice things about HP, but that one seems a stretch. The world is paper-thin.
I think the world of HP comes across as paper-thin because everyone has done a deep dive into the world to analyze it, which is the point at which the setting falls apart. And people did that analysis because that is a contemporary thing to do with popular works. I don't recall anyone sitting down with Tolkien and doing the whole analysis of how the society and economy of Middle Earth function.
If HP doesn't have depth, it does have breadth of world-building. People wouldn't be comparing which Hogwarts house they'd be in or posing with a Platform 9 3/4 sign or trying to hold 'Muggle Quiddich' games if the world didn't have some resonance.
Nah, it really only takes a momentary lapse in one's effort to suspend disbelief. Fake-Latin spell names? School that employs "guess the teacher's password" as almost entirely its sole method of teaching? An entire society of adults /that/ wilfully ignorant about the world they live in? It doesn't take world-building seriously at all. It's the J J Abrams approach, where everything else goes under the bus so long as the plot can move forward and the picture is pretty.
> I don't recall anyone sitting down with Tolkien and doing the whole analysis of how the society and economy of Middle Earth function.
Tolkien spent an incredible amount of time on this stuff, and therefore when people look - and a great many do look - there is plenty to find.
History, geography, geology, societies, economics, all of it carefully planned and intertwined. He constructed entire languages! All the names, dropped words etc make linguistic and cultural sense when you dig into the lore!
You just don't get that with JKR. She paints vibrant, compelling colourful word-pictures, and she is great at characters and plot hooks, but scratch any surface and it's all empty underneath; just like the Hogwarts lessons depicted in the books, lots of shiny ideas concepts with no links between them.
> I think the world of HP comes across as paper-thin because everyone has done a deep dive into the world to analyze it
It comes across as paper-thin because it's not a world - it's a beautifully decorated stage. Stage decorations can be very elaborate, but they are not expected to be consistent, have depth or make sense. This is not their purpose.
It comes across as paper-thin because it's Doctor Who, not Star Trek. The latter employs tech advisers and continuity checkers; when a character pulls out their phaser or communicator or tricorder, the audience knows what the device is capable of. In the former, meanwhile, the Doctor flits from scene to scene and his screwdriver does whatever is needed to make the plot advance and the character developments happen. Both are very good at what they do, but their strengths are different.
"I don't recall anyone sitting down with Tolkien and doing the whole analysis of how the society and economy of Middle Earth function."
Perhaps no one sat down with Tolkien to talk about these things, but all this and more is in the works themselves. People have gone into far greater depth in Middle-earth than HP. The history is vast, detailed, and relevant. For example, Aragorn is the most recent in an unbroken line of over 30 kings, spanning 6000 years or more, depending on which lifespans you're considering.
> This lends itself to things like reading alternate translation
Good news! In our fully commercialised dystopian world we aim to provide all things to all comers, and if you wish to enjoy Harry Potter in these high-brow ways instead of the low-brow enjoyment the hoi polloi content themselves with, you can: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1582348251/
There's a reason that the Academy Awards include Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Sound, Best Film Editing, Best Visual Effects, Best Costume Design...
What’s your take on Master and Margarita? Is it high-brow because it is a beautiful work of art that is also relatively - but not totally - inaccessible to westerners, or low-brow because there are many adaptations, a vast amount of what would now be called fanfic (all Russian, natch) and a ton of merchandise?
What about Brave Soldier Schwejk? I’ve been to the branded cafe, very pleasant.
I suggest that how much merchandise a thing spawns is a function not of its quality but of its age: commercialised fandom is a relatively recent development.
Meanwhile, can you name modern western highbrow works that have not spawned hundreds of fanfics? AO3 is right there, so we can check.
…oh, wait, I see a search for “karamazov”finds 272 fanworks. Ooops.
Master and Margarita is one of the most widely read and appreciated Russian novels not by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky among Westerners, what are you talking about?
“Westerners who appreciate Russian novels” is not a large group. Meanwhile, fanfiction, merch and movies of it exist and are all popular, which by the gentleman’s definition above means it is low-brow entertainment like Harry Potter, not high-brow like Dostoyevsky (his examples, not mine).
That such a definition leaves something to be desired is my entire thesis here.
I don't know anything about either of those works.
From googling around a bit, Brave Soldier Schwejk (or "Good Soldier Švejk" seems to be more common?) seems to be a serially-published comic anti-war book. I can't find anyone writing about it in a way that suggests it's highbrow. This seems likely to simply not be a highbrow work.
From a little reading, Master and Margarita seems like it might be a highbrow work. At least some people seem to consider it such.
> Meanwhile, can you name modern western highbrow works that have not spawned hundreds of fanfics? AO3 is right there, so we can check.
If Ao3 has a way to filter on source material, I'm not seeing it. I went to spot check White Teeth, a modern western highbrow novel of high regard, and found that phrase used but no obvious connections to the original.
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I don't think this is the real path to settling whatever disagreement we may have, though. If access to sales numbers and something like "number of fanfics on ao3," are both available, one could do some simple graphing to see if there are noticeable differences.
In the absence of that work being done, I am merely gesturing at something I have noticed. I find that I experience different kinds of works very differently. When I read a lowbrow novel, say something by Sanderson, there's a sense of wanting the next thing, of needing to know more about the story, of moving on to the next chapter, uncovering the reveal. When I read a "highbrow" novel, one of the things that's different about the experience for me is that it doesn't produce this sort of compulsion. I think these are connected. That's all. You may certainly disagree.
I really like The Master and Margarita, but I'd consider it middlebrow, not "high" or "low". I wouldn't consider, say, The Brothers Karamazov to be 'highbrow' either, it was intended for a mass market audience (and has traditionally been read by a mass public, at least in Russia). Same for, say, Dickens.
Highbrow is a term i reserve for, I dunno, James Joyce and the like.
I...think I'm going to report this? As spam? But it's so obvious that it almost seems satirical, so, uh, apologies if this is a really clever joke and I just didn't get it
28. thanks for the link! & oops i accidentally deleted my comment so im trying again.
i dont think what i was saying was tautological. i think that any work of art that people are willing to pay direct attention to is probably in good taste, and that most works of art do not stand up to direct attention. eg--the results post for the ai art turing test--with the ai-created picture of the gate, it seemed like scott & ilzo were interacting w the picture very differently. my impression is that, & forgive me if this is presumptuous & im wrong, scott liked the vibe of the picture & stopped directly paying attention to it as soon as the vibe was established. the picture could have been very different in any of its details & if it had the same vibe, he would have liked it equally, and paid equally little attention to it. otoh it seems like ilzo actually looked at it, and it couldnt stand up to that. my guess is that ilzo likes art for its vibe & its representational content, but also needs the thing in itself to be actually something that you can pay direct attention to, something that's good in itself, in its own specificity.
then i think i defended harry potter as something that some children are clearly having a literary experience with, in a way that it is obvious no child is w captain underpants, or teenager is w the vampire diaries, & that you can easily tell from talking to those kids about harry potter that they are paying attention to it. but i would not for instance reread harry potter that much personally so im not gonna try to reconstruct how i rode so hard for it in the last comment
If I recall correctly, Bruce Schneier did a bit about whether your self-driving car was allowed to drive on a Saturday, during a conference’s Q+A session on AI ethics. He was, I think, joking. But here we are, with pretty much that example, unironically,
The fact that the sites ban smart-appearing gamblers makes them clearly the bad guy here. If you claim to offer people "freedom," but squelch those who actually achieve something with their freedom, you're evil.
No the popularity of Segal and his 80s cohort like Van Damme is extremely specific to the once Soviet world. For them, he was and is the greatest movie star of human history.
18. Seems like the fix here is to not let them turn away gamblers that are too good? That decreases the house incentive to encourage gambling--it's the shark users who are getting the money, not the bookie. This still lets every gambling market where we want to learn things about the underlying world (capital markets, prediction markets, etc.) operate. (Like, imagine turning someone away from the stock exchange because their stocks went up too much!)
36. There's something like this in one of Feynman's books--he gets interested in dreams, does experiments on them, and then realizes he's determining the results of his experiments with where he's focusing his attention, and then moves on to other topics.
I think it's weird that anyone would object to an Incan revanchism movement based on a tenuous connection with the evils of German National Socialism, rather than its much less tenuous connection with the evils of the Incas.
> Bentham’s Bulldog responds to all of your objections to donating to shrimp.
I find this to be a very poor response as it doesn't respond to the biggest criticism: The author proposes that the suffering of a person is morally equivalent to 32 shrimp. Folks, myself included, disagree with this ratio.
Instead of making the ratio clear and supporting it, the author instead converts shrimp pain to human pain and uses human pain in their argument.
It is clear we can prevent shrimp pain. It is clear other charities can prevent human pain. The key disconnect is how shrimp pain should be valued. Instead of addressing this disconnect, the author sweeps it under the rug in a citation of a citation.
If you consider "32 shrimp is morally equivalent to one person" is correct, close to correct, or even in the right order of magnitude, their calculation is convincing.
It is difficult to estimate a ratio because shrimp intelligence research is not extensive. Research that does exist focuses on the smarter shrimp (e.g. Mantis Shrimp) rather than the shrimp we commonly eat (e.g. Pacific White Shrimp).
Based on what research we have [1], I would guess that shrimp are roughly as smart as ants. From that perspective, I reject Bentham's bulldog ratio of 32:1 and their most conservative estimate of 100:1. What should the ratio be? It's hard to say but I would put the lower bound somewhere around 100,000 shrimp.
[1] Observation of Agonistic Behavior in Pacific White Shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) and Transcriptome Analysis
That's a feature not a bug. I would much rather have my bank be amoral than heavily invested in a morality which might differ from mine. And they're VERY accountable: to their customers and their shareholders (much more accountable than the religious are to God, at least in this world). Amoral people, as long as they're sufficiently intelligent, can generally be relied upon to listen to market forces. That makes them predictable, which is exactly what I want from my bank. There's no telling what a religious zealot is liable to do. FTX might still exist had SBF simply been amoral.
"ordinary anti-money-laundering laws which predate cryptocurrency tell banks to be on the watch for certain dangerous transaction patterns, and crypto companies have those patterns. And after the nth time that a bank closed a crypto company account and the founder had the brilliant idea to game the system by running the company out of their personal account, the banks started closing crypto founders’ personal accounts too"
does not seem fairly to justify this:
"Banks are unaccountable amoral actors who have no qualms about cutting you out of the global financial system if an algorithm says people vaguely like you have posed a regulatory risk in the past"
In this instance aren't the banks simply following laws? Isn't the party responsible for "cutting you out of the global financial system" the legislators who wrote and passed those laws?
The problem is the grey area right next to "the law says we must debank you", which is labelled "we don't know whether we need to debank you or not, but it's cheaper and easier to debank you than to investigate it properly".
Yeah, sort of. The government says "we'll fine you a zillion dollars if you mess up" and lets the banks decide how not to mess up. The banks (very reasonably) get rid of their dangerous customers.
I would compare this to, for example, a bank in world without non-discrimination laws, which found that black people were 10% less likely to pay off loans and decided never to loan to black people. It's a perfectly logical business decision, but it sucks if you're black and want to be connected to the global financial system. And the more important banks are for living a normal life, the more you'd want to figure out some solution (either a different institution that doesn't do this, or non-discrimination laws).
This is why I said "amoral" rather than "immoral".
> (#23): The only thing I would add is that there needs to be amazing noise insulation.
Modern, high-quality, buildings do have very good noise insulation. When I lived in Luxembourg, the neighbours next door wall the drums and you could faintly hear it if you were in the adjacent room (but just barely).
This was my original response to Zvi's article on sports betting:
This is how I know I'm temperamentally libertarian. You can give me all the evidence in the world about how letting people make their own choices means they'll make bad choices, and I'll still be in favor of it.
Zvi documents how allowing online sports gambling has probably caused a significant increase in bankruptcies, reduced savings, and an increase in domestic violence, and it was a mistake to allow it. The case is pretty compelling, but I can't get on board.
As usual, when it comes to banning things, this is your classic case of letting a few bad apples spoil the bunch. Sports gambling is fun! And almost everyone who does it has fun with it and doesn't ruin their finances. As Alex Tabarrok says, it's "no different from people buying Taylor Swift tickets." Zvi's numbers show that 34%-39% of people have placed a bet at least once. Any way you slice it, that's over 100 million people who chose to participate in sports betting at least once. If you ban sports betting, that's 100 million people you're saying can't place bets if they want to, in order to (maybe) prevent 100,000 bankruptcies each year. I can't find the raw numbers for the domestic violence numbers, but I expect it's less than that.
I'm one of those people who enjoys sports betting! Last year, I put $300 into a Draftkings account. During football season, I generally place a number of $5 bets every week on various teams to win and/or cover. It's great! It makes the games much more exciting for me! And I'm already annoyed at all the regulation which makes it annoying to do. As an example, for some reason, NJ doesn't let me log in with my fingerprint, so I can to type in my password every time I want to check my bets.
AFAICT, this is the usual experience - people casually placing bets with money they can afford to lose, for fun. Zvi even admits that for most gamblers, it's "a harmless form of recreation."
My least favorite thing about government, and authority in general, is the impulse to ban things for everyone when it's only a problem for a small minority. I hate it so much. Just let people do things! If a small amount of people can't handle it, direct your interventions at them. Don't punish the vast majority for the actions of a tiny minority. If I can gamble responsibly, I should be allowed to.
I would love a Scott write-up of "how much of art is an acquired taste?"
If I think about Coffee - initially it is an acquired taste, but once you get over the first hurdle, a great coffee tastes great no matter your level of sophistication, but if you're e.g. James Hoffmann you can articulate and appreciate it at a different level.
If I think about Beer - it has the same "initial hurdle", but if someone provides a new beer drinker who doesn't mind a basic lager some complex, award winning IPA or other overly hops loaded thing, it's entirely possible that they hate it.
If I think about Movies - there is so much path dependence in 'genre', but experts can pick up on things like mise-en-scene that may be overlooked by the casual enjoyer, but everyone can appreciate a good soundtrack or cohesive story. Those who claim true appreciation for the art can enjoy films where nothing happens (https://scottsumner.substack.com/p/much-ado-about-nothing), whereas the general viewer would find this a bad experience.
I had a friend who was deeply into avante-garde music, and he once told me he would never try anything too racy in the bedroom because he feared his personality type would lead him down a rabbit hole of fetishes etc. that left him unable to enjoy the vanilla stuff anymore.
Is the "problem" of architecture that there is limited new works, and all the stuff that is created solely in the domain of "acquired taste, unable to be appreciated without following a specific path of mental gymnastics", without any intermediary works that facilitate the public walking along this path? Is it even the path we should want to walk on (i.e. is there a natural convergence there, or is this some arbitrary local minima that the academy have just stumbled into)?
I feel this last question is the one Scott is trying to answer.
I had an experience like this where I attended a Scotch tasting as a fundraiser for charity and it destroyed my ability to enjoy normal Scotch, while I’m unwilling to pay the prices for the exotic and aged varieties that now suit my palate.
Does anyone else find the Jane Street 2016 Election story dubious or at least missing details that would make it make sense as told? While the chart has unfortunately suffered some bit rot that it's now unhelpfully showing several days past the election too, the New York Times still has an archived chart of their probability of a Trump win in 2016 being updated throughout that day:
Contrary to some current impressions of an extremely sudden reversal where Trump won over Clinton in a matter of minutes (and it feels weird even saying that about something slightly over 8 years ago), the reality of that day, both looking at the archived chart and as I remember it from that same page back then, was that it became very gradually likely that a Trump win was going to happen until it was certain over the course of several hours, the entire evening. Under such circumstances, what would it _mean_ to have the "results" a few _minutes_ early? When mass media "calls" a state in a presidential election, they're really just saying it such a high probability of it going a particular way that it's implausible for it to go the other.
As a sidenote, I've no particular like for the NYT for multiple reasons, and the treatment that Freddie de Boer has described in the other link can be another one, but they happened to be the site I was watching for election updates back in 2016.
I suppose maybe Jane Street could have scraped the raw vote totals and/or exit polls faster than media outlets and used that to update a private election model that they were effectively a few _hours_ ahead of common knowledge? That still doesn't quite add up as a tale of what happened, but it's more plausible.
That's a rather different scenario, both in the number of people involved as well as more importantly the sudden difference in private and public information. My point is that there was no moment in time on November 8, 2016 where the difference could have been that big over the course of mere minutes. If you're supposing a very large difference in the probability of a Trump win, that's a difference of hours, not minutes. And the original claim was *not* that they were minutes ahead of a handful of others in the market, who could themselves have been hours ahead of everyone else in updating on the election results, but rather that they were minutes ahead of "mainstream media outlets".
#33 The XKCD piece on units cancelling reminds me of my favorite example - the Hubble Constant units are distance/time/distance, so when you cancel the distances you get 1/time, which is a frequency. So the Hubble Constant is a musical pitch.
Also - if you take its inverse, you get a time value which is very close to the age of the universe. This must Mean Something.
Hah, I've taught this particular topic to college freshmen. And yes, inverting the time value of the Hubble Constant means something rather straightforward and intuitive (enough so that it's how the lesson approaches the topic in the first place).
Debris from any explosion will necessarily display the same behavior described by Hubble's Law: at any given time, the pieces further from the center are moving faster, because everything started in the same place at the same time. Or to put it another way, their velocity is proportional to their displacement from the center: v =kd for any piece, with k constant among the pieces. Subbing that into good old d = vt yields d = kdt or k = 1/t. So the constant of proportionality is just the time elapsed since the explosion.
Of course, the expansion of the universe isn't really an explosion: there's no center, the motion is due to the expansion of space itself and the early universe had inflationary weirdness that has no obvious analogy in a stick of dynamite. But as a simple model, it still works quite well for getting a handle on the basic situation. And using freshman algebra to derive a fairly accurate age for the universe just from a speed-vs-time plot of galaxies is a pretty cool trick.
I sometimes refer to the Hubble frequency as "universes per second" or "big bangs per second." But of course really it should be an upper bound on that number: it may be constant(ish) across space, but over time it ought to be falling. Not that we'd ever be able to measure that on human time scales.
39: At least ChatGPT can string together grammatically correct sentences. I graded hundreds of term papers and essay questions on exams while TAing a poli sci course at a middling university and most students had dismal writing skills. I'd likely be far less cynical about the education system if all of them had used AI to cheat
By dismal writing skills I meant, for example, paragraphs of sentence fragments with no independent clauses in sight. Surely even low quality high schools teach how to write complete sentences. Those accepted into university should be the high school students who have the cognitive ability to learn how to write properly after being taught the basics. It shouldn't take more than that since natural pattern recognition can take care of the rest if the student is smart enough to benefit from post secondary education (not counting the piece of paper as a benefit)
Side note: I noticed that the students leaning to math heavy majors wrote better on average than the social science/humanities majors
Coinbase not hiring crypto-unfriendly lawyers is not cancel culture. Coinbase's own success depends on crypto and crypto-friendly regulation succeeding, so it has a justifiable basis for avoiding them. Similarly it would not be cancel culture if Starbucks didn't hire anti-coffee lawyers. It would only become cancel culture if Coinbase refused to hire anti-coffee lawyers, because the only basis for that would be that their executives believe that being anti-coffee is evil and anti-coffee people don't deserve to have jobs or participate in society.
But you could say the same thing about leftist cancellations! Under your rules, it would be perfectly reasonable for someone to not associate with people who have anti-transgender sentiments because their well-being or the well-being of someone close to them could be jeopardized.
Nobody expects left-wing PACs to not discriminate against right-wingers. The difference is Coinbase acting in its interest as a business, or Coinbase’s executives leveraging Coinbase to advance interests that are different to Coinbase. You are totally free not associate with someone as an individual but not when you are acting as an officer on other’s behalf.
And what if the others want it as well? You keep talking about "Coinbase" as if it's some independent agent, but a company isn't some psychopathic entity blindly pursuing profit. It's composed of real people with their own values and motives. If the company's values and interests reflect the values of the people working there... what's wrong with that?
Scott, you know a great deal about many things I will never understand, but one lacuna in your knowledge seems to be streams of Judaism. The paper on AI was not issued by "a Conservative rabbinical assembly," it was issued by the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly, which is the rabbi's association of the Conservative movement. "Conservative" in this sense does not mean politically conservative (though some rabbis are) but indicative of the desire to "Conserve" the Jewish tradition. It's a brand name, not a political orientation.
Similarly, in your articles about early Christianity a few weeks back, you referred to assimilated Jews as "Reform," in the sense of "these Jews are kind of lazy and ignorant about Judaism,", but the Reform movement was founded (in the early 1800's) to <resist> assimilation into Christianity by positing that Jews are no longer bound by halacha, but nevertheless have a unique religious outlook and community. Whether they succeeded is a fair question, but the work Reform as a brand name in Jewish life has a meaning other than "doesn't really care."
Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and Jewish Renewal are the brand names in Jewish life; "Orthodox" is a generic label applied to hundreds of groups that have a similar outlook on the continued force of halacha, or Jewish law.
Great links post! As I read through, I thought of a couple of things to comment on. But now, after checking out that Covid bet details, not because I am hung up on the outcome, but because I was genuinely curious how they set the bet conditions, I have to ask:
For the love of God, why do they have 2 judges, and not an odd number?
It seems clear to me from the article that the city's argument against allowing him to search the landfill is that everything that gets placed there becomes the property of the city, and he no longer has any legal claim to ownership of the drive in the first place. Which makes complete sense to me.
40: I think the real result here is MUCH more limited than the way it's being interpreted. I believe the result they found in the study, but I think the study mostly measured how much people knew about what AI poetry was like prior to beginning the study. It is interesting that people in this situation think that AI poetry feels more human than human poetry, but a huge reach for the authors to turn this into the title “AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry”, making it sound like it is a fundamentally difficult task for people with experience and/or some poetry knowledge. It very much does not mean that after a little bit of experience you cannot tell them apart.
Main evidence: I went through (nearly) all the poems in the study myself in all 10 conditions of the original study and correctly classified 84 out of 87 poems, and two of my mistakes were in the first round when I didn't know what I was doing (and I arguably only made those two because I thought the AI poems were going to be better than they were). Also, some of the trials were trivially easy. By contrast, I only scored 60% on the AI Art Turing Test, and it was very hard the whole way through.
A cursory glance at the study seems to be "we picked people who didn't read poetry, didn't know much about poetry, and didn't like poetry then asked them if they preferred the chopped-up prose style AI poetry or the obscure 14th century human poetry".
Well, duh, no wonder they got the result they did! Though I may be doing the AI an injustice by assuming it was the "chopped up prose" style of modern poetry. Any links to the actual excerpts/poems used?
I can see why they wanted "people unfamiliar with poetry" in order to avoid "Okay, I know this poem so I know it's by a human" effects but going for "people who don't like poetry" is a bit like going for "people who don't like wine" in a study to see "do people prefer the bottle of Two Buck Chuck or the expensive snooty Le French Le Wine Snob Drink?"
Most of them had regular meter/rhyme and traditional formalist-ish styles, just executed poorly – the model was asked to imitate the style of a particular real human poet for each (sometimes with much more success than others).
> I can see why they wanted "people unfamiliar with poetry"
It's unclear to me to what extent they selected here, because they did have a measure of familiarity with poetry, and found it had essentially no correlation to performance (R^2=.0012). The methods section was *very* brief on all this kind of thing (maybe they have more details buried somewhere I didn't look?).
On athletes with bigger livers: Much of glycogen storage occurs in the liver. Glycogen is carbohydrates stored as a fast energy source for physical activity and is stored with added water, in muscles and in the liver. So that alone would explain why someone with high energy turnover (an athlete) would also develop a bigger gas tank (liver). Strangely, the original blog post seems not to mention this and the original article apparently says that scientists "speculate" about protein intake leading to larger livers. I would look at glycogen first as the thing that is inflating the livers of athletes.
18 - Sports Gambling - I'm kind of shocked that no one has mentioned that Michael Lewis is currently in the middle of a podcast season about this very thing: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/against-the-rules Season four, episodes 5 and 7 are particularly relevant:
Anecdotal evidence performed by the podcast team would indicate that the big sports gambling companies are *EXTREMELY* good at detecting the skilled professional gamblers and then denying them meaningful access to the platform (either outright banning them or only allowing trivial bet amounts).
And also that they bombard the rest of the gamblers - the "losers" - with constant temptation. One company even *automatically* "upgraded" a normal bet into a high-risk parlay without informing the player!
> 7: Study: women who are more prone to intrasexual competition are more likely to advise other women to cut their hair short, especially if those women are of similar attractiveness to themselves. This study is too cute to be true and I expect it not to replicate; I link it for amusement value only - but, uh, still be careful about whose advice you take.
Pretty sure more competitive women are also more likely to actually think short hair is cool (since it's rebel-/masculinity-coded).
>If you read the Iliad, it either speaks to you and transforms your soul, or it doesn’t. Nobody says “I just finished the Iliad - give me a second to check whether it was novel for its time or not, so I can decide whether my soul should be transformed.”
Learning the context sometimes does transform your understanding of the work. When I saw the Venus de Milo, I was like "this just looks like Yet Another Armless Greek Marble Statue," and then I looked at the description and read about how the pose it's in was unusual and required new sculpting techniques to create and I'm like "oh, that's kinda interesting."
For a more modern example, modern superhero stories like Watchmen or Worm are often specifically targeting older superhero tropes that went unexamined, and while they're entertaining on their own merits you definitely enjoy them more if you're familiar with the tropes being skewered. They rely on the expectations created by other superhero stories to create the intended audience reaction.
"CFPB has...actually has been pretty principled in opposing debanking for conservatives"
This is false. As far as I am aware, the CFPB has never taken any action to oppose the debanking of conservatives. Singal is citing a court case where the CFPB was arguing to give itself broad "antidiscrimination" powers and presented the debanking of Christians as a hypothetical.
They'd hadn't taken any actions against debanking because their authority to do so was being challenged in court, and also because there wasn't yet any federal rule covering such actions by "non-bank actors" (PayPal et al). That the agency would center that issue in its court defense still does support Singal's point.
The agency's director had addressed the Federalist Society (!) in June to publicly promise that the CFPB would be going after politically-motivated deplatforming by payments platforms:
I once had a patient with cluster headaches, and because it is typical for the nostril to run and the eyeball to soften (enophthalmos) on the affected side, I admitted him to catch the expected 'headache' the next morning. When it started I took sinus x-rays and saw a completely whited out maxillary antrum on the painful side. After it resolved an hour or so later, they were repeated: normal! Definitely some massive vasodilation going on there, underlining a similar pathophysiology to migraine.
FYI, for me Substack has stopped alerting about responses to my comments here at ACX uniquely. It is still alerting me to new responses on comments I make elsewhere within Substack.
If there is some ACX-specific notification setting which I've accidentally disabled I am not aware of it (and would not have chosen to disable it).
Are there any cost-effective ways to increase shrimp suffering? It seems like Bentham's argument means that this would be more effective at increasing suffering than doing so to humans.
Well yeah, obviously. You can just farm more shrimp, or breed them for the express purpose of torturing them. It's obviously going to be much, much cheaper than breeding humans, though... I highly doubt that torturing shrimp would be that satisfying.
Regarding 29, I think art, in the form of paintings/galleries, invokes an immediate visceral response vs a novel or more long form piece of content. As a viewer, you're response is either primed or it's not. Take for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa. If a painting like the great wave was made by some Williamsburg transplant in 2024, no one would look at it twice. That isn't because the piece of art itself isn't as impressive, but it's because it has nothing interesting to say. The great wave (I can't 100% prove this) invoked a visceral response in the Japanese. The painting was created at a time of uncertainty of foreign influence, towards the end of the edo period which was defined by Japanese isolationism. If I were to look at the great wave, with no knowledge of Japanese history, I would think it was a cool painting of a wave. With added context, I can appreciate it more and sympathize with the feeling I thought it conveyed.
> The world really wants to believe that effective altruists are evil humorless people who want to prevent every kind of good except raw life-saving and think you’re a moral monster for not agreeing.
I mean... aren't they ? Yes, that phrasing is really prejudicial and hyperbolic -- certainly EAs are not humorless. But it sure looks like EA's main tenet is measuring the number of lives saved per donation. I understand that philosophically speaking this doesn't need to be the case, and that one could use EA methodology to devise an optimal donation to e.g. semiconductor research; but in practice EAs always seem to be counting lives saved (either immediately or in future projections).
And from a Utlilitarian point of view, I think it makes sense. For example, if I spend $1M on researching a new flavor of ice cream, I could make a billion people infinitesimally happier; but if I spend that $1M on mosquito nets instead, I could save the the lives of 100,000 or more people who would otherwise die in great pain and never experience any happiness ever again. Is there any rational (or perhaps I should say capital-R "Rational") argument for why I should let those people die just to make slightly tastier ice cream ?
Only fake EAs can be evil. I'm not an EA, but it is right there in the name: altruist. Those that want to profit somehow from being an EA are just EAINOs: EA in name only, which I recognize isn't exactly catchy.
I'm not an EA because the philosophy, no matter how intellectually satisfying, doesn't take distance into account, of any sort except for reducing the amount of giving. I think my family and friends are more important than acquaintances, who are more important than customers/business associates, who are more important than strangers, who are more important than distant strangers. I think human life/pain is more important than that of pets, which is more important than that of wild animals, which is more important than insects, which is more important than bacteria.
So if I can make lots of money for me and my family by making a billion people infinitesimally happier, I would definitely call it a win, despite being able to spend that money instead on saving the lives of distant strangers. And I would not consider reducing my standard of living to make the lives of shrimp easier, unless perhaps I fish or farm shrimp (which I don't).
Does anyone know of a service that uses tornado codes to secure bitcoin keys? They're error-correcting erasure codes. The idea is the data is encoded into N blocks, and any N-R blocks can be used to reconstruct the data. That gives you R-way redundancy without a single point of failure (like someone finding one of your private key backups). It's similar to RAID 5. Seems like the only sane way to deal with keys that unlock hundreds of millions of dollars.
"I guess this is specifically calculated to make me sweat, since unlike visual art I actually have great taste in poetry and am fiercely committed to it"
Okay, I get that this is slightly tongue in cheek. But only slightly. If you understand that there is such a thing as having a taste in poetry - then how do you not see the analogy to visual art?
Re: Hazimism: I think this is how sanctions should work. What use it is to sanction Russia or China when Turkey or Mexico buy from one and sell to the western world with a price hike?
"Harry Potter, Marvel, and anime) seem especially lowbrow to me. They are all smart, complex works of art with interesting characters and deep themes..."
I guess you would call me, and Scott, a snob because those are definitely not "smart, complex works of art" in comparison to anything I consider those things. As others have mentioned, all of those are designed to appeal to the sophistication and attention span of teenagers. And yes, teenagers can be inspired to think deep thoughts and there's nothing wrong with enjoying what you enjoy but I have difficulty understanding someone that considers any of the things you mention deep let alone complex. Charitably I think I would call even the most loved Superhero movies unsophisticated.
I say this as someone who was really into comics in my young teens. I was totally blown away by Frank Miller's The Dark Knight and his work on Electra and Daredevil. They seemed to plumb the depths of the human condition and have infinite subtlety in how they told stories. That first issue of The Dark Knight series ruined all other superhero comics. By the time I was 14 I was over all of them. None of them seemed serious anymore. The first thing that steered me away from them was the comic book Love and Rockets then there was MAUS. After that I discovered "serious" novels from the likes of Hesse and Vonnegut. My good friend was still into Batman and the X-Men and I couldn't help but think I had outgrown him. I certainly had better taste!
By the time I finished by BFA in Film, Photography, and visual arts in the mid 90s, I was firmly ensconced in the appreciation of highbrow art. Almost got into a physical fight with my sophomore film major roommate that actually believed that Star Wars should have won best picture instead of Annie Hall in 1977 lol.
Is the word sophistication used anymore? I think that's probably a better term than highbrow. I think it paints a better picture of both the complexity/subtlety that people like me crave but also the value judgement we inevitably have over people that are moved by things we think lack it. I might enjoy watching The Dark Knight (I didn't actually) but it was never going to impress me let alone make me think I watched a great film.
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Happy Solstice to those who celebrate it! Live streaming of the sun coming in through the Newgrange megalithic tomb this morning - you need to jump around 1 hr and 25 mins into the video and there's a lot of unnecessary yakking while they wait for the sun to appear, but very faintly and gradually the path of light travels over the floor of the tomb as it has done for 5,000 years:
In #22, the Putin joke about the vegetables is familiar in the UK from a TV sketch back in the 1980s about the domineering then-prime-minister Margaret Thatcher. I could well believe that it's an old soviet joke that we borrowed, but the research reckons it to be home-grown English: https://www.dirtyfeed.org/2024/08/and-what-about-the-vegetables/
Santa Muerte is best translated as Holy Death (not St. Death). Other examples of that usage are e.g. Santa Cruz (holy cross), la santa iglesia (the holy church).
As someone who claims to have taste in science fiction and fantasy literature and has read literally hundreds of such novels, I think that I'm reasonably qualified to say that the Harry Potter series is *genuinely good* and just because it's both newer and more popular than Dostoyevsky doesn't make it less worthy.
>If we discovered that some people (say, Laotians) had the same capacities as us but were aliens and thus not our species, their pain wouldn’t stop being bad. [...] But if we discovered that the most mentally disabled people were aliens from a different species, their pain obviously wouldn’t stop being bad.
Here's the problem with this style of arguments: nobody actually has to play along with this. You can make up science-fiction stories about worlds where I'd reject my current moral beliefs all you want, but none of those stories are actually going to happen, and nothing forces me to pretend that those stories demonstrate anything about what you should *actually* do in the world that *actually* exists.
If you do want to play by the rules that any moral claim which we would reject in some imaginary fantasy story has to be rejected in real life too, then, by those rules, I can refute all the Bulldog's claims just as easily. All I have to do is make up a story where an omniscient infallible deity appears in the sky and tells everyone that all his claims are false, and then he's not allowed to make any of them anymore.
With regards to this specific hypothetical, one reason why it matters that we're not in the world described is that if we were in a world where extraterrestrials were able to flawlessly disguise themselves as humans, then we wouldn't be able to *tell* whether the victims of some harm were human or not, which would make prioritizing human pain over that of other species a much less practical standard than it is in reality.
Regarding 29, Frank Lantz sounds, from your characterization, like a New Historicist. Some interesting reasons to pay attention to that perspective (understanding context can help you understand value), but when I was in grad school, I found their measuring of the value of a text SOLELY by its context and influence to be distasteful.
Reminds me of the guy I knew in film school who refused to have a personal opinion about any movie--he would just quote its box office to let you know whether or not he thought it was any good.
What is the social-proof v. popularity twitter ratio like? - is a question I've been asking myself. I have the world's most elite human capital followed twitter account (as a ratio of my total follows) because of my substack articles, but I really haven't posted much on twitter. At the moment the list of my X followers gets me into all the important parties, but that's a function of their being easy to find.
Assuming I decide to invest in getting more X followers through threads or whatever, how many followers does one need to equal having my followers?
Oh come on, it's actually quite impressive that he's gotten 355 followers and 3.2k subscribers in such a short amount of time, especially given his... rhetoric. It's not like those subscribers are just casual viewers either; it takes very, uh... spirited belief, to be able to appreciate his articles. And there's a chance that some of those people are very important people! And maybe some of those people have suddenly found themselves in positions of power due to recent events, if you catch my drift.
I've never heard of you but if any of these parties are scheduled for anywhere in Egypt this month, I'd be willing to consider making your acquaintance.
That really depends on how much mileage you can get out of your current connections. If I'm correctly guessing what those connections are... well, they're going to be far more valuable than any amount of money.
Clearly not true for *any* amount of money. At some level of money, you become one of the people everyone wants a connection with.
All the money in the world isn't going to protect you against an angry populace that wants you dead. It's always just better to be on the winning side.
It's pretty hard to have all the money in the world and not have other people on your side though, even if they're more opportunists than ideological allies.
That's a good point. The Bourbons and Romanovs both were institutionally impoverished before their respective revolutions. Russia had soldiers going unpaid. The Romanovs were personally tremendously wealthy, but their wealth was rather illiquid.
