Re #17, while HUAC was reoriented from Fascists to Communists, McCarthy, a Senator, wasn't responsible. His famous "list" of infiltrators came a couple years after HUAC had investigated Alger Hiss.
Worth noting the builders remedy manifold market only has 5 trades right now (2 of which are mine). Might want to wait to see what it settles on once this article makes it popular.
I think they’re going to need to come up with a more compelling name than “vat meat” or even “cultured meat”... yet they’ll have to invoke the lab aspect if they want to get people to eat endangered species’ meat.
Intimidation, and the idea that melee feels much more in the right spirit than crossbows under anti-gun regs. Also, crossbows aren't great unless massed and at that point you are killing thousands of enemy troops.
Regarding #47--the polled question concerns satisfaction derived from a social cause. Wokeness isn't in itself a social cause, but more like a new religion.
#13 seems mostly false or at least highly misleading. They identified 160 cancer trials which recieved in total ~$5 billion in federal funding. They then assess these trials as saving 14 million DALYs. Dividing one by the other gives $326 / DALY. But the federal funding is not the only cost for the drugs saving these lives. An honest assessment would have to include the private funding for the trials as well as the drug development costs.
Regarding #5, Erik Berenson, if anyone can scientifically refute his latest critique I'd appreciate it. The way he writes is trustworthy, to me, but I would appreciate someone from this community checking his logic and primary sources before questioning the efficacy of the flu and covid vaccine to the extent he does.
Re: Berenson - I find his antivax stuff mediocre at best, but it's making him bank, so I kind of get it. His take on the media, however, I have found quite perceptive and interesting. The only place I heard it was the Grant William podcast (paywall), but he's probably said the same things elsewhere.
> Cancer research produces so many valuable treatments that it saves one DALY per $326 spent.
It would be very interesting to see how this claim fits with the seemingly opposite claims in Vinay Prassad's book Malignant. Obviously, one possibility is that one or the other party is simply wrong. I'm wondering if there is a more subtle possibility where they are somehow talking about different (but compatible) things.
The vice justice idea isnt very well considered. Let me list just a few issues:
First, this just shifts who does the assassinating. It doesn't eliminate the incentives. If you want to affect the court balance you now assassinate an old justice on your side who has a young (or at least healthier) vice justice. But fine maybe that's less likely.
But it also creates some really nasty procedural problems. Say Roberts dies from a fall down the stairs in his home. Some republicans in Congress allege (as they are incentivized to do) it was actually his wife who pushed him. The DA investigates the case. What happens in the mean time? Does Biden get to appoint a justice in the year the DA spends investigating? Does that mean the DA has the power to remove that new justice by filling charges? What if they offer the wife a slap on the wrist in exchange for a confession? She might want the vice-justice to be appointed and agree. Or just think a small fine is worth avoiding the risk of trial (the DA/DOJ's political preferences might mean they play along). If you require a conviction what happens if they accept a plea?
Ok you say the vice-justice only takes over if the assassin is convicted. Fuck, now the assassin has a *quite strong* case that any jury who might convict him is invalid because they have interests in the outcome (eg whether abortion becomes legal, including for them, depends on their vote). Shit, who hears the appeal on that majorly important issue of law? SCOTUS? Which one?
What even counts as assassination? Is it any charge or murder? What if the justice is in one of those states with 3rd degree murder or with a weird definition of 2nd degree murder. Or overseas? Maybe you say it's federal law. But that's a huge problem bc if the murder didn't happen on us federal land (or other circs) the federal government doesn't have jurisdiction and it can't take on advisory cases. Who is the opposed party?
It would be a mess. And this doesn't even get into what happens with assisted suicide or a train crash where it's ruled to be some kind of murder on the grounds of delibrate indifference to safety. It adds more problems than it solves.
Re: gay soccer players isn't an obvious explanation that a combination of homophobia, fear or homophobia and desire to fit it with what is seen as high status by those you want to date all discourage young gay men from going into soccer. Or that either the sex or the homophobia distracts them at a key stage in their career?
Don’t want to blanket defend the AEA but it does seem at least possible to me that there’s not much juice left to squeeze from inflation and other traditional economic topics (or at least that the juice has become harder to squeeze). It’s worth noting that “woke” economics has produced useful work like Chetty’s very clever research on economic mobility by zip code (and the disproportionate effect it has on men). As far as I can tell, global warming therapy has just produced a bunch of very sad teens and large insurance bills.
5. Alex Berenson is not, I think, related to the Berenson sisters who were models and actresses. Marisa is still alive. her sister died on 9/11 as a passenger in one of the airplanes.
Reading the selection criteria for the cancer funding effectiveness article says they limited the studies they looked at to those that found statistically significant results. Isn't that basically just looking at the successful trials and then only counting their costs?
18. Mars. Not thinking we should go to Mars with our current technology is not the same as thinking we should never go.
Chemical powered rockets just won't cut it. The trip to Mars is just too long and too difficult. We need to be able to build fusion powered rockets that can make the trip in weeks or months not years and can mover real tonnages of supplies.
>In theory this also paves the way for human meat, though regulators might have other ideas.
If human meat farms became very popular, would they serve as an incubator for new diseases, like current meat markets and factory farms but without the moderating factor of having to jump species?
I'm sure the current/first production facilities will be very sterile, but I wonder what that will look like if vat meat really does replace factory farming livestock and operates on the same scale as a global commodity.
>“I’m increasingly sympathetic to [the] theory that whatever psychosocial traits make men highly interested in team sports make them highly heterosexual too”.
Is 'getting beaten up by the jocks for being gay' a psychosocial trait?
I get that major sports teams have their players wear rainbow jerseys as a PR stunt sometimes these days, and I'm sure we all have impressions of very progressive and accepting schools as something that exists; but I would not be surprised if middle school and highschool sports and locker rooms still had a lot of cultural homophobia ten to forty years ago (when it would have been relevant to producing current and retired soccer players)
> Study looks at what happens when the FDA reclassifies medical devices from a highly-regulated to a less-highly-regulated category; in general, those devices get better, cheaper, and there are somewhere between similar and fewer deaths/injuries related to those devices.
Presumably the FDA has reasons for reclassifying those specific devices and not others (selection bias), so not much evidence for a general rule I would think. Would be interesting to know the same stats for cases where they moved something from less to more regulated (if that's a thing that happens).
>But it also claims autism genes increase linguistic ability but have no effect on math - doesn’t that contradict common sense? What am I missing?
Perhaps it has something to do with autistic women often being extremely chatty as a compensatory mechanism (dominating conversations to keep them in topics they understand and feel safe discussing rather than letting them drift into vague scary social stuff).
Or perhaps it just has to do with mildly autistic people generically becoming very focused on specific interests and ideas, in a way that often makes them read about those things a lot, such that they simply read more than the average person.
>Were there really more than twice as many sessions on global warming as on obsessive compulsive disorder? Three times as many on immigration as on ADHD?
I feel like there's a bias at play here with how well-established a field of study is, exacerbated by the type of people who present at conferences rather than publishing in major journals.
ADHD is pretty heavily studied at this point, I don't know how much you are going to add to the literature as a grad student or post-doc with near-zero budget, or even a junior professor trying to crank out things for you CV to put before the tenure committee, which in my experience is most of who presents at APA conferences. I think to add something new to the ADHD literature you sort of need a giant controlled study at this point, and the institutions that can afford that publish to major journals directly.
Whereas with a trendy new topic based on broad social issues, anyone can publish a case study or media analysis or w/e and have something novel to say. Not something useful, perhaps, but at least something they can say with a straight face is a new idea that hasn't been tested 10,000 times already.
Same for inflation and GDP growth, I would think.
>Psychologist Russell Warne looks into the evidence and finds that no, Irish IQ has probably been pretty stable during that time, though some of this depends on the definition of “IQ” and “stability”
Of course, the anti-'biodiversity' side can just look at this and say 'Oh, so the entire field can be wrongly convinced that an entire ethnic group had very low IQ, based on shoddy testing and reporting methods? Ok, that works for us too.'
> 17: Did you know: the Congressman who founded the House Committee On Un-American Activities was, in fact, a paid Soviet spy (tweet, Wiki article). This actually makes sense; he originally started HUAC to root out fascists, and McCarthy only used it against communists later on. “There has been a push to rename the street [currently named after the Soviet spy], but as of 2018 it has been unsuccessful.”
He also invented the Business Plot. That's still widely believed on the American left as a real thing. There is no evidence for it but it continues on as a conspiracy theory. Which is honestly depressing to me. Some Soviet agent made up fake news a century ago and there are still people posting it to the front page of Reddit to this day talking as evidence about how nothing's changed and the business community is a threat to democracy. Which was probably exactly its purpose a century ago.
> 34: Etirabys: In 1910, Argentina was the 7th richest country in the world. Starting around 1930, it flatlined harder than anyone had ever flatlined before, until now it is only about average for South America, itself a relatively mediocre region. Why? Etirabys brings up fifty years of incessant coups and countercoups centered upon Juan Peron and his opponents. @moritheil clarifies two additional points: first, "though the Peronists are often described as proto-fascist, First Lady Eva would in modern terms be called a social justice warrior . . . Argentina discovered identity politics decades before the US did". This is probably not the sentence you want to read about your country’s governing party if you’re hoping for economic growth. Second, during the period involved, Argentina accepted an extraordinary number of immigrants, especially from Italy (60% of Argentines are now of at least partial Italian descent), reaching percent-immigrant levels more than double the US at its peak. Those immigrants were an awkward combination of Jews and other refugees fleeing Europe just before World War II, and defeated Nazis fleeing Europe just after World War II. These conflicts created the fertile soil for the identity politics half of Peronism. Garrett Jones says that his new book on immigration has a chapter on this. Related quote: “There are four types of economies: developed, developing, Japan, and Argentina”.
The Peronists were not proto-fascists. They were just straight up fascists. You can read Peron's writings where he talks about how his movement is directly inspired by Mussolini but also how he has some disagreements with Mussolini. Argentina also objected to the Nuremburg trials and Peron's initial coup was backed by the Axis. Peron had multiple supporters who went to Italy for fascist training.
Italian fascism (and its offshoots) tended to be anti-racist because loyalty to the state and the collective social enterprise was supposed to come above narrow, backward ethnic concerns. You had things like minority fascist organizations under the broader umbrella of the party. For example, Italy had a Jewish fascist organization and more for several other minorities. It also was the first major Italian political party to have a women's organization. Needless to say, Hitler did not agree with any of this. But Eva Peron's position was very within the ideology.
But yes, fascist economics do not work.
Also, Argentina's immigrant population decreased throughout the period. The peak of their immigrant population was the late 19th century. But it was decreasing from a gigantic amount, possibly more than 90%.
> 44: Related: El Salvador's murder rate has fallen from 103 (highest in the world) to 7.8 (lower than US), giving its (Bitcoin-obsessed) president an approval rating of 87%, highest in the western hemisphere. How did he do it? Originally people suspected a truce with gangs, but that truce broke down and now he’s just trying mass incarceration at unprecedented scale, up to 2% of the population. See article for case somewhat against, first comment for case somewhat for. I would like to see a better analysis of how he was able to muster the state capacity to do this, and whether other gang-ridden countries aren’t doing it because of civil rights concerns, because they’re in the pocket of the gangs, or just because it’s too hard.
The President is left wing. He's managed to convince a majority of the El Salvadorean left that crime is a social justice issue, effectively. And the El Salvadorean right was, as you might expect, already tough on crime. This has required marginalizing some farther left elements and burning a lot of political capital in heavily arming the police, making it easier to arrest and prosecute people, expanding policies like occupying areas or random searches, etc. It's also involved ignoring several civil rights organizations. (These people claimed it was outreach efforts or a truce because, to be frank, it fit their narrative better.)
The other thing is that the US is bankrolling this. But that's not particularly unique. It's only a few hundred million dollars and the US has given similar amounts to other countries.
This is a wider trend in Latin America, by the way. AMLO's "abrazos no balazos" has turned into using the military against the cartels. (This militarization of the police is becoming more common too.) Personally I think it's partly due to increased Chinese influence. Communist far leftism might be, to some extent, crowding out anarchist far leftism. And XJP Thought is not interested in abolishing the carceral state or the state in general.
This is going to sound terrible, but I work in biological research and I strongly suspect that funding anything as well-studied as cancer has long gone past the point of diminishing returns. There are lots of reasons to fund it but "most lives saved per dollar" cannot be one of them.
There are occasional breakthroughs obviously, and cancer research has given us a lot of insight into how cells work in general, but given how expensive research is and how specific new treatments are, I really doubt that on the margin more cancer research is providing many QUALYs.
This is mostly just based on vibes and assumptions because I'm not sure how I'd prove it either way, but saying this is against my interests so I think you can trust me.
Is there a disproportionately large lesbian population within female professional sports (particularly directly competitive sports like soccer/football/hockey/basketball/lacrosse/etc.)?
> If not, don’t we have to start trying to do the hard thing at some point? (I don’t care about this because I assume AI will will flip the gameboard one way or another ...)
Isn't this a fully general argument against doing anything (or, at least, anything long-term) ? It sounds like an extremely high-risk, high-reward play, similar to the one made by the followers of Harold Camping.
#34: I dove into Mori's twitter thread and would like to raise some complications. Let me disclose my bias at the top in that I was motivated to do this mostly because "Argentina's downfall was caused by idpol and immigrants" to be a bit too convenient for right-wing political aims. Linking to each tweet would look uggo since you can't format links in comments, so I'll refer to them by placement in the thread.
Tweets 2-3: Mori references the "resource curse" as a potential explanation for Argentina's economic problems, which is a common poli-sci concept that holds that economies reliant on extractive industries tend to be more fragile and do worse in the long-term because they are beholden to international commodity prices beyond their control. This isn't a perfect concept, but it largely holds water. Mori says this is insufficient to explain Argentina's downfall, and I agree, but then she holds up Saudi Arabia as a counterexample, which I find to be lacking. Petrostates like Saudi Arabia benefit from the pricing power of OPEC, which helps mitigate the resource curse as these states can artificially reduce the supply of their primary export, thereby inflating prices and stabilizing their economy. Argentina's primary exports during its heyday were agricultural products, and could not benefit from an international cartel such as OPEC because 1) oil is geographically locked in a way that agriculture is not, 2) agriculture is subject to external shocks such as drought and disease that make it a less reliable resource, and 3) such international agreements weren't really on the table in the late 19th century. All this is to say that I think the resource curse problem is a bit more prominent in Argentina's economic history than Mori is giving it credit for, and that Saudi Arabia is really not a good counterexample for the point she is making.
Tweet 6: Mori glosses over Yrigoyen as a "radical," which he certainly was, but I want to point out that Argentine politics was already kinda offbeat before Perón. Yrigoyen's party, the Radical Civic Union, drew much of their political power from the middle class and focused on reforming Argentine institutions toward becoming more democratic, rather than advocating for any kind of class struggle. His economic reforms were left-wing but pretty similar in content to FDR's New Deal policies. The Radical Civic Union still exists as a political party today, and is aligned with the anti-Peronists. It's a bizarre country.
Tweet 7-9: Mori's characterization of the Perons is basically correct, in that Juan Peron started off as a pretty standard caudillo type and Eva drove the party toward a social justice message that resonated with much of the populace and afforded their regime a lot of goodwill from the public. Mori then moves on without establishing any kind of causal link between this and Argentina's economic collapse. The mere presence of a powerful ideology in a failing country does not mean that that particular ideology caused that country to fail. In my opinion, the failing of Peron's first regime can be mostly attributed to that ancient weakness of charismatic autocrats: the military never cared for him, and took him out as soon as they thought they could. If anyone has a serious thesis on why Eva Peron's social justice messaging caused the economic or political decline of Argentina, I would welcome discussion on that point.
Tweet 12-13: Mori paints the fact that Argentina was accepting immigrants from varied backgrounds as a reason for economic decline by way of cultural incompatibility. I would like to remind everyone that before the Chinese Exclusion Acts, the USA had basically no restrictions on immigration, and we didn't develop a full quota system until 1924. This made a lot of people very nervous, but all signs indicate that the US economy did pretty well during that period anyway.
Tweet 14: Mori makes a separate point here about the scale of immigration. Her figures for both the US and Argentina appear to be correct. I will quibble with the part about "descendants" making up over 60% of the population of Argentina today--I imagine a vast majority of Americans can also trace their lineage at least in part to Ellis Island-era immigration, but I can't imagine how that would be captured statistically. Again, Mori doesn't make an explicit causal link, and given that there's a pretty low n for "countries to which large numbers of disparate European ethnic groups flocked during the 19th and 20th centuries", I'm not really comfortable making an explicit connection between Argentina's high immigration levels and its economic decline.
Tweet 15: This summation seems to come out of the blue to me. The implication that Peronism's social-justice element combined with the immigrant makeup of the country led to political instability that tanked the economy is a feasible thesis, but not really strongly supported in her argument nor in my understanding of Argentine history. Political upheavals in Argentina were between the political elite and the military almost exclusively–there is very little mass movement politics in Argentina's history. Rather, entrenched politicians and the military have used popular movements as pretext to act in their self interest. This is a finer distinction, but I think an important one, especially when comparing Argentina to other Latin American countries like Cuba or Mexico, which also had flourishing small-l liberal governments in the early 20th century that imploded in one way or another.
I did fire this off pretty quickly, so let me know if I said something super idiotic! I have spent a decent amount of time studying Argentina and I like to take the opportunity to talk about it when it comes up. Fascinating place with really idiosyncratic politics.
DIE ZEIT: Mr. Hitzlsperger, you asked for an interview, why?
Thomas Hitzlsperger: I'm coming out about my homosexuality. I would like to advance a public discussion - the discussion about homosexuality among professional athletes. The topic always gets stuck in clichés - professional athletes are seen as perfectly "disciplined," "tough" and "hyper-masculine." Homosexuals, on the other hand, are seen as "bitchy," "soft," "sensitive." Of course, this doesn't fit. A homosexual professional athlete? Contradictions are built up here that have annoyed me time and again in my professional career. These contradictions are sold as sensations at the regulars' tables. I was also annoyed by the fact that it is precisely those with the least expertise who talk the loudest about the subject.
ZEIT: So why do you want to speak now? Has someone threatened to out you?
Hitzlsperger: That would not be a threat for me. What's the point? As a professional, I was a public figure that any sociopath could rub up against without much thought. In soccer, you can be accused of anything: "manic-depressive," "homosexual," "gambling sick," "bankrupt. But most common at the moment is "homosexual," especially with the gleefully denunciatory rating "gay."
