Re "on a land that was once theirs": This is historically inaccurate. The Palestinians never at any point in history held sovereignty over any part of Israel.
The claim is "land that was once theirs". It is true at least in the case of some individual Palestinians that they once personally owned land in the place that is now the state of Israel. It is also true for more Palestinians if you extend it to families who once had family land there.
Another data point in favour of land reform, I guess!
In all seriousness, if anyone did get their land eminent-domained without standard market rate compensation then it would seem proper for them to be paid compensation now. Has Israel ever done this?
The issue isn't land that was eminent-domained; there was some of that but not much in the grand scheme of things. The issue is land that was marked as abandoned in 1948 when the new Israeli government noticed that, yep, this plot of land is definitely inside the cease-fire land and nope, we can't find anyone inside the cease-fire land that owns it.
In some cases, this decision was made improperly - there was an Arab family that owned the land in now-Israel, still living in Now-Israel, but illegible to the Israeli government because they'd e.g. taken shelter with their cousins three villages over and hadn't told any one. I don't think those people ever got compensation, but I'm not sure on that and I think they did all get Israeli citizenship (and so are doing better than most non-Israeli Palestinians).
In most cases, the Palestinians who used to own the land were hanging out in Egypt or Jordan or whatnot, and since 1948 resulted in a cease-fire line rather than a peace treaty there wasn't any way for them to get back home to press their claim.
Meanwhile, there were a whole lot of homeless Jewish refugees trying to settle in Israel, and here's a bunch of land that has been determined (perhaps hastily and carelessly) to be abandoned, so, yeah, "land reform".
Plus we have a very divided government right now, with decisions being made that offend both sides. The Supreme Court has moved very activist right-wing, overturning the abortion decision, blocking efforts to apply the clean air act to global warming, etc. And this is likely to continue to bother most Dems. On the other hand, the Biden Administration continues very activist on student debt as well as social welfare moves like regulating Insulin prices, even if they can't get legislation through the house. The House of Representatives has talked very partisan and blocked several moderate/liberal intiatives, such as the immigration bill that almost passed in the Senate. And, the house leadership seems back to using brinksmanship with shutting down the government to force their position the other side, but if they follow through, it makes pretty much everyone unhappy except extreme libertarians who don't like government at all, at least, if they're not dependent on government funding (like research grants or whatever) to support their work.
One top of that with regard to immigration, a very hot issue that's needed attention for decades, a partisan deadlock has prevented any sensible action. OK, obviously this would require a bunch of compromises which neither side seems very willing to embrace. It's so bad that Republican senators who hammered out a compromise plan in the Senate wound up voting against the bill they had helped draft and signed off on, because right-wing opposition made it too politically costly for them. As a result, both sides lose because both are unwilling to do anything except what their ideology dictates.
In other words, compromise is out of season. So, we have met the enemy and it is us. Perhaps both sides think they're losing, because both sides are losing!
When one thinks about land reform in Africa, they probably would still think of Zimbambwe, and at least looking at the graphs, Zimbabwean economy seems to actually have indeed been mostly growing even quite fast in some years, since 2008, this being the year when Mugabe had to include opposition in government and hyperinflation was stopped through dollarization (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=ZW).
Because it has to be *reform*. You don't improve things by one group at the top of the food chain grabbing land off the owners (be they white colonials or not) and continuing to grind the tenant farmers/labourers into the dust, mismanagement, wasting money produced on high living instead of continuing to improve the land, etc.
Replacing absentee landlord Sir John Smythe with native guy from another tribe Jonno Smi-The who in turn carries on being an absentee landlord rackrenting the tenantry to maintain a city-dwelling lifestyle of high living is not reform.
I like thinking about land reform, as maybe the one thing communism gets right. But as you say there are other channels to that outcome, but they tend to be violent one way or another.
The Japanese abolition of feudalism (which was a very large redistribution of land away from feudal elites and towards the peasantry) was not particularly violent; it followed on a short civil war (the Boshin War), but the civil war was over the question of which elite clique would hold power, not a war by the commons against the nobility, and by and large the nobility who had backed the victors in the war continued to hold power afterwards, just as government officials instead of feudal lords.
Good example. My understanding was that the peasantry always owned it in some practical sense, but that the feudal lords applied confiscatory taxes. The abolition of feudalism meant the central government was now taxing it directly in a more standardized, probably lower way.
My impression - though I'm not an expert in this field, much though I'd like to be - is that the peasantry were assigned it, in practice decided what to do with it in the fashion of serfs everywhere, but that they didn't own it; there existed the legal fiction that all the land was owned by the Emperor who assigned it to his officials who assigned it to peasant families, and in practice the daimyos had control over the land themselves, and that any transfers of land had to be - unofficial? Under the table? That there wasn't good infrastructure for sorting it out?
Upon reflection, the land reforms may have been more directly tied to the Boshin War than on first appearance. The land reforms had the effect that the elites drastically reduced their own number in assigning a greater slice of the economy to the peasantry. The elites in power may not have been able to do that if they had not just won a war establishing their dominance over the rest.
I'll agree that the civil war meant that the victorious revolutionaries had the power to make swift, effective reforms without going through the centuries of red tape the Shogunate had accumulated; on the other hand, the Shogunate was also desperately trying, with some difficulty, to cut down on red tape so it could make swift, effective reforms, because the leaders of both sides were (very sensibly) panicking about imperialism and desperately trying to modernize before a western country conquered them.
On the other hand, I disagree that this meant that they could carry out swift, effective reform without provoking a civil war. They did provoke a civil war, the Satsuma Rebellion, caused by disgruntled revolutionaries who disapproved of the westernizing tack favored by the elites; according to Romulus Hillsborough, the historian writing about this period who has most recently written most books for sale at a reasonable price, the Meiji government responded by hiring their former enemies to put down their former allies. So I don't think their dominance really was securely established, even if it was more secure than the prewar Shogunate had been.
(And I do also want to note that the Boshin War was comparatively short and bloodless; it lasted a year and a half and Wikipedia suggests around 14000 casualties in a Googled population of 36.3 million, which is not a tremendously bloody war, especially not when you compare it to communism.)
I don't disagree with that. I am thinking in terms of how much can we characterize this as a successful example of land reforms without lots of accompanying violence. As you point out there was a civil war (comparatively less deadly than most) but state that was an intra-elite competition, not the peasantry vs the elite. I am saying that the land reform was part of the intra-elite competition too. The victors took a huge amount of economic power away from not just the losers but all other members of the nobility and sort of split it between themselves and the peasantry. So war + land reforms as one package therefore not land reforms ex-violence.
Still it is as you say notable how small the war had to be. It is quite interesting that the land reforms effectively stripped a large military class of their livelihood and role in society and the backlash wasnt larger. The substantial asymmetry enabled by new technology may have played a large role there.
Ireland is another example, the land reform was compensated. In an effort to prevent rebellions, the British government bought land from landlords in Ireland and then sold it on generous terms to the resident-tenants.
Those tenants were now making loan repayments of about the same as their previous rent, but they had full control over their land, and productivity rose rapidly.
At independence, Ireland assumed those debts from the British and then mostly wrote them off, resulting in a lot of fairly small landowners.
Another example is the French Revolution, which seized aristocrats' land.
"At independence, Ireland assumed those debts from the British and then mostly wrote them off, resulting in a lot of fairly small landowners."
It didn't go completely smoothly; there was the Economic War where we tried to repudiate repayment of the loans (on the grounds that 'why should we pay you for our own property?') and Britain retaliated with "okay we're not taking your exports" which hurt the Irish economy because we relied heavily on Britain as our main trading partner (part of the reason Ireland was glad to join the EU back in the 70s as a new market) and were an agricultural rather than an industrial economy:
"The Anglo-Irish Trade War (also called the Economic War) was a retaliatory trade war between the Irish Free State and the United Kingdom from 1932 to 1938. The Irish government refused to continue reimbursing Britain with land annuities from financial loans granted to Irish tenant farmers to enable them to purchase lands under the Irish Land Acts in the late nineteenth century, a provision which had been part of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. This resulted in the imposition of unilateral trade restrictions by both countries, causing severe damage to the Irish economy.
The "war" had two main aspects:
- Disputes surrounding the changing constitutional status of the Irish Free State vis-à-vis Britain;
- Changes in Irish economic and fiscal policy following the Great Depression.
...The resolution of the crisis came after a series of talks in London between the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and de Valera, who was accompanied by Lemass and James Ryan. An agreement to reach an acceptable settlement was drawn up in 1938, enacted in Britain as the Eire (Confirmation of Agreements) Act. ...The treaty also settled the potential £3 million-per-annum land annuities liability by a one-off payment to Britain of £10 million, and a waiver by both sides of all similar claims and counter-claims.
...It also included the return to Ireland of the Treaty Ports which had been retained by Britain under a provision of the 1921 Treaty. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939 the return of the ports allowed Ireland to remain neutral."
Or, as Bullseye notes below, "enclosure" in early modern England.
It mostly doesn't matter who does the land reform or why, except that if the people doing it are Communists you don't get the benefits until you switch to a better system. And it mostly doesn't matter who gets the land.
What matters is, under the old system it was "All the land south of the millhouse to the three funny rocks, and three furlongs in from the river, belongs to Alice. Her family has been farming that land for generations, everybody knows that, and if we see anyone other than Alice trying to farm that land we all know to throw stones at them". But now Alice is out and Bob is in, and it doesn't matter why. Under the new system, it's "Survey Plot QC317 belongs to Bob; says so right here on the paperwork. Anyone gives Bob any guff about that, the new regime will send men with guns to take care of them. If Bob ever decides to transfer the land, we'll update the paperwork at the district capital".
If it turns out Bob isn't cut out to be a farmer but would do well in some other business, or if he is cut out to be one of the new-style mechanized farmers, he can mortgage the farm and use the loan to capitalize is business. If Alice had tried to do that, the banker would just have said "...and your collateral is a bunch of land you can't prove you own, but if I ever go there everyone will throw stones at me? Denied!".
Economic potential unlocked, even if Alice was the rightful and virtuous owner of the land and Bob is a nogoodnik in league with a corrupt regime. Maybe you'll have to wait on Bob's son, who by regression to the mean probably won't be so much of a nogoodnik.
"settler-colonies are typically richer than the countries the settlers came from as land could be easily taken from natives"
True, but also access to new resources and untapped sources (like virgin forests, etc.) Back home everything has been claimed and used except the marginal lands. Out there there's acres of logging, farmland, mineral resources, spices, new goods, and cheap labour. You can claim acres of land, settle and farm it, and *if* you're moderately lucky and work hard and succeed, now you are as rich and high-status in your new society as your superiors back home in your old society (farming doesn't always work, there are crop diseases, animal diseases, natural disasters, etc. but if you avoid or overcome these, you can end up on top of the heap).
Plus you probably have somewhat advanced tech compared to the natives, so you are better placed to exploit the resources (an iron mine may not be much use to them but you know how to extract the ore, refine it, and smelt it into goods).
New Zealand had land reform in the late 19th century and has been continuously democratic. This is despite always having a very low population to farmable land ratio. It is a largely unknown event today, or at least I was surprised to learn of it.
The phrase probably has older linguistic roots, but it wasn't a standard name for the Roman province at the time (it seems to have changed only after the bar kokhba rebellion lead the Romans to fold up the province of Judea into Syria).
> c. 450 BCE: Herodotus, The Histories, First historical reference clearly denoting a wider region than biblical Philistia, referring to a "district of Syria, called Palaistinê"
> c. 340 BCE: Aristotle, Meteorology, "Again if, as is fabled, there is a lake in Palestine, such that if you bind a man or beast and throw it in it floats and does not sink, this would bear out what we have said. They say that this lake is so bitter and salt that no fish live in it and that if you soak clothes in it and shake them it cleans them." This is understood by scholars to be a reference to the Dead Sea.
So "Palestine" already included Bethlehem in the 4th century BC, and probably before then.
This seems consistent with people from a thousand miles away mixing up the geography a little bit (the dead sea isn't that far from the coast, and Aristotle wasn't exactly a local).
The Philistines certainly did use the term Philistia to describe their lands near what is now Gaza hundreds of years earlier. At the time of Jesus, the Romans were using the term Judaea. They changed this in the second century CE as part of their revenge after the Bar Kochba revolt.
That's an interesting example. What else would you call it? No contemporary name for that region is known, and since no history exists, none will ever be known. We don't know who built it, what they called themselves, what they were called by other local groups, or what the local political structure was like.
This is not quite the right point (which is a problem for a nitpick). Some cognate of Palestine was widely used by Greek and Roman writers from at least the 5th century BCE. The difficulty is that there is some uncertainty as to what they meant by that and at least some authors seem to have meant an area not including Jesus' putative childhood home.
Certainly there wasn't a polity called Palestine/Palestina/Παλαιστίνη in the 1st century CE, so a reference to a "1st century Palestinian dwelling" is unclear.
We have Feldman (Some Observations on the Name of Palestine, 1990): "Writers on geography in the first century [CE] clearly differentiate Judaea from Palestine. ... Jewish writers, notably Philo and Josephus, with few exceptions refer to the land as Judaea, reserving the name Palestine for the coastal area occupied [formerly] by the Philistines." (Copied from Wikipedia.)
3. Comments on the twitter thread point out that the question is poorly posed. On the Earth's surface, "due East" and "straight line" are mutually [in]compatible. The question is misleading.
I was wondering about that. There's nothing wrong with the concept of a straight line going due east. But people who pose problems like this tend to tell you, after you've answered their question, that you should have realized that the only possible definition of a straight line on a globe is as an arc of a great circle (that is, a circle centered on the center of the globe).
This is of course untrue, but that doesn't stop anyone. I visited the link to see if that was going on here, but it appears to be a Twitter thread, and Scott only provided a link to the first tweet.
> There's nothing wrong with the concept of a straight line going due east.
Yes, there is (except at the equator, obviously). That's the point! If you want to perverse, you could say there's a "curved line" going due east, but that it's not straight isn't merely a semantic argument: you can literally measure it. For instance, you could paint a strip and measure the circumferences on each side, and they'd be different. Or you could imagine laser relays or something.
Be that as it may, it's a trick question. Using a compass needle as a reference, it's a straight line from Seattle to the Atlantic coast of France. However, I'll grant you that using compass data may be a cultural bias. After all, Muslim scholars have used spherical geometry to calculate qiblas since the 10th Century CE.
Not everything that isn't obvious and intuitive to you is a trick question: this is just a straightforward question about non-Euclidean geometry.
If you're simply deciding whatever looks like a line on your projection is straight, you can choose much weirder ones than Mercator.
If you're decreeing that moving in the direction your compass points is a straight line despite you clearly continuously turning, you could decide instead to follow the minute hand on your pocket watch.
I respectfully disagree. The mention of due east implies one is following a compass direction. What if it had been worded this way it wouldn't have been a trick question — "If a plane takes off from SeaTac airport initially heading in a due-easterly direction, what is the nearest land mass it would encounter on a great circle?" But then the questioner wouldn't have gotten the opportunity to laugh at the people for getting hung up on the due-east clue.
> Imagine you begin a journey in Seattle WA, facing exactly due east. Then start traveling forward
A straight line on a map projection does not usually translate to a geodesic on the surface of the Earth; if you try and walk the line you describe it will feel like you're constantly turning slightly left.
Hmmm. If a pilot flies due east and maintains a due east course, the pilot doesn't have to constantly adjust the direction slightly left to maintain that course. While on a great circle course, the pilots have to make course corrections to keep it on the great circle...
Per ChatGPT...
You:
When pilots fly a great circle course, does the plane have to adjust its direction to maintain that great circle course?
ChatGPT
Yes, when pilots fly a great circle course, they must adjust their direction periodically to maintain the correct path. A great circle is the shortest route between two points on a sphere, such as the Earth, and it represents the shortest distance between two points.
Since the Earth is a sphere, while flying along a great circle, the plane's heading will need to change gradually as it follows the curvature of the Earth to stay on the great circle path. Pilots use navigational instruments and calculations to make these adjustments and stay on course.
What is meant by "direction" here? I strongly suspect it is being used to mean "bearing", in which case you absolutely do have to change it to fly in a great circle.
But if you start a perfectly symmetrical plane flying forwards, it will describe a great circle, whereas if you want to maintain a constant bearing, you're going to need to tilt the flaps (unless it's a great circle or equator).
To see this, just imagine a symmetrical plane flying on a spherical planet with no compass or other instruments, and no knowledge of NSEW. Obviously, this situation is rotationally symmetrical - there's no information to break the symmetry - so it has to describe a great circle because that's the only symmetrical trajectory. And, equally obviously, describing a system of compass points can't change how the plane flies.
(In principle there could be an effect from the rotation of the Earth, but in practice that's far too weak to be relevant).
The question is very carefully, and correctly posed. It doesn't say "a straight line due East", it says "you are facing due East" and then "you move in a straight line". No connection is made between cardinal directions and straight lines; if there's confusion, it's inserted by the reader based on their own assumptions (and of course, that's why it's a puzzle!).
To be correctly posed, it would need to include a definition of "straight line".
A common definition would be "the line of minimal length between two given points", but that can't be applied at all if all you have is one point and a direction.
The most common definition would be "a path in 3-space of the form s(t) = s₀ + t·v, where s₀ and v are 3-dimensional vectors", but in that case our hypothetical puzzle inhabitant would lift off the ground.
I fear you're letting your evolved conceptual understanding trip you up. If a Neanderthal tried to walk straight ahead, they would just....do it. They wouldn't be confused. It's not ambiguous. It might be hard to reconcile with various definitions in words that you learned in high school. But the actual action itself is not ambiguous or ill-defined.
So? If a Neanderthal tried to walk east into the sea, they would give up and go back. But if they didn't, they'd drown without reaching land. This is not a mode of analysis that can answer the question posed.
If a Neanderthal tried to sail east across the sea, they wouldn't be able to do so. It is not at all obvious how to do that.
(And in fact, humans who are told to walk in a straight line also aren't able to do it, unless they can see the sun. I imagine mountains would also work. That trick won't work at sea, nor will it work for a journey that takes long enough for the sun to move across the sky.)
> humans who are told to walk in a straight line also aren't able to do it, unless they can see the sun. I imagine mountains would also work.
The Sun wouldn't work for a journey of more than an hour or so, because it moves in the sky. The technique I've been taught for mountain navigation is to sight along a bearing and pick out a landmark, then walk towards that landmark. When you reach the landmark, pick a new one. In a whiteout, send one member of the party ahead until they're on the edge of visibility, shout "left a bit/right a bit!" until they're on the bearing, then walk towards them (I have used this technique in anger: it works). Of course, this assumes you have a compass, and will result in you walking along a line of constant bearing rather than a geodesic.
I agree with Emma here - the two parts are both very clear: "face due east" and "walk in a straight line", both normal and well-defined human activities that anyone can do. (If I get pulled over under suspicion of drunk driving and the cop tells me to walk in a straight line, I'm not going to ask them whether they mean a path that draws a straight line on a map or if they want a great circle path!)
The point of the puzzle is that people think "walk in a straight line" (i.e. continue in the direction you are facing, without turning to the left or to the right") will draw a straight line on a map, but that's not the case.
Right, this whole thing hinges on the difference between a loxodrome (path of constant bearing) and a geodesic (path of shortest distance). But actually, the answers to both versions of the puzzle were still surprising to me!
One point and an *initial* direction defines a path that forms a unique great circle on a sphere. Specifying walking ensures that we are only talking about paths along the surface. Straight line, regardless of definition, implies we are not actively turning.
You can always nitpick every word. 99.9% of people understand that when a puzzle asks about walking in a straight line from Seattle to the Atlantic ocean and past, it doesn't mean lifting into space. It means just walking straight without veering left or right.
It would probably have been better to phrase it as proceeding directly forward, and not mention lines.
To get an intuition of the resulting great circle path, one can then take the equator and rotate it about an axis through the Earth's centre so that the point on it due south of the starting point is northernmost and moves up its line of longitude until it reaches that starting point.
That way the path clearly starts eastward as required, and is the only such path, and its subsequent southward aspect also becomes obvious.
It's not really much of a puzzle, because I think most people (with some knowledge of spherical geometry) see at once that the author is planning to "surprise" us by announcing that a straight line on the surface of a sphere is a geodesic. But it just isn't so.
A geodesic is neither a straight line in 3-dimensions nor is it (in general) a straight line on the usual 2D projections. Geodesics are straight lines in a gnomonic projection, but that can only cover a portion of the sphere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomonic_projection
It is not possible simply to walk in a straight line for any significant distance. One has to have to some way to maintain a "constant" course, which requires that one take some view as to what "straight" means.
Realistically, your Neanderthal starting due East and intending to walk in a straight line is going to keep their bearing aligned with the rising sun and will therefore walk on a loxodrome. In practice, navigating along a geodesic requires considerable skill (since you need constantly to adjust your bearing) and it doesn't help to say "just go straight"!
Well, if it has the normal amount of momentum, it will hit the ground somewhere in Seattle. If it has functionally infinite momentum, it will shoot off into space tangent to the surface of the earth.
Somewhere in between those, though, it will go into orbit around the Earth. And in fact, the solution presented for the original problem is exactly what orbit ground traces for LEO sats look like - that curved line.
A version of this puzzle than wasn't channeling xkcd://169 could have stated something like, "imagine a satellite is passing directly over Seattle; at that time its velocity vector is aligned due east" and proceed from there.
>Somewhere in between those, though, it will go into orbit around the Earth. And in fact, the solution for this is exactly what orbit traces for LEO sats look like - that curved line.
<mild snark>
Except the LEO sats' orbits trace circles (more generally ellipses if apogee and perigee aren't at the same altitude) with a constant orientation in space - _not_ rotating with the Earth... At lower velocities, the ground path of the trajectory of a bullet fired from a gun doesn't quite follow a great circle on the ground (except on the equator, fired due east or west). Coriolis effect distorts it (in the rotating frame of the Earth's surface).
> Somewhere in between those, though, it will go into orbit around the Earth.
Nope. Either it escapes Earth's gravity or it falls back to Earth. Neglecting the atmosphere, the projectile is in free fall after launch, so if it not going to escape it is travelling on an elliptic trajectory. Crucially, that ellipse intersects (or at least touches) the Earth at the Earth surface at the point of launch. The term for such a trajectory is sub-orbital.
As Kerbal players know, reaching orbit should be done with two burns: one to orbital height, and another to increase your velocity at that point so that your apogee is safely outside the atmosphere.
I think the puzzle was as clear as it could be without giving the solution away. My co-commentator has already pointed out that the orbital version of this puzzle is much less straight-forward unless you also tell people to disregard the rotation of the Earth. (For an extreme case, consider a polar orbit. Its trace on the earth will be significantly different from a great circle.
(Potential ways around: launch your gun from a big mountain, or use a
But what if we didn't disregard air resistance? Since in this thought experiment, the initial velocity is unbounded, couldn't we start at with supra-orbital trajectory, and then factor in the negative delta-v from the air, giving us the effects of a two-burn launch in reverse? Is there not an equilibrium solution there that results in an orbital trajectory?
Here's an easier puzzle: exactly how fast would a 5.56 NATO shot have to go, to finally fall to earth in Australia? (Assuming no atmosphere; if we add in air effects, this would probably turn into one of those XKCD-style discussions involving shock waves that rip the planet apart.)
I do not believe this depends on the particular projectile.
I would say roughly the orbital speed at the radius of the earth, which is some 7.9km/s (or escape velocity / sqrt(2)).
I don't think including the atmosphere is likely to harm the planet, small meteors travel through that atmosphere at such velocities all the time without destroying Earth. You might need to make the projectile tungsten and start with a bigger diameter than what you get at impact, and will require a higher velocity. Most of the trajectory will be outside the atmosphere.
Also note that kinetic bombardment is an act of war, so I would aim for the outback and hope that they mistake it for yet another meteor. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advise :)
The correct answer is that it depends on your frame of reference and likely on the date and time of day, and speed of travel, as a straight line will head off into space, but also the earth will move.
So why doesn't the question result in you walking off the surface of the earth? If you're walking in a straight line (as you say, the question poses!) then why are you staying on the curvature of the earth? Not a straight line!
Yes, so many people forgetting that if they attempt to walk in a straight line without a guide, they will walk in circles. And not because of the curvature of Earth.
Except that to navigate a great circle course pilots are constantly adjusting their course to maintain their great circle path. A great circle course may be the shortest distance between two points on a sphere, but it's not a straight line for a pilot or the plane.
My interpretation is that you face due East and then move in a straight line. Your path is a great circle tangent to due East at Seattle.
I believe this answer for this version is "Australia", and this may be the only other country you encounter (possibly also Papua New Guinea) before returning to the United States.
The trick is, first, to mess around until you find a US East Coast airport underneath the early portion of the great circle. ("PHF" is Newport News, Virginia. You can see the initial bearing out of Seattle is 90 degrees, or due east.)
After that I tried various airports in western Africa but after a while I saw the trick: the great circle passes straight down the North and South Atlantic oceans and hits Antarctica before hitting any actual countries. It looked like Australia was probably the right answer.