People act as if revolutions happen because the poor are oppressed. More often, they seem to happen because the middle classes are strong and the elites, by comparison, are poorly organized, suffer military losses and government incapacity, etc.
Perhaps that's a bit afield from what's being discussed.
No, that's actually very relevant to current events. Thank you for the context.
If I recall my reading of Citizens correctly, the best among the French aristocracy - contra the usual narrative - were starting businesses and getting involved in decidedly middle class activities prior to the revolution.
One may see that the aristocracy was not exactly ascendant.
Ayako Fujitani, Steven Seagal's daughter with the Japanese woman, grew up to be an actress. She starred in "Gamera Guardian of the Universe" and it's two sequels ("Attack of the Legion" and "Revenge of Iris") in the Nineties. This trilogy among the greatest kaiju-eiga films ever made and I really recommend them. Since then she has starred in many other films, but I haven't seen any of those because Gamera isn't in them.
That is interesting, I have only seen the old Gamera films and the serialized ones that got cannibalized (by Sandy Frank or somebody like him) and ended up on MST3k. There has been some buzz in America around recent Godzilla films, but I never hear these newer Gamera films mentioned.
The trilogy of Gamera films that was made in the 1990s has epic plots and absolutely fantastic special effects. Watching them after seeing the old ones is like watching Christopher Nolan's Batman movies after seeing the Adam West Batman TV show. Amazon Prime Video is streaming them all.
There is also another Gamera movie, "Gamera the Brave," which was made in the 2000s and is targeted for a younger audience again, but still has impressive special effects. Netflix also released an animated Gamera TV series last year. It has a good storyline, but the animation is done in that creepy style where they try to make 3-D CGI models look like 2-D hand-drawn animation.
55.
>I’d always thought that Christianity beat paganism because it was inherently more attractive. Yet the Mexican youth are turning away from the stodgy boring Catholic Church en masse to worship Santa Muerte. Why?
For what it's worth, the more stereotypically pagan elements within Catholicism, like saint veneration seem particularly popular in Latin America, where demand for saints to venerate exceeds the supply, leading to folk saints: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_saint#Local_character.
The Catholic Church should be co-opting Santa Muerte rather than condemning her. Co-option of local beliefs and deities into Christianity was one of the reasons it became succesfull(This is not a gotcha against Christianity, its something I genuinly like about Catholic/Orthodox Churches).
Possibly part of the issue is the decline in trust in the church as an institution. So they can't really absorb it if it exists to be an alternative
co-option was THE default before monotheistic religions, so this explains nothing.
Well, the only problem with that is the piddling little detail that it's heresy and possibly blasphemy but definitely occultism. "Santa Muerte" is not a saint, it's a personification of death and specifically invoked for bad purposes like murder. It's magic, not religion. Sure, folk religion teeters on that verge all the time, but there's a difference between "turning a prayer to a local saint into a charm" and "invoking a genuine demonic spirit to help you get away with literal murder and crime".
Yeah, I know Protestants think there's no difference there between Catholicism and witchcraft, but we do have *some* rules.
EDIT: Anyway, if you want to venerate skeletal figures, there are the Catacomb Saints:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacomb_saints
And the commercialisation of Santa Muerte may in fact soften the image. That there are variants and that the "tarot, crystals, candles" set are getting in on the act means that the imagery and practice will probably move away from its roots in crime, the underworld, and remnants of pre-Christian beliefs and become something more rootless and commodified.
I do not mean to suggest that this is the church's doing, and nor do I have direct experience culturally - but can testify an Anglo living in a Mexican area 150 miles from the border could be forgiven for thinking that out of the richness, at least style-wise (which I've always been drawn to), that is Mexican/Spanish-Mexican heritage - the most significant thing, the thing that will last the most and that people are most desirous of sharing via commercialization, is - tediously - Dia de Los Muertos. (My local grocery store had an appropriately grotesque Dia de Los Muertos Barbie for sale.) Now without having enough interest in it to so much as watch "Coco", I realize Dia de Los Muertos has not the sinister element that Santa Muerte does. Still, the iconography seems to be a through-line, and the focus on death over life.
And it's perhaps not a coincidence that it's not uncommon even to see police cruisers with skulls decorating them. Everyone is driving around with skulls and roses.
Well, Day of the Dead is easy to cross-pollinate with Hallowe'en and the commercialised version of American Hallowe'en has now made its way across the Atlantic to replace the traditional Irish customs.
So if you want to sell Mexican heritage that makes the easiest impact and widest spread to a non-Mexican culture, anything that is "This is our version of thing you already celebrate" is the best pick. And Dia de Los Muertos Barbie sounds like the perfect hellscape result of commercial interest, cultural appropriation, rowing back on that appropriation by a new 'diverse, inclusive' form of appropriation, and the old reliable selling tat to kids.
I can't speak for the Mexican version, but traditional Hallowe'en was not so much about the focus on death *over* life, but rather death as *part* of life, particularly when it cross-pollinated with the Christian feasts of All Saints and All Souls Days. The dead are not gone (as much as you might think), they are there and still part of our family. Death is the inevitable end of life, we will all die one day. The dark of the year is the time for spirits and reflections on mortality. You can fear it, try to placate it - or accept it and celebrate it.
The American version was completely free of association with one's own dead. Had more of a harvest festival aspect perhaps. And a bit of a ritual allowing children more freedom one night a year.
I like there to be different customs. I used to love those "Christmas Around the World" type books, or those children's books about different countries (they never questioned the "nation" framework :-)) and what their celebrations are and their favorite foods and their "dress".
I might not love Day of the Dead stuff personally, on aesthetic grounds - but would appreciate it as an interesting custom and not think about it otherwise if it were not seemingly rising to pre-eminence, possibly over Christmas, eventually.
>seemingly rising to pre-eminence, possibly over Christmas, eventually.
Why, at this rate, Dia de los Muertos is poised to overtake Christmas in the West in a mere--what--five or six hundred years!
It's just Dia de Muertos.
Interesting. My city has a "Dia de Los Muertos" museum - but what do a million Mexicans know.
I've tried to read this comment like three times, and each time I fail to parse it. I can't tell what the object of the second sentence is, nor what "that" means in 'thinking that out of richness'. is it a referrant to what the person you're replying to thought? "you only think that out of richness" kind of thing? This is the way my brain keeps trying to parse it but it doesn't work
figured this feedback might be useful
Oh, that seems like a waste of your time - am I controlling your mind at a distance?
Try maybe making another account, under another name?
ETA: oh yes, apologies!
> the "tarot, crystals, candles" set
Ah, yes. The people who make it almost impossible to get a good deck of cards for playing French Tarot in this country.
I used to help run a traditional card gaming group, and the main host told me one day he wanted to change the name, or promote the event more. I told him that if we posted an event on Meetup titled "Tarot at the Botanical Gardens", we'd end up with a lot of very confused women with crystals.
>[...] It's magic, not religion. Sure, folk religion teeters on that verge all the time, but there's a difference between "turning a prayer to a local saint into a charm" and "invoking a genuine demonic spirit to help you get away with literal murder and crime".
I find the difference to be a purely practical one.
Sure, praying cost much less MP, but the results are unpredictable. I can never be sure what my deity of choice will do. Summons, albeit much more costly, have not once failed me.
You joke, Shinji, but there's a kernel of truth. Contra Christian copers, I claim that one of the contemporarily unacknowledged reasons Christianity beat paganism was that its god was a more effective prayer-answerer and miracle-deliverer than the older pantheon. Sadly, this is no longer the case, and if the local crossroads god or spirit of a folk hero or guardian of the dead answers prayers and provides real aid, why waste your time and attention?
(And I have found conjuration to provide somewhat unpredictable results compared to e.g. old hoodoo standbys or prayer to the deathless gods. FWIW.)
The Orthodox Church doesn't and never did co-opt local beliefs and deities, it's the same as it was 2000 years ago. Unlike the Catholic Church who "adapts to the modern times". Good luck with that
Ah, I see you have managed to avoid or be unaware of the Orthodox version of "it was all pagan anyway" that Catholicism has got; didn't you know that all the local Greek saints are just thinly-disguised Classical deities that the peasants and ordinary folk continued to worship under the noses of the clergy? 😁
"The legend of Barlaam and Josaphat was derived, via Arabic and Georgian versions, from the life story of Siddartha Gautama, known as the Buddha. The king-turned-monk Joasaphat (Arabic Yūdhasaf or Būdhasaf; Georgian Iodasaph) also gets his name from the Sanskrit Bodhisattva, the term traditionally used to refer to Gautama before his awakening. Barlaam and Ioasaph were placed in the Orthodox calendar of saints on 26 August, and in the Roman martyrology they were canonized (as "Barlaam and Josaphat") and assigned 27 November. The story was translated into Hebrew in the Middle Ages as Ben-HaMelekh ve HaNazir ("The King's Son and the Nazirite"). Thus the Buddhist story was turned into a Christian and Jewish legend."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barlaam_and_Josaphat
"Barlaam and Josaphat were entered into the Greek Orthodox liturgical calendar on 26 August Julian (8 September Gregorian), and into liturgical calendar of the Slavic tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church, on 19 November Julian (2 December Gregorian)."
Sorry, friend: like the Protestants, every sword you pick up to use against us Romans turns in your hand to attack your own beliefs.
I have no Barlaam or Josaphat in my Romanian calendar and this is from the link you gave:
Barlaam and Josaphat, also known as Bilawhar and Budhasaf, are Christian saints. Their life story was not based on the life of the Gautama Buddha,[1] who may have lived several centuries before Jesus. Their story tells of the conversion of Josaphat to Christianity.
Depending on which national church where, there are variant calendars in Orthodoxy. One calendar online gives me this:
"This month, on the thirtieth day, the commemoration of our venerable Isaac the Confessor, abbot of the Dalmatian Monastery in Constantinople.
...Also on this day, the memory of the holy martyr Natalie, who was killed by the sword.
Also on this day, the memory of the venerable Varlaam, who died peacefully.
Also on this day, the commemoration of the holy martyrs Romano and Teletie, who were killed by the sword, was celebrated.
Also on this day, the commemoration of the holy martyr Evplu, who died wrapped in ox hide and exposed to the scorching sun.
Through their holy prayers, O Lord, have mercy on us and save us. Amen."
Wikipedia gives me this:
"Varlaam is a variant of the saint's name Barlaam, used in the Orthodox churches due to the Byzantine sound shift from /b/ to /v/. A shortened form is Varlam."
Varlaam is the Romanian version of the name Barlaam. Not the same Barlaam as in the legend, but it's clear that even for the Romanians, the name was being used as a saint's name to give in christening.
So the greater point is that if you are trying to maintain the Orthodox "never co-opted local deities and beliefs", you're going to run up against the same questioning and the same secular correlations drawn up since Enlightenment times (and before). You can't escape it, except by work like that done by Tim O'Neill and others, about how the origins of the great Christian feasts were not pagan.
The Orthodox slide under the radar in the West because they're not known enough or big enough to be important. Catholicism is the main church that gets attacked, and then the various Protestant ones in turn. But because Catholicism is the biggest and most monolithic, as it were, a lot of people have an interest in "well actually those Christian festivals are really not Christian" type of work. If they knew about your Romanian Orthodox claims, they'd be happy to do the same demolition job on you.
So saying "oh well the Catholics were contaminated by heresy and secularism and paganism, but not us" is not going to work there. They don't care about the Great Schism, or even that the Protestants were making the same claims in regard to Catholicism, because it's Christianity in general (as the religion that influenced them and which they left or feel is trying to impose its morality on them) that they are fighting, so they're happy to go on about 'the saints are re-purposed gods and spirits' and the like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_Orthodoxy
"Folk Orthodoxy (Russian: народное православие, romanized: narodnoe pravoslavie; Bulgarian: народно православие, romanized: narodno pravoslavie; Serbian: народно православље, naradno pravoslavlje; Latvian: narodno pravoslavlje) refers to the folk religion and syncretic elements present in the Eastern Orthodox communities. It is a subgroup of folk Christianity, similar to Folk Catholicism. Peasants incorporated many pre-Christian (pagan) beliefs and observances, including coordinating feast days with agricultural life."
See the same thing about Hallowe'en, which superficially looks correct - until you realise that the geographical areas which celebrated Hallowe'en weren't converted to Christianity until a few centuries later, and the veneration of All Saints' Day had already been established before contact was made.
"Elements of dual faith inhere in several Christian cultures. One example is All Souls' Day and All Hallow's Eve (better known as Halloween). Halloween is an ancient Celtic pagan holiday commemorating ancestors, similar to the Christian feast-day All Saints' Day. A number of Christian cultures celebrate Carnival before Great Lent, which preserves pre-Christian customs, thus combining pagan and Christian customs."
Folk *traditions* were incorporated, or better said, kept as part of the overall celebration, but were never part of the religious practice and it's not true to say that 'the church took over Hallowe'en from the pagans so as to persuade the peasant to switch over'.
When I toured in Bulgaria I saw famous ancient Orthodox monasteries where the icons included the "pre-Christian" saints Orpheus and Pythagoras.
There's nothing like that in my Romanian calendar and neither in the Bulgarian one, I'm sure.
The degree of syncretism in Christianity and Islam is really vastly overrated- if you want to see a *genuinely* syncretic religious tradition that actually does co-opt local deities, Hinduism or Buddhism would be much closer to the mark.
European Christians today don't have any genuine, serious theological content inherited from Slavic or Nordic paganism, just like modern African Christians (in my experience, anyway), are really much closer to what a 17th or 18th century European Christian believed than to what their animist kin of a generation or two ago believed.
See also: Voodoo, where the Loa basically result from a syncretism of Catholic saint veneration and West African religions.
In a way, it is just the logical conclusion of saint veneration. If you believe that saints are supernatural entities with specific domains (like curing specific illnesses) who can be enticed to intercede in the natural world on your behalf in the natural world, then it is also reasonable to be on the lookout for other supernatural entities the church does not want you to know about.
By contrast, a strong monotheism where the only entity allowed to enact changes on the natural world is God, and the correct way to entice them is to pray to them directly is likely less vulnerable to that failure mode. Of course, a deist world view where even God does not meddle with the universe would be even safer, but would be also hamstrung in cultural evolution, as "you can make supernatural entities intervene on your behalf" likely has a huge mass appeal.
"By contrast, a strong monotheism where the only entity allowed to enact changes on the natural world is God, and the correct way to entice them is to pray to them directly is likely less vulnerable to that failure mode."
Ah, that explains why the staunchly Puritan New England was wracked by witchcraft crazes and fears of the Devil 😀
In such a condition, the failure mode is a form of Zoroastrianism or Manicheanism - God and the Devil as equals and opposites, where the Devil is just as strong and is more inclined to intervene or be accessible to mortals who can invoke demons to do for and give to them what God won't do for or give to them.
When you strip away the layers of saints etc . you have the stark God and Devil scenario, and unless your faith is very secure and you are very confident, it's easy to be haunted by fear of the enemy which goeth about like a roaring lion - God is far away but the Devil is all too eager to get involved with and mess up humans. Placating the powers of darkness is thus one temptation as to how to cope with that message.
> In such a condition, the failure mode is a form of Zoroastrianism or Manicheanism - God and the Devil as equals and opposites
That can be fixed easily by going naturalistic about the good/evil polarity.
You don't need a counterpart to the primordial being of God, to explain why evil happens; once you have a multiplicity of beings, then evolution and game theory dynamics alone is enough to make sure they develop the structures of good and evil, and explore the whole range of possibilities. No need for interventionist or battling supernatural powers for that.
why are Zoroastrianism and Manichaeanism 'failure modes'?
I thought this article was very informative:
https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/reaper-drones-over-houston
"5 days later 13 bodies were found Strung up from bridges in West Virginia, Florida, and Tennessee. Each showed signs of torture, the women showing signs of the worst sexual abuse before being shot, and the men covered in hammer blows having finally died of brain trauma and fractured skulls."
Sorry, the terrible formating and bad spellling made me. Lose attention as I could no longer. Keep reading the borken sentences all jumpbled up.
Seems to be a left-wing version of that website which 'reports' courtmartials and trials of Democrats and their executions.
> I can’t believe this is our first “secretly controlled” accusation and it’s not even something cool.
While the rationalists are at it, how about they secretly control Friendster & Myspace too.
Okay, so the Steven Segal lesson is: "Make a lot of money as a bad ass movie star for a few years and then you can do whatever you want forever and ever thereafter".
Obviously this is just anecdotal but I get the feeling that other "one-time bad ass movie stars" are generally having a fun go of it long after their glory days.
Comedy stars though....well, Robin Williams of course and... I don't know, is there any way to quantify this?
And does the action star actually have to have been fit at any given point, or can Saul Goodman marry the 19 princesses of Siam because of his silly beat-em-up-on-the-bus movie?
Robin Williams had a terminal illness.
Everybody does. Care to elaborate?
Robin Williams had advanced Lewy Body Dementia, which would have left him ~5 years of declining mental function.
If only there were a system of interconnected computers that one could use to find out, quickly and easily, whether an extremely famous person had a terminal illness!
Alternatively, I had already heard from his wife's publicist and remained skeptical of her convenient get-out-of-guilt card but preferred to...
oh, why am I talking to you. You're just another unoriginal midwit who thinks she's clever enough to critique.
Think again.
You are very, very confused. I don't know what else to say.
I would generalize that to "Make a lot of money for a few years and then you can do whatever you want forever and ever thereafter, if you can do basic money management."
Steven Seagal ostensibly had mob connections predating and to some degree causative of his movie stardom. I think his results probably don't generalize.
Vague impression I have is that the 1980s comedy scene was a very hard world from the perspective of drug use (akin the earlier 70s music scene), and if you were big in it, you went pretty hard. There's a tax to be paid for that lifestyle. Conversely, the big action stars seemed to avoid hard drugs, generally speaking, so they have aged somewhat better (and if you had problems with hard drugs, you probably never made it to being "big"-Jan Michael Vincent would be the example here, although not an action star per se).
Some in the 1980s comedy scene went hard with their drug use, many went less hard, a few didn't go at all. Like quite literally any other corner of show business (Source: family member was in that scene, wasn't big but knew the big ones personally pre- and post-fame). Would be absolutely shocked if the same weren't true of the 1980s action-movie scene.
For 23, I would say high-rise buildings for family are pretty common in Hanoi, Vietnam. This is one of the biggest real estate tycoon in Vietnam: https://vinhomes.vn/en. And they are all about high rise buildings for family.
To add to this: most newly built apartment buildings (at least in Europe?) very sound-proof. You will definitely not hear your neighbors crying baby.
Maybe in Europe; I wouldn't know. It is absolutely not true of the US.
The best apartment dwellings from a noise perspective tend to be conversions from outdated usages. Former warehouses converted into lofts or apartments, etc. You get heavy frame construction and/or thick masonry walls. I've known several couples over the years who lived in those with new children and everybody in the house slept like a baby.
An extreme example is, for some years a fellow pro-am musician I knew was living in what had been Chicago's main "film repository" (regional distribution hub for Hollywood product). It was built in the era of nitrate film reels having a high tendency to burst into flame. This Art Deco-style building, which some years back was converted into rather great apartments, has walls that were designed to contain the occasional exploding film canisters. We used to have rehearsals/songwriting sessions at his place, he on electric bass and me on electric piano, and he never once heard a complaint from anybody. He figured we could have had the whole group in there, drums and all, and been at most a distant rumble to any neighbors.
I am genuinely happy for you and the rest of the .000001% of US residents living in an extremely specific kind of adaptively reused building stock. However, I think you'll agree that this doesn't say much about the state of noise insulation in the overwhelming majority of multifamily dwellings in the US.
Didn't offer any opinions about the state of noise insulation in the overwhelming majority of multifamily dwellings in the US, and don't plan to. I will suggest that your pedantic exasperation doesn't add value to this or any other discussion.
I can't really say for sure. But in Vietnam, most of the wall are concrete, so they are very sound-proof. Like you cannot hear the noise between the living room and bedroom. But when I lived in Japan, it was rare to find house that have concrete walls. They were usually drywall and wood. So noise was a big problem.
I feel obligated to pont out here that Eliezer Yudkowsky warned us against unending chains of takfir: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JKxxFseBWz8SHkTgt/tolerate-tolerance :)
I'm not convinced that the counterfactual world where there is no sports gambling is notably better. If you ban sports gambling, you still have a large population of humans with addictive personalities who still get addicted to things and still waste their money on things that are probably bad for them.
If you want to address the problem, I think you need to address the root of it, which is that we have a notable population of people with addiction problems and available treatments/therapies have limited effect, and as a society we don't have better outlets available for people to get addicted to.
Banning sports betting, IMO, is just another paternalistic regulation that doesn't actually address the underlying problem.
Counterpoint: we had all those people with latent addiction problems before, but it didn't become a problem until we put casinos in everyone's pockets and let companies with giant war chests buy advertising blitzes. Putting up barriers to easily addictive behavors seems to cut down on those addictive behavors, much like how putting up barriers to impulsive suicides cuts down on impulsive suicides.
Another point: we have all these incredibly sophisticated computers in our pockets, all of them feeding utterly amoral companies with masses of data to use against us. Perhaps "paternalistic regulations" are needed just to level the playing field.
While a reasonable hypothesis, I would want some incredibly strong evidence of efficacy before taking away people's freedom to choose what content they consume.
To be convinced enough to consider taking away freedom of choice I think I would want to see two very similar jurisdictions compared over a 10 year period after one jurisdiction put up the barriers you mentioned and the other didn't (and otherwise remain similar to each other), and I would want to see a very large effect size, on the order of 30% or more difference in some significant metric chosen in advance of the experiment.
I recognize that proving such regulations are actually effective is incredibly hard, which is why I generally just default to "give people the freedom to make mistakes" because I know that gathering the data necessary to convince me that limiting freedom is acceptable is unrealistically difficult. 😖
The reason I would want to see something like the above is because I have seen *way* too many good intentioned regulations end up being completely ineffective at solving the underlying problem they set out to solve, and often they cause more harm as side effects than good. So even just trying out a regulation comes with non-trivial costs, not to mention complexity of everyone staying up to date on all of the current regulations so they don't end up in prison or fined due to not being aware.
No.
I think when we protect people from the consequences of their own mistakes, it greatly slows down and sometimes halts the rate we as individuals/society/species learn from those mistakes.
I have made a *lot* of mistakes in my life, and most of my learning comes from the consequences of those failures. Not everyone will learn as quickly, but learning does occur when you (or someone you know) suffer the consequences of those failures, and I think is generally a bad idea to interfere with that learning process.
Since I don't care about being cancelled, I'll openly state that yes, I am okay with people suffering all of the consequences of their own choices, including the really bad/sad ones. This is the trade for allowing humans to fully explore the choice landscape, including choices that many of us probably agree are obviously bad choices. Essentially, I'm not sufficiently confident that I know for certain what is best for humanity, so I prefer to keep the search space as wide open as possible, and allow people to make what I consider to be very bad life choices.
That being said, I am *also* okay with people having local/voluntary support groups/charities to address these problems. I don't think we should stop people from helping each other, I just don't think we should be nationalizing such assistance.
What you stated in your first paragraph is a good point, and I think somewhat core to why people who start going a little bit libertarian tend to end up going all the way eventually. The inverse is also true for people who dip their toe into socialism, you kinda have to go all the way. Trying to play in the middle where the state exercises partial control over people's lives is a slippery slope in both directions, as the introduction of regulations often requires the introduction of more regulations to deal with the problems created, and the removal of regulations requires the removal of more regulations to remove the problems that the regulation was patching up.
Which jurisdictions, exactly, do you want to see used for this comparison? In order to compare one with regulations to one without, you need to let somebody use the regulations in the first place.
I'm generally a fan of testing proposed regulations on a small scale for an extended period of time before trying to scale up to larger populations. In an ideal world, we would first test regulations at a local level, then county/province, then state, then national. Each step verifying that the regulation achieved metrics agreed on in advance of implementation, when compared to some similar jurisdiction.
What I dislike is jumping straight to regulating things at the national level without strong evidence that the proposed solution actually works.
Drifting offtopic, but over and over again I encounter a pattern:
* I read newspaper reports about some policy being trialled at a local level
* a few months later I read newspaper reports about how everyone involved loved the new policy and the trial was a resounding success on all metrics
* everyone involved goes back to doing things the old way
* nothing ever happens about the policy until eventually the whole pattern repeats - may be a long or short amount of time, but in any case no sooner than the next election cycle
I've seen this pattern with things like homelessness / unemployment initiatives, four-day working weeks etc.
Meanwhile other proposals are pushed over and over with no trial or evidence that they make things better more than worse or indeed at all, until eventually the resistance doesn't resist quite hard enough and the proposal rolls out nationwide; cf. various Internet censorship /surveillance "protect the children" acts coming into force in assorted jurisdictions over the next few months.
Why does this keep happening? How do we make things actually scale up when the trial outcome suggests they should, instead of everyone involved just quietly pretending the trial never happened?
As it is, I have come to believe that the only way we can ever see actual nationwide change is to roll out the proposal nationwide - as quickly as possible, so the rollout can complete within one election cycle - then hope the next administration rolls it back if it turns out to have been a terrible idea. This is terrible and I wish it were otherwise, but that seems to be the price of being able to change anything at all in the world we live in.
Could you give a specific example?
>To be convinced enough to consider taking away freedom of choice I think I would want to see two very similar jurisdictions compared over a 10 year period after one jurisdiction put up the barriers you mentioned and the other didn't (and otherwise remain similar to each other), and I would want to see a very large effect size, on the order of 30% or more difference in some significant metric chosen in advance of the experiment.
Well...good luck with that. In the real world, you're going to have to be content with what we actually have, which is a comparison between the welfare of gambling addicts in the world pre-ubiquitous-online-gambling and the welfare of gambling addicts in the world post-ubiquitous-online-gambling. Yes, there are confounders, yes, they will have to be accounted for. Doesn't seem insurmountable.
Incidentally, "taking away people's freedom to choose what content they consume" sounds more like a description of the government banning an edgy Twitter account than the government forbidding online casinos from accepting cash bets on sporting events. Is there a reason you worded it that way?
I think it is important to differentiate between paternalistic regulations (victimless crimes) and regulations that prevent direct harm to others. Gambling is a victimless crime, so it is the government taking away freedom of choice from people without giving any direct protection to other people within society. Same as laws against drug use and basically every regulation one might label as paternalistic.
While one can argue that victimless crimes have downstream consequences on others in society (e.g., a drug user that resorts to theft to feed their drug habit), I think we should address the actual crime with a victim rather than reducing the freedom of choice of everyone in society because some people make bad choices that lead to more bad choices that are then crimes with victims.
I also worry that if we allow people to use the argument of "drug users resort to theft to get their fix, so we should ban drug use" as a valid argument for introducing victimless crime regulations to protect the broader society, clever people will be able to find a path between anything they dislike and some downstream consequence. For example:
People are allowed to freely engage in employment and sometimes people make bad choices and take jobs with horrible bosses. They then end up with a lot of pent up rage and take that out violently on other members of society. We should not allow people to choose their own employment in order to protect society from bad decisions made by a subset of the population when selecting a job.
> it didn't become a problem until we put casinos in everyone's pockets and let companies with giant war chests buy advertising blitzes.
Maybe unpopular opinion but: I've been thinking more and more that targeted digital advertising (and other forms of adversary algorithmic feeds) are just too socially deleterious and should probably be banned globally.
It's just too easy for ruthless companies to target your weaknesses in a way that side steps our social mechanisms of collective validation. Since the messages are tailored to you, and shown privately, you don't get to see your friends or wider society criticizing or dismissing or doubting them.
I feel like we should search for better solutions than just "ban X". Perhaps future generations will become inoculated to advertising, or perhaps we can figure out ways to inoculate people against advertising at a young age (e.g., parents teaching their children how to spot advertisements, and how to recognize that those advertisements are designed to exploit you).
Historically, the solution to problems was parents teaching children how to deal with insults from the world, and I feel like these days we are too quick to just kick the can to government to fix our problems.
Advertising itself is fine, we've had it for a few generations and we can deal with it, as long as it's *public*. Companies put their reputation in line for the ads they show us, and it can absolutely backfire if they're seen as excessively manipulative or whatever. That mechanism works fine as long as ads are publicly visible, on the street or on screens, but we all see them. They have the power of their dark psychologists and manipulation experts, but we have the power of numbers and social coherence among the lay public. It more or less balances out.
This all breaks down when they are allowed to first track our behavior and weaknesses, and then target us individually using fine-grained criteria. At that point the power differential becomes unbridgeable, so I don't think there's any other solution than a collective decision to use government power. It's not about asking the govt to fix our problems, as if they were some weird entity out there with its own agendas; it's about us together using what's left of our democratic powers to coordinate fixing them through the mechanisms of government.
It's fine to ban entire business models when they are deemed deletorious to society in ways that cannot be fixed. I think it's time to start recognizing that most of Meta's model is unfixable in this way.
I would say you're making too much of advertising. I don't think I was much less likely to ignore advertising on the interwebs in the olden days of untargeted ads than I am now. These weaknesses you're speaking of...I don't think most people actually have them.
It's weird. I feel like targeted advertising has relatively little negative impact on me and I'm capable of dealing with it critically or just ignoring everything which is not subject to the social review you allude to. But it seems like there are a significant number of people who are deeply impacted by targeted ads. And I wonder what the difference between us is, that gives us such radically different life experiences. From what you say, you seem to rely a lot on social criticism and you're much less critical when that criticism is absent and also don't actively seek such social review if you need it, i.e. "Bob, what do you think of this ad. I'm thinking of buying the product...") That summary is probably at least a little off base, but where do you think it falls short?
OK it's a bit off-topic and late, but let me explain myself a bit. I'm certainly not worried about Joe Rando buying an extra toaster he doesn't really need. I'm worried about the impact of targeted messages of many kinds: pushing addictive things like gambling or get-rich-quick schemes while targeting those who are most likely to be vulnerable to those messages. Pushing culty and crazy ideas that the wider population would laugh at, specifically at those who are likely to fall for them. It's yet another way in which community is lost; in a well-functioning society we're all together part of the wider culture's immune system, which is part of the feedback loop where new ideas are tried out, "out there" stuff gets initial traction, but then things that turn out to be bad ideas are naturally weeded out.
But when anyone with money or clout can push their chosen messages at targeted groups without the rest of society even noticing, the salutary feedback loop is no longer there, and you get what we're seeing more and more of since the algorithmic feed took off: craziness spinning out of control, fueled by a mix of large-system effects among the larger well-meaning population, to which you can certainly add a whole lot of hostile actors and foreign powers who have everything to win by weakening Western countries, and whom we have just handed an easy and cheap way to sow discord.
And the generic tool that is allowing these things to happen is the algorithmic feed. Social media feeds present themselves as a combination of ads and "organic" content, but both of them are hostile algorithmic feeds, optimized against the user's best interest, and that can be manipulated for shockingly low money.
I think this is right. As gambling crept back into repute as a way to enrich state coffers, prelude to the lottery it was salivating for, my state legalized pari-mutuel racing in the 80s, and I recall going to a track with my parents. I was looking forward to it. Somehow the result was super-boring. There weren't many people there. Anyway, my father wasn't especially interested in horses*, outside of Dick Francis novels anyway - he'd just gone along with some friends in investing in a quarter horse. (That was his kind of betting, and I'm sure it turned out much like his investment in something rather pathetically called "Club Dallas" lol.)
Anyway, the track just gave off this vibe of utter loser-dom which was uncomfortable in that perspective-shaking way for a kid dragged along to something with her parents.
The lameness of it served as a kind of barrier, I imagine, and the track went out of business - as, basically, did the even lamer greyhound racing track in another city. Which remains, to this day, a giant dystopian hole in the urban fabric.
*Though as a child in that urban/semi-rural fringe, he liked to find a horse or a cow and lead it home with him, my grandmother then discovering it tied up in the yard.**
**He once went on a week-long winter hunting trip in the Bob Marshall Wilderness - as someone who had scarcely ever sat a horse since childhood, I imagine - on horseback, and I believe he didn't much enjoy it. I'm pretty sure it would have been the greatest week of my life, horses or no.
If sports gambling had been observed to lead addictive personalities away from more self-destructive forms of behavior (like, leading to fewer opioid overdoses), you'd have a point, but it hasn't. As it stands, it's just an additional very low-threshold, legal way of ruining one's life on top of many less-convenient, less-legal ways.
Also, refusing to tackle a specific problem using well-understood steps because that wouldn't fix the broader underlying issue that no one has an idea how to fix (let alone fix without intrusive paternalistic measures) is not very helpful.
I would argue that gambling isn't a "specific problem". There are plenty of people in the world who engage in casual gambling (e.g., poker with friends once a week, or a trip to Las Vegas once a year) without deleterious negative effects and many times there are positive effects (socialization, stress release, entertainment, etc.). IIUC, the proposal here is to take away some types of gambling from everyone because a subset of people have a problem (addiction) that we don't know how to solve.
I'm generally quite wary of removing a freedom from an entire population because a small subpopulation doesn't do well with that freedom of choice. This feels like one of those situations where we recognize a problem (addiction), we don't have a good solution, so we are left implementing solutions we know have negative externalities so we can at least say we tried to do something. I would rather live in a society where some degenerate gamblers ruin their own lives because they don't do well with free choice, than a society where freedom of choice is removed to protect a handful of people from themselves.
It is also worth mentioning that there are *many* ways to gamble besides sports betting, including lotteries (which are run by the same governments that ban sports betting), many mobile games, uninformed stock trading, etc. and many of these alternatives are just as predatory. However, taking away people's ability to trade stocks has even greater negative externalities, so at best we are just redirecting from sports to something else.
Zvi's post is specifically about basically unrestricted access to sports gambling, which was illegal not so long ago, was made legal by specific legislation, and had measurable negative impact, as explained in the post. I don't see the big issue with making something that was illegal ten years ago illegal again.
Also, sure, there are many forms of gambling, and many of them are more or less harmful. But there is a qualitative difference in having to travel to a specific place and going to a specific building in order to gamble vs. just betting anywhere, anytime, with one click. IMO, it is the duty of society to find the right level of gatekeeping for vices like this, and "but Freedom! Freedom, I tell you!" is a lazy way of shirking that responsibility.
(BTW, I'm not convinced that everyone should have the right to "trade" in stocks - meaning, opportunistic buying and selling at the drop of a hat, rather than long-term investment - including people who have never heard of the efficient market hypothesis.)
Every single one of Zvi's arguments would apply to legal prediction markets, despite his afterthought-like three-sentence paragraph saying "no, prediction markets are different (but I offer no rationale why)".
Does this mean that opening prediction markets was followed by an observable spike in bad outcomes? Because that seems to be the crux of his argument. He didn't oppose sports betting before taking in that data.
Prediction markets don't currently have enough of an audience to make a measurable spike in anything. But if prediction markets were widely used, there's no reason to expect different social effects. Sports gambling is literally a prediction market on sports.
Prediction market bets don't lend themselves to the impulsive short time horizons or spectator excitement aspects of sports betting. There's no shared culture that has been exploited for prediction markets like there is for sports betting, except maybe around election results, but aside from the presidential election every four years nobody cares.
The people who oppose legalized prediction markets make exactly this argument. The fact that they're illegal prevents them from being part of popular culture.
If you want legal prediction markets, you need to accept that a sportsbetting-like culture will grow up around it. You don't get to choose "this is only going to be for policy wonks and bay area technologists".
If the prediction market apps come up with high-iteration dopamine-style markets like 'will the next pitch be a ball or a strike?' then sure.
Prediction markets are closer to day trading. That's not great but doesn't seem to drive bankruptcies.
WallStreetBets has entered the chat.
Sports gambling piggybacks on a popular, commonplace social activity (watching sports)
I'm not sure prediction markets do so, except for predicting election results, and elections are a heck of a lot less common than sporting events.
That said, I do not share the general fondness here for prediction markets, and wouldn't at all mind if they (or just gambling on election results) were banned too.
> IMO, it is the duty of society to find the right level of gatekeeping for vices like this, and "but Freedom! Freedom, I tell you!" is a lazy way of shirking that responsibility.
My belief in maximizing liberty isn't because I'm too lazy to formulate an argument against paternalism, but rather because we can look at history and see that paternalism often causes more harm than good, governments often exploit their population rather than protect it (see lotteries run by states while they simultaneously ban gambling), and in general more liberal societies tend to make more progress (something I like) than more paternalistic societies.