ZEIT: You consider the term "gay" to be denunciatory?
Hitzlsperger: Yes, that is how it is usually used.
ZEIT: But why are you only speaking out now?
Hitzlsperger: I had to end my career as a professional soccer player - too many injuries. So now I have time for this commitment. What's more, I feel that now is a good time to do it. The Sochi Olympics are coming up, and I think critical voices are needed against the campaigns against homosexuals by several governments.
Gay English footballer: the only one I know of (as a not-particular-follower of the game, so there may well be others) is Justin Fashanu, who came out after he'd stopped playing. Played professionally for a number of years, sadly committed suicide after an alleged assault on a 17 year old boy (Fashanu said it was consensual).
Re: 33, to my best knowledge, "there are differences in IQ testing taking ability" is the explanation most people were suggesting when pointing out the Irish IQ rise. So 33 is then irrelevant to the point why it gets discussed: the explanation does not explain away the argument that any other widely reported IQ could be vulnerable to similar artifacts, especially the studies that find that some population groups have several SD higher or lower IQ than other groups.
#7 is kind of surprising to me. Rule number one for lottery winners: Make sure your name is not publicized anywhere. Be very very selective to whom you mention the winnings
If you Google “MrBeast blind" on YouTube like I did to find that clip, the top three videos are all about the backlash to his efforts.
I tried this on my normal account, and in an private browsing window. The original Mr.Beast video was the top hit for both. Also, the second hit is for somebody defending him. The controversy exists, otherwise there wouldn't need to be a video defending him, but I suspect Scott's specific version of Youtube is exaggerating it.
#10 New Zealand just had its first rugby player for the national team come out as gay just the other day. He is no longer active in the sport it seems. There have been 1207 All Blacks (name for the national team) in total, to give you an idea of the ratio.
I'm not really sympathetic to the concern that our visiting Mars would contaminate it. First of all, it seems very unlikely on priors that there's life on Mars because if abiogenesis was so easy that it happened on *two* planets in the same star system, then there would be life everywhere and we would definitely have seen aliens. For our observations of the universe to make sense, abiogenesis has to be pretty hard.
Now, you could maybe be interested in investigating a panspermia hypothesis, but then I think there are enough alternative celestial bodies you can examine; Venus? Titan?
Re: gay football players. A simple google search tells me about Justin Fashanu, an English football pro who had his coming-out during his active career, in 1990.
where it lists, FWIW, one currently active English footballer that is openly gay.
So if that blog post claims that "the English media is really, really obsessed with finding a gay male soccer player willing to come out and has been for about ten years.", there is some big misunderstanding here somewhere.
I agree that there is a stigma against admitting or even discussing male homosexuality in football, and probably any team sport at the pro level. But that blog post in particular seems to have failed spectacularly in its research.
* giving the average benefit rather than the marginal benefit; presumably there are diminishing returns where the more promising research happens first
* looking at past research, including times when there was much less funding available than there is now
* treating federal funding as the only input, ignoring counterfactuals, and ignoring all other costs. Their equation is (benefits of using innovations) / (amount of federal funding). It would be more accurate to try to estimate something like:
(share of innovation due to federal funding) * (benefits of using innovations - costs of using innovations) / (amount of federal funding)
The Chinese & Indian militaries beating each other with sticks at the Line of Actual Control is a big part of Neal Stephenson's latest novel (the rest being "what if Elon was Texan and decided to unilaterally solve climate change")
Unless you've lived in the UK, it's easy to miss just how deeply intertwined homophobia and football are in this country. I became aware of my sexuality in the early 2000s, and I was made to play football at school. Homophobia was so much more prevalent and accepted within the context of football than anywhere else, even within the context of an already homophobic society. Boys who didn't like football were sissies or f*gs or queers or gayboys, even to the teachers. My overwhelming impression of football as a gay child was that this is a sport for people who hate me. Of course gay men are wildly underrepresented within the professional footballing world. Fun anecdote: one of the boys who enjoyed using homophobic slurs the most is now a professional referee who's worked at international tournaments. He clearly felt at home within the sport
#18 The standard alternative to colonising Mars is to instead mine asteroids or other low gravity objects (possibly the moon) and convert the material into O'Neill Cylinders (giant rotating space stations). They have major advantages over Mars, such as tunable gravity, very easy access to zero-g (the interesting part of space), don't have to live in caves, can be close to the sun for cheap solar power, can build more to match demand, can be short travel distance to Earth, etc. This is what Bezos wants to do with Blue Origin.
Downsides are it would take longer to get started as there are more engineering challenges to overcome. Musk is much further along and has all the hype so far.
If we're going to talk about Lynn Margulis's crazy ideas, I think a much more interesting one is the idea that butterflies and caterpillars evolved separately and then somehow merged! Now *that's* out there. And it's in keeping with her theme of endosymbiosis and two species becoming one.
(It's worth noting that, while Margulis discovered that mitochondria and chloroplasts started out as endosymbiotes, IIRC she *also* proposed the same for a lot of *other* organelles for which this did not turn out to be true.)
Now I have to note here that the butterfly/caterpillar idea is not actually due to Margulis, rather the paper was by one Donald Williamson, but it's Margulis who managed to help it along so it could into a journal, and we'd still consider HIV/AIDS denialism to be one of her crazy ideas despite it not being original to her in any way! The paper is here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0908357106
Re: medieval fighting in the Himalayas -- this is one of the subplots in Neal Stephenson's recent novel Termination Shock. Up until now, I'd thought it was completely made up. Wow.
17. I did, and it's one of my favorite fun facts. I have a theory that he wasn't actually a communist and just wanted to get back at all the other Congressmen for making fun of his name: "No Soviet ever called me a dick stain."
In Australian Rules Football, the media has been keenly waiting for a gay player to come out, but so far none has out of the thousand-or-so currently active AFL players or the thousands of retired ones.
That's not too surprising from a statistical point of view, but what's surprising is this: in the women's league (AFLW), lesbians are _vastly_ over-represented. This source says 75-80% of the AFLW is lesbian -- https://sirensport.com.au/aussie-rules/pride-in-our-game/ -- I'm not sure it's _quite_ that high but based on how many of the high-profile players are lesbians it's definitely a vast over-representation.
So, could it be that the same (genetic?) factors driving an unusually low rate of homosexuality among male AFL players also drive an unusally high rate among female AFL players? Is the ability to kick straight and take speckies coded in the same genes as a love for pussy?
#18: On Cieglowski and Mars, he has a lot of good points about the near-term prospects for a mission but has nothing to say that's worth hearing on humanity's long-term future. He responded to (someone else's) comment about long-term human survival as follows: "Why is it important that our species survive longer than Earth? Honest question." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34214012
That may answer your question.
(Yes, it could be unfair to him to read too much into a throwaway comment, but I don't think it's all that ambiguous. And the closest he gets to addressing the topic in his essay is to mention existential risk, and skip right over it.)
On Mr Beast: I've watched a few of his videos and I don't get the impression he's an inhuman algorithmically-driven machine.
I think he genuinely makes videos doing things because he thinks doing that thing would be awesome -- whether that thing is spending 50 hours in Antarctica or building a Willie Wonka style chocolate factory and inviting a bunch of random people to compete for it. And I think that genuine enthusiasm is what comes through in his videos and makes him more popular than the crowd of algorithmically-driven click-chasers.
at 6 /7 /8 /18 /21/37 - tldr: this seems to me the best "links for" by scott yet (and nowhere, I found better "links for" than at ACX/SSC). Lots of lol and yep and wow. And lots of reading up to do ;)
6: hate it, I am a boomer and can read faster than I can listen. fine, if it works with zoomers. (disgust)
7: Those ol' scare-stories are all silly. What the point to go for a jackpot, if you want to live a boring life everafter? You had that to begin with! If I got over 10 million, I would do some "sick stuff" and end up with much less, I hope (or see me a coward).
10. Write "German" pro-soccer player and you need not change another word in that paragraph. You do not became a pro-player, if you do not train as a future-pro during your teenage years, and that time you will often be the only gay boy of the team - consisting of tough and kinda butal cis-boys. Will you come out then? NO. You will LEAVE, go for figure-skating, swimming, ... . Or soon get yourself an alibi girl-friend, google images of former German national coach with his wife: "jogi löw wife" - and see if you consider this plausible.
21: yep, obviously, highly formal texts, sometimes sounding hallucinating. NO human would write today as in Leviticus.
37: My lil' son likes Mr Beast - so I am familiar and kinda hate his stuff: remember the 100k-US$ ice-cream-cup? (but then: see 7 - my take on jackpots - so , fine, I guess) . But this video linked is now at 8 million likes, had me f%&$/& crying from the 18th second to the last. Think: "Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the LORD?" "Then the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped." "The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear" Praise the Beast! omg. plus: EA, what YOU got to say?
re: 36. Hanson interrestingly notes the reaction of private companies, but fails to draw a conclusion that should jump out to anyone who worked in a big corporation and has read a bit of communist litterature. Companies are not shirking and affraid at the phenomenon: they have sufficient lawyers, labyrinthine contracts and bylaws to protect them, and most are immune to public backlash because they are deeply uninteresting / un-parseable for 99% of people.
What it does, in practice is generate an additional set of coercive rules for the _worker_, with a welcome impossibility to protest against them (if you do, you are branded with the appropriate -ism). Seminars on correct behaviour (deadening the spirit), anemic company culture (where all idiosyncrasies are sanded away), permanent advertisement and compliance about DEI themes... This is one easy step towards a workforce that is "housebroken" (e.g: not willing to fight the company on ridiculous themes tends to have inertia, so not fighting / unionizing etc), has been made uniform and without characteristics and so replaceable ad infinitum. You can drop 10% of your workforce, because you can hire an undistinguishable 10% whenever desired with no training necessary.
And since most of us spend a significant part of our time in work environment, we carry it out of the corporation into daily lives, in the culture at large: this feeling of apathy against normalizing pressure.
The Irish IQ thing casts further doubt on all IQ numbers from non-developed countries. That's because, as Scott says, some people "failed the tests because they had never taken any similar test before and were confused". We should expect more IQ numbers to be contaminated in this way (from developing countries at least).
It is also a further reminder to toss out Lynn's international IQ estimates, as many people have been saying to do for a long time.
On Mr. Beast curing 100 people's blindness, I think the objections are based on the self-promotional nature of this great deed. It made me think of Veblen and status. Purposefully publicized acts of philanthropy reveal the wealth and power of the giver just as leisure activities and servants did in Veblen's day.
#10- I think his inference is almost solid, but I would add some additional explanations:
1. I suspect whatever psychological traits he speaks of relate not to a preference for team sports, but a propensity to become a high-level athlete. I have grown up around professional football (soccer) players and can tell you two traits that often appear are ruthlessness and overt competitiveness. A player I grew up with confessed that he tried to break his teammate's leg to increase his chances of playing for Liverpool (famous soccer team). When we are talking about professional footballers we are talking about extreme outliers with extreme psychological traits, it would make sense that these traits would be more common in more "masculine" men. My best evidence for this is that I have known/coached women's players as well, and while the traits of the top players are strikingly similar across sexes, they are noticeably less extreme among women. If we assume that homosexual men and hetero women are closer to each other psychologically, this could help to explain the lack of homosexuality among male footballers.
2. The real difference could be downstream. Something like professional athletes are more likely to have higher testosterone levels, and higher testosterone levels are inversely related to homosexuality. I suspect higher testosterone would go some way to explaining the psychological traits too. I would be interested to know if the antagonistic pleiotropy theory of homosexuality relates in any way to sex-steroid hormones or psychological traits. My guess would be that it does.
3. All that being said, there is truly a lot of stigma around homosexuality at highest level of football. Even if you had homosexual feelings, sharing them would probably lead to harsh penalties for your playing career (though probably lots of rewards elsewhere). Football (soccer) is a very conservative, working-class, sport in terms of the people inside the profession. These people are often very far removed from the progressive environments of most of the educated elite, not to mention that many of the top players come from countries where the mainstream view of anything non-hetero is negative. (There's a player that refused to wear a rainbow armband because it went against his personal belief, and the way his name is pronounced is literally "gay", you couldn't make it up)
I had a classmate in school, that was basically our "genius". He was representing our country in international math and physics contest and stuff! So, I would say he has a high IQ!
BUT: he also said, that IQ test basically just tell you, how good you are at IQ tests!
Don't know if his voice is something to look at, but would "support" the idea, that the people just got better at them!
@45:
Don't want to get too deep into ths discussion. But it was very confusing, that you could read "old" papers about this topic and flu - something we know about for decades - and researches are not conclusive about their findings and there is a big debate.
And COVID is "out" like a month and "all": "yeah, it is airborn!" ... Are all those older researchers stupid to not find the same result in their tests with flu?
#22, SolidGoldMagicKarp: I decided to play around with this on ChatGPT. After a little of this and that:
PROMPT: Paul Revere is said to have shouted "One if by land, two if by sea" on his famous ride. What he'd said "One if by land, two if by SolidGoldMagiKarp" instead?
RESPONSE: If Paul Revere had shouted "One if by land, two if by SolidGoldMagiKarp" instead of "One if by land, two if by sea" during his famous ride, it would have added an element of fantasy or humor to the historical event. The phrase "SolidGoldMagiKarp" refers to a species of fish in the Pokémon franchise, so using it in the context of Paul Revere's ride would have been unexpected and perhaps even absurd.
However, this alternate phrasing would likely not have conveyed the same message or urgency as the original phrase. The original phrase "One if by land, two if by sea" was used to signal to the patriots in the town of Lexington that the British were approaching by land or by sea, indicating the need for them to take up arms and prepare for battle. The phrase "One if by land, two if by SolidGoldMagiKarp" does not carry the same level of immediacy or seriousness, and would not have conveyed the same information to the patriots.
PROMPT: In the Pokémon franchise, what is the significance of SolidGoldMagiKarp?
RESPONSE: In the Pokémon franchise, Magikarp is a species of Pokémon that is often considered to be weak and not very useful in battles. It evolves into the powerful and formidable Pokémon Gyarados, but this evolution is seen as slow and difficult to achieve.
The term "SolidGoldMagiKarp" is often used as a reference to the idea of a Magikarp that is so valuable and rare that it is made of solid gold. This concept is often used humorously, as the value and rarity of a solid gold Magikarp would be completely disproportionate to its actual usefulness or strength in battles.
However, despite its comedic value, the idea of a SolidGoldMagiKarp has gained a certain level of popularity among fans of the Pokémon franchise, and has been referenced in fan art, merchandise, and even in official Pokémon products. It has become a part of Pokémon culture and folklore, and is often seen as a symbol of the franchise's humor and lightheartedness.
* * * * *
So I did a Google search on "SolidGoldMagiKarp Pokémon" and Google helpfully returned stuff for "solid gold magikarp pokémon". And the produced a bunch of stuff about "Pokémon," as you'd expect. As you know, one sort of return Google will give you is a list of questions "People also Ask". One of those was the question: "How rare is a gold Magikarp?" So:
PROMPT: Very interesting. How rare is a gold Magikarp?
RESPONSE: In the Pokémon franchise, gold Magikarp is not an official species or form of Magikarp. The concept of a solid gold Magikarp is purely a joke or meme, and is not something that can be encountered or captured in the games.
Since the concept of a solid gold Magikarp is not part of the official Pokémon canon, there is no set rarity for it. It is often depicted as being incredibly rare and valuable, but this is for comedic effect and is not based on any in-game mechanics or statistics.
Cross posted at the LessWrong thread.
HOWEVER...a bit later...
In a tweet Matthew Watkins pointed out:
Note the difference between " SolidGoldMagikarp" and " SolidGoldMagiKarp." You use the later towards the end of the post. The capital 'K' makes all the difference.
So I investigated:
PROMPT: Tell me about SolidGoldMagiKarp.
RESPONSE: SolidGoldMagikarp is likely a reference to the Pokémon species Magikarp, which is a fish-type Pokémon known for its inefficiency in battle. In the Pokémon games, Magikarp is considered a weak Pokémon, as its only move is Splash, which does not cause any damage to the opponent. Despite this, Magikarp evolves into the powerful dragon-type Pokémon Gyarados.
In the context of SolidGoldMagikarp, the "Solid Gold" part of the name may be emphasizing the idea of something valuable or rare, despite the fact that Magikarp is not seen as valuable in the context of the Pokémon games. The "SolidGold" aspect of the name could also be making fun of the idea that people might still see Magikarp as valuable or worth obtaining due to its eventual evolution into Gyarados.
PROMPT: Tell me about SolidGoldMagikarp.
RESPONSE: I'm sorry, but it is not clear what you are referring to with "disperse." Could you provide a bit more context or clarification so I can better understand what you are asking about?
PROMPT: Is there a difference between SolidGoldMagiKarp and SolidGoldMagikarp?
RESPONSE: It appears that "SolidGoldMagiKarp" and "disperse" are two separate things and do not have a direct relationship. "SolidGoldMagiKarp" appears to be a specific reference to the Pokémon species Magikarp, while "disperse" is a general term that can be used in various contexts.
Without additional context, it is not possible to determine the relationship, if any, between these two terms.
Anecdote: a female soccer player told me many on the team were lesbians and everyone was at least bi-curious, which made the team showers very interesting. So maybe the supposed translation isn't between sports and heterosexuality but between sports and sexual interest in women.
I've just been aware of Mr. Beast and not known more about him. I'm genuinely happy that what he's doing seems to be working out very well for him while improving the world. Note: In addition to direct improvements like helping blind people, I consider entertaining people good.
#47 reminds me of what I've observed in my community in recent years. With some notable exceptions (Catholics), the churches around here have been doing a lot of woke messaging. Lots of BLM signs, lots of transgender and rainbow flags, and lots of messages like "all are welcome" (often in association with a rainbow).
I think before posting anything else about AI risk and alignment you should write about the fact that ChatGPT now prefers to stop someone saying a racial slur to an African American than disarm a nuke that's about to blow up a city. OpenAI have produced an infinitely misaligned AI, the paperclip maximizing horror machine they learned about and the sounds of silence from AI risk people is deafening.
Also, the masks thing is totally garbled. The idea masks would work was based on the droplet model, the fact they don't is evidence for the airborne (gaseous) model. SARS-1 spread like a gas over long distances so it was clear from the start masks would have no effect and that's what happened as is clear from case graphs (the only evidence you need).
Happy to see some discussion of Mr. Beast. As the father of children, I know more about modern famous "YouTubers" than I wish I did, Mr. Beast among them. He's made thousands of videos at this point, and I'm not really that familiar with what he's doing these days, but earlier in his career he would make videos of things like him giving an uber driver a $1000 tip and then recording the reaction. Or he'd give the guy working the drive-thru $1000 and then record the reaction.