The full great circle has to take you back to Seattle, so I tried flying west from Newport News towards various Australian airports. You can see from the link that Darwin makes the circle too polar and Perth makes it too equatorial. The correct line has to be somewhere in between the two (just like Seattle-Newport News is between the two), meaning it makes landfall somewhere on Australia's western coast.
You can put coordinates directly in gcmap. A route that goes straight east will cross the equator within 90 degrees of longitude, then touch the antipode, then touch the equator again within -90 degrees of longitude.
Seconding that the question is misleading. A straight line can also be interpreted as "straight within the coordinate system we're using". Now, latitude and longitude happen to be a nonlinear coordinate system, so we have to constantly steer left to go "straight", but then the "official" answer has the same problem. a great circle is *not* a straight line in euclidean geometry either! Just a different nonlinearity.
What's frustrating about this type of question is that in an actual application such as navigation, there's usually a "more correct" answer (e.g. navigating from A to B along the shortest possible path does *not* go in a straight line on a map). But posed as a free-floating logic puzzle, such context has been deliberately stripped away. I guessed the "wrong" way because I thought the question was going to be about the relative geography of Europe and North America, which is plenty unintuitive on its own.
I would argue that great circles are as close as you get to straight lines in spherical geometry. By any reasonable definition, they are much closer to a straight line than a five meter circle around the south pole, which is what you get when you trust your compass.
The effect is important when pointing an antenna, as I found out when I put up an antenna for amateur radio operation. The effect is clearly seen on an azimuthal map: https://ns6t.net/azimuth/azimuth.html.
I initially thought it was misleading too, though I knew what they were getting at (I didn't actually bother to find what the relevant great circle was before looking) but but on reflection I think the question is actually well posed and that the stated answer is uniquely correct. If I travel due east from Seattle, that's of course not a straight line by any definition except "on a map projection that makes plumb lines straight." Not straight lines through space, not along on the surface if the Earth. When I get to the east coast and face due east, there is exactly one great circle I can walk along, which is the one specified. Any other definition of a straight line would have me walking off into space, digging underground, or constantly turning in ways I could only figure out with training and navigation equipment.
> If I travel due east from Seattle, that's of course not a straight line by any definition except "on a map projection that makes plumb lines straight."
OK, before you can have a straight line, you need a definition of a straight line. I said that.
I don't follow what you're trying to say here; no path you travel can be a straight line by any definition except "on a map projection that makes certain lines straight". If you assume that you're sticking to the surface of the earth, you've already ruled out using a line that is straight in some sense other than being projected onto a straight line, because the surface of the earth is not planar.
Fine, yes, but "walking in a straight line along the Earth's surface" already has a standard definition: "Keep stepping forward and don't turn." On Earth, that procedure generates a great circle given any starting point and orientation.
In other words: yes, in general, it's worth defining your terms precisely to avoid ambiguity. Puzzles that deliberately take advantage of ambiguity and use obscure definitions in weird ways to confuse people are genuinely aggravating. But this puzzle is only using the most standard definition we all learned in school and use every time we think about walking in straight lines locally. It's just showing that it leads to a surprising result. I think that's why I have a hard time seeing why its bothering so many people so much in this case.
Edit to add: I guess technically we're assuming away local geographical variation, otherwise any tiny hill completely changes the answer, but since the starting point is just "Seattle" and not a single dimensionless point, we have to assume that doesn't matter.
A straight line embedded in a curved surface will look curved from an exterior view, but it's still a straight line (i.e. the shortest distance between two points) in the surface. "due East" is a bit more problematic, as that depends on something exterior to the surface, but I don't see how it could cause any confusion in context.
> A straight line embedded in a curved surface will look curved from an exterior view, but it's still a straight line (i.e. the shortest distance between two points) in the surface.
It will still be a straight line in some sense; it won't necessarily be the shortest distance between two points in the surface. A line that goes due East is, obviously, the intersection of the sphere (the surface) with a plane parallel to the equator. This is "a straight line embedded in a curved surface". It's a straight line, but it's not a great circle, it's a circle centered in the plane that defines it.
For an example that is almost the same, consider the line in the complex plane containing those numbers whose real part is 5, as it exists in the Riemann sphere.
I don't think it was misleading. I tested the logic with a basketball and a ruler. I placed the ruler about 2/3 "high" on the basketball facing "due east", then rolled the ruler straight down around the ball and sure enough it made a circle around the width of the ball (or would have if the ruler were longer).
Disagree. The phrasing is that you are FACING due east when you start walking. There is nothing incompatible between facing a direction, then walking a straight line. Obviously its a riddle so there is meant to be some level of misdirection, but its an honest question.
I myself didnt get the catch and guessed Israel thinking it would be funny if it were so arranged to shoot the whole Mediterranean.
Even upon seeing "greater circle" I didnt think it could miss all of africa as I have always had the intuition that the U.S. antipode is the middle of the Indian ocean. However Seatle's antipode is 10degrees south of the cape of good hope, so plenty of space to get through.
My update is that not just Europe, but all of Africa (maybe the whole eastern hemisphere?) is more north than my intuition tells me.
Even if we idealize the surface of the Earth to be a sphere, it's still non-Euclidean geometry. As everyone who has read Lovecraft knows, extended contemplation of non-Euclidean geometry leads to insanity. To paraphrase Tolstoy, all sane minds think alike; each insane mind is insane in its own way. So we should expect extensive disagreement over the answer to this riddle, because it is literally driving people insane.
Spherical geometry is fine. What's weird is hyperbolic geometry.
The surface of a torus is, famously, Euclidean - the interior angles of a triangle will sum to 180 degrees - but I don't think that makes it easier for people to understand.
The surface of a cylinder is, and the surface of a torus built by revolving a very eccentric ellipse around a circle is, but the surface of a garden variety, donut-ish, torus built by revolving one circle around another, larger, one has locally positive curvature on the outside surface and locally negative curvature on the inside surface.
> But there’s some reason to think that many of them didn’t entirely understand the ruling and thought it banned pro-white racism or something; a majority of young black adults think the decision will make it easier for blacks to attend university.
This looks pretty easy to explain: the official messaging says two things:
1. The United States is an irredeemably racist society, and all its mechanisms are configured to make things harder for blacks.
2. The Supreme Court just outlawed racial discrimination in college admissions.
If you believe 1, the obvious conclusion is that all the racial discrimination against blacks that colleges have been doing is about to stop. They are not aware that, in reality, colleges were engaging in epic amounts of racial discrimination against nonblacks so that they could admit more blacks. That wouldn't make sense in a worldview where society is set up to keep blacks down.
Note that the ruling _does_ ban pro-white racism; if people think that, it isn't a misunderstanding. The misunderstanding is in their belief that an American institution would engage in pro-white racism.
Yes, generally I've found white men to be far more aware and have far more accurate beliefs about the actual discrimination that's happening than other groups, who tend to believe the narrative far more than you'd imagine. Not only for American blacks. In the past I was part of a group out drinking, mostly men and one woman, and talk turned to a particular woman at work who was a pathological liar. The woman in the group asked why she hadn't been fired yet, at which point the men sort of laughed and eye rolled hard and were like "uh why do you think". She turned out to be genuinely confused and had no idea of the extent of pro-female discrimination at this company! She also seemed to struggle to accept this and was shocked that every man in the group thought it was too obvious to mention.
This only really happens if you work at a software company that has a tiny fraction of female engineers to begin with (which, to be fair, is most of them, because the large firms aggressively snap up good female talent to keep up their numbers and are able to fire female engineers because they have enough remaining to dodge discrimination lawsuits).
I've worked places where minorities and women were difficult if not impossible to fire. My boss made me hire a black female who was ridiculously unqualified, because we had to do government reporting for AA (we were a federal contractor).
Alternatively, we live in a society where nearly everyone's getting screwed, but in different ways (and in the case of Black Americans this often happens very early in the pipeline, well before universities get involved)
Yeah, I don't understand the pressure on universities. By that point there are meaningful differences in qualification that would make someone potentially unable to handle the work.
If you believe in blank slateism, but believe that the environment can negatively effect people, then I would think that only very early interventions would make sense. Waiting 16-20 years to intervene just seems pointless.
My guess is that you are a white man, and you judge white men's beliefs about discrimination to match your beliefs about discrimination more than other people's beliefs about discrimination match your beliefs about discrimination.
I am skeptical that you have actual measures of discrimination to check this against, rather than your own opinion.
We do have data on Harvard admissions from the lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court decision. It shows that admitted blacks averaged substantially lower on objective measures and admitted asians higher than admitted whites.
>In any case, Harvard admissions is one tiny thing
Racial discrimination in Harvard admissions is what prompted the Supreme Court case that generated the ruling that prompted the link that prompted this thread.
What I mean by an objective measure is one that doesn't depend on the values or priors of the person using it. If someone got a 750 on the math SAT that is a fact whether the observer approves of it or doesn't. Whether it is a good measure is another question.
If you observe that the people admitted are consistently better (or worse) on the objective measures you know Harvard admissions uses depending on their race that is good evidence that the measures which do depend on the observers are more positive for the ones who do worse on the objective measures, more negative for the ones who do better. That looks like evidence that Harvard admissions discriminates in favor of the one group, against the other.
You were skeptical that I had actual measures of discrimination to check this against, and I just gave you one. What are the measures you have that point the other way? The context was the issue of discrimination in university admissions, which is what my evidence is about.
Harvard is one school but I have seen figures for other elite schools with the same pattern.
"Just because something is objective does not make it a better measure of what we care about."
Okay, there's something to that, insofar as "Tony is stupider than Bob, how should we treat Tony?" is the question and not "how smart or stupid are Tony and Bob?"
One answer is "We hold Tony and Bob to be morally equal, so we owe Tony the same protections as Bob gets, so we treat Tony the same as Bob".
Another answer is "Tony is inferior to Bob because of his stupidity. He will never be as productive or useful to the economy as Bob. Depending on exactly how stupid he is, he may extract more resources than he contributes. Therefore Tony should not be treated the same as Bob, and he is not owed the same protections, and indeed we can make it legal for Bob to shoot Tony if he feels like it".
Which answer we pick has nothing to do with an objective measure of testing intelligence. But an objective test *is* better if we need to establish "Is Tony stupid?" and "Should Tony get a job as an air traffic controller?"
If we care about "will the planes crash into each other?" then the objective measure is much better. If we care about "yes, we all know Tony is stupid, but let's pretend he isn't so we can give him a job as an air traffic controller because unless Tony has a job working beside Bob, it won't be wrong for Bob to use him as a live target in shooting practice" then the objective test is not better, but that still means the objective test is the true measure of "is Tony stupid or not?" and the way we treat Tony is the problem, not the test.
In the context the question is whether Tony and Bob will do equally well at Harvard, which is partly a question of how much they will learn from the classes, partly of what they will later do with what they learn.
Whether "protections" includes "the right to go to Harvard" or, more plausibly, "the right to be admitted to Harvard if you meet the relevant criteria" determines which of your two categories is relevant. I don't believe it does — from my standpoint Harvard has the right to discriminate in favor of Blacks, or against Blacks, so the question is "who would it be desirable for Harvard to admit" along the lines of your air traffic controller examples, not who has a right to be admitted.
But many people disagree with me. Under current US law as interpreted by the Supreme Court applicants do have a right not to be discriminated against. That puts it in your first category, so the question is what the relevant criteria are. If they are "how intellectually able are you" then an outcome with lots of Asian students and very few Black students may be fine, an outcome the other way is discrimination if it results, as it did, in lower admission standards for Blacks, higher for Asians. If one of the criteria is "are you a member of a group that has fewer Harvard admissions than its fraction of the population — if so admit more easily" then the observed outcome is fine.
>They are not aware that, in reality, colleges were engaging in epic amounts of racial discrimination against nonblacks so that they could admit more blacks.
Which suggests that those young black adults who think that the ruling will make it easier for blacks to attend university are the subset with a looser grip on reality, who presumably, are going to have a more difficult time than their peers attending university.
Why would having poor knowledge about the kinds of admissions processes at universities be relevant to whether or not someone would be a good student at university? It's not a prize for who can answer the most trivia questions about admissions.
Not understanding a very basic principle like what affirmative action is, to the point that you think its abolition will make it EASIER for black people to get into college, betrays a lack of intelligence.
This is not some factoid trivia tidbit. This was one of the biggest domestic news stories of 2023 and one that directly pertained to black americans. The only way you can be that confused about it is not just ignorance, it's that it's literally too complicated for them to understand.
But you're right, admissions isn't a trivia contest. It's a fucked up system of discrimination that has resulted in many intellectually sub-par black students being admitted to universities in the place of more capable students. There's already too many black people attending university as a proportion of available spaces at respective universities relative to their intellectual ability, so the idea that the big problem is that they aren't taking up enough spaces is absurd.
3. One day I was curious where I'd end up in if I went straight east across the Atlantic (following the same line of latitude). I was guessing Portugal, but I was surprised to find that I was in a narrow range that threads the Strait of Gibraltar, ending up in Algiers. But now I need to think carefully about how I phrase that factoid.
Living in Scotland, I'm always amused how comically far south the populated parts of North America are compared to us. Edinburgh is on the same latitude as Fort Severn First Nation, Ontario: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Severn_First_Nation
Hey, did you know in January Glasgow and Washington DC have similar average temperatures? I keep being surprised at just how warm European winters are, even though I should already know by now.
I've been following Quillette's history of Canada series, and a recurring theme is how the French don't have a clue how to survive in Canadian winters, despite being at about the same latitude, because they took the Gulf Stream for granted.
I was curious about the details so I looked at Google maps (I live in America) and happened to notice that as near as I can tell every country in the world is labeled with the English version of the name — Germany, not Deutschland, etc. — except for Türkiye.
Yeah I actually thought of the geodesic answer but I think that this time, this is trying to reveal another plot twist, that America is very south compared to Europe. In hindsight the wording do refer to geodesic, but I still feel fooled.
How reliable is threadreaderapp? A while ago I tried to use it on a thread, and it wouldn't show me anything but a plea to sign up with threadreaderapp.
When I followed Scott’s link and saw the map, I thought, “Ah, cute, the answer is Canada,” but when I returned I thought the business about the Atlantic was too unfair a red herring.
I too thought it was Canada, because by the time you get to the Great Lakes you're on the border there, but I suppose the Great Lakes are not on this 'geodesic great circle straight line" or whatever the true answer is.
If you want one of these with a Canadian-themed answer, the question is "On a direct flight from Los Angeles to London, what is the longest overwater segment?"
Answer is Hudson's Bay, because the Atlantic crossing is broken up by Greenland and Iceland.
There's a better formatted version of the East from Seattle puzzle (with illustrations, clickable links, and spoiler toggle) on the writer's own website:
1. Bill Thurston, arguably the greatest geometer in history, certainly the greatest of the last 100 years, and who specifically revolutionized the ways that mathematicians visualize the geometry of 3-dimensional spaces by visualizing themselves inside them, had no depth perception.
Regarding the original claim, I wonder if this is just a matter of blind mathematicians being less disadvantaged in these areas. Manipulating complex equations without the benefit of eyesight seems like it would be quite difficult, whereas geometry and topology rely more on mental visualization.
I don't know if it's decisive, but I can imagine at least one concrete advantage blind geometers would have.
Suppose your goal is to imagine a 2D manifold, such as a Mobius strip. If you visualize it, then what you're visualizing isn't exactly the manifold: it's an embedding of it in 3D space. If, on the other hand, you're imagining what it would be like to put your hands on it and trace the shape with your fingers, you're a lot closer to thinking about its intrinsic geometry.
On the subject of "personal experiences which may or may not be universal", does anyone actually find that their depth perception is all that much worse when they cover one eye? I can tell the difference, and I can see how 3D glasses make a flat image look three-dimensional, but in everyday life the advantage of binocular vision is pretty small.
I cannot consciously perceive any difference at all.
It might be that there is a difference but my brain is abstracting it away. I'd be slightly curious to find some sort of objective test that I can attempt with one eye and then with two eyes and see if I do any better.
(I mean a test like "estimate how far away this object is" rather than "can you unfocus your eyes and see two copies of your finger". I can do the latter, but other than that artificial and contrived situation I can't see any difference in what the objects in my visual field look like with one eye vs. with two.)
It's also not at all obvious to me whether a film is in "2D animation" or "3D animation", whereas I think my husband finds this distinction as obvious as the distinction between monochrome and colour. (I don't mean actual 3D movies with 3D glasses, but the way e.g. Pixar movies are referred to as 3D but classic Disney is 2D.)
FWIW, I'm also aphantasic and moderately prosopagnosic, so not a very visual person generally.
Re Gaza GDP, worth noting that it was significantly based on massive amounts of international aid - it's plausible to believe that an economy based on aid (in the form of either humanitarian aid or terror funding) is significantly poorer in practice than a similar economy that produces its own goods (both for various functionality reasons and because a self-producing economy is better at judging its needs).
(But also that said yes, Gaza was closer to western living standards in many ways than most of the third world, including access to e.g. Israeli hospitals or cell networks, which are presumably much more functional than what rural India has).
Does rural India have good cell network? (I've heard they've done surprisingly well with rail electrification but don't know much about the internet infrastructure)
It does, yeah. 4G LTE penetration is now essentially complete, with 5G rolling out now.
I should clarify that this measure is mostly just about getting on the internet (so you can read news, browse Facebook, conduct transactions, that kind of thing) and says little about how good it is for, say, video streaming or online gaming; it's the classic latency vs. throughput vs. bandwidth thing. The rural cell network in India is not very good for something like that.
I suspect it's as good as it is because the land lines are poor. Neil Stephenson pointed this out some time ago.
North Americans have relatively bad cell networks because they have had the alternative of a fairly competently executed landline network, which was "good enough" for many for a long time.
I concur, but the effect in practice can be quite surreal (in a steampunk-like way) if you're implicitly expecting the same tech progression path as the US.
I've read (not sure how good the information is) that the Hamas tunnels under Gaza are as long as the London Underground.
To build tunnels of that length would cost, to use a scientific term, a metric f**kton of money!
The "Gaza GDP > India GDP" statistic is shocking at first glance, but it becomes plausible once you remember that a) a lot of rural India is still terribly poor, b) Gaza received lots of international aid that can be counted towards their GDP, as you say; c) Hamas took that aid and used it to build tunnels and stockpile weapons instead of doing anything useful for their people.
Would that the Hamas leadership cared about Gazan civilians 0.1% as much as the average NYT commenter does!
The tunnels are cheaper than they'd otherwise be because they cared very little about safety during construction (I've heard over a hundred children died digging them). But yeah :/
That and Lepanto are great to say aloud! Chesterton gets things turned around, I was very sorely puzzled in my teens trying to work out the battle formations because he had Alfred's troops facing one way and then in another part swapped them round, but that's not important. It's the imagery and the language and the rhythm that are important 😁
Like Pringles, once you start quoting, you can't stop:
I had the sound off when I clicked it, thought "that's pretty and kind of cool I guess" and then was about a minute in when I saw it and switched the sound on.
> nine people in a family in Scotland have a mutation in the RIMS1 gene, which makes them go blind in their twenties and also apparently adds 20 IQ
(annoyed at the description of addition on a non linear curve without a starting point)
it looks like 100 to 120; n of 8
verbose nonsense(tables, brain scans, oh my) and not like descriptions of how they gave the iq test(did they test the "control" with written and verbal iq tests to look for differences at all?), protental life differences (maybe several of the sighted family members worked in a job with some poison) does the family agree with the assessment? Whats the family estimated iq of the missing data?
An untested "outsider"(II:3) is the parent of the 150's(III:1/2)
Alternative theory, II:3 is a good parent of an family with a baseline of 115-130 iq that had historical difficulties(potato famine? the troubles? idk), II:6 and II:7(being presumed younger) copied parenting techniques
I'm not surprised that consistent-pseudonymous comment sections are best: persistent identities allow consequences for bad behaviour, and pseudonyms free people up to say things that they wouldn't want to show up under a casual Google search for their real name.
Also, I could see people viewing a persistent pseudonym as a sort of blank slate of how people see them, so they may want to put their best foot forward to craft a good image. Maybe people see their real identity as already somewhat "tarnished" and set, so feel it's not worth trying to put forward an "inauthentic but better" persona
Seriously, I have no idea why anyone here thinks that thinks it's a good idea to use your real name on the internet. They do realize that the whole reason this blog exists is because its author got doxxed, right?
For me that's a plus. It makes it more likely that people will try to sell me things I want to buy, less likely that they will call me up to offer to refinance my nonexistent mortgage.
Unfortunately, as a side effect, people sometimes lose their jobs, when the things they said somewhere online are too easily connected to their identity.
I was responding to the point about advertising. Some people see to see advertisers finding out that you are a potential customer as a negative, I see it as a positive. Obviously there are other reasons to avoid using your real name.
My wife used to worry that someone offended by one of my arguments online — that was in the days of Usenet — would throw a brick through our window but it never happened.
Because the only fair way to run the world is to either doxx everybody or to doxx nobody.
"Nobody" is my preferred outcome but to get there we may need to go through a moment where everybody is equally exposed, and some of us have the balls to make that happenby stepping up to the plate and unabashedly exposing ourselves, no matter how uncommon our viewpoint or character.
I've been using my real name online for forty or fifty years and arguing about lots of things. One reason to do so is that I have a good deal of published writing, much of it available online, and sometimes want to refer to it. My wife used to argue that some day someone angry at my arguments would throw a brick through our window but it hasn't happened yet.
When I set up my web page about thirty years ago I thought about whether it should cover both my professional work and my hobbies, whether I should worry that a potential employer — I'm an academic economist — would be less likely to hire me if he knew I spent substantial time and effort researching medieval cooking and making rope beds and medieval tents. I decided that a department that saw that as a substantial negative was probably not the best place for me to be.
To be fair, I've had a pretty easy life, might feel differently if I thought knowledge of my activities online would be a serious threat to my well being, as for some people it surely is. But not for all.
We are also aware that this blog's author lives in the Bay Area and is deeply embedded in the tech/rationaliist culture.
I *want* people I meet in real life to recognize me for my writings here, and elsewhere on the internet. It rarely happens except at SSC-adjacent meetups or the like, but it's pretty much always a plus when it does. I want to be able to reference my work elsewhere, when talking to people on the internet. I'm proud of what I've contributed here, and I'm proud of what I have contributed in meatspace, and I want to enjoy the reputation that comes from all of that combined.
I also *don't* like in the Bay Area or work in "tech", or anywhere else where I would plausibly be subject to real-world "cancellation". I mean, if I really offend someone here, they're welcome to call the Space Force and say they'll boycott GPS if they don't have me fired, see how far that gets them.
Persistent pseudonyms for anyone who needs them or benefits from them, sure - I'm not saying they should be prohibited. But neither are they the One True Way.
they are the one true way for people who don't have power, though. And many more people don't.
sort of a big issue here where people don't realize how wealth and privilege lets you escape things. Yes, you yourself could get fired too but you'd need to offend vastly more powerful people than others. But not everyone is indispensable ir can get jobs like that.
A lot of things are like this. Urbanists don't get that cities suck for the poor; public school haters don't get that its easy to make homeschooling work when you are rich enough to afford a stay at home parent and tutors/enrichment opportunities.
"Wealth" and "power" are not the variables that matter here. Donald Sterling and Brendan Eich had both, and both had to worry about being "cancelled" for wrongspeak. An Appalachian hillbilly with forty acres, a mule, and a two-bit meth lab has very little wealth or power, but doesn't need to worry about people being mad at him for something he said on the internet. Other counterexamples should be obvious, and considering them broadly should perhaps give you insight into what *does* matter here
Yes. There's also the example of many great writers throughout history using pseudonyms for analogous reasons. For example, Mark Twain, Poor Richard, and Scott Alexander.
I'm more annoyed with whoever decreed that Google+ would allow wallet names only. Huge unforced error, that kept many who otherwise would have been enthusiastic early adopters away. Maybe Google could never have killed Facebook, for whom social media is life-or-death, but they shouldn't have handicapped themselves like that.
Meh. Their attempt to claim social was when they started giving different search results to different people. That was the beginning of the end for a company that until then was pretty darned ethical and reliable.
Yes. Here, we are free to have civil discussions with people whom we would not risk engaging under our real names. Also, depending on our situation, we can engage with other people without having them be tarnished by association with our real names.
When the outside environment is hostile enough, people build greenhouses. When the hostile environment is because of social pressure to conform, pseudonyms provide insulation.
I agree with their conclusion: it's about who our audience really is.
(Although, I also think some of it may be to the human-equivalent of what happens when we prompt an LLM to be smart, to act like it's an expert.)
To expand on that point, persistent pseudonyms allow many people to participate who otherwise could not. People from repressive regimes, people with jobs that ban them from expressing their views (e.g. national security, neutral civil servants), it lets people do low-level leaking (comments like "I work for a Big Tech Corp and..." would get them fired if they were identifable), teens with conservative parents can be out as LGBT+ or whatever. To pick an example pertinent to our host, psychiatists can comment without risk of their patients finding the comments.