Also, as I mentioned in the OP I'm not convinced that this specific solution actually solves the real problem, which is that some people struggle to function in modern society.
>see lotteries run by states while they simultaneously ban gambling
Lotteries are significantly less exploitative than the kind of gambling in question here.
I don't know about that. Lotteries and scratch tickets are pretty bad. Of course, you can't buy those tickets from an app that sends you push notifications every hour (afaik, yet)
>"IMO, it is the duty of society…"
Rebuttal: "There's no such thing as society." -Margaret Thatcher
Also: "F*** you I won't do what you tell me." -Rage Against The Machine
Perhaps the way cigarettes are handled would be instructive. They aren’t illegal but advertising them and displaying them has rules.
That's probably only due to many years of lobbying and dirty tricks from the tobacco industry. If tobacco was arriving now for the first time into the wider world, but we still knew all we currently know about its negative effects on health and highly addictive nature (e.g b/c some small third world country had a full cigarette culture), it would probably be made illegal in a jiffy.
Yes, I have no doubt you are right about tobacco being made illegal immediately if it were to come up now. But gambling hasn’t just come up now, it has been around for a long time. This is a bump in availability and marketing.
Note that Zvi is specifically not at all proposing banning sports gambling altogether - They're saying that the reduced friction increases compulsive behaviour, which vice versa means more friction may be good.
And as someone with a problem with compulsive-addictive behaviour - although at least not as destructively as gambling, namely gaming and extreme reading habits - I couldn't agree more. People don't spring into existence already addicted, they become addicted through easy access to addictive goods, and some people have a personality type that makes it easier to get addicted to certain things. Even worse, this is more a difference of degree than kind - somebody who might have had no trouble resisting addictive gambling when he has to go to a physical casino may have great trouble when it's always available on a phone.
You're line of argument is imo equivalent to saying that, instead of helping people with nut allergy to avoid nuts, we should just give them better nuts.
What is being proposed isn't "help people with nut allergies avoid nuts", it is "make it so no one is allowed to eat nuts". We should not restrict the freedom of all members of society because a small fraction struggle to manage that particular freedom well.
I’m not sure that’s a fair analogy. Sports betting would still exist, it just couldn’t be done as casually. Even when you buy a case of beer there’s friction in the form of an ID check and extra taxes and laws about where exactly you can drink it and what you’re allowed to do while you’re lit.
No, if you want to phrase it more negatively you could say this is like "make nuts more cumbersome to get for everyone". But sports betting will continue to exist just fine.
I understand your concern, and I'm strongly against outlawing almost anything, but imo you underestimate the value of appropriate friction. There's an extremely wide range of convenience for different things, and moving generally destructive things to high-friction is not at all like making it illegal.
There's also some great country-based initiatives mentioned in the comments to Zvi's article where you can sign up by your own volition and they make it so that you can't gamble anymore. This wouldn't give any trouble to responsible gamblers (or even irresponsible gamblers who just don't sign up). Imo there's many things you can try that disproportionally help people with addiction but minimally impact people without.
I think it's worth recognizing here that the companies involved in the types of sports betting discussed here will outright kick people off their sites if they seem too canny and effective with their betting. So it's kind of like if some portion of people have nut allergies which cause them to pass out insensate but not die, and companies are taking advantage of that to specifically serve nuts to those people to make them pass out and rob them, and they have no interest in serving nuts to the rest of the population. Should their freedom to preserve their business model of serving nuts specifically to allergic people so they can rob them be preserved because some people are able to eat nuts safely?
I *would* like to see a solution to what feels a lot like fraud, where betting establishments don't let people win (essentially). But I feel like solving that is unlikely to address the addiction side of the problem in a meaningful way.
This doesn't help if we have no idea how to address the root problem, and I don't think we have any idea.
If the root problem of broken bones is getting injured, we can do some things to make injury less likely, but it still makes sense to se bones.
I agree that we as a society still struggle to address the root cause of addictive behaviors.
Regarding the broken bone analogy, I think banning gambling is akin to telling everyone they aren't allowed to ride bicycles anymore because some subset of people break bones when riding them. I know there are some helicopter parents out there who would support this, but I don't think it is a good solution to implement society wide restrictions because a subset of the population struggle to be effective in an unrestricted society.
That doesn't apply here. The question isn't banning gambling, it's about banning specific types of gambling that are particularly likely to suck in addicts. There's no bicycle analogy because there's no such thing as being addiucted to bicycles. Furthermore, bicycle manufacturers don't make most of their money from customers who break bones by orders of magnitude more than regular customers.
Modern sports gambling isn't "spend $2000 on the World Series, your team lost, now you can't go on vacation."
It's "spend $5 on whether the next pitch is a ball or strike, repeated 100x a night, 7 nights a week" and if you are any good at it they close your account.
Online poker seems like a charity by comparison.
I do feel like the whole "close your account if you are good" feels like it is getting close to fraud, but I'm not sure exactly how to address it using existing laws. I don't think banning sports gambling altogether, or all online sports betting, is the right solution though as it is too much of a blunt solution to a pretty narrow problem.
I recognize that solving the "looks like fraud" problem doesn't address the addiction problem, but perhaps the solution will help dissuade people from participating in the first place if such policies were more clear and widely known.
I agree that it's a problem if winning at sports betting gets you banned. However, I'm not sure how many Americans (in the modern age of online betting) are making actual profits on betting, or were just trying to wring every drop out of all the promos, special offers, etc. offered by various companies. There's a fantasy that a whole bunch of us are smart enough the beat the bookies at their own game, but realistically, that's just not very likely. If the companies lose too much, the odds they offer just get worse and worse for the player.
I'm almost always sympathetic to libertarian arguments, so I don't necessarily want to see things banned just because some people can't use them responsibly. But I think there's a lot that could be done short of banning online sports betting--you could ban all the sports betting TV commercials, for one.
I've dabbled in sports betting, but at this point I rarely bother. Besides, even if I did make any money, it would probably be a tax nightmare. I'd happily trade away legal online sports betting if we could get legal online poker back.
I'm not sure winning more than you lose is a fantasy. I think it's more that the bookies are rarely wrong, and so to take advantage of their occasional screw-up you need to have a lot of liquidity sitting around idle, and then you need to keep putting up bets with a tiny little edge until the odds even out. If you're just motivated to make money then you'd be better off sticking that wealth in an ETF and getting a job.
So in the sense that you're playing a game against them, you can "win" a pyrrhic victory.
The way that the sites justify the policy of banning winners is that the TOS says that it's a site for "recreational bettors". The other people are "professional bettors". If you are a winner, you could be trying to be a professional bettor, so they now have the right to cut you off.
It's only 90% as explicit as that, but that's how they do it.
There's a pattern where companies get to try to self regulate for a while, and if a subset go really beyond the pale, the whole field gets beaten down with badly written, borderline vindictive regulation. For example, the FDA and 1920s radium medicine, or the GDPR cookie banner hell coming out of Zuckerberg's "They trusted us, the dumb fucks."
I would be shocked if the current crop of gambling apps can behave themselves well enough to avoid this fate.
This doesn't really depend on what threshold of harm the government picks for giving up on principle and rolling out the endlessly snowballing draconian regulation: once doing harm is exponentially profitable, the harm will just double every 18 months or whatever until it meets the threshold. Even if we don't set any threshold, that just puts the threshold at when the people riot in the streets, kill the libertarians in charge, and drag everyone into communist famine. A high bar, but exponential growth can get there fast! We recently got a hint of how close we are to that level with regard to healthcare.
For clarity, are you trying to describe "what is" here, or "what should be"? I think you are just describing the way the world works to which I don't really have any reasonable rebuttal other than "I think we should strive to build and live in a world that doesn't work like that.
Unfortunately there is precedent in *some* jurisdictions for casinos being able to refuse your action if you're any good. Brick-and-mortar casinos routinely ban blackjack players who engage in card counting, a practice that involves no actual cheating whatsoever but rather consists of paying attention to which cards of what value have been dealt from the pack(s) so far and adjusting your betting strategy, which therefore rounds out simply to "being really really good at blackjack."
(Note that in some jurisdictions, casinos are in fact banned from banning card counters. So there's precedent in both directions.)
No addiction allows you to lose so much money as fast as online gambling. Okay maybe OnlyFans.
Also, the market makers do some extremely shady stuff to shut out successful gamblers and double down on extracting money from problem gamblers.
I would like to see a solution to the problem of bookies kicking people out when they are profitable. This feels like fraud to me because they implicitly advertise to users that they can make money if they are good (particularly in sports betting), and then prevent them from actually achieving that implicit commitment. I'm not sure exactly how to deal with this situation though without some curve fitted or overly prescriptive solution that leaves us in an even worse spot.
These companies have significant investments from team owners like Jerry Jones, so regulation will be very difficult. We're in a Moloch trap.
I think the bigger issue is not gambling per se, but gambling via smartphone apps. It's much harder to control one's gambling when all it requires is pulling your phone out of your pocket and tapping on the screen a few times rather than physically traveling to a casino. I don't know if I want to tell people they can't ever use these apps, but I wouldn't argue with some paternalistic regulation that required each app to send you a message periodically saying "are you sure you want to keep these gambling apps on your phone? Do you realize how dumb that is?" Maybe they should have an algorithm that makes fun of you when you lose, too. "Putting Will Levis' team in a parlay? Are you drunk, or just a moron?" Stuff like that. Make it fun.
Make the phone AI smart enough to ridicule you before you make the final click to place the bet.
Banning push notifications from the apps would be a good start
Consider the case of Vietnam veterans who were addicted to opiates, but who then were no longer addicted when in a new context (home) where it was hard to get the drug, and where there was less environmental/ social temptation to do so.
21. Does "tongues" mean that he can suddenly speak Icelandic, or Gibberish. The former would impress me more.
Sounds like he means what we would hear as Gibberish. He seems to be claiming it's meaningful. Paul in the Bible says that speaking in tongues is worthless unless you have an interpreter, so even if he's speaking in another language I'm not sure how meaningful that is unless someone can interpret what he's saying.
I believe the conceit is that the language he's speaking is a real one, but one that's ancient and now forgotten. So it SOUNDS like Gibberish, but it's actually more analogous to your Icelandic example.
(I'm not sure if anyone has ever claimed to speak a language that's incomprehensible because it's from the far FUTURE.)
Statistical analysis (or ML) could pretty easily determine if there was information contained in the "gibberish."
You could also look at things like "is he using only phonemes that appear in English" (plus maybe one or two extras that he'd have heard of). I don't think people who speak in tongues use many Xhosa clicks.
They actually have done statistical analysis on speaking in tongues. The results don't look like real language, but also don't look like someone deliberately producing gibberish.
"Speaking in tongues" is a common thing in certain types of Christianity. No one understands the words, so, to a skeptic, it's gibberish. But the speaker probably sincerely believes they're saying something, even if they don't know what.
2: Criminally missed opportunity to fine them 1 googol dollars.
16: I think the causality is reversed here, the Nazis appropriated a bunch of their symbolism from other cultures. Eg the swastika was used in a lot of Hindu/Buddhist cultures, eagles were a big part of Germanic pagan (Norse) culture, etc.
33: gallons/mile being (length^3)/length = length^2 is pretty mind bending.
34: This seems like a much higher caliber of conspiracy theory than we get here in the US. If aliens had the whole universe to pick as a destination to fly their UFOs, would they go to New Jersey? I mean come on.
54: Re my comment on 34, of all the lame things to come up with.
> 2: Criminally missed opportunity to fine them 1 googol dollars.
If you follow the link, fines are doubling each week they're not paid, and in around four years it will be a googol dollars.
> 16: I think the causality is reversed here, the Nazis appropriated a bunch of their symbolism from other cultures.
The combination of the color scheme, the angular emblem, and the eagle all at once seems like an awfully big coincidence for reverse causality to be plausible. If you have evidence of Inca iconography using those elements from before the 1930s I suppose I can be convinced but otherwise c'mon.
The angular emblem is a chakana, which predates Nazi Germany by quite a few centuries. If a red/white color scheme on a flag and eagle symbolism are Nazism, then the US trivially qualifies. Again, the Nazi symbols show up everywhere because they just took stuff from a bunch of other mythologies and threw it together.
ETA: The founder of the movement, the father of the guy in the picture, was a member of the Peru Communist Party and also a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist group.
US color scheme red white blue. Nazis use red-white-black. Also with that particular arangement (black symbol in white circle on red background). Also use by the Russian National Bolsheviks party (aka "Nazbols")
Also amusingly, the military gear they are using is American (which makes sense for the region); if they'd wanted to go with Nazi-inspired elements, they probably could have found some, as the stahlhelm was widely used in Latin America.
https://wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/the-stahlhelm-in-latin-america-after-wwii/
It's not an eagle, it's a condor. Get your big birds right!
In all seriousness though, black, red and white have been used often in Latin American extreme left iconography:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Left_Movement_(Peru)
And red and white are the national colors (in flag) of Peru.
It takes a long time for broadcasts to go through space; the aliens are just now receiving Jersey Shore.
33. My answer: suppose your car has no gas tank, and there's a gasoline filled trough along the road that you drive along, and the car slurps up the gas that it passes. The cross sectional area of the trough needs to be at least your car's gallons per mile to sustain the car's speed.
#41 Reminded me that SCOTT DONATED A KIDNEY!
Congratulations are perpetually in order.
I also donated a kidney this past June thanks to Scott's article. It was such an inspiring, funny, and informative post! I really think it goes down as one of his best.
I'm going to jump on this thread to remind everyone that, according to Scott, one of the three takeaways you should have from the article is that we should modify NOTA to allow compensation for organ donation.
The Coalition to Modify NOTA has made huge strides since Scott wrote about it. Elaine Perlman, after receiving an ACX grant to work on this full time, has been an absolute powerhouse, organizing a very effective campaign. We now have a bill in the house (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/9275/text) and need every bit of help we can to get it passed. Mostly we're just looking for constituents in every state to reach out to their congresspeople. You can get looped into the emails/monthly zoom meetings by signing up at modifynota.org.
Very cool of you my friend. 🙏
> I think the best path from here is to cut losses and try to figure out how to restrict online sports betting without collateral damage to potentially positive-sum things like investments, financial innovation, and prediction markets.
In the US, online gamblers already have to declare their identity. The IRS is already notified of wins over a certain threshold. Building on those, one potential compromise would be letting gamblers wager up to 10% of their previous year's income (as declared in taxes) per year.
Positives I see
-creates an incentive for gamblers to earn more income
-isn't as coercive as banning online/all gambling
-less illegal gambling than in the gambling-banned scenario
I would exempt foreign visitors. But this means US dual citizens could evade the limit by using their other passport(s).
> If you read the Iliad, it either speaks to you and transforms your soul, or it doesn’t. Nobody says “I just finished the Iliad - give me a second to check whether it was novel for its time or not, so I can decide whether my soul should be transformed.”
For me, art appreciation *is* coupled with my understanding of the social context of the work. And at the same time, understanding how art and aesthetics have progressed adds a rich texture to my understanding of history — for example, the decline of Christian symbolism in European art documents a real shift in consciousness.
The fact that different social, economic, political, and cultural circumstances led to the formation of different movements and genres is crucial to understanding why contemporary aesthetics are the way they are.
For instance, Suprematism only makes sense in the context of the Russian revolution; Dadaism requires post-WWI malaise; the Blues exists in the context of slavery and segregation.
And just as you can't really understand Rock 'n Roll if you don't get the Blues, the biggest name in contemporary architecture, Zaha Hadid, is only understandable in context of Suprematism.
(Zaha Hadid on Kazimir Malevich) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yye33DucQvw&t=15s
I disagree, about music, at least. Blues and rock'n'roll are quite good without any context. The tunes are fun, danceable and light on lyrics. You miss a lot of undertones if you don't dig the jive, but this doesn't lessen the enjoyment of songs. I consider myself to be quite a lover of both of these styles, yet I care only very little about their social context, even though now - many years after I began listening to this music - I know enough about it.
Compare and contrast literature: I get that "War and Peace" and "Crime and Punishment" were big hits in its time, but I can't find even an iota of enjoyment in either of them, even though I had their social context drilled into my head at school (I didn't even finish the later, because it was so atrociously miserable, yet I wrote A+ graded essay, which was mentioned to the whole class by our teacher).
I also happen to enjoy country music (of various sub-styles and periods) a lot, even though I'm as far removed from a cowboy or a redneck farmer or a truck driver as can be, and probably know very little about life of one, aside from stereotypes I learned from those same songs.
For what it's worth, I enjoyed War and Peace quite a lot, although I am something of a military/history buff (not really possible to understand one without the other).
I agree with your general point, though. I enjoy music for what it is. I enjoyed classical music long before getting into history--and, on the flip side, all the historical context in the world isn't going to make me appreciate Cubism or whatever.
Whereas I thought Crime and Punishment was fully enjoyable with no context whatsoever.
Music is a weird one. I heard 100s of Rock and Roll songs before my first Blues song, and I don’t think I only understood them after I listened to the Blues. Maybe I gained a little more appreciation, but Rock is still enjoyable on its own.
Of course rock is enjoyable on its own. But to fully *appreciate* art requires knowledge of its lineage, I contend. Beyond the question of valence (do I like the work?) is a question of understanding (why is the work the way that it is?).
Lots of people like songs without understanding the lyrics or having any sense of its musical structure. But to really love a song, you should inquire into what it means.
“Banks are unaccountable, amoral actors…” I don’t think it’s that simple. Here’s JP Koning:
“Hard-core privacy advocates and civil libertarians would probably describe me as a sell-out or a wishy-washy centrist because I'm willing to compromise on financial privacy. Fair enough. But I do wonder how many privacy advocates would go so far as to call for an all-out decriminalization of money laundering. Doing so would maximize privacy, but surely no privacy advocate thinks that bankers who clean money for the mob should by allowed to walk free. We are probably closer than they think.”
http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/11/how-my-views-on-financial-privacy-have.html?m=1
> Doing so would maximize privacy, but surely no privacy advocate thinks that bankers who clean money for the mob should by allowed to walk free. We are probably closer than they think.
I'll bite - this is me, I don't care about money laundering. KYC laws have manifestly done nothing to stop cartels, Mafia, drug dealers, or other criminals from pursuing their trades and amassing money and power, in every country in the world.
On the other hand they definitely HAVE led to colossal pains in the asses, unbanking, and tons of bureaucracy for regular law abiding people.
Why exactly are you counting KYC as a "win" here?
This might be true, but it's hard to compare how much criminal activity we'd see in the counterfactual of no measures against money laundering without getting to run the experiment. We can't expect any measure to stop all organized crime, the question is how much difference it makes.
> KYC laws have manifestly done nothing to stop cartels, Mafia, drug dealers, or other criminals from pursuing their trades
They've not reduced these things to zero, but few non-draconian measures will. The optimal amount of fraud, as Patrick McKenzie famously discusses at length, is not zero. What they've done is made things harder and more expensive for the criminals. As someone with a window into risk management from the bank's side, I can tell you right now that we would have a /lot/ more of all of this stuff without KYC, SARs etc etc. (EDIT: admittedly not in the US; perhaps things are erring the wrong way there, I wouldn't know - though the McKenzie article suggests, for crypto in particular, otherwise).
"KYC laws have manifestly done nothing to stop cartels, Mafia, drug dealers, or other criminals from pursuing their trades and amassing money and power, in every country in the world."
There is a big gap between "have done nothing, in every country of the world" and "do not work perfectly". Just two weeks ago Didier Reynders, the former Belgian EU Commissioner for Justice (of all things) was caught laundering money. He was caught because a lotto company followed the law and reported him for placing suspicious amounts of money on bets.
Obviously, money laundering laws can not stop money laundering in all cases, especially against super-powerful organizations. They can definitely not stop a mafia which controls judges and has already amassed enough power to be immune to law. But they do work sometimes.
Why is it worth so many of the rest of us suffering in order to sometimes stop money launderers?
I never made any statement about whether it's worth it or not.
Because organized crime is cancerous to society in a way people knowing it only through the Sopranos cannot even phantom.
Alas, we are at the point where significant swathes of the country are demanding the head of doctors prescribing opioids, do you really think "yeah this guy was taking money from the cartels selling fent walked free, but who cares, paperwork is annoying" is going to fly?
This is too strong, but directionally correct. The more defensible claim, one I believe strongly, is that it is actually worth tolerating nontrivially more organized criminals getting away with money laundering in order to spare innocent people these stupid, capricious, despotic hassles. It's not our fault as ordinary money-transferring citizens that money launderers exist, and we are being shat on for standard concentrated benefit/diffuse cost Mancur Olson reasons.
Patrick McKenzie has convinced me that, to the extent they do "work" (and that's rather debatable), the existing KYC and AML regimes are increasingly just backdoor ways for finance to plausibly-deniably cosplay as a government enforcement arm for unrelated policies/political jockeying. The charge might not be accurate with this particular crypto* case, but having seen the same sort of scenario actually play out several times in the past...well, skepticism is certainly the proper approach. The optimal amount of money laundering is not zero.
*I know it's not what the term actually means, but is the increasing right-wing embrace of non-fiat currency...crypto-fascism?
Alex Tabarrok recommended this - https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/07/scrap-amc-kyc-laws.html - and although I don't know anything about finance I trust him a lot.
I also remember hearing the current KYC regime is very new - post-9/11 - and society was hardly collapsing before this.
I think an obvious counterargument here would be that financial crimes are going to grow in sophistication, particularly as technology makes this much, much easier. The pre-9/11 era was much less online, people didn't have access to nearly as good computers, there were no cryptocurrencies, etc.
It's entirely plausible that if you went back to a pre-2001 enforcement regime that it would make it trivial for everybody to do all the money-laundering they wanted.
Whether the current regulations are cost-effective is hard to say, though, since it's probably mostly a question of how much it deters actions in the first place.
> but surely no privacy advocate thinks that bankers who clean money for the mob should by allowed to walk free.
What? JP Koning is crazy. Of course they should be allowed to walk free. They're not doing anything bad or hurting anyone.
It is possible to hurt people in ways that do not involve physically walking up to them and punching them. Indeed, less direct approaches are generally more efficient.
You punch a person once, you have blood on your hands and one person suffers for a little while. You siphon trillions of dollars from an economy, you make a whole population suffer while your own hands are clean; you've not directly caused them harm - the market did it on your behalf!
Banks have people whose full time job it is to look at the subset of their customers who are "politically connected persons" and work out whether they're the sort of person who will make the bank end up in newspaper headlines when the disgruntled populace finally can't take it any more, raid their private palace and find the bank statements. They're far from perfect, as evidenced by banks ending up in newspaper headlines for being enablers in this sort of scenario on a somewhat regular basis, but they learn and get a little better at what they do every time.
See also funding terrorism, etc etc. Often it is the same people complaining about banks being too risk averse and about banks allowing too much money to get siphoned to nasty ends.
Sadly, the most intelligent of the bad actors are much better at looking like regular folk than the weirder regular folk are at not looking like bad actors, and therefore past a certain point you cannot bring false negatives down without the false positives going up. The best you can do is find some kind of balance between the volume of complaints about one vs the other. For the bank, getting this balance too wrong in either direction is potentially an existential problem; they cannot afford to ignore it.
My read of the McKenzie essay is
* regulators have done all sorts of *complete fucking bullshit* such that they deserve no expectation of good faith
* no, really, there's a lot of bullshit, enough I need two bullets points, because the regulators lie while extra-judicially debanking people for political reasons
* CFPB is full of many kinds of bullshit, but not *debanking* bullshit
* while the CFPB is nominally anti-debanking, if you just read their press releases you would have no idea about this since they spend all their energy on other things
* even without shenanigans, crypto firms often ended up doing things that set off alarm bells even for the most fair-minded regulators
>"But I do wonder how many privacy advocates would go so far as to call for an all-out decriminalization of money laundering."
If you can explain how money laundering per se deprives a specific person of life, liberty, or property through force or fraud, then I could be convinced to oppose decriminalization. Without that it appears victimless and therefore calling it a "crime" is nonsense.
Consider a gang of thieves. One guy goes into a building and steals stuff. One guy keeps a lookout. One guy drives the getaway car.
Only the one that actually went in and took things directly deprived anyone of property. However, the crime would not have succeeded without the others. It is a cooperative effort, and therefore all the gang members are culpable.
Now we have a fourth person involved: the launderer. Their job is to hide the origin of the money so the gang can use it; because if this is not done properly, investigations will reveal what happened, whatever is left of the money will be returned and the gang tried, just as in the case where the lookout or the getaway driver fail at their respective tasks.
They are a key part of what is happening, and carry responsibility. Without their involvement, the property will return to its rightful owner. They are to stolen money what a fence is to stolen goods.
Same pattern with fraud, contract killings etc etc
If the launderer is a member of the conspiracy, then you get them when you get the actual thief and offer him a year off his sentence for every co-conspirator he rats out. If the "launderer" is just a banker who respects his customer's privacy, then he's not the problem. Either way, try going after the actual thief if you want to stop the thefts.
> Either way, try going after the actual thief
Yes, this is exactly what the people investigating financial transactions are doing. A banker who fails to cooperate is either negligent or malicious, and is punished accordingly. Also, note how far the goalposts have now moved from “money laundering is a victimless crime”.
I checked the USC for money laundering (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1956) and was surprised to discover that every branch includes elements of knowing and specific unlawful activity so I will concede that, as codified, money laundering is not victimless.
That said, in practice KYC laws undermine that by criminalizing passively not meeting the knowing element. So it's really the crime of "declining to surveil your customers" (is often rounded off to "money laundering" in casual conversation) that's victimless. It's an end run around the Fourth Amendment, akin to criminalizing phone companies for *not* monitoring every text & call.
Note that KYC and AML are different, separate, independent sets of requirements. One is about checking whether e.g. a potential customer is a sanctioned Russian, the other is about looking for suspicious patterns in transaction flows.
I'll call for an all-out decriminalization of money laundering, at least until we can find a way to combat money laundering without hurting innocent bystanders, Bankers who clean money for the mob are no different than grocery-store owners who sell food to mobsters; are we next going to have know-your-customer laws for the grocery and restaurant industry so as to starve out the mob? And anyone who is mistaken for a mobster?
If there's a problem, it's the mob, so fight the damn mob already. If the mob is hurting innocent people, then you can have them tell you when and where that happens and now you know where to look for the mob. If the mob is just satisfying people's desires for what society declares to be illicit vices, such that nobody is willing to complain, then maybe the mob isn't the problem.
> grocery-store owners who sell food to mobsters
…no, money launderers are like grocery-store owners who sell food *for* mobsters. You know that bodega that never seems to have any customers or refresh its stock but also never quite seems to go bankrupt? That’s… that’s literally a money launderer. Their purpose is to make the other crimes succeed, they are part of the criminal system and their activity is criminal.
> so fight the damn mob already
We’re trying, despite libertarians who keep defending them for some reason.
I once heard a statistic that the UK anti-fraud regulations cost regular customers about 30x the amount of actual fraud prevented. If you have dealt a UK bank, and I have dealt with several, you will understand how absolutely kafka-esque they are to deal with (Barclay's being by far the worst). The economic losses are enormous.
I am based in the UK, bank there and have literally never had a problem with KYC/AML; and neither has anyone else I know. What on earth do you do to get on their radar?
I have lasting power of attorney for a relative who had accounts at a number of UK banks.
30: It seems to me that, to the extent that the Coinbase/law firm blacklisting thing has teeth, there would be a market dynamic that could moderate it. Just like when investors avoid certain stocks for ESG reasons, they make those stocks more attractive to other investors by improving their expected returns. I guess this is one way that markets can help to promote cooperation even in a large world with a wide diversity of opinions.
55.
It's more simply understood as Death Worship. I've investigated the matter up close in Tijuana, Mexico City and Culiacan (those who know, know).
Without getting into why religion-shaped holes exist, in certain environments it's "nice" to have a simple faith that regards murder as not just *good*, but rewarded.
The psychosis that arises from environmentally-imposed superegos at war with evolutionary necessities (not to mention the id) may be the greatest madness to beset man since the invention of monotheism.
Santa Muerta beautifully frees devotees from such morality without ridiculously demanding they become Nietzscheans -- something silly ole Friedrich himself couldn't pull off.
Some cunning? and evil? Catholic could turn these people into modern Crusaders fighting for persecuted Christians in the Middle East or something. A violent strain exemplified by the Crusaders and Conquistadors existed in Western Christianity but has more or less died out in the past few centuries, but it is possible someone could ressurect it back. Islamists pulled it off bringing Jihad back into the popular conscisouness of Muslims in the past few decades resulting in Indonesians and Nigerians for example fighting for some faction in Syria (However, I do think its easier for Muslims, as the violent strain was there from the beggining. For Christians it took 3 centuries to gain any temporal power and thus waging any religious warfare) .
No. You missed the point entirely.
It isn't about giving you license to do evil for no reason whtsoever, it's specifically tailored to the realities of Mexico's horrifying drug murder world.
Re: A violent strain exemplified by the Crusaders and Conquistadors existed in Western Christianity but has more or less died out in the past few centuries, but it is possible someone could ressurect it back.
Why? Christendom did not cover itself with glory when it slaughtered unbelievers indiscriminately and even sacked Orthodox Constantinople. And in a world where nukes exist do we really want to resurrect a violent strain?
I have never looked carefully into it, but I was still living in Mexico in the 2000's, when it started to be a thing. It is not a coincidence that it began gaining popularity in Tepito, which is the largest criminal hub in Mexico City.
I left about fifteen years ago and haven't really kept track, but I will go out on a limb and say that the quite excellent imagery is to be thanked for a big part of its popularity.
55: (From Wikipedia) the majority of Santa Muerte followers are young women; this makes me think of the vast number of young Western women who've come to think of themselves as witches in recent years. In both cases, it doesn't matter that at a societal level Christianity outperforms paganism; the new pagans are rejecting an establishment that is perceived (perhaps correctly?) as marginalising them. If the establishment were pagan presumably they'd instead be turning to Christianity as a way to get their spiritual fix without getting it from the establishment they mistrust - and in fact isn't this basically how Christianity originally gained its foothold?
Learning about Santa Muerta by the eunichs who write for wikipedia about persecuted lady believers is about as fruitful as learning about Judaism by watching that lady rabbi Che wheels onto Weekend Update as part of his joke on Colin.
I read Scott's write-up on the matter and wondered what the hell he was talking about.
Trust me, the lady rabbi on SNL is the most apt analogy here.
My man, you can't even keep 'muerte' and 'muerta' straight. At least the "eunichs" can do that.
what an idiotic comment. you must be the last typo nazi alive. enjoy
The first major EA conspiracy theory was that we were just hyping up the threat of catastrophic AI to make money. The theory goes that we make a big fuss about the dangers posed by AI, this propagates the idea that frontier AI systems are extremely capable and economically lucrative, which drives up tech stock prices and accelerates adoption of AI, which makes the AI tech companies more valuable. It's extremely dumb and will reliably get you a chorus of hardy agreement in many corners of the Internet that consider themselves conspiracy-theory-proof.
Ya, I'm on Hacker News way more than anywhere else, but there this accusation is thrown far more than the reality on the ground. That place really dropped the ball. They used to be at the forefront of AI, web dev, and societal issues (early to FB problems), but collectively haven't much realized they're not top-tier for any of those anymore.
I don't think AI alignment advocates do this. But I legitimately think some of the AI companies are doing exactly that.
On the topic of 17, can this be explained by the rational primary hypothesis? If the primary selects for Skill At Winning Elections, and height is one non-determinitive component, wouldn't you therefore expect taller candidates going up against shorter candidates to mean (say) less eloquent candidates going up against more eloquent candidates?
Tallness is plausibly more important in general elections, where margins are smaller.
I have a few responses to Scott's discussion of #28 and #29:
1. First, I want to push back at the idea that people find lowbrow art to be deep and transformative, because none of the examples that Scott gives (Harry Potter, Marvel, and anime) seem especially lowbrow to me. They are all smart, complex works of art with interesting characters and deep themes (anime is a wide category, but I would say that that statement is true of a great many popular anime). I might call them midbrow since they have wide popular appeal, but also have some of the qualities we associate with highbrow art.
2. The response to Scott on taste that really "clicked" with me was from Ozy on "Thing of Things" (open.substack.com/pub/thingofthings/p/in-defense-of-the-reality-of-good), in particular the section "Art Appreciation is a Skill," which draws an analogy between art appreciation and learning to read speculative fiction. Reading speculative fiction is a skill that I have acquired that allows me to notice and appreciate things about speculative fiction that people without that skill cannot. It seems plausible to me that other people might develop similar skills for other art forms.
3. In general I think that "highbrow" art can be defined as art that can only be appreciated by someone who has developed skill in art appreciation, whereas "lowbrow art" can be appreciated without skill, although a skilled person might be able to appreciate it in new and different ways ("midbrow" art would be art that doesn't require skill to appreciate, but is substantially more rewarding to someone with skill).
4. Where status signaling and snobbery comes in is when people claim that highbrow art is better than other types because it takes skill to appreciate it. This seems like an instance of the more general trend of someone who has honed a skill acting like they are better than other people for doing so. It seems similar to someone running a marathon or climbing a mountain acting like that is a special experience that sets them apart from other people. It is simultaneously true that they have developed a skill that they have a right to be proud of, but also that they shouldn't be snobs about it.
Developing taste gives you more ways to love and hate art. This may ruin some "lowbrow" art, but it doesn't have to. Mr. Bean sketches for example are really simple and don't require "taste" to be appreciated. But if you do have "taste" they're still just as funny! Developing taste only ruins art where there is some critical flaw that you only notice when you have "taste". On the other hands, if art works on multiple levels, the amount of enjoyment may be multiplied. Because you can enjoy both the basic and the advanced qualities of the art.
Mr. Bean isn't bad comedy, it's just silly. The analogy would be to something like Big Bang Theory, which to anyone with a modicum of comedy taste is not funny.
I thought it was a documentary.
> none of the examples that Scott gives (Harry Potter, Marvel, and anime) seem especially lowbrow to me
What the heck _is_ lowbrow if those don't count? Paw Patrol? Goat porn?
If we are talking about the Marvel movies specifically, they are generally a cut above the average action movie. Compare them to, for example, the live action Transformer movies (except Bumblebee), or the Asylum's "mockbuster" series of films. I will say that the recent series of movies that Sony made based on the Marvel comics, but not set in the same universe as the main Marvel series, are pretty lowbrow.
The actually Marvel comics started out as simple mass children's entertainment that was maybe slightly more sophisticated than your average comic, but they grew up with their audience. The modern ones are generally targeted towards intelligent adults.
Similarly, the Harry Potter series is one of the more intelligent and sophisticated series of YA books out there. There are far worse, more lowbrow YA series like "The Mortal Instruments" or "Lorien Legacies."
Anime runs the gamut. Some of it is genuine high art (Memories), some of it is ludicrously lowbrow (Eiken), some is in the middle somewhere (Gundam). It's just a term for animated stuff made in Japan, so talking about whether it is highbrow or lowbrow is like talking about if "American movies" or "British novels" are highbrow or lowbrow.
+1
> some is in the middle somewhere (Gundam)
The Gundam franchise is a large collection of very different shows made by different teams for different audiences with different goals. I'd say it runs the entire gamut in itself.
"none of the examples that Scott gives (Harry Potter, Marvel, and anime) seem especially lowbrow to me. They are all smart, complex works of art"
Hardly. It's all work primarily intended for children, young adults, and the occasional superannuated young adult.
That doesn't follow. Children and young adults are fully capable of developing artistic taste and skill in art appreciation. Additionally, most creators of work directed at children nowadays are skilled at adding additional layers of complexity and meaning that go over the heads of many children, but that adults appreciate. That way the parents don't get bored when they are watching something with their children or reading it to them.
None of that helps if one's definition of lowbrow amounts to "a child wouldn't be bored by this".
By adding the constraint "the book/movie needs to be entertaining to children," you're necessarily capping the complexity and depth (or at least making it much more difficult to achieve).
For a food example, the "best meal made from convenience store ingredients" is an entirely different scale than "best meal." You can't take a 90th percentile meal from the former group and assume it's a 90th percentile meal in the latter. There's a limit to what you can do flavor-wise when you're dealing with all prepackaged ingredients.