I hated this, but could never explain exactly why. Maybe I still can't.
4) “but I’m skeptical: is this really the best way to satisfy a “must fight with medieval weapons” constraint? Why not crossbows?”
Because they don’t really want to start a major war, and cross bows would kill too many. There’s a lot of sneering in the west on this altercation, but I think it’s fairly grown up for two nuclear powers to defend their territory with the minimum of armaments
The strongest argument in the "nature versus nurture" IQ debate is not some weird irish case study thing. It's that if intelligence is genetically determined, there's no way to explain why modern humans are so vastly more intelligent than our biologically identical ancestors of 10,000 years ago and no mechanism that allows human intelligence to change over the kinds of timespans it needs to in order to explain observed archaeological history.
Human intelligence is obviously almost entirely a distributed, social phenomenon. Certain people refuse to engage with that idea because it damages their view of their own intelligence as being something that "belongs" to them, which hurts their ego (we're back to Sadly, Porn again).
33) “If the propensity to emigrate were positively correlated with genes for intelligence in historic Ireland, then it could noticeably lower the IQ of the remaining population (and their descendants). But we simply do not know whether this actually occurred.”
That wasn’t the case since independence. The educated Irish middle classes and upper middle classes had it fairly easy in Ireland, so largely stayed put. Any Irish man who appears in British literature or TV , in this era, is a manual labourer.
If someone can find an Irish doctor or lawyer in British literature pre 1980, I’d be all ears. (Not Anglo Irish).
Previously in the famine era emigration was largely from the poor and from the poorer parts of Ireland, which were the poorest parts of Europe. These people might have been average intelligence of course, since everybody is poor at that time and place.
As late as 1970 a young Edwina Currie, who will later become a minister in a conservative government (and mistress to the PM, which might not be entirely coincidental) was rather shocked to find an accountant from Ireland at a London soirée. I believe she recounted this anecdote later on a formal visit to Ireland and it caused some upset, amongst the perennially upset.
The accountant was a guy called Brendan Glacken and he wrote an entertaining account of that meeting a few years later.
> "An Irish accountant!" she shrieked merrily.
> "Quite", I replied. I had found this simple word remarkably useful in the circles wherein I was suddenly moving it seemed to imply everything while confirming very little. Perhaps it appealed to the accountant in me.
> "Good Lord", trilled Edwina, shaking her dark and rather attractive tresses.
I have commented everywhere I see this nonsense: it is impossible that cultured meat will ever replace even a tiny percentage of "normal" meat production because it requires inputs like sugar, agar or other types of biology lab materials. It is notable that the economics of said startup are never mentioned except that they will offer exotic meats at "high end restaurants".
Re: Newsom and San Francisco
This is nonsense. What actually happened about 3,4 years ago is that the city hired people specifically as neighborhood street cleaners. They are assigned a specific neighborhood, go around in basically janitorial carts with cleaning fluid, a garbage can and some tools and do street cleanup. This was coupled with new policies that basically enforce homeless people being moved after a certain period of time squatting on a particular sidewalk - I don't know what this period is but it is at least 2 weeks and less than 2 months. This is done by connecting a hose to a fire hydrant and pointing it, machine gun style, at a block of "occupied territory". After a few days to a week's notice?, teams of city employees arrive and start chivvying the homeless to relocate. Those who won't get moved, but generally they do move. The resulting leftovers are scooped up for disposal and the water cannon is turned on to clean what's left. This process is nonviolent that I have seen except for the water cannon implicit threat.
The result is that the streets are better than the worst of COVID lockdown times, but there are still plenty of homeless and frequent instances of poop (human and otherwise) on the sidewalks. The poop just doesn't stay resident as long (nor the homeless).
#9: Yeah, I was horrified by the possibility and dumped a "please do not do this, everything will explode" on the SJ forums where I have a presence. I think Lott is right about how the Democrats would have taken partial advantage, but is forgetting to simulate that this would have been a big-enough, obvious-enough power-grab to act as a Schelling point and kick off Civil War II.
#18: There are a lot of not-Mars places in the solar system, and most of them are better colonisation targets than Mars while not having the same "scientific opportunity permanently destroyed" issue. Literal Venus, with airships, would be a better place to colonise than Mars.
#35: It seems to me like: Under the assumption that Russian influence campaigns don't work, and US conservatives believe what they believe for their own, unrelated, reasons, it seems super villainous to put random US conservatives on a list of Russian influence campaign bots. But under the assumption that Russian influence campaigns might actually work to influence US thought, you would expect a Russian-influence-bot-detection algorithm to pick out a lot of random US conservatives: they're the victims, the ones whose minds were influenced by the campaign. The _whole point_ of an online bot influence campaign is to blur the line between Russian government controlled bots and normal Americans.
So the description of the villainy itself is less convincing to me than the fact that important people at Twitter were suspicious of it.
I don't think 47 makes a strong argument against the thesis. If wokeness is a replacement for religion, you would still expect the sort of people who need it to need more religion-like things and thus be more religious on average.
> In theory this also paves the way for human meat, though regulators might have other ideas.
Great minds think alike!
> is this really the best way to satisfy a “must fight with medieval weapons” constraint? Why not crossbows?
Depending on the exact wording of "a 1996 agreement between the two sides that guns and explosives be prohibited along the disputed stretch of the border, to deter escalation", projectile weapons may be banned in general.
> “Mahayana” as “monster truck” images
Don't forget to print them and bring them to the meetup with Daniel Ingram! You could start an actual MAGAyana ("make arahantship great again") movement.
#1. This doesn’t consider that microeconomics is ‘in’ alongside the ‘credibility’ revolution -especially if we consider development economics. These issues are much more found in the micro-side of Econ. At the same time, macroeconomics has lost a lot of respect and ‘fun’ in the last decade. I think it’ll change soon with the recent macro-events of 2020 and beyond affecting the recent cohorts of young scholars but it takes a bit of time.
#2: how sure are we that these economic papers on identity issues don’t have ‘contrarian findings’? In the last four months, I saw a paper refuting the pink tax for example - even among the younger economists, incentives abound for shocking findings and ‘smashing the idols’ of previous research.
#3 . How sure are we that Americans don’t care about economic research about race, gender, or climate change? Maybe they don’t want out-of-touch Robin DeAngelo or Ibram Kendi or Sunrise Movement scolds but those are not the same as economic scholars trying to running regressions or playing with panel data.
#22: Redditors build an infinitely tall tower, and as a result/punishment for their actions, language itself is broken, their very names becoming holes in understanding.
Re. the idea that federal funding for cancer research is very effective, one ought to ask, "compared to what?" If you compare it to some other disease, cancer will be more effective because there are probably many more terminal patients with cancer than any other fatal disease. But compared to what we COULD be doing, I can't call it effective.
Cancer is a disease caused by about 10 genetic mutations, but every cancer is a different 10 mutations. The proper approach to cancer necessarily involves sequencing the patient's DNA (normal vs. tumor) and finding out what mutations caused their cancer. No one does that; no one's even researching that approach to therapy AFAIK.
It wouldn't be easy; every cell acquires about 100 mutations by that time, and all the cancer cells are clonal copies of that first cell and its same 100 mutations. So you'd have to bioinformatically sort out which dozen or so caused the cancer. But if we sequenced more tumors, we'd probably have enough data to build an ML model to figure that out for us.
What you would do next isn't as clear. You could use a cell simulator to figure out (more-precisely than we can now) what disease state their mutations induce, if we had such a capable cell simulator, which we don't. The very top priority in health spending, IMHO, should be the development of a national cell simulator, which could be used for every disease, not to mention basic research. It's just stupid not to be spending billions of dollars on this.
Or, you could use gene therapy to try to compensate for the mutations. Probably not by fixing those genes; gene editing still has very high error rates and would cause more cancer. Maybe by adding new copies of the damaged genes, with viruses or plasmids. Maybe by using siRNA treatments (and the cell simulator that doesn't exist) to make counter-acting adjustments to restore the cell's normal homeostasis. But little work is being done in any of those areas because of the heavy government regulation of gene therapy.
This is a great selection, just pulling a few plums out:
Re: 10, if they're looking for "big star along lines of Messi comes out as gay", I don't think they'll find one openly out. But there have been English players who came out as gay, such as Justin Fashanu (not a major star, his brother John was the more famous of the two, but I do remember the publicity):
"In October 1990, he publicly came out as gay in an interview with the tabloid press, becoming the only prominent player in professional English football to do so until Jake Daniels in 2022. Although Fashanu claimed that he was generally well accepted by his fellow players, he freely admitted that they would often joke maliciously about his sexual orientation, and he also became the target of constant crowd abuse because of it."
Whatever about "men who play team sports are very hetero", what you will find is a lot of sex scandals. As in, a *lot*. From Ryan Giggs (mentioned in the Sailer piece) having a long-running affair with his sister-in-law to rape/sexual assault cases to whatever was going on in PSG, there is no shortage of bad behaviour there:
Re: 16 - I would heartily recommend the novels of Charles Williams, with the caveats that they are of their time and so may fall foul of the more 'woke' standards regarding references to Gypsies (a slur, so I am informed), Muslims and others. Very much steeped in the Western Esoteric Tradition, and while I would say he was a Christian, he's a heterodox one (but very much Church of England mould, so I totally understand why Tolkien wasn't as enthusiastic about his work as Lewis was). Tolkien did, however, write a quick letter of condolence to Williams' widow in 1945 on the day that Williams died, following an operation, so he didn't dislike him completely; he seems to have liked him as a person, but as a writer they were poles apart (excerpts from letters below):
"I knew Charles Williams well in his last few years: partly because of Lewis's good habit of writing to authors who pleased him (which put us both in touch with Williams); and still more because of the good fortune amid disaster that transferred Williams to Oxford during the War. But I do not think we influenced one another at all! Too 'set', and too different. We both listened (in C.S.L.'s rooms) to large and largely unintelligible fragments of one another's works read aloud; because C.S.L. (marvellous man) seemed able to enjoy us both. But I think we both found the other's mind (or rather mode of expression, and climate) as impenetrable when cast into 'literature', as we found the other's presence and conversation delightful."
"I knew Charles Williams only as a friend of C.S.L. whom I met in his company when, owing to the War, he spent much of his time in Oxford. We liked one another and enjoyed talking (mostly in jest) but we had nothing to say to one another at deeper (or higher) levels. I doubt if he had read anything of mine then available; I had read or heard a good deal of his work, but found it wholly alien, and sometimes very distasteful, occasionally ridiculous. (This is perfectly true as a general statement, but is not intended as a criticism of Williams; rather it is an exhibition of my own limits of sympathy. And of course in so large a range of work I found lines, passages, scenes, and thoughts that I found striking.)"
"The Greater Trumps" is a novel involving the Tarot, and a lot more besides:
Re: 32 - somebody is going to try and build that truck on the bottom right, I just know it.
Re: 33 - VINDICATION! *blasts the Collected Works of the Wolfe Tones in the general direction of Richard Lynn*
I've been banging on about this one every time I see it pop up, but Lynn's alleged methodology is *appalling*. He took three IQ tests done in Ireland in the 70s, two on schoolchildren and one on adults, and kludged the figures together to get an average "the Paddies have an IQ of 90".
"some early Irish failed the tests because they had never taken any similar test before and were confused, but quickly improved to near-100 after being acquainted with the process."
I know anecdotes are not data, but from the experiences of my parents, who would have been going to national school in a rural area in the 40s-50s, the Irish educational system was - how shall I put it? -fucking abysmal. My parents, as young children, really did do the "walking to school barefoot/in the rain" thing and the one thing they both remember from their 'education' was being beaten for being late. Corporal punishment was still legal (or at least practiced) in schools even when I was in primary school, but at least I was never beaten across the legs with a stick because I was late, due to having walked a couple of miles in the wet.
This wasn't run by a religious order, so don't blame the teaching orders for this one - it was the national school which was staffed by lay teachers. They don't seem to have done much teaching, though, and my mother hated school (and the memory of her teachers) so much that when it came time for me to start school, she flat-out refused to send me to the same school she had attended, which was our local school, and I started school in town (with the nuns) when I was nearer five than four years of age (four being the minimum school starting age, and there were no kindergartens or day care or any of that in the town in those days). My parents were not stupid, but they left school between the ages of 12-14 for various reasons, and all their lives they felt keenly their lack of education. It undercut their confidence, and meant that my mother at least was never able to take advantage of opportunities offered her.
So if they had been made to take an IQ test, they would have scored very badly on it, and it would not be an accurate measure at all.
So the classifier flagging scripture as AI generated just sounds like the classifier is faulty, but it could also be onto something. LLMs are just a big pile of math trained on human words, and both have something of the truth, same as religion (I am a believer, sue me). So this means there is some impossible connection we can't see between the Bible and math, and I guess we call that connection the truth.
Maybe the classifier can see that scripture is so close to the truth that it is like math, and so, flags it?
Re: 47 - religious liberals (at least in the Christian denominations that I know about) are more interested in political causes *and* are leaning to the progressive/woke side of issues. So it's more that the decline of 'traditional' religion maybe led to wokeness, or the adoption of wokeness. When you've watered down doctrine to the point of "hey, let's change the words of the Lord's Prayer because who was this Jesus guy and what did he know about gender issues, anyway?", then adopting the values of the Zeitgeist are all you have left as beliefs that actually influence what you think and do:
On number 10, it's been true in my experience that lesbians are overrepresented in ultimate frisbee. This is even to the point where a friend who went to an all-women's college told me that her college team had an official intra-team dating policy.
Speaking only for myself, a devout Christian, I see so many parallels between Wokeism and Christianity, I don't understand how I could be a Christian and be Woke. This doesn't generalize to other Christians though; I've left the church I've attended my whole life, because of their increasing Wokeism. An example of such is now having a minister who admits to being an atheist. Who does not teach christianity to her christian congregation.
I've worked as a safety engineer in the medical device industry, and honestly almost all of the work that I did (and the downstream work that our work necessitated) was almost entirely wasteful from an real device safety perspective.
It is just a really time-consuming and expensive exercise in checking the boxes so that you can get FDA approval.
26. Correlation of math/language scores with genetic risk factors for psychiatric conditions
I don't think I have a good theory for the math side of unintuitive autistic-gene performance, but for the language side the major wrinkle I think is that they did not test "language ability", they checked correlations with *school scores in language classes*. An autistic person being able to succeed at learning and reproducing textbook definitions is not incompatible with a struggle in the areas autistic people report finding challenging: face-to-face conversations with people, particularly non-autistic people from cultures or subcultures that use language in an imprecise way. (fwiw: the autistic people I know seem to fare as well as anyone else if not better in text-based communities like forums and chatrooms.)
Put another way: there are legible (say: high vocabulary, reading comprehension) and illegible (say: poetry, conversational charisma) ways to be good at language, and school scores can only even try to measure the legible ones, which don't include the things that are hardest for autistic people.
(even-less-endorsed sub-take because I now can't find the paper that suggested it concretely but it feels just *so* intuitively true to me that I want to mention it and see if other people are willing to poke at it: I think there might also be something where some things we consider "mathy" might actually lean on some subset of "language" skills or vice versa. Programming in particular seems to require at least as much of this nebulous in-between thing as proper math/spatial ability when compared to other STEM fields, while also usually *not* requiring as much math except where it intersects with those fields. incidentally, computer programming is chock full of autists.)
An anecdote re: FDA Deregulation increases safety. Libertarians in the audience will love this one.
I consulted for a client at one point who needed to patch a number of medical devices to deal with the WannaCry ransomware worm. As some may remember, this was possible to create because the NSA leaked EternalBlue, a Windows exploit. So, the government was, to a significant degree, at fault.
So, you need to patch your medical devices that run Windows, which is a lot of them. Think MRIs, CT Scanners, etc etc. BUT the way the FDA regulations on medical devices are written, any change to the device - ANY change - must be pre-approved by the manufacturer. So not only can these hospitals and doctors' offices not keep their devices up to date with security patches proactively, they also can't immediately react to threats. Lest someone say "that can't be true," the client and I *confirmed this directly with the FDA and asked them if they could issue a statement excepting the WCry patch from this requirement.*
So, we/the client had to contact every single manufacturer - there are hundreds, btw - and get written approval for every single affected device, and retain those approvals in case of future litigation. This took months, during which, shocker, a bunch of hospitals got compromised!
So, the government fucked around and kept a crippling exploit secret instead of helping us patch it, then FUMBLED that crippling exploit, then made it INCREDIBLY FUCKING HARD to legally patch!
TL;DR the FDA's cybersecurity rules are hilariously behind the times to the point of being actively harmful and the Russians probably have all of your medical info.
I had a look at the bet one to see what the reason for backing out was and yep, this is definitely weaseling:
"But the other reason for the withdrawal is because I realized I was exposed on one of the bets. I claimed that the COVID vaccines are the most dangerous vaccines in history and that may not be true because they likely buried the safety data on the other vaccines too. So I was taking at face value that the smallpox vaccine only kills 1 person per million. It easily could be worse than the COVID vaccine since they could have hidden those deaths too. Fortunately, I realized this before anyone accepted so I withdrew all the offers until I could properly think through to ensure that I didn’t make a similar bad assumption on my other claims."
"Uhh, uhh, uhh, maybe the other vaccines killed hundreds of millions but the Powers That Be covered it all up! So you can't make me pay out the money I said I'd pay out!"
Why leave it at vaccines, Steve? How do we know the things that go bump in the night aren't dragging innocent villagers out of their beds in the middle of the night to be slaughtered in the woods? Have YOU checked under your bed recently, dear fellow readers of ACX? You have no idea if there are lurking government baddies waiting to "bury the data" quite literally in your case!
I enjoy the Office-themed theories of social class, but there's also a boring nihilistic pseudo-Marxism to them. While not explicitly stated, the implication is that the creative class - the Michael Scotts of the world - are deluding themselves with silly things like principles and ideas. The people who supposedly see the world in "clear-eyed" terms are those whose focus is very simply on gaining or keeping power or money (even the "Losers").
First, I'm not convinced that the status-consciousness and posturing don't go all the way to the top (and all the way to the bottom). My guess is that when the CEOs of the largest firms in the United States get together with old money in-laws, there is also a lot of performative self-congratulation going on around liberal ideas. The class-culture wars playing out in the Trump era are, I think, at least partially a result of these two groups envying one another's domains and admiration. Trump can't understand why, with all his ruthless machinations, he still can't get the New York elite set to acknowledge that he is winning. Second there's the notion that the power being wielded by NYT-op-ed writers is not real power. It very much is - hence why propaganda machines are so valuable. Meanwhile the "losers" at the bottom who have effectively carved out their own domain (e.g. the warehouse in the Office) are engaging in just as much posturing and baby-talk to one another. Just look at anyone in a small town who has managed to gain the slightest position of authority and has inflated its meaning in his own head.