I think the study is weak and we shouldn't draw strong conclusions about the quality of real names vs pseudonymous. For those who didn't actually click the link, they are examining one site that changed policies over 2(3) years 2013-2015. They have 2 different measures swearing and complexity of language. Based on the summary they observe swearing decreased after removing anonymous comments. For real name they allowed users to use their facebook accounts and noticed that complexity of language decreased from the previous psudonymous level. Note this is confounded by time (people commenting in 2015 are different from people commenting in 2013 and also the tenor of discussion can change) and ease of posting (people logged into Facebook find it easier to comment).
" Did you know: the Gaza Strip has (had?) a higher GDP per capita than India. I’m not sure what to think upon learning this." One might perhaps want at least to consider the possibility that everything we were told about the Palestinians in Gaza ("open air prison," etc) before October 7 was a complete lie. A sort of willing suspension of disbelief, not unlike accepting the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry "statistics" on civilian deaths.
Wait, what? How? If you start at the latitude of Seattle and travel across the Atlantic, the first country you reach is France. I just checked it on a globe. What am I missing?
I don't think so. I live in eastern Canada, and if you build a directional shortwave antenna directed due east, it points towards Africa and not Europe.
'41: How bad is it to marry a cousin? New study suggests offspring of cousin marriages live on average three years less than expected.'
An important limitation of the study is that they didn't have data on what the people died of. They even say it:
"To evaluate how marrying a cousin affects the health of offspring, we use as an outcome their years of life (‘longevity’). Since genealogical profiles do not contain direct information on health, such as diseases, disability, or cause of death, we treat longevity as a proxy for overall, life-time health."
One of the other studies they cited, "Consanguinity and child health" (2008) by A. Saggar, A. Bittles,
found that the risk of offspring having recessive genetic disorders unsurprisingly had a positive correlation with the degree of relatedness between their parents. 30% of children conceived through incest had at least one recessive genetic disorder, and 3-6% of children conceived through first-cousin marriages had it. If the parents are unrelated, the odds of their children having such a disorder are less than 1%.
This makes me suspect that the average life expectancy of children of first cousins is dragged down by the 3-6% of their cohort who have recessive disorders. Maybe the other 94-97% have normal lifespans.
It raises the prospect that it might be perfectly safe for first cousins or even family members more closely related than that to have children through IVF and embryo screening.
IVF embryo screening is (reportedly) done by eyeballing the embryos and picking the one that "looks the healthiest". This will only catch an extremely small portion of the reinforced recessives.
My understanding is that can pull a cell out of the embryo and test it for whatever genetic disorders they are checking for. I don't know if that always happens or if some is what you describe.
>This makes me suspect that the average life expectancy of children of first cousins is dragged down by the 3-6% of their cohort who have recessive disorders. Maybe the other 94-97% have normal lifespans.
Hmm... I'd expect that for any _given_ recessive disorder, there is a nice clear all-or-nothing behavior. But I wouldn't be surprised if there are a bunch of alleles where a recessive pairing gives you sort-of-subclinical-but-crappier-than-usual consequences. I'd like to see whether the distinction between the 3-6% and the 94-97% is crisply bimodal - or something fuzzier.
Also, there might be some survivor bias: An embryo which is not viable because it has two defective copies of some essential gene will probably not show up in lifetime statistics.
Also, this should really depend on the prior amount of inbreeding going on. If both parents had 1024 different ancestors ten generations ago, then it is likely that any recessive gene defects their ancestors had were not selected against. If they went through generations of inbreeding, they will be less likely to carry fatal gene defects. I mean, the Targaryens are doing just fine :-P
See here: https://twitter.com/edardaman/status/1744453999695176046 tl;dr a16z submitted written evidence to the House of Lords Communication and Digital Select Committee, claiming that "recent advances in the AI sector have resolved [the issue of black-box models]". That's not even close to true and they damn well ought to have known that. Unfortunately there appear to be essentially no consequences for lying to a Parliamentary Select Committee.
I dunno: knowingly providing false information to the country's legislative body, which will then use that information to make hugely consequential decisions, seems pretty bad.
But knowingly providing information that a court might conclude was false possibly not. Given an imperfect court system criminalizing that might be a way of keeping the legislators from learning unpopular facts.
Any law can be criticized on the grounds that a court might get it wrong, punish an innocent man who was doing a good thing, and so frighten other innocent doers of good things. Most of us do not turn anarchist because of this.
If the law prohibits "knowingly providing false information", as opposed to "providing information that we subsequently determine is false", that I think puts it in the same category as all of the other laws most of us accept in spite of the certainty that courts will occasionally get it wrong. It's roughly equivalent to the current law against perjury, which is relatively noncontroversial. And it does result in a high barrier to enforcement, which is fine - you can't win them all, but you could win some good fights with this one (as you can with perjury laws).
This isn't the government, it's the legislature, whose function is partly to hold the goverment, and other powerful interests, to account. These committees often require government ministers to give evidence to inquiries, which is a kind of quasi-judicial function.
In fact Select Committees do have the power to punish lying in evidence, which is a species of 'Contempt of Parliament', in a similar way to 'Contempt of court'. They just don't use it very often (usually it is used to compel testimony in the first place).
I'm guessing their point was that lying while testifying under oath to the legislature is different from lying to the government in general, and they just worded it very badly.
He's talking about Britain; I think "government" has a specific meaning over there? (Like the way we in America have bizarre ideas of what "nation" and "state" mean. Or like the way everyone has contradictory ideas about what "liberal" means.)
> Like the way we in America have bizarre ideas of what "nation" and "state" mean.
We think they're synonymous. The top-level internal divisions of the US are also called "states", but this clearly conflicts with the normal use of the term; it is a vestige of the idea that American states held sovereignty over their own territory.
Having internal entities with an inappropriate historical name isn't the same thing as having a strange idea of what that name refers to. Compare how, in other countries with other labels for their internal divisions, those of the US are still called by the local term "states". Similarly, we refer to French "departments" regardless of the ordinary meaning of the word, because that's what they're called.
As far as "nation" goes, our idea is certainly not compatible with the historical meaning, but it's less obvious to me that it differs from the current meaning assigned in other countries.
For that to be valid, you would need to assume, as Ajb seems to have, that when I comment in American English on an American blog, I was really intending to use British English.
There are many cases where people should uncontroversially not be allowed to lie to the government. If you lie to a court, that could result in an innocent person going to jail. If you lie on your tax return, the government doesn't get the money it needs. In general, the government needs the ability to gather truthful information to do its job.
That said, I think it's also important to distinguish "This is Official Testimony where you will face punishment for knowingly lying, proceed with caution" and "We're looking for comments from our citizens, don't be afraid to tell us what you think" and (not being a UK citizen) I don't know which bucket their statement falls into, legally.
>>In general, the government needs the ability to gather truthful information to do its job.
>That's true of everything; why give special treatment to the government?
That's a good point. Some of our more powerful corporations have internal procedures (often kafkaesque!) for punishing customers or suppliers that they don't like. Do any of them punish the corporate version of "perjury"?
The second: if they think they are lying, they will call them in and place them under oath and ask them to repeat the statement; if they then decline, well, the committee knows what to think. If they persist (and it is a lie) then they can have them prosecuted for perjury. If they refuse to turn up, they can be prosecuted for contempt of parliament. If they refuse to answer the question, the same.
Note: testimony given in parliament under oath is a parliamentary proceeding and so has absolute privilege, ie cannot be used as evidence against you in court, which means there is no protection against self-incrimination, so the UK equivalents of the Fifth Amendment don't apply.
Evidence to a parliamentary select Committee is not normally under oath. If the Committee thinks you're lying, they can place you under oath. Then you can be prosecuted for perjury.
I know that the Wiki article says Palestinian architecture for some reason, but I would have gone for 1st Century Judaean architecture, given that was actually the country at the time. Saying Palestinian is misleading and kinda ahistorical
I suppose I'm mildly surprised people haven't heard of the Holy House of Loreto, but then again, it is old-school Catholicism and I imagine even a lot of younger Catholics have no idea about it.
I read about it years ago, when I was a young Catholic in Poland, but even then I didn't get the sense it was common knowledge. If you asked the average person on the street about the Virgin Mary's house, you'd probably get a blank stare.
36: It doesn’t surprise me that consistent-pseudonym comments are no worse than real-name ones, but I don’t understand why they would be better
You have skin in the game with the community in question, but you can take on a persona that is disassociated from other parts of your life, and that persona can signal differently than you may need/want to (for various social reasons) with your real name.
Case Study: I heard a rumor that Scott Alexander prefers pseudonyms and finds that it lets them be more honest/vocal about their beliefs than if they were using their real name, which would mix their personal/work life with their online discourse.
The person who is Deiseach seems to have a reputation and a recognisable persona. Is this the same as the real life person? Who can say, but one thing I can tell you is that I wouldn't give half or even a quarter of the opinions I do were I going under my real name that could be traced back to real me in my real life.
"Sometimes grumpy, far more religious/conservative than I am, very intelligent and interesting to read, likes to quote Chesterton and C.S. Lewis at length" is certainly a reputation and recognizable persona! 😊
100% agree with you on "I give opinions that I would not want to be the first thing people knew about me if they met me IRL."
I go by my real life name, but I have the advantage of being retired, so the usual cancellation attack of "get their employer to fire them" doesn't apply.
I also suspect that real name commenting encourages engagement in tribal coded discourse, being unnecessarily combative and inflexible as the sense of participating publicly in a fight is heightened
I came here to write pretty much the same thing. By writing under the same name I have a reputation to uphold (even if no one here remembers me, they might look me up later). By not using my real name I can say more than if I had to consider real life implications.
I suspect there are also huge selection effects. First, there could be a reason a site decided to go real-name-only (eg terrible comment section). Second, the only examples I can think of are newspapers and a couple of mainstream-conservative websites, which have the same ease-of-access problems as Facebook when it comes to commenter quality.
> The House of Commons is not believed to have fined anybody since 1666 and has not "committed anyone to custody", apart from temporarily detaining them, since the 19th century.
Going to the linked article, I think they're covering themselves with the wiggle room of "we're only stating our beliefs about AI". Oh, they were wrong? Well, we told you them in all sincerity, how dare anyone imply we were deliberately lying!
Michael! I am putting my hand on my chest and gazing in shocked amaze at you! Do you really mean that a company that wants to get in on the magic money fountain and swim in an ocean of cash might fib to a regulatory body?
How very untrusting of the free market and its impeccable correctness you are!
I don't think so, though it depends on your purposes. A competent-but-evil a16z might be a good guide to investment (as long as you look at their actions rather than their public statements). An incompetent a16z would be useless.
When I was 25, and far more associated with the effective altruism movement than I am now, I attempted to do an undirected kidney donation. It was, hands down, the most painful experience of my life. Not the donation, that never actually happened, but trying to navigate the bureaucracy and sheer cluelessness of every single person even tangentially connected to the organ donation.
I started out talking to a doctor, they were very confused about why anyone would do this, and how you might even start out (they ended up doing a general blood screening test largely out of a feeling of obligation and to get rid of me). I then went on to try to communicate with all hospitals in my area with a kidney donation service, to absolutely no success - I couldn't even get them to return my calls or e-mails. I had no more luck with the various donations who worked *specifically* in this area. When I could get someone to talk to me, they were universally confused about the very idea of non-directed donations, despite the foundations and hospitals having pages on their websites on exactly that topic.
After weeks and weeks, I finally managed to bully the foundation to getting a phone call with the one of the people responsible for sourcing donors. They told me, flat out, that I was too young (remember, 25 years old), and while they appreciated my enthusiasm I should try again when I was at least 40 (yes, that was exactly as patronising as I make it sound).
I concluded that they actually don't need kidneys, and remain skeptical to this day.
The concept of kidney exchanges has slowly gained popularity over the last few years. Nowadays, they use top trading cycles or similar algorithms to find groups of matches even when pairs of matches don't exist. An undirected donation injects slack into these systems, and can result in much more than 1 additional successful donation. The record for longest chain of exchanges stands at something like 70, which is mind-boggling.
source: I used to work in the general academic field (market design). The kidney exchange stuff was pioneered in large part by Al Roth, who I mentioned just recently regarding the ethical difficulties of creating markets in domains where payments are taboo. EAs desperately need to be more aware of that stuff!
I've heard that, of course - that was the motivation to even try, and to keep pushing. But I feel like there's more to the analysis than that.
Let us assume, for a moment, that all the things you list are 100% true, and that a given person (Bob) is able to do so without undue risk, financial burden etc. That does not, in itself, constitute the entirety of the analysis. Because Bob's decision is not just 'should I donate a kidney', it's also 'do the organisations I need to deal with let kidney donations happen'. Maybe part of the reason kidney donations are so needed is because the gatekeepers only let 1% of willing/able donors actually donate, and if they allowed a wider fraction then we'd be swimming in them. Now, you could argue that Bob should try, because expected value, but that assumes it's just a matter of volume - we need to jam more potential donors through so sufficient make it through their insane process.
However, I would argue that the problem there is not enough people donating, but the gatekeepers not letting people donate, and since people who are realistically able/willing to donate is not huge, engaging with that system is ultimately futile. Especially if the things you list are not true - I notice all those numbers come from the US, which apart from being very strange in a lot of ways, has a very particular healthcare system which really doesn't generalise to the rest of the world. For example, if the gatekeepers allow 1% of willing/able donors to actually donate, then I would be shocked if the marginal impact of an actual donation on further donations was detectable at all, which sharply limits the good done by the donation.
And I think there's a revealed preferences aspect to be considered here. Let us assume that the gatekeepers - hospitals, foundations, whatever - are in some way accountable to either private shareholders or the government or popular opinion or whatever. In that case, if they are doing such a lousy job in the face of *actual* need, then it raises the question of why that situation has been allowed to continue. This is by no means a knockdown argument, there's a few reasons it could be the case, but none paint the gatekeepers in a light which makes them appear remotely trustworthy. They are, at best, hamstrung by rules which they are powerless to change (more likely), and at worst outright liars who perpetuate a narrative to facilitate financial donations and social prestige (very unlikely).
Regardless of your analysis, if I *can't* donate because of gatekeepers despite being willing, it doesn't really matter that much why in terms of outcome for purposes of analysis.
I'm too lazy to dig for data right now, but IIRC there are a bunch of people on the waitlist for organ donation. So I'll ascribe it to institutional incompetence rather than the kidneys not actually being needed.
Keep in mind that the whole idea of donor chains and so on has only started to be implemented maybe 15 years ago? Depending when you tried donating, you were very close to the cutting edge. It takes new knowledge and techniques time to percolate through institutions, to become the new normal. On top of that, economists think about the ethical issues very differently than doctors, who often have a more narrow, conservative concept of what it means to do no harm, and a tendency to bristle at utilitarian style arguments (for good / understandable reasons IMO).
I just got approved for donation at Georgetown University Hospital. It was super easy, they were friendly and accommodating, have things streamlined to get all the testing done in one day, and didn't bat an eye my request (a la Scott) to get an MRI instead of a CAT scan.
I think "works closely with the NKR" might be a good filter for finding a hospital to work with..
Eh, it is what it is. I won't go into detail for privacy reasons, but I will say I worked with both the largest hospital in my city (I think it's one of the biggest in my state? I'd certainly heard about it when I was living in a different part of the state), and the national kidney body, assuming that they would be best-placed to manage it, advise me etc. Both were about equally useless, although from memory the person who told me I was too young was from the national body.
There are other communist/ex-communist countries in Africa (Eritrea split from Ethiopia after the end of communism, Angola has an AK-47 on its flag) that haven't done that well. James Scott used land reform in socialist Tanzania as one of his negative examples in "Seeing Like a State".
Richard Hanania noted that IVF was overwhelmingly endorsed in surveys by the 70s, I speculated that there was more far-mode opposition before it arrived:
Interesting. http://www.glicko.net/research/preface-z28.pdf goes into more depth. This is by Mark Glickman, inventor of the Glicko rating system. He says that the Elo system "had a basis" in the methods in Zermelo's paper, while not being sure if Elo actually knew about that paper.
Another Kruschev anecdote from Marvin Kalb’s ‘The Year I Was Peter the Great 1956: Kruschev, Stalin’s Ghost and a Young American in Moscow’
After the death of Stalin finally sunk in, Kruschev began to talk publicly about how awful Stalin had been:
“Another story heard in the Moscow market had one troubled delegate jumping to his feet and shouting, “Well then, why didn’t you all get rid of him?”
Khrushchev, interrupted by the question, looked slowly around the chamber. “Who said that?” he asked.
No one answered. “Who said that?” he repeated more forcefully.
But again there was no answer, only a sudden chill and silence. Khrushchev grinned. “Now you understand why we didn’t do anything,” he said drily before continuing his speech.”
Same problem on PC (don't have an account). I guess it's a trick question. Seattle is kind of to the north, and if the latitude was adversarially chosen (hint: it was) then the straight line might miss a bunch of countries by a hair's breadth and go way into nordic territory. My blind guess is Russia (Kaliningrad), or perhaps Sweden.
34 (long COVID prevalence): This is a big *relative* increase. Still waaay out of line with what the catastrophists were saying a few years ago. I remember I had to call BS on claims of double-digit long COVID prevalence. That was indeed "I can look out the window and immediately see your theory is BS" territory.
I'm prepared to believe that we have something like 0.2% prevalence (eyeballing from your graph). For that, covid doesn't even need to be particularly special. That might follow just from base rates of post-viral syndrome, combined with an immuno-naive population.
Yeah, this is also what immediately came to my mind. The problem is that the only people who are talking about long covid (somewhere where people see them talking about it, ie. not just the studies) are long covid activists, who keep jocking completely ludicrous numbers for long covid prevalence (10-20 % etc), ie. numbers where most of those outside the community seeing them will instantly go "but I don't know anyone who has long covid myself and all my friends seem to be as active as previously, adjusting for age" and stop listening to them.
Also, when it comes to statistics like these, we'll probably also in the coming years have the split where a third of those who still care about the issue will see the statistic and go "See? It can't be anything other than Covid!" while another third will go "See? It can't be anything other than the vaxx!"
I haven't looked at that post, but looking at this blog's other posts, the author is clearly obsessed with COVID and having and spreading anxiety as an ideology. So I wouldn't be surprised if they obsessively looked for the statistic that makes long COVID look like a big problem the most.
Yep. Given the author's dodgy theory of immunology (the immune system should be thought of as a bag of 100 snakes which viruses steal and "any other explanation you might hear is propaganda to keep you grinding away in the system"), I'm not much inclined to take their long Covid assessment very seriously.
Remember this graph would be assuming that everyone with long covid is applying for disability, which is certainly not the case. Maybe not double digit prevalence but certainly higher than these #s would suggest
And in the other direction, the pandemic might have incentivized a bunch of people on the edge of employability to get out of the job market entirely. "Maybe not double digit prevalence" is a huge understatement. There's a factor 20 of slack here! Every single statistical error your can come up with would need to point in the same direction for double digits to be even remotely on the table. Extremely unlikely. (Also, as I already said in the OP: look out the window. Do you see a society where a double digit fraction of jobs suddenly aren't getting done due to lack of workers? That would be economic collapse in most places. Empty store shelves, businesses shuttering left and right)
> But it’s also no surprise that societies built on supremacist foundations and eugenicist tales of the strong conquering the weak are unable to look honestly at physical, bodily deterioration.
> It’s no surprise that ableist societies are disabling themselves.
> A genocidal mindset is coming home to roost.
> The truth is our relative privilege as citizens of the imperial core could only ever last so long.
Maybe it's wrong, but this kind of rhetoric makes me *extremely* wary - the author clearly started with a ideologically-driven conclusion and found evidence to support it. In this case, I think other commenters are basically right - the evidence presented supports the view that a very small percentage of people have long-term consequences of a COVID infection, but is presented in a maximally alarmist fashion to drive an agenda of anxiety.
Eugenics covers a bunch of ideas, some clearly good (registers of carriers of Tay-Sachs disease) and some clearly evil (forcibly sterilising people with Down's syndrome), but it's caught in a vicious circle where it's strongly associated with the evil ones, which scares off most non-evil people, and so it's mostly evil people use the word to describe what they want.
Screening embryos for Down's is available on the NHS, which a) I think is a good thing, b) clearly meets my definition of eugenics, and c) is popular. But most of the people who support it would react with instant suspicion and hostility to people openly advocating for eugenics, *and they're right to do so* because of who does and doesn't use the word to describe their beliefs.
This strikes me as regrettable but hard to fix, and probably not catastrophic.
Polygenic screening really is a motte-and-bailey example. The motte is "we only want to ensure healthy babies, who could possibly object to that? do you *want* babies to be born with conditions that mean they will have bad lives and suffer horribly? what kind of monster are you?"
Indeed, who could object to healthy babies? But the bailey will be (and I have no expectation that there will *never* be a settlement in the bailey, given how all other such cases have gone):
"Well, we're already selecting for no-disease, we're already doing negative screening. What about positive screening? Who could object to babies who will grow up to be smarter and happier?" Any objections from us heartless knuckle-draggers are met with the retreat to "but healthy babies with no disease!" motte, until it is safe to creep back out to the bailey once more.
And the definition of "positive screening" creeps more and more, so that "better" takes on a whole range of the undesirable, bad old connotations once more: breeding humans like cattle to get the better race, grading offspring to see who is worthy or not, the unworthy sequestered away and not permitted to marry or reproduce (and that's only the milder pipe dreams of previous eugenicists).
And then in time we get the full horrors of "but who could possibly have foreseen that would happen?" when the skulls are piled up in heaps all round us.
Completely agree. The trigger in this latest increase was lockdowns and home working rather than long Covid, in conjunction with the long march of chronic illnesses and expanding definitions of sickness. The amount of people I know who have mentally checked out is worrying. They either sincerely believe that their relatively minor ailment is grounds to not work again, or are cynically lying because they don't want to go back to the 9-5.
At least in the UK there's a lot of skepticism about disability numbers. Many people on disability claim to have vague forms of mental illness or depression or otherwise have an inability to work, but the criteria and assessment are amazingly lax. Recently they have even pushed to reclassify the menopause as a disability worthy of state payouts.
State capacity and effectiveness collapsed dramatically in the last few years in the UK, in part because the left managed to take control of the civil service from the government and the (notionally but not really) right wing ministers just gave up trying to control them. Given that context it can easily be a purely political issue rather than anything "real".
Governments don't have a lot of incentive to reduce the number of dodgy disability claims either, because most of them would otherwise be pumping up the unemployment numbers and making the government look bad.
A couple of decades ago it used to be said that 5% was the theoretical minimum for unemployment, but nowadays we regularly reach the low 3% range in good times. Why? Probably because we have shifted the 2% of most marginally employable people (the slightly crazy or very lazy) from a state of perpetually hopping in and out of jobs to a state of sitting around getting disability benefits for some semi-fictitious condition.
The left took control of the civil service in the last few years? That's quite a claim.
I accept that left and right are relative (you clearly have a different baseline to me if you think Johnson, Truss, and Sunak are "not really" right wing) but the idea that there was a recent leftwards lurch sounds like it could do with some evidence.
You have a lot of recent cases of this, like when the head of the border force retired and stated he had never believed in "bloody borders" anyway. Or the way the police and CPS are super-keen on prosecuting hate speech but have lost interest in burglary and other such boring physical-world crimes.
The criteria and assessment are not amazingly lax; they are amazingly incompetent. They will routinely classify people who are literally bed-bound (as in "have to use a bedpan") as able to work, while also classifying people with vague mental illnesses as unable to do so.
The worst stories told by both the left and right wing press are true: the problem is that neither is representative, because there is no such thing as a representative anecdote of a system with such enormous variations in outcome.
It may have a similar effect (people will try it on and hope they get incompetent laxity rather than incompetent strictness), but causal explanations and efforts to fix the problem are completely different.
I find myself wondering whether there's a way to separate the "covid" effect from the "stuck in lockdown (with nothing to do but feed my hypochondria on the Internet)" effect.
Can you explain what you mean? Looking at the UK graph, it looks like the number of long term sick goes from ~2m to ~2.8m. 0.8m people out of 65m in the country is 1.2%. (I'm being generous here and assuming that 100% of the population got COVID and also assuming that that line levels off immediately, which it shows no sign of doing.) That's the people who are so sick they're economically inactive. Doesn't seem unreasonable that that number might just be 10% of all the people suffering with the condition.
Maybe you're referencing people who were predicting double digit percentage of people being so sick as to be economically inactive. If so, I agree those people are off by an order of magnitude (assuming the numbers don't keep getting worse). But I think a lot of people who were once labelled as doomsayers will be feeling quite vindicated by these stats.
We are in rough agreement here. It's so frustrating because in some groups I have to take the role of the alarmist, and in other groups I'm trying to calm people down. Long covid is a real and serious condition, understudied, underdiagnosed, and will have a noticeable impact on our society. But it's not earth-shatteringly bad either. Quite a large population of people unable to work already existed. This newest illness is just a very visible member of this previously invisible group.