That constraint is why I have a hard time placing Harry Potter on the spectrum of literature quality. I think they're fantastic books (easily one of the top YA books of all time if not the top). I don't think they compare favorably to what a lot of people consider the pinnacle of literature more generally. You're just limited in what you can do with plot and style when writing for a YA audience.
Whatever happened to great art being born from simplicity and constraint?
Taking your example of food: to a first approximation, all today’s most high status cuisines have their roots in poor common fare. Who in their right mind would be the first to try eating mouldy cheese, or sea cockroaches, or weird looking field grass, unless it was that or starve?
It is easy to get confused when 99 percent of everything is rubbish. Some process must filter the gems; otherwise, you find yourself drinking from the firehose, encounter a bunch of awful things - unless you get incredibly lucky - and assume everything from that source must be that way.
You can look to experts to filter for you, but their culture then forms part of the filter. You can look to time to filter for you - Shakespeare was common entertainment in his day! - each of his plays is at least a quarter puns and innuendo! Many of the classics would be in the YA section if they were written today! - but then you’re limited to old things; there are more brilliant artists creating today than in all of history (but this is also true of the rubbish, of course).
…or you can put away the pride and the status games, stop following the herd, drink from the firehose and pick out what speaks to you for yourself.
> Whatever happened to great art being born from simplicity and constraint?
Mozart.
By that logic Animorphs would be considered dumb/simple, but I would never be willing to concede that.
Yeah I also enjoyed Ozy's article, I think Scott should read it. It's a pretty clear case of how we can hardly notice when we're missing an entire dimension of experience.
> If I understand correctly, her thesis is that taste doesn’t just make you hate bad art - it also gives you the ability to love good art more deeply, which can be a transformative experience.
That's 100% right. I can (somewhat) tell because I have deep appreciation for music, but not for the visual arts. So when I hear some run-of-the-mill pseudo classical music with plain chords and progressions that were already cliché by the end of the 19th century, I cringe, but I can understand that most people just find it nice, because that's exactly how plain and unsophisticated I am in front of a painting.
Pardon me for asking, but what's your opinion on the Final Fantasy VI soundtrack? I can't tell if I love it because it's actually good in the way music experts would appreciate or because of nostalgia and the emotional hooks that came from playing the game itself.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mKyg_pdrg6J7_wJzmBWwPk7WPFI03hED0&si=5ttICTn-RQh6OSlJ
Sure, why not... I haven't much explored the genre of video game soundtracks. The first tracks sound to me like pretty well-crafted "genre music", quite cinematic, in a pop-classical kind of idiom. The synthetic instruments sound a bit shrill, but it's good enough that I'd probably enjoy it if I heard it live by an actual orchestra.
Oops, just go to tracks 4 and 5 (Locke's theme, Battle) and the musical quality just took a deep nosedive, just as the sounds became even shriller. Have to skip ahead... Shadow's theme is nice instrumental pop. Stopping here, this thing is way too long, but I'm sure someone could extract a decent 25-minute suite out of it.
To elaborate further, this music sounds honest to me, in that it's not trying to be what it's not.
The sorts of things I had in mind above are, for example, the kind of piano music that classical playlists on Spotify tend to devolve to, when you leave auto-play on, and that sound like a third-rate clone of Satie having drunken musical sex with Einaudi. And then there's a rich asshole out there, whose name I forgot, who could easily be a top soundtrack composer, or a pop-classical celebrity, but instead is trying to buy his way into the Western Musical Canon, when his glitzy faux-romantic music is nowhere anywhere near good enough for that.
These days I get much of my musical info by the man Ted Gioia, if you want to open your ears, you could do worse than following him.
As a holiday thank you for engaging in this conversation, here's my fave album of the year 😀 https://homerecordsbe.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-shepherds-and-sultans
>someone running a marathon or climbing a mountain acting like that is a special experience that sets them apart from other people
Whereas, in reality, running a marathon or climbing a mountain is........a special experience that sets them apart from other people!
It is, but not from all people. There are many other mountaineers and marathon runners. Similarly, there are many other people who are skilled at art appreciation, but it isn't universal.
I didn't say *all* other people, and nobody who runs marathons or climbs mountains is unaware of the existence of the rest of the small handful of exceptional people who do the same. Surely this is so obvious as not to need mention?
I like Ozy's post, too. I was thinking you could articulate it this way:
No-one is obliged to develop taste. But if you do, through deliberate effort, as a result of lots of exposure, or any other way, then you're empirically likely to find that your taste moves you in particular directions. Like, lots of people go from thinking Harry Potter is good to thinking Shakespeare is good. But almost no-one goes in the other direction. Lots of people start with an appreciation of classical art, and move on to an appreciation of cubism. I think the reverse is rarer (I'm less sure about this one, but I think it still holds.) And I don't think that anyone brought up with an appreciation for Schoenberg ends up thinking that Taylor Swift is superior music.
So, without making any claims about objective quality, we can still make an empirical observation about common directions of travel, and derive non-arbitrary hierarchies of taste in that way.
Re. 7 intrasexual competition: I'm willing to believe it. Has anyone else noticed a pattern of successful 40ish actresses advising aspiring young actresses that it's a terrible, exploitative business and that they shouldn't let themselves be sexualized?
Or how about dudes with hair telling balding fellas to just shave it all off.
You know, like Elon, Putin, Erdogan, Netanyahu, Biden, McCain...
You think people who aren't balding view people who are as their most dire competitors who must be neutralized...?
28. I buy the thesis that good taste is a function of a capacity for enjoying art and that those who enjoy it more will consume it more and continue to acquire better taste. This should hold true, generally, regardless of what art is consumed as long as the goal is to enjoy it. The 40-year-old who reads 100 novels a year probably has good taste in novels. If such a person declares Harry Potter the pinnacle of Western Literature, perhaps Harry Potter is pretty great. The art-lover who visits museums and galleries every week for decades probably has good taste in art. If they claim Thomas Kinkade to be the greatest artist of the century, maybe he is. But the odds are that such people won't claim those things.
What about a 40-years-old who reads 100 trashy novels a year? Like, bodice-rippers, or "former SEAL fight Evil of the Week"? I have a feeling this is more wide-spread than one might think initially. Especially for TV shows. My grandma used to watch TV almost all day, so she probably developed a great appreciation for very shitty daytime soap operas, but I wouldn't trust her opinion of a different genre.
i think even if they're reading a lot, bodice-ripper readers are not paying that much attention to what they're reading
Maybe. But I’d guess the person who’s determined to read The 100 Greatest Novels Ever Written is even more detached from the material. At least the romance reader is choosing his/her material based on their preferences for the content and not somebody else’s. It’s not like the romance reader receives any reputational capital for being well versed in the work.
well, most people reading most books are clearly not paying attention. you can super see this in jane austen readers--most are just there for the regency vibe & read p&p & come away literally saying like "gosh i wish courtship was still like this & i could find a polute old fashioned man"
but also the 100 greatest novels are actually better & you can tell because some people exist who will actually pay attention to them in a way that the most prolific romance readers just dont do. stuff doesnt just get status totally out of nowhere--people want to read the 100 best novels basically bc of enjoyment
I’m sympathetic to most of what you’re saying but don’t agree that stuff doesn’t get status out of nowhere and that status usually signifies greater worth. Designer handbags don’t hold more stuff, luxury watches don’t tell time better, small portions at fancy restaurants, ripped jeans, the list goes on.
oh i certainly dont think status perfectly correlates w worth--just that there has to be some kind of seed to the pearl---altho the other way round bc i think status is not as good as what it builds on
Anecdotally, myself and a sibling of mine are both well read.
So I was gobsmacked to learn she is MAGA.
As someone who generally does not subscribe to any politician or political faction, I wondered how someone who reads even more than I do, could believe in any politicult, especially one even more absurd than most.
Then it dawned on me. I have not been able to enjoy reading fiction for decades, so I read faction only. She reads almost exclusively fiction books.
And I never got the impression she reads classics and critically acclaimed novels, which tend to impart higher ideals via fictional entertainment.
I have started and partly read over a hundred trashy Royal Road web serials in the past year, but exactly three real novels.
I would argue this gives me next to zero taste when it comes to deciding whether War and Peace is better than Notes from Underground. However, I can give you a detailed explanation of why Sexy Steampunk Babes is a gripping well-paced narrative in a world of political intrigue despite its puerile fanservice, yet Fantasy Arms Dealer is a one-dimensional and derivative take on the LitRPG genre that lets down its imaginative premise with stale characters and an edgy MC whose inner life is boring.
How can we tell whether Notes from Underground is tastier than the internationally acclaimed literary juggernaut that is Sexy Steampunk Babes, I hear you ask? I'd say that if most people whose revealed preference is for steampunk elf harems will admit that writing like Dostoevsky takes more skill, then perhaps we can assume that the most skilful writer has the most tasteful output.
I note that this doesn't measure quality but instead finds the author who can settle on the most contorted way of writing, and further note that James Joyce is regarded as /very/ tasteful. It is a family tradition of mine to give each young adult a copy of Finnegan's Wake upon turning 18 and not tell them anything about it, for the purpose of comedy.
> further note that James Joyce is regarded as /very/ tasteful
(Never Google "James Joyce farts" if you wish to retain that impression. Or, indeed, for any reason. You cannot unknow things.)
Some trash is very good at what it tries to do, and some isn't. My late wife was a big fan of Janet Evanovich's "Stephanie Plum" novels and liked listening to me read them out loud to her. They don't have much of the "depth" that I often like in the SF&F epics I like to read, but I found them funny and they're very good at being light entertainment.
Well, I read over 100 novels a year when I was in high school, including many "classics" and, in my opinion, Harry Potter actually is pretty great. ;)
(The first book isn't particularly impressive, but "Goblet of Fire" made my all-time favorites list, which also includes Shakespeare's Hamlet.)
Will look at the other links later but for now, just know the Russian jokes are fantastic and I legitimately cannot imagine anyone who seriously reads and loves the Illiad not also spending a lot of time contextualizing it.
I read a prose adaptation of The Odyssey and loved it, but when I tried to read a translation of the actual poem I bounced off. :/
> He converted to Tibetan Buddhism, where a lama declared him to be the reincarnation of 16th century saint Chungdrag Dorje.
I just love this because no matter what, it's meaningless. Either the Tibetan Buddhists are right, in which case sainthood is meaningless, the Catholics are right, in which case reincarnation isn't even a thing, or both are wrong and it's doubly pointless.
You might have missed the part where Chungdrag Dorje's name is clearly Tibetan. He was a "saint" (i.e a notable spiritual figure) in Tibetan Buddhism; nothing to do with the Catholic Church's list of saints.
> ... ordinary anti-money-laundering laws which predate cryptocurrency tell banks to be on the watch for certain dangerous transaction patterns, and crypto companies have those patterns ...
Scott, you say this as if this is innocent, but it's not. The transactions patterns in question are defined formally, without reference to any underlying crime (e.g., drug dealing, weapons dealing, etc.) So a perfectly innocent party can fall under those patterns, with the violation being strictly technical, not related to anything that is intuitively a crime. THAT'S NOT OK! That's not somehow a defense of what the banks did to those crypto companies.
Scott says like one sentence later that he doesn't think it's okay. He's specifically arguing against Andreesen's unsubstantiated claim that the reason this happened is because someone in the government made a specific effort to shut down crypto companies' access to banks for ideological reasons.
The Jesse Singal piece on this made no sense. It's just a complaint that Andreessen attributed a debanking effort to the CFPB and the CFPB wasn't doing it. But since malevolent ideological debanking by the government is routine ... as is touched on in Singal's piece ... it means almost nothing to point out that the CFPB wasn't doing it.
It means a lot of you think somebody is going to try to get rid of the CFPB and you think they're a rare example of a government regulator that actually does generally good stuff and isn't captured by industry.
Is the process supposed to be:
1. Complain a lot about the evils of debanking
2. ???
3. Anarchy!
Because if you think debanking is a problem that should be fixed, and you *don't* think that you're going to be able to pull this off by smashing the state and abolishing all government, then it seems rather important to correctly identify which particular part of the government is causing the problem.
I'd recommend reading or skimming the linked post. This summary leaves out too much imo. For one, it is not just specific transaction patterns that banks need to look out for, the government directed them to keep their crypto exposure below some threshold. Now, the government was reacting to bank failures caused by over-exposure to crypto so this is in some sense standard practice for them but of course it ruffles my more libertarian sensibilities.
...if people are going to ask to be bailed out with government funds when their crypto experiments go wrong, it does not seem unreasonable for the government to try to limit the risks.
If we want completely unregulated banks, we should be prepared to let them (and, by extension, their customers) go under when the decisions they make backfire.
It turns out that when push comes to shove, the people who begged to be allowed to take the risk beg to be rescued from the consequences, over and over again.
Yes that’s true. I merely meant to communicate that my instinct is to complain about the government dictating what risks businesses can take. In this case since the government is explicitly insuring customer deposits we can’t expect it not to interfere but I still instinctively resent it.
The discussions re: taste all remind me of https://xkcd.com/915/ - i.e. people more exposed to a particular genre of thing will form opinions and preferences about it. Also see "Ambijectivity" - some of these preferences will diverge in "random" ways (i.e. Beethoven vs Mozart) and some will tend to align for various reasons (i.e. getting bored of common tropes in the "entry-level" art, narratives and subtext getting increasingly meta in ways they wouldn't have recognized before, and also status signalling), creating a class of "highbrow" connoisseurs with predictable patterns of taste.
I think this explanation is equally charitable to lowbrow-enjoyers and highbrow-enjoyers. Highbrows will say that lowbrows simply haven't "acquired the taste" or "learned to recognize good art" because they've only been exposed to a few popular things and so can't tell the difference, and this is basically true. Lowbrows will say that the highbrows are obsessing over trivial and possibly imagined subtext, and using taste as a means of status signaling and need to touch some grass, and this is also basically true.
This is in the ballpark with what CS Lewis proposes in "An Experiment in Criticism." He goes into a a much deeper discussion, of course. For instance, it is not merely a matter of passive "exposure" in his theory, but of active concentration borne of fascination with a particular art. He also emphasizes the "democratization" that such a theory brings, and dismisses such concepts as "low" or "high" art, or "guilty pleasures" or "boring classics."
omg another "experiment in criticism" enjoyer--can i ask if you first read it recently & if so where you might have heard about it? it seems like a lot of people read it for some reason like last year
I think I first read it ... 5-7 years ago? Then reread sometime in the last 2 years. I had known of it for a long time and had always been curious to read it, and finally got around to it. I liked it immensely, though it surprised me that Lewis of all people! should have developed a theory so ... Logical Postivistic ... in spirit. (Had Quine written it, it might have emerged under the title "Aesthetics Naturalized.")
FWIW, I am currently trying to make a go of the OHEL. It is very dry, but the introduction ("New Learning and New Ignorance") is very interesting, and in spots (such as his discussion of John Knox) Lewis has some wicked sport with his subjects.
when you say ohel do you mean his “english literature in the 16th c?” i read it last year & loved it. i didn’t know eg skelton before reading it
Yes, that's the one I mean. I can't resist calling it the "OHEL" after learning that Lewis himself called it the "O Hell" in his correspondence.
I am finding it dry because it is very allusively written, offering for the most part snappy judgements with only rare supporting illustrations. Not that I am criticizing the book. Given its breadth, depth, and the physical limitations imposed by the size of the spine (as it is, the covers may already be slightly too far apart) it could not be otherwise. I am reading to learn what I can, and enjoying it on the same basis that I enjoy David Thomson's "A Biographical Dictionary of Film" -- the wit and style the author displays even when talking of people and books I am otherwise lost with.
> Andreesen might have a grudge against them because of a time they shut down one of his companies for repeatedly deceiving its customers.
I assume that's about LendUp, which is one of companies a16z invested in (among other investors such as Google, Y Combinator, Victory Park Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Yuri Milner, etc.) - the list, according to ChatGPT (yeah, I know, I'm lazy, so it may be not the full list even) is:
Google Ventures (GV), Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, PayPal Ventures, QED Investors, Y Combinator, Kapor Capital, Susa Ventures, Data Collective (DCVC), Thomvest Ventures, Victory Park Capital.
I assume every single person associated with these companies is from now on forever disqualified from criticizing CFPB because they all "have a grudge".
Now, how big of a grudge does Andreessen have? Looking up on Crunchbase, they raised $361.5M, but a16z is not listed to participate anywhere but the seed round. Seed rounds, as I understand, are usually around $1-2M or so, and there were also Kleiner Perkins and GV there, maybe others. But let's not split hairs - assume the whole $2M is a16z, and they lost it all because of CFPB. That's a very painful loss of about 0.00476% of their portfolio (not taking into account present value since I am lazy).
While I understand that the relationship between size of the loss and the size of the grudge does not have to be linear, I think this line of argument is not very strong. And calling a company in which his fund contributed a (relatively) tiny amount into the seed round (while others contributed $350M+) "one of his companies" sounds to me a little bit misleading. It's only fitting that this is happening in the section where other people are criticized for being misleading, isn't it?
On 55.
Stark made the observation/definition that sects, rather than cults, tend to represent a call to traditionalist roots. They are based on “weeding out corruption” and attract the lower rungs of society. Cults, on the other hand, offer something completely new and tend to attract the more erudite and upper crust. Given this, perhaps we should look at Santa Muerte devotion, in the context of Mexican Catholicism, as a sect.
Mexican Catholicism can still trace some of its traditions, offerings, and obsessions (particularly around death and sacrifice) to pre-Columbian practices which were incorporated into the Mex-Cath hegemony. Mexican Catholicism has a tradition of strong devotion to their own personal “Mary/divine feminine/divine but also truly mortal” figure alongside their “Jesus/divine masculine/mortal but also truly divine”. Yes, the Virgin of Guadalupe is Mother Mary, but she is also distinctly a Mexican figure with her own set of domains and symbols).
The problem with modern Mexican Catholicism is that there are too many saints to pray to for intercession. There are hundreds of them, everywhere, with very few performing miracles. It’s practically polytheism. Santa Muerte, on the other hand, is a one stop shop. Tales of miracles from her abound in urban and rural legends. You don’t need to split your time between a bunch of low level saints.
From the article:
“Most importantly, the Mexican folk saint of death has quickly developed a reputation for being the speediest and most efficacious miracle-worker on the Mexican religious landscape, not to mention in the U.S. and Central America as well,” he said. “Unlike Catholic saints who tend to specialize in one or two types of miracles, Santa Muerte is a considered a powerful multi-tasker who delivers on petition of all sorts, but mostly related to health, wealth, and love.”
By rejecting the plethora of saints that have become too expansive, the Santa Muerte devotees can return to “traditional” Mexican Catholicism dualism with Christ representing Life and Santa Muerte representing Death. Both figures garner provenance based strictly on miracles/divine feats they are able to perform.
Another element of this “dualism”: Santa Muerte seems to be more associated with the material world. Unlike Christ, she prefers real offerings and real goods; her powers are tied to the material world, waxing and waning with the moon, getting stronger at night, being stronger in the winter, etc.
Sounds like the mexicans have reinvented the cult of Shakti. The more things change... 😃
Damn, it seems we're seeing memetic natural selection at work. Monotheism always triumphs in the end.
Seems to me that the old Aztec demon-gods never left the area.
You thought the old troll critique "anyone who disagrees with me is Hitler" was cool, but it's johnny-come-lately compared to the far more traditional "every god but mine is actually demons".
Some gods I don't believe in seem rather pleasant, but if any gods were demons the Aztec gods certainly were.
The bad-faith(heh) dunk would be to respond with "let's not hear squeamish moral critiques from the religion which ritualistically eats its god's flesh and drinks his blood on a monthly basis". But that would be bad-faith because consuming the divine being is often right and proper. Instead, it's the idea that there are evil/opposed-to-God spiritual beings out there which is wrong, and indeed laughable. There are dangerous and harmful spirits, just like there are dangerous and harmful material beings; and there are chthonic and underworld spirits. Both of these "classes" of creatures serve the ultimate transcendent Deity.
Since there are evil/opposed-to-God material beings out there, why not spiritual ones as well?
49. On the Notre Dame Question.
On the Notre Dame question:
I’m skeptical of claims of the form “if only we didn’t have this great and wonderful thing, we could have used the money to make the poor better off.” These claims never really seem to pan out. Leftists are fond of claims like: “Each mission to Jupiter costs a billion dollars! Ending homelessness in California costs a billion dollars! If we cancelled just one Jupiter mission, we could end homelessness in California forever!” This sounds compelling until you realize that California has spent $24 billion on stopping homelessness over the last 5 years and homelessness is worse than ever.
As an aside, a related question:
“If there was a button which would obliterate all human art (and all knowledge about that art) created before 1800 AD but give every human the quality of life of an average American, would you push it?”
My gut instinct is no. I value a lot of different goods: beauty, truth, happiness, virtue, etc. I really want there to be some of each good in the world. As the quantity of a particular good approaches zero, the value I place on a marginal unit of that good becomes large.
I would be happy to sacrifice 99% of all pre-1800s art to end world poverty. That would be enough to give us a dim view of what pre-modern cultures were like, leave us with a handful of masterpieces to enjoy. But that last 1%? That’s a big ask.
I wouldn't like to give everyone the life quality of the average American, but I can see some upsides to magically destroying all art.
Art is stuck because all the good ideas are taken, and all the interesting art forms are played out. Imagine we could do it all over again.
>I wouldn't like to give everyone the life quality of the average American
Why not?
Because it would be a downgrade for me and everyone I care about.
There's a deeper thing here about the great wonderful things maybe having a long term cultural effect that makes us more likely to care about other humans, and thus have the political will to fix poverty.
I think there are several differences between EAs claiming donating more to effective charities would save lives and progressives claiming we could end homelessness in CA. Namely:
1. EAs regularly publish their methodology for how they arrive at their numbers. See e.g. here: https://www.givewell.org/how-much-does-it-cost-to-save-a-life
2. The claim is more plausible because EAs are not claiming they'll get rid of death or bring life expectancy in the poorest countries in line with rich or middle income countries. They are simply claiming that they can improve outcomes somewhat. Contrast to eradicating homelessness which has never been accomplished in a large society afaik.
Note that if someone promised they could implement the last scenario you describe would similarly be untrustworthy because the magnitude of intervention they need and the promised outcome are both much much larger than what EAs are suggesting.
EAs are more open (mostly) and more accurate (mostly), but this does come with disadvantages. Like, precisely this example!
If your argument is "this money could *solve homelessness*, that's better than cathedrals" some number of people will think that's great and donate. Describing the problem in hilariously inaccurate ways may well net them more support.
If your argument is "this money is being poured into a bottomless pit of suffering (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/27/bottomless-pits-of-suffering/), that's better than cathedrals," I suspect more people will go for the cathedral than if they'd lied. The cathedral is a bounded problem. The endpoint is realistic and visible.
A lot of EA problems are bottomless pits of suffering and in general they do not communicate such tradeoffs in normie-sensible ways. Scott being a rare exception who, as much as he wishes so, does not make up for the rest of the movement.
I think this is fair and part of why mainstream EA critiques are so frustrating. They feel like they’re gesturing at this or other potentially-sensible arguments like “focusing my philanthropy on causes near and dear to my heart is better for me so I do it as a compromise between fully selfish spending and fully altruistic philanthropy” but they avoid saying these things explicitly.
Maybe if you say this explicitly it kind of stops working.
In what sense?
...Because they just look like a selfish asshole.
The selfish benefit of this philanthropy is mainly that it makes you look (to yourself and others) like a good person who does things altruistically. If you acknowledge that your motivation is largely selfish, you no longer get that benefit.
Bounded vs. unbounded seems to hinge around the question of 'solving' a problem versus alleviating one. In that, I think people have an intuitive sense that solutions are much more valuable than ongoing alleviation of suffering. It's just that solutions are rare, or don't work like we expected (sometimes creating more problems), while alleviation is an omnipresent and nigh-oppressive demand.
Many altruism discussions tacitly conflate ongoing alleviation campaigns with true solutions. Yes, alleviation is desirable, but since it's an endless pit of suffering it seems to have a different impetus for moral action than a solution does.
"This sounds compelling until you realize that California has spent $24 billion on stopping homelessness over the last 5 years and homelessness is worse than ever."
I agree that $1 billion would not end homelessness forever, but it seems undeniable that if you spent that money on homelessness, there would be more money to fight homelessness in some sense (even if that money was spent inefficiently or didn't go infinitely far). "Money is fungible" is an easier sell than "homelessness is an easy problem to solve", so I think we need a better counterargument.
Empirically, “we can spend X amount of money to alleviate Y amount of suffering” seems to be a relatively hard claim to get right, even for the best of us (and EAs are definitely the best of us). This is partially because social problems are complicated. Well-intended policies like “let’s solve homelessness by giving everyone an apartment to anyone who asks” run into complications like “desperate and mentally ill people have a hard time dealing with bureaucrats.” This is partially because there are so many ways for humans to suffer. Cure cholera in an area, and people die of malaria instead. Cure all disease, and a horrible civil war breaks out.
Scientific and artistic projects, on the other hand, usually do what they say on the tin. They even sometimes come in under budget! The restoration of Notre Dame, for example, was €140 million under budget, and it looks pretty good. CERN confirmed the Higgs boson, Kepler detected a ton of exoplanets, etc.
The EA movement is brilliant, intellectually honest, and morally unimpeachable. Nonetheless, the number of QALYs that even the best intervention buys is always somewhat uncertain and ultimately the project of relieving human suffering is probably 95% developmental economics and 5% charity.
Given this uncertainty, at a certain point, the expected number of QALYs that giving a marginal dollar to EA generates is less valuable than the expected amount of beauty or truth that giving to the arts and sciences generates.
This point is high! It might be around 80% or 90% of all charitable dollars.But it’s not literally 100%, and that’s what arguments like Singer’s seem to demand.
(I take back that last bit if Singer has published something like “repairing Notre Dame is worth 1,000 lives but not 250,000”. Finding a conversion factor between QALYs and beauty seems like something that an EA would do but I haven’t actually read an analysis like that.)
Isn't this an isolated demand for rigor? Why are the EA charities penalized for uncertainty, but not Notre Dame? Or, are you saying that giving to Notre Dame has less uncertainty regarding what you get for your money? If so, why?
Yes, scientific and artistic projects have a great deal less uncertainty than sociological projects.
This is because sociological projects are affected by complex second and third order effects. Messing around with human systems is very complicated. Technological projects are much simpler.
For example, missions to the outer planets have a 100% success rate in hitting their scientific goals! Federal funding of research has huge economic multipliers. The Notre Dame project came in under budget!
Scrolling through the EA forums, the rate of success on their projects seems to be much lower. The most recent accountability study (from Farmed Animal Protection Hungary) reports setting up meetings with 3/16 of its corporate lobbying targets (for cage-free eggs).
This is not a criticism of EA. Lobbying is hard and it needs to be done! Its just that "restoring a building" or "building a telescope which will provide useful scientific data" is a much simpler task that "reducing homelessness in California" (let alone "lobbying for animal rights" or "reducing AGI x-risk").
Happy to talk more/collaborate on gathering evidence which you'd find convincing.
It's almost certainly the case that the *first* dollar spent on homelessness, will do real good. Low-hanging fruit is easy to pick, and if your entire fight-the-homeless budget is sixty bucks, you can't come up with clever schemes to squander it and you're stuck with just putting up some homeless dude in a Motel 6 for the night.
But it's quite possible that the 24,000,000,001st dollar spent fighting homelessness in California, has crossed beyond the point of diminishing marginal returns and into actual negative returns. If for example it goes to hiring one more bureaucrat who now has a motive to ensure that homelessness is never abolished or even substantially diminished so as not to cut off his personal gravy train.
I would think one of the central lessons of EA is that you can't just assume that throwing money at [X] results in significant positive change; you have to actually do the math and show your work. Or get an Effective Altruist to do the math for you, but then I'm going to want to see their work.
It’s quite likely that medieval cathedrals had a net cost of zero. Or positive.
How?
Imagine a society with no surplus. Everybody has to be a farmer since food is essential. Farmers might trade a bit if they specialise but mostly they consume their own produce. This is the ultimate subsistence society.
Now imagine the farmers can produce a surplus, so they could sell on the market if there was a market. However they need people to buy. In a simplified local economy where there’s a church taking a tithe from the farmers, paying the cathedral builders and suppliers, who then buy the surplus food the economy can maintain a steady state, or even grow. The farmer loses money on the tithe, but gains on the market.
Since the cathedral can attract pilgrims (and later tourists) it will also pay for itself. For a long time.
I agree. It's sort of a ridiculous claim that the money spent on Notre Dame should have been spent on solving other problems, since all transactions, not only charitable donations, are fungible.
We could theoretically all live in smaller homes, with less electricity, less heating and A/C in the winter, less eating out, less quality of life in general, while still having a better quality of life than our grandparents. So long as we don't take it to the point we are starving, and limit it to inconveniences, multiple trillions of dollars could easily be liberated for effective charitable purposes.
But the real world doesn't work like that. The real underlying currency is not dollars but motivation to do things. Removing much of the quality of life risks impoverishing us all.
EA seems perpetually vulnerable to various "value bait" scenarios: Batkid, burning building with paintings worth $50 million in one room and ten orphans in the other, rebuilding Notre Dame, buying a castle. This vulnerability suggests to me that EA needs a better framework for obligation vs. opportunity, and how to interface with emotionally-driven moral arguments. Also EA probably needs to be better at not engaging impulsively when academics (e.g. Singer) fall into the usual pattern of "capitalize on issue in the news to cause controversy that draws attention to the cause I care about" -- a pattern in human behavior that is not at all unique to EA.
On Trump kowtowing to the ILA:
I recently looked into this for a post. As many of you probably know, the ILA held basically the entire US economy hostage so that already ridiculously compensated dockworkers could make even more. They make ~$40 an hour now, and were outraged that management had proposed a MERE 50% wage increase over the next 7 years, so they went on strike on Oct 1, 2024, and that's what this Trump thing was about.
What you may not know is that Longshoremen have a centuries long history of doing this, and that they have ALWAYS been the biggest brake on productivity and shipping economics overall.
Some choice examples:
1. Shipping interests in Liverpool tried repeatedly to eliminate a practice known as "the welt," under which half of each longshore gang left the docks, often for a nearby pub, while the other half worked; after an hour or two, the absentees would return and those who had been working would take a prolonged break.
2. In Los Angeles, labor productivity dropped 75 percent between 1928 and 1954.
3. West Coast ports handled 9 percent less cargo per work-hour in 1954 than in 1952.
4. The Port of New York needed 1.9 man-hours to handle a ton of cargo in 1950, but 2.5 by 1956.
5. In Britain, tonnage per man-year was nearly flat from 1948 to 1952, leaped by one-third thanks to a surge of cargo in 1953, and then sank again under the weight of stringent work rules.
Longshoremen have always been among the most strike happy of any workers:
“An eleven-nation study found that dockworkers, along with miners and seafarers, lost more workdays to labor disputes than any other professions. In Britain alone, dock strikes resulted in the loss of nearly 1 million man-days of labor from 1948 through 1951 and another 1.3 million in 1954.”
Theft is also absolutely IMMENSE when longshoremen were involved in packing and transporting goods. To give an idea, judging by insurance premiums, something like 20-30% of *everything* was subject to “shrinkage,” with even more intense concentration and essential uninsurability in categories like whiskey, watches, and precious metals when they were packed and placed by longshoremen.
All these dates are in the 50's because starting in the late fifties, shipping containers started being used. The advent of the container reduced shipping costs by frankly absurd amounts - it literally drove prices down to 3% of what it cost with longshoremen packing ships, it drove shipping losses down by 95%, legible theft down by ~30%, and time in port from 6 days to 8 hours for a given volume.
And here Trump is, rewarding the ILA, the biggest brake on progress and efficiency ever involved in shipping and logistics, and keeping them in place so they can keep holding our entire economy hostage anytime they want more in the future.
Longshoremen must have some unique advantage over other workers when it comes to striking. Perhaps it is the fact that the value they destroy by striking is so great compared to their own productivity. But why don't Amazon logistic workers have the same advantage? Is it just the strike-happy culture among longshoremen that is working towards their advantage?
It's probably the long-standing links to organised crime, which go back to the days when half of the whisky routinely disappeared during shipment.
> Longshoremen must have some unique advantage over other workers when it comes to striking.
Most of the advantage is that ports are very limited resources in terms of throughput, but they are literally our connection to the global economy. They're a choke point.
Despite undertaking heroic efforts to reduce longshoremen in the ports when containerization took off (achieved via methods like literally guaranteeing every single longshoreman's career for life - they were such an immense drag on productivity and operational efficiency that literally paying every single one of them to do nothing for the entire extent of their remaining career, as long as we could automate, was strongly net positive), we still kept longshoremen in the remaining sliver of jobs operating the cranes to unload the ships.
We actually start off at a large disadvantage because our port capabilities in terms of expeditious unloading and loading are quite slow and shoddy compared to most other country's ports. Ports like Shanghai, Singapore, Rotterdam, and Hong Kong routinely handle 2-5x the cargo volume of US ports, largely via automation.
That slowness and low capability is thanks to the ILA, by the way. But we're one of the biggest markets in the world in terms of being an international trade destination, so we're like a tiny straw trying to drink a big milkshake. It's very easy to block things.
When a ship pulls up to be unloaded, there's a lot of other ships waiting. Every single container ship has goods worth between $400-$800M, and as long as they're waiting, they're costing somebody money, and given the value of the cargo, they're collectively costing these somebodies lot of money.
Then you get into overall logistics impacts - remember all the shortages during COVID? A lot of those were caused by backups and logistics problems at the ports, and those backups are prone to happening because of our low port volume capabilities.
Bottom line, that tiny sliver of ILA crane operators can now hold appreciable chunks of the entire economy hostage, because ports are a choke point for all international trade and economic activity.
And yes, to Melvin's point, they are historically associated with organized crime (along with the Teamsters union).
Aren't fulfillment centers choke points in the same way?
> Aren't fulfillment centers choke points in the same way?
It's less of an issue, because Amazon has a lot of redundancy, and generally has many fulfillment centers near large metros, usually with quite a bit of inventory overlap.
Any given fulfillment center could strike, and Amazon could still easily fulfill from the other nearby ones.
Of course if ALL Amazon workers went on strike at once, it would be a severe problem for Amazon, and would undoubtedly cost them hundreds of millions per day, and that's probably why Bezos and Amazon are so militantly anti-union and anti-organization attempts.
And for consumers, there's no problem. Even if Amazon was striking, there's still Target or Walmart or whatever.
But those overseas container ships are what fuels EVERY retailer and business that buys or uses goods produced overseas, which is basically everyone by now. Amazon AND Walmart AND Target AND everyone else, AND a lot of businesses. It's a much bigger deal.
A competitor could build a new fulfillment center three blocks away and hire non-unionized workers, whereas building a whole new port...little but more expensive.
You can't just put a port anyplace on a given coast you need to be starting from a certain degree of deep-water geography. Meanwhile the most economically efficient ships keep getting bigger. This gradually reduces the number of places at which it is practical to have a top-level port no matter how much you'd be willing to spend to create one.
So while fulfillment centers' redundancy keeps increasing (in fact I know where there are several million-square-foot empty ones sitting under huge for-sale signs), the redundancy of top-level container ports gradually declines. Hence the longshoremens' ability to plausibly threaten to freeze up a continental-scale economy.
Is there something to be said for expanding ports in Canada and Mexico and loading onto trains to bypass US ports entirely?
> Is there something to be said for expanding ports in Canada and Mexico and loading onto trains to bypass US ports entirely?
Mexico is probably your best bet, because Canadian port workers are unionized and strike-happy to a similar degree as US ones (see Vancouver).
Unfortunately, the biggest port in Mexico (Manzanillo) is ~6x smaller in volume than the biggest US ports. In fact, the entire annual volume of ALL ports in Mexico are equivalent to just one of any of the top 4 or 5 ports in the US. I’m not acquainted enough with the particulars to know if Manzanillo or other ports are ~20x expandable, geographically or politically, but it sounds like that might be tough. I imagine there’d be smuggling concerns too, if a much larger volume of US port container traffic started originating in Mexico.