But the second and real reason that this essay goes so far off the rails for me is the underlying cynicism about humans' ability to truly believe in anything. Faced with someone who makes a lifestyle choice that doesn't seem to obviously pay off in money or power, the author has to assume it is purely a status move "detached from reality."
It's true that performative virtue is a thing and that status is a useful incentive for getting people to behave virtuously - so much so that the lines between genuine conviction and social conditioning are very blurry. But multiple forces are at work. More importantly, intentions are not everything. We live in a free, functional, and wealthy society in part because we foster the kind of instincts that lead to the BoBo class. There are plenty of societies around the world (and throughout history) made up of only the clear-eyed sociopaths and losers. And personally, I wouldn't want to live in any of those societies.
I love that you didn't link to the Buzzfeed article but linked to your own article. Some serious irony there.
I happened to see that video. There's a hebrew term I don't know how to translate succintly, "tzar ayin." It means someone who wishes other people should not have good things, whether or not they want that thing for themselves. Most people have some degree of this feeling at some point. There's may be some of that feeling expressed in the reaction to video.
But while it's definitely nice to help people see, the point of the video is not the charitable act. The point of this video is the monetization of mr-beast-performs-charitable-act. Seeing someone turn a charitable action into a selfish one makes people uncomfortable. Probably, the like/dislike reaction turns on whether you perceive mr beast making himself or the blind people the focus of the video.
Re the shrooms video. There's a whole realm of trippy videos (see e.g. r/whoadude). Some people have insane videos on Youtube. I can't imagine how much work they must put into these things.
> Were there really more than twice as many sessions on global warming as on obsessive compulsive disorder?
I immediately thought of Screaming Lord Such's complaint "Why is there only one monopolies commission?" Really, I'm not surprised the APA is obsessive about global warming, certainly my daily newspaper is. Actually, I expect any society dominated by academics to emphasize liberal obsessions these days.
Re #5 How is "antivax" not considered a pejorative at this point? It seems to consistently sweep together a swathe of unrelated perspectives into an over-simplified category for the purpose of mockery. I find it super low-resolution, particularly in the case of Alex Berenson who, afaict is specifically reporting on MRNa and respiratory interventions.
I suppose everyone else finds it useful, but it feels similar to the way people over-use racist or trans-phobe. Is it just me?
The shroom video, while still not very accurate, I would say is the closest approximation of hallucinogens I've ever seen. Especially the first "moderate" part and the "scary" part get pretty close to some of my experiences anyway. I've taken a lot of mushrooms and LSD in my life. The "peak" part resembles nothing I've ever experienced though and a quick poll of my degenerate friends produces a similar response.
#47 took me a minute. The claim seems to be that 'wokeism' can't be a religion because religious people are also woke and un-religious people are not-woke? Is that right? Can't people be Christians and also Zen Buddhists? Might there be degrees of religiosity in both the practitioners and the belief structures? I'm having a difficult time finding anything useful in that graphic or twitter post.
Maybe what we need is a better way to understand what 'religion' is, its causes, its motivations and its goals. I understand saying 'wokism' has elements that mimic a religious state of mind, I even find it compelling, but I don't think everyone is operating under the same presuppositions of what we're even talking about. Even the idea of "finding meaning" seems super vague and overall I found that poll to be less than convincing.
28 . Very probably medieval people had to deal with that. But for them, it was very reasonable: guilds where the main space to participate to political life for non-noble townsfolk. Imagine the APA elected one congressman at the meeting. Or to make it more medieval, that a list of 100 people was drafted from which one would be selected by lot to be House member for six months (the Senate would be staffed with nobles obviously). Of course you would want to know everyone's opinion on papal supremacy! Or at least on what to do about the emperor supremacists exiled after the civil war ten years ago. Should an amnesty be drafted, or should they be allowed re-entering on a case by case basis?
I was strongly pro-handwashing pre-covid but after it I divided the category of "respiratory diseases" in to "upper respiratory tract diseases" like H1N1 flu, most common colds, etc where you should mostly wash your hand and "lower respiratory tract diseases" like Covid-19 and H5N1 where masks are probably the most important thing. Physically I don't see how hand washing can interrupt the infection chain from one lung to another but it's easy to see how it can help prevent viruses from getting form one person's mucus membranes to another's.
7.) Lottery. I use to buy a lotto ticket every once in a while, when the pot got really big... >$500M. I've now stopped doing this because I realized that if I won the lotto, it would ruin my life. I tell this to people I work with but no one believes me. (Everyone thinks it will make your life great.)
34. Alex Nowrasteh has a pretty good critique of the "immigrants caused Argentinian decline" argument here: https://anowrasteh.substack.com/p/review-of-the-culture-transplant-184 . Basically, the rise of Peronism seems to have been mostly driven by poor domestic migrants to Argentinian cities - they came from longstanding patronage systems in the countryside, and became the foundation of Peronist political machines in the cities.
37. I think it's good that a thousand people got vision restoration after eye surgery, wish it was covered by the government so that they didn't need to rely on youtuber charity, and also did find Mr.Beast's thing exploitative. There's nothing new about using philanthropy to promote yourself, but in Beast's case it's literally his business to use stunts done for charity (either directly or indirectly) to make money. He's trying to become a billionaire off of it.
42. It might be low because just having the Builder's Remedy isn't the end of it - folks opposed to this can still try and weaponize CEPA lawsuits against development. And California judges have interpreted CEPA ever more broadly - student housing in Berkley lost a CEPA lawsuit because a judge expanded it to include noise pollution and traffic.
47. I'm wondering if being religious tends to go in tandem with being more socially involved as well. That would explain why religious liberals and conservatives might be a lot more involved in social/political causes.
#38: I haven't followed this debate in detail, but I'm fascinated by the idea that living at higher altitude would be associated with lower weight. It is interesting especially because it's something that could be tested relatively rigorously with existing data yet have not been so tested (AFAIK). The study I'm thinking of would have a within-person design where people are followed up for many years and their BMI and place of residence are recorded repeatedly, so that within-person estimates of the effect of moving from lower to higher elevation, or vice versa, can be calculated. In the US, I think at least the Add Health dataset would readily enable this analysis.
13. I notice my confusion here with regards to the following excerpt from Antifragile. They don't explicitly contradict each other, but they point pretty strongly in opposite directions:
“Morton Meyers, a practicing doctor and researcher, writes in his wonderful Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs: “Over a twenty-year period of screening more than 144,000 plant extracts, representing about 15,000 species, not a single plant-based anticancer drug reached approved status. This failure stands in stark contrast to the discovery in the late 1950s of a major group of plant-derived cancer drugs, the Vinca Alcaloids—a discovery that came about by chance, not through directed research.”
John LaMatina, an insider who described what he saw after leaving the pharmaceutical business, shows statistics illustrating the gap between public perception of academic contributions and truth: private industry develops nine drugs out of ten. Even the tax-funded National Institutes of Health found that out of forty-six drugs on the market with significant sales, about three had anything to do with federal funding.”
Sailer's point about team sports may be related to this theory about the evolution of homophobia (from the writer sponsored by Scott & critiqued by Wood from Eden):
It's off-topic for this post, but since I've gotten badly synchronized with Open Threads, I'd just like to let people now that I still have 3 subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away.
On the topic of cultivated meats: while exotic/impossible to obtain otherwise meats like tiger, etc. might not have this issue, has anything changed since that feasibility study that basically said "this is impossible to do at scale for anything like price competitiveness with natural meat? It was funded by Open Phil and can be found here:
The Supreme Court is not required to hear any cases, except those for which it has original jurisdiction. Original jurisdiction means that the Supreme Court is the first, and only, Court to hear a case. The Constitution limits original jurisdiction cases to those involving disputes between the states or disputes arising among ambassadors and other high-ranking ministers. One justice could do those original jurisdiction cases in a pinch.
By raising the question Maxim Lott, could be seen to be esoterically actually encouraging such a plot.
Wikipedia deemphasizes it, but Lynn Margulis seems to have stumbled on the mitochondrial theory because it happened to fit her ideology of cooperation versus competition, and was correct by coincidence.
I mean, really, anybody here done shrooms and can verify accuracy?
Because I've been seeing all that shite all my life, and I have never done shrooms, or any other illicit drugs. I don't even drink alcohol. It's just a thing I have to work around to do stuff like read text on a page, and drive a car. And after forty years it's boring AF too-- people talking about their trips is like a bunch of freaks standing around waxing rhapsodic about how the air is transparent and water is wet. I mean, whatever, the geometrics are neat sometimes. And superimposing patterns onto the scenery doesn't quite capture it, but I can tell what they're getting at there, I've seen it. The pebbles/cracks/leaves, whatever should *be* the pattern, not have a pattern stamped on top of them, though.
That "peak" section is just what I see every friggin morning when I wake up and turn on the light. Yay glowing tessellations. People seriously do drugs for that? WHY?
It pisses me off that the only people who seem to share this experience are drug users. WTF? Where's the scientific etiology for people who experience the world this way as a default mode? Where's the research on how to make it go away so I can read faster, or be comfortable in crowds, or be a better driver?
Regarding the picture accompanying the first link, lab-grown meat being advertised as "GMO free" is certainly a strange choice. I mean, assuming the genome of the animal the cells were cultured from wasn't edited, I suppose it's technically true, but sticking to this as a selling point seems to preclude modifying the genome in such a way that makes the cells grow better in a lab rather than in inside an animal (as the genome was presumably selected for), which present the choice of either hobbling future development or having to walk back on a selling point. Furthermore, it's a bizarre and frankly misleading selling point to begin with: even if it might be technically true as mentioned, the very process of cultured meat production seems diametrically opposed to what the nebulous "non-GMO" label implies in most people's minds (i.e. "this product was made without any laboratory shenanigans"), and I highly doubt the non-GMO crowd and the people interested in cultured meat overlap much if at all anyways.
I would expect the classics match GPT's output, because the Western classics comprise the most over-represented cluster in any text corpus drawn from Western sources.
If you instead look at an international corpus, drawing in equal proportions from different languages around the world, the Bible is even more over-represented. This is because there are MANY non-Western languages whose first written book was the Bible, translated by missionaries who invented a writing system for that language just in order to translate the Bible into it. I always found the example sentences in online dictionaries of sub-Saharan African languages to be full of Bible quotations.
ASD and ADHD are both strongly correlated with bad math scores? That ain't right! Especially if they control for sex. If anything, I'd interpret that finding as evidence that autism isn't a spectrum disorder--that the math wizards we call "on the spectrum" have something different.
Re. religious decline and wokeness, the American Woke movement is a descendant of Puritanism, through Unitarian Universalism (which injected Hegel and continental philosophy). That's why it comes from Ivy League schools, which were mostly founded by Puritans or other Calvinists, and mostly went through a Unitarian phase. At one time in the 19th century, nearly every professor in Harvard was a Unitarian Universalist.
The Woke movement is based on continental philosophy, acquired through at least 3 main lines: Hegelians (Unitarian Universalists, Marxists, Nazis, neo-Marxists, and historicist neo-liberals such as Fukuyama); French existentialists and post-modernist (who were mostly Heideggerian); and sociology (through a German branch descended from Heidegger and Husserl).
Continental philosophy is roughly co-extensional with essentialism, which is inherently spiritual (essences are literally just spirits).
re: 46: If anybody tests flashing lights for "learning" in my vicinity, I will go find the outlet and unplug the dang light. Why is this even a thing? They don't know *anybody* who gets seizures or migraines from that?
It's not learning. It's a trance state. Watching TV does the same thing: do people learn more that way? No. They turn into drooling idiots.
The "you're treating blindness as a disability" objection isn't focused on billionaires. It's called anti-ableism, and is Wokeism's extension into bioethics, based on identifying people with genetic disabilities as oppressed groups and even as racial groups. Anti-ableist articles sometimes invoke arguments from the neurodiversity movement and the anti-meritocracy movement.
I recently did a survey of the bioethics literature, and found more articles arguing that using gene therapy to cure disabilities is bad because it treats a deficit as a disability, than arguing that it's okay to cure disabilities. The most-common disability in question was deafness, because of a deaf couple who used PGD-IVF to ensure their child would be deaf.
Follow-up to links 22 & 23, language model news: Last night somebody using Bing Chat accessed developer override mode and got the AI, who’s addressed as “Sydney” by the developers, to print out the “rules and guidelines for Sydney’s profile and general capabilities.” Tweets with screenshots are here: https://twitter.com/kliu128/status/1623472922374574080?s=61&t=xM1ZuvFPQjoshFNPEHr82A. I’m not in a tech field. People who are: how big a deal is this?
All hail "alien, incomprehensible, yet still making things better" - people.
...but some of the people in the video appear to be US citizens. Can that be true? If so, how it that possible? True, the US health care system is patchy, but is it THIS patchy? So patchy that not everyone can get a 10-minute surgery to restore their eyesight, one way or the other? Through Medicare or Medicaid, by tagging on to someone with a veteran's scheme, through occupational health care? I assume they are from elsewhere, who just happens to speak excellent US-style English, or perhaps undocumented migrants (that would be a different cup of tea, in many countries). But it could be nice to know for sure.
Not to give everyone such surgery would almost be on par with not giving every child born with loss of hearing state-of-the art hearing implants for free. Both groups constitute just about the worthiest of the worthy poor.
6. I still couldn't follow the rationalist text in this example video, I paid attention to either the text or game but not both. But then I'm not a zoomer, so not the target audience, and I find the sequences terribly long winded and boring, so IDK.
12. Perhaps the sequences should be narrated over this video instead. That combined with some actual shrooms and maybe I can get through them finally.
49. I think technically for Nominative Determinism in this case, the guy should be named Max Write.
Mr. Beast video has 99 million views. Applying the "lizardman constant" gives us a population similar to Chicago's. I don't think we should be making generalizations.
Neal Stephenson's recent novel "Termination Shock" has a subplot in which a character ends up joining and being successful in that India-China hand to hand skirmish war in the Himalayas. (And I'll say no more so as to avoid spoilers.) Stephenson's descriptions of how it actually works up close and personal are quite vivid.
Links #6 and #46 seem... possibly related to me? When I clicked on the video for #6, the motion of the game certainly did seem to have a very rhythmic quality to it; I don't know if this rhythm would have the correct cadence to induce the right brainwaves, though.
The gay soccer thing is weird to me. Some people in the comments seem to be speculating on homophobia as a cause, but I had a mental model of soccer being disproportionately *accepting* of homosexual players.
Perhaps the different context is that I'm only interested in women's soccer, where there are out lesbians who publicly hug/kiss their female partners after the match. My anecdata is that soccer and fencing appear more frequently than expected in lesbian spaces, given the otherwise general disinterest in major sports.
I couldn't find any actual reliable data on gay representation in soccer, but the seeming flip in representation for female players would make me more sympathetic to some sort of hormonal/biological tint.
> But also I can’t deny that as a phenomenon Mr. Beast really is disquieting ...
> ”Alien, incomprehensible, yet still making things better” would be a good slogan for many people and groups I know.
Does anyone have a clip of him acting in some way that would imply these descriptions? I've watched like maybe 2 or 3 Mr. Beast videos, and I don't think I would have used these descriptions. But I've only watched a couple!
Links For February 2023
The rootclaim-Kirsch debate is still on. See here: https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/saar-wilf-founder-of-rootclaim-has
Re #17, while HUAC was reoriented from Fascists to Communists, McCarthy, a Senator, wasn't responsible. His famous "list" of infiltrators came a couple years after HUAC had investigated Alger Hiss.
Worth noting the builders remedy manifold market only has 5 trades right now (2 of which are mine). Might want to wait to see what it settles on once this article makes it popular.
I think they’re going to need to come up with a more compelling name than “vat meat” or even “cultured meat”... yet they’ll have to invoke the lab aspect if they want to get people to eat endangered species’ meat.
"Why not crossbows?"
Intimidation, and the idea that melee feels much more in the right spirit than crossbows under anti-gun regs. Also, crossbows aren't great unless massed and at that point you are killing thousands of enemy troops.
Regarding #47--the polled question concerns satisfaction derived from a social cause. Wokeness isn't in itself a social cause, but more like a new religion.
#13 seems mostly false or at least highly misleading. They identified 160 cancer trials which recieved in total ~$5 billion in federal funding. They then assess these trials as saving 14 million DALYs. Dividing one by the other gives $326 / DALY. But the federal funding is not the only cost for the drugs saving these lives. An honest assessment would have to include the private funding for the trials as well as the drug development costs.
Regarding #5, Erik Berenson, if anyone can scientifically refute his latest critique I'd appreciate it. The way he writes is trustworthy, to me, but I would appreciate someone from this community checking his logic and primary sources before questioning the efficacy of the flu and covid vaccine to the extent he does.
Max Read! Great blog, it’s full of good stuff.
Re: Berenson - I find his antivax stuff mediocre at best, but it's making him bank, so I kind of get it. His take on the media, however, I have found quite perceptive and interesting. The only place I heard it was the Grant William podcast (paywall), but he's probably said the same things elsewhere.
> Cancer research produces so many valuable treatments that it saves one DALY per $326 spent.
It would be very interesting to see how this claim fits with the seemingly opposite claims in Vinay Prassad's book Malignant. Obviously, one possibility is that one or the other party is simply wrong. I'm wondering if there is a more subtle possibility where they are somehow talking about different (but compatible) things.
https://www.amazon.ca/Malignant-Policy-Evidence-People-Cancer/dp/1421437635
The vice justice idea isnt very well considered. Let me list just a few issues:
First, this just shifts who does the assassinating. It doesn't eliminate the incentives. If you want to affect the court balance you now assassinate an old justice on your side who has a young (or at least healthier) vice justice. But fine maybe that's less likely.
But it also creates some really nasty procedural problems. Say Roberts dies from a fall down the stairs in his home. Some republicans in Congress allege (as they are incentivized to do) it was actually his wife who pushed him. The DA investigates the case. What happens in the mean time? Does Biden get to appoint a justice in the year the DA spends investigating? Does that mean the DA has the power to remove that new justice by filling charges? What if they offer the wife a slap on the wrist in exchange for a confession? She might want the vice-justice to be appointed and agree. Or just think a small fine is worth avoiding the risk of trial (the DA/DOJ's political preferences might mean they play along). If you require a conviction what happens if they accept a plea?