Yeah, post-viral syndrome / ME / chronic fatigue syndrome / Long covid, whatever the fuck it is, is clearly real, and clearly debilitating. I have a friend who has it and is almost wholly reliant on her powered wheelchair, not because she can't stand up / walk, but because more than three or four steps leaves her utterly exhausted and gasping for breath. She was an active woman with several kids and then went into this serious decline after a viral infection about 15 years ago.
It's been around for a long time, but covid meant that a lot of people got a serious viral infection in a short period of time, so a lot more people got it all at once, and that's resulting in a lot more of the medical profession taking it seriously and starting to study and diagnose it better.
Please put an epilepsy warning in links to videos with flashy or otherwise bizarre frame transitions! We don't know how good companies are (or will be) at RLHFing dangerous characteristics out of these videos.
It gets harder to be anti-conspiracy-theorist when you discover people are pulling convoluted bullcrap like 22 (the FAA discrimination questionnaire) for reasons that aren't even ambitious. Maybe that's why it flew under the radar (ha!) for so long?
... because conspiracy theorists are wrong on *most* things? Because they have terrible epistemics? You bite the bullet on some unpopular opinions regarding covid or something, and next thing you know your allies are weird naturopaths who think Bill Gates put microchips into the vaccines.
Are they wrong about most things? How would you measure that? What's the denominator in that fraction, the count of all possible things?
I believe in a lot of conspiracy theories. This is because there are a lot of conspiracies. Why so many; well, a society that ostracizes anyone who points out conspiracies against the public clears the way for those who want to engage in them. There have been an amazing number of those in recent years.
The weird naturopaths as you call them are a curious example to pick. Many of the things that happened with COVID vaccines were being described as conspiracy theories mere months before they actually happened. For example vaccine passports may have used QR codes on a phone rather than the (real, existing) Gates Foundation proposal for "quantum dot" tattoos, but that's a trivial difference in the grand scheme of things. The core of the idea - that people would be forced to take vaccines by giving everyone unforgeable marks - was correct.
The denominator would be the number of reasonably popular conspiracy theories out there.
Equating covid passports with injected microchips is weaksauce though. If a QR code on a smartphone is an "unforgeable mark", then so is every government record ever, including your id card. By the way, people are forced to take vaccines by exotic mechanisms known as *laws*, which are needed to implement something like covid passports. I'm with you that there's an ick factor and a slippery slope towards informal / unjustified use, but ultimately people were forced to take vaccines because most other people wanted them to.
I hadn't heard about the quantum dot proposal, seems pretty obvious that's where the conspiracy theories came from. Again, I agree with the ick factor and I really hope it's never implemented.
I'm not sure I'd call it a conspiracy. This looks quite open, a press release, not a secret cabal in hiding. (In retrospect, I think I vaguely recall seeing something about them in science news some years ago.) When I first saw the headline, my reaction was: Wait a minute, quantum dots? Aren't those usually things like cadmium selenide, which are rather toxic? In the press release they mention that these dots are a copper compound, so toxicity is much less of an issue.
Re the ick factor
Umm, why? Its just a record keeping device, driven by the fact that in undeveloped countries records tend to get lost more easily than in the 1st world.
Also, _most_ of medicine has an "ick" component, particularly for any new practice. Surgery looks gory. Blood transfusion looks vampirish. Transplants look Frankenstinian.
I think of "ick", of disgust, as folk microbiology. It is better than _not_ having an "ick" reaction to actions that could spread pathogens, but it isn't as good as _actual_ microbiology.
The conspiracy is that (a) Bill Gates or the Gates foundation are actually doing this, as opposed to thinking about doing it (b) not doing it at the behest of a government, but out of their own initiative and in secret (c) it's a compound actually added to the vaccine itself. Let alone the confusing idea that this is some microchip they use to control you.
Of course the reasonable version of the theory sounds reasonable. The whole point is that it's *not* a secret cabal doing this against your will.
Eh, there's something weird happening in this thread whereby you "debunk" me calling something a conspiracy theory by changing the facts claimed by the conspiracy to a more innocent version. Classic motte and bailey.
But this was never a conspiracy theory. To be a conspiracy theory, it first has to be a *theory*, which in common usage means something widely suspected of being true but not known to be true. It also has to be a *conspiracy*, which by law is an agreement to commit a crime - common usage may stretch that one to things that the community in question generally believes to be Seriously Evil even if nobody has enacted a statute yet.
The FAA's nonsense here isn't criminal, though it may be tortious. It's not something generally considered Seriously Evil. And it's not a theory, having jumped directly from something almost nobody suspected to something everyone paying attention knew was true (even if we don't all agree about whether it is tortious or otherwise mildly evil).
There's good reason to be extra suspicious of claims that meet both the "conspiracy" and "theory" label, which mostly don't apply to this sort of bureaucratic unpleasantness.
Well, in fairness, I think the conspiracy theory Nobody is talking about is that there is a widespread coordinated effort to do this to every major institution, and there has been considerable gaslighting trying to convince us that it isn’t true.
Common interest and environment is not conspiracy. It doesn't require "coordination" for the leadership of Harvard to say "We're going to face a shitstorm of controversy and protest if we don't hire a DEI czar and give them free reign; who has time for that?", and for the leadership of Stanford to come to the same conclusion. Nor does it require coordination for the students of Harvard and Stanford to both incite controversy if they see their school's leadership as insufficiently woke in its approach to DEI.
Common interest and environment leads to groupthink, whether or not there are Secret Masters telling the group what to think. And groupthink gets you all the rest. Accusations of "conspiracy!" are emotionally satisfying, but they make the accusers look foolish.
Maybe we need a new word for the case where they’re all doing something skeevy (out of common interest and groupthink) but they all deny that they’re doing it (out of common interest and groupthink).
You know the old saying: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is common interest and groupthink.
"Groupthink" pretty much is that word. I get that you're concerned with collective action and not just collective thinking, but we don't generally talk about groupthink until the groupthinkers have demonstrated it through action.
“Groupthink” doesn’t capture the gaslighting that the stuff we see going on with our own eyes isn’t really happening. I think that aspect of the current era is what suggests conspiracy to many.
I accept that it’s just part of the current groupthink that denying it is good and effective . But more central examples of “groupthink” are those in which it just never occurs to the group thinkers that anybody would disagree.
Researchers preventing use of their data for polygenic risk screening may be in violation of NIH funding agreements if they were funded by the NIH, which undoubtedly many will be.
NIH now requires that data be generally made available
Their research was publicly funded and the NIH generally requires publicly funded data is publicly available.
I should add a caveat that perhaps the researchers would argue that only have the obligation to provide data in its raw form--im not sure about that--but at the least, if it's published, it should be provided in a form that justifies the publication.
There must also be various safeguards for protecting subject anonymity, dual use tech, etc, and certainly there's risky gain-of-function research which none of us want to be made generally available.
But I don't think researchers are entitled to put arbitrary conditions on the use of their data just so its use can be confined to their own arbitrary philosophical beliefs about embryo selection.
Hmmm, while the NIH genomic data usage policy doesn't necessarily give researchers discretion on use to their data, usages do have to be approved by the NIH. And who knows what the government's philosophical beliefs about embryo selection will be!
"Are you not happy, King Midas?" Hermes asked. "You have all the gold you could ever want!"
"Oh, curse my gold!" sobbed King Midas. "Give me back my little daughter and I shall never long for gold again!"
"Very well, O King," replied Hermes, "I will do so, but first, you must do me a service."
"Anything!"
"There is a terrible monster called the Medusa, in the form of a woman with writhing serpents on her head. All she looks upon are instantly turned to stone. Many heroes have attempted to kill her, and all have failed. But with your golden touch, you can sneak up on her and turn her to gold. I will take you to her now."
King Midas agreed, and Hermes took him to where the Medusa was. As silently and cautiously as he could, the King tiptoed up to the Medusa, reached out his hand and touched her... and the monster turned into a magnificent golden statue. The people were grateful to Midas for freeing them from the monster, but he cared not; all he wanted was his daughter back. Hermes kept his promise; he took away the King's golden touch and gave him back his daughter, and Midas lived happily ever after.
OK, how's this then: King Midas agrees to kill Medusa, knowing that he himself will be turned to stone in the process, on the condition that after he's dead, Hermes will bring his daughter back to life? Then the King's grieving daughter has the Medusa/Midas statue transported to her palace, where it is discovered many centuries later.
Why would anyone care that Medusa is dead? They still can't go to that island because of Stheno and Euryale, and it's not like they're one third of the way to making the island habitable because those two are immortal.
This "links for [month] [year]" series is great mainly because Scott can write about basically whatever the fuck he wants.
However, I think we could get even more quality if we ramp up the freedom even more. If Scott sees a quote he likes, he should be able to let everyone see it. There's a gold mine of quotes in the new "best of Lesswrong" series https://www.lesswrong.com/leastwrong
Obviously there's constraints here. e.g. if he references Unsong too frequently, there's risk that a lot of people will leave due to the cringe self-promotion (even though Unsong is free just like HPMOR).
Somewhere around here I have an SQLite database wherein I scraped all quotes from the old rationality quotes posts LW used to do along with their upvote ratings. I'll have to do something with that one of these days...
35. Things unexpectedly named after people. Church Street in Elmira NY which, even though it has five churches, was named after Mr. Church. Also, Pink Schoolhouse Road south of Canton NY was not named for the color of the schoolhouse, but instead after Mr. Pink, who was the schoolteacher.
Two fictional examples, both sounding ridiculous: the WB show Smallville tried to tell us that Smallville was named after founder Henry Small, as opposed to (in reality) being named as a counterpart to Metropolis. NOT BUYING IT.
Obscure old-person entry: in the 1970/80s show Trapper John MD (sequel to MASH, but for copyright reasons, sequel to the book, not the TV show), the hospital is named Riverside Hospital. Because of where it's located? No: because the founding benefactor was the Riverside family, including the vaguely-Frank-Burns-ish regular character Dr. Charles Riverside.
I do want to know whether "Batman" was derived from the British "batman". I picture some American reading the word and thinking "that sounds so cool" and then learning what it actually means and being incredibly disappointed, and then vowing on the grave of his parents that no one will ever be that disappointed again!
This part from #9 blew my mind: "Almost all countries in Africa have higher death rates from obesity than in Western Europe and the USA"
I suppose it makes sense if we consider that food (including high-caloric-density, processed food) is a lot cheaper than medical care (hello Baumol, my old friend!). So, I can see a scenario in which a poor-ish country is just rich enough for some people to afford a lot of processed food and to get fat, but then those people can't afford/obtain medical care for any associated diseases, and so they die at higher rates than people in rich countries do, even though rich countries obviously have much higher obesity rates.
This is true and I would go even further: only *some* rich countries like the US have much higher obesity rates. In other rich countries (e.g. here in Switzerland) obesity is actually much lower, on top of having better health care.
I 100% believe you that Switzerland has much lower obesity rates than the US does, for many reasons.
I'm less convinced that Switzerland has lower obesity rates than literally every country in Africa, including desperately poor and unstable countries like the DRC. I'm not saying it can't be so, stranger things have happened, but I would like to see some data.
I don't want to see data badly enough to go digging for it (sorry), but I can attest to some related facts by comparing countries I've actually lived in: Chile has both higher obesity and worse healthcare than Switzerland. I expect something similar to be true for many (not all) African countries.
Our World in Data had Switzerland at 21% obese, higher than any country in sub-saharan Africa except South Africa (The African nations on the Mediterranean all had higer obesity).
It's much simpler than that: death rates are just generally high in most African countries, this just happens to pick out one group which we don't associate with Africa. Your death rate for any given age or characteristic will be much higher than the Western baseline, so even with lower obesity rates the overall higher death rates make that easy to achieve.
Are you sure? Our World In Data is showing me 14,961 people died of obesity in Ethiopia in 2019, which was only 2% of their deaths. Both the Wikipedia page and Our World In Data show an obesity rate of 4.5% for Ethiopia in 2016.
On 12 (reactions to Supreme Court affirmative action ruling), I don't deny that some respondents might be misunderstanding the facts of the case, but there are certainly plausible reasons why younger blacks might be genuinely in favor:
1) Racial preferences lead to racial resentment, which is bad for everybody
2) Savvy employers have wised up to affirmative action and so might (rationally?) discount the school admission of a black applicant; banning affirmative action is one step towards getting away from this. This point in particular might be more relevant to younger blacks at the lots-of- job-applications stage of their careers.
3) The affirmative action system which was struck down favored certain categories of black people, mostly the kids of middle or upper class ones from good school districts. Moving to zip code admissions, which colleges are still allowed to do, will give an awful lot of black people a better chance of getting into a decent school.
(Are they? I hope so - it'd better handle the problem affirmative action was implemented to address - but money rules everything in this world and universities may value "not giving out more financial aid" a lot more than they value diversity, and use the SCOTUS decision as cover)
I have my doubts about schools using something like zip codes. Many people seem to think that Ivy schools were using AA as cover for bringing in rich immigrants. They get the benefits of bringing in minorities without actually bringing in underperforming or poor families.
Harvard could easily give preferences for poor students and always could, but managed to imply that they were while instead bringing in a different class of rich students.
> Moving to zip code admissions, which colleges are still allowed to do, will give an awful lot of black people a better chance of getting into a decent school.
Won't people simply buy an "official" residence in the ghetto that they can put on their kids' college applications, then? (Can't wait to see the knock-on effects of that particular distortion on the property market.)
Hmm, would they even need to prove they own or rent a residence, or could they just claim that they do on the application? Seems easy to game regardless of how you do it. Easiest I can think of is to pay $200 for a landlord to vouch for you.
>(Are they? I hope so - it'd better handle the problem affirmative action was implemented to address - but money rules everything in this world and universities may value "not giving out more financial aid" a lot more than they value diversity, and use the SCOTUS decision as cover)
It's not just money though
The poorest black people are the ones least capable of getting through college
"Good school districts" are the places where the smartest black people tend to live
People of any race with an IQ of 85 have no business being at anything beyond a community college
Having most of your black students drop out, or having to engage in even more gratuitous affirmative action in grading/passing students to avoid this, and having ever less capable graduates on average, is a pain in the ass compared to just letting in the smarter ones who cause less headaches in this regard
Approximately 38% of Americans graduate college. IQ is intentionally set up where 100 is the average. This implies that college graduates are, or should be, above 100 IQ (if intelligence alone is the reason people go, though it's often not).
You don't need to go to college at all to have a good life or make a good living. People with 85 IQs can do okay in the modern economy. Most likely they should not even be looking at community college, though. That's a waste of money in a country where even inflated numbers of people going to college doesn't get us to 50%. Nobody should start out life in debt for a degree they either don't get or never use.
Did you click the link? It wasn't just the healine binary question, there were questions exploring reasons.
37% of respondents 18-39 believed that abolishing affirmative action would make it *easier* for black people to attend university (62% 18-39 think the SCOTUS decision was a good thing for comparison)
This is simply being too dumb and/or too ignorant to understand how affirmative action works
It definitely confused me at first. Wikipedia says south-pointing compasses were common at that time, and Fra Mauro had worked a lot on navigaitonal stuff. And there are a lot of early maps (Peutinger Table, T-O maps) with east at the top.
9. It still doesn't follow that quite the similar fertility translation would have happened in China without 1CP, since China would not have otherwise been as exposed to the general West-oriented family planning and fertility control discourse as Taiwan due to the Great Firewall and general greater avoidance of Western memes. Taiwan also had its own top-down family planning policies aiming for 2-child families (https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2020/06/14/2003738180) - of course the means were softer than in PRC, but it's very possible that it took 1CP to achieve in PRC the same as was achieved through softer family planning policies and Western meme exposure to environmentalism etc. in Taiwan.
The One-Child Policy started in 1979, so I'm not sure the Great Firewall is relevant here. It sounds like the Taiwanese version started in the early 70s, but I'm not as sure what kind of Western cultural exposure the general Taiwanese population was getting at the time.
2. Wikipedia's source for the "Angelos" explanation is as follows:
"In May 1900, papal physician Giuseppe Lapponi indicated that he had read in the Vatican archives..."
But it seems nobody has subsequently been able to confirm Lapponi's alleged discovery. (The conspiracy theory is that Vatican archivists are hiding the evidence because they want us to keep believing in the angelic miracle.)
8. I don't understand what point about plagiarism literalbanana is trying to make here. (I'm not on Twitter, so I may be missing thread context.) Anyone care to explain?
11. An interesting irony of the Psalmazanar story is that there were in fact genuine records of Formosan languages in Europe at the time. The Dutch missionary Daniel Gravius had introduced European script to Formosa in the seventeenth century and translated portions of the Bible into the Siraya language. (The peoples of southern Formosa continued to use the European script in their contracts with the Chinese in bilingual documents until the early 19th century, the so-called "Sinkang manuscripts.")
> 8. I don't understand what point about plagiarism literalbanana is trying to make here. (I'm not on Twitter, so I may be missing thread context.) Anyone care to explain?
The point is that the plagiarism is like Al Capone's tax evasion. The real reason lots of plagiarists should be fired is that their research is sloppy or fraudulent, but that's more abstract and harder to prove than just showing some duplicated paragraphs from someone else's work.
Ouch! I'm kind-of sympathetic, but this relies on the people _selecting_ the sloppy and/or fraudulent researchers (privately, without due process) to be accurate and not too biased in who they then get fired for plagiarism. I'd rather see the more serious offenses directly attacked, even if it takes more work. I'm not thrilled to have the academic equivalent of more-or-less dead letter laws nominally in place, to be used when someone with the power to do the equivalent of prosecuting sees fit to unearth them.
I think the point is that there's a close correlation between "lots of copy-paste in the write-up of the research" and "research is sloppy or fraudulent" - both are associated with the underlying "lazy person who doesn't want to do all the work required".
So by catching the first one, you indirectly catch lots of the second.
Many Thanks! I agree that there is a correlation. Note, though, that in this very post there is an example of a _non_plagiarist fraud,
>11: George Psalmanazar (1679 - 1763) was “a Frenchman who claimed to be the first native of Formosa (today Taiwan) to visit Europe”. He explained away his white skin by saying that Taiwanese people lived underground. Psalmanazar invented an incredibly elaborate fake Taiwanese language, mythology, and custom
For point 13, I can just picture someone at A16Z asking ChatGPT "Is AI interpretability still a problem?" and ChatGPT just responding, "Yep! Everything is OK with that, chief!"
10 is about a claim that psi effects (don’t) decline in individuals over time, not that they (didn’t) decline in the research with better methods. Completely different thing.
"In this island of Hibernia, which is most extraordinarily fertile, it is said that there is a water in which, if you immerse wood, after a while that part of the wood which is in the earth becomes iron, whilst that in the water becomes stone, and that above the water remains wood. And if one believes this thing, one can also believe in the lake of Andaman."
Infinite gold hack left as an exercise for the reader.
"If someone finds incredible certain of the previously-unheard things which I have noted above, he should not submit them to the judgement of his own reason but rather list them amongst the secrets of Nature. We know only a small part of the innumerable things that Nature does, and those that we know by constant experience are not really held in consideration - even if they are admirable - whilst those which seem to us to be unusual we do not believe. This occurs because Nature goes beyond the human intellect; and those who do not have an elevated intellect cannot grasp even the things of constant experience, let alone those which are unusual. Thus, those who want to understand must first believe in order to then understand"
My gut reaction is that in the West I'd say semaglutide or something similar is probably the most cost-effective way to save lives lost due to diabetes (and similar obesity-related illnesses). Maybe that's the best route in Africa as well, although I don't know if other health interventions would be more useful/cost-effective. Are there simple lifestyle changes/habits that could be changed? Are there cheaper medications that would be helpful if they were more widely used? I don't know.
I know this is tongue in cheek, but: Only if obesity and diabetes are more tractable than tropical diseases, which is unlikely given that problems which still impact rich people are likely to be difficult to solve
I suspect this depends a lot on what you mean by "need of aid". If you mean, diabetes and heart disease cause more loss of life and health than tropical diseases, that is extremely plausible, with or without high obesity. If you mean, aid will do more to decrease deaths if targeted to diabetes and heart disease, that's less clear, since it's harder to prevent death from diabetes or heart disease.
It might also depend on whether you say "sub-Saharan Africa" - I think the Arab world is high obesity, and something like 10% of the population of Africa is Egyptian Arabs.
Psalmanazar reminds me of Princess Caraboo... actually Mary Baker of Devonshire, who in 1817 somewhat similarly claimed to be a princess from Javasu ... though she didn't go to quite the same degree of trouble in inventing a fictional alphabet.
"Claim: nine people in a family in Scotland have a mutation in the RIMS1 gene, which makes them go blind in their twenties and also apparently adds 20 IQ points."
There are some theories that torsion dystonia is something similar. It's a low penetrance genetic disorder ~exclusive to Ashkenazim that causes (in the unlucky ~30% who develop it) painful and progressive muscle contractures, and also might have a 10 point IQ gain compared to matched controls. The studies on these are really old, and I'm not sure if they've...been redone, or replicated? As someone whose areas of psychology/psychiatry/genetics often lead me down "needing to read a ton of 60s/70s studies" rabbit holes, my default response to stuff claimed from 60s/70s studies (as the torsion dystonia thing is) is "oh God". Not "no, that can't be true" -- "oh God, I hope you're right, but I know how those guys think and I'm not optimistic".
Some other later studies on childhood dystonias suggest lower average IQs, or impairments in particular cognitive skills. TD is not the be-all-end-all of childhood dystonias, so, who knows. (Secondary dystonias, i.e. not a purely dystonic syndrome, are more associated. You'd expect this in general; secondary or syndromic developmental disorders are very unlike their more classical forms. To avoid turning this into a rant about syndromic autism, I'll just gesture at the direction that we're currently diagnosing a whole lot of genetic disorders as autism when they probably aren't.)
First, it's from the dark ages. 2007? most of the resources related to genetic data didn't even exist then so this next bit is going to be a pain. They give no coordinate vs any human reference genome. (This is why i hate papers by protein guys, they think coordinates within a protein are immutable)
It claims the genetic change is Arg844His in the RIMS1 gene... I wish I could explain easily to non genetics people how imprecise that description is. Lets start trying to translate it into a modern reference.
Arg844His, so at the 884th position in the protein produced by the RIMS1 gene it goes from Arg(R) to His(H)
Looking at all the modern isoforms of the gene... none have an Arg(R) amino at position 844
Fortunately they do give an NM number.
NM_014989
At the time of publication the accepted version of the gene was NM_014989.2
But this still isn't right, that version of the protein has T(Thr) at position 844
So they got the basics wrong to start off.
Maybe the suplemental data will include the sanger sequence from around the site... nope
So they had the wrong sequence for the protein, from the paper it's not straightforwardly possible to work out what mutation they're even talking about because their addressing doesn't match the NM code they reference.
their idea of where it was in the protein was wrong and even the association with vision problems was probably wrong.
Honestly you'd be better trusting a hypothesis smeered on the mens room wall.
I can't tell you how great it is to be able to read this whole thing without having a twitter (X) account. Twitter links appear to only go to single tweets now, so you can see the first tweet but not any replies/chains. And tools like nitter seem not to work anymore. (I struggle to express how much I despise the fact that large amounts of important public commentary happens there. How the hell did so many people look at a platform that, originally, had an extremely tight character limit per tweet, and decide that this is the way to communicate long, detailed, nuanced issues???)
Also, speaking of X, why is the entry between 36 and 37 simply numbered as "X"?
This is nitpicky but you got #22 about the FAA slightly wrong. The code words and the biographical questionnaire were two different things.
There were 2 different tests for qualification, an eight hour cognitive test and a biographical questionnaire. The biographical part was multiple choice and eliminated 90% of potential applicants.
The National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE) had people telling their members exactly what to answer on it to get through that screening.
The code words were a different thing about an algorithm that was being used to scan resumes and put ones that had certain buzzwords at the top. Someone formerly at HR gave the list to NBCFAE so their members could game the algorithm.
On #23, I have my doubts that buzzwords are the best indicator considering the power of a social movement like this, since political lexicons can change all the time. “Wokeness” is now a hackneyed term signaling conservative backlash much as “political correctness” became in the 90s and early 2000s. It seems to me that a measure of institutional control like “how many corporations have DEI departments and what kind of powers do they wield” is far more revealing of the state of success of this movement than use of cultural signifier terms in articles. Use of terms in the NYT assuredly isn’t all just noise, either, but I think that it’s more revealing of the cultural face rather than the sociopolitical belly.
Many thanks for the link drop in #40, I think that many here will find much of what I wrote about on Azerbaijan interesting and relevant to some recent discussions in the community here!
The use of buzzwords is a pretty good measure: for example, the New York Times ran 8.8 times as many articles including the word "racism" in 2020 as in 2011. It's unlikely that there was 8.8 times as much racism in 2020 as in 2011, so that suggests a moral panic, a media campaign, or the like.