There are only 5,000 longshoremen in the US, compared to 1.1 million Amazon employees. Admittedly, that includes management and admin, but it’s still much easier to coordinate a small group in a handful of port cities.
Source for this number?
I got the number from https://www.zippia.com/longshoreman-jobs/demographics/, but the union says they represent 85,000 longshoremen. https://ilaunion.org
The problem you really have here is the little man having a bit of power
The problem here is the little man having a lot of power.
A small number of little men having a lot of power, and the fact that this power can only be exercised by massively hurting everyone else.
At what point do they stop being little?
> In Los Angeles, labor productivity dropped 75 percent between 1928 and 1954.
This is a particularly interesting example, because Long Beach was constructed as an automated port, specifically because the longshoremen of the then-thriving port of San Francisco blocked automation. The result was that the automation happened anyway and the port of San Francisco completely died. This is on the whole a good result, though it would make *more* sense for the longshoremen to die away and the port of San Francisco to revive without them.
How did longshoremen get control of Long Beach? How is the ILA stopping us from building a modern port today, the same way we did then?
>Long Beach was constructed as an automated port, specifically because the longshoremen of the then-thriving port of San Francisco blocked automation. The result was that the automation happened anyway and the port of San Francisco completely died.
What on God's green earth are you talking about? The contents of these two sentences border on an AI-hallucination level of Not Even Wrongness. Every fact stated, with the exception of "the port of San Francisco completely died" is ludicrously incorrect, and the port of San Francisco died because containerized shipping terminals--automated or not--require far more real estate than is realistically available in geographically small, hilly San Francisco. Thus the move for Bay Area ports to Oakland and Alameda--which are, and always were, under the jurisdiction of the exact same longshore locals that had jurisdiction in San Fransisco.
The Port of Long Beach--which I must point out is hundreds of miles away from San Francisco and services an entirely different region--was constructed in the early twentieth century, many decades before cargo-handling automation was a gleam in the eye of shareholders; its construction had absolutely nothing to do with San Francisco longshoremen's imaginary response to (at the time) imaginary automation; and it slowly-then-rapidly became containerized (not automated; the two things are not even remotely the same) decades later in the 1960s, around the same time that the ports of Los Angeles and Oakland became containerized. During every minute of all this time, the longshoremen of all the ports mentioned in your/my post were members of the exact same union: ILA until 1937, and ILWU thereafter. At no point in history since the coastwise organization of West Coast longshoremen have longshoremen from Long Beach been in a different union from those in San Francisco.
>How did longshoremen get control of Long Beach?
The exact same way they got "control" of San Francisco, as a result of the exact same strike, in the exact same year, culminating in them all, along with the rest of the west coast dockworkers, becoming members of the exact same union (and soon thereafter forming a separate one from the ILA).
>How is the ILA stopping us from building a modern port today, the same way we did then?
On the west coast, which seems to be the area of your concern, the ILA isn't stopping anybody from doing anything. The ILA hasn't had jurisdiction over a single west coast port since 1937.
Just...good grief. The internet exists. You're on it, right now! You can look this stuff up!
"Without a 50% pay increase, there's no future for the Sobotkas on the waterfront!" somehow just makes for less compelling tv, though.
43. Another spectacular argument at the link:
> Andreessen’s claim never made sense. The point of the CFPB is to protect consumers against potentially rapacious financial institutions with far more power than them. Whatever you think of the Bureau, it’s very hard to imagine a situation in which it would team with financial institutions to help them kick off individual consumers. Hence the organization’s actual, anti-debanking stance.
I am frankly astonished by the stupendous naiveness of this argument. It's like saying "the point of the police to prosecute crime, so it is preposterous to assume it could ever be itself involved in any criminal activity or that a policeman could do anything against the law". The author seems to be an adult and working in journalism, which means he must have heard at least some news from the last 500 years. If he did, he must know government agencies - and people working for those agencies - regularly become corrupt, violate their mandates and do exactly the opposite of what they are supposed to do, and often exactly the thing they were supposed to protect the citizens from. It is not "hard to imagine", it has happened and still is happening, many times over, right in front of our eyes.
Now, of course, this is not a proof a particular agency, CFPB, did a particular instance of corrupt behavior (debanking crypto bros). That remains to be seen, and maybe it is true that they indeed are a staunch opponents of it and were accused unjustly. But presenting it as if the mere fact that their official mission is "to protect consumers" ipso facto makes them immune to corruption, and it alone makes Andreessen’s claim nonsensical, is just bizarre. And reading such an argument from a person who must know it is absolutely false only confirms my worst stereotypes about journalists.
If you read the essay, which can be a long task as it's written by patio11 so 3x as long as it should be, he calls out a number of explicit abuses by agencies and bureaucrats.
*EDIT* Whoops you were talking about Jesse Singal and not Patrick McKenzie. Yeah, more skepticism on Jesse's part is warranted.
Yes that was about Jesse Singal's post.
Re: Bitcoin in the rubbish dump, this is a *long*-running saga. This idea that the council is just being difficult is what the plaintiff is putting out there. The council's actual arguments are a lot stronger:
* When it went into the landfill, the laptop became the council's property, so it isn't *his* laptop to retrieve, it's the council's laptop.
* Digging through the rubbish costs money and causes environmental harm. These costs are surprisingly high (millions last I saw). The plaintiff isn't going to pay for any of that, the council will have to. The plaintiff says don't worry, you'll be compensated by your 10%! But...
* We don't actually know if the laptop is there. If it's there, we don't know if the data can be restored. Who's to say there's anything to find?
Ultimately this guy wants taxpayers to spend vast sums looking for a needle in a haystack, when it's not even his own needle, and pay us back on the never-never. No wonder the council says no.
>The plaintiff isn't going to pay for any of that
Huh, briefly skimming article headlines didn't inform me of that. Unless he's willing to take on a loan or whatever, he obviously has no ground to stand on.
I remain confused on this. I've seen people claim (as you seem to be saying) that the plaintiff is demanding the council dig through the landfill for him. But Scott seems to be saying the plaintiff just wants permission to do it himself. This seems like it should be an answerable question.
It seems like an answerable question with the answer "no".
I'm sure he's not the only guy in history who has ever chucked something out by accident and wanted to search the dump. These requests probably happen all the damn time and "no" is the default answer.
I'm most interested in knowing why digging through the rubbish will cause millions of dollars worth of environmental harm, which seems to be the only strong point here.
We are talking about shifting about a large fraction of the dump. While most of it will be basic rubbish, there will be quite a lot of stuff that's not supposed to be there, like asbestos, chemicals, old now -decaying electronics. It won't a large fraction of the dump but it will be a large amount in absolute terms. Searching in such a way that is safe and doesn't release this stuff could be pretty expensive.
It's quite likely that one reason they are refusing is that they simply don't have the capacity even to evaluate how to do it safely. Newport is one of the poorest towns in the UK . And that's not a responsibility that can just hand over to him.
Honestly, I suspect a large part of it is because the council doesn't want to, and so have come up a huge number of costs to do with environmental impact. It really shouldn't cost millions to search a section of a rubbish dump. But the civil service does this with everything they don't want to do - and they spend the money too. Given the UK's very limited state capacity, this man's quest doesn't seem like the highest priority for cut-through.
Modern landfills are not just piles of garbage. They are carefully engineered depending on the environment, and not easy to search through. I’d wager they are actually incredibly difficult or dangerous to search through. This is a good intro: https://youtu.be/HRx_dZawN44?si=axfrjbJmhgiTOh7O
Exactly the video I thought you might have linked. Great channel.
It wouldn’t cause millions of dollars worth of environmental harm, but that’s not generally how environmental regulations are written. I don’t know about in the UK, but in the US facilities have effluent limits. Staying under the limits is not (supposed to be) optional. If the government finds an internal e-mail that says, “hey, this project will probably put us over our effluent limit, but the fine is only $10,000, and the upside is millions,” that is grounds for a willful violation and possibly (though still quite unlikely) criminal penalties for the personnel involved.
According to the linked article, the hard drive went into the dump in 2013. So it's been sitting out in all weathers in a steaming, stewing heap of rotting rubbish for eleven years.
Good luck hoping it'll be recoverable after *that*.
And he doesn't even know where it is - the claim is that he has narrowed it down to a certain area, and wants the council to let him go fossicking through that.
Okay, suppose they do, and he doesn't find the Hard Drive O'Riches. Then what? "Oh, sorry, I meant the for-sure-this-time location is three metres west of this spot, lemme dig that up"?
If they let this guy do this, then they've created a precedent to allow any random person to go strolling through the dump looking for treasure. And that's going to hammer their public liability insurance, since if the random treasure seeker breaks his leg or cuts himself on rusty metal and contracts tetanus, that's a law suit for damages.
Which, from what I've seen in my limited experience in local government, judges will be all too happy to pay out*.
So the good citizens of Newport will now face either a drastic rise in rates to pay for all this, or public services will be cut back to pay for all this. Yeah, that's a winning proposition!
In short, when I read stories like this, I know that the full story is not being told, and that the council is bound by regulations and legal considerations from going "Look, here's the real facts of the matter". So whatever Scott Aaronson says about "blankfaces", there's a reason for the "sorry we can't comment on particular cases, here is our canned answer".
* I'm sure I've regaled all on here with tales of ambulance-chasing local lawyers, who coincidentally just the other day had an ad on the radio shilling for business, and the mysterious string of unfortunate accidents that happened to one family in one particular spot with regard to a loose part of the pavement and they all fell over on that, one after another, where the courts awarded pay-outs to them based on the council being negligent. Or the guy who got an award of €10,000 to help him find private rented accommodation, adjudged on him being not permitted to go on the social housing list when he was eighteen and so the judge decided that ten years of not getting a council house was worth that much. Needless to say, first the solicitors took a big chomp out of that for fees, and with what was left, did he go looking for private rented accommodation? I give you three guesses and the first two don't count. Once he'd blown through whatever was left of his win on fun party times and fun party substances, he went back on teh social housing list and is no better off than he started. Well, apart from whatever fun memories he acquired, but he certainly did *not* improve his living conditions, which was the reasoning behind the judicial decision to give him that money in the first place.
Digging around (ha!) a bit, it looks like Newport did start recycling collections in the 2000s but by the sound of it, the Hard Drive O'Riches was chucked into the general rubbish collection.
I don't know if, for example, it ended up in this landfill - okay, according to the "Guardian" of 2013 it did, and they even let him have a quick look round back then, but this is the kind of thing we're talking about when we say "just dig through the landfill":
https://www.stantec.com/uk/projects/d/docksway-landwill
"We helped restore the site, formally a ‘dilute and disperse’ municipal landfill, to include a new fully contained landfill at the same location, largely sited on a former river meander.
For the new containment landfill, our first task was to establish baseline environmental data and build up evidence for risk assessments. Newport City Council required us to prepare two pollution prevention and control permits (PPCs) for different areas at the same time. We then provided design and support services to the council and devised a novel technique for soil strengthening. This used cement columns to transform the porridge-like alluvium into a surface on which the containment layer could be constructed. We continue to provide quality assurance for construction and contract management support."
What's "dilute and disperse"?
https://www.circularonline.co.uk/features/time-to-bury-landfill-for-good/
"Landfill (and landraise) has been the principal method of waste disposal in the UK for the last 120 years. In the early 1970s, landfill sites were typically just large holes in the ground in which rubbish was squashed and buried with little regard for the consequences.
Landfills were designed on the “dilute and disperse” principle, which assumes that pollutants are generated slowly and migrate into the surrounding environment via chemical, physical, biological and microbiological processes that render them less concentrated until they become harmless.
This approach did not work well, with landfills causing considerable air, water and soil pollution and adverse social impacts. A combination of regulation and research required that the best landfill sites should become highly engineered containment vessels in which the deposited wastes have stabilised physically, chemically and biologically to a state in which the undisturbed contents are unlikely to pose a pollution risk – so-called “completion”."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site
"Buried somewhere under four feet of mud and rubbish, in the Docksway landfill site near Newport, Wales, in a space about the size of a football pitch is a computer hard drive worth more than £4m.
...He even went down to the landfill site itself. "I had a word with one of the guys down there, explained the situation. And he actually took me out in his truck to where the landfill site is, the current ditch they're working on. It's about the size of a football field, and he said something from three or four months ago would be about three or four feet down."
...Howells considered retrieving the hard drive himself, but was told that "even for the police to find something, they need a team of 15 guys, two diggers, and all the personal protection equipment. So for me to fund that, it's not possible without the guarantee of money at the end." As such, he's resigned to never getting the virtual money back."
That was back in 2013. Add on eleven years of weather and more activity, and this isn't even a needle in a haystack. The story reminds me of the people pouring money into the Money Pit on Oak Island in pursuit of phantom riches. Never gonna happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Island_mystery
The fact that he and his backers are only willing to pay the council if they find the bitcoin, not upfront, seems like a pretty big tell that the expected costs won't meet its expenses.
My understanding was that the plaintiff had backers who would pay for the search (and get a percentage of the treasure, if found).
Do you have a source? I had a quick look and didn't find anything other than him offering a percentage. For example "The court heard Howells was being backed by data recovery engineers and legal teams working pro bono on the basis that they get a share of the bitcoin profits if successful."[1]
If he were in a position to offer ready money, he could simply offer to buy the land and the council would be pretty much obliged to consider that. From [2] I estimate the area of Cell 2 to be about 11 acres. It's currently a landfill and seems unlikely to qualify for the highest value uses . 11 acres of Ag land would be <£1M. It's next to an industrial estate, maybe permission for that use could be obtained, in which case it might be worth £20M although discounted for the remediation due to having to deal with the landfill. If there were a realistic prospect, I'd think this kind of amount could be raised as a speculation (especially bearing in mind that you would still anyway have the land to sell later)
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/dec/03/500m-bitcoin-hard-drive-landfill-newport-wales-high-court
[2] https://publicregister.naturalresources.wales/Search/Download?RecordId=66540
Not sure about the non-Inca influences: There's that Mexican-American trade union (United Farm Workers) whose flag has the same color scheme and arrangement as the Nazi flag, with a pixelated Naziesque eagle in the place of the swastika, and AFAIUI they are a leftist bunch with nothing to do with Nazism.
EDIT: Apparently the Peruvian movement in question is called "ethnocacerism", and it's a mixture of hard indigenous ethnic nationalism and economic leftism. Idk if their flag is inspired by the Nazi one.
Nit. Before Marcuse told marxists to take over institutions, Gramsci did.
About Cluster Headaches:
What's wrong with just muesuring the QALYs the conventional way "would you take a X% chance to get rid of this condition?
Not hiring lawyers who have argued against your position is pretty standard in many contexts actually, because their words can be used against them. If you say the opposite of what you used to say on an issue with any degree of interpretation, opposing counsel might use it against you or the judge will be more skeptical. [Haven't clicked through, no idea if is relevant in this case, just sharing in case some don't know]
...That seems insane? The lawyers are representing their client, not themselves. Surely judges of all people should understand this?
No, because you are required to offer arguments in good faith.
If you have an interpretation of the law that hasn't been fully settled, you will offer certain analogies as valid, certain precedents as more relevant, etc.
And over time you build a reputation as being capable of defending and arguing persuasively for certain things.
Another example in the public context, the government often reinterprets statues because of a new administration and needs to make the opposite argument, even though the law didn't change. It gets very awkward if the same lawyer has to explain to the same judge why they now argue for the opposite, and usually they find someone else, otherwise the government usually loses because the court infers they are abusing discretion of statute interpretation to get the policy outcomes they want.
Procedurally generated experiences are cool.
My favorite one was 'infinite chain of think of a concept, and realize that your thought about it was actually a meta level up also an example of that, and proceed like this constantly amazed how many levels up you go'
I would (based on extremely small sample size) suggest to throw away anything during the middle of an experience, but 'learn from' the edge of stretched mind and normal self as you come down.
>proceed like this constantly amazed how many levels up you go
I'm amazed at how few levels I can go, before it all blends into meaninglessness.
If there was a cultural effective altruism conspiracy at work, say a fifth of open AI employees being ready to smash the servers with a sledgehammer on command, or something. Would we know?
What amusing hypothetical would you enjoy discovering in the morning post?
On the blackface phenomena: So much of what people are is what their mind lingers on, not fixates on. This determines what accumulates over the years, not just whether they focus on the personalities and the challenge to their authority ('oh, so you think you're better than me, huh?) when they end up in a novel situation that an outsider has a solution to. Long years of light lingering on certain types of elements (like social power and drama), and sufficient avoidance of other elements (like consequentialism or whether the future will contain enough historians for their life in particular to be deeply evaluated) affects behavior much more than the smaller number of strong tendencies unusually powerful enough to be thought of as fixations or aversions.
> On the blackface phenomena:
What are you responding to?
And why is it (possibly-AI generated) gibberish?
"blackface" autocorrected to "blackface", causing a frame-shift that turned that paragraph into gibberish.
The most ACX comment ever!
I believe the intended word was "blankface"
Yes, chrome very very inconspicuously autocorrected "blackface" to "blackface" twice in a row without my knowledge or consent.
Make that 3 times. I was trying to type the word b l a n k f a c e
13 "If you ask a cluster patient to rate their pain, they’ll almost always say 10/10. Does that mean the headaches are twice as painful as a 5/10 condition? There are some philosophical reasons to expect pain to be logarithmic, so plausibly cluster headaches could be orders of magnitude more painful than the average condition."
It seems problematic that people are asked to rate things, but afterwards there is debate about what their rating means. If you want to solve the 5/10 vs. 10/10 problem, you should probably tell people "where 10/10 is twice as bad than 5/10", or however you want to interpret it afterwards while still making sure that people understand it.
However, ratings of whatever always have the problem that they are bounded, so if people experienced some level of pain for the first time, their previous answers and the answers of other people to the same question may be meaningless or distorted.
The conventional 1-10 pain scale is in no way linear. Numbers are typically given descriptions, like "1: Barely noticeable pain" or "5: You can't ignore it for more than a few minutes but with some effort you can still do other things" or "10: Worst pain imaginable".
If it were linear, then ten minutes of a 1/10 pain would be just as bad as one minute of the worst pain imaginable, which doesn't seem right at all.
I don't think it's even logarithmic. The worst pain I've ever experienced (from appendicitis) I rated as 8/10 at the time. It was bad, but quite finitely worse than other pains -- I'd rather have a minute of 8/10 than an hour of 6/10.
But I feel like a 10/10 pain, the literal worst pain you can ever possibly experience, must be many many many times worse than an 8/10. It terrifies me to think about what that must be like. I'd rather suffer an hour of 8/10 than a single minute of 10/10.
Well, "worst pain imaginable (by you)" and "worst pain you can possibly experience" could be very different, depending on the strength of your imagination and/or experience.
I've seen some pain charts with a more objective wording, something like "it's painful but I'm still able to walk around with difficulty" vs "it's so painful I can't do anything but lie here in agony."
Yeah. Honestly, I have no idea how high the pain scale goes, and I hope I never find out.
But I think that if I ever felt a 10/10 then I'd know it immediately.
In a documentary, I have seen someone who said that due to his condition, he has a permanent 10/10 pain, but sometimes 11/10.
Obligatory xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/883/
Scientifically speaking, there are two different pain scales: one scale for intensity, and one scale for unpleasantness. They are often, but not always, correlated.
Cluster headaches are notable because their unpleasantness is extremely high, this may be related to the effects of the cluster on the autonomic nervous system. If you have ever seen anyone have a cluster headache, you can observe them pacing restlessly, maybe swearing or pounding the wall. This is a dramatic contrast to migraine patients, who like to remain still in a dark quiet place.
I completely agree with Scott’s statement about the impact of cluster headache and the need for better treatment availability, and endorse his reference to the clusterbusters.
The proposal may be justified! However, if we accept the way to get to that conclusion, then such scales and the accumulated data based on them seem questionable. Do people who say some number know what it means, or is supposed to mean? This does not only change conclusions based on the 10/10 cases, but on all of them.
After many, many years, I figured out that I was miscommunicating with doctors, other people, and myself because while I don’t feel less pain than average, I perceive it as less urgent: my threshhold is average, but my tolerance is very high. This means that I assumed other people were in much more pain than me in equivalent situations, that I was in less pain than I was (and therefore that various situations were less serious than they were), and failed to get medical staff to take various situations seriously in a timely manner. Those screamy-face scales are useless.
So now I do the weird robot thing of explaining to the nurse that I’m not very good at knowing how much pain I’m in, and my face won’t reflect that I’m in pain, and yes you just watched me walk relatively normally into this room, but I do feel like crying all the time and I feel a little faint, so I suspect I am actually in a lot of pain (my toe was broken).
55. Christianity won partially because ordinary romans thought Jesus was a very powerful Harry Potter-like wizard that could help them with their problems.
We don't know much about the beliefs of ordinary early converts as literary sources focus on saints, martyrs and theologians but we do have some early Christian sarcophagi from the catacombs of Rome and the reliefs depict a youthful, round-faced Jesus performing miracles with a wand. It is only after Christianity won imperial support that we start to see depictions of more theologically important themes. In the beginning it was all about miracles.
Yep, miracles certainly were a major part of popular appeal, and Christianity had plenty of strong competition. https://infidels.org/library/modern/richard-carrier-kooks/
44 I was talking to a police officer friend at the weekend and he made an arrest just before his night shift finished that morning and then had to stay working past the end of his shift for quite a long time to do all the paperwork. Police officers here in the UK are definitely de-incentivised to make arrests!
Is there a way around this, though?
Hard to imagine a reasonable system where a police officer can arrest someone at 4:45, drop him off at the station at 4:58, and then go home at 5, leaving no written record of why the hell this person is now in the holding cells. What is the next shift supposed to do with this prisoner?
Solution I thought of just now (which is therefore probably flawed):
Mandate that the last hour of the officer's shift is spent at the desk. That way he *can't* make an arrest at the end of his shift and therefore doesn't have to worry about forcing himself to work late.
I guess it's a partly a question of how long the paperwork takes? If you're there for an extra hour say it's not wonderful but also not so bad perhaps, but if it's several hours work then that that you are going start wondering if you really need to make that arrest?
Typo: area of area → unit of area
23: I am now confused about the ages of your children?
51: Gave me a scare until clicked through. "Didn't he just have a Status Update: S'all Good, Man? This is out of left field!"
55: TOK would like a word. Better keep an eye on that Luxor pyramid...
23: Sorry - was a hypothetical.
The council has previously said the issue is that the money he's raised isn't enough to cover the costs if the hard drive isn't found in working condition, which they think is unlikely and he's not willing to pay in that case. https://web.archive.org/web/20220802082708/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/02/computer-scientist-begs-use-robot-dogs-search-landfill-site/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_buried_in_Newport_landfill
> Under his latest proposal, Mr Howells has secured £10m of funding from venture-capital money in Germany and Switzerland and says he will deploy robot dogs, drones and an AI machine to filter through 110,000 tons of waste.
10 million isn't enough?
Consider the amount of waste your household produces each week. Now multiply that by a million over decades. You need to manually sort through the waste for a tiny object. This either necessitates employing a bunch of people, or inventing a novel technological solution.
It is also likely underneath large amounts of other waste which you'll need the equivalent of earth movers or mining equipment to move, in such a way that wouldn't damage a tiny object. Which needs both the equipment and the expertise to move it.
This waste is probably not very healthy for people to be exposed to so you need some safety equipment and liability insurance.
Even if it's in usable condition it will probably need professional work to repair.
This object is also ridiculously valuable so you'll need security at all times to stop your employees or some random person stealing it, either during retrieval, transport or repair.
Also presumably this will disrupt the normal operations of the site so there are costs to doing that.
So yeah I could see it easily being way about 10 million
At what point will it be worthwhile? On the one hand, Bitcoin keeps going up in price. On the other hand, the more time that passes the less likely it will be that any recovered hard drive will have recoverable data on it. On the gripping hand, are they adding additional trash through which they would have to sort?
It's allegedly worth about $700 million now. Five years ago, it would have been worth perhaps $200 million. If Bitcoin hits $1M within five years, so about 10 times the current price, would it be worth a try?
He's been trying to recover this since 2013 and even back then, by the time he went to the dump, the likely spot had been covered four feet deep by assorted refuse. Eleven years on, imagine what it's like by now in this place:
https://i2-prod.walesonline.co.uk/incoming/article27682000.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/1_WNS_020822_Bitcoin_Landfill_023JPG.jpg
For those who doubt "what could be the environmental impact of digging it up, the council is just making up excuses", this is what:
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/im-suing-council-495m-because-30106009
"They have also vowed to help the council "modernise" the landfill which has repeatedly been in breach of its permit since 2020 over levels of arsenic, asbestos, methane and other substances. Pointing to damning reports from Natural Resources Wales the claim says: "These compliance reports call into question whether the [council] is a fit and competent landfill operator."
The guy sounds obsessed by "I lost a fortune and if I could only get the hard drive back I'd be rich as Croesus" and I imagine he's brooded on this over the years and has now convinced himself all he has to do is find the hard drive and recover the data, and this is going to be easy-peasy because he knows precisely where it is (he doesn't), and the platter will be whole (it won't) and his experts can decode it all (they can't).
The guy wants the council to take responsibility for the costs of excavating the landfill on the promise of "if my magic money beans grow, I'll give you tens of millions". Now maybe it's worth swapping the cow for the bag of magic beans, but maybe it's not. If he can't find his Hard Drive O'Riches, or he does and it's a heap of rust and can't produce the goods, they're in the hole for millions because I feel like his team of experts will fade away like the morning dew if there is no fortune forthcoming, and he's just an ordinary guy with no money of his own to cover the costs.
If you want easy riches, just stick to playing the lotto. It was really hard luck but he was careless, now let go of the entire obsession and move on.
I'm kind of imagining the situation like someone accidentally threw away his original issue #1 of Superman, or a rookie Mickey Mantle baseball card, or something similar.
About Enochian chess:
Frustrated by the fact that the color of the kings' squares are the wrong color
Hazimis are analogous to Donatists. I expect that the fate of this movement within ISIS will be much like that of Donatism within the early Church: some appeal to rigorists and local spread, but eventual condemnation since it's so hard to make and keep allies.
"30: Related: we talked before about various edge cases of cancel culture. Here’s a real-life one: crypto company Coinbase has said they’ll end their relationship with any law firm that hires lawyers who have previously opposed crypto."
Variation on an old joke:
God and Satan are arguing over the property line between Heaven and Hell. Eventually, God threatens to sue. Satan just laughs and responds "Go ahead. I have all the good lawyers."
Coinbase is making a mistake, IMO. Why exclude people experienced in exactly the kind of law you're looking to defend yourself against? If it were me, I'd be specifically targeting firms that were successful in crypto cases in the past, regardless of which side they were on. If they know the arguments that win in court, I want them on my side.
EDIT: And if I have the BEST on my side, I know they're not going to be representing the opposition!
"Andreesen accused a regulator called the CFPB of being behind the debanking conspiracy, but CFPB has nothing to do with crypto"
And banking regulators in the Bush and Obama admins had nothing to do with guns or porn, but you know who did? Banks. And who do banking regulators have authority over? Banks. A quiet note to the bank's risk division along the lines of:
"We're concerned about the potential risk profile of your bank. We may have to reassess your position in the banking industry if nothing changes.
To change the subject completely, and as a friendly heads-up, we believe [TARGET] represents a significant risk to banks in which they hold accounts. Obviously, we're not suggesting any kind of specific be taken on this issue, because we're not permitted."
resolves the issue quite cleanly.
I think Patrick addresses this, and the Bush/Obama gun comparison especially, in his post.
Maybe, but it's dishonest to pretend that the gov't agency in charge of regulating banks and payment processors doesn't have influence over the crypto space.
Edit:
Oh COME ON.
"But this was a ridiculous claim on its face, given that the CFPB is specifically designed to protect consumers against rapacious companies against whom they have little recourse."
This is an incredibly stupid claim, given the entire world history of government. This isn't "Wet streets cause rain", this is "I sold our house for this one bean because the guy told me it was a special bean worth a billion dollars."
> given the entire world history of government
…I mean, if you start with the axiom that all government agencies are evil, I am not sure that concluding a government agency is evil adds anything new to the conversation.
Heh, well-put.
I didn't. There's well over a century, just in the US, of agencies that are supposed to protect consumers getting captured and protecting the very interests the agencies were intended to constrain.
I’ve a funny feeling that Peter Singer is going to leave a very large estate.
Actually just googled it and found this:
https://www.domain.com.au/news/philosopher-peter-singer-sells-richmond-hill-apartment-block-20150819-gj2d7u/
Not sure what you mean. Singer has publicly said he donates 40% of his regular income (and 100% of any special prizes he gets). That seems compatible to me with a company run by his family member spending $150K on an apartment in 1983.
Given the harshness of Singer’s moral philosophy as applied to others, 40% isn’t good enough. In fact if giving away that 40% doesn’t reduce him to below the median income he’s in no position to lecture anybody at the median income, if after the 40% he is on double the median he’s in no position to lecture anybody below twice the median income. And so on.
And clearly he should leave an estate of $0.
There are still drowning children and singer is in a better position to most to save them.
His thought experiment did convince me to spend considerably more on charity, albeit not to the self impoverishment he would demand, but then it hasn’t convinced him either.
You seem to be implying that Singer has claimed that everyone above median income is morally obligated to give away the excess. Has he ever actually said something like that? Or if not, what is the "harshness" that you are referring to, which would demand more than 40% of income be donated?
Median wage? No. People in the west would have to give away large percentages of their income way below that income.
His philosophy is often distilled to “we have a moral obligation to give significantly to help others in need if doing so does not cause us comparable harm” - quoting chatGPT there but it’s a good synopsis.
39. That tracks if professors are pattern-matching to compliance and standardized form, not actually evaluating the merits of the essay. And text AI is nothing but the standard form. It may just be a variation of the old concept describing the differences in who S/A class people hire, vs. B/C hire.
The article bizzarely reads this as an indictment of AI detection not the assignments and grading. Also surreal to write something advocating greater use of AI detection software without addressing the false-positive rate or the consequences of false positives. Forbes in general is more of a medium competitor than an actual journalism outfit these days.
55. Because the Pope clearly isn't Catholic, why should anyone else be?
I am a protestant. I thought our whole disagreement with catholic was that the fact that whatever the church authorities say, it is catholic by definition. If you can say that the pope isn't catholic, why couldn't Luther say that indulgences aren't catholic.
My understanding of the Catholic position was that understanding nontrivial theological truths is a difficult process that requires serious scholarly study and philosophical analysis. And the Church is the central institution within which that study and analysis takes place and its techniques and conclusions are taught and applied.
The Church is believed to have some divine inspiration to protect it against error, but its authority is mostly based on the idea that the consensus of the one big mainstream community of experts are much more likely to be right on any given question in their field than a clever individual who has come up with substantially different conclusions on his own.
That makes sense enough. But then you should also trust "the Church" to determine if the pope us still catholic or not. Which it says he is.
And they did, until the Church started saying things that were unpopular with Catholics. A dictatorship still needs popular support.
"Church authorities" here is the operative term- a church council can, and has in the past, decided that a pope's beliefs were heretical.
Church authorities still endorse Francis as far as I can tell. Seems like a Catholic should defer to them.
yea, not saying that bishops or councils have reined in Pope Francis, just that they could, in theory, and that there's precedent for it.
I just happened to write a post on this very subject just now
https://open.substack.com/pub/ariethoughts/p/deference-vs-autonomy-the-eternal
I am pleasantly delighted to have my priors about Tibetan Buddhism reinforced by #1.
Re: conspiracies: Effective altruism is obviously a front for the International Mosquito Net Manufacturers Association. Not much more needs to be said.
Re: Headaches: "plausibly cluster headaches could be orders of magnitude more painful than the average condition. Once you internalize that possibility, it throws a wrench into normal QALY ratings and suggests that, even though cluster headaches are pretty rare, they might cause a substantial portion of the global burden of disease (or even a substantial portion of the suffering in the world). "
Oh dear, that sounds very bad indeed. Orders of magnitude, my word. So where is this going?
"Some psychedelics, especially psilocybin and DMT, seem to treat cluster headaches very effectively"
Aha. Bro, please bro, just try it, I swear.
Re: Cluster headaches, some resources:
- List of related publications, compiled by the main CH advocacy organization: https://clusterbusters.org/resource/psychedelic-research/
- Frerichs (2019): Treating Cluster Headaches Using N,N-DMT and Other Tryptamines (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4dppcsbcbHZxyBC56/treating-cluster-headaches-using-n-n-dmt-and-other-1)
- Testimonial of a chronic cluster headache patient after using DMT to abort attacks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClBV0gDFX-o)
- CH support groups often discussing psychedelics and other treatments: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1196899617347865 and https://www.reddit.com/r/ClusterHeadaches/
3: The accusation of "conspiracy theory" doesn't depend on whether there's in fact a conspiracy. It's simply a convenient way to make a status claim about beliefs and attitudes that you think should be mocked and/or dismissed out of hand. A "superweapon", if you will.
My favorite Chess variant (to think about, not to play) is called Horde Chess and was invented by Lord Dunsany (one of the best fantasy authors before Tolkien). One side is normal, the other side is a giant swarm of pawns, and for the normal side to win it has to kill all the pawns. Given his title, you have to wonder how personally he took the game.
I have cluster headaches (or something very similar to it, according to my neurologist) but I can get rid of them in a few minutes of intense cardio
It might have something to do with blood oxygenation? Since one of the known treatments is oxygen supplementation
I keep procrastinating on posting about it on the cluster headache subreddit but this may be the highest EV action in my life
Hi! I wrote the linked post on cluster headaches. Let me know if you write that post!
A couple of related papers:
- Kang et al. (2024): Exercise as an abortive treatment for cluster headaches: Insights from a large patient registry (https://doi.org/10.1002/acn3.52263)
- Borkum (2024): Cluster Headache and Hypoxia: Breathing New Life into an Old Theory, with Novel Implications (https://doi.org/10.3390/neurolint16060123)
Congrats on your article, it is impressively thorough and informative
And thanks for the very relevant sport study! Squats, sprints and pushups are exactly what I would order.
It also fits with my assessment that I have a mild form of the condition.
Because of this cardio approach, it's been a while since I have had a full crisis, but I don't remember them as 10/10 bad. To be clear, I was unable to do any real task, and it did feel like getting repeatedly stabbed with a blunt stake above the eye and behind the ear, but I can imagine worse experiences.
Probably because most serious pains are accompanied by a high likelihood of long-term or permanent loss of function, and the fear mixes with the pain (*waves hands in predictive processing*). Whereas cluster headaches are purely "baseless" pain from a system 2 perspective. Of course this is compatible with your paragraph on pain and suffering.
Other characteristic that may be non-typical: for me the onset of the crisis can be quite a bit longer than 9 minutes. Staying in the predictive processing theme, I sometimes find it hard to differentiate between the anxious anticipation of a likely crisis and the emerging pain itself
Other than that, I do think my symptoms are pretty typical, at least enough so that conditions similar to mine would regularly be diagnosed as cluster headaches. I am really bad at keeping a journal but I would say the periods hover around 5 months, with about 1-3 crises every other day, one eye getting red puffy and teary, and so on
I tried intranasal triptans, but they didn't make any sensible difference
About the coping mechanisms, I feel like I can experience both extremes. I remember some crises where I just wanted to lay down and find some peace, and some where I tried hitting my forehead with the heel of my hand (ineffective). And when a crisis comes, I almost feel like I can choose whether to be sleepily annoyed by the pain, or outraged by the affront. Obviously the cardio thing motivates me to switch to the latter.
All that aside though, I feel like this duality between suffering and instinctive prediction of future suffering (or between happiness and instinctive prediction of future happiness) can be hard to deal with from a utilitarian perspective, because it leads to an infinite regress
It doesn't have to be a counter-argument to utilitarianism though, maybe utilitarianism just highlights the problem better
That's why the story of this lady that "doesn't feel pain" that Scott talked about in a previous links post seems so weird to me, although it's consistent with the fact that she " has no anxiety" either
55. ..."the Mexican youth are turning away from the stodgy boring Catholic Church en masse to worship Santa Muerte. Why?"
Christianity makes great demands on believers. Quid-pro-quo paganism lets you do whatever, as long as you pay up.