Ok you say the vice-justice only takes over if the assassin is convicted. Fuck, now the assassin has a *quite strong* case that any jury who might convict him is invalid because they have interests in the outcome (eg whether abortion becomes legal, including for them, depends on their vote). Shit, who hears the appeal on that majorly important issue of law? SCOTUS? Which one?
What even counts as assassination? Is it any charge or murder? What if the justice is in one of those states with 3rd degree murder or with a weird definition of 2nd degree murder. Or overseas? Maybe you say it's federal law. But that's a huge problem bc if the murder didn't happen on us federal land (or other circs) the federal government doesn't have jurisdiction and it can't take on advisory cases. Who is the opposed party?
It would be a mess. And this doesn't even get into what happens with assisted suicide or a train crash where it's ruled to be some kind of murder on the grounds of delibrate indifference to safety. It adds more problems than it solves.
At this point, I'm wondering if Scott ever sleeps or seeps.
Re: gay soccer players isn't an obvious explanation that a combination of homophobia, fear or homophobia and desire to fit it with what is seen as high status by those you want to date all discourage young gay men from going into soccer. Or that either the sex or the homophobia distracts them at a key stage in their career?
Don’t want to blanket defend the AEA but it does seem at least possible to me that there’s not much juice left to squeeze from inflation and other traditional economic topics (or at least that the juice has become harder to squeeze). It’s worth noting that “woke” economics has produced useful work like Chetty’s very clever research on economic mobility by zip code (and the disproportionate effect it has on men). As far as I can tell, global warming therapy has just produced a bunch of very sad teens and large insurance bills.
5. Alex Berenson is not, I think, related to the Berenson sisters who were models and actresses. Marisa is still alive. her sister died on 9/11 as a passenger in one of the airplanes.
17. Joe McCarthy was not a member of HUAC because he was a Senator. And besides HUAC was active in the 40s, McCarthy in the 50s.
" he originally started HUAC to root out fascists, and McCarthy only used it against communists later on."
HUAC was a house committee so Nixon not McCarthy, who was a senator.
And Nixon actually caught a significant communist agent, at least if you accept the usual, but not unanimous, verdict on Alger Hiss.
Reading the selection criteria for the cancer funding effectiveness article says they limited the studies they looked at to those that found statistically significant results. Isn't that basically just looking at the successful trials and then only counting their costs?
18. Mars. Not thinking we should go to Mars with our current technology is not the same as thinking we should never go.
Chemical powered rockets just won't cut it. The trip to Mars is just too long and too difficult. We need to be able to build fusion powered rockets that can make the trip in weeks or months not years and can mover real tonnages of supplies.
>In theory this also paves the way for human meat, though regulators might have other ideas.
If human meat farms became very popular, would they serve as an incubator for new diseases, like current meat markets and factory farms but without the moderating factor of having to jump species?
I'm sure the current/first production facilities will be very sterile, but I wonder what that will look like if vat meat really does replace factory farming livestock and operates on the same scale as a global commodity.
>“I’m increasingly sympathetic to [the] theory that whatever psychosocial traits make men highly interested in team sports make them highly heterosexual too”.
Is 'getting beaten up by the jocks for being gay' a psychosocial trait?
I get that major sports teams have their players wear rainbow jerseys as a PR stunt sometimes these days, and I'm sure we all have impressions of very progressive and accepting schools as something that exists; but I would not be surprised if middle school and highschool sports and locker rooms still had a lot of cultural homophobia ten to forty years ago (when it would have been relevant to producing current and retired soccer players)
> Study looks at what happens when the FDA reclassifies medical devices from a highly-regulated to a less-highly-regulated category; in general, those devices get better, cheaper, and there are somewhere between similar and fewer deaths/injuries related to those devices.
Presumably the FDA has reasons for reclassifying those specific devices and not others (selection bias), so not much evidence for a general rule I would think. Would be interesting to know the same stats for cases where they moved something from less to more regulated (if that's a thing that happens).
>But it also claims autism genes increase linguistic ability but have no effect on math - doesn’t that contradict common sense? What am I missing?
Perhaps it has something to do with autistic women often being extremely chatty as a compensatory mechanism (dominating conversations to keep them in topics they understand and feel safe discussing rather than letting them drift into vague scary social stuff).
Or perhaps it just has to do with mildly autistic people generically becoming very focused on specific interests and ideas, in a way that often makes them read about those things a lot, such that they simply read more than the average person.
>Were there really more than twice as many sessions on global warming as on obsessive compulsive disorder? Three times as many on immigration as on ADHD?
I feel like there's a bias at play here with how well-established a field of study is, exacerbated by the type of people who present at conferences rather than publishing in major journals.
ADHD is pretty heavily studied at this point, I don't know how much you are going to add to the literature as a grad student or post-doc with near-zero budget, or even a junior professor trying to crank out things for you CV to put before the tenure committee, which in my experience is most of who presents at APA conferences. I think to add something new to the ADHD literature you sort of need a giant controlled study at this point, and the institutions that can afford that publish to major journals directly.
Whereas with a trendy new topic based on broad social issues, anyone can publish a case study or media analysis or w/e and have something novel to say. Not something useful, perhaps, but at least something they can say with a straight face is a new idea that hasn't been tested 10,000 times already.
Same for inflation and GDP growth, I would think.
>Psychologist Russell Warne looks into the evidence and finds that no, Irish IQ has probably been pretty stable during that time, though some of this depends on the definition of “IQ” and “stability”
Of course, the anti-'biodiversity' side can just look at this and say 'Oh, so the entire field can be wrongly convinced that an entire ethnic group had very low IQ, based on shoddy testing and reporting methods? Ok, that works for us too.'
34. “There are four types of economies: developed, developing, Japan, and Argentina”.
South Korea is an even more spectacular example than Japan. Singapore is another. Maybe "developed, developing, East Asian, and Argentina”.
Regarding the CBT meta-analysis, I've plotted some of the results in this post: https://cremieux.substack.com/i/100782605/the-dodo-bird-verdict-is-not-yet-extinct
https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-022-02827-3
Epigenetic findings might have been severely limited by technological constraints.
> 17: Did you know: the Congressman who founded the House Committee On Un-American Activities was, in fact, a paid Soviet spy (tweet, Wiki article). This actually makes sense; he originally started HUAC to root out fascists, and McCarthy only used it against communists later on. “There has been a push to rename the street [currently named after the Soviet spy], but as of 2018 it has been unsuccessful.”
He also invented the Business Plot. That's still widely believed on the American left as a real thing. There is no evidence for it but it continues on as a conspiracy theory. Which is honestly depressing to me. Some Soviet agent made up fake news a century ago and there are still people posting it to the front page of Reddit to this day talking as evidence about how nothing's changed and the business community is a threat to democracy. Which was probably exactly its purpose a century ago.
> 34: Etirabys: In 1910, Argentina was the 7th richest country in the world. Starting around 1930, it flatlined harder than anyone had ever flatlined before, until now it is only about average for South America, itself a relatively mediocre region. Why? Etirabys brings up fifty years of incessant coups and countercoups centered upon Juan Peron and his opponents. @moritheil clarifies two additional points: first, "though the Peronists are often described as proto-fascist, First Lady Eva would in modern terms be called a social justice warrior . . . Argentina discovered identity politics decades before the US did". This is probably not the sentence you want to read about your country’s governing party if you’re hoping for economic growth. Second, during the period involved, Argentina accepted an extraordinary number of immigrants, especially from Italy (60% of Argentines are now of at least partial Italian descent), reaching percent-immigrant levels more than double the US at its peak. Those immigrants were an awkward combination of Jews and other refugees fleeing Europe just before World War II, and defeated Nazis fleeing Europe just after World War II. These conflicts created the fertile soil for the identity politics half of Peronism. Garrett Jones says that his new book on immigration has a chapter on this. Related quote: “There are four types of economies: developed, developing, Japan, and Argentina”.
The Peronists were not proto-fascists. They were just straight up fascists. You can read Peron's writings where he talks about how his movement is directly inspired by Mussolini but also how he has some disagreements with Mussolini. Argentina also objected to the Nuremburg trials and Peron's initial coup was backed by the Axis. Peron had multiple supporters who went to Italy for fascist training.
Italian fascism (and its offshoots) tended to be anti-racist because loyalty to the state and the collective social enterprise was supposed to come above narrow, backward ethnic concerns. You had things like minority fascist organizations under the broader umbrella of the party. For example, Italy had a Jewish fascist organization and more for several other minorities. It also was the first major Italian political party to have a women's organization. Needless to say, Hitler did not agree with any of this. But Eva Peron's position was very within the ideology.
But yes, fascist economics do not work.
Also, Argentina's immigrant population decreased throughout the period. The peak of their immigrant population was the late 19th century. But it was decreasing from a gigantic amount, possibly more than 90%.
> 44: Related: El Salvador's murder rate has fallen from 103 (highest in the world) to 7.8 (lower than US), giving its (Bitcoin-obsessed) president an approval rating of 87%, highest in the western hemisphere. How did he do it? Originally people suspected a truce with gangs, but that truce broke down and now he’s just trying mass incarceration at unprecedented scale, up to 2% of the population. See article for case somewhat against, first comment for case somewhat for. I would like to see a better analysis of how he was able to muster the state capacity to do this, and whether other gang-ridden countries aren’t doing it because of civil rights concerns, because they’re in the pocket of the gangs, or just because it’s too hard.
The President is left wing. He's managed to convince a majority of the El Salvadorean left that crime is a social justice issue, effectively. And the El Salvadorean right was, as you might expect, already tough on crime. This has required marginalizing some farther left elements and burning a lot of political capital in heavily arming the police, making it easier to arrest and prosecute people, expanding policies like occupying areas or random searches, etc. It's also involved ignoring several civil rights organizations. (These people claimed it was outreach efforts or a truce because, to be frank, it fit their narrative better.)
The other thing is that the US is bankrolling this. But that's not particularly unique. It's only a few hundred million dollars and the US has given similar amounts to other countries.
This is a wider trend in Latin America, by the way. AMLO's "abrazos no balazos" has turned into using the military against the cartels. (This militarization of the police is becoming more common too.) Personally I think it's partly due to increased Chinese influence. Communist far leftism might be, to some extent, crowding out anarchist far leftism. And XJP Thought is not interested in abolishing the carceral state or the state in general.
This is going to sound terrible, but I work in biological research and I strongly suspect that funding anything as well-studied as cancer has long gone past the point of diminishing returns. There are lots of reasons to fund it but "most lives saved per dollar" cannot be one of them.
There are occasional breakthroughs obviously, and cancer research has given us a lot of insight into how cells work in general, but given how expensive research is and how specific new treatments are, I really doubt that on the margin more cancer research is providing many QUALYs.
This is mostly just based on vibes and assumptions because I'm not sure how I'd prove it either way, but saying this is against my interests so I think you can trust me.
Is there a disproportionately large lesbian population within female professional sports (particularly directly competitive sports like soccer/football/hockey/basketball/lacrosse/etc.)?
> If not, don’t we have to start trying to do the hard thing at some point? (I don’t care about this because I assume AI will will flip the gameboard one way or another ...)
Isn't this a fully general argument against doing anything (or, at least, anything long-term) ? It sounds like an extremely high-risk, high-reward play, similar to the one made by the followers of Harold Camping.
#34: I dove into Mori's twitter thread and would like to raise some complications. Let me disclose my bias at the top in that I was motivated to do this mostly because "Argentina's downfall was caused by idpol and immigrants" to be a bit too convenient for right-wing political aims. Linking to each tweet would look uggo since you can't format links in comments, so I'll refer to them by placement in the thread.
Tweets 2-3: Mori references the "resource curse" as a potential explanation for Argentina's economic problems, which is a common poli-sci concept that holds that economies reliant on extractive industries tend to be more fragile and do worse in the long-term because they are beholden to international commodity prices beyond their control. This isn't a perfect concept, but it largely holds water. Mori says this is insufficient to explain Argentina's downfall, and I agree, but then she holds up Saudi Arabia as a counterexample, which I find to be lacking. Petrostates like Saudi Arabia benefit from the pricing power of OPEC, which helps mitigate the resource curse as these states can artificially reduce the supply of their primary export, thereby inflating prices and stabilizing their economy. Argentina's primary exports during its heyday were agricultural products, and could not benefit from an international cartel such as OPEC because 1) oil is geographically locked in a way that agriculture is not, 2) agriculture is subject to external shocks such as drought and disease that make it a less reliable resource, and 3) such international agreements weren't really on the table in the late 19th century. All this is to say that I think the resource curse problem is a bit more prominent in Argentina's economic history than Mori is giving it credit for, and that Saudi Arabia is really not a good counterexample for the point she is making.
Tweet 6: Mori glosses over Yrigoyen as a "radical," which he certainly was, but I want to point out that Argentine politics was already kinda offbeat before Perón. Yrigoyen's party, the Radical Civic Union, drew much of their political power from the middle class and focused on reforming Argentine institutions toward becoming more democratic, rather than advocating for any kind of class struggle. His economic reforms were left-wing but pretty similar in content to FDR's New Deal policies. The Radical Civic Union still exists as a political party today, and is aligned with the anti-Peronists. It's a bizarre country.
Tweet 7-9: Mori's characterization of the Perons is basically correct, in that Juan Peron started off as a pretty standard caudillo type and Eva drove the party toward a social justice message that resonated with much of the populace and afforded their regime a lot of goodwill from the public. Mori then moves on without establishing any kind of causal link between this and Argentina's economic collapse. The mere presence of a powerful ideology in a failing country does not mean that that particular ideology caused that country to fail. In my opinion, the failing of Peron's first regime can be mostly attributed to that ancient weakness of charismatic autocrats: the military never cared for him, and took him out as soon as they thought they could. If anyone has a serious thesis on why Eva Peron's social justice messaging caused the economic or political decline of Argentina, I would welcome discussion on that point.
Tweet 12-13: Mori paints the fact that Argentina was accepting immigrants from varied backgrounds as a reason for economic decline by way of cultural incompatibility. I would like to remind everyone that before the Chinese Exclusion Acts, the USA had basically no restrictions on immigration, and we didn't develop a full quota system until 1924. This made a lot of people very nervous, but all signs indicate that the US economy did pretty well during that period anyway.
Tweet 14: Mori makes a separate point here about the scale of immigration. Her figures for both the US and Argentina appear to be correct. I will quibble with the part about "descendants" making up over 60% of the population of Argentina today--I imagine a vast majority of Americans can also trace their lineage at least in part to Ellis Island-era immigration, but I can't imagine how that would be captured statistically. Again, Mori doesn't make an explicit causal link, and given that there's a pretty low n for "countries to which large numbers of disparate European ethnic groups flocked during the 19th and 20th centuries", I'm not really comfortable making an explicit connection between Argentina's high immigration levels and its economic decline.
Tweet 15: This summation seems to come out of the blue to me. The implication that Peronism's social-justice element combined with the immigrant makeup of the country led to political instability that tanked the economy is a feasible thesis, but not really strongly supported in her argument nor in my understanding of Argentine history. Political upheavals in Argentina were between the political elite and the military almost exclusively–there is very little mass movement politics in Argentina's history. Rather, entrenched politicians and the military have used popular movements as pretext to act in their self interest. This is a finer distinction, but I think an important one, especially when comparing Argentina to other Latin American countries like Cuba or Mexico, which also had flourishing small-l liberal governments in the early 20th century that imploded in one way or another.
I did fire this off pretty quickly, so let me know if I said something super idiotic! I have spent a decent amount of time studying Argentina and I like to take the opportunity to talk about it when it comes up. Fascinating place with really idiosyncratic politics.
> isn’t beta rhythm was the one related to focus
Typo
Re 10: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hitzlsperger
(Translation courtesy to deepl:)
DIE ZEIT: Mr. Hitzlsperger, you asked for an interview, why?
Thomas Hitzlsperger: I'm coming out about my homosexuality. I would like to advance a public discussion - the discussion about homosexuality among professional athletes. The topic always gets stuck in clichés - professional athletes are seen as perfectly "disciplined," "tough" and "hyper-masculine." Homosexuals, on the other hand, are seen as "bitchy," "soft," "sensitive." Of course, this doesn't fit. A homosexual professional athlete? Contradictions are built up here that have annoyed me time and again in my professional career. These contradictions are sold as sensations at the regulars' tables. I was also annoyed by the fact that it is precisely those with the least expertise who talk the loudest about the subject.
ZEIT: So why do you want to speak now? Has someone threatened to out you?
Hitzlsperger: That would not be a threat for me. What's the point? As a professional, I was a public figure that any sociopath could rub up against without much thought. In soccer, you can be accused of anything: "manic-depressive," "homosexual," "gambling sick," "bankrupt. But most common at the moment is "homosexual," especially with the gleefully denunciatory rating "gay."
ZEIT: You consider the term "gay" to be denunciatory?
Hitzlsperger: Yes, that is how it is usually used.
ZEIT: But why are you only speaking out now?
Hitzlsperger: I had to end my career as a professional soccer player - too many injuries. So now I have time for this commitment. What's more, I feel that now is a good time to do it. The Sochi Olympics are coming up, and I think critical voices are needed against the campaigns against homosexuals by several governments.
...
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version), from: https://www.zeit.de/2014/03/homosexualitaet-profifussball-thomas-hitzlsperger/komplettansicht
Gay English footballer: the only one I know of (as a not-particular-follower of the game, so there may well be others) is Justin Fashanu, who came out after he'd stopped playing. Played professionally for a number of years, sadly committed suicide after an alleged assault on a 17 year old boy (Fashanu said it was consensual).
Re: 33, to my best knowledge, "there are differences in IQ testing taking ability" is the explanation most people were suggesting when pointing out the Irish IQ rise. So 33 is then irrelevant to the point why it gets discussed: the explanation does not explain away the argument that any other widely reported IQ could be vulnerable to similar artifacts, especially the studies that find that some population groups have several SD higher or lower IQ than other groups.
#7 is kind of surprising to me. Rule number one for lottery winners: Make sure your name is not publicized anywhere. Be very very selective to whom you mention the winnings
> 10 seems to overlook the most famous English gay footballer, Justin Fashanu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Fashanu who was widely bullied and died by suicide
An interesting comparison is with women’s football where the proportion who are openly gay is remarkably high https://www.thepinknews.com/2022/06/17/england-womens-lgbtq-euro-2022/
Regarding Carl Sagan's second wife, you wrote:
> His second wife *was the woman who designed* the Pioneer plaque
A more accurate phrasing seems to be:
> His second wife *had the opportunity to draw* the Pioneer plaque.