One methodological issue is that new words come into fashion. Rozado has an excellent list of 2010s fad words, but less so of 2020 fad words. For example, "equity" -- one of the fad words of this decade -- is not included, nor is "racial reckoning." (Equity also raises the issue of what to do with words that have non-woke meanings: the New York Times back in non-woke 2011 ran a huge number of articles mentioning "equity" relating to the stock market or home ownership.)
If anybody can think of how to handle this problem of how to fairly incorporate new buzzwords to measure whether wokeness is declining, Professor Rozado would appreciate hearing your suggestion.
I think the exercise-depression discourse is all messed up. It’s been tainted by drug metaphors from people who already exercise and don’t do drugs. Terms like “runners high” etc make it seem like an immediate payoff, and just in my personal life and on the internet I’ve seen more people lamenting the fact that they recently started exercising and it hasn’t helped at all. Combine that with the people who see studies like this and immediately conclude that anti depressants are a scam.
Excercise is the low hanging fruit of long term goal setting for people. It requires minimal financial or time investment, and there are no special skills required of you to get started. Literally any person can get fit. It’s simple, but it’s fucking *hard*. Setting and working towards a long term goal, especially a difficult one like gaining muscle mass, is always going to boost self esteem. I’m sure learning guitar has similar effects.
This is why even if anti depressants are half as effective as exercise, you can still make a good case for them for the same reason you can make a case for them over learning to paint water color to treat your depression.
Tbf, obviously exercise has positive mental effects in and of itself, but I think they’re greatly exaggerated and the benefit is mostly in the long term.
> “why should we force people to stay dependent on expensive, inconvenient, and side-effect medication when we can just not do this?”
Because we can't. At least not yet. Polygenic selection is a fantastic idea with a pretty nebulous implementation and hitherto unknown long-term risks. Medication is a pretty crappy idea with a proven success ratio and well-understood long-term risks. I think that polygenic selection is definitely very promising, but switching to it wholesale is premature. We're not playing around with software here, but with the human genome, which is going to be a lot harder to restore from backup.
I'll ask this question here since it is somewhat relevant to your comment even though I'm not addressing it to you directly.
Decades ago I was taught in Health Class that sperms racing to impregnate an egg was part of ensuring, or at least improving the odds, that the sperm that got there first was a healthy sperm. Is there something to that or was Coach Daniels wrong?
It's basically correct, but "healthy" in this case doesn't mean anything more than "undamaged." A damaged sperm wouldn't be able to reach an egg and fertilize it, which is good since damaged sperm contain damaged DNA and would result in a fetus with genetic defects.
But that's the extent of the selection effect. In a race between undamaged sperm, there's no mechanism to ensure the one with "better" genes wins out. It's not like the genes associated with faster running speed would affect how fast a sperm swims.
34. Call me a mass disabling event denialist. Unfortunately, the SSA doesn't list Long COVID as a category in its annual report. So we don't know how many SSA disability applications for Long COVID were processed or approved. However, In 2021, SSA field office applications increased somewhat after falling for the previous eight years. It's worth noting that field office applications rose ~170% between 2001 and 2011, peaking in 2011 (Full disclosure, I don't know what caused this peak). But between 2012 and 2020 SSA FO applications fell back to 2004 levels before inclining upward again in 2021. As of the end of 2023, the raw numbers were at 2005 levels...
But here's the kicker — given US population growth, the current per capita rate of SSA FO applications is 17% below the 2000 rate.
A quick eyeball estimate of the data suggests that there were approximately 1.25 million MORE claims from 2021-2023 than if the decline in field office claims had continued at its previous rate. Since the US population has not grown significantly in that period, the per capita application rate *has* increased during that period. Is this a Long COVID signal in the macro data?
If we assume that all the apparent 1.25 million difference was due to applications for Long COVID disability, and if we assume that roughly 230 million Americans were infected w/ COVID as 1Q 23 (Per CDC, 70% of blood bank donors had the N protein marker, indicating that they had been infected), then *at max* only half a percent of the infected are applying for disability.
I presented a subthread on this in my 2024 epidemiological week 2 update on Twitter. Pretty charts and graphs there...
> Many say that on this island there is a lake in which, if you immerse iron, it becomes gold. I say this just to do justice to the testimony of many people.
This sounds like it was written by someone named Trumpius Maximus or something.
I understand (I think) why this blog doesn't allow us to "like" or otherwise "react" to posts but it means I am sometimes at a loss how to respond to posts that (like this one) simply make me laugh.
Re: 34. Are we confident the increase in disability isn't due to fraud / poor audit of claims? Lots of anti-fraud processes in the government got suspended intentionally (anti-eviction rule by the CDC) or unintentionally (pandemic checks fraud). I wouldn't be surprised if people simply started applying for disability under the guise of Long COVID and the government simply hasn't audited their claims properly just yet.
The US SSA data paints a very different from the UK ONS data. I crunched the numbers in a reply to 34 above. There's been a slight uptick in SSA field office initial claims since 2021, but if that's all due to Long COVID, it doesn't look like a mass disabling event to me! However, with US population growth over the past 24 years, per capita, initial claims for SSA disability (as of the final quarter of 2023) are significantly below 2000 rates.
There's bit in the Wealth of Nations of how aristocrats set the stage for a market society by trading their inheritance for "silver shoe buckles," which strikes me as an unforced redistribution of land. There really are no new ideas!
45 -- The scrolls burnt in the Vesuvius eruption seem to be from a home library of someone who might have been an Epicurean (that is, you know, a follower of Epicurus, not a devotee of fancy food) At least the recovered portion seems consistent with that. If they are Epicurean works, that might be pretty significant as much of the Epicurean writing of antiquity was destroyed by religious authorities who made a concerted effort to stamp it out. And also tried to smear Epicurus and his followers as some kind of ultra sensual hedonists when that's not at all what they actually meant by pursuit of pleasure. If the library turns out to be mostly Epicurean it might be a treasure trove for those of us who recognize Epicurean thought as major contribution to western history.
I would be amused if it turned out the documents revealed that Epicureans actually were heavily sensual hedonist, if only to once again observe the cycle of "nuh uh" "ya huh" "nuh uh" again. But generally I'm just really excited following this project, I find it extremely cool.
The idea that ancient philosophical works, and particularly the works of the Epicureans, were deliberately destroyed by religious authorities is a popular myth, but it has little historical evidence to back it up. Tim O'Neill has a great write up on this on his blog, but here's a relevant section:
>"...there is actually no evidence of any such “systematic” or even sporadic but extensive attempt at extinguishing ancient learning. And if this had happened as Grayling claims, we would indeed have plenty of such evidence. After all, it is not like the Christian emperors of the fourth to sixth centuries were shy about letting everyone know of which ideas, people and works they disapproved. Grayling points to Theodosius as the point of origin of this imagined campaign of destruction, and Theodosius’ laws and edicts as collected in the Theodosian Code certainly do contain some references to books and writings he decreed were to be found, gathered and destroyed. But these were the Christian writings of those deemed “heretics”, not pagan philosophers and playwrights...Similarly Theodosius and other emperors of the time condemned divination and astrology and ordered astrological books to be burned (see C Th. 9.16.12). But nowhere in this compendium or in any subsequent collections of imperial edicts do we find any injunctions to burn pagan learning. Nor do we find any references to any such orders anywhere else, even in the writings of enthusiastic anti-pagan Christian polemicists, who celebrated any examples of the humiliation of their former persecutors. Grayling says “they smashed a lot of temples” and this is more or less true (though often wildly overstated), but it does not follow that they also deliberately destroyed pagan learning as well, for the reasons discussed in more detail below."
" Claim: a study finds that completely anonymous comments sections are bad for discourse, real-name comments sections are better, and consistent-pseudonym comments sections (like Substack) are best of all! It doesn’t surprise me that consistent-pseudonym comments are no worse than real-name ones, but I don’t understand why they would be better, and I don’t feel like this link really explains it."
Best guess that isn't just selection effects: You can get a surprising amount of signal from a real name. Also, sites that use real name identification are much, much more likely to include a location and/or small profile pic of the person commenting next to the picture, so you can see if, for example, Mike Smith from Greatlakesdrive Michigan is a sunglass and MAGA hat wearing boomer who takes his profile shot from inside his pick-up truck, and formulate a lot of conclusions about his entire personality and political ideology that isn't implied just by a pseudonym. So you can see how comment sections would sort themselves tribally very, very quickly
Oh... And if everyone knew I was Joe Schmoe from Nowheresville, I also couldn't larp as a public intellectual. That makes sense. Prophets get honored everywhere except their home, but if no one knows where my home is...
Re 36, the most obvious thing to me is selection effect: the only people who are comfortable broadcasting their political opinions under their real name (beyond their social circle) are either people with entirely boring opinions or people who don't mind if everyone who Googles them finds out all their opinions. This rules out the best commenters on many blogs.
(Of course, our host is the last person who needs anyone to mention that hypothesis.)
"But my favorite is Mormonism with - wait for it - Brick’em Young (h/t @seanw_m)"
/groan
"(also, no offense to Islam, but the Kaaba is the most boring possible building to make a LEGO set for, sorry)"
True that, but there's plenty of magnificent Muslim architecture that would make awesome LEGO sets. How about the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, or Alhambra, or the Great Mosque of Djenne? Collect them all!
Alas, it's not a spaceship, but that's OK. A spaceship can crash into it, and then the minifigs can build a new and cooler spaceship from the combined wreckage!
" Sebastian Jensen at CSPI looks into the dysgenic hypothesis: are we getting dumber because more intelligent people are less likely to have children? Answer: this is happening more in poorer countries, less in richer ones. IQ decline per decade “ranges from as low as 0.01 points in the Estonia and Switzerland to 0.65 points in Panama, Romania, and North Macedonia”."
... I browsed the paper to see if the authors discuss the possible importance that some countries are still in the middle of the hierarchical-diffusion-of-low-fertility associated with being in the middle of the demographic transition (such as Turkey), compared to countries where the hierachical diffusion process is mostly finalised (such as Scandinavia). As far as I can see, they do not discuss if this could be important.
If it is important, the observed IQ decline in countries like Turkey (where poorly educated rural mothers still have more children than highly educated urban mothers) might taper off and become negligible if and when Turkey catch up with the roughly-same-low-fertility-across-all-regions-and-socioeconomic- groups characterizing Scandinavian countries. (Assuming here at least a weak correlation between urban/rural & low/high education level, and intelligence.)
If you know of any country among the 193 countries and self-ruled territories in the world where there is not a long-term tendency for fertility to fall, please give me references. (Not a rhetorical question - I would be genuinely interested. I have seen perhaps 2-3 countries where the jury might still be out, but that's it.)
Also, if you know of any country where the internal process do not resemble hierarchical diffusion, i.e. educated urban women from ethnic majorities first reduce their fertility, less educated rural women from ethnic minorities last reduce their fertility, plesase give me references. I know of none.
Granted, once you reach below the magic number of 2.1. children on average per women, fertility at some point stabilises or starts to a limited extent to fluctuate up and down, sometimes reaching 2.1 an odd year or two, but it does not long-term reach 2.1. again. The US is no exception, according to the data I have seen. Last year registered by Our World in Data (2021), total fertility rate (TFR) in the US was 1.66 children per woman on average. It went below 2.1 children per woman in 1972.
For #46, Gaza has a much higher literacy rate and is more urbanized. Gaza has higher human capital. They score better on PISA and other tests than than the average Indian. The Levant and the Ottoman Empire regions have historically always had more average wealth and income (average wages etc.) than India.
32: Is it possible that real-life incidents happen with semi-popular names like "Monica" and fictional incidents happen with oddball names like "Damien"? (At the very least, real-life incidents should happen more often with popular names, whereas there's no reason for this to be true in fiction, and maybe some reason for it to be false.)
If a very popular name is linked with something negative, we expect its popularity to crater, since most people will no longer want to give their kids that name. On the other hand, if a rare name is linked to something negative, but 1% of parents decide that it's cool anyway, the added boost in popularity from that 1% could be enough to make a difference.
Sudden peaks and troughs in a name's popularity are weird, and really do seem to be more about visibility than nature. Real-life incidents happen with very unfamiliar names all the time -- one of the biggest popularity spikes of the last decade was "Daleyza", a name invented by a Hispanophone reality TV star that immediately rocketed from zero to persistent popularity. ("Nevaeh" has a similar pattern, but is something people can independently derive more.) While presidential names haven't had meaningful baby impacts for decades, names of people associated with presidents can ("Melania" was a much more popular name just after Trump's election). The intensity of a spike doesn't seem much associated at all with how high-profile the event itself was, or how central the name was to the event.
It's hard to explain, but there seems to be something strongly vibes-based about name trends that grasps for the metaphor "collective unconsciousness". Names for given cohorts are *very similar* stylistically. A name which is right or wrong for a cohort can have substantial swings from coverage, and these can persist. The Stat Significant article actually understates the effect quite a bit -- it discusses more temporary spikes, but some of these last decades and produce super-popular juggernaut names. ("Madison" as a female name was invented as a joke for a now-forgotten 80s romcom.)
Damien isn't really an oddball name, it's an ordinary alternative (more French) spelling of Damian, which was already on a big upswing in the 1970s. The release of The Omen seems to have made the Damien spelling more popular than Damian for a few years. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=damian+vs+damien
The other thing nobody is talking about in those plots is that after Regan's burst of post-Exorcist popularity it suddenly collapsed in 1980 and came back in the 1990s. I'm guessing that Regan suddenly sounded a lot like Reagan, and even if you were a Reagan supporter you probably wouldn't want everyone thinking you named your daughter after him.
Laura Wattenberg has written about this pattern for years. Whether a name catches on is much more about whether it fits current name styles than whether the name comes from something positive or negative. Real-world events usually feature people whose names are 20-30 years out of date, while fictional events (particularly supernatural or fantasy ones) involve names invented by people who are involved in setting current styles.
One test she noted is that "final girls" from horror movies are less likely to produce baby name bumps than many other types of characters - but this is related to the fact that "final girls" often have names that are cutesy by means of being out-of-date.
The history of land reform in China is pretty interesting. IIRC the Maoists took all the land away from the landlord class and gave it to the peasants, then reversed course and "collectivised" all the land, i.e. took it back from the peasants and established the Communist Party as a new and far more brutal landlord class. There's a bit about it in How Asia Works. Fascinating that the exact same thing apparently happened in Ethiopia.
How you possibly think that? The sentence before this is literally " black people approve of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to ban affirmative action at universities".
Almost no native English speakers with an IQ above 90 would not be able to tell that "against" means "against the supreme court's decision". Why would you not assume that the next sentence would be talking about the exact same thing as the previous sentence when nothing else was talked about in the interim?
Apart from the incredibly condescending way you made your point, you also implicitly dismissed all non-native speakers as irrelevant and not worth the effort to write clear sentences for.
Your post fails on kindness, according to Peasy on truth, and frankly I wouldn't even call it necessary.
24. Yep, people are thinking of Alzheimer's as a prion disease in the sense that it involves misfolded proteins encouraging other copies of the protein to misfold. This doesn't mean the prions are contagious (unless you inject them straight into someone's brain)—we don't think people with Alzheimer's are catching it like mad cow disease, just that Aβ and tau go prion-y over time, as you say.
Lots of neurodegenerative diseases probably act like this: there's a whole family of "tauopathies" that seem to be caused by tau protein acting like a prion. Some people think the important differences between these tauopathies are which neural network the prion starts spreading through first and what exact shape the prion templates. Here is a cool paper (with some good background in the intro) about how you can induce different neurodegenerative pathologies in mice by infecting them with different misfolded shapes of the very same tau protein: Sanders '14, doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2014.04.047. Other neurodegenerative diseases may have similar mechanisms but with different prions, like α-synuclein in Parkinson's.
There's definitely more to discover. If Aβ and tau are ready to go prion-y, why do they sometimes do it at age 40 and sometimes at 70 and sometimes not even at 90? Is it just a question of when an unfortunate spark starts the slow burn, or is it variation in the protein folding homeostasis machinery that keeps things under control better in some people than others? Are the prion aggregates best thought of as the cause of these diseases or as a symptom of an underlying protein folding problem? And once we figure all this out, what can we do to help?
The theory behind the study was that people would answer more honestly in an anonymous Internet-based poll than they would if the Iranian government could tell whom gave what answer.
Researchers who do snowball sampling are well-aware of the possibility of bias. The popular reporting of their paper probably doesn't dive deep into the methods section where they discuss how they attempted to correct for this, but they usually do make some good attempts.
5. Isn't Ethiopia currently in a state of collapse due to the splintering of tribal groups? Feels weird to read about previous growth while ignoring what is going on now.
20. Doesn't it seem more likely that Panama, Romania and North Macedonia are decreasing in IQ due to classic drain brain/emigration than fertility effects?
32. Lolita is not negatively portrayed in the movie.
37. I doubt that the Uzbekistan National Baseball Team is a professional team.
I don't know whether "negatively" vs "positively" is the right question to be asking about Lolita, but it's fair to say that she is not a model of the sort of thing that most parents would want of their own daughter.
Besides, even Lolita wasn't actually named Lolita, she was Dolores. Lolita was a nickname.
Maybe it matters more whether the character is shown in a positive or negative situation than whether the character is judged positively or negatively.
And yes, Lolita is a diminutive form of Lola, which itself is a common infantile corruption* of Delores.
*the kind of situation where a very young child cannot quite pronounce an adult name or title--like "Beto" for Roberto, "Memo" for Guillermo, "Peggy" for Margaret, "Bubba" for brother, etc--and everyone in the family thinks it's cute and the name sticks.
>13: Claim: venture capital firm A16Z testified to the British House of Lords that AI interpretability has been “resolved” and the logic behind AI decisions is now fully transparent. No AI researcher would support this claim (despite some recent promising first steps), suggesting A16Z either doesn’t understand even the very basics of the field it’s investing in, or else that they’re committing perjury.
There's a more charitable reading of this quote, if you include the context of it. Here's a cliff notes version of his argument.
1. If you write a regulation that open-source models cannot comply with, then there will be no open-source models.
2. With many other pieces of software, like Linux, open-source software is more secure than closed-source competitors, because given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
3. Advocates for AI safety guidelines say that point #2 is not important, because AI models are fundamentally inscrutable.
4. But actually, lots of useful AI interpretability work has been done on model internals, such as glitch tokens or polysemanticity, which would've been impossible if researchers had no access to internal model activations and weights. Therefore, the normal arguments for open source software being better apply.
The FFA scandal is one of the most obviously evil, stupid, unfair and DANGEROUS manifestations of DEI ideology, and predictably it will lead to ZERO people on the left updating their views at all.
But what do you expect? Several threads ago, a number of DEI supporting commenters were defending DEI as simply a way of countering pro-white/anti-minority bias in hiring and therefore it leads to more meritocratic outcomes. But every single instance of DEI is the exact opposite of this and nobody cares. They don't because ACTAULLY, the only thing that matters is advancing the ingroup and hurting the outgroup, and if this endangers society then so be it.
And the more "reasonable" on the left will simply wave it aside as some isolated event, while supporting 100% some only slightly less egregious from of DEI.
>> Sotonye Jack, along with his other writing, interviews interesting people in tech, blogging, and academia. This month he interviewed me.
Scott: In that interview you said...
"...if you look at the lucid dreaming community, they've been saying forever that the two easiest ways to realize you're in a dream are mangled hands and mangled text."
Do you have references for your assertion? As a fairly lucid dreamer I've been trying to train myself to read in my dreams, and I've had some success. One of the frustrations of my dreaming life was going into dream bookstores (which happens frequently) and not being able to read the books on the shelves. The breakthrough came a few years back when I was driving through a dream forest when I came to a crossroads. At the intersection was a stop sign, and I read the letters STOP. I was so excited that I read the letters and could see them clearly that I woke up. Since then, I've been trying to carefully direct my focus to the words in dream books, staring at them without letting my attention waver. Right now, I seem to be at a third-grade reading level in my dreams. The words have to be simple for me to concentrate on them. Also, I have to dream that they're written in large block letters. This is what I read the other night in a book that I opened: "The shore has always been a snake [that] slides between two worlds. It has been doing this from the time before life arrived from the seas..." Unfortunately, I lost my attention to the text. I woke up and I wrote down what I read on the notepad that I keep by my nightstand. AFAICT my dreaming self didn't plagiarize this, but I don't feel like I'm the author, either.
As for mangled hands, I can't remember looking at my hands in my dreams. I'll make a point of trying the next time I remember to do this in my dreaming. But my to-do notes to my dreaming self require a lot of repetition (self-hypnosis?) to get across the waking consciousness/dreaming consciousness membrane.
I've always wondered how common the "can't read while dreaming" thing is too, because I often dream where I'm simultaneously reading the dream and experiencing it, and I can very clearly see words and read them.
I guess this could be an artifact of being a lifelong and extremely bibliovoracious reader, but it always seemed weird to me that people would say words were gibberish in their dreams.
Yeah, I can read in dreams too. A lot of the time it will be in complete, relatively grammatically correct sentences as well. I can't lucid dream at all so I've also chalked it up to being a lifelong reader.
I was wondering if this might be more common among certain age cohorts thanks to being on the internet when much of it was text, in the same way there's a cohort that dreams in black and white possibly because of black and white television, but I think the pivot to video was too quick to be able to tease out something like that.
I'm beginning to think it should be "normal people can't read in dreams" because a few nights ago I was reading in a dream with a beautifully laid out, headings in different colour, flipping back and forth looking up references between different paragraphs and comparing them, periodical.
So, ahem, yeah. The perils of being hyper literate/hyper lexia? You can not alone read in dreams, you are self-publishing magazines and books?
I've never looked at my hands in dreams, though. That was an exercise that Don Juan gave to Castaneda, though, to enhance his dreaming skills. I'll need to tackle that dream project next.
I've heard that the reading test in dreams is to read something, look away then read it again. In a dream, the words will always change from what you read the first time. I, at least, have found that to be true.
Also a dream reader here. Without any particular effort on my part to learn to read in dreams, I had one dream where I read a newspaper headline saying "Beef named the London of Cambridgeshire; most depressing news since the Holocaust."
> But there’s some reason to think that many of them didn’t entirely understand the ruling and thought it banned pro-white racism or something; a majority of young black adults think the decision will make it easier for blacks to attend university.
Aren't they correct? My understanding was that the universities reacted to the ruling by changing their admissions system to focus on things correlated with being black, until the numbers went back to how they were before the ruling, thus making actual lower-class black people in mostly-black neighbourhoods able to attend, as opposed to, eg, recent Nigerian immigrants, or wealthy people with one black great-grandparent, etc.
30: For completeness’s sake, worth noting that it’s at least theoretically possible for both parties to be simultaneously correct that they are losing “on the issues to matter to them” if the parties care about different issues. Not entirely crazy as a partial factor: If the parties really care most passionately about policies strongly favored by their own bases but unpopular in the electorate as a whole (e.g., the most extreme social justice issues for Democrats or the Mexico wall for Republicans), each party could correctly think it is losing on those issues that matter most to themselves.
14. Wiki page says, one of the conditions was "People must abandon witchcraft, incest, and adultery". Clearly, this is where it all went wrong.
22. The scary part here is that almost nobody is talking about it, and those who do are talking about it just because of an unusual situation that some people that were discriminated against had an unusually good claim by being part of specific FAA-endorsed schools. In general, when you rely on the services supposedly and previously highly-specialized highly-trained professionals, you have no way of verifying if they actually still the same professionals as before, or they were hired because they checked some diversity boxes and they are fire-proof for the same reasons. Obviously, if somebody is a bad traffic controller, it will eventually show up by the raise of the number of bad incidents etc. - but that would not be any consolation for people who would in the meantime be part of those incidents. I feel like there's a complex system of making the mechanisms of modern technology work safely, and certain movements work very hard at dismantling those for ideological reasons. And in many cases we can't even see it.
34. Can it be just people learning that being on disability is better than working, and learning to game the system - or the system's resistance to being gamed significantly lowering (just as COVID money distributions were plagued by gargantuan amount of fraud and nobody really cared)? After all, if the government mostly gave up, for example, on border protection - why we can't consider they also gave up on disability fraud protection?
46. Gaza has been not doing that badly before October 7. They had a lot of money coming in, there were a lot of permits for work in Israel allowed, and the import restrictions weren't that severe. There's a lot of push to present Gaza as some kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape, because that'd easily explain why Hamas is so popular there without going into the dark depths of human capability for evil that no one wants to look into. It's much easier to say "well, of course since they are uniquely poor and live in uniquely squalid conditions, they support the only movement that promises them to lift them out of these conditions and given them normal middle-class life". The reality is the conditions weren't uniquely poor and squalid, especially compared to other Arab Middle-Eastern countries not having oil spewing out of every hole in the ground, and the support of Hamas is as strong in a middle-class and rich population as it is in the poor one. And a lot of money invested in Gaza failed to improve situation and often went to construct Hamas tunnels and Hamas rockets and Hamas headquarters inside hospitals.
35) Southern Blot (a technique for isolating fragments of DNA) is one of my favorites. Especially because, subsequent to Dr. Southern developing his technique, others developed similar methods for RNA, proteins, and metabolites and appropriately named them Northern, Western, and Eastern blots, respectively.