Christianity took off despite this because it offered more than it demanded: A taste of heaven on Earth amid a community of transformed believers, and promise of true heaven to come.
This lost credibility over time. The uniquely impressive character of the early Christian community could not be maintained once the Christian community extended to all of society. Christianity still kept spreading for centuries due to prestige, power, individual examples of spiritual transformation, and the innate attractiveness of the message. But then science and the Enlightenment came along, undermining people's faith in the hereafter.
If you don't believe in spiritual transformation because you don't see any in the Christians around you, and you don't believe in the afterlife, Christianity isn't very attractive at all. It's easy to see it as just a bunch of dour thou-shalt-nots and false promises.
Enter Santa Muerte. It offers a connection to the spirit world (materialism, though persuasive, is deeply unsatisfying to most people); provides immediately tangible results (or so it claims); and makes no limiting demands on believers. If you don't think Christianity can make good on its offers, and you're not bothered by human sacrifice, that's very attractive by comparison.
That being said, I would like to point out that Christianity is growing in Mexico as well. In the same period since 2001, the Protestant population in Mexico has exploded. Not to imply that Catholic Mexicans are not Christians, but mass conversions to forms of Christianity totally at odds with Mexican tradition must represent a genuine upwelling of religious fervor.
Yes, good comment.
>Christianity makes great demands on believers. Quid-pro-quo paganism lets you do whatever, as long as you pay up.
Makes sense. My guess is that very few of the Santa Muerte believers are participating in anything like regular worship, allocating the equivalent of an hour at Mass. Of course, many self-identified Catholics in Mexico aren't doing this either, though my understanding is that Mass attendance in Mexico is relatively high.
>That being said, I would like to point out that Christianity is growing in Mexico as well. In the same period since 2001, the Protestant population in Mexico has exploded.
Yes -- and I would bet that new Protestants are attending church at much higher rates than the Roman Catholics, let alone the Santa Muerte cultists.
It's generally my belief that Roman Catholicism is incapable of remaining dominant in an open religious marketplace. Indeed, it's unlikely that any form of Christianity can remain dominant under such conditions, but the RCC, in places where its monopoly is long established and consequently sclerotic, is especially unsuited to competition against more dynamic alternatives.
33: "Gas mileage in gallons per mile has area of area", shouldn't that read "units of area"?
I think the XKCD gives a fairly good answer, and it shouldn't really be a surprise that a volume divided by a distance results in an area (at least I hope it isn't to anyone that thinks about it for more than a moment). Physically you could imagine that instead of carrying gas with you, you connect the car to a pipe filled with gas, and then "pump" that gas into your car by simply driving into it, kind of like a ramjet. Mileage would represent the (average) cross-sectional area of the pipe.
Yes, it is simply the minimum cross-section area a 'vein' of gasoline must have so that a car with a snorkel could follow it indefinitely.
Also, for EV, the efficiency given as energy per distance could be interpreted to be the force required to push the vehicle along, divided by the engine efficiency.
9. Has been rumbling on for ages, it seems to resurface every now and then when the bitcoin price spikes. On the council side, it appears they think the hard drive is buried amidst 15,000 tonnes of other waste (which might be the "small" area he talks about) and that digging it up will take months and cost millions. No guarantee of a payout either, since its been buried for more than a decade and who knows if they can even locate it.
Re 36: Tyler Alterman's looping psychospiritual delving...
Historically, I suspect most cultures where psychospiritual experiences were part of the mental health ecosystem were like Ancient Greece and Rome and employed them sparingly, either as one off initiations - Eleusis, Mithras - or as part of the yearly rhythm of communal experience.
The recursive delving was for full time mystics, magicians and saints, and not everybody can be that.
Regarding the Marxist takeover of institutions etc., I've read documents from/describing the Communist Party of Finland in the 1960s, when a lot of academics entered it (for the first time in basically, well, ever), and the general feeling was that while they welcomed the influx they were also quite suspicious of the new recruits and constantly worried that this would eventually draw the party away from the working-class base (the fears were correct, as it turns out to be).
Of course, this was specific to the fact that communism was a mass movement in Finland and the situation in Anglo countries, where it always seems to have had a more middle-class characteristic, seems to be different, but it's also this aspect which has meant communism has taken a more conspiratiorial aspect particularly in the US - the Soviets indeed seem to have led the CPUSA to take a more "subversive", secretive role, but less so to increase the levels of gayness or what have you, but simply to put operatives in levels of society where they can access secret data that Soviets could use, a la the Rosenbergs. This was hardly an universal main function for a communist party, though!
(Also, in many cases, there's a bit of a cause-and-effect confusion on the Right on the specific relation of communism and, say, anti-racist, feminist, environmentalist, pacifist movements and such; the communists in various countries were interested in such movements and often tried to enter them to turn them into Communist Party tools or, failing that, construct their own movements as imitation, but this is different from anti-racism, feminism, environmentalism or pacifism *specifically* being a communist idea as such, or movements advocating the same only existing due to communists specifically creating them.)
As I indicated in my book contest review (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QiotH3aGFgNLGqsIHTK_Plm_gem2E4l2C2ctyGJd0jY/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.fktwij6u8c98 - I probably really should get around to rehosting it), much of the rise of communism in the intellectual classes after WW2 was probably just aftereffects of secularization, and the perceived specific link between secularism and Marxism, not the least reinforced by right-wing Christians specifically going on about the threat of godless communism - one of the reasons why Ayn Rand was important was in strengthening the idea that one could simultaneously be an atheist and strong anticommunist, not all that common during the 50s or 60s in the West.
The specific strategy of orthodox Marxism has always been based specifically organizing the working class as working class, since the whole idea is that working class is specifically distinct from national or other identity groups by virtue of holding the power in its own hands *as* working class, concretized by strike; if the workers stop working, the entire society stops. Obviously there have been revisionist Marxists disagreeing with this thesis, but that's what makes them revisionist, ie. not orthodox.
Incidentally, as someone who was active in the university left around 2009-2011 and know a lot of people from it since then, I don't remember if I ever heard anyone refer to Marcuse as an actual point of reference, ie. something beyond a historical figure. It's not even that Frankfurt School in general has been forgotten, Adorno was a continuous point of reference and a topic for discussion. Some Marcuse was translated around 60s-70s, but it took until 2022 for anyone to bother to translate Eros and Civilization, for example. That's probably one of the main reasons why it has always seemed a bit strange to me that Marcuse, of all the Frankfurt School figures, is the constant bugaboo for right-wingers - I suspect they're more cognizant of his thought than the Left, these days.
100%
Having read up on the Frankfurt School guys 8 or 9 years ago when the esteemed SSC right wing posters were very convinced they were dangerous, I was surprised to crack into Adorno and Marcuse and find it mostly amounted to "The proletarian revolution as imagined obviously isn't coming. Instead of watching TV and movies and letting your brain rot, form reading groups to bone up on your Aristotle and work to change groups you're in locally until we have a better idea of how to respond to how modernity has evolved"
Basically the most Jordan Peterson "clean your room first before changing the world" branch of leftism I ever heard about and it had people TERRIFIED. Totally baffling
Finally got around to rehosting it. https://www.ahponen.fi/p/book-review-fundamentals-of-marxism
Excellent review, thanks for the link!
Following up with the comment on your post, I've also had some interaction with the SWP (US variety, i live in America) in the past, and I would have voted for their candidate this year if she'd been on the ballot in my current state of residence. As you're aware, the US and UK SWPs are quite different ideologically.
I have experience in meeting the UK SWP, and they gave me a strongly cultish feeling even before the rape allegations etc. came fore.
The UK SWP is Trotskyist, as far as I know. The US SWP is more 'orthodox' Marxist, and since the fall of the Soviet Union is pretty strongly attached to Cuba.
Interestingly enough, they're one of the few far-left organizations in the US that's currently pro Israel as well as critical of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
"Here are some notable names leading communist countries and their professions before politics: Nikita Khrushchev was a metalworker, as was Władysław Gomułka, the general secretary of the Polish Communist Party. Walter Ulbricht of the German Democratic Republic was a joiner. Yugoslavia's longtime leader, Josip Broz Tito, was a machinist. The same applied to the Western communist parties. Maurice Thorez, the longtime leader of the Communist Party of France, was a miner, for example."
This is a really good point, and one I make to people all the time. One could extend the list much further, of course.
The one leader of a postwar Warsaw Pact country who comes to mind who genuinely was an upper middle class intellectual (maybe there are others that I'm not remembering) was Enver Hoxha in Albania, and probably not by accident, he was also the most ideologically extreme / wacky.
I think you're generally right about how communism was never a genuine mass movement in the Anglosphere countries (minus Grenada and Guyana, i guess, and maybe modern South Africa if you consider that Anglosphere), compared to what it was in much of continental Europe and the rest of the world.
That said, it's worth noting that the longtime leader of the Communist Party USA (a Finnish-American, interestingly enough, who grew up speaking Finnish) was genuinely working class, started his adult (well, mid-teen, actually) life out as a logger and miner and grew up in a literal log cabin in Minnesota.
Yes, CPUSA had pockets of working class support, such as famously among Finnish-Americans, but Gus Hall was nothing if not loyal to Soviet Union and as such followed the Soviet general strategy for Communist operations in America.
Re 23, yeah, this sounds like the kind of thing I live in. Chinese cities consist of lots of these walled high-rise complexes, with mainly pedestrianised space between the buildings, which is lovely, because you can just let your kids out to roam in a fairly safe space.
Most Chinese apartments are much too small for American tastes, I'm sure, but in some of the better complexes the flats can be pretty big. As for soundproofing... I dunno, I've never found it a problem. How quiet can you make a house anyway? How quiet do you want a house to be? In the city, there's usually some traffic noise. In the country, there's country noise. And lots of houses creak and gurgle at night... I'm not really convinced by the sound worry.
I think this is largely cultural. Anglosphere countries have a really, really high preference for total silence at home, and sharing walls with neighbours or living directly on a busy street is an unacceptable level of noise for the typical Anglosphere resident. When I first migrated to Australia I couldn't sleep because it was perpetually far too quiet for me. Even now, when I travel to remote regions for work, my colleagues often complain about the ore train noises - but I like the ambient noise personally.
The Chinese norm of being woken up by a yelling street vendor or other urban noises is unthinkable in the west.
Re 43: "all banks are like this in a correlated way, and it would be nice to have some means of financial system access which isn’t like this."
I'm not convinced by this at all. I don't see why the "financial system" should be set up so that anyone and everyone can use it. In part, this is just a numbers thing: in fact, out of 1,000 irregular users who get screened out by banks, 999 of them are doing crime. (And I have no problem with banks screening out people who do crime.) And for the other 1... it's not obvious to me why an entire complex global system should be set up to serve them.
Individuals deserve respect on a moral level, and they deserve political participation on a social level. I don't see that they deserve banks.
Do the crimes they're doing have anything to do with banking? Those are the crimes bankers should be trying to avoid. Let them work to their strengths.
Police, on the other hand, are approaching this incorrectly. They should instead let criminals try to legitimize their activities by banking, and investigate banking activities that can lead to evidence of their actual crimes, and prosecute those.
Tyler Alterman’s claim does sound plausible. It’s like a scientist who builds a computer model to understand some complex phenomenon in the world and then gets sidetracked exploring all the artifacts of the model, conflating them with the phenomenon in the world they originally set out to explore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVTS_J7Xmxs&ab_channel=DrBenMiles
About an improved insulin which I hope is successfully sensitive to the amount of glucose in the blood so it turns itself on when there's too much and off when there's too little, but also about the intriguing idea that there isn't a good pipeline to get scientific discoveries to common use.
The universities are chasing breakthrough research, and development is boring. Venture capitalists want something better developed than a research paper to work with. So a lot of promising research doesn't become anything useful because no one wants to do the dull part.
Ben Miles is working on investing in development so he might be biased. Or he might be right.
I was surprised that sports betting might be more drastically damaging than other addictions. I'd like to think that MLMs do more damage, but I could be wrong.
Is small-scale sports betting (like office pools) legal?
According to my go-to legal source on gambling (the movie Molly's Game, lol) gambling is generally legal if all the bets get paid out to the players. That describes most casual/social gambling (home poker game, office pool, bingo, etc.).
You run into legal issues if you as the game operator try to turn a profit, which you'd do by charging people a flat fee or a share of the pot.
Online sports gambling is kind of uniquely terrible because it combines the addictive, at-your-fingertips-24/7 money wasting of freemium/loot-box mobile games with the near universal popularity (among straight guys, anyway) of sports.
You can squander your life savings on an MLM, but it takes time and hard work and there'll be clear warnings signs for your friends and family, like the garage full of junk and MLM Facebook posts.
Mobile gambling is more like alcoholism -- you can ruin your life in secret, 24 hours a day, without anyone around you being the wiser until your spouse notices her credit score has fallen off a cliff and the debt collectors come knocking.
>You run into legal issues if you as the game operator try to turn a profit, which you'd do by charging people a flat fee or a share of the pot.
Often, flat-fee arrangements have been determined to be legal. In Texas, at least, poker rooms that charge a flat fee per hour to sit at a table have been adjudicated to be legal, while taking a rake (a percent of each pot) is extremely illegal.
In the movie the make-a-profit-while-not-taking-a-rake thing is a legal grey area (in CA and NY, anyway). So she makes her money on tips and her lawyer basically tells her: don't break any _other_ laws while you're making a small fortune on tips because you won't be prosecuted for the tips in isolation, but if you break other laws they'll charge you with running an illegal casino plus the other stuff.
>I’m not usually a fan of accusations that cultural Marxism is a “conspiracy theory” - some leading leftists said they should take over institutions, leftists did take over institutions, you don’t have to be a Nazi to wonder if these two things are connected.
This is too charitable. I generally hear "Cultural Marxism" used as a snarl word - "I want to call my opponents communists, because everyone agrees that communists are evil, but they aren't proposing any actual communist policies so I'm going to say they're communists *in spirit.*" Most of the time it's not even used about economics, anything "woke" is presumptively communist.
Given how often you've reiterated that you shouldn't call Trump supporters "fascists" unless they're openly proposing "round people up and put them in camps"-tier policies, I think you should have a similar policy against calling people Marxists unless they're actually proposing to seize the means of production.
Cultural Marxism is just a convenient short-hand for the collection of political philosophies of Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and Marcuse (all of which are most definitely Communist in their political and philosopical leanings) that are quite often implemented today. Common phrases like "the Right side of History," "voting against their own [class] interests," "late stage capitalism," and the "Paradox of Tolerance" (the exact phrase may be Popper, but Marcuse explored the political implications) are all very much tent poles of Cultural Marxism as a philosophy. Specifically addressing your objection, Cultural Marxism does not require, and in some interpretations does not even advocate for, Marxist economic policies. The liberation it advocates comes through other means.
I would submit that Cultural Marxism combined with Neo-Liberal economics is the most accurate description for most of the Left as they exist in the Western world today. It is not a slur, it is an accurate description.
Calling Trump supporters "Fascists" is not the same thing, as it's not remotely close to accurate. Among other things, Fascism requires strong central state apparatuses, and Trump's commitments to cut or scale back many of those apparatuses flies in direct counter to charges of Fascism. One can argue endlessly whether they constitute good governance, but it's not really debatable that Mousilleni would be unimpressed.
> "people seem to obsess over (to the point of centering their lives around) various forms of lowbrow art from Harry Potter to Marvel to anime."
I think it's a mistake to assume that Harry Potter and (some) Marvel and (some) anime are "lowbrow."
Edit: I didn't make it clear that I meant "just yet." I suspect Rowling is going to follow the same trajectory as Dickens; wildly popular but considered to be mostly pulpy "trash" in her time, then regarded as great literature three to four generations later.
I know little of Marvel and anime, but I read the first three books of Harry Potter and found them pretty vacuous. It seemed like the world-building was ad hoc, and the books seemed to forget what happened in previous books, such as always starting in the tiny room under the stairs, despite the foster parents learning their guardian was a person of some import to other people. The sport of quidditch seemed designed to make the protagonist win, and the supporting players a little less than background.
Many of Rowlings choices are in the style of - if not a direct homage to - Dickens, specifically tropes like character names designed to sound like character traits and the exaggeration of protagonist / antagonist actions in relation to the protagonist (especially for secondary and tertiary characters). The Dursleys utter dedication to domestic villiany is thoroughly Dickensian, and intended to be enjoyed as such by adult literate readers.
It'd be one thing if you noticed that intention and were complaining that Rowling was too derivative. There's a good argument that The Worst Witch + Dickens = Harry Potter.
But given your specific complaints here, it doesn't look like you actually understood Rowling.
Y'know, everyone talks about the similarity of motifs between Rowling's books and those of other fantasy writers. No one ever talks about how derivative its plot may be. Consider:
A young boy is living with his uncle and aunt because something awful has happened to his parents. The uncle dislikes the boy, and when an opportunity presents itself he happily packs his nephew off to a private school. On the trip to the school, the boy makes some friends, but also makes a bitter enemy of a wealthy and arrogant boy also on his way to the school, and during the year various plots and pranks are practiced between the cliques that form around the two boys. On arriving at the school, the boy also makes an enemy of a teacher who thereafter delights in embarrassing and punishing him, but the boy acquires a protector in the form of the wise and kindly headmaster who has for some reason taken a shine to him.
Halfway through the fall semester, the boy joins the school sports team (sports are very important at his school) and his skill on the field wins an important game, heightening his reputation.
Gradually, the boy and his friends realize that the teacher who hates him is executing some kind of evil plot. They investigate and frustrate it at the climax. During the denouement, the boy discovers that the father of his wealthy rival may be complicit in whatever awful thing it was that befell his father.
The match between the plot of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" and that of Edward Stratemeyer's "The Rovers Boys at School, or The Cadets of Putnam Hall" (published 1899) is not exact, but the books track so closely in structure and basic incident that it's impossible to read the two without suffering a very strong sense of deja vu.
Rowling was writing a parody of school stories, in a fantasy setting. So yes, it’s deliberately derivative of school stories. It’s also why so much of the language used by wizard characters has an Enid Blyton flavour.
It also has quite a lot of satirical content about British society, which I gather isn’t very visible to those outside Britain.
As I mentioned, there are some very good arguments that Harry Potter is highly derivative! I've never heard of The Rovers Boys at School, but The Worst Witch was an *extremely* popular children's book series about a British boarding school for magic. It was published in the mid-'70s to '80s (Rowling would have been 10 when the first book was published). It doesn't line up as exactly as The Rovers Boys at School apparently does, but it has a lot of magic boarding school elements in common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Witch
Personally, I don't mind if a work is derivative if it manages to significantly improve upon the work that went before it. That could be setting a story in a more compelling genre or focusing on a different point of view character or, or, or...the list is endless. "First" doesn't necessarily mean "best!"
I agree with the points about derivative works. I found The Sword of Shanarra to be a fairly blatant rip-off of The Lord of the Rings, with a powerful wizard character, a BBEG, a weak protagonist who turns out to be needed, etc. If you found enough original material to find Harry Potter entertaining, then more power to you.
But if it can only be properly appreciated by a timeslice of British people who can better understand the inside jokes, then I doubt it will stand the test of time. Shakespeare had lots of jokes that were current at the time and now need explanation, but it also had a lot of timeless content.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm not criticizing Rowling. There's nothing wrong with close modeling, even of plot, so long as the work itself is transformative, which (at least relative to the Rover Boys) Harry Potter certainly is.
BTW, the Rover Boys were parodied in a Merrie Melodies cartoon, "The Dover Boys", available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDN0LKfurCw
And to close the circle, in the comments you will find people blithely applying the infamous "Dumbledore said calmly" joke to one of the cartoon's trademark lines.
“If you don’t like it, it’s your fault for not understanding the genius of it” is, respectfully, kind of obnoxious.
FWIW the complaints noted above match what made me pretty lukewarm on Harry Potter. Some fun stuff to read on a beach or a rainy day, a whimsical aesthetic for kids to cosplay, but it doesn’t hold up that well to scrutiny.
But I also find Dickens wildly overrated so maybe I’m just a Scrooge.
Strawmanning people's comments with exaggerated and incorrect rephrasing is, respectfully, also kind of obnoxious.
I meant exactly what I said, not what you imagined. Arrk Mindmaster's *specific* objections appear to indicate literal ignorance about Dickensian tropes and Rowling's deliberate use of them.
With respect, you have given no examples of Dickensian tropes used in Harry Potter. I've read a little Dickens (which sounds awfully odd out of context), but it was long ago, and know of nothing that would make something sound like something Dickens may have written. It is not reasonable to expect me to now read the body of Dickens' work in order to understand Harry Potter better.
> "specifically tropes like character names designed to sound like character traits and the exaggeration of protagonist / antagonist actions in relation to the protagonist (especially for secondary and tertiary characters)."
Someone usefully wrote about Dickensian characters in Harry Potter for me: https://scholarworks.uark.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1301&context=etd
With the arguable exception of my use of the word “genius”, I stand by my paraphrase. Your objection to Arrk is a specific example of the general form of argument trope where a critic’s fair objections, rooted in their own taste and experience of the work, are condescendingly dismissed because they failed to “understand” some obscure allusion or theme in the work. Intended or not, it comes off as a sneer, as if you are saying, “you just don’t get it because, unlike me, you are not well read enough to appreciate it”. No you didn’t actually say that exactly, and may not have meant it, but the subtext comes through loudly.
Especially since you haven’t even answered why any of these derivations or allusions actually mitigate Arrk’s complaints! If the ad hoc worldbuilding, Quidditch, and characterization of the Dursleys is an homage/rip-off of Dickens or a British book from the 70s, so what? It’s a genuinely interesting factoid and I’m glad you shared it, but why should it really change Arrk’s (or my, since I have similar issues with HP) experience of the novels?
With a few exceptions, a book (especially an adventure novel for kids!) should stand on its own, and, as Arrk has said, if understanding Harry Potter requires a comprehensive understanding of Dickens and the literary criticism around it, I’d say it’s rather failed. It’s a nice Easter egg for British book nerds, but it’s not a crutch for weak world building.
I think you've changed my mind; I'll actually go ahead and semi-embrace your strawman exaggeration as being essentially correct at its core.
I indeed don't consider Arrk (or you) to be qualified "critics" of Harry Potter, given your individual specific objections about world-building details which were *intended* to be whimsical, if not actually absurd. Cultural details like Quidditch rules arise from an alternative universe of cause and effect which is fundamentally based in the whimsical and the absurd (magic!). Of course wizards have weird rules for their weird flying broom game! They don't even have normal physics!
You can of course say that the work was not to your personal taste because you don't like whimsical or Dickensian stuff or whatever, no matter how well it's executed.
But that's different from declaring that something is bad because you misunderstood the author's intent and thus did not perceive when that intent was achieved. Personally, I'm actively annoyed by the entire "men engaging in black market crime to feel powerful" genre (Breaking Bad, Scorsese's organized crime movies, etc), but I would never argue against the objective high quality of those works merely because I, personally, think that operating in black markets to feed one's ego is inexcusably stupid. Breaking Bad is objectively successful at executing its intention, and so is Goodfellas. I don't *like* either of them and don't want to see either of them again, but I acknowledge their greatness. They achieved their objectives at an extremely high level. There's no rational argument otherwise.
Beyond that, there are entire categories of art on which I might express my personal taste, but would never attempt to defend as legitimate "criticism." I know almost nothing about music; I don't have anything much to say about what's objectively "good" or not. There are ethnic cuisines I don't know well enough to differentiate the mediocre from the excellent (or even if there's something about the foundational flavors of that cuisine that I'll never enjoy). I can't say anything intelligent about sports (if we want to consider pro sports a kind of performance). It goes on and on.
Dickens is an influential writer to this day because he had actually important things to say about his society.
Rowling may have started with important messages that she wanted to say, but a lot of it didn't go anywhere once she made her fortune and became hypocritical. She had interesting insights into class in the UK, in the form of the House system, but abandoned those themes in the later books. She maybe had interesting thoughts about activism (SPEW arc) but they didn't go anywhere. She might have had interesting subversive ideas about gender, but she ended her book with the extremely normative "happy ending" of getting hetero married and having kids and sending them to school. Whatever she had to say on the topic of school bullying is bizarre and unfocused (Snape's entire arc).
It's entertaining, but not particularly insightful, because Rowling is an entertaining but not particularly insightful author. She has a lot of things that seem like the beginning of an insight then completely fails to resolve them into a coherent message.
A lot of the deeper analyses of Harry Potter are done by people who bring so much of their analytical framework to the table that they might as well have written it themselves. There's reading between the lines and then there's bringing a microscope to do that.
Pratchett would be what I call an insightful author, and he doesn't need a microscope.
i think its less that the worldbuilding is ad hoc & more that like....now tolkien-style worldbuilding is in fashion, but in the past it was more like "in the land of faerie, where all the stories are true," & the more stories you knew the more richly you could populate your world. rowling is clearly more doing that. tolkien's worldbuilding is incredibly lovely but a lot of tolkien style worldbuilding is thin boring & uninspired even if internally consistent-- i think pretolkien-style worldbuilding is great too
Countless different authors have made anime or Marvel comics; let us not paint them all with the same brush.
Harry Potter, on the other hands, is one author's work, and I agree with Arrk Mindmaster here. I read the first book, and it was very banal, therefore I don't expect the sequels to be Shakespeare.
Feel free to see my response to Arrk Mindmaster; I think both of you perhaps failed to see the craft and authorial choices Rowling was making throughout her work.
Only time will tell if Rowling eventually ends up being regarded as highbrow and included on the same "classics" shelf as Dickens and Dostoevsky. I'm just saying it's a little too soon to tell.
7: Joke on them, shot-hair tomboys are cuter anyway.
Shot? with a camera?
shot through with another color?
It’s one of those things that’s cute on a very particular type of girl, but most people who end up trying that are not that type of girl.
Also “pixie cuts” proper don’t code that “tomboyish” to me. They seem equally likely to be something very femme girls go through a phase of trying out.
Pixie cut + Obesity is a rather unfortunate combination. If the *goal* is to repel men, though, it's hard to beat!
I was aware Santa Muerte is a narco-saint, and I had head of Jesús Malverde.
I was not aware this is an entire category of saints.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-saint
What does it actually mean when they claim that Santa Muerte has "29 million followers"? What's the definition of a follower, and what is even the source? The Wikipedia article gives zero sources for this particular number - it says the following: "Since 2001, there has been "meteoric growth" in Santa Muerte belief, largely due to her reputation for performing miracles.[29] She has roughly 12 million adherents, with the great majority of concentrated in Mexico, the US, and Central America. In the late 2000s, the founder of Mexico's first Santa Muerte church, David Romo, estimated that there were around 5 million devotees in Mexico, constituting approximately 5% of the country's population.[30]"
...but these numbers are obviously smaller than 29 million, and why should we trust Santa Muerte church official (who is apparently competing with other claimants) on face value, anyway? The article cited later in the Wikipedia entry (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mexicos-top-two-santa-mue_b_8253318) offers no sources, either.
Hey Scott, thanks for linking my discussion about Cobenfy! I was wondering if you would mind linking directly to the article on my blog instead/in addition too the repost on Seeds of Science - I can use all the exposure I can get.
https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/a-new-therapeutic-for-schizophrenia?r=5s3xs
Done.
Thank you!
Re. Dylan Matthews' claim that EA donations amount to <$1B/year. The NYT article mentions (and I had also heard) that Dustin Moskovitz pledged billions of dollars to EA causes. I assume this is over a long period but still, does it mean he personally accounts for >10% of all EA giving?
Oh definitely, I wouldn't be surprised if he and his wife account for more than half. It's not an optimal situation, but they have $20 billion and you need a *lot* of other people before that becomes less than half of your movement.
Here's to hoping we get there soon. I was also somewhat surprised in the opposite direction that there aren't a handful of billionaires or near billionaires driving down the Moskovitzes' share. Guess I was fooled by the "EA has captured the Silicon Valley Elite" narrative.
I think there is one other highly committed EA billionaire (Jaan Tallinn, though he might be high nine figures rather than low ten), but there's a big difference between $20 billion and $1 billion!
Supposedly some of the EAs at Anthropic might be really rich now, but if so they're doing a good job keeping quiet about it.
For the point about noise and high rises, I think this is mostly a solved problem.
Most high rises are built with concrete floor plates which isolate sound phenomenally. You’ll basically never hear “mouth vibrations” from above or below (stomping on the floor itself will still translate unfortunately).
So the bigger issue is internal walls and I think that with bigger floor plans and easiest thing to do would be to make each unit a corner unit and minimize the amount of wall space they share.
Ideally you’d design the building to have no shared walls, with the units always being separated by hallways.
This plays well with the courtyard idea. Basically have multiple separated towers joined by catwalks and or common spaces on some floors with the vast majority of units having no shared walls.
I live in one of the world's first high-rise residential buildings. It was built in the late 20's, the internal walls are made of gypsum blocks, and I have heard my neighbors speaking through the walls exactly once over the last four years. (That was a special case, with an angry man screaming at someone so loudly that I wondered if I should call the police.) Wikipedia says buildings in the USA haven't been built this way since the 20's, but buildings in Europe still are... I wonder if any Europeans can comment about their gypsum block experience.
I've lived in three high density housing situations in the US.
1. WW2 era military barracks converted to university dorms. Cinderblock walls, could not hear anything from the units on either side or above / below.
2. 2010s era "texas donut" university housing. Given what you said (and my impressions) I would expect this to be pretty poorly built, but I could also never hear any of the people I shared walls with or the people above / below me (expect for that one girl who did yoga at 8 am right above me, when I just heard lots of random thumps on the ceiling). However, the internal walls of the units were shit so I could totally hear my roommates conversations ... which leads to believe they were intentionally sound proofing the walls between units.
3. 1910s era Tenement / row house. Floors are not sound isolate so we can sometimes hear conversations / the TV from the unit below us. The walls are between 3 and 6 feet of brick so we've never heard anything from the unit we share a wall with.
I think a much bigger concern with urban noise is windows. In both the university housing and the row house most of our noise issues are people having parties / conversations outside which leaks in through our poorly noise isolated windows.
But this is also a solvable problem. I work in a modern "glass and steel" office building and you literally never hear anything from the outside even though its got floor to ceiling windows.
My place has had the original 1929 cast-iron single-pane casement windows replaced with modern "city windows" that resemble the originals (this is a historic building) but almost completely block out pretty much everything quieter than a siren. Actually I can hear a siren right now but even that is less loud (but more shrill) than a person speaking quietly. I like showing off to guests by opening one of the windows a tiny bit; instantly the fairly loud background noise of being near a busy road becomes audible.
I guess what I'm saying is that residential windows are a solved problem too (as long as you don't open them). With that said, window replacements like mine are expensive - thousands of dollars per window, although I presume that much of the cost is due to the the difficulty of retrofitting an old building.
18: my country is also currently being destroyed by online gambling (and its enabling cousin, online money lending). What's funny for me is that both are relatively unheard of before 2022, and it gives me hope. If it can grow exponentially for 2 years, it may be able to be utterly destroyed in next 2 years.
Which is your country? Are there any English language resources about what's happening?
Its Indonesia. I first thought it'd not attract large international media attention (like every other news from Indonesia, the invisible giant) but google returns more than I expected. I guess the most reputable one I can find is https://www.reuters.com/technology/indonesia-vows-crack-down-blood-sucking-online-gambling-2024-06-14/ .
About the 2022 part, graphs I can find attribute the rise more to 2020 so maybe I was mistaken in seeing a graph from TV. But then again the rise is exponential so maybe the 2024 rise is so significant that 2020 rise is dwarfed? Even so it still looks like a fairly recent phenomenon.
About #17 - the nazi-inspired flag represents pretty much a south-american indigenist flavored version of ethnonationalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocacerism
Counterpoint: Bluesky is super duper cool. They did not just build a Twitter clone, they built a protocol which makes it hard to just thrive on a network affected prison population by giving a credible path towards another organization coming in and hosting the same posts, social graph, etc.
Now what's TBDIIC (to be determined if it's cool) is whether you can actually run a tech company without that moat
Can you elaborate a bit more on what you describe as a credible path towards another organization ... ?
Am thinking to give bluesky a try!
Happy to, the idea of “credible exit” (I heard it for the first time at Bluesky) boils down to: it must be feasible for another organisation with some resources (but not a crazy amount of resources) to spin up their own infrastructure and participate in/provide an alternative to the Bluesky network. Seemless account migration, without losing one’s contacts included! I’ve heard it also being described as the last network effect recently.
This is in contrast to the protocol behind Mastodon which instead optimizes for ease of spinning up any instance participating in the network, at the cost of not providing ease of migration or as “global” of an experience as Twitter or Bluesky.
Further reading:
https://bnewbold.net/2024/atproto_progress/
Kind of technical from one of their engineers
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t
Also him, in response to a (very constructive) debate with one of their mastodon protocol authors
Cool in theory. In practice it seems like it’s an echo chamber for a lot of the worst elements of Old Twitter. Jesse Singal’s foray there has been illuminating in a not good way.
I don’t have a lot of context with Singal but the posts I’ve seen of him felt like unproductive bait, milking replies for his Twitter audience. If there’s something substantive about him I should read I’d be interested
His actual writing is all worth reading. His Economist article, which he linked as his first BlueSky post and got him immediately made the most blocked person on BlueSky and accused of pedophilia, receiving death threats and piss fantasies, is well worth reading.
He gets into dumb Twitter fights, I’ll grant that. Twitter and its clones do not bring out the best in people. But blaming the reaction of BlueSky to him on him “baiting” them has a distinct air of “well look what she was wearing, she was asking for it”.
More to the point, if linking a piece of professional journalism in The Economist about a detransition lawsuit counts as “bait”, that rather proves my observation about the BlueSky population.
He deleted all his posts so checking what he has been up to has gotten a bit trickier. My context is this:
https://glaad.org/gap/jesse-singal/
And my memory of him posting about some interaction with a sympathetic-to-him kiwifarmer (a site that boils down to abuse coordination).
So what I’ve been seeing of him had a “just asking questions” vibe to him, which with that background, feels pretty far from victim blaming.
From the little I know, he seems like a bad actor and I sumpathesize with my trans friends not wanting him around.
But yh again, I know little, if he or anyone else responded to the numerous GLAAD accusations in a reasonable way, I’d be interested in catching up more with that debate.
GLAAD is not a good faith actor on this topic, at all. He’s spent years doing professional, careful journalism about the science of youth gender medicine, and more recently defending NYT’s coverage of the same, which landed him on GLAAD’s shit list because it doesn’t support the GLAAD party line on the topic. He was also subject to more bad faith objections surrounding his reporting on a whistleblower from a gender clinic, largely related to (extremely and obviously false) claims that he published personal medical information in violation of HIPAA/HIPPA.
Dismissing this as “just asking questions” is extremely unfair, but I’ll excuse that as a product of your unfamiliarity. Anyway he’s written extensively on this and other controversies about himself on his Substack (which is partially paywalled, but I think he’s made some of the relevant ones public), and talked about it on his podcast (blocked and reported, which I’ll warn is a more freewheeling snarky thing than his more serious published work and substack).
If you need an endorsement, Scott clearly reads him as he links to one of his posts here. You can also of course read the Economist article and his 2018 piece on detransitioners in The Atlantic that made GLAAD et al decide he was untouchable, and judge for yourself.
Sorry busy week before the holidays, hence late reply:
What GLAAD talks about and what I cross checked with wiki that I found interesting is his Defense of Zucker. To me that reads pretty clear cut as aligning oneself with regressive values over health maximizing outcomes. But I guess now I’m just saying the same thing about him that he is saying about his detractors.
Ultimately this would require a literature review which would take a long time to do for me, so I’ll pray to the Scott’s of this world to do it instead.
Until then, I’m going to stick to the devils I know, friends and acquaintances working in the field, deeming practices like Zucker’s a danger to health.
I’ll try to get informed about the doxing next, but with him reposting Kiwifarms, I’m not hopeful I’ll find much sympathies for him there.
Scott quoting/linking to someone only makes me update to “can say interesting enough things”. Scott being a master of decoupling and all (vague memories of him arguing at length with some aristocratic neo reactionary pop into my mind).
Update: I read some more on the question of doxing. I agree that he didn’t dox in that instance he cites.