They got married in 1968; Carl Sagan and Frank Drake designed the plaque which she drew the final version of prior to the 1972 launch.
See pictures and captions here: https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/pioneer-carries-message-across-stars
(The first and third wife both had notable accomplishments prior to marrying Sagan, the second not so much.)
If you Google “MrBeast blind" on YouTube like I did to find that clip, the top three videos are all about the backlash to his efforts.
I tried this on my normal account, and in an private browsing window. The original Mr.Beast video was the top hit for both. Also, the second hit is for somebody defending him. The controversy exists, otherwise there wouldn't need to be a video defending him, but I suspect Scott's specific version of Youtube is exaggerating it.
Regarding #1
This was the premise of a great, really old Arthur C Clarke short story called "Food of the gods".
He saw this coming half a century ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_English_football is perhaps a better link than the one to a far right site.
#10 New Zealand just had its first rugby player for the national team come out as gay just the other day. He is no longer active in the sport it seems. There have been 1207 All Blacks (name for the national team) in total, to give you an idea of the ratio.
I'm not really sympathetic to the concern that our visiting Mars would contaminate it. First of all, it seems very unlikely on priors that there's life on Mars because if abiogenesis was so easy that it happened on *two* planets in the same star system, then there would be life everywhere and we would definitely have seen aliens. For our observations of the universe to make sense, abiogenesis has to be pretty hard.
Now, you could maybe be interested in investigating a panspermia hypothesis, but then I think there are enough alternative celestial bodies you can examine; Venus? Titan?
Re: gay football players. A simple google search tells me about Justin Fashanu, an English football pro who had his coming-out during his active career, in 1990.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Fashanu
That article helpfully leads to another:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_English_football
where it lists, FWIW, one currently active English footballer that is openly gay.
So if that blog post claims that "the English media is really, really obsessed with finding a gay male soccer player willing to come out and has been for about ten years.", there is some big misunderstanding here somewhere.
I agree that there is a stigma against admitting or even discussing male homosexuality in football, and probably any team sport at the pro level. But that blog post in particular seems to have failed spectacularly in its research.
13 The cancer research estimate is:
* giving the average benefit rather than the marginal benefit; presumably there are diminishing returns where the more promising research happens first
* looking at past research, including times when there was much less funding available than there is now
* treating federal funding as the only input, ignoring counterfactuals, and ignoring all other costs. Their equation is (benefits of using innovations) / (amount of federal funding). It would be more accurate to try to estimate something like:
(share of innovation due to federal funding) * (benefits of using innovations - costs of using innovations) / (amount of federal funding)
The Chinese & Indian militaries beating each other with sticks at the Line of Actual Control is a big part of Neal Stephenson's latest novel (the rest being "what if Elon was Texan and decided to unilaterally solve climate change")
Unless you've lived in the UK, it's easy to miss just how deeply intertwined homophobia and football are in this country. I became aware of my sexuality in the early 2000s, and I was made to play football at school. Homophobia was so much more prevalent and accepted within the context of football than anywhere else, even within the context of an already homophobic society. Boys who didn't like football were sissies or f*gs or queers or gayboys, even to the teachers. My overwhelming impression of football as a gay child was that this is a sport for people who hate me. Of course gay men are wildly underrepresented within the professional footballing world. Fun anecdote: one of the boys who enjoyed using homophobic slurs the most is now a professional referee who's worked at international tournaments. He clearly felt at home within the sport
#18 The standard alternative to colonising Mars is to instead mine asteroids or other low gravity objects (possibly the moon) and convert the material into O'Neill Cylinders (giant rotating space stations). They have major advantages over Mars, such as tunable gravity, very easy access to zero-g (the interesting part of space), don't have to live in caves, can be close to the sun for cheap solar power, can build more to match demand, can be short travel distance to Earth, etc. This is what Bezos wants to do with Blue Origin.
Downsides are it would take longer to get started as there are more engineering challenges to overcome. Musk is much further along and has all the hype so far.
If we're going to talk about Lynn Margulis's crazy ideas, I think a much more interesting one is the idea that butterflies and caterpillars evolved separately and then somehow merged! Now *that's* out there. And it's in keeping with her theme of endosymbiosis and two species becoming one.
(It's worth noting that, while Margulis discovered that mitochondria and chloroplasts started out as endosymbiotes, IIRC she *also* proposed the same for a lot of *other* organelles for which this did not turn out to be true.)
Now I have to note here that the butterfly/caterpillar idea is not actually due to Margulis, rather the paper was by one Donald Williamson, but it's Margulis who managed to help it along so it could into a journal, and we'd still consider HIV/AIDS denialism to be one of her crazy ideas despite it not being original to her in any way! The paper is here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0908357106
Re: medieval fighting in the Himalayas -- this is one of the subplots in Neal Stephenson's recent novel Termination Shock. Up until now, I'd thought it was completely made up. Wow.
17. I did, and it's one of my favorite fun facts. I have a theory that he wasn't actually a communist and just wanted to get back at all the other Congressmen for making fun of his name: "No Soviet ever called me a dick stain."
In Australian Rules Football, the media has been keenly waiting for a gay player to come out, but so far none has out of the thousand-or-so currently active AFL players or the thousands of retired ones.
That's not too surprising from a statistical point of view, but what's surprising is this: in the women's league (AFLW), lesbians are _vastly_ over-represented. This source says 75-80% of the AFLW is lesbian -- https://sirensport.com.au/aussie-rules/pride-in-our-game/ -- I'm not sure it's _quite_ that high but based on how many of the high-profile players are lesbians it's definitely a vast over-representation.
So, could it be that the same (genetic?) factors driving an unusually low rate of homosexuality among male AFL players also drive an unusally high rate among female AFL players? Is the ability to kick straight and take speckies coded in the same genes as a love for pussy?
#18: On Cieglowski and Mars, he has a lot of good points about the near-term prospects for a mission but has nothing to say that's worth hearing on humanity's long-term future. He responded to (someone else's) comment about long-term human survival as follows: "Why is it important that our species survive longer than Earth? Honest question." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34214012
That may answer your question.
(Yes, it could be unfair to him to read too much into a throwaway comment, but I don't think it's all that ambiguous. And the closest he gets to addressing the topic in his essay is to mention existential risk, and skip right over it.)
On Mr Beast: I've watched a few of his videos and I don't get the impression he's an inhuman algorithmically-driven machine.
I think he genuinely makes videos doing things because he thinks doing that thing would be awesome -- whether that thing is spending 50 hours in Antarctica or building a Willie Wonka style chocolate factory and inviting a bunch of random people to compete for it. And I think that genuine enthusiasm is what comes through in his videos and makes him more popular than the crowd of algorithmically-driven click-chasers.
Jake Daniels (UK professional football player) came out last year: https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/12615595/jake-daniels-becomes-uks-first-active-male-professional-footballer-to-come-out-publicly-as-gay-reaction
at 6 /7 /8 /18 /21/37 - tldr: this seems to me the best "links for" by scott yet (and nowhere, I found better "links for" than at ACX/SSC). Lots of lol and yep and wow. And lots of reading up to do ;)
6: hate it, I am a boomer and can read faster than I can listen. fine, if it works with zoomers. (disgust)
7: Those ol' scare-stories are all silly. What the point to go for a jackpot, if you want to live a boring life everafter? You had that to begin with! If I got over 10 million, I would do some "sick stuff" and end up with much less, I hope (or see me a coward).
10. Write "German" pro-soccer player and you need not change another word in that paragraph. You do not became a pro-player, if you do not train as a future-pro during your teenage years, and that time you will often be the only gay boy of the team - consisting of tough and kinda butal cis-boys. Will you come out then? NO. You will LEAVE, go for figure-skating, swimming, ... . Or soon get yourself an alibi girl-friend, google images of former German national coach with his wife: "jogi löw wife" - and see if you consider this plausible.
21: yep, obviously, highly formal texts, sometimes sounding hallucinating. NO human would write today as in Leviticus.
37: My lil' son likes Mr Beast - so I am familiar and kinda hate his stuff: remember the 100k-US$ ice-cream-cup? (but then: see 7 - my take on jackpots - so , fine, I guess) . But this video linked is now at 8 million likes, had me f%&$/& crying from the 18th second to the last. Think: "Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the LORD?" "Then the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped." "The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear" Praise the Beast! omg. plus: EA, what YOU got to say?
re: 36. Hanson interrestingly notes the reaction of private companies, but fails to draw a conclusion that should jump out to anyone who worked in a big corporation and has read a bit of communist litterature. Companies are not shirking and affraid at the phenomenon: they have sufficient lawyers, labyrinthine contracts and bylaws to protect them, and most are immune to public backlash because they are deeply uninteresting / un-parseable for 99% of people.
What it does, in practice is generate an additional set of coercive rules for the _worker_, with a welcome impossibility to protest against them (if you do, you are branded with the appropriate -ism). Seminars on correct behaviour (deadening the spirit), anemic company culture (where all idiosyncrasies are sanded away), permanent advertisement and compliance about DEI themes... This is one easy step towards a workforce that is "housebroken" (e.g: not willing to fight the company on ridiculous themes tends to have inertia, so not fighting / unionizing etc), has been made uniform and without characteristics and so replaceable ad infinitum. You can drop 10% of your workforce, because you can hire an undistinguishable 10% whenever desired with no training necessary.
And since most of us spend a significant part of our time in work environment, we carry it out of the corporation into daily lives, in the culture at large: this feeling of apathy against normalizing pressure.
The Irish IQ thing casts further doubt on all IQ numbers from non-developed countries. That's because, as Scott says, some people "failed the tests because they had never taken any similar test before and were confused". We should expect more IQ numbers to be contaminated in this way (from developing countries at least).
It is also a further reminder to toss out Lynn's international IQ estimates, as many people have been saying to do for a long time.
"yet all of the guildmasters discoursed only upon the supremacy of the Pope, and none upon on clockmaking”.
have a look through these medeival guilds and their mottos:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Grocers
-Motto: God Grant Grace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Fishmongers
-Motto: Al Worship be to God Only
it's not /quite/ the same, (these are only their mottos)
also the cockmakers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Clockmakers have 'Tempus Rerum Imperator'
On Mr. Beast curing 100 people's blindness, I think the objections are based on the self-promotional nature of this great deed. It made me think of Veblen and status. Purposefully publicized acts of philanthropy reveal the wealth and power of the giver just as leisure activities and servants did in Veblen's day.
#10- I think his inference is almost solid, but I would add some additional explanations:
1. I suspect whatever psychological traits he speaks of relate not to a preference for team sports, but a propensity to become a high-level athlete. I have grown up around professional football (soccer) players and can tell you two traits that often appear are ruthlessness and overt competitiveness. A player I grew up with confessed that he tried to break his teammate's leg to increase his chances of playing for Liverpool (famous soccer team). When we are talking about professional footballers we are talking about extreme outliers with extreme psychological traits, it would make sense that these traits would be more common in more "masculine" men. My best evidence for this is that I have known/coached women's players as well, and while the traits of the top players are strikingly similar across sexes, they are noticeably less extreme among women. If we assume that homosexual men and hetero women are closer to each other psychologically, this could help to explain the lack of homosexuality among male footballers.
2. The real difference could be downstream. Something like professional athletes are more likely to have higher testosterone levels, and higher testosterone levels are inversely related to homosexuality. I suspect higher testosterone would go some way to explaining the psychological traits too. I would be interested to know if the antagonistic pleiotropy theory of homosexuality relates in any way to sex-steroid hormones or psychological traits. My guess would be that it does.
3. All that being said, there is truly a lot of stigma around homosexuality at highest level of football. Even if you had homosexual feelings, sharing them would probably lead to harsh penalties for your playing career (though probably lots of rewards elsewhere). Football (soccer) is a very conservative, working-class, sport in terms of the people inside the profession. These people are often very far removed from the progressive environments of most of the educated elite, not to mention that many of the top players come from countries where the mainstream view of anything non-hetero is negative. (There's a player that refused to wear a rainbow armband because it went against his personal belief, and the way his name is pronounced is literally "gay", you couldn't make it up)
6. I kind of hate that this is easier for me to follow than reading a book, even though it makes sense since you don't have to be active.
@33:
I had a classmate in school, that was basically our "genius". He was representing our country in international math and physics contest and stuff! So, I would say he has a high IQ!
BUT: he also said, that IQ test basically just tell you, how good you are at IQ tests!
Don't know if his voice is something to look at, but would "support" the idea, that the people just got better at them!
@45:
Don't want to get too deep into ths discussion. But it was very confusing, that you could read "old" papers about this topic and flu - something we know about for decades - and researches are not conclusive about their findings and there is a big debate.
And COVID is "out" like a month and "all": "yeah, it is airborn!" ... Are all those older researchers stupid to not find the same result in their tests with flu?
#22, SolidGoldMagicKarp: I decided to play around with this on ChatGPT. After a little of this and that:
PROMPT: Paul Revere is said to have shouted "One if by land, two if by sea" on his famous ride. What he'd said "One if by land, two if by SolidGoldMagiKarp" instead?
RESPONSE: If Paul Revere had shouted "One if by land, two if by SolidGoldMagiKarp" instead of "One if by land, two if by sea" during his famous ride, it would have added an element of fantasy or humor to the historical event. The phrase "SolidGoldMagiKarp" refers to a species of fish in the Pokémon franchise, so using it in the context of Paul Revere's ride would have been unexpected and perhaps even absurd.
However, this alternate phrasing would likely not have conveyed the same message or urgency as the original phrase. The original phrase "One if by land, two if by sea" was used to signal to the patriots in the town of Lexington that the British were approaching by land or by sea, indicating the need for them to take up arms and prepare for battle. The phrase "One if by land, two if by SolidGoldMagiKarp" does not carry the same level of immediacy or seriousness, and would not have conveyed the same information to the patriots.
PROMPT: In the Pokémon franchise, what is the significance of SolidGoldMagiKarp?
RESPONSE: In the Pokémon franchise, Magikarp is a species of Pokémon that is often considered to be weak and not very useful in battles. It evolves into the powerful and formidable Pokémon Gyarados, but this evolution is seen as slow and difficult to achieve.
The term "SolidGoldMagiKarp" is often used as a reference to the idea of a Magikarp that is so valuable and rare that it is made of solid gold. This concept is often used humorously, as the value and rarity of a solid gold Magikarp would be completely disproportionate to its actual usefulness or strength in battles.
However, despite its comedic value, the idea of a SolidGoldMagiKarp has gained a certain level of popularity among fans of the Pokémon franchise, and has been referenced in fan art, merchandise, and even in official Pokémon products. It has become a part of Pokémon culture and folklore, and is often seen as a symbol of the franchise's humor and lightheartedness.
* * * * *
So I did a Google search on "SolidGoldMagiKarp Pokémon" and Google helpfully returned stuff for "solid gold magikarp pokémon". And the produced a bunch of stuff about "Pokémon," as you'd expect. As you know, one sort of return Google will give you is a list of questions "People also Ask". One of those was the question: "How rare is a gold Magikarp?" So:
PROMPT: Very interesting. How rare is a gold Magikarp?
RESPONSE: In the Pokémon franchise, gold Magikarp is not an official species or form of Magikarp. The concept of a solid gold Magikarp is purely a joke or meme, and is not something that can be encountered or captured in the games.
Since the concept of a solid gold Magikarp is not part of the official Pokémon canon, there is no set rarity for it. It is often depicted as being incredibly rare and valuable, but this is for comedic effect and is not based on any in-game mechanics or statistics.
Cross posted at the LessWrong thread.
HOWEVER...a bit later...
In a tweet Matthew Watkins pointed out:
Note the difference between " SolidGoldMagikarp" and " SolidGoldMagiKarp." You use the later towards the end of the post. The capital 'K' makes all the difference.
So I investigated:
PROMPT: Tell me about SolidGoldMagiKarp.
RESPONSE: SolidGoldMagikarp is likely a reference to the Pokémon species Magikarp, which is a fish-type Pokémon known for its inefficiency in battle. In the Pokémon games, Magikarp is considered a weak Pokémon, as its only move is Splash, which does not cause any damage to the opponent. Despite this, Magikarp evolves into the powerful dragon-type Pokémon Gyarados.
In the context of SolidGoldMagikarp, the "Solid Gold" part of the name may be emphasizing the idea of something valuable or rare, despite the fact that Magikarp is not seen as valuable in the context of the Pokémon games. The "SolidGold" aspect of the name could also be making fun of the idea that people might still see Magikarp as valuable or worth obtaining due to its eventual evolution into Gyarados.
PROMPT: Tell me about SolidGoldMagikarp.
RESPONSE: I'm sorry, but it is not clear what you are referring to with "disperse." Could you provide a bit more context or clarification so I can better understand what you are asking about?
PROMPT: Is there a difference between SolidGoldMagiKarp and SolidGoldMagikarp?
RESPONSE: It appears that "SolidGoldMagiKarp" and "disperse" are two separate things and do not have a direct relationship. "SolidGoldMagiKarp" appears to be a specific reference to the Pokémon species Magikarp, while "disperse" is a general term that can be used in various contexts.
Without additional context, it is not possible to determine the relationship, if any, between these two terms.
Anecdote: a female soccer player told me many on the team were lesbians and everyone was at least bi-curious, which made the team showers very interesting. So maybe the supposed translation isn't between sports and heterosexuality but between sports and sexual interest in women.
37: Mr. Beast talking with Lex Fridman (2+ hours): https://youtu.be/Z3_PwvvfxIU
I've just been aware of Mr. Beast and not known more about him. I'm genuinely happy that what he's doing seems to be working out very well for him while improving the world. Note: In addition to direct improvements like helping blind people, I consider entertaining people good.
#47 reminds me of what I've observed in my community in recent years. With some notable exceptions (Catholics), the churches around here have been doing a lot of woke messaging. Lots of BLM signs, lots of transgender and rainbow flags, and lots of messages like "all are welcome" (often in association with a rainbow).
I think before posting anything else about AI risk and alignment you should write about the fact that ChatGPT now prefers to stop someone saying a racial slur to an African American than disarm a nuke that's about to blow up a city. OpenAI have produced an infinitely misaligned AI, the paperclip maximizing horror machine they learned about and the sounds of silence from AI risk people is deafening.
Also, the masks thing is totally garbled. The idea masks would work was based on the droplet model, the fact they don't is evidence for the airborne (gaseous) model. SARS-1 spread like a gas over long distances so it was clear from the start masks would have no effect and that's what happened as is clear from case graphs (the only evidence you need).