A few more than I didn't see listed:
Bridgestone (the tire brand) is actually the literal translation of the last name of the man who started it, Shojiro Ishibashi (technically the order is Stonebridge).
The graham cracker is named after its inventor, Sylvester Graham.
Ferris wheel (George Ferris). I had always thought it was somehow derived from the word fair.
I would have assumed they were named that way because they're made with graham flour, but upon looking into it graham flour is (unsurprisingly) also named after Sylvester Graham.
That seems like it goes both ways, then. Most words that aren't extremely basic parts of human existence going back millennia probably came from a name somewhere down the line.
> A substantial minority, perhaps 15 per cent of all Xhosa, refused to obey the prophetess Nongqawuse's orders to kill their cattle and destory their cornl [sic]. This divided Xhosaland into two parties, the amathamba (‘soft’ ones, or believers) and the amagogotya (‘hard’ ones, or unbelievers).
For anyone who wants to make a slogan out of this, you'll probably need the singular of amagogotya: igogotya.
Re: 36: I assume pseudonyms are better for discussion because two categories of people will comment with their real name: those with utterly uncontroversial ideas (and even then, not the most careful of them), and those with very little care of what shit they leave online, which, I assume, correlates with behaviors detrimentals to the quality of discourse
36) I think the pseudonym effect may be confounded. If part of the purpose of switching to FB login was to expand the commenter base, maybe they got exactly that. I may have had a bit too much scotch, but I am struggling to think of times when lowering the barrier to entry has elevated the level of discourse.
15: Strongly reminds me of a plot from the great TV series The Games, a mockumentary about the preparations for the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. Unfortunately, it seems to have been too early to have clips available online, but consider this a strong recommendation to watch it if you're able. It's by the great John Clarke and Bryan Dawe of The Front Fell Off fame (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM)
In more "AI will change the world, use AI to be more productive and creative!" news, another example of people whose eyes were bigger than their appetites. Greedy or just foolish? You decide!
So, in Glasgow, some enterprising bunch decided to put on a Willy Wonka Fantasy Adventure Experience, that had an AI-generated script, and illustrations to match.
The reality was rather less fantastical. The AI can't be blamed for this, but the script and imagery did not translate over into anything achievable on a budget of "We're buying our supplies from Tesco".
I was made aware of this on Tumblr, but it's all over the place now.
When they couldn't even be bothered to correct the misspellings on the AI-generated art (or were unable to, or couldn't afford to), I think this indicates how the 'experience' would end up. You, lucky customer, can go through the Imagnation Lab and the 'Twilight Tunnel in Dim Tight for Encherining Entertainment, and by the sounds of it, the Entertainment was indeed Encherining. (But please not let's dwell on the Sweet Teats, I don't want to contemplate what that/those might be).
It is hugely (and sadly) amusing that people just looked at the imagery and never read the text, but this just reinforces my opinion as to the real AI threat: stupid human tricks. We don't need smart AI that decides to take over the world, we'll hand it to them for a Willy Wonka Extravaganza in Glasgow.
Though someone did a great version of the Oompa-Loompa as the "Bar at the Folies-Bergere":
>but this just reinforces my opinion as to the real AI threat: stupid human tricks. We don't need smart AI that decides to take over the world, we'll hand it to them for a Willy Wonka Extravaganza in Glasgow.
Certainly it is a nearer term problem - similar to what people have been doing with sort-of-crappy software for decades, but probably more of it, since it takes less "skill" to prompt GPT-4 or DALL-E and fail to look at the result than to use most older software.
I think the danger is in the push to get us all to accept the output unquestioningly. Older software, you could look at something and think "yeah that's been Photoshopped" or "this lump of text makes no sense".
But adoption of AI is being heavily shoved at us as "it's got all the knowledge of the Internet! it can do these routine tasks for you to free up time!" and we're supposed to accept that it doesn't need to be checked and whatever it produces is correct.
That's the thing that tripped up the Canadian airline: the lure of "sack even your cheap workers and replace them with free labour" meant that they ended up having to honour, thanks to the courts, a refund policy that their customer service chatbot hallucinated. It's clear nobody was checking "does this thing actually answer queries correctly?" Nope, it's AI, it's the latest thing, the machine is always right.
That was a small error, but imagine something incorporated into the likes of banking system, stock exchange or government department and hallucinating policies and answers. Indeed, we don't have to imagine it; the Fujitsu software scandal in the British Post Office for decades shows us exactly what goes wrong. People were ruined, imprisoned, even driven to suicide because the authority stubbornly would not concede that the software system it imposed could be at fault. "Private Eye" covered it for years and honestly, heads should have rolled at all levels. But even with the final revelation of the truth, the people in high office are untouched and not even seeing a day in jail, when they were liars and incompetents who killed people. And I don't say "killed people" lightly; I mean when your bullying tactics drove people to suicide, you are responsible for their deaths.
"Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office and the statutory authorities of the UK, including the CPS, the PPSNI, and the COPFS, proceeded against hundreds of subpostmasters in criminal prosecutions in magistrates' courts and the Crown Court when the Horizon accounting system showed money was missing from their post offices. Subpostmasters were also pursued through civil actions. In all, between 1999 and 2015, over 900 subpostmasters were prosecuted and 236 went to prison. The Post Office itself prosecuted 700 people. Once the Post Office had secured a criminal conviction, it would attempt to secure a Proceeds of Crime Act order against convicted subpostmasters, allowing it to seize their assets. In addition to those convicted, there were subpostmasters who were prosecuted but not convicted, and many more who, without being prosecuted, had their contracts terminated and lost money as they were forced to pay the Post Office for Horizon shortfalls. In all, over 4,000 subpostmasters had been identified as eligible for compensation by February 2024. The actions of the Post Office caused the loss of jobs, bankruptcy, family breakdown, criminal convictions, prison sentences and at least four suicides.
Alex Hern wrote in the The Guardian in January 2024:
"A 1984 act of parliament ruled that computer evidence was only admissible if it could be shown that the computer was used and operating properly. But that act was repealed in 1999, just months before the first trials of the Horizon system began. When post office operators were accused of having stolen money, the hallucinatory evidence of the Horizon system was deemed sufficient proof. Without any evidence to the contrary, the defendants could not force the system to be tested in court and their loss was all but guaranteed."
Many Thanks! That was appalling. I'd thought that one could rely on the courts to have some measure of sanity. Evidently not - and for 16 years! Computer-assisted kafkaesque false accusations...
It was indeed appalling. The problem was that the Post Office, by some legal quirk, was able to bring prosecutions itself instead of going through the courts, and then the people in charge lied through their teeth. The Fujitsu suppliers lied about the software, and the people who made the decision that they needed to automate things lied about failure.
So the small post-office managers, faced with a national organisation that had plenty of money to drag cases out for years, got bad advice about "plead guilty so you won't end up in jail" and some did, and paid money they never owed. Others tried to fight, but were convicted on the grounds that well, a body like the Post Office would never lie about the facts for years, now would it?
All the past heads and some government ministers should be in jail, but of course they won't be.
30. "which matter to them" is an important qualifier here. The two sides may be talking about very different sets of issues. This observation may be consistent with 100% on both sides correctly calibrating the proportion of past wins//losses. One way one could get this result is when both parties are dominated by party elites that are achieving wins on issues important to them but easily concede issues that are important to rank-an-file partisans. Another way to get results like that is when an issue stops being important to one of the sides once it resolves in their favour. This is how people tend to think about many liberties - these are important while they are denied but may not be perceived as important if everybody is used to them.
> In support of this, Yaw says that "Ethiopia's rapid growth in comparison to many African nations is attributed to a significant increase in agricultural productivity".
You mean when people don't have to worry about their next meal due to abundance, they can get other things done, like making other goods and providing useful services? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.
> This is a response to the people saying polygenic selection is bad, because we should instead make parents have children with diseases, then treat the diseases with medication.
What a stupid argument. Yes, let's encourage society to become increasingly fragile rather than anti-fragile/robust. A major problem with fragile societies is that become inherently more risk averse in many ways, eg. projecting power or sabre rattling against other major military powers to keep each other in check.
> It doesn’t surprise me that consistent-pseudonym comments are no worse than real-name ones, but I don’t understand why they would be better, and I don’t feel like this link really explains it.
Maybe partly plausible deniability. Other people can share your real name, but your pseudonym typically really is quite unique, and is self-selected so it forms part of your online identity that you don't want to have to abandon.
33. Worked in phage for a few years. I suspect that the future is a combination of phage + antibiotic because it happens that bacteria often trade resistance to one at the expense of the other. In the event that a bacterium managed to balance both, I suspect this would come at the price of fitness loss somewhere else that would need to be exploited. Maybe pre/probiotics to allow synergists and commensals to better outcompete super-duperbugs.
Substack won't let me reply to others' comments for some reason, but as others noted, lots Gaza's GDP is probably going to destructive ends (digging tunnels/waging war) rather than making its citizens better off. I did originally guess that international aid might be playing a role, but according to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002219961730096X, aid is not counted as GDP (which makes sense, as usually GDP is limited to what is *produced* in a country):
> Second, we shift the focus to whether and how foreign aid is absorbed by the domestic economy. Aid, as a capital transfer, is not part of measured GDP.
So aid should make it seem like Gaza is actually richer than their GDP statistics show.
I don't actually know what the state of the average Gazans' life was like prior to the most recent war, but it seems like they had a reasonable amount of infrastructure (big apartment buildings, schools, etc) because I've seen a lot of news on such things being destroyed. I wonder if there was a sort of negative halo effect, where non-economic issues like an unstable government and unclear citizenship were assumed to also indicate poor economic productivity.
For pseudonymous comments being higher quality than real-name comments, I would guess the cause is selection bias for commenters in the real-name comment sections. I tend to use a lot of the ‘higher-quality’ (per the study’s criteria) marks such as qualifier words for the same reasons I avoid real-name comment sections: a fairly cautious mindset. The “average” real-name commenter posted far less than the “average” pseudonymous one; I’d guess that’s less of an even reduction and more of the more cautious portion disproportionately avoiding comments.
I asked Perplexity (free version) for more examples of unexpectedly eponymous names. I haven't checked if any of these are hallucinations or copied wholesale from Scott's link or anywhere else.
"Some examples of unexpectedly eponymous names include:
French Hill (neighborhood in Jerusalem) named after British general John French.
Snowflake, AZ named after Erastus Snow and William Jordon Flake.
Lake Mountain, Victoria named after George Lake, the Surveyor-General of the area.
German Chocolate Cake named after Samuel German, an English-American chocolate maker.
Baker's Chocolate named after Dr. William Baker.
Loop subdivision (CG term) named after its inventor Charles Loop.
Caesar salad named after Caesar Cardini, a restaurateur in San Diego and Tijuana.
Sideburns named after American Civil War general Ambrose Burnside.
These examples showcase how various things have been unexpectedly named after individuals, highlighting the diverse origins of eponymous names in different contexts."
> the Gaza Strip has (had?) a higher GDP per capita than India
2 points:
1. This validates my hypothesis for 'GDP floors'. A nation's GDP floor can be directly inferred from the wealth of its neighbors and access to their labor market. Israel is a rich country and Gaza *had* moderate access to their labor market. Kerala (Indian State) has a similarlt elevated floor because of labor export to the gulf. This tells you nothing about the prductivity of the labor market. Another GDP floor is low-skill high margin argriculture.Along similar lines to Kerala, Gaza is entirely dependent on foreign remittances (aid) and the fertility of their soil. This allows them to grow high margin crops. Kerala fortunately, has a more forgiving water situation.
2. Points about aid being unfairly counted are dime a dozen. But, I have another point on aid. The UP-BIhar region of India has about 500 million Indians living in sub-saharan poverty. Not only have global aid organizations ignored this region, its recent turn around has been the center of Modi's popularity. Both states started off in a similar place to Bangladesh, with a low-skilled populace, no jobs and zero infrastructure. Bangladesh correctly relaxed labor laws and opened their nation up for exploitation. UP and Bihar continued down their criminal-socialist path, supported by the national govt's famously federal approach to state level governance. Strongmen like Modi and now UP's Yogi are a necessary evil to making a place governanble and reversing a deeply rooted cultural leaning towards povertarianism.
The playbook turning around an underdeveloped country remains unchanged:
1. Spawn your country with easy access to wealthy labor markets
2. Get a strong man to ensure functioning of basic systems
3. Open your market to any and all business
4. Become a democracy so grid lock disables backsliding.
> liberalized economy + land reform is the secret combination
By George! Maybe we should give his ideas a try.
> (36. Pseudonyms) It sounds like the "real names" phase was confounded by the Huffington Post outsourcing name/account management to Facebook, that is, to comment you needed not just your real name but a facebook account under your real name (and be willing to link your facebook account to your Huffington Post activity, I presume). Maybe that filtered out some people who otherwise could have made sensible contributions? It passes the "common sense" test for me because I and most of my friend group these days, although some of use still use facebook, wouldn't use it to link with accounts anywhere else.
People naming their child Lolita after the movie weren’t even getting it right, as her name is Dolores, so that’s really weird. They’re calling their kid what the pedophile called her, complete with the -ita suffix that is meant to imply young/small. I’ve only read the book, but I’m assuming that’s the same.
Very few people actually read the books or know more than "oh that sounds good to me". There were at least 9 babies named "Khaleesi" in Ireland since the Game of Thrones TV show, and in a former job I encountered one baby named "Daenerys":
Naming a character "Chardonnay" started as a joke reference to the kind of trashy glamour WAG type in a British TV drama "Footballers' Wives" but apparently some people really did start naming their children after that:
I'm going to guess that's more "between episodes 2 and 7 of Game of Thrones" and not "since Game of Thrones". And I hope their parents gave them sensible middle names to fall back on.
Benioff and Weiss have got some 'splainin to do, and the cohort of young women demanding explanations will come of age in about eight years. They might want to invest in a private island hideout before then.
#9 following the link- interesting fact number 7 on Greenland suicides: I’d like to propose an alternative hypothesis to the poor sleep. Perhaps they are depressed in the long winter and then with spring finally have the energy to do something about it. Similar to the early suicide peak when starting ssri’s.
That TracingWoodgrains FAA thing is fucking insane.
Affirmative action in the open is one thing, personally I do not like it, but I can tolerate it.
Subverting a supposedly meritocratic process is something totally different.
First, the an agency which seriously considers this is implying that qualifications don't matter, that it is all hoops of empty credentialism through which the applicants have to jump to land a cushy Homer Simpson job. So if anyone was on the fence if cheating in an FAA exam was morally okay, they can now be assured that it is, air traffic controllers being a bit more or less qualified is not a matter of life or death. If they can cheat to meet their diversity goals, why should you not cheat to meet your professional aspirations?
The second thing is the deafening silence in the media. If the conspiracy was meant to aid Privileged groups -- whites, males, etc -- then the NYT and the Guardian would be howling for the blood of everyone within a 1000 yards, the lobby organizations, the people making the decision, the ones recommending not to prosecute and the head of the agency out of general principle. "The White Supremacist conspiracy to keep Blacks from becoming Air Traffic Controllers".
And they would be right.
But invert the privilege, and everything becomes a-ok. Underhanded dealings to create a Juster World are fine, too bad that they got caught so. Better not report on it, because it would be in conflict with the Message.
And when fucking Trump wins another election, and liberal media whine about the decline in trust in both institutions and traditional media, and why do these stupid MAGA people prefer to read fake news on some Telegram channel instead of Trustworthy sources like the NYT, I will be playing a very sad song on the worlds smallest violin for them.
The ironic thing, as TracingWoodgrains discussed on Blocked and Reported, is that this policy existed for at least some of Trumps term, so the MAGA people failed to 1) notice or 2) stop it. I don’t like the policy, but this makes it hard to feel like I can vote about it in any way whatsoever.
Well, institutional inertia exists. It is not like when a new president is sworn in, all bureaucrats align themselves to them immediately, and report any policies which are now unaligned for revision.
One of the few things I am sure Trump is innocent of is underhanded deals to further racial equality. I have little doubt that the questionnaire policy originated from the woke drive to seek equality in outcomes.
Personally I am in the lucky position to be a foreigner and thus not having to decide which party is the lesser evil. (Even after this, I would say Biden. This is more of a statement on state of the GOP, though.)
I’m a touch more ambivalent about the correct political choice overall in this election, but mostly out of a desire to curse both sides (“a pox on both your houses!”). But, the reason I comment that is that if Trump’s team had even been looking this would have been the easiest, most enjoyable policy to overturn with an executive order. It’s hard for MSNBC to defend this level of crazy, so it would have been a clean, cheap political win, and they still didn’t do anything about it. It speaks to how hard it is for a “hostile” elected executive to control bureaucracy.
"It speaks to how hard it is for a “hostile” elected executive to control bureaucracy."
You really think Donald Trump knew about this, said "there's no way I can win against the bureaucracy and if I try I'll just look foolish", and did nothing?
I'm pretty sure this speaks mostly as to how out of touch Donald Trump was with the realities of actually being President of the United States and getting the job done.
Seconded. I'd say there were two issues: Trump's lack of ability and his lack of interest in actually accomplishing what his supporters wanted. It's hard to tell which one applies in any given instance.
>28: Joe Carlsmith’s commentary on C.S. Lewis’ Abolition Of Man, with an EA and AI alignment bent.
One comment on one of Carlsmith's comments:
>That is, available power to predict and control the natural world will increase radically, to a degree that makes it possible to _steer_ _and_ _stabilize_ the future, and the values that will guide the future, in qualitatively new ways.
[emphasis added]
It is important to recall that one very major qualitative increase in power to steer the future is not in our future but in our _past_. The invention of literacy was a _huge_ increase in the duration that someone's words could span, in contrast to illiterate earlier civilizations. Some words have even literally been carved into stone. And, yeah, it has not been an unalloyed good. The dead hands of the authors of scriptures and ideological scripture-equivalents are still racking up victims every day.
I'm sort of disappointed, reading more of this person's writings which from the Lewis one I thought good, even if I don't fully agree.
He has an essay about facing reality and deep atheism and scout mindset, and in the midst of praising the virtue of fearlessly letting go and accepting whatever Reality may be, even if it's not how you wish it were or would like it to be, he drops in this lump of "our bubble beliefs that all right-thinking people know are True (just like those theists know God is True)" which disheartened me:
"But scout-mindset also risks the knowledge thing. And doing so gives it a kind of dignity. I remember the first time I went to a rationalist winter solstice. It was just after Trump’s election. Lots of stuff felt bleak. And I remember being struck by how clear the speakers were about the following message: “it might not be OK; we don’t know.” You know that hollowness, that sinking feeling, when someone offers comforting words, but without the right sort of evidence? The event had none of that. And I was grateful. Better to stand, in honesty, side by side."
God help us, even the Rationalists? The ones you would hope would try the "face reality without imposing expectations on it, try for the facts and not our emotional biases" were sitting around glooming about "it might be terrible now Orange Man Bad in power"?
That is *not* scout mindset, being all prepared that "of course it's going to be awful". If you DON'T KNOW that it might not be okay, then you also DON'T KNOW that it might be okay. And in this case, the easy, no-brain required response was the gloomy one, the *true* scout mindset of fearlessly going out to discover the facts of reality would have been "it might be okay!"
As I said, I'm disappointed. I like the rest of the writing, but this is (to me) such an obvious blindspot that of course it casts a doubt on the rest of his perceptions of "this is the correct conclusion" (the same way he doubtless would find that my uncritical recounting of a Eucharistic miracle would cast doubt on my perception of what is correct view of Reality).
Many Thanks! I, too, would emphasize the "DON'T KNOW". I'm not thrilled about how the
>“it might not be OK; we don’t know.”
was phrased. I would have preferred a more symmetrical phrasing, more like:
It might be ok. It might not be ok. We don't know.
In the same essay, a little further on, Carlsmith goes on at considerable length about the interaction between priors, and whether one is privileging a hypothesis by expecting mostly good or mostly bad.
In particular, he talks about how, if one only calls very special outcomes "good", then one will expect most outcomes to be "bad", and, if one only calls very special outcomes "bad" then one will expect most outcomes to be "good".
This is really just different language for the old saw about some folks seeing a glass as half full and others seeing the same glass as half empty.
>And note, too, that to the extent that the slavery in question is just the slavery of living in a natural world, and having a causal history, at all, then we are really letting go of the other ethical associations with slavery – for example, the chains, the suffering, the domination, the involuntary labor. After all: pick your favorite Utopia, or your favorite vision of anarchy. Imagine motherless humans born of the churn of Nature's randomness, frolicking happily and government-free on the grass, shouting for joy at the chance to be alive. Still, sorry, do they have non-natural soul/chooser/free-will things that somehow intervene on Nature without being causally explained by Nature in a way that preserves the intuitive structure of agency re: choosing for reasons and not just randomly? No? OK, well, then on this story, they're slaves. But in that case: hmm. Is that the right way to use this otherwise-pretty-important word? Do we, maybe, need a new distinction, to point at, you know, the being-in-chains thing?
I agree with him. Freedom is not an absence of causality, but rather an absence of being threatened with punishment by some master, and the absence of chains or prison bars.
46.- Why is everyone equating "West Bank and Gaza" with Gaza?
The West Bank is more populated than Gaza (around 3 million compared to ~2 million) and per capita GDP of "West Bank and Gaza" probably overestimates Gaza's GDP and underestimates the West Bank's.
Good catch. The article does cite a source (the CIA World Factbook) for Gaza alone having a per capita GDP greater than India - but looking at the numbers, I'm pretty sure that's for PPP-adjusted GDP. Which has its uses, but in this case is akin to saying "The Gazans are doing better than you think; look how cheaply you can hire servants there!"
By nominal GDP, Wikipedia says $2612 for India, $1924 for the West Bank, and $876 for Gaza.
Seeing the Medusa statue reminded me of something that occurred to me a while ago, about how the legend may have arisen.
I hope and believe I've not posted here before on this topic, but I'm unable to check because for some reason substack comment pages can't be saved, in either Firefox or Chrome. Yet another Substack comment gripe. Something stops a save in its tracks. So I am unable to grep previous comments.
In the past, and I think until quite recently in India, certain religions funded the upkeep of their temples largely by prostitution. Young women (and possibly young men , not sure) would live with the religious community, which would benefit from the proceeds of their sexual services.
( Christians can scoff, but in the Middle Ages the Bishop of Winchester owned all the brothels in south London and took a major cut of their profits. So Christianity has also benefitted from the same source of funding! )
So what kind of women were chosen for this service? I'm not an expert, but I would guess it was mostly women who for whatever reason were considered unmarriagable. Perhaps they were orphans, with no father to provide a wedding dowry. But among others, it must also have included "wild childs" who would have been thought too much of a handful for any husband. Maybe they had been too free and easy with their favors, and would very likely be unfaithful. Or perhaps they were simply half mad and obviously quite dangerous. It does happen.
From statues and friezes of temple prostitutes in those days, it appears they usually had elaborate hairdos, what we might call beehives. As it would take considerable time and effort to prepare a hairdo like that, the chances are they would leave it intact for as long as possible between hairdressing appointments!
But as some women with beehive hairstyles fashionable in the 1960s found out the hard way, there are certain species of moth which like to lay eggs in tightly structured and undisturbed hair. After all, it is little different to wool. And once that happened then obviously before long small caterpillars would literally pop up and become visible.
In summary then, I propose that the original Medusa must have been some real-life temple prostitute, with a somewhat menacing glare, scary enough, her clients would joke, to figuratively turn people to stone, and in whose beehive hair could be seen moth caterpillars, later exaggerated to snakes.
Note that the Medusa of legend lived in an abandoned temple, at least if that film Jason and the Argonauts is to be believed. So that in itself is a temple connection.
Substack sign-in woes continue with a new twist. Now, it will allow "sign in with password" if you "complete the captcha".
The twist? There is no captcha.
Back to email signing-in, and I'd almost suspect this was a deliberate ploy to force us to remain signed-in, except I don't think Substack is that efficient (I say nothing as to whether or not they're that devious). I prefer to sign out of *everything* once I'm done, so I'll keep on signing out until this gets fixed.
Chortle! That's a new one. I have to go through a couple of "Complete your profile setup" each time I post, The twist being that there is nothing else in the profile that needs setting up, as far as I can see.
For me, the most vexing fault is that on a PC the blog page plus comments cannot be saved, in either Firefox or Chrome. Sometime I must run the page in a Javascript debugger and try to identify the impediment (which is probably deliberate, for some unfathomable reason! )
No, I was underthinking the problem, at least based on the more complex answers. I was thinking of heading due east, and visualized this as looking at a flat map. I first thought 'Seattle's what, about 47N? So what do you hit first after crossing the Atlantic - southern England? Likely too far north. So probably France.
And then, duh, I saw that it would actually be southern Ontario, which surprisingly extends slightly S of the northern border of California (42N).
Therefore, I meant that running into a part of Canada when travelling due E from the California-Oregon border is more impressive than when starting out from Seattle (in my flat Earth way of thinking).