Critiques that I did find that I didn’t seem him address boil down to: he has a transphobic harassment friendly fanbase, his enthusiastic use of reposting other people puts targets on them (sth that’s more frowned upon in general on Bluesky than over at Twitter), and “them” are often an already marginalised group that already has too deal with enough random ass internet death threats. IMO there exists an obligation to think about how your followers act, and to culture them (sth Scott does a commendable job at).
(One source I had for this was http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2017/12/my-jesse-singal-story_11.html)
My summary so far: probably not a doxer, most likely not well equipped enough to write and hyper engage on the topics he chooses (maybe he just got caught up in the social media frenzy of it all). Definitely can understand with trans friends seeing him as a danger. Not sure the evidence is tight enough to ban him as a harasser, I wouldn’t mind if the hammer comes down on anyone expressing the slightest of Kiwifarms sympathies (like he did)
Link 49 (NYT and Notre Dame): Please link the NYT article directly so we can check it out ourselves? :)
Re: Saint Muerte, I think Christianity's advantage was almost entirely in the fact that it was evangelistic while paganism wasn't. Get people to try convincing other people of paganism over Christianity, a lot of them are going to succeed. Despite coming after paganism, Christianity effectively has a first mover advantage.
> The block of Tsargrad TV’s YouTube channel came [1] in 2020 after the US sanctioned its own Konstantin Maolfeyev, a Russian oligarch who the DOJ said [2] was instrumental in the country’s [...] 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
I'm pretty sure English grammar doesn't allow for this. To break the binding between "said [2]" and "came [1]", you need to change the tense of the verb. I'd suggest "who the DOJ has said".
That's an incredibly tiny detail of syntax, do you always read every line of text with this level of precision? Are you a linguist specializing in syntax, or a literary editor, by any chance?
Well... do you agree with me that the sentence unambiguously identifies the DOJ as having made, in 2020, a statement about the events of 2022?
When you read that sentence, does the fact that there is no way for it to be true not bother you?
No, in my reading the two verbs are not temporarily linked, and the DOJ would have said its thing later, after 2022. But I'm not a native speaker, so my intuition may not 100% track the finer points of English grammar.
Well, my description isn't quite complete - "said" might be linked to "came", or it might be linked to "sanctioned". But in either of those cases, the suggested sequence of events is impossible.
The syntactic phenomenon here goes by the traditional name "sequence of tenses". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_of_tenses
What it means as applied here is that the past tense of the sentence "the US [now] proposes to sanction Konstantin Maolfeyev, a Russian oligarch who the DOJ [now] says was instrumental in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine" is "the US proposed [in the past] to sanction Konstantin Maolfeyev, a Russian oligarch who the DOJ said [at the time] was instrumental in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine".
You could hypothetically mark an explicit time for "said" to refer to ("a Russian oligarch who the DOJ said, when we inquired, was instrumental in..."), but that hasn't been done here, so it's stuck referring to the time of the channel blocking or the sanctioning.
As I was saying, I think I detect a language geek! 👋👋
The wikipedia article only talks about the simple part where the tenses of quoted verbs shift towards the past ("he said he was going"). I didn't find an explanation for the binding of reference times between two verbs in the same quoted tense, but I trust you must have learned it somewhere.
From my non-prescriptivist point of view, the question I would ask is: do most native English speakers have this intuition? Does it hold in all English-speaking areas?
> I try to err on the side of liberty when it’s at all plausible, but I think Zvi makes a convincing case that this has destroyed too many lives for too little gain
I think, to make this argument, you'd need to show that the same system has the same effects elsewhere in the world. The US previously followed the unusual practice of banning sports gambling. Before we attribute current problems to the new policy, shouldn't we see whether those problems also exist in places where the same policy isn't new?
The fact that a transitional period causes problems isn't a good argument that we need to stop having policy transitions.
>Banks are unaccountable amoral actors who have no qualms about cutting you out of the global financial system if an algorithm says people vaguely like you have posed a regulatory risk in the past, all banks are like this in a correlated way, and it would be nice to have some means of financial system access which isn’t like this.
Sort of, but there's also some giant flashing signs of who they *can't* deny based on algorithmic analysis of risk. They can't deny *people* vaguely like you, no no no. *Businesses* vaguely like you, especially along somewhat-prudish lines, yes. Crypto will never be useful to the average person, though.
I think it was also Patrick Mackenzie that wrote about it being practically a rite of passage for young analysts to recognize the most direct way to credit scores being improved in accuracy is to use zip code, and then being taken aside for explanations of why they don't do that, along the lines of the government coming down on them in fire and blood.
"They can't deny people vaguely like you, no no no. *Businesses* vaguely like you, especially along somewhat-prudish lines, yes. Crypto will never be useful to the average person, though."
Isn't that disproven by them denying crypto founders as well as crypto businesses?
I haven't followed the crypto debanking story all that closely, so... unsure.
Probably depends on the demographics of crypto founders. I'm assuming they're mostly not from the demographics that the government goes out of its way to protect from banking's algorithmic bias.
Strong recommendation of Patrick McKenzie (Bits About Money).
A reasonably good AML intro: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/kyc-and-aml-beyond-the-acronyms/
A somewhat-longer and recent piece on the crypto side of things: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunking/
I wonder if the deal with using zip codes would be changed now given recent legal precedent. There’s been a glut of cases about using zip codes for school admission as a proxy for race, which have seemingly all resulted in wins for the schools using them. I’d be happier with the converse though: if credit score companies started using zip codes, got shut down for that, and then that precedent was used to stop the schools.
49. You say you've learned that it's necessary to say "I'm not saying the horrible thing you're desperate to attribute to me" all the time. But sometimes, despite these fervent denials, they're saying it anyway.
I'm sorry I can't remember the specific incident, but not long ago you made exactly that accusation to someone else. You wrote that they believed something you found objectionable; they wrote to you that they didn't believe that; you apologized and retracted the accusation. Then you went and read the entirety of what they'd originally written and concluded that, no, they did believe the original thing after all, so you retracted the apology.
36.
Maybe the program generating the labyrinth is not directly accessible, we can only see its output (the labyrinth) and from that extrapolate what is the program. One would hope it'll get repetitive after a while and stop going in there too often.
Also, Dylan Matthews response was notoriously *bad*, not good, and in my vague circles led to much more negative reaction than the NYT piece itself.
It (or perhaps, rather than this article alone, he?) practically is a caricature of the "evil and humorless" approach that you've spent so long pushing back against that looks at the repugnant conclusion, says "good, actually," and burns down everything beautiful. He is saying the horrible thing! There's no dodging that wrench.
> "The idea is: rich people may want to donate money to causes that appeal to them. A rich person whose child died of a rare pediatric cancer might be more interested in donating to cure rare pediatric cancers than to bednets or whatever."
I thought the next sentence was going to be "and so we inject specially tailored miseries into the lives of these rich people to make them sympathetic to more high-impact causes"
Came to the comments to make this same joke :P
And then they give their children rare pediatric cancers!?!?
You're not wrong. The best way to get everyone to care about AI safety is to have an AI kill a lot of people.
the difficulty is in making sure it leaves large numbers around to care about AI safety
And that's why I'm donating money to charity eradication.
6: "Polygone Riviera" isn't the name of the place, but the former name of the building itself (a shopping mall). The town is called Cagnes-sur-Mer.
Thanks, fixed. Do you know the story behind it? I couldn't find much in English.
Unfortunately, there isn't much in French either.
I don't know the place, but it (kind of) reminds me of Antigone, a completely neoclassical neighbourhood also in southern France, filled with monstrous oversize quotes of classical architectural motifs :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigone,_Montpellier
The Cagnes-sur-Mer building looks like the non-classy, shopping-mall version of the same idea.
42. A good, working use case for crypto is Lofty.ai,, which uses the Algorand blockchain to tokenize rental properties as legal Wyoming DAO LLCs. Having done a fair amount of real estate investing, I expect this model to become very popular over the next several years.
Why is it good to tokenize rental properties as Wyoming DAO LLCs?
It’s the only legal way to have more than 100 shareholders in an LLC, which makes it easier for people to invest $50-100 at a time.
How is evading regulations a legitimate use case?
Ponzi and grey-market all the way down...
It’s not illegal. DAOs are specifically allowed to do this in Wyoming, Tennessee and Vermont. All corporations are organized under state laws.
Legal isn't the same thing as useful.
It's been very useful to me and my shareholders, which is what I said in the very beginning of this comment chain. Previously you called it "evading regulations" but now you've moved the goalpost to say I'm not finding it useful. Okay.
They have their own tokens, which are worthless without their involvement. Since you have to perform all your activities via lofty.ai, and trust them to actually give you whatever they claim they will when the blockchain records say they ought to, what does the accident of them using a blockchain instead of a traditional database actually add, other than hype and costs?
“Tokens” is just another word for shares or units. I also do conventional real estate syndications and these are materially no different, but a lot easier to move around in terms of custody.
Also, tokens are traded on a DEX via smart contracts. The income is collected by me, then passed through to shareholders as USDC. No different than any other syndication that pays dividends.
Behind the Bastards did an epic series on Steven Seagal
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-steven-seagal-is-so-much-worse-than-youd-ever/id1373812661?i=1000421926086
Regarding "blankface" we have a related term in British English: a "jobsworth" is someone who enforces pointless rules out of fear or a desire to feel powerful.
From the stereotypical phrase "I can't let you do that, it's more than my job's worth".
I like blankface though. It immediately reminds me of the face police do when you ask them a question. It's less "I'm personally motivated to obstruct you" and more "I am professionally trained to avoid accountability".
Re 18 (sports gambling): Last week's Economist had an article (paywalled link below) supporting online betting. If I recall right, among the reasons to support online gambling were that people clearly get joy out of it and that it's less regressive than other gambling (i.e., because it draws relatively more white-collar folks).
I was surprised by the Economist's take, and maybe disappointed. I don't know that the Economist's argument was faulty, and I wasn't reading it with an eye toward preparing a counterargument. But it left me with the (odd) impression that the Economist wanted to get on some sort of bandwagon.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/12/05/americas-gambling-boom-should-be-celebrated-not-feared
Sports betting may be salvageable with some minor regulations, like limiting the number of distinct bets you can make, or requiring the bets to be made a certain amount of time is advance. Stopping the casino effect of rapidly pressing the slot machine button.
Re: 17, I usually hear this claim as being since the rise of mass media, which makes more sense because how many voters in 1800 knew whether Adams or Jefferson was taller? The presidents shorter than average were all from the 19th Century, and since JFK the shortest president was Carter at 5'9½ (who was the only one shorter than 5'11½). I also found the exceptions illustrative while looking at the list, because some people look taller than they are. For example, would you have guessed that Trump is three inches taller than Biden, or that Obama and Romney were the same height?
For 39, no not in college at least. We see chatgpt answers from students all the time, and in some ways it’s simply not a problem because chatgpt gives bad answers unless the question was incredibly simple. It just gives surface level answer in “AI”y prose, ie ideas don’t connect over distances and it mostly just gives lists.
#16 Inca. The Inca are absolutely fascinating. They attempted to not just rule an enormous territory from Modern Ecuador to Chile on the west coast of South America, but to socially re-engineer it it to a cultural and political unity. They did this without money, wheels, or writing. It is hard to know whether they could have succeeded because the Spanish showed up and destroyed it before it was 100 years old.
If you are interested I suggest reading: "The History of the Conquest of Peru" by William Hickling Prescott
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1209
It was originally published in1847, but is still substantially accurate.
Th closest modern analogies to the Inca are the 20th Century communist regimes such as Soviet union, Maoist China, and Pol Pot Cambodia. the fascist iconography is not that far off.
The whole Mesoamerican civilisation thing makes no sense to me. You've got a continent's worth of people sitting around for thousands of years being hunter-gatherers or farming the occasional proto-potato. But a couple of times a millenium a bunch of them in some random location independently decide to start up a civilisation, which inevitably winds up being all about pyramids and human sacrifices. Then they collapse after a few hundred years.
At least, that's my layman-level understanding of it, which is surely mostly bullshit.
you're conflating Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America, corn) and the Andes (Peru and Bolivia, potatoes - speaking broadly on food though, both plants spread) for one.
And empires/complexity rising and falling isn't just a Mesoamerican thing, look at the Dark Ages or the Bronze Age Collapse.
Yea I've only recently done some reading about the Bronze Age Collapse and it's pretty wild to think about. Seems deserving of more prominence in our basic-world-history type schoolbooks.
(This recent work is an easy read and was a bit of a gateway for me to more readings on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/1177-B-C-Civilization-Collapsed-Turning/dp/0691168385 )
To be fair, the Aztec and Incan civilizations were going through serious crises, but only collapsed due to aggressive war waged by a technologically advanced outsider after a lengthy struggle.
they did it without private ownership or much in the way of markets, either, which is the most impressive thing to me. (And is one reason why the Latin American left has traditionally looked on the Inca Empire as a big source of inspiration).
Yes, it was probably the most complete approach to pure communism ever. Read Prescott linked above.
The conquistadors wanted to recreate medieval Spanish society with themselves as grandees and the indians as serfs. That does a lot to explain the subsequent course of south American politics.
#18 There is no anti-gambling movement, and to judge from sports talk shows, the phenomenon has a rel base of popular support.
Sports betting is genuinely fun and I think a high percentage of people enjoy dabbling in it (even if it’s just a low stakes NCAA pool at work). But it clearly creates a lot of addicts, in a way that’s more rapidly financially destructive than even, say, alcoholism.
I like the proposed compromise of making it legal but only in person. I’m not a gambler really, but the most fun I had gambling in Vegas was placing a few bets and hanging out in the MGM sports book on a big college football Saturday.
> to judge from sports talk shows
FWIW they're often owned / sponsored by sports gambling so discussion of gambling is basically product placement.
I don't mean that as a conspiratorial thing -- it's just good business. There's a symbiotic relationship between sports coverage (which mostly loses money, but keeps people engaged with sports) and sports gambling (which prints money if people are engaged with sports).
Now in principle the gambling sites could just pay for ad slots, but then you get in an ugly bidding war with the other sports gambling sites, and people often tune out paid ads anyway. The equilibrium is common ownership, where the sports coverage is tailored to drive business to the affiliated gambling site. See, e.g. ESPN and ESPNBet.
Concerning EA: I was in Palm Beach for a business project and deicded that I wanted to go to the library one evening.
The library itself was a grand new building, very shiny, very modern. But the selection of books was paltry.
My SWAG was that donating enough $$ for the building meant that you got to put your name on the lintel, while donating $$ for books was just as tax-deductible, but didn't get your name anywhere.
Libraries around me are increasingly removing all their books, because nobody actually looks at them any more. Libraries around here are used for groups of foreign students to study. (Which is an improvement over the US where I understand they're mostly used as homeless shelters.)
I've lived in parts of the US (Boston) with a large homeless population and the libraries still had books, in addition to computers and printers.
I'm sure that homeless people showed up, as its something to do which doesn't cost money, and I imagine if I fell on such times I too would spend much of my day in the library. But they were reading books or using computers just like everyone else; its not like libraries were downsizing to make room for homeless services.
#20 I am living proof that you can eat a lot faster than you can exercise. Semaglutides saved me, not more exercise.
16. As a Peruvian I know that man very well from local news: That's Antauro Humala, brother of former President Ollanta Humala. Antauro was in prison for 19 years for killing 4 police officers when he stormed a local police station on an Andean town (Andahuaylas). He is widely regarded as a crank in Peru but some people say they would vote for him.
He stormed a police station and killed _four_ of them and got out after 19 years?
Not even the most lenient police-defunding U.S. jurisdiction of MAGA fever dreams could allow that outcome under present laws. (And if it tried to the resulting outrage would be front-page national news sufficient to change election results.) Unless there were mitigating circumstances I guess....did those police officers open fire on him first or something?
He took the police station as a "political statement" to force then President Alejandro Toledo to resign, the police officers of course fought him and then his brother Ollanta interceded to get him to surrender.
#23 The insulation problem might be solved by using massive wood structures:
https://www.axios.com/2022/04/26/wooden-skyscrapers-mass-timber
My guess is that they would not transmit sound very well.
Of course, making everybody put down wall to wall carpet with heavy padding would also help.
Staggered stud walls (https://www.soundproofingcompany.com/soundproofing_101/building-a-staggered-stud-wall) would also help a lot with minimal changes to current construction practices & processes.
Santa Muerte isn't replacing Christianity - my understanding is that it's an unofficial add-on to Catholicism, and most adherents continue to attend Catholic services also.
RE: the guy who wants to search the city dump for his lost hard drive, I'm with the Newport council on this.
First, the guy is an idiot. Or very unlucky. Or both. He has a snowball in Hell's chance of actually finding his damn hard drive. What's more likely is that he injures himself and then sues the council for letting him do something dangerous and forbidden, and given the kind of decisions I've seen judges make in such cases, he'll win even though he expressly sued to force them to do this. "Well you should have stopped him anyway!" will be the logic here.
Secondly, every chancer in ten miles is going to descend on the dump looking for the Hard Drive of Riches. They're going to get hurt and sue the council. Rinse and repeat.
Worse yet, laptops and hard drives really don't like being outside in the elements for long periods of time, especially in UK weather. Or crushed under hundreds to thousands of pounds of trash. Even if they find the Hard Drive of Riches, there's a very solid chance that the Bitcoin is unrecoverable.
Even worse, this is the dump for a large (by Welsh standards) city, and with the population contributing to it for some years, his will not be the only laptop of that brand in there, assuming it's even at all recognisable and not broken up into component parts. Even once they get through all the other hurdles, they'll have to cough up the data recovery fees for the clean room + forensic tech + magnetic force microscope platter scans on each piece of candidate hardware they find, in case it's what they're looking for.
On 33. and gallons, an insight not present in the twitter thread:
A disk's circumference (a circle) is the rate of change of its area as shown in this 1-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjmtmCT5N8Q. In other words, to increase the area of a disk you add more circles around it. Symbolically, if you differentiate the area formula (with respect to the radius) then you get the circumference formula.
Likewise, a ball's surface area (a sphere) is the rate of change of its volume. To increase the volume of a ball, you add more layers around it like an onion. Symbolically, if you differentiate the volume formula (with respect to the radius) then you get the surface area formula.
You could create a "gas solid" equal to the volume of consumed gas. If you set the length to the length of the car's path, then the cross-sectional area represents the instantaneous gas consumption (what MPG represents). If the car has constant MPG (like how my car assumes when it tells me what my mileage is each time I'm done driving it), then the solid is just a rectangular box.
In real life, a car's MPG is not constant and changes over your trip. A fully-detailed readout of your trip's MPG would be a "gas solid" that isn't a box. It would be a solid that has constantly changing cross-sectional area - some regions would be thick (spending much gas) and other regions would have thin area (spending little gas).
Somehow I had never considered differentiating the area formula as a mechanism for deriving the formula for circumference. What a fun comment, thank you!
52: Why is the FDA's review capacity so limited? It seems like fixing this problem is itself low-hanging fruit?
I don't know. Probably they get some limited amount of funding, and their mandate is such that the funding doesn't go very far. The government doesn't fund them more because it doesn't immediately pay off in political capital, and although there are some complicated ways that companies can help fund the FDA, the easy route (a company pays all the costs for assessing its drug) might be too conflict-of-interest-y.
Seems like this is easily solved with a big "rapid review fee". Take a simple non-blockbuster drug that pulls in, say $365 million/year. That's worth $1 million/day on patent exclusivity. Plus they probably have competitors (I've been in this industry long enough to know most NME NDAs are looking over their shoulders at competitors) they're racing to market against.
Current slow-walk timeline is, what, 10 months? If you set a fee of $10 million to review in 3 months, companies would absolutely pay for that. Then pharma aren't paying to direct the process, just paying a higher fee for faster service.
(Why not faster? All those site audits take time, but if the money is there they could do it faster, I'm sure.)
typo: "has area of area"
Re: 29 (on great art being novel for its time)
Anecdotally, I've just had this exact feeling that you mocked. I'd just watched Fritz Lang's "M" and found it a bit underwhelming. But once I understood that it was the original source of a whole set of film conventions (which I absolutely love)... Well, my perception changed a lot, despite the fairly obvious fact that this (almost 100 years old) movie is certainly not that great nowadays.
If I had to describe it, I'd guess that this is how it must feel to read when you read something like the bible for the first time as an adult. Something like "A-ha! So that's what Nietzsche was referencing when he wrote that awesome book".
Some insightful Chinese humor, to complement the Russian humor in 22: https://open.substack.com/pub/asteriskmag/p/a-chinese-internet-phrasebook
RE: Shrimp welfare
It seems to me that telling people shrimp feel pain is probably an infohazard, and may add some suffering on the human side that isn't being accounted for. Shrimp is a healthy, low calorie food that is desirable, reasonably affordable, and adds variety to the diet of people who carefully manage their weight. (There's only so much boneless, skinless chicken breast you can eat in a week, which is what these people are primarily told to eat for protein.) In light of the social cost and individual suffering caused by the obesity crisis in America, any information that might discourage the consumption of a healthy food has negative consequences that are hard to estimate but probably are big enough to factor in your equation. I'd also note that while humans and the animals we eat may both be able to feel pain, only humans are capable of future-oriented mental states, and so only we can experience the different sort of pain that comes from having our dreams and ambitions frustrated.
RE: Dock Automation
On a recent podcast, one of the guys at National Review (who is sort of a populist-leaner relative to the Buckleyite orthodoxy there) made the argument that dock automation is kind of a scam. Sure there are isolated things you can say "automating this clearly saves money", but when a dock automates they aren't only getting those processes that are obviously more efficient. They are instead buying a huge package of automation, put together by a company that wants to sell all these features. And given the nature of sales these days, I presume the automated features require constant maintenance and software upgrading by the company that created them, all the typical XaaS model nonsense that is designed to hook the buyer into paying forever for something he already bought. The NR commentator claimed a port in New Zealand was de-automating not for labor-friendly reasons but because it wasn't cost effective, and I assume this bloat is why. Maybe in a world where a profit-motivated dock manager could strategically target specific processes to automate, dock automation would work, but that won't be the case in a world where dock automation is almost certain to be a government-awarded contract to a company that cares more about getting you on the hook forever for a ton of services regardless of whether they actually improve the process. (And this may be the case even if you don't ascribe grubby motives to the automation company, probably there are lots of cases at a dock where if you automate X you have to automate Y and Z that are related to it, and when the automated version of Y breaks down neither X nor Z will work.)
Supposedly one of the automations the longshoremen refused at a port was literally a parking gate (as in, no you can’t have an unmanned gate that opens when somebody swipes a key card, you must have it manned 24/7 by a union employee). I can certainly understand not all automation being a panacea, but I think US ports are at basically “mandating buggy whip purchase” level of Luddism.
“Paying forever for something he already bought” doesn’t sound that bad actually when the alternative is “pay a guy 2024 wages for 1974 productivity, and then pay him a substantial fraction of that plus generous health bennies for the rest of his life after he retires in his fifties”.
just noticing the tension between these two sentences
> Approximately 1% of people have heard of effective altruism, and their opinion is mostly “I think it has something to do with charity, so I guess it sounds nice”.
> The world really wants to believe that effective altruists are evil humorless people who want to prevent every kind of good except raw life-saving and think you’re a moral monster for not agreeing.
The world mostly doesn't want to believe anything in particular about EA. they don't care!
Re: 16, Peruvian flags: that symbol is a Chakana, an Incan symbol supposedly representing the balance of the universe. New age types sometimes refer to it as an Incan compass. The red and white is the Peruvian flag. I guess there are only so many sacred symbols you can make using a few straight lines.
Re: 36, procedurally generated mental landscapes: a particularly fine and artistically valuable version of this is Carl Jung’s work in the “Red Book” where he plunged into his own psyche, met a tutelary spirit, and saw a bunch of really weird and psychedelic things Which touch up upon his interest in ancient history, religion, and psychopathology. Highly recommended.
Re 55: There is a Santa Muerte shrine open to the public in LA and it is absolutely metal, if you like that sort of thing. Not hard to see how the cult might catch on.
"There is a Santa Muerte shrine open to the public in LA and it is absolutely metal, if you like that sort of thing. Not hard to see how the cult might catch on."
Yes, as I said above, it is good imagery. No surprise there are lots of 'followers' especially since not much is expected from them.
Maybe we can think of it as a way of splitting the difference between Christianity and Satanism? You get the "badass" scary imagery and anti-authoritarian vibes, while still being ostensibly on the side of good.
It honestly does depend on what is meant by "Satanism". Some of the modern versions are just atheist-adjacent (if not actually atheist) "we effin' love SCIENCE!" who like to poke fun at conventional (American) Christianity and be edgy (insert eyeroll emoji here).
I don't mind Baphomet Christmas displays, as I find them funny more than enraging (mostly because they often get the original imagery slightly off and also because I have a sneaking suspicion based on nothing but feelings that a lot of the users have no idea where it came from and do think it's some original traditional pre-Christian symbolism) but I do blink at "Samuel Alito's Mom's Satanic Abortion Clinic". Yeah, that's a thigh-slapper guys, any other 14 year old teenage boy jokes to share?
https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/samuel-alitos-moms-satanic-abortion-clinic
Serious Satanists who believe in magic and the occult are a different matter. Again, some are on the Gnostic axis (what you call good is in fact evil, and what you call evil is in fact good) and a very small few are genuine devil-worshippers (though I imagine those are few and far between, and you get more of the Santa Muerte narco saint types than reasoned theology of the Crowleyan kind).
So if you want Edgelords who think dressing as Goths to pwn Grandma's non-denominational church are the way to go, eh. Scary imagery and anti-authoritarian (but you should really not be still doing this into your 30s and 40s) is not going to make me do more than sigh and go "okay, you do you". If Christianity really was overthrown in the morning, they'd have to rebel against cutting your hair/growing your hair/something else 'society' wants to force you to do but you're too cool for school.
Genuine devil-worship? Hard to put that one on the "side of good".
Though for those who hate compulsory schooling, good news! You may be eligible for a Satanic Temple scholarship!
"TST is pleased to present our Devil’s Advocate Scholarship to four students who have extraordinarily shown how compulsory schooling has dampened their creativity and inhibited their potential. Each recipient was awarded $666."
Who can not but be touched by this plaint from a middle-schooler in Texas whose mean ol' teacher made him write about animals:
"Here is something I hate: having to write whatever the teacher wants you to write. I like writing a lot but only when I can write what I want. For example, last year, my teacher wanted me to write about animals. I chose to write about penguins but I really wanted to write about ninjas. I had to do all this research about penguins instead. It’s not fair."
Ah, that makes me... long for the days of corporal punishment when this free-thinking little budding genius would have got a slap of the báta if he whinged about having to write essays. Clearly I am too mean to be a good Satanist!
> I have a sneaking suspicion based on nothing but feelings that a lot of the users have no idea where it came from and do think it's some original traditional pre-Christian symbolism
FWIW I donated to their original Baphomet Kickstarter, and IIRC they were pretty up-front about it being an artist's elaboration on a symbol invented by a medieval Templar-alchemist and then picked up by Alistair Crowley. However, they also took practical considerations into account; notably, their version of Baphomet has a flat lap that you can sit on, i.e. the statue can also serve as a park bench. I appreciate that sort of practicality in religious iconography :-)
> Genuine devil-worship? Hard to put that one on the "side of good".
True, but modern Satanists (at least the semi-popular ones) do not actually worship the Devil, as they don't believe he exists; TST certainly doesn't. Rather they espouse the moral/philosophical principles for which the literary character of Devil is (in their view) unfairly maligned, notably the rejection of blind obedience to tyrannical authority. By analogy, it is possible to say "we should all strive to be charitable yet just, like Santa Claus", without believing in a literal Santa Claus.
From what I can tell, Crowley-type Satanists believed in some muddled mystical mumbo-jumbo, but still not in a literal Satan.
Also, I should point out that atheists are often accused of worshiping the literal Satan, which I find rather amusing at times. "Yes but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist ?"
Re 31: It turns out Ashtar Galactic Command predates the 1977 broadcast by 25 years. People have been channeling Ashtar’s directives to humanity since 1952 when George Van Tassel first received telepathic messages from the Command’s interdimensional namesake. Since then dozens of other people have channeled similar messages, which usually involve begging the people of earth to lay down their WMDs and save themselves. Apocalyptic predictions were made and turned out to be false which hurt Ashtar’s credibility but did not extinguish it. These false predictions were largely chalked up to negative space beings who had rebelled against the Command. Little, loosely affiliated churches and religious groups happily and freely passed on Ashtar’s teachings for decades until the mid ‘90s when a new, more unified movement declared that no new channeled messages would be accepted unless they met 12 specific criteria established by the fledgling orthodoxy. This last development smells like a bullshit move to me.
44. Yet another reason we are short quality officers, terrible UI! Jonathan Ive may not be the hero we want, but he is the hero we deserve.
> people seem to obsess over (to the point of centering their lives around) various forms of lowbrow art from Harry Potter to Marvel to anime. I think that distinguishing this from the deep love and transformation of highbrow art risks assuming the conclusion - the guy who says Harry Potter changed his life is deluded or irrelevant, but the guy who says Dostoyevsky did has correctly intuited a deep truth. But we believe this precisely because we know Dostoyevsky is tasteful and Rowling isn’t - I would prefer a defense of taste which is less tautological.
I think this can be rescued from tautology. There are (at least!) two paths here:
1) Harry Potter is in fact highly aesthetically valuable. Nobody centers their lives around any of the enormous volume of low-quality YA fiction that gets published each year. Many people are very devoted to their love of Harry Potter. This is significant evidence that Harry Potter is in fact a very valuable piece of art.
2) The *ways* that people love lowbrow art are different than the ways they love highbrow art. People who love Harry Potter appear very different than people who love Dostoyevsky. Harry Potter fans have merch, they see all the movies and play the video games and so on. It's a very acquisitive sort of experience, a kind of yearning for More Harry Potter. People who love Dostoyevsky have an intense experience while doing so, and talk about how profound and powerful and beautiful it was, but they don't end up _craving more_. I think this quality of causing-craving-for-more is an important one to notice.
One could easily argue that 2 is a matter of opportunity - if more people loved Dostoyevsky, someone would be motivated to sell _Crime and Punishment_ merch, and then Dostoyevsky lovers would buy it, and so their apparently different engagement pattern is contingent. Perhaps so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think many people will reflexively dismiss 1 but I think that's not fair. It's the most successful childrens/YA literature of all time! Surely it has some real artistic value! I think HP is of lower quality than Great Literature in a real if hard-to-convincingly-explain way, but I still think it is of pretty high quality especially compared to its reference class.
(I, personally, have read and enjoyed Brothers Karamazov, and was unable to finish the Harry potter series in either book or movie form, just for the record.)
I'd like to propose 3) People who enjoy Crime and Punishment on a deep, life-changing level are also actually more likely to enjoy Harry Potter on a deep, life-changing level.
That might seem to put the lie to the idea of taste altogether, but to be clear, I also think people who enjoy Crime and Punishment are also more likely to hate Harry Potter with unbridled rage.
If I go look at a picture in a museum, I glance at it, notice if the colors seem pleasing, notice the skill. I'll try to spend a lot of time taking in all the details. "Look at how realistic the tablecloth looks and the shadows of its wrinkles." "Wow, the glass actually bends the light." "Wow, they managed to capture the reflection of the table in this person's eye using nothing but paint. That's really cool, they must have worked really hard to do that."
I have to do that because after I've spent 5 minutes doing that, my wife is going to want to keep looking at it for another half hour. I'll ask her what the hell she's still looking at and it'll instantly become clear that she's operating on a different level than me. She's noticing which things in the painting are references to historical art movements. She's putting herself into the head of the painter, trying to understand why this or that detail was important enough to include. And she's emotionally engaging with the artist in a way I can't. They are having a conversation.
And she's more likely to enjoy a piece of "modern art" that doesn't feel skillful to me (though not very likely tbh), or strongly dislike a piece that's put together skillfully but doesn't really communicate anything meaningful to her. That doesn't mean she hates "non-museum" art though! In fact she likes a lot of it, and dislikes a lot of it depending on whether it's meaningful to her. It's just that she's experiencing meaning on a second level that goes beyond "technically competent."
Likewise, a lot of people watch a movie and go "yup that was a movie, what's for lunch." I do not. I am constantly questioning why they shot it this way, why the character said this line, etc. And often there is a whole second layer or more underneath the technical competence and storytelling of a movie or novel. Being able to find that makes me more likely to deeply enjoy *both* Harry Potter and Cervantes. It's not an either/or. I think the reason it's mistaken for being either/or is that this tendency does mean that I'm likely to strongly dislike things that execute well on popular tropes without having that strong second layer.
Beautifully said.
Adding on to this with regard to Harry Potter, I find that it excels in a different way than (for example) the Iliad, which excels in different ways than Orwell. This is why fans of each work enjoy and react to them in different ways.
Harry Potter has excellent world building, wonderful characters, and a great plot. This lends itself well to things like fan fiction, discussions about the magic system, etc.
Something like the Iliad rewards a closer attention to things like meter, historical context, and translational choice. This lends itself to things like reading alternate translations, learning about the history surrounding the Iliad, etc.
Point being that excellence comes in different forms, some of which highbrow taste seems to like and some that aren't as highly valued.
> Harry Potter has excellent world building
…you can say many nice things about HP, but that one seems a stretch. The world is paper-thin.
> Something like the Iliad rewards a closer attention to things like meter, historical context, and translational choice. This lends itself to things like reading alternate translations, learning about the history surrounding the Iliad, etc.
What do any of those things have to do with the Iliad? Someone encountering it in its day, as we encounter Harry Potter now, would have none of these things except the meter. They are not an inherent part of the work. They are complications that come from the time and culture gap between then and now. They are the cruft of age and distance, getting between you and the work; if a definition of highbrow focuses on these things instead of the work, it is also cruft.
>…you can say many nice things about HP, but that one seems a stretch. The world is paper-thin.
I think the world of HP comes across as paper-thin because everyone has done a deep dive into the world to analyze it, which is the point at which the setting falls apart. And people did that analysis because that is a contemporary thing to do with popular works. I don't recall anyone sitting down with Tolkien and doing the whole analysis of how the society and economy of Middle Earth function.
If HP doesn't have depth, it does have breadth of world-building. People wouldn't be comparing which Hogwarts house they'd be in or posing with a Platform 9 3/4 sign or trying to hold 'Muggle Quiddich' games if the world didn't have some resonance.
> deep dive into the world to analyze it
Nah, it really only takes a momentary lapse in one's effort to suspend disbelief. Fake-Latin spell names? School that employs "guess the teacher's password" as almost entirely its sole method of teaching? An entire society of adults /that/ wilfully ignorant about the world they live in? It doesn't take world-building seriously at all. It's the J J Abrams approach, where everything else goes under the bus so long as the plot can move forward and the picture is pretty.
> I don't recall anyone sitting down with Tolkien and doing the whole analysis of how the society and economy of Middle Earth function.
Tolkien spent an incredible amount of time on this stuff, and therefore when people look - and a great many do look - there is plenty to find.
History, geography, geology, societies, economics, all of it carefully planned and intertwined. He constructed entire languages! All the names, dropped words etc make linguistic and cultural sense when you dig into the lore!
Do even a cursory search and you discover rabbit holes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Middle-earth - check out that reference list! Those academic papers!
You just don't get that with JKR. She paints vibrant, compelling colourful word-pictures, and she is great at characters and plot hooks, but scratch any surface and it's all empty underneath; just like the Hogwarts lessons depicted in the books, lots of shiny ideas concepts with no links between them.
> I think the world of HP comes across as paper-thin because everyone has done a deep dive into the world to analyze it
It comes across as paper-thin because it's not a world - it's a beautifully decorated stage. Stage decorations can be very elaborate, but they are not expected to be consistent, have depth or make sense. This is not their purpose.
It comes across as paper-thin because it's Doctor Who, not Star Trek. The latter employs tech advisers and continuity checkers; when a character pulls out their phaser or communicator or tricorder, the audience knows what the device is capable of. In the former, meanwhile, the Doctor flits from scene to scene and his screwdriver does whatever is needed to make the plot advance and the character developments happen. Both are very good at what they do, but their strengths are different.