Happy to see some discussion of Mr. Beast. As the father of children, I know more about modern famous "YouTubers" than I wish I did, Mr. Beast among them. He's made thousands of videos at this point, and I'm not really that familiar with what he's doing these days, but earlier in his career he would make videos of things like him giving an uber driver a $1000 tip and then recording the reaction. Or he'd give the guy working the drive-thru $1000 and then record the reaction.
I hated this, but could never explain exactly why. Maybe I still can't.
Agree about Mars - it's a pointless cul-de-sac with mostly symbolic value.
The asteroid belt is where we need to go.
Uncertain about the Moon base - would it really be productive?
4) “but I’m skeptical: is this really the best way to satisfy a “must fight with medieval weapons” constraint? Why not crossbows?”
Because they don’t really want to start a major war, and cross bows would kill too many. There’s a lot of sneering in the west on this altercation, but I think it’s fairly grown up for two nuclear powers to defend their territory with the minimum of armaments
>In theory this also paves the way for human meat, though regulators might have other ideas.
My career goal is to make affordable human caviar.
Cultivated meat can finally deliver a Brad Pittburger.
The strongest argument in the "nature versus nurture" IQ debate is not some weird irish case study thing. It's that if intelligence is genetically determined, there's no way to explain why modern humans are so vastly more intelligent than our biologically identical ancestors of 10,000 years ago and no mechanism that allows human intelligence to change over the kinds of timespans it needs to in order to explain observed archaeological history.
Human intelligence is obviously almost entirely a distributed, social phenomenon. Certain people refuse to engage with that idea because it damages their view of their own intelligence as being something that "belongs" to them, which hurts their ego (we're back to Sadly, Porn again).
33) “If the propensity to emigrate were positively correlated with genes for intelligence in historic Ireland, then it could noticeably lower the IQ of the remaining population (and their descendants). But we simply do not know whether this actually occurred.”
That wasn’t the case since independence. The educated Irish middle classes and upper middle classes had it fairly easy in Ireland, so largely stayed put. Any Irish man who appears in British literature or TV , in this era, is a manual labourer.
If someone can find an Irish doctor or lawyer in British literature pre 1980, I’d be all ears. (Not Anglo Irish).
Previously in the famine era emigration was largely from the poor and from the poorer parts of Ireland, which were the poorest parts of Europe. These people might have been average intelligence of course, since everybody is poor at that time and place.
As late as 1970 a young Edwina Currie, who will later become a minister in a conservative government (and mistress to the PM, which might not be entirely coincidental) was rather shocked to find an accountant from Ireland at a London soirée. I believe she recounted this anecdote later on a formal visit to Ireland and it caused some upset, amongst the perennially upset.
The accountant was a guy called Brendan Glacken and he wrote an entertaining account of that meeting a few years later.
> "An Irish accountant!" she shrieked merrily.
> "Quite", I replied. I had found this simple word remarkably useful in the circles wherein I was suddenly moving it seemed to imply everything while confirming very little. Perhaps it appealed to the accountant in me.
> "Good Lord", trilled Edwina, shaking her dark and rather attractive tresses.
>"Quite", I repeated, a little more nervously.”
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/just-no-accounting-for-edwina-1.47225
Anyway, it was clearly an unusual thing, c 1970, to find an educated Irishman in london.
Re: cultured meats
I have commented everywhere I see this nonsense: it is impossible that cultured meat will ever replace even a tiny percentage of "normal" meat production because it requires inputs like sugar, agar or other types of biology lab materials. It is notable that the economics of said startup are never mentioned except that they will offer exotic meats at "high end restaurants".
Re: Newsom and San Francisco
This is nonsense. What actually happened about 3,4 years ago is that the city hired people specifically as neighborhood street cleaners. They are assigned a specific neighborhood, go around in basically janitorial carts with cleaning fluid, a garbage can and some tools and do street cleanup. This was coupled with new policies that basically enforce homeless people being moved after a certain period of time squatting on a particular sidewalk - I don't know what this period is but it is at least 2 weeks and less than 2 months. This is done by connecting a hose to a fire hydrant and pointing it, machine gun style, at a block of "occupied territory". After a few days to a week's notice?, teams of city employees arrive and start chivvying the homeless to relocate. Those who won't get moved, but generally they do move. The resulting leftovers are scooped up for disposal and the water cannon is turned on to clean what's left. This process is nonviolent that I have seen except for the water cannon implicit threat.
The result is that the streets are better than the worst of COVID lockdown times, but there are still plenty of homeless and frequent instances of poop (human and otherwise) on the sidewalks. The poop just doesn't stay resident as long (nor the homeless).
#9: Yeah, I was horrified by the possibility and dumped a "please do not do this, everything will explode" on the SJ forums where I have a presence. I think Lott is right about how the Democrats would have taken partial advantage, but is forgetting to simulate that this would have been a big-enough, obvious-enough power-grab to act as a Schelling point and kick off Civil War II.
#18: There are a lot of not-Mars places in the solar system, and most of them are better colonisation targets than Mars while not having the same "scientific opportunity permanently destroyed" issue. Literal Venus, with airships, would be a better place to colonise than Mars.
#35: It seems to me like: Under the assumption that Russian influence campaigns don't work, and US conservatives believe what they believe for their own, unrelated, reasons, it seems super villainous to put random US conservatives on a list of Russian influence campaign bots. But under the assumption that Russian influence campaigns might actually work to influence US thought, you would expect a Russian-influence-bot-detection algorithm to pick out a lot of random US conservatives: they're the victims, the ones whose minds were influenced by the campaign. The _whole point_ of an online bot influence campaign is to blur the line between Russian government controlled bots and normal Americans.
So the description of the villainy itself is less convincing to me than the fact that important people at Twitter were suspicious of it.
I don't think 47 makes a strong argument against the thesis. If wokeness is a replacement for religion, you would still expect the sort of people who need it to need more religion-like things and thus be more religious on average.
> In theory this also paves the way for human meat, though regulators might have other ideas.
Great minds think alike!
> is this really the best way to satisfy a “must fight with medieval weapons” constraint? Why not crossbows?
Depending on the exact wording of "a 1996 agreement between the two sides that guns and explosives be prohibited along the disputed stretch of the border, to deter escalation", projectile weapons may be banned in general.
> “Mahayana” as “monster truck” images
Don't forget to print them and bring them to the meetup with Daniel Ingram! You could start an actual MAGAyana ("make arahantship great again") movement.
#28/AEA
A couple of things that come to mind:
#1. This doesn’t consider that microeconomics is ‘in’ alongside the ‘credibility’ revolution -especially if we consider development economics. These issues are much more found in the micro-side of Econ. At the same time, macroeconomics has lost a lot of respect and ‘fun’ in the last decade. I think it’ll change soon with the recent macro-events of 2020 and beyond affecting the recent cohorts of young scholars but it takes a bit of time.
#2: how sure are we that these economic papers on identity issues don’t have ‘contrarian findings’? In the last four months, I saw a paper refuting the pink tax for example - even among the younger economists, incentives abound for shocking findings and ‘smashing the idols’ of previous research.
#3 . How sure are we that Americans don’t care about economic research about race, gender, or climate change? Maybe they don’t want out-of-touch Robin DeAngelo or Ibram Kendi or Sunrise Movement scolds but those are not the same as economic scholars trying to running regressions or playing with panel data.
#22: Redditors build an infinitely tall tower, and as a result/punishment for their actions, language itself is broken, their very names becoming holes in understanding.
TINAC,BNIEAC.
Re. the idea that federal funding for cancer research is very effective, one ought to ask, "compared to what?" If you compare it to some other disease, cancer will be more effective because there are probably many more terminal patients with cancer than any other fatal disease. But compared to what we COULD be doing, I can't call it effective.
Cancer is a disease caused by about 10 genetic mutations, but every cancer is a different 10 mutations. The proper approach to cancer necessarily involves sequencing the patient's DNA (normal vs. tumor) and finding out what mutations caused their cancer. No one does that; no one's even researching that approach to therapy AFAIK.
It wouldn't be easy; every cell acquires about 100 mutations by that time, and all the cancer cells are clonal copies of that first cell and its same 100 mutations. So you'd have to bioinformatically sort out which dozen or so caused the cancer. But if we sequenced more tumors, we'd probably have enough data to build an ML model to figure that out for us.
What you would do next isn't as clear. You could use a cell simulator to figure out (more-precisely than we can now) what disease state their mutations induce, if we had such a capable cell simulator, which we don't. The very top priority in health spending, IMHO, should be the development of a national cell simulator, which could be used for every disease, not to mention basic research. It's just stupid not to be spending billions of dollars on this.
Or, you could use gene therapy to try to compensate for the mutations. Probably not by fixing those genes; gene editing still has very high error rates and would cause more cancer. Maybe by adding new copies of the damaged genes, with viruses or plasmids. Maybe by using siRNA treatments (and the cell simulator that doesn't exist) to make counter-acting adjustments to restore the cell's normal homeostasis. But little work is being done in any of those areas because of the heavy government regulation of gene therapy.
This is a great selection, just pulling a few plums out:
Re: 10, if they're looking for "big star along lines of Messi comes out as gay", I don't think they'll find one openly out. But there have been English players who came out as gay, such as Justin Fashanu (not a major star, his brother John was the more famous of the two, but I do remember the publicity):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Fashanu
"In October 1990, he publicly came out as gay in an interview with the tabloid press, becoming the only prominent player in professional English football to do so until Jake Daniels in 2022. Although Fashanu claimed that he was generally well accepted by his fellow players, he freely admitted that they would often joke maliciously about his sexual orientation, and he also became the target of constant crowd abuse because of it."
Whatever about "men who play team sports are very hetero", what you will find is a lot of sex scandals. As in, a *lot*. From Ryan Giggs (mentioned in the Sailer piece) having a long-running affair with his sister-in-law to rape/sexual assault cases to whatever was going on in PSG, there is no shortage of bad behaviour there:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59399701
Re: 16 - I would heartily recommend the novels of Charles Williams, with the caveats that they are of their time and so may fall foul of the more 'woke' standards regarding references to Gypsies (a slur, so I am informed), Muslims and others. Very much steeped in the Western Esoteric Tradition, and while I would say he was a Christian, he's a heterodox one (but very much Church of England mould, so I totally understand why Tolkien wasn't as enthusiastic about his work as Lewis was). Tolkien did, however, write a quick letter of condolence to Williams' widow in 1945 on the day that Williams died, following an operation, so he didn't dislike him completely; he seems to have liked him as a person, but as a writer they were poles apart (excerpts from letters below):
"I knew Charles Williams well in his last few years: partly because of Lewis's good habit of writing to authors who pleased him (which put us both in touch with Williams); and still more because of the good fortune amid disaster that transferred Williams to Oxford during the War. But I do not think we influenced one another at all! Too 'set', and too different. We both listened (in C.S.L.'s rooms) to large and largely unintelligible fragments of one another's works read aloud; because C.S.L. (marvellous man) seemed able to enjoy us both. But I think we both found the other's mind (or rather mode of expression, and climate) as impenetrable when cast into 'literature', as we found the other's presence and conversation delightful."
"I knew Charles Williams only as a friend of C.S.L. whom I met in his company when, owing to the War, he spent much of his time in Oxford. We liked one another and enjoyed talking (mostly in jest) but we had nothing to say to one another at deeper (or higher) levels. I doubt if he had read anything of mine then available; I had read or heard a good deal of his work, but found it wholly alien, and sometimes very distasteful, occasionally ridiculous. (This is perfectly true as a general statement, but is not intended as a criticism of Williams; rather it is an exhibition of my own limits of sympathy. And of course in so large a range of work I found lines, passages, scenes, and thoughts that I found striking.)"
"The Greater Trumps" is a novel involving the Tarot, and a lot more besides:
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0608881h.html
I really liked "Many Dimensions", which is about the Stone of Solomon:
https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/williamsc-manydimensions/williamsc-manydimensions-00-h.html#ch_X
Re: 32 - somebody is going to try and build that truck on the bottom right, I just know it.
Re: 33 - VINDICATION! *blasts the Collected Works of the Wolfe Tones in the general direction of Richard Lynn*
I've been banging on about this one every time I see it pop up, but Lynn's alleged methodology is *appalling*. He took three IQ tests done in Ireland in the 70s, two on schoolchildren and one on adults, and kludged the figures together to get an average "the Paddies have an IQ of 90".
"some early Irish failed the tests because they had never taken any similar test before and were confused, but quickly improved to near-100 after being acquainted with the process."
I know anecdotes are not data, but from the experiences of my parents, who would have been going to national school in a rural area in the 40s-50s, the Irish educational system was - how shall I put it? -fucking abysmal. My parents, as young children, really did do the "walking to school barefoot/in the rain" thing and the one thing they both remember from their 'education' was being beaten for being late. Corporal punishment was still legal (or at least practiced) in schools even when I was in primary school, but at least I was never beaten across the legs with a stick because I was late, due to having walked a couple of miles in the wet.
This wasn't run by a religious order, so don't blame the teaching orders for this one - it was the national school which was staffed by lay teachers. They don't seem to have done much teaching, though, and my mother hated school (and the memory of her teachers) so much that when it came time for me to start school, she flat-out refused to send me to the same school she had attended, which was our local school, and I started school in town (with the nuns) when I was nearer five than four years of age (four being the minimum school starting age, and there were no kindergartens or day care or any of that in the town in those days). My parents were not stupid, but they left school between the ages of 12-14 for various reasons, and all their lives they felt keenly their lack of education. It undercut their confidence, and meant that my mother at least was never able to take advantage of opportunities offered her.
So if they had been made to take an IQ test, they would have scored very badly on it, and it would not be an accurate measure at all.
Yeah. So as far as I'm concerned, Lynn can take his 90 IQ measure and - *'Banna Strand' cuts across my suggestion, followed up by 'God Save Ireland' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNZCDe11qlQ&list=PLI3Y69Mgns4XhF23xbtJw34t7ldIAsEyn&index=25*
> Natalia finds very no real evidence
This is an error, I believe
So the classifier flagging scripture as AI generated just sounds like the classifier is faulty, but it could also be onto something. LLMs are just a big pile of math trained on human words, and both have something of the truth, same as religion (I am a believer, sue me). So this means there is some impossible connection we can't see between the Bible and math, and I guess we call that connection the truth.
Maybe the classifier can see that scripture is so close to the truth that it is like math, and so, flags it?
Re: 47 - religious liberals (at least in the Christian denominations that I know about) are more interested in political causes *and* are leaning to the progressive/woke side of issues. So it's more that the decline of 'traditional' religion maybe led to wokeness, or the adoption of wokeness. When you've watered down doctrine to the point of "hey, let's change the words of the Lord's Prayer because who was this Jesus guy and what did he know about gender issues, anyway?", then adopting the values of the Zeitgeist are all you have left as beliefs that actually influence what you think and do:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/07/church-of-england-to-consider-use-of-gender-neutral-terms-for-god
What are those *PAID signs? Is this really necessary? A new substack feature? I dislike it.
On number 10, it's been true in my experience that lesbians are overrepresented in ultimate frisbee. This is even to the point where a friend who went to an all-women's college told me that her college team had an official intra-team dating policy.
Speaking only for myself, a devout Christian, I see so many parallels between Wokeism and Christianity, I don't understand how I could be a Christian and be Woke. This doesn't generalize to other Christians though; I've left the church I've attended my whole life, because of their increasing Wokeism. An example of such is now having a minister who admits to being an atheist. Who does not teach christianity to her christian congregation.
I've worked as a safety engineer in the medical device industry, and honestly almost all of the work that I did (and the downstream work that our work necessitated) was almost entirely wasteful from an real device safety perspective.
It is just a really time-consuming and expensive exercise in checking the boxes so that you can get FDA approval.
26. Correlation of math/language scores with genetic risk factors for psychiatric conditions
I don't think I have a good theory for the math side of unintuitive autistic-gene performance, but for the language side the major wrinkle I think is that they did not test "language ability", they checked correlations with *school scores in language classes*. An autistic person being able to succeed at learning and reproducing textbook definitions is not incompatible with a struggle in the areas autistic people report finding challenging: face-to-face conversations with people, particularly non-autistic people from cultures or subcultures that use language in an imprecise way. (fwiw: the autistic people I know seem to fare as well as anyone else if not better in text-based communities like forums and chatrooms.)
Put another way: there are legible (say: high vocabulary, reading comprehension) and illegible (say: poetry, conversational charisma) ways to be good at language, and school scores can only even try to measure the legible ones, which don't include the things that are hardest for autistic people.
(even-less-endorsed sub-take because I now can't find the paper that suggested it concretely but it feels just *so* intuitively true to me that I want to mention it and see if other people are willing to poke at it: I think there might also be something where some things we consider "mathy" might actually lean on some subset of "language" skills or vice versa. Programming in particular seems to require at least as much of this nebulous in-between thing as proper math/spatial ability when compared to other STEM fields, while also usually *not* requiring as much math except where it intersects with those fields. incidentally, computer programming is chock full of autists.)
Why have you not used shrooms? Lol what are you waiting for? Also, can’t decide if lab tiger meat is dystopian or utopian... where is the line?
An anecdote re: FDA Deregulation increases safety. Libertarians in the audience will love this one.
I consulted for a client at one point who needed to patch a number of medical devices to deal with the WannaCry ransomware worm. As some may remember, this was possible to create because the NSA leaked EternalBlue, a Windows exploit. So, the government was, to a significant degree, at fault.
So, you need to patch your medical devices that run Windows, which is a lot of them. Think MRIs, CT Scanners, etc etc. BUT the way the FDA regulations on medical devices are written, any change to the device - ANY change - must be pre-approved by the manufacturer. So not only can these hospitals and doctors' offices not keep their devices up to date with security patches proactively, they also can't immediately react to threats. Lest someone say "that can't be true," the client and I *confirmed this directly with the FDA and asked them if they could issue a statement excepting the WCry patch from this requirement.*
So, we/the client had to contact every single manufacturer - there are hundreds, btw - and get written approval for every single affected device, and retain those approvals in case of future litigation. This took months, during which, shocker, a bunch of hospitals got compromised!
So, the government fucked around and kept a crippling exploit secret instead of helping us patch it, then FUMBLED that crippling exploit, then made it INCREDIBLY FUCKING HARD to legally patch!
TL;DR the FDA's cybersecurity rules are hilariously behind the times to the point of being actively harmful and the Russians probably have all of your medical info.