I'm not sure I follow the fertility rate for China and Taiwan comparison, the two countries have very different GDP's and Westernization trajectories. Fertility rates also fell at a similar pace in South Korea, and I don't think the comparison shows any impact or lack thereof for the one-child policy.
I'm surprised at how absolutely no one has commented on 18 - Piketty and his diatribe on inequality have been at the forefront of the left crusade on capitalism and classical liberal style economics. And no one here finds the fact that Piketty et al were substantially incorrect worth comment?
I think it's obvious for anyone with a CS background to listen to Andreessen talk for 10mins and realize it's blatantly obvious he has no clue what he's investing in.
36: Aside from the obvious points other people got to first, there's the matter of Trolls.
Trolls bring down the level of discourse wherever they go, but it takes time and work to become an effective troll. If you come in guns-a-blazing, you're banned immediately, but if you insinuate yourself into the community first, it'll be harder to ban you and you can spend more time trolling (and riling up others) before you lose your platform. Having a real name reputation can help you bypass that work. If you troll in a culture war, people on your side see you fighting their enemy and become your unwitting ally. You can ride that reputation into their forum and bypass the work required to establish yourself as a member of the community.
Meanwhile, when fighting with trolls, a pseudonymous person can engage the devil's advocate with productive-but-controversial takes to somewhat mitigate the damage, whereas a person who has their real-name reputation at stake will stick with the tame and unproductive barbs like "shut up" or "go away" or "modmin pls ban", which do nothing to contribute to the discourse.
Culture war aside, Trolls may be less restrained in pseudonymous than real-name fora, but in both cases, they can be banned, returning the level of discourse to baseline, which for reasons mentioned elsewhere, favors pseudonyms.
43: Re: exercise vs depression—I'm resistant to clicking those links because as one of those people for whom (trying to) exercise has never helped my depression (the one time it came close resulted in me finding out I'm bipolar), I find myself angrily biased against anyone who tries to tell me to do so. Can anyone tell me whether they adequately accounted for selection bias? i.e., people dropping out of the study (or not signing up) because they weren't able to stick to the required exercise regimen long enough for effects to be measured?
Re "on a land that was once theirs": This is historically inaccurate. The Palestinians never at any point in history held sovereignty over any part of Israel.
The claim is "land that was once theirs". It is true at least in the case of some individual Palestinians that they once personally owned land in the place that is now the state of Israel. It is also true for more Palestinians if you extend it to families who once had family land there.
Another data point in favour of land reform, I guess!
In all seriousness, if anyone did get their land eminent-domained without standard market rate compensation then it would seem proper for them to be paid compensation now. Has Israel ever done this?
The issue isn't land that was eminent-domained; there was some of that but not much in the grand scheme of things. The issue is land that was marked as abandoned in 1948 when the new Israeli government noticed that, yep, this plot of land is definitely inside the cease-fire land and nope, we can't find anyone inside the cease-fire land that owns it.
In some cases, this decision was made improperly - there was an Arab family that owned the land in now-Israel, still living in Now-Israel, but illegible to the Israeli government because they'd e.g. taken shelter with their cousins three villages over and hadn't told any one. I don't think those people ever got compensation, but I'm not sure on that and I think they did all get Israeli citizenship (and so are doing better than most non-Israeli Palestinians).
In most cases, the Palestinians who used to own the land were hanging out in Egypt or Jordan or whatnot, and since 1948 resulted in a cease-fire line rather than a peace treaty there wasn't any way for them to get back home to press their claim.
Meanwhile, there were a whole lot of homeless Jewish refugees trying to settle in Israel, and here's a bunch of land that has been determined (perhaps hastily and carelessly) to be abandoned, so, yeah, "land reform".
Plus we have a very divided government right now, with decisions being made that offend both sides. The Supreme Court has moved very activist right-wing, overturning the abortion decision, blocking efforts to apply the clean air act to global warming, etc. And this is likely to continue to bother most Dems. On the other hand, the Biden Administration continues very activist on student debt as well as social welfare moves like regulating Insulin prices, even if they can't get legislation through the house. The House of Representatives has talked very partisan and blocked several moderate/liberal intiatives, such as the immigration bill that almost passed in the Senate. And, the house leadership seems back to using brinksmanship with shutting down the government to force their position the other side, but if they follow through, it makes pretty much everyone unhappy except extreme libertarians who don't like government at all, at least, if they're not dependent on government funding (like research grants or whatever) to support their work.
One top of that with regard to immigration, a very hot issue that's needed attention for decades, a partisan deadlock has prevented any sensible action. OK, obviously this would require a bunch of compromises which neither side seems very willing to embrace. It's so bad that Republican senators who hammered out a compromise plan in the Senate wound up voting against the bill they had helped draft and signed off on, because right-wing opposition made it too politically costly for them. As a result, both sides lose because both are unwilling to do anything except what their ideology dictates.
In other words, compromise is out of season. So, we have met the enemy and it is us. Perhaps both sides think they're losing, because both sides are losing!
When one thinks about land reform in Africa, they probably would still think of Zimbambwe, and at least looking at the graphs, Zimbabwean economy seems to actually have indeed been mostly growing even quite fast in some years, since 2008, this being the year when Mugabe had to include opposition in government and hyperinflation was stopped through dollarization (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=ZW).
There's an alternate timeline in which Joshua Nkomo didn't get ousted by Mugabe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Nkomo
Curious how that one would have turned out
Why would this be a "darker" example? Why is land reform worse when carried out by one group rather than another?
I would guess mass murder/genocide has something to do with it
As opposed to nuclear war?
Because it has to be *reform*. You don't improve things by one group at the top of the food chain grabbing land off the owners (be they white colonials or not) and continuing to grind the tenant farmers/labourers into the dust, mismanagement, wasting money produced on high living instead of continuing to improve the land, etc.
Replacing absentee landlord Sir John Smythe with native guy from another tribe Jonno Smi-The who in turn carries on being an absentee landlord rackrenting the tenantry to maintain a city-dwelling lifestyle of high living is not reform.
I like thinking about land reform, as maybe the one thing communism gets right. But as you say there are other channels to that outcome, but they tend to be violent one way or another.
The Japanese abolition of feudalism (which was a very large redistribution of land away from feudal elites and towards the peasantry) was not particularly violent; it followed on a short civil war (the Boshin War), but the civil war was over the question of which elite clique would hold power, not a war by the commons against the nobility, and by and large the nobility who had backed the victors in the war continued to hold power afterwards, just as government officials instead of feudal lords.
Good example. My understanding was that the peasantry always owned it in some practical sense, but that the feudal lords applied confiscatory taxes. The abolition of feudalism meant the central government was now taxing it directly in a more standardized, probably lower way.
Thank you!
My impression - though I'm not an expert in this field, much though I'd like to be - is that the peasantry were assigned it, in practice decided what to do with it in the fashion of serfs everywhere, but that they didn't own it; there existed the legal fiction that all the land was owned by the Emperor who assigned it to his officials who assigned it to peasant families, and in practice the daimyos had control over the land themselves, and that any transfers of land had to be - unofficial? Under the table? That there wasn't good infrastructure for sorting it out?
Also lower taxes, yes.
Upon reflection, the land reforms may have been more directly tied to the Boshin War than on first appearance. The land reforms had the effect that the elites drastically reduced their own number in assigning a greater slice of the economy to the peasantry. The elites in power may not have been able to do that if they had not just won a war establishing their dominance over the rest.
I'll agree that the civil war meant that the victorious revolutionaries had the power to make swift, effective reforms without going through the centuries of red tape the Shogunate had accumulated; on the other hand, the Shogunate was also desperately trying, with some difficulty, to cut down on red tape so it could make swift, effective reforms, because the leaders of both sides were (very sensibly) panicking about imperialism and desperately trying to modernize before a western country conquered them.
On the other hand, I disagree that this meant that they could carry out swift, effective reform without provoking a civil war. They did provoke a civil war, the Satsuma Rebellion, caused by disgruntled revolutionaries who disapproved of the westernizing tack favored by the elites; according to Romulus Hillsborough, the historian writing about this period who has most recently written most books for sale at a reasonable price, the Meiji government responded by hiring their former enemies to put down their former allies. So I don't think their dominance really was securely established, even if it was more secure than the prewar Shogunate had been.
(And I do also want to note that the Boshin War was comparatively short and bloodless; it lasted a year and a half and Wikipedia suggests around 14000 casualties in a Googled population of 36.3 million, which is not a tremendously bloody war, especially not when you compare it to communism.)
I don't disagree with that. I am thinking in terms of how much can we characterize this as a successful example of land reforms without lots of accompanying violence. As you point out there was a civil war (comparatively less deadly than most) but state that was an intra-elite competition, not the peasantry vs the elite. I am saying that the land reform was part of the intra-elite competition too. The victors took a huge amount of economic power away from not just the losers but all other members of the nobility and sort of split it between themselves and the peasantry. So war + land reforms as one package therefore not land reforms ex-violence.
Still it is as you say notable how small the war had to be. It is quite interesting that the land reforms effectively stripped a large military class of their livelihood and role in society and the backlash wasnt larger. The substantial asymmetry enabled by new technology may have played a large role there.
Ireland is another example, the land reform was compensated. In an effort to prevent rebellions, the British government bought land from landlords in Ireland and then sold it on generous terms to the resident-tenants.
Those tenants were now making loan repayments of about the same as their previous rent, but they had full control over their land, and productivity rose rapidly.
At independence, Ireland assumed those debts from the British and then mostly wrote them off, resulting in a lot of fairly small landowners.
Another example is the French Revolution, which seized aristocrats' land.
"At independence, Ireland assumed those debts from the British and then mostly wrote them off, resulting in a lot of fairly small landowners."
It didn't go completely smoothly; there was the Economic War where we tried to repudiate repayment of the loans (on the grounds that 'why should we pay you for our own property?') and Britain retaliated with "okay we're not taking your exports" which hurt the Irish economy because we relied heavily on Britain as our main trading partner (part of the reason Ireland was glad to join the EU back in the 70s as a new market) and were an agricultural rather than an industrial economy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Irish_trade_war
"The Anglo-Irish Trade War (also called the Economic War) was a retaliatory trade war between the Irish Free State and the United Kingdom from 1932 to 1938. The Irish government refused to continue reimbursing Britain with land annuities from financial loans granted to Irish tenant farmers to enable them to purchase lands under the Irish Land Acts in the late nineteenth century, a provision which had been part of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. This resulted in the imposition of unilateral trade restrictions by both countries, causing severe damage to the Irish economy.
The "war" had two main aspects:
- Disputes surrounding the changing constitutional status of the Irish Free State vis-à-vis Britain;
- Changes in Irish economic and fiscal policy following the Great Depression.
...The resolution of the crisis came after a series of talks in London between the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and de Valera, who was accompanied by Lemass and James Ryan. An agreement to reach an acceptable settlement was drawn up in 1938, enacted in Britain as the Eire (Confirmation of Agreements) Act. ...The treaty also settled the potential £3 million-per-annum land annuities liability by a one-off payment to Britain of £10 million, and a waiver by both sides of all similar claims and counter-claims.
...It also included the return to Ireland of the Treaty Ports which had been retained by Britain under a provision of the 1921 Treaty. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939 the return of the ports allowed Ireland to remain neutral."
Or, as Bullseye notes below, "enclosure" in early modern England.
It mostly doesn't matter who does the land reform or why, except that if the people doing it are Communists you don't get the benefits until you switch to a better system. And it mostly doesn't matter who gets the land.
What matters is, under the old system it was "All the land south of the millhouse to the three funny rocks, and three furlongs in from the river, belongs to Alice. Her family has been farming that land for generations, everybody knows that, and if we see anyone other than Alice trying to farm that land we all know to throw stones at them". But now Alice is out and Bob is in, and it doesn't matter why. Under the new system, it's "Survey Plot QC317 belongs to Bob; says so right here on the paperwork. Anyone gives Bob any guff about that, the new regime will send men with guns to take care of them. If Bob ever decides to transfer the land, we'll update the paperwork at the district capital".
If it turns out Bob isn't cut out to be a farmer but would do well in some other business, or if he is cut out to be one of the new-style mechanized farmers, he can mortgage the farm and use the loan to capitalize is business. If Alice had tried to do that, the banker would just have said "...and your collateral is a bunch of land you can't prove you own, but if I ever go there everyone will throw stones at me? Denied!".
Economic potential unlocked, even if Alice was the rightful and virtuous owner of the land and Bob is a nogoodnik in league with a corrupt regime. Maybe you'll have to wait on Bob's son, who by regression to the mean probably won't be so much of a nogoodnik.
"settler-colonies are typically richer than the countries the settlers came from as land could be easily taken from natives"
True, but also access to new resources and untapped sources (like virgin forests, etc.) Back home everything has been claimed and used except the marginal lands. Out there there's acres of logging, farmland, mineral resources, spices, new goods, and cheap labour. You can claim acres of land, settle and farm it, and *if* you're moderately lucky and work hard and succeed, now you are as rich and high-status in your new society as your superiors back home in your old society (farming doesn't always work, there are crop diseases, animal diseases, natural disasters, etc. but if you avoid or overcome these, you can end up on top of the heap).
Plus you probably have somewhat advanced tech compared to the natives, so you are better placed to exploit the resources (an iron mine may not be much use to them but you know how to extract the ore, refine it, and smelt it into goods).
New Zealand had land reform in the late 19th century and has been continuously democratic. This is despite always having a very low population to farmable land ratio. It is a largely unknown event today, or at least I was surprised to learn of it.
https://teara.govt.nz/en/government-and-agriculture/page-3
Nitpick on 2: the usage of the name palestina (originally as Syria palestina) dates to the second century at the earliest.
This is unlikely, if you believe the identification of the "peleset" mentioned as one of the Sea Peoples in Egyptian records with the Palestinians.
(And it's not crazy at all - the Sea Peoples invaded precisely that region and the correspondence of sounds is excellent.)
The phrase probably has older linguistic roots, but it wasn't a standard name for the Roman province at the time (it seems to have changed only after the bar kokhba rebellion lead the Romans to fold up the province of Judea into Syria).
There were Greeks using the terms, but the Romans did not adopt it until after the Bar Kochba revolt as part of the ensuing genocide.
That is not a strong argument that the usage dates to the second century at the earliest.
Usage of the phrase *for that region*. The previous philistine people (if they existed) were coastal (around Gaza/ashkelon), not in Bethlehem.
Enough other people seem to have been minded to make your remark that there is a wikipedia page devoted entirely to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_name_Palestine
> c. 450 BCE: Herodotus, The Histories, First historical reference clearly denoting a wider region than biblical Philistia, referring to a "district of Syria, called Palaistinê"
> c. 340 BCE: Aristotle, Meteorology, "Again if, as is fabled, there is a lake in Palestine, such that if you bind a man or beast and throw it in it floats and does not sink, this would bear out what we have said. They say that this lake is so bitter and salt that no fish live in it and that if you soak clothes in it and shake them it cleans them." This is understood by scholars to be a reference to the Dead Sea.
So "Palestine" already included Bethlehem in the 4th century BC, and probably before then.
This seems consistent with people from a thousand miles away mixing up the geography a little bit (the dead sea isn't that far from the coast, and Aristotle wasn't exactly a local).
The Philistines certainly did use the term Philistia to describe their lands near what is now Gaza hundreds of years earlier. At the time of Jesus, the Romans were using the term Judaea. They changed this in the second century CE as part of their revenge after the Bar Kochba revolt.
I wouldn't call it a nitpick. It's like calling Great Zimbabwe a Rhodesian historical site.
That's an interesting example. What else would you call it? No contemporary name for that region is known, and since no history exists, none will ever be known. We don't know who built it, what they called themselves, what they were called by other local groups, or what the local political structure was like.
This is not quite the right point (which is a problem for a nitpick). Some cognate of Palestine was widely used by Greek and Roman writers from at least the 5th century BCE. The difficulty is that there is some uncertainty as to what they meant by that and at least some authors seem to have meant an area not including Jesus' putative childhood home.
Certainly there wasn't a polity called Palestine/Palestina/Παλαιστίνη in the 1st century CE, so a reference to a "1st century Palestinian dwelling" is unclear.
We have Feldman (Some Observations on the Name of Palestine, 1990): "Writers on geography in the first century [CE] clearly differentiate Judaea from Palestine. ... Jewish writers, notably Philo and Josephus, with few exceptions refer to the land as Judaea, reserving the name Palestine for the coastal area occupied [formerly] by the Philistines." (Copied from Wikipedia.)
3. Comments on the twitter thread point out that the question is poorly posed. On the Earth's surface, "due East" and "straight line" are mutually [in]compatible. The question is misleading.
I was wondering about that. There's nothing wrong with the concept of a straight line going due east. But people who pose problems like this tend to tell you, after you've answered their question, that you should have realized that the only possible definition of a straight line on a globe is as an arc of a great circle (that is, a circle centered on the center of the globe).
This is of course untrue, but that doesn't stop anyone. I visited the link to see if that was going on here, but it appears to be a Twitter thread, and Scott only provided a link to the first tweet.
That is indeed what's going on. You can read an unrolled version of the thread here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1744059290120245347.html
> There's nothing wrong with the concept of a straight line going due east.
Yes, there is (except at the equator, obviously). That's the point! If you want to perverse, you could say there's a "curved line" going due east, but that it's not straight isn't merely a semantic argument: you can literally measure it. For instance, you could paint a strip and measure the circumferences on each side, and they'd be different. Or you could imagine laser relays or something.
Be that as it may, it's a trick question. Using a compass needle as a reference, it's a straight line from Seattle to the Atlantic coast of France. However, I'll grant you that using compass data may be a cultural bias. After all, Muslim scholars have used spherical geometry to calculate qiblas since the 10th Century CE.
Not everything that isn't obvious and intuitive to you is a trick question: this is just a straightforward question about non-Euclidean geometry.
If you're simply deciding whatever looks like a line on your projection is straight, you can choose much weirder ones than Mercator.
If you're decreeing that moving in the direction your compass points is a straight line despite you clearly continuously turning, you could decide instead to follow the minute hand on your pocket watch.
I respectfully disagree. The mention of due east implies one is following a compass direction. What if it had been worded this way it wouldn't have been a trick question — "If a plane takes off from SeaTac airport initially heading in a due-easterly direction, what is the nearest land mass it would encounter on a great circle?" But then the questioner wouldn't have gotten the opportunity to laugh at the people for getting hung up on the due-east clue.
> Imagine you begin a journey in Seattle WA, facing exactly due east. Then start traveling forward
The question didn't say "travel due east" though. That WOULD have been a mistake. It was carefully phrased to say "face due east and travel forward."
A straight line on a map projection does not usually translate to a geodesic on the surface of the Earth; if you try and walk the line you describe it will feel like you're constantly turning slightly left.
Hmmm. If a pilot flies due east and maintains a due east course, the pilot doesn't have to constantly adjust the direction slightly left to maintain that course. While on a great circle course, the pilots have to make course corrections to keep it on the great circle...
Per ChatGPT...
You:
When pilots fly a great circle course, does the plane have to adjust its direction to maintain that great circle course?
ChatGPT
Yes, when pilots fly a great circle course, they must adjust their direction periodically to maintain the correct path. A great circle is the shortest route between two points on a sphere, such as the Earth, and it represents the shortest distance between two points.
Since the Earth is a sphere, while flying along a great circle, the plane's heading will need to change gradually as it follows the curvature of the Earth to stay on the great circle path. Pilots use navigational instruments and calculations to make these adjustments and stay on course.
What is meant by "direction" here? I strongly suspect it is being used to mean "bearing", in which case you absolutely do have to change it to fly in a great circle.
But if you start a perfectly symmetrical plane flying forwards, it will describe a great circle, whereas if you want to maintain a constant bearing, you're going to need to tilt the flaps (unless it's a great circle or equator).
To see this, just imagine a symmetrical plane flying on a spherical planet with no compass or other instruments, and no knowledge of NSEW. Obviously, this situation is rotationally symmetrical - there's no information to break the symmetry - so it has to describe a great circle because that's the only symmetrical trajectory. And, equally obviously, describing a system of compass points can't change how the plane flies.
(In principle there could be an effect from the rotation of the Earth, but in practice that's far too weak to be relevant).
The question is very carefully, and correctly posed. It doesn't say "a straight line due East", it says "you are facing due East" and then "you move in a straight line". No connection is made between cardinal directions and straight lines; if there's confusion, it's inserted by the reader based on their own assumptions (and of course, that's why it's a puzzle!).
To be correctly posed, it would need to include a definition of "straight line".
A common definition would be "the line of minimal length between two given points", but that can't be applied at all if all you have is one point and a direction.
The most common definition would be "a path in 3-space of the form s(t) = s₀ + t·v, where s₀ and v are 3-dimensional vectors", but in that case our hypothetical puzzle inhabitant would lift off the ground.
I fear you're letting your evolved conceptual understanding trip you up. If a Neanderthal tried to walk straight ahead, they would just....do it. They wouldn't be confused. It's not ambiguous. It might be hard to reconcile with various definitions in words that you learned in high school. But the actual action itself is not ambiguous or ill-defined.
So? If a Neanderthal tried to walk east into the sea, they would give up and go back. But if they didn't, they'd drown without reaching land. This is not a mode of analysis that can answer the question posed.
If a Neanderthal tried to sail east across the sea, they wouldn't be able to do so. It is not at all obvious how to do that.
(And in fact, humans who are told to walk in a straight line also aren't able to do it, unless they can see the sun. I imagine mountains would also work. That trick won't work at sea, nor will it work for a journey that takes long enough for the sun to move across the sky.)
> humans who are told to walk in a straight line also aren't able to do it, unless they can see the sun. I imagine mountains would also work.
The Sun wouldn't work for a journey of more than an hour or so, because it moves in the sky. The technique I've been taught for mountain navigation is to sight along a bearing and pick out a landmark, then walk towards that landmark. When you reach the landmark, pick a new one. In a whiteout, send one member of the party ahead until they're on the edge of visibility, shout "left a bit/right a bit!" until they're on the bearing, then walk towards them (I have used this technique in anger: it works). Of course, this assumes you have a compass, and will result in you walking along a line of constant bearing rather than a geodesic.
I agree with Emma here - the two parts are both very clear: "face due east" and "walk in a straight line", both normal and well-defined human activities that anyone can do. (If I get pulled over under suspicion of drunk driving and the cop tells me to walk in a straight line, I'm not going to ask them whether they mean a path that draws a straight line on a map or if they want a great circle path!)
The point of the puzzle is that people think "walk in a straight line" (i.e. continue in the direction you are facing, without turning to the left or to the right") will draw a straight line on a map, but that's not the case.
Right, this whole thing hinges on the difference between a loxodrome (path of constant bearing) and a geodesic (path of shortest distance). But actually, the answers to both versions of the puzzle were still surprising to me!
One point and an *initial* direction defines a path that forms a unique great circle on a sphere. Specifying walking ensures that we are only talking about paths along the surface. Straight line, regardless of definition, implies we are not actively turning.
You can always nitpick every word. 99.9% of people understand that when a puzzle asks about walking in a straight line from Seattle to the Atlantic ocean and past, it doesn't mean lifting into space. It means just walking straight without veering left or right.
It would probably have been better to phrase it as proceeding directly forward, and not mention lines.
To get an intuition of the resulting great circle path, one can then take the equator and rotate it about an axis through the Earth's centre so that the point on it due south of the starting point is northernmost and moves up its line of longitude until it reaches that starting point.
That way the path clearly starts eastward as required, and is the only such path, and its subsequent southward aspect also becomes obvious.
It's not really much of a puzzle, because I think most people (with some knowledge of spherical geometry) see at once that the author is planning to "surprise" us by announcing that a straight line on the surface of a sphere is a geodesic. But it just isn't so.
A geodesic is neither a straight line in 3-dimensions nor is it (in general) a straight line on the usual 2D projections. Geodesics are straight lines in a gnomonic projection, but that can only cover a portion of the sphere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomonic_projection
It is not possible simply to walk in a straight line for any significant distance. One has to have to some way to maintain a "constant" course, which requires that one take some view as to what "straight" means.
Realistically, your Neanderthal starting due East and intending to walk in a straight line is going to keep their bearing aligned with the rising sun and will therefore walk on a loxodrome. In practice, navigating along a geodesic requires considerable skill (since you need constantly to adjust your bearing) and it doesn't help to say "just go straight"!
What if the puzzle were about firing a gun rather than walking?
Well, if it has the normal amount of momentum, it will hit the ground somewhere in Seattle. If it has functionally infinite momentum, it will shoot off into space tangent to the surface of the earth.
Somewhere in between those, though, it will go into orbit around the Earth. And in fact, the solution presented for the original problem is exactly what orbit ground traces for LEO sats look like - that curved line.
A version of this puzzle than wasn't channeling xkcd://169 could have stated something like, "imagine a satellite is passing directly over Seattle; at that time its velocity vector is aligned due east" and proceed from there.