"I don't recall anyone sitting down with Tolkien and doing the whole analysis of how the society and economy of Middle Earth function."
Perhaps no one sat down with Tolkien to talk about these things, but all this and more is in the works themselves. People have gone into far greater depth in Middle-earth than HP. The history is vast, detailed, and relevant. For example, Aragorn is the most recent in an unbroken line of over 30 kings, spanning 6000 years or more, depending on which lifespans you're considering.
> Perhaps no one sat down with Tolkien to talk about these things
Famously, they did that, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inklings
> This lends itself to things like reading alternate translation
Good news! In our fully commercialised dystopian world we aim to provide all things to all comers, and if you wish to enjoy Harry Potter in these high-brow ways instead of the low-brow enjoyment the hoi polloi content themselves with, you can: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1582348251/
"Excellence comes in different forms".
There's a reason that the Academy Awards include Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Sound, Best Film Editing, Best Visual Effects, Best Costume Design...
What’s your take on Master and Margarita? Is it high-brow because it is a beautiful work of art that is also relatively - but not totally - inaccessible to westerners, or low-brow because there are many adaptations, a vast amount of what would now be called fanfic (all Russian, natch) and a ton of merchandise?
What about Brave Soldier Schwejk? I’ve been to the branded cafe, very pleasant.
I suggest that how much merchandise a thing spawns is a function not of its quality but of its age: commercialised fandom is a relatively recent development.
Meanwhile, can you name modern western highbrow works that have not spawned hundreds of fanfics? AO3 is right there, so we can check.
…oh, wait, I see a search for “karamazov”finds 272 fanworks. Ooops.
Master and Margarita is one of the most widely read and appreciated Russian novels not by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky among Westerners, what are you talking about?
“Westerners who appreciate Russian novels” is not a large group. Meanwhile, fanfiction, merch and movies of it exist and are all popular, which by the gentleman’s definition above means it is low-brow entertainment like Harry Potter, not high-brow like Dostoyevsky (his examples, not mine).
That such a definition leaves something to be desired is my entire thesis here.
They're Scott's examples, just for the record
I don't know anything about either of those works.
From googling around a bit, Brave Soldier Schwejk (or "Good Soldier Švejk" seems to be more common?) seems to be a serially-published comic anti-war book. I can't find anyone writing about it in a way that suggests it's highbrow. This seems likely to simply not be a highbrow work.
From a little reading, Master and Margarita seems like it might be a highbrow work. At least some people seem to consider it such.
> Meanwhile, can you name modern western highbrow works that have not spawned hundreds of fanfics? AO3 is right there, so we can check.
If Ao3 has a way to filter on source material, I'm not seeing it. I went to spot check White Teeth, a modern western highbrow novel of high regard, and found that phrase used but no obvious connections to the original.
---
I don't think this is the real path to settling whatever disagreement we may have, though. If access to sales numbers and something like "number of fanfics on ao3," are both available, one could do some simple graphing to see if there are noticeable differences.
In the absence of that work being done, I am merely gesturing at something I have noticed. I find that I experience different kinds of works very differently. When I read a lowbrow novel, say something by Sanderson, there's a sense of wanting the next thing, of needing to know more about the story, of moving on to the next chapter, uncovering the reveal. When I read a "highbrow" novel, one of the things that's different about the experience for me is that it doesn't produce this sort of compulsion. I think these are connected. That's all. You may certainly disagree.
I really like The Master and Margarita, but I'd consider it middlebrow, not "high" or "low". I wouldn't consider, say, The Brothers Karamazov to be 'highbrow' either, it was intended for a mass market audience (and has traditionally been read by a mass public, at least in Russia). Same for, say, Dickens.
Highbrow is a term i reserve for, I dunno, James Joyce and the like.
Cochroaches of the sea
Not sure if some sophisticated joke I'm not getting, or just literal mail-order lobster spam.
Do you guys sell shrimp?
I...think I'm going to report this? As spam? But it's so obvious that it almost seems satirical, so, uh, apologies if this is a really clever joke and I just didn't get it
28. thanks for the link! & oops i accidentally deleted my comment so im trying again.
i dont think what i was saying was tautological. i think that any work of art that people are willing to pay direct attention to is probably in good taste, and that most works of art do not stand up to direct attention. eg--the results post for the ai art turing test--with the ai-created picture of the gate, it seemed like scott & ilzo were interacting w the picture very differently. my impression is that, & forgive me if this is presumptuous & im wrong, scott liked the vibe of the picture & stopped directly paying attention to it as soon as the vibe was established. the picture could have been very different in any of its details & if it had the same vibe, he would have liked it equally, and paid equally little attention to it. otoh it seems like ilzo actually looked at it, and it couldnt stand up to that. my guess is that ilzo likes art for its vibe & its representational content, but also needs the thing in itself to be actually something that you can pay direct attention to, something that's good in itself, in its own specificity.
then i think i defended harry potter as something that some children are clearly having a literary experience with, in a way that it is obvious no child is w captain underpants, or teenager is w the vampire diaries, & that you can easily tell from talking to those kids about harry potter that they are paying attention to it. but i would not for instance reread harry potter that much personally so im not gonna try to reconstruct how i rode so hard for it in the last comment
If I recall correctly, Bruce Schneier did a bit about whether your self-driving car was allowed to drive on a Saturday, during a conference’s Q+A session on AI ethics. He was, I think, joking. But here we are, with pretty much that example, unironically,
>Russia fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
I feel like this was a real missed opportunity. Shouldn't the fine have been 10^100 rubles? A literal google.
On #18, sports betting:
The fact that the sites ban smart-appearing gamblers makes them clearly the bad guy here. If you claim to offer people "freedom," but squelch those who actually achieve something with their freedom, you're evil.
You are clearly right as a realist matter. But my formalist bones are not satisfied.
No the popularity of Segal and his 80s cohort like Van Damme is extremely specific to the once Soviet world. For them, he was and is the greatest movie star of human history.
18. Seems like the fix here is to not let them turn away gamblers that are too good? That decreases the house incentive to encourage gambling--it's the shark users who are getting the money, not the bookie. This still lets every gambling market where we want to learn things about the underlying world (capital markets, prediction markets, etc.) operate. (Like, imagine turning someone away from the stock exchange because their stocks went up too much!)
36. There's something like this in one of Feynman's books--he gets interested in dreams, does experiments on them, and then realizes he's determining the results of his experiments with where he's focusing his attention, and then moves on to other topics.
42: The attempt to find an actual use case for crypto other than crime continues. And continues, and continues.
I think it's weird that anyone would object to an Incan revanchism movement based on a tenuous connection with the evils of German National Socialism, rather than its much less tenuous connection with the evils of the Incas.
> Bentham’s Bulldog responds to all of your objections to donating to shrimp.
I find this to be a very poor response as it doesn't respond to the biggest criticism: The author proposes that the suffering of a person is morally equivalent to 32 shrimp. Folks, myself included, disagree with this ratio.
Instead of making the ratio clear and supporting it, the author instead converts shrimp pain to human pain and uses human pain in their argument.
It is clear we can prevent shrimp pain. It is clear other charities can prevent human pain. The key disconnect is how shrimp pain should be valued. Instead of addressing this disconnect, the author sweeps it under the rug in a citation of a citation.
I wish Scott would stop giving BB attention. All his writing can be summarized, as he describes his interlocutors in the comment section of the linked post (https://benthams.substack.com/p/rebutting-every-objection-to-giving/comment/78374811), as "Adds nothing, is just annoying."
He’s got a real talent for finding seemingly absurd conclusions, see his recent call for the destruction of nature. I respect that.
If shrimp really do experience 1/32 the suffering of humans then they're literal utility monsters
I find Bentham's bulldog annoying too, but this doesn't seem like a huge problem
Can't you redo the calculation with your own estimate?
If you consider "32 shrimp is morally equivalent to one person" is correct, close to correct, or even in the right order of magnitude, their calculation is convincing.
It is difficult to estimate a ratio because shrimp intelligence research is not extensive. Research that does exist focuses on the smarter shrimp (e.g. Mantis Shrimp) rather than the shrimp we commonly eat (e.g. Pacific White Shrimp).
Based on what research we have [1], I would guess that shrimp are roughly as smart as ants. From that perspective, I reject Bentham's bulldog ratio of 32:1 and their most conservative estimate of 100:1. What should the ratio be? It's hard to say but I would put the lower bound somewhere around 100,000 shrimp.
[1] Observation of Agonistic Behavior in Pacific White Shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) and Transcriptome Analysis
"The global GDP for a millennium" doesn't approach it. It's closer to 15 billion times the age of the universe (at current yearly GDP)
>Banks are unaccountable amoral actors
That's a feature not a bug. I would much rather have my bank be amoral than heavily invested in a morality which might differ from mine. And they're VERY accountable: to their customers and their shareholders (much more accountable than the religious are to God, at least in this world). Amoral people, as long as they're sufficiently intelligent, can generally be relied upon to listen to market forces. That makes them predictable, which is exactly what I want from my bank. There's no telling what a religious zealot is liable to do. FTX might still exist had SBF simply been amoral.
All corporations are "unaccountable amoral actors", that's our capitalist system. But some banks are less moral than others - Wells Fargo, TD Bank...
Re #43. This:
"ordinary anti-money-laundering laws which predate cryptocurrency tell banks to be on the watch for certain dangerous transaction patterns, and crypto companies have those patterns. And after the nth time that a bank closed a crypto company account and the founder had the brilliant idea to game the system by running the company out of their personal account, the banks started closing crypto founders’ personal accounts too"
does not seem fairly to justify this:
"Banks are unaccountable amoral actors who have no qualms about cutting you out of the global financial system if an algorithm says people vaguely like you have posed a regulatory risk in the past"
In this instance aren't the banks simply following laws? Isn't the party responsible for "cutting you out of the global financial system" the legislators who wrote and passed those laws?
The problem is the grey area right next to "the law says we must debank you", which is labelled "we don't know whether we need to debank you or not, but it's cheaper and easier to debank you than to investigate it properly".
Yeah, sort of. The government says "we'll fine you a zillion dollars if you mess up" and lets the banks decide how not to mess up. The banks (very reasonably) get rid of their dangerous customers.
I would compare this to, for example, a bank in world without non-discrimination laws, which found that black people were 10% less likely to pay off loans and decided never to loan to black people. It's a perfectly logical business decision, but it sucks if you're black and want to be connected to the global financial system. And the more important banks are for living a normal life, the more you'd want to figure out some solution (either a different institution that doesn't do this, or non-discrimination laws).
This is why I said "amoral" rather than "immoral".
Yea that's fair.
> (#23): The only thing I would add is that there needs to be amazing noise insulation.
Modern, high-quality, buildings do have very good noise insulation. When I lived in Luxembourg, the neighbours next door wall the drums and you could faintly hear it if you were in the adjacent room (but just barely).
(Outside noise is a much bigger deal)
This was my original response to Zvi's article on sports betting:
This is how I know I'm temperamentally libertarian. You can give me all the evidence in the world about how letting people make their own choices means they'll make bad choices, and I'll still be in favor of it.
Zvi documents how allowing online sports gambling has probably caused a significant increase in bankruptcies, reduced savings, and an increase in domestic violence, and it was a mistake to allow it. The case is pretty compelling, but I can't get on board.
As usual, when it comes to banning things, this is your classic case of letting a few bad apples spoil the bunch. Sports gambling is fun! And almost everyone who does it has fun with it and doesn't ruin their finances. As Alex Tabarrok says, it's "no different from people buying Taylor Swift tickets." Zvi's numbers show that 34%-39% of people have placed a bet at least once. Any way you slice it, that's over 100 million people who chose to participate in sports betting at least once. If you ban sports betting, that's 100 million people you're saying can't place bets if they want to, in order to (maybe) prevent 100,000 bankruptcies each year. I can't find the raw numbers for the domestic violence numbers, but I expect it's less than that.
I'm one of those people who enjoys sports betting! Last year, I put $300 into a Draftkings account. During football season, I generally place a number of $5 bets every week on various teams to win and/or cover. It's great! It makes the games much more exciting for me! And I'm already annoyed at all the regulation which makes it annoying to do. As an example, for some reason, NJ doesn't let me log in with my fingerprint, so I can to type in my password every time I want to check my bets.
AFAICT, this is the usual experience - people casually placing bets with money they can afford to lose, for fun. Zvi even admits that for most gamblers, it's "a harmless form of recreation."
My least favorite thing about government, and authority in general, is the impulse to ban things for everyone when it's only a problem for a small minority. I hate it so much. Just let people do things! If a small amount of people can't handle it, direct your interventions at them. Don't punish the vast majority for the actions of a tiny minority. If I can gamble responsibly, I should be allowed to.
I would love a Scott write-up of "how much of art is an acquired taste?"
If I think about Coffee - initially it is an acquired taste, but once you get over the first hurdle, a great coffee tastes great no matter your level of sophistication, but if you're e.g. James Hoffmann you can articulate and appreciate it at a different level.
If I think about Beer - it has the same "initial hurdle", but if someone provides a new beer drinker who doesn't mind a basic lager some complex, award winning IPA or other overly hops loaded thing, it's entirely possible that they hate it.
If I think about Movies - there is so much path dependence in 'genre', but experts can pick up on things like mise-en-scene that may be overlooked by the casual enjoyer, but everyone can appreciate a good soundtrack or cohesive story. Those who claim true appreciation for the art can enjoy films where nothing happens (https://scottsumner.substack.com/p/much-ado-about-nothing), whereas the general viewer would find this a bad experience.
I had a friend who was deeply into avante-garde music, and he once told me he would never try anything too racy in the bedroom because he feared his personality type would lead him down a rabbit hole of fetishes etc. that left him unable to enjoy the vanilla stuff anymore.
Is the "problem" of architecture that there is limited new works, and all the stuff that is created solely in the domain of "acquired taste, unable to be appreciated without following a specific path of mental gymnastics", without any intermediary works that facilitate the public walking along this path? Is it even the path we should want to walk on (i.e. is there a natural convergence there, or is this some arbitrary local minima that the academy have just stumbled into)?
I feel this last question is the one Scott is trying to answer.
I had an experience like this where I attended a Scotch tasting as a fundraiser for charity and it destroyed my ability to enjoy normal Scotch, while I’m unwilling to pay the prices for the exotic and aged varieties that now suit my palate.
End result, I no longer drink Scotch.
Does anyone else find the Jane Street 2016 Election story dubious or at least missing details that would make it make sense as told? While the chart has unfortunately suffered some bit rot that it's now unhelpfully showing several days past the election too, the New York Times still has an archived chart of their probability of a Trump win in 2016 being updated throughout that day:
https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2016/forecast/president
Contrary to some current impressions of an extremely sudden reversal where Trump won over Clinton in a matter of minutes (and it feels weird even saying that about something slightly over 8 years ago), the reality of that day, both looking at the archived chart and as I remember it from that same page back then, was that it became very gradually likely that a Trump win was going to happen until it was certain over the course of several hours, the entire evening. Under such circumstances, what would it _mean_ to have the "results" a few _minutes_ early? When mass media "calls" a state in a presidential election, they're really just saying it such a high probability of it going a particular way that it's implausible for it to go the other.
As a sidenote, I've no particular like for the NYT for multiple reasons, and the treatment that Freddie de Boer has described in the other link can be another one, but they happened to be the site I was watching for election updates back in 2016.
I suppose maybe Jane Street could have scraped the raw vote totals and/or exit polls faster than media outlets and used that to update a private election model that they were effectively a few _hours_ ahead of common knowledge? That still doesn't quite add up as a tale of what happened, but it's more plausible.
Imagine the stock market was only you, and 10 other people, and you, and five of those people, thought that the stock market would tank if trump won.
"Being a few minutes early" means that you sold all your stuff a few minutes before the 5 other people who thought that the stock market would tank.
That's a rather different scenario, both in the number of people involved as well as more importantly the sudden difference in private and public information. My point is that there was no moment in time on November 8, 2016 where the difference could have been that big over the course of mere minutes. If you're supposing a very large difference in the probability of a Trump win, that's a difference of hours, not minutes. And the original claim was *not* that they were minutes ahead of a handful of others in the market, who could themselves have been hours ahead of everyone else in updating on the election results, but rather that they were minutes ahead of "mainstream media outlets".
The Rationalists are behind Big Kidney.
I would hope nephrologists would be behind hydronephrosis.
#33 The XKCD piece on units cancelling reminds me of my favorite example - the Hubble Constant units are distance/time/distance, so when you cancel the distances you get 1/time, which is a frequency. So the Hubble Constant is a musical pitch.
Also - if you take its inverse, you get a time value which is very close to the age of the universe. This must Mean Something.
Hah, I've taught this particular topic to college freshmen. And yes, inverting the time value of the Hubble Constant means something rather straightforward and intuitive (enough so that it's how the lesson approaches the topic in the first place).
Debris from any explosion will necessarily display the same behavior described by Hubble's Law: at any given time, the pieces further from the center are moving faster, because everything started in the same place at the same time. Or to put it another way, their velocity is proportional to their displacement from the center: v =kd for any piece, with k constant among the pieces. Subbing that into good old d = vt yields d = kdt or k = 1/t. So the constant of proportionality is just the time elapsed since the explosion.
Of course, the expansion of the universe isn't really an explosion: there's no center, the motion is due to the expansion of space itself and the early universe had inflationary weirdness that has no obvious analogy in a stick of dynamite. But as a simple model, it still works quite well for getting a handle on the basic situation. And using freshman algebra to derive a fairly accurate age for the universe just from a speed-vs-time plot of galaxies is a pretty cool trick.
I sometimes refer to the Hubble frequency as "universes per second" or "big bangs per second." But of course really it should be an upper bound on that number: it may be constant(ish) across space, but over time it ought to be falling. Not that we'd ever be able to measure that on human time scales.
39: At least ChatGPT can string together grammatically correct sentences. I graded hundreds of term papers and essay questions on exams while TAing a poli sci course at a middling university and most students had dismal writing skills. I'd likely be far less cynical about the education system if all of them had used AI to cheat
University spots should be slashed by some 80%.
my university had writing composition classes, for which I am grateful, and I went to a *good* public school beforehand!
Writing is a skill like any other, and in most cases it does have to actually be taught.
By dismal writing skills I meant, for example, paragraphs of sentence fragments with no independent clauses in sight. Surely even low quality high schools teach how to write complete sentences. Those accepted into university should be the high school students who have the cognitive ability to learn how to write properly after being taught the basics. It shouldn't take more than that since natural pattern recognition can take care of the rest if the student is smart enough to benefit from post secondary education (not counting the piece of paper as a benefit)
Side note: I noticed that the students leaning to math heavy majors wrote better on average than the social science/humanities majors
Coinbase not hiring crypto-unfriendly lawyers is not cancel culture. Coinbase's own success depends on crypto and crypto-friendly regulation succeeding, so it has a justifiable basis for avoiding them. Similarly it would not be cancel culture if Starbucks didn't hire anti-coffee lawyers. It would only become cancel culture if Coinbase refused to hire anti-coffee lawyers, because the only basis for that would be that their executives believe that being anti-coffee is evil and anti-coffee people don't deserve to have jobs or participate in society.
But you could say the same thing about leftist cancellations! Under your rules, it would be perfectly reasonable for someone to not associate with people who have anti-transgender sentiments because their well-being or the well-being of someone close to them could be jeopardized.
Nobody expects left-wing PACs to not discriminate against right-wingers. The difference is Coinbase acting in its interest as a business, or Coinbase’s executives leveraging Coinbase to advance interests that are different to Coinbase. You are totally free not associate with someone as an individual but not when you are acting as an officer on other’s behalf.
And what if the others want it as well? You keep talking about "Coinbase" as if it's some independent agent, but a company isn't some psychopathic entity blindly pursuing profit. It's composed of real people with their own values and motives. If the company's values and interests reflect the values of the people working there... what's wrong with that?
Scott, you know a great deal about many things I will never understand, but one lacuna in your knowledge seems to be streams of Judaism. The paper on AI was not issued by "a Conservative rabbinical assembly," it was issued by the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly, which is the rabbi's association of the Conservative movement. "Conservative" in this sense does not mean politically conservative (though some rabbis are) but indicative of the desire to "Conserve" the Jewish tradition. It's a brand name, not a political orientation.
Similarly, in your articles about early Christianity a few weeks back, you referred to assimilated Jews as "Reform," in the sense of "these Jews are kind of lazy and ignorant about Judaism,", but the Reform movement was founded (in the early 1800's) to <resist> assimilation into Christianity by positing that Jews are no longer bound by halacha, but nevertheless have a unique religious outlook and community. Whether they succeeded is a fair question, but the work Reform as a brand name in Jewish life has a meaning other than "doesn't really care."
Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and Jewish Renewal are the brand names in Jewish life; "Orthodox" is a generic label applied to hundreds of groups that have a similar outlook on the continued force of halacha, or Jewish law.
Great links post! As I read through, I thought of a couple of things to comment on. But now, after checking out that Covid bet details, not because I am hung up on the outcome, but because I was genuinely curious how they set the bet conditions, I have to ask:
For the love of God, why do they have 2 judges, and not an odd number?
On #9:
It seems clear to me from the article that the city's argument against allowing him to search the landfill is that everything that gets placed there becomes the property of the city, and he no longer has any legal claim to ownership of the drive in the first place. Which makes complete sense to me.
40: I think the real result here is MUCH more limited than the way it's being interpreted. I believe the result they found in the study, but I think the study mostly measured how much people knew about what AI poetry was like prior to beginning the study. It is interesting that people in this situation think that AI poetry feels more human than human poetry, but a huge reach for the authors to turn this into the title “AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry”, making it sound like it is a fundamentally difficult task for people with experience and/or some poetry knowledge. It very much does not mean that after a little bit of experience you cannot tell them apart.
Main evidence: I went through (nearly) all the poems in the study myself in all 10 conditions of the original study and correctly classified 84 out of 87 poems, and two of my mistakes were in the first round when I didn't know what I was doing (and I arguably only made those two because I thought the AI poems were going to be better than they were). Also, some of the trials were trivially easy. By contrast, I only scored 60% on the AI Art Turing Test, and it was very hard the whole way through.
Detailed explanation of my self-experiment and what I think is going on here: https://controlaltbackspace.org/ai-poetry/
A cursory glance at the study seems to be "we picked people who didn't read poetry, didn't know much about poetry, and didn't like poetry then asked them if they preferred the chopped-up prose style AI poetry or the obscure 14th century human poetry".
Well, duh, no wonder they got the result they did! Though I may be doing the AI an injustice by assuming it was the "chopped up prose" style of modern poetry. Any links to the actual excerpts/poems used?
I can see why they wanted "people unfamiliar with poetry" in order to avoid "Okay, I know this poem so I know it's by a human" effects but going for "people who don't like poetry" is a bit like going for "people who don't like wine" in a study to see "do people prefer the bottle of Two Buck Chuck or the expensive snooty Le French Le Wine Snob Drink?"
All the data is on OSF; here's a direct link to a selection of 10 poems (I think they used this one for the aesthetic preferences study):
https://osf.io/53qcr
Most of them had regular meter/rhyme and traditional formalist-ish styles, just executed poorly – the model was asked to imitate the style of a particular real human poet for each (sometimes with much more success than others).
> I can see why they wanted "people unfamiliar with poetry"
It's unclear to me to what extent they selected here, because they did have a measure of familiarity with poetry, and found it had essentially no correlation to performance (R^2=.0012). The methods section was *very* brief on all this kind of thing (maybe they have more details buried somewhere I didn't look?).
On athletes with bigger livers: Much of glycogen storage occurs in the liver. Glycogen is carbohydrates stored as a fast energy source for physical activity and is stored with added water, in muscles and in the liver. So that alone would explain why someone with high energy turnover (an athlete) would also develop a bigger gas tank (liver). Strangely, the original blog post seems not to mention this and the original article apparently says that scientists "speculate" about protein intake leading to larger livers. I would look at glycogen first as the thing that is inflating the livers of athletes.
I thought the same thing, but there seems to be evidence that:
-chronic liver glycogen storage does _not_ increase with training
-acute rate of liver glycogen depletion during exercise decreases with training
-chronic skeletal muscle glycogen storage does indeed increase with training
See e.g. https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpendo.00232.2016
Thanks for the info, that was a very interesting article on the entire glycogen regulation.
18 - Sports Gambling - I'm kind of shocked that no one has mentioned that Michael Lewis is currently in the middle of a podcast season about this very thing: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/against-the-rules Season four, episodes 5 and 7 are particularly relevant:
Anecdotal evidence performed by the podcast team would indicate that the big sports gambling companies are *EXTREMELY* good at detecting the skilled professional gamblers and then denying them meaningful access to the platform (either outright banning them or only allowing trivial bet amounts).
And also that they bombard the rest of the gamblers - the "losers" - with constant temptation. One company even *automatically* "upgraded" a normal bet into a high-risk parlay without informing the player!
I agree it's not bad. That's the point
> 7: Study: women who are more prone to intrasexual competition are more likely to advise other women to cut their hair short, especially if those women are of similar attractiveness to themselves. This study is too cute to be true and I expect it not to replicate; I link it for amusement value only - but, uh, still be careful about whose advice you take.
Pretty sure more competitive women are also more likely to actually think short hair is cool (since it's rebel-/masculinity-coded).
>If you read the Iliad, it either speaks to you and transforms your soul, or it doesn’t. Nobody says “I just finished the Iliad - give me a second to check whether it was novel for its time or not, so I can decide whether my soul should be transformed.”
Learning the context sometimes does transform your understanding of the work. When I saw the Venus de Milo, I was like "this just looks like Yet Another Armless Greek Marble Statue," and then I looked at the description and read about how the pose it's in was unusual and required new sculpting techniques to create and I'm like "oh, that's kinda interesting."
For a more modern example, modern superhero stories like Watchmen or Worm are often specifically targeting older superhero tropes that went unexamined, and while they're entertaining on their own merits you definitely enjoy them more if you're familiar with the tropes being skewered. They rely on the expectations created by other superhero stories to create the intended audience reaction.
"CFPB has...actually has been pretty principled in opposing debanking for conservatives"
This is false. As far as I am aware, the CFPB has never taken any action to oppose the debanking of conservatives. Singal is citing a court case where the CFPB was arguing to give itself broad "antidiscrimination" powers and presented the debanking of Christians as a hypothetical.
They'd hadn't taken any actions against debanking because their authority to do so was being challenged in court, and also because there wasn't yet any federal rule covering such actions by "non-bank actors" (PayPal et al). That the agency would center that issue in its court defense still does support Singal's point.
The agency's director had addressed the Federalist Society (!) in June to publicly promise that the CFPB would be going after politically-motivated deplatforming by payments platforms:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCjRHgFEUJY
And, following up on the director's June commitment, the agency finalized a new federal rule a month ago:
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-finalizes-rule-on-federal-oversight-of-popular-digital-payment-apps-to-protect-personal-data-reduce-fraud-and-stop-illegal-debanking/
All of which seems good.
“Did you hear that they erected a George Orwell monument in Russia?”
“Where?”
“Honestly, almost everywhere.”
I told my black neighbor this joke, and her response, "Who the F**** is George Orwell?"
Didn't you know that there's a moral imperative to "trust women of color"? Obviously this George Orwell character never existed.
At least she knows what Russia is. Presumably.
I once had a patient with cluster headaches, and because it is typical for the nostril to run and the eyeball to soften (enophthalmos) on the affected side, I admitted him to catch the expected 'headache' the next morning. When it started I took sinus x-rays and saw a completely whited out maxillary antrum on the painful side. After it resolved an hour or so later, they were repeated: normal! Definitely some massive vasodilation going on there, underlining a similar pathophysiology to migraine.
FYI, for me Substack has stopped alerting about responses to my comments here at ACX uniquely. It is still alerting me to new responses on comments I make elsewhere within Substack.
If there is some ACX-specific notification setting which I've accidentally disabled I am not aware of it (and would not have chosen to disable it).
Are there any cost-effective ways to increase shrimp suffering? It seems like Bentham's argument means that this would be more effective at increasing suffering than doing so to humans.
Well yeah, obviously. You can just farm more shrimp, or breed them for the express purpose of torturing them. It's obviously going to be much, much cheaper than breeding humans, though... I highly doubt that torturing shrimp would be that satisfying.
Regarding 29, I think art, in the form of paintings/galleries, invokes an immediate visceral response vs a novel or more long form piece of content. As a viewer, you're response is either primed or it's not. Take for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa. If a painting like the great wave was made by some Williamsburg transplant in 2024, no one would look at it twice. That isn't because the piece of art itself isn't as impressive, but it's because it has nothing interesting to say. The great wave (I can't 100% prove this) invoked a visceral response in the Japanese. The painting was created at a time of uncertainty of foreign influence, towards the end of the edo period which was defined by Japanese isolationism. If I were to look at the great wave, with no knowledge of Japanese history, I would think it was a cool painting of a wave. With added context, I can appreciate it more and sympathize with the feeling I thought it conveyed.
> The world really wants to believe that effective altruists are evil humorless people who want to prevent every kind of good except raw life-saving and think you’re a moral monster for not agreeing.
I mean... aren't they ? Yes, that phrasing is really prejudicial and hyperbolic -- certainly EAs are not humorless. But it sure looks like EA's main tenet is measuring the number of lives saved per donation. I understand that philosophically speaking this doesn't need to be the case, and that one could use EA methodology to devise an optimal donation to e.g. semiconductor research; but in practice EAs always seem to be counting lives saved (either immediately or in future projections).
And from a Utlilitarian point of view, I think it makes sense. For example, if I spend $1M on researching a new flavor of ice cream, I could make a billion people infinitesimally happier; but if I spend that $1M on mosquito nets instead, I could save the the lives of 100,000 or more people who would otherwise die in great pain and never experience any happiness ever again. Is there any rational (or perhaps I should say capital-R "Rational") argument for why I should let those people die just to make slightly tastier ice cream ?
Only fake EAs can be evil. I'm not an EA, but it is right there in the name: altruist. Those that want to profit somehow from being an EA are just EAINOs: EA in name only, which I recognize isn't exactly catchy.
I'm not an EA because the philosophy, no matter how intellectually satisfying, doesn't take distance into account, of any sort except for reducing the amount of giving. I think my family and friends are more important than acquaintances, who are more important than customers/business associates, who are more important than strangers, who are more important than distant strangers. I think human life/pain is more important than that of pets, which is more important than that of wild animals, which is more important than insects, which is more important than bacteria.
So if I can make lots of money for me and my family by making a billion people infinitesimally happier, I would definitely call it a win, despite being able to spend that money instead on saving the lives of distant strangers. And I would not consider reducing my standard of living to make the lives of shrimp easier, unless perhaps I fish or farm shrimp (which I don't).
#9: on lost bitcoin keys
Does anyone know of a service that uses tornado codes to secure bitcoin keys? They're error-correcting erasure codes. The idea is the data is encoded into N blocks, and any N-R blocks can be used to reconstruct the data. That gives you R-way redundancy without a single point of failure (like someone finding one of your private key backups). It's similar to RAID 5. Seems like the only sane way to deal with keys that unlock hundreds of millions of dollars.
You don’t understand the appeal of worshipping a female skeleton holding a scythe and a globe??
Named Santa Muerte???
"I guess this is specifically calculated to make me sweat, since unlike visual art I actually have great taste in poetry and am fiercely committed to it"
Okay, I get that this is slightly tongue in cheek. But only slightly. If you understand that there is such a thing as having a taste in poetry - then how do you not see the analogy to visual art?
Re: Hazimism: I think this is how sanctions should work. What use it is to sanction Russia or China when Turkey or Mexico buy from one and sell to the western world with a price hike?
Alterman's pity quote about psychospiritual mind journeys may be the most on-the-nose nominative determinism I've ever seen.
"Harry Potter, Marvel, and anime) seem especially lowbrow to me. They are all smart, complex works of art with interesting characters and deep themes..."
I guess you would call me, and Scott, a snob because those are definitely not "smart, complex works of art" in comparison to anything I consider those things. As others have mentioned, all of those are designed to appeal to the sophistication and attention span of teenagers. And yes, teenagers can be inspired to think deep thoughts and there's nothing wrong with enjoying what you enjoy but I have difficulty understanding someone that considers any of the things you mention deep let alone complex. Charitably I think I would call even the most loved Superhero movies unsophisticated.
I say this as someone who was really into comics in my young teens. I was totally blown away by Frank Miller's The Dark Knight and his work on Electra and Daredevil. They seemed to plumb the depths of the human condition and have infinite subtlety in how they told stories. That first issue of The Dark Knight series ruined all other superhero comics. By the time I was 14 I was over all of them. None of them seemed serious anymore. The first thing that steered me away from them was the comic book Love and Rockets then there was MAUS. After that I discovered "serious" novels from the likes of Hesse and Vonnegut. My good friend was still into Batman and the X-Men and I couldn't help but think I had outgrown him. I certainly had better taste!
By the time I finished by BFA in Film, Photography, and visual arts in the mid 90s, I was firmly ensconced in the appreciation of highbrow art. Almost got into a physical fight with my sophomore film major roommate that actually believed that Star Wars should have won best picture instead of Annie Hall in 1977 lol.
Is the word sophistication used anymore? I think that's probably a better term than highbrow. I think it paints a better picture of both the complexity/subtlety that people like me crave but also the value judgement we inevitably have over people that are moved by things we think lack it. I might enjoy watching The Dark Knight (I didn't actually) but it was never going to impress me let alone make me think I watched a great film.
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Happy Solstice to those who celebrate it! Live streaming of the sun coming in through the Newgrange megalithic tomb this morning - you need to jump around 1 hr and 25 mins into the video and there's a lot of unnecessary yakking while they wait for the sun to appear, but very faintly and gradually the path of light travels over the floor of the tomb as it has done for 5,000 years:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=776csdogJo0
In #22, the Putin joke about the vegetables is familiar in the UK from a TV sketch back in the 1980s about the domineering then-prime-minister Margaret Thatcher. I could well believe that it's an old soviet joke that we borrowed, but the research reckons it to be home-grown English: https://www.dirtyfeed.org/2024/08/and-what-about-the-vegetables/
Santa Muerte is best translated as Holy Death (not St. Death). Other examples of that usage are e.g. Santa Cruz (holy cross), la santa iglesia (the holy church).
As someone who claims to have taste in science fiction and fantasy literature and has read literally hundreds of such novels, I think that I'm reasonably qualified to say that the Harry Potter series is *genuinely good* and just because it's both newer and more popular than Dostoyevsky doesn't make it less worthy.
From the Bulldog post in Link 32:
>If we discovered that some people (say, Laotians) had the same capacities as us but were aliens and thus not our species, their pain wouldn’t stop being bad. [...] But if we discovered that the most mentally disabled people were aliens from a different species, their pain obviously wouldn’t stop being bad.
Here's the problem with this style of arguments: nobody actually has to play along with this. You can make up science-fiction stories about worlds where I'd reject my current moral beliefs all you want, but none of those stories are actually going to happen, and nothing forces me to pretend that those stories demonstrate anything about what you should *actually* do in the world that *actually* exists.
If you do want to play by the rules that any moral claim which we would reject in some imaginary fantasy story has to be rejected in real life too, then, by those rules, I can refute all the Bulldog's claims just as easily. All I have to do is make up a story where an omniscient infallible deity appears in the sky and tells everyone that all his claims are false, and then he's not allowed to make any of them anymore.
With regards to this specific hypothetical, one reason why it matters that we're not in the world described is that if we were in a world where extraterrestrials were able to flawlessly disguise themselves as humans, then we wouldn't be able to *tell* whether the victims of some harm were human or not, which would make prioritizing human pain over that of other species a much less practical standard than it is in reality.
My eyes glaze over whenever Scott glazes EA. I don’t trust him, I don’t trust the movement, and I find it more and more his secular religion.
#36: See "The Mind is Flat" by Nick Chater.
Regarding 29, Frank Lantz sounds, from your characterization, like a New Historicist. Some interesting reasons to pay attention to that perspective (understanding context can help you understand value), but when I was in grad school, I found their measuring of the value of a text SOLELY by its context and influence to be distasteful.
Reminds me of the guy I knew in film school who refused to have a personal opinion about any movie--he would just quote its box office to let you know whether or not he thought it was any good.