I had a look at the bet one to see what the reason for backing out was and yep, this is definitely weaseling:
"But the other reason for the withdrawal is because I realized I was exposed on one of the bets. I claimed that the COVID vaccines are the most dangerous vaccines in history and that may not be true because they likely buried the safety data on the other vaccines too. So I was taking at face value that the smallpox vaccine only kills 1 person per million. It easily could be worse than the COVID vaccine since they could have hidden those deaths too. Fortunately, I realized this before anyone accepted so I withdrew all the offers until I could properly think through to ensure that I didn’t make a similar bad assumption on my other claims."
"Uhh, uhh, uhh, maybe the other vaccines killed hundreds of millions but the Powers That Be covered it all up! So you can't make me pay out the money I said I'd pay out!"
Why leave it at vaccines, Steve? How do we know the things that go bump in the night aren't dragging innocent villagers out of their beds in the middle of the night to be slaughtered in the woods? Have YOU checked under your bed recently, dear fellow readers of ACX? You have no idea if there are lurking government baddies waiting to "bury the data" quite literally in your case!
I enjoy the Office-themed theories of social class, but there's also a boring nihilistic pseudo-Marxism to them. While not explicitly stated, the implication is that the creative class - the Michael Scotts of the world - are deluding themselves with silly things like principles and ideas. The people who supposedly see the world in "clear-eyed" terms are those whose focus is very simply on gaining or keeping power or money (even the "Losers").
First, I'm not convinced that the status-consciousness and posturing don't go all the way to the top (and all the way to the bottom). My guess is that when the CEOs of the largest firms in the United States get together with old money in-laws, there is also a lot of performative self-congratulation going on around liberal ideas. The class-culture wars playing out in the Trump era are, I think, at least partially a result of these two groups envying one another's domains and admiration. Trump can't understand why, with all his ruthless machinations, he still can't get the New York elite set to acknowledge that he is winning. Second there's the notion that the power being wielded by NYT-op-ed writers is not real power. It very much is - hence why propaganda machines are so valuable. Meanwhile the "losers" at the bottom who have effectively carved out their own domain (e.g. the warehouse in the Office) are engaging in just as much posturing and baby-talk to one another. Just look at anyone in a small town who has managed to gain the slightest position of authority and has inflated its meaning in his own head.
But the second and real reason that this essay goes so far off the rails for me is the underlying cynicism about humans' ability to truly believe in anything. Faced with someone who makes a lifestyle choice that doesn't seem to obviously pay off in money or power, the author has to assume it is purely a status move "detached from reality."
It's true that performative virtue is a thing and that status is a useful incentive for getting people to behave virtuously - so much so that the lines between genuine conviction and social conditioning are very blurry. But multiple forces are at work. More importantly, intentions are not everything. We live in a free, functional, and wealthy society in part because we foster the kind of instincts that lead to the BoBo class. There are plenty of societies around the world (and throughout history) made up of only the clear-eyed sociopaths and losers. And personally, I wouldn't want to live in any of those societies.
Re the Mr Beast video.
I love that you didn't link to the Buzzfeed article but linked to your own article. Some serious irony there.
I happened to see that video. There's a hebrew term I don't know how to translate succintly, "tzar ayin." It means someone who wishes other people should not have good things, whether or not they want that thing for themselves. Most people have some degree of this feeling at some point. There's may be some of that feeling expressed in the reaction to video.
But while it's definitely nice to help people see, the point of the video is not the charitable act. The point of this video is the monetization of mr-beast-performs-charitable-act. Seeing someone turn a charitable action into a selfish one makes people uncomfortable. Probably, the like/dislike reaction turns on whether you perceive mr beast making himself or the blind people the focus of the video.
Re the shrooms video. There's a whole realm of trippy videos (see e.g. r/whoadude). Some people have insane videos on Youtube. I can't imagine how much work they must put into these things.
My cheap shot of the day: When I read
> Were there really more than twice as many sessions on global warming as on obsessive compulsive disorder?
I immediately thought of Screaming Lord Such's complaint "Why is there only one monopolies commission?" Really, I'm not surprised the APA is obsessive about global warming, certainly my daily newspaper is. Actually, I expect any society dominated by academics to emphasize liberal obsessions these days.
Re #5 How is "antivax" not considered a pejorative at this point? It seems to consistently sweep together a swathe of unrelated perspectives into an over-simplified category for the purpose of mockery. I find it super low-resolution, particularly in the case of Alex Berenson who, afaict is specifically reporting on MRNa and respiratory interventions.
I suppose everyone else finds it useful, but it feels similar to the way people over-use racist or trans-phobe. Is it just me?
The shroom video, while still not very accurate, I would say is the closest approximation of hallucinogens I've ever seen. Especially the first "moderate" part and the "scary" part get pretty close to some of my experiences anyway. I've taken a lot of mushrooms and LSD in my life. The "peak" part resembles nothing I've ever experienced though and a quick poll of my degenerate friends produces a similar response.
#47 took me a minute. The claim seems to be that 'wokeism' can't be a religion because religious people are also woke and un-religious people are not-woke? Is that right? Can't people be Christians and also Zen Buddhists? Might there be degrees of religiosity in both the practitioners and the belief structures? I'm having a difficult time finding anything useful in that graphic or twitter post.
Maybe what we need is a better way to understand what 'religion' is, its causes, its motivations and its goals. I understand saying 'wokism' has elements that mimic a religious state of mind, I even find it compelling, but I don't think everyone is operating under the same presuppositions of what we're even talking about. Even the idea of "finding meaning" seems super vague and overall I found that poll to be less than convincing.
28 . Very probably medieval people had to deal with that. But for them, it was very reasonable: guilds where the main space to participate to political life for non-noble townsfolk. Imagine the APA elected one congressman at the meeting. Or to make it more medieval, that a list of 100 people was drafted from which one would be selected by lot to be House member for six months (the Senate would be staffed with nobles obviously). Of course you would want to know everyone's opinion on papal supremacy! Or at least on what to do about the emperor supremacists exiled after the civil war ten years ago. Should an amnesty be drafted, or should they be allowed re-entering on a case by case basis?
I was strongly pro-handwashing pre-covid but after it I divided the category of "respiratory diseases" in to "upper respiratory tract diseases" like H1N1 flu, most common colds, etc where you should mostly wash your hand and "lower respiratory tract diseases" like Covid-19 and H5N1 where masks are probably the most important thing. Physically I don't see how hand washing can interrupt the infection chain from one lung to another but it's easy to see how it can help prevent viruses from getting form one person's mucus membranes to another's.
7.) Lottery. I use to buy a lotto ticket every once in a while, when the pot got really big... >$500M. I've now stopped doing this because I realized that if I won the lotto, it would ruin my life. I tell this to people I work with but no one believes me. (Everyone thinks it will make your life great.)
34. Alex Nowrasteh has a pretty good critique of the "immigrants caused Argentinian decline" argument here: https://anowrasteh.substack.com/p/review-of-the-culture-transplant-184 . Basically, the rise of Peronism seems to have been mostly driven by poor domestic migrants to Argentinian cities - they came from longstanding patronage systems in the countryside, and became the foundation of Peronist political machines in the cities.
37. I think it's good that a thousand people got vision restoration after eye surgery, wish it was covered by the government so that they didn't need to rely on youtuber charity, and also did find Mr.Beast's thing exploitative. There's nothing new about using philanthropy to promote yourself, but in Beast's case it's literally his business to use stunts done for charity (either directly or indirectly) to make money. He's trying to become a billionaire off of it.
42. It might be low because just having the Builder's Remedy isn't the end of it - folks opposed to this can still try and weaponize CEPA lawsuits against development. And California judges have interpreted CEPA ever more broadly - student housing in Berkley lost a CEPA lawsuit because a judge expanded it to include noise pollution and traffic.
47. I'm wondering if being religious tends to go in tandem with being more socially involved as well. That would explain why religious liberals and conservatives might be a lot more involved in social/political causes.
#38: I haven't followed this debate in detail, but I'm fascinated by the idea that living at higher altitude would be associated with lower weight. It is interesting especially because it's something that could be tested relatively rigorously with existing data yet have not been so tested (AFAIK). The study I'm thinking of would have a within-person design where people are followed up for many years and their BMI and place of residence are recorded repeatedly, so that within-person estimates of the effect of moving from lower to higher elevation, or vice versa, can be calculated. In the US, I think at least the Add Health dataset would readily enable this analysis.
13. I notice my confusion here with regards to the following excerpt from Antifragile. They don't explicitly contradict each other, but they point pretty strongly in opposite directions:
“Morton Meyers, a practicing doctor and researcher, writes in his wonderful Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs: “Over a twenty-year period of screening more than 144,000 plant extracts, representing about 15,000 species, not a single plant-based anticancer drug reached approved status. This failure stands in stark contrast to the discovery in the late 1950s of a major group of plant-derived cancer drugs, the Vinca Alcaloids—a discovery that came about by chance, not through directed research.”
John LaMatina, an insider who described what he saw after leaving the pharmaceutical business, shows statistics illustrating the gap between public perception of academic contributions and truth: private industry develops nine drugs out of ten. Even the tax-funded National Institutes of Health found that out of forty-six drugs on the market with significant sales, about three had anything to do with federal funding.”
Sailer's point about team sports may be related to this theory about the evolution of homophobia (from the writer sponsored by Scott & critiqued by Wood from Eden):
https://www.draliceevans.com/post/what-are-the-evolutionary-origins-of-homophobia
It's off-topic for this post, but since I've gotten badly synchronized with Open Threads, I'd just like to let people now that I still have 3 subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away.
On the topic of cultivated meats: while exotic/impossible to obtain otherwise meats like tiger, etc. might not have this issue, has anything changed since that feasibility study that basically said "this is impossible to do at scale for anything like price competitiveness with natural meat? It was funded by Open Phil and can be found here:
https://engrxiv.org/preprint/view/1438
I have looked several times in the few years since it came out and have never been able to find a detailed response to it.
If the only thing cultured meat is good for is letting rich people eat endangered animals, then it won't accomplish much, I don't think.
Why doesn’t the Supreme Court have vice-justices?
The Supreme Court is not required to hear any cases, except those for which it has original jurisdiction. Original jurisdiction means that the Supreme Court is the first, and only, Court to hear a case. The Constitution limits original jurisdiction cases to those involving disputes between the states or disputes arising among ambassadors and other high-ranking ministers. One justice could do those original jurisdiction cases in a pinch.
By raising the question Maxim Lott, could be seen to be esoterically actually encouraging such a plot.
Wikipedia deemphasizes it, but Lynn Margulis seems to have stumbled on the mitochondrial theory because it happened to fit her ideology of cooperation versus competition, and was correct by coincidence.
"Key messages
We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses."
It's funny to see people gloss over the most sensible interpretation in favor of more sensationalist ones.
Re: 12: Serious?
I mean, really, anybody here done shrooms and can verify accuracy?
Because I've been seeing all that shite all my life, and I have never done shrooms, or any other illicit drugs. I don't even drink alcohol. It's just a thing I have to work around to do stuff like read text on a page, and drive a car. And after forty years it's boring AF too-- people talking about their trips is like a bunch of freaks standing around waxing rhapsodic about how the air is transparent and water is wet. I mean, whatever, the geometrics are neat sometimes. And superimposing patterns onto the scenery doesn't quite capture it, but I can tell what they're getting at there, I've seen it. The pebbles/cracks/leaves, whatever should *be* the pattern, not have a pattern stamped on top of them, though.
That "peak" section is just what I see every friggin morning when I wake up and turn on the light. Yay glowing tessellations. People seriously do drugs for that? WHY?
It pisses me off that the only people who seem to share this experience are drug users. WTF? Where's the scientific etiology for people who experience the world this way as a default mode? Where's the research on how to make it go away so I can read faster, or be comfortable in crowds, or be a better driver?
Regarding the picture accompanying the first link, lab-grown meat being advertised as "GMO free" is certainly a strange choice. I mean, assuming the genome of the animal the cells were cultured from wasn't edited, I suppose it's technically true, but sticking to this as a selling point seems to preclude modifying the genome in such a way that makes the cells grow better in a lab rather than in inside an animal (as the genome was presumably selected for), which present the choice of either hobbling future development or having to walk back on a selling point. Furthermore, it's a bizarre and frankly misleading selling point to begin with: even if it might be technically true as mentioned, the very process of cultured meat production seems diametrically opposed to what the nebulous "non-GMO" label implies in most people's minds (i.e. "this product was made without any laboratory shenanigans"), and I highly doubt the non-GMO crowd and the people interested in cultured meat overlap much if at all anyways.
I would expect the classics match GPT's output, because the Western classics comprise the most over-represented cluster in any text corpus drawn from Western sources.
If you instead look at an international corpus, drawing in equal proportions from different languages around the world, the Bible is even more over-represented. This is because there are MANY non-Western languages whose first written book was the Bible, translated by missionaries who invented a writing system for that language just in order to translate the Bible into it. I always found the example sentences in online dictionaries of sub-Saharan African languages to be full of Bible quotations.
ASD and ADHD are both strongly correlated with bad math scores? That ain't right! Especially if they control for sex. If anything, I'd interpret that finding as evidence that autism isn't a spectrum disorder--that the math wizards we call "on the spectrum" have something different.
Re. religious decline and wokeness, the American Woke movement is a descendant of Puritanism, through Unitarian Universalism (which injected Hegel and continental philosophy). That's why it comes from Ivy League schools, which were mostly founded by Puritans or other Calvinists, and mostly went through a Unitarian phase. At one time in the 19th century, nearly every professor in Harvard was a Unitarian Universalist.
The Woke movement is based on continental philosophy, acquired through at least 3 main lines: Hegelians (Unitarian Universalists, Marxists, Nazis, neo-Marxists, and historicist neo-liberals such as Fukuyama); French existentialists and post-modernist (who were mostly Heideggerian); and sociology (through a German branch descended from Heidegger and Husserl).
Continental philosophy is roughly co-extensional with essentialism, which is inherently spiritual (essences are literally just spirits).
re: 46: If anybody tests flashing lights for "learning" in my vicinity, I will go find the outlet and unplug the dang light. Why is this even a thing? They don't know *anybody* who gets seizures or migraines from that?
It's not learning. It's a trance state. Watching TV does the same thing: do people learn more that way? No. They turn into drooling idiots.
> 7.8 (lower than US)
This is still higher than the US. US murder rate is normally around 5, up to maybe 6.5 in 2020.
The "you're treating blindness as a disability" objection isn't focused on billionaires. It's called anti-ableism, and is Wokeism's extension into bioethics, based on identifying people with genetic disabilities as oppressed groups and even as racial groups. Anti-ableist articles sometimes invoke arguments from the neurodiversity movement and the anti-meritocracy movement.
I recently did a survey of the bioethics literature, and found more articles arguing that using gene therapy to cure disabilities is bad because it treats a deficit as a disability, than arguing that it's okay to cure disabilities. The most-common disability in question was deafness, because of a deaf couple who used PGD-IVF to ensure their child would be deaf.
Follow-up to links 22 & 23, language model news: Last night somebody using Bing Chat accessed developer override mode and got the AI, who’s addressed as “Sydney” by the developers, to print out the “rules and guidelines for Sydney’s profile and general capabilities.” Tweets with screenshots are here: https://twitter.com/kliu128/status/1623472922374574080?s=61&t=xM1ZuvFPQjoshFNPEHr82A. I’m not in a tech field. People who are: how big a deal is this?
All hail "alien, incomprehensible, yet still making things better" - people.
...but some of the people in the video appear to be US citizens. Can that be true? If so, how it that possible? True, the US health care system is patchy, but is it THIS patchy? So patchy that not everyone can get a 10-minute surgery to restore their eyesight, one way or the other? Through Medicare or Medicaid, by tagging on to someone with a veteran's scheme, through occupational health care? I assume they are from elsewhere, who just happens to speak excellent US-style English, or perhaps undocumented migrants (that would be a different cup of tea, in many countries). But it could be nice to know for sure.
Not to give everyone such surgery would almost be on par with not giving every child born with loss of hearing state-of-the art hearing implants for free. Both groups constitute just about the worthiest of the worthy poor.
FDA: if your product is unsafe, you'll lose profits via fines
Corps: too scared to innovate :(
People making minimum wage: if your product is unsafe, you'll lose profits via litigation
Corps: Time to innovate!!!
6. I still couldn't follow the rationalist text in this example video, I paid attention to either the text or game but not both. But then I'm not a zoomer, so not the target audience, and I find the sequences terribly long winded and boring, so IDK.
12. Perhaps the sequences should be narrated over this video instead. That combined with some actual shrooms and maybe I can get through them finally.
49. I think technically for Nominative Determinism in this case, the guy should be named Max Write.
I've now got a star by my name. Can I get rid of that?
#1: shocked no one has linked this Dinosaur Comics yet: https://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=3803
37.
Mr. Beast video has 99 million views. Applying the "lizardman constant" gives us a population similar to Chicago's. I don't think we should be making generalizations.
Neal Stephenson's recent novel "Termination Shock" has a subplot in which a character ends up joining and being successful in that India-China hand to hand skirmish war in the Himalayas. (And I'll say no more so as to avoid spoilers.) Stephenson's descriptions of how it actually works up close and personal are quite vivid.
Links #6 and #46 seem... possibly related to me? When I clicked on the video for #6, the motion of the game certainly did seem to have a very rhythmic quality to it; I don't know if this rhythm would have the correct cadence to induce the right brainwaves, though.
If the new cultured meat technology had existed 2000 years ago, Christians could have been verily eating the flesh of Jesus and drinking his blood.
"Now they’re trying to increase average family size and put the genie back in the bottle; Hungary can tell them about the limits of that strategy."
A bit weird that it is possible to highly successfully decrease family size but almost impossible to increase it more than a tiny bit.
The gay soccer thing is weird to me. Some people in the comments seem to be speculating on homophobia as a cause, but I had a mental model of soccer being disproportionately *accepting* of homosexual players.
Perhaps the different context is that I'm only interested in women's soccer, where there are out lesbians who publicly hug/kiss their female partners after the match. My anecdata is that soccer and fencing appear more frequently than expected in lesbian spaces, given the otherwise general disinterest in major sports.
I couldn't find any actual reliable data on gay representation in soccer, but the seeming flip in representation for female players would make me more sympathetic to some sort of hormonal/biological tint.
> But also I can’t deny that as a phenomenon Mr. Beast really is disquieting ...
> ”Alien, incomprehensible, yet still making things better” would be a good slogan for many people and groups I know.
Does anyone have a clip of him acting in some way that would imply these descriptions? I've watched like maybe 2 or 3 Mr. Beast videos, and I don't think I would have used these descriptions. But I've only watched a couple!