>Somewhere in between those, though, it will go into orbit around the Earth. And in fact, the solution for this is exactly what orbit traces for LEO sats look like - that curved line.
<mild snark>
Except the LEO sats' orbits trace circles (more generally ellipses if apogee and perigee aren't at the same altitude) with a constant orientation in space - _not_ rotating with the Earth... At lower velocities, the ground path of the trajectory of a bullet fired from a gun doesn't quite follow a great circle on the ground (except on the equator, fired due east or west). Coriolis effect distorts it (in the rotating frame of the Earth's surface).
</mild snark>
> Somewhere in between those, though, it will go into orbit around the Earth.
Nope. Either it escapes Earth's gravity or it falls back to Earth. Neglecting the atmosphere, the projectile is in free fall after launch, so if it not going to escape it is travelling on an elliptic trajectory. Crucially, that ellipse intersects (or at least touches) the Earth at the Earth surface at the point of launch. The term for such a trajectory is sub-orbital.
As Kerbal players know, reaching orbit should be done with two burns: one to orbital height, and another to increase your velocity at that point so that your apogee is safely outside the atmosphere.
I think the puzzle was as clear as it could be without giving the solution away. My co-commentator has already pointed out that the orbital version of this puzzle is much less straight-forward unless you also tell people to disregard the rotation of the Earth. (For an extreme case, consider a polar orbit. Its trace on the earth will be significantly different from a great circle.
(Potential ways around: launch your gun from a big mountain, or use a
But what if we didn't disregard air resistance? Since in this thought experiment, the initial velocity is unbounded, couldn't we start at with supra-orbital trajectory, and then factor in the negative delta-v from the air, giving us the effects of a two-burn launch in reverse? Is there not an equilibrium solution there that results in an orbital trajectory?
Here's an easier puzzle: exactly how fast would a 5.56 NATO shot have to go, to finally fall to earth in Australia? (Assuming no atmosphere; if we add in air effects, this would probably turn into one of those XKCD-style discussions involving shock waves that rip the planet apart.)
I do not believe this depends on the particular projectile.
I would say roughly the orbital speed at the radius of the earth, which is some 7.9km/s (or escape velocity / sqrt(2)).
I don't think including the atmosphere is likely to harm the planet, small meteors travel through that atmosphere at such velocities all the time without destroying Earth. You might need to make the projectile tungsten and start with a bigger diameter than what you get at impact, and will require a higher velocity. Most of the trajectory will be outside the atmosphere.
Also note that kinetic bombardment is an act of war, so I would aim for the outback and hope that they mistake it for yet another meteor. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advise :)
Or just a person "proceeding" rather than walking. That way they can hop in a boat when they reach water!
The correct answer is that it depends on your frame of reference and likely on the date and time of day, and speed of travel, as a straight line will head off into space, but also the earth will move.
So why doesn't the question result in you walking off the surface of the earth? If you're walking in a straight line (as you say, the question poses!) then why are you staying on the curvature of the earth? Not a straight line!
There's a looooooooooootta motherfuckers who don't know how to walk in this thread, smdh.
Yes, so many people forgetting that if they attempt to walk in a straight line without a guide, they will walk in circles. And not because of the curvature of Earth.
The Lost Road into the West - only Elven ships can sail on a straight line, for the rest of us, the world is curved 😁
Except that to navigate a great circle course pilots are constantly adjusting their course to maintain their great circle path. A great circle course may be the shortest distance between two points on a sphere, but it's not a straight line for a pilot or the plane.
My interpretation is that you face due East and then move in a straight line. Your path is a great circle tangent to due East at Seattle.
I believe this answer for this version is "Australia", and this may be the only other country you encounter (possibly also Papua New Guinea) before returning to the United States.
I think you may transit both halves of New Guinea: the Indonesian part as well as the PNG part.
Substituting Jayapura and Port Moresby for Darwin and Perth also gives you two great circles that bound the correct route:
http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=sea-PHF-DJJ-PHF-POM
It says you start out going due east. Since a straight line is a great circle, you won't be going precisely due east after the first instant.
Here's the website I used to solve it. "Great Circle Map" lets you draw a great circle between airports:
http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SEA-PHF-PER-PHF-DRW
The trick is, first, to mess around until you find a US East Coast airport underneath the early portion of the great circle. ("PHF" is Newport News, Virginia. You can see the initial bearing out of Seattle is 90 degrees, or due east.)
After that I tried various airports in western Africa but after a while I saw the trick: the great circle passes straight down the North and South Atlantic oceans and hits Antarctica before hitting any actual countries. It looked like Australia was probably the right answer.
The full great circle has to take you back to Seattle, so I tried flying west from Newport News towards various Australian airports. You can see from the link that Darwin makes the circle too polar and Perth makes it too equatorial. The correct line has to be somewhere in between the two (just like Seattle-Newport News is between the two), meaning it makes landfall somewhere on Australia's western coast.
You can put coordinates directly in gcmap. A route that goes straight east will cross the equator within 90 degrees of longitude, then touch the antipode, then touch the equator again within -90 degrees of longitude.
http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=122.309444W+47.448889N+-+32.309444W+0N+-+57.624573E+47.448889S+-+147.624573E+0S+-+122.309444W+47.448889N
Seconding that the question is misleading. A straight line can also be interpreted as "straight within the coordinate system we're using". Now, latitude and longitude happen to be a nonlinear coordinate system, so we have to constantly steer left to go "straight", but then the "official" answer has the same problem. a great circle is *not* a straight line in euclidean geometry either! Just a different nonlinearity.
What's frustrating about this type of question is that in an actual application such as navigation, there's usually a "more correct" answer (e.g. navigating from A to B along the shortest possible path does *not* go in a straight line on a map). But posed as a free-floating logic puzzle, such context has been deliberately stripped away. I guessed the "wrong" way because I thought the question was going to be about the relative geography of Europe and North America, which is plenty unintuitive on its own.
I would argue that great circles are as close as you get to straight lines in spherical geometry. By any reasonable definition, they are much closer to a straight line than a five meter circle around the south pole, which is what you get when you trust your compass.
The effect is important when pointing an antenna, as I found out when I put up an antenna for amateur radio operation. The effect is clearly seen on an azimuthal map: https://ns6t.net/azimuth/azimuth.html.
I initially thought it was misleading too, though I knew what they were getting at (I didn't actually bother to find what the relevant great circle was before looking) but but on reflection I think the question is actually well posed and that the stated answer is uniquely correct. If I travel due east from Seattle, that's of course not a straight line by any definition except "on a map projection that makes plumb lines straight." Not straight lines through space, not along on the surface if the Earth. When I get to the east coast and face due east, there is exactly one great circle I can walk along, which is the one specified. Any other definition of a straight line would have me walking off into space, digging underground, or constantly turning in ways I could only figure out with training and navigation equipment.
*Rhumb line
> If I travel due east from Seattle, that's of course not a straight line by any definition except "on a map projection that makes plumb lines straight."
OK, before you can have a straight line, you need a definition of a straight line. I said that.
I don't follow what you're trying to say here; no path you travel can be a straight line by any definition except "on a map projection that makes certain lines straight". If you assume that you're sticking to the surface of the earth, you've already ruled out using a line that is straight in some sense other than being projected onto a straight line, because the surface of the earth is not planar.
Fine, yes, but "walking in a straight line along the Earth's surface" already has a standard definition: "Keep stepping forward and don't turn." On Earth, that procedure generates a great circle given any starting point and orientation.
In other words: yes, in general, it's worth defining your terms precisely to avoid ambiguity. Puzzles that deliberately take advantage of ambiguity and use obscure definitions in weird ways to confuse people are genuinely aggravating. But this puzzle is only using the most standard definition we all learned in school and use every time we think about walking in straight lines locally. It's just showing that it leads to a surprising result. I think that's why I have a hard time seeing why its bothering so many people so much in this case.
Edit to add: I guess technically we're assuming away local geographical variation, otherwise any tiny hill completely changes the answer, but since the starting point is just "Seattle" and not a single dimensionless point, we have to assume that doesn't matter.
A straight line embedded in a curved surface will look curved from an exterior view, but it's still a straight line (i.e. the shortest distance between two points) in the surface. "due East" is a bit more problematic, as that depends on something exterior to the surface, but I don't see how it could cause any confusion in context.
> A straight line embedded in a curved surface will look curved from an exterior view, but it's still a straight line (i.e. the shortest distance between two points) in the surface.
It will still be a straight line in some sense; it won't necessarily be the shortest distance between two points in the surface. A line that goes due East is, obviously, the intersection of the sphere (the surface) with a plane parallel to the equator. This is "a straight line embedded in a curved surface". It's a straight line, but it's not a great circle, it's a circle centered in the plane that defines it.
For an example that is almost the same, consider the line in the complex plane containing those numbers whose real part is 5, as it exists in the Riemann sphere.
I don't think it was misleading. I tested the logic with a basketball and a ruler. I placed the ruler about 2/3 "high" on the basketball facing "due east", then rolled the ruler straight down around the ball and sure enough it made a circle around the width of the ball (or would have if the ruler were longer).
That was clearly what was meant in plain English.
Disagree. The phrasing is that you are FACING due east when you start walking. There is nothing incompatible between facing a direction, then walking a straight line. Obviously its a riddle so there is meant to be some level of misdirection, but its an honest question.
I myself didnt get the catch and guessed Israel thinking it would be funny if it were so arranged to shoot the whole Mediterranean.
Even upon seeing "greater circle" I didnt think it could miss all of africa as I have always had the intuition that the U.S. antipode is the middle of the Indian ocean. However Seatle's antipode is 10degrees south of the cape of good hope, so plenty of space to get through.
My update is that not just Europe, but all of Africa (maybe the whole eastern hemisphere?) is more north than my intuition tells me.
Even if we idealize the surface of the Earth to be a sphere, it's still non-Euclidean geometry. As everyone who has read Lovecraft knows, extended contemplation of non-Euclidean geometry leads to insanity. To paraphrase Tolstoy, all sane minds think alike; each insane mind is insane in its own way. So we should expect extensive disagreement over the answer to this riddle, because it is literally driving people insane.
TLDR: it's a trap!
Spherical geometry is fine. What's weird is hyperbolic geometry.
The surface of a torus is, famously, Euclidean - the interior angles of a triangle will sum to 180 degrees - but I don't think that makes it easier for people to understand.
>The surface of a torus is, famously, Euclidean
The surface of a cylinder is, and the surface of a torus built by revolving a very eccentric ellipse around a circle is, but the surface of a garden variety, donut-ish, torus built by revolving one circle around another, larger, one has locally positive curvature on the outside surface and locally negative curvature on the inside surface.
The surface of a torus is not Euclidean. The second image in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_curvature shows the nonzero curvature.
> But there’s some reason to think that many of them didn’t entirely understand the ruling and thought it banned pro-white racism or something; a majority of young black adults think the decision will make it easier for blacks to attend university.
This looks pretty easy to explain: the official messaging says two things:
1. The United States is an irredeemably racist society, and all its mechanisms are configured to make things harder for blacks.
2. The Supreme Court just outlawed racial discrimination in college admissions.
If you believe 1, the obvious conclusion is that all the racial discrimination against blacks that colleges have been doing is about to stop. They are not aware that, in reality, colleges were engaging in epic amounts of racial discrimination against nonblacks so that they could admit more blacks. That wouldn't make sense in a worldview where society is set up to keep blacks down.
Note that the ruling _does_ ban pro-white racism; if people think that, it isn't a misunderstanding. The misunderstanding is in their belief that an American institution would engage in pro-white racism.
Yes, generally I've found white men to be far more aware and have far more accurate beliefs about the actual discrimination that's happening than other groups, who tend to believe the narrative far more than you'd imagine. Not only for American blacks. In the past I was part of a group out drinking, mostly men and one woman, and talk turned to a particular woman at work who was a pathological liar. The woman in the group asked why she hadn't been fired yet, at which point the men sort of laughed and eye rolled hard and were like "uh why do you think". She turned out to be genuinely confused and had no idea of the extent of pro-female discrimination at this company! She also seemed to struggle to accept this and was shocked that every man in the group thought it was too obvious to mention.
Is it that she was beautiful, or was it general pro-woman bias?
It was a software company. Female engineers were unfireable for DEI reasons regardless of what they did.
This only really happens if you work at a software company that has a tiny fraction of female engineers to begin with (which, to be fair, is most of them, because the large firms aggressively snap up good female talent to keep up their numbers and are able to fire female engineers because they have enough remaining to dodge discrimination lawsuits).
This was at a large firm with a higher number of females than average. They got that result by never firing women.
I've worked places where minorities and women were difficult if not impossible to fire. My boss made me hire a black female who was ridiculously unqualified, because we had to do government reporting for AA (we were a federal contractor).
Alternatively, we live in a society where nearly everyone's getting screwed, but in different ways (and in the case of Black Americans this often happens very early in the pipeline, well before universities get involved)
Yeah, I don't understand the pressure on universities. By that point there are meaningful differences in qualification that would make someone potentially unable to handle the work.
If you believe in blank slateism, but believe that the environment can negatively effect people, then I would think that only very early interventions would make sense. Waiting 16-20 years to intervene just seems pointless.
My guess is that you are a white man, and you judge white men's beliefs about discrimination to match your beliefs about discrimination more than other people's beliefs about discrimination match your beliefs about discrimination.
I am skeptical that you have actual measures of discrimination to check this against, rather than your own opinion.
We do have data on Harvard admissions from the lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court decision. It shows that admitted blacks averaged substantially lower on objective measures and admitted asians higher than admitted whites.
What do you mean by an “objective measure”? Just because something is objective does not make it a better measure of what we care about.
In any case, Harvard admissions is one tiny thing, and there are a much larger number of forms of discrimination that matter too.
>In any case, Harvard admissions is one tiny thing
Racial discrimination in Harvard admissions is what prompted the Supreme Court case that generated the ruling that prompted the link that prompted this thread.
What I mean by an objective measure is one that doesn't depend on the values or priors of the person using it. If someone got a 750 on the math SAT that is a fact whether the observer approves of it or doesn't. Whether it is a good measure is another question.
If you observe that the people admitted are consistently better (or worse) on the objective measures you know Harvard admissions uses depending on their race that is good evidence that the measures which do depend on the observers are more positive for the ones who do worse on the objective measures, more negative for the ones who do better. That looks like evidence that Harvard admissions discriminates in favor of the one group, against the other.
You were skeptical that I had actual measures of discrimination to check this against, and I just gave you one. What are the measures you have that point the other way? The context was the issue of discrimination in university admissions, which is what my evidence is about.
Harvard is one school but I have seen figures for other elite schools with the same pattern.
"Just because something is objective does not make it a better measure of what we care about."
Okay, there's something to that, insofar as "Tony is stupider than Bob, how should we treat Tony?" is the question and not "how smart or stupid are Tony and Bob?"
One answer is "We hold Tony and Bob to be morally equal, so we owe Tony the same protections as Bob gets, so we treat Tony the same as Bob".
Another answer is "Tony is inferior to Bob because of his stupidity. He will never be as productive or useful to the economy as Bob. Depending on exactly how stupid he is, he may extract more resources than he contributes. Therefore Tony should not be treated the same as Bob, and he is not owed the same protections, and indeed we can make it legal for Bob to shoot Tony if he feels like it".
Which answer we pick has nothing to do with an objective measure of testing intelligence. But an objective test *is* better if we need to establish "Is Tony stupid?" and "Should Tony get a job as an air traffic controller?"
If we care about "will the planes crash into each other?" then the objective measure is much better. If we care about "yes, we all know Tony is stupid, but let's pretend he isn't so we can give him a job as an air traffic controller because unless Tony has a job working beside Bob, it won't be wrong for Bob to use him as a live target in shooting practice" then the objective test is not better, but that still means the objective test is the true measure of "is Tony stupid or not?" and the way we treat Tony is the problem, not the test.
In the context the question is whether Tony and Bob will do equally well at Harvard, which is partly a question of how much they will learn from the classes, partly of what they will later do with what they learn.
Whether "protections" includes "the right to go to Harvard" or, more plausibly, "the right to be admitted to Harvard if you meet the relevant criteria" determines which of your two categories is relevant. I don't believe it does — from my standpoint Harvard has the right to discriminate in favor of Blacks, or against Blacks, so the question is "who would it be desirable for Harvard to admit" along the lines of your air traffic controller examples, not who has a right to be admitted.
But many people disagree with me. Under current US law as interpreted by the Supreme Court applicants do have a right not to be discriminated against. That puts it in your first category, so the question is what the relevant criteria are. If they are "how intellectually able are you" then an outcome with lots of Asian students and very few Black students may be fine, an outcome the other way is discrimination if it results, as it did, in lower admission standards for Blacks, higher for Asians. If one of the criteria is "are you a member of a group that has fewer Harvard admissions than its fraction of the population — if so admit more easily" then the observed outcome is fine.
>They are not aware that, in reality, colleges were engaging in epic amounts of racial discrimination against nonblacks so that they could admit more blacks.
Which suggests that those young black adults who think that the ruling will make it easier for blacks to attend university are the subset with a looser grip on reality, who presumably, are going to have a more difficult time than their peers attending university.
Which is the perfect example of why most of them have no business being there
Agreed (within that subset). Many Thanks!
Why would having poor knowledge about the kinds of admissions processes at universities be relevant to whether or not someone would be a good student at university? It's not a prize for who can answer the most trivia questions about admissions.
Not understanding a very basic principle like what affirmative action is, to the point that you think its abolition will make it EASIER for black people to get into college, betrays a lack of intelligence.
This is not some factoid trivia tidbit. This was one of the biggest domestic news stories of 2023 and one that directly pertained to black americans. The only way you can be that confused about it is not just ignorance, it's that it's literally too complicated for them to understand.
But you're right, admissions isn't a trivia contest. It's a fucked up system of discrimination that has resulted in many intellectually sub-par black students being admitted to universities in the place of more capable students. There's already too many black people attending university as a proportion of available spaces at respective universities relative to their intellectual ability, so the idea that the big problem is that they aren't taking up enough spaces is absurd.
Well said!
3. One day I was curious where I'd end up in if I went straight east across the Atlantic (following the same line of latitude). I was guessing Portugal, but I was surprised to find that I was in a narrow range that threads the Strait of Gibraltar, ending up in Algiers. But now I need to think carefully about how I phrase that factoid.
Living in Scotland, I'm always amused how comically far south the populated parts of North America are compared to us. Edinburgh is on the same latitude as Fort Severn First Nation, Ontario: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Severn_First_Nation
Hey, did you know in January Glasgow and Washington DC have similar average temperatures? I keep being surprised at just how warm European winters are, even though I should already know by now.
I've been following Quillette's history of Canada series, and a recurring theme is how the French don't have a clue how to survive in Canadian winters, despite being at about the same latitude, because they took the Gulf Stream for granted.
I was curious about the details so I looked at Google maps (I live in America) and happened to notice that as near as I can tell every country in the world is labeled with the English version of the name — Germany, not Deutschland, etc. — except for Türkiye.
Yeah I actually thought of the geodesic answer but I think that this time, this is trying to reveal another plot twist, that America is very south compared to Europe. In hindsight the wording do refer to geodesic, but I still feel fooled.
FYI -- when you link to threads on X, only the first post of that thread is visible if someone doesn't have an account.
Yep, though you can use threadreaderapp to see the whole thing. Here are the relevant links:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1744059290120245347.html - walking East from Seattle
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1746211702968906049.html - surprising facts from Our World In Data
How reliable is threadreaderapp? A while ago I tried to use it on a thread, and it wouldn't show me anything but a plea to sign up with threadreaderapp.
Dunno, but I get a reasonably high hit-rate when searching for threads people have shared. I haven't signed up for the app.
Many thanks!
When I followed Scott’s link and saw the map, I thought, “Ah, cute, the answer is Canada,” but when I returned I thought the business about the Atlantic was too unfair a red herring.
I too thought it was Canada, because by the time you get to the Great Lakes you're on the border there, but I suppose the Great Lakes are not on this 'geodesic great circle straight line" or whatever the true answer is.
If you want one of these with a Canadian-themed answer, the question is "On a direct flight from Los Angeles to London, what is the longest overwater segment?"
Answer is Hudson's Bay, because the Atlantic crossing is broken up by Greenland and Iceland.
There's a better formatted version of the East from Seattle puzzle (with illustrations, clickable links, and spoiler toggle) on the writer's own website:
https://finmoorhouse.com/writing/go-east/
How obnoxious. I'm sorry and have switched to a threadreader link.
I've been wondering why everyone started linking to individual posts in Twitter and stopped letting me read the threads!
Every day we move closer to the day when Twitter dies the death I wish it died ten years ago
1. Bill Thurston, arguably the greatest geometer in history, certainly the greatest of the last 100 years, and who specifically revolutionized the ways that mathematicians visualize the geometry of 3-dimensional spaces by visualizing themselves inside them, had no depth perception.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thurston
Regarding the original claim, I wonder if this is just a matter of blind mathematicians being less disadvantaged in these areas. Manipulating complex equations without the benefit of eyesight seems like it would be quite difficult, whereas geometry and topology rely more on mental visualization.
I don't know if it's decisive, but I can imagine at least one concrete advantage blind geometers would have.
Suppose your goal is to imagine a 2D manifold, such as a Mobius strip. If you visualize it, then what you're visualizing isn't exactly the manifold: it's an embedding of it in 3D space. If, on the other hand, you're imagining what it would be like to put your hands on it and trace the shape with your fingers, you're a lot closer to thinking about its intrinsic geometry.
On the subject of "personal experiences which may or may not be universal", does anyone actually find that their depth perception is all that much worse when they cover one eye? I can tell the difference, and I can see how 3D glasses make a flat image look three-dimensional, but in everyday life the advantage of binocular vision is pretty small.
I cannot consciously perceive any difference at all.
It might be that there is a difference but my brain is abstracting it away. I'd be slightly curious to find some sort of objective test that I can attempt with one eye and then with two eyes and see if I do any better.
(I mean a test like "estimate how far away this object is" rather than "can you unfocus your eyes and see two copies of your finger". I can do the latter, but other than that artificial and contrived situation I can't see any difference in what the objects in my visual field look like with one eye vs. with two.)
It's also not at all obvious to me whether a film is in "2D animation" or "3D animation", whereas I think my husband finds this distinction as obvious as the distinction between monochrome and colour. (I don't mean actual 3D movies with 3D glasses, but the way e.g. Pixar movies are referred to as 3D but classic Disney is 2D.)
FWIW, I'm also aphantasic and moderately prosopagnosic, so not a very visual person generally.
#StereoblindSupremacy
I knew having antimetropia would come in handy one day...somehow...
Re Gaza GDP, worth noting that it was significantly based on massive amounts of international aid - it's plausible to believe that an economy based on aid (in the form of either humanitarian aid or terror funding) is significantly poorer in practice than a similar economy that produces its own goods (both for various functionality reasons and because a self-producing economy is better at judging its needs).
(But also that said yes, Gaza was closer to western living standards in many ways than most of the third world, including access to e.g. Israeli hospitals or cell networks, which are presumably much more functional than what rural India has).
The hospitals, yeah, but you might be surprised by the cellular network.
Does rural India have good cell network? (I've heard they've done surprisingly well with rail electrification but don't know much about the internet infrastructure)
It does, yeah. 4G LTE penetration is now essentially complete, with 5G rolling out now.
I should clarify that this measure is mostly just about getting on the internet (so you can read news, browse Facebook, conduct transactions, that kind of thing) and says little about how good it is for, say, video streaming or online gaming; it's the classic latency vs. throughput vs. bandwidth thing. The rural cell network in India is not very good for something like that.
I suspect it's as good as it is because the land lines are poor. Neil Stephenson pointed this out some time ago.
North Americans have relatively bad cell networks because they have had the alternative of a fairly competently executed landline network, which was "good enough" for many for a long time.
I concur, but the effect in practice can be quite surreal (in a steampunk-like way) if you're implicitly expecting the same tech progression path as the US.
Also because India is densely populated, which makes it easier for the fixed costs of the infrastructure to pay for themselves.
So why are the land lines in India so bad?
No, it's not that. It's that the land lines were badly run. So people got cell phones instead when they were available.
I've read (not sure how good the information is) that the Hamas tunnels under Gaza are as long as the London Underground.
To build tunnels of that length would cost, to use a scientific term, a metric f**kton of money!
The "Gaza GDP > India GDP" statistic is shocking at first glance, but it becomes plausible once you remember that a) a lot of rural India is still terribly poor, b) Gaza received lots of international aid that can be counted towards their GDP, as you say; c) Hamas took that aid and used it to build tunnels and stockpile weapons instead of doing anything useful for their people.
Would that the Hamas leadership cared about Gazan civilians 0.1% as much as the average NYT commenter does!
The tunnels are cheaper than they'd otherwise be because they cared very little about safety during construction (I've heard over a hundred children died digging them). But yeah :/
Link to children digging them and dying?
https://m.jpost.com/diplomacy-and-politics/at-least-160-children-died-digging-tunnels-for-hamas-369138
What sorts of thing does Gaza produce?
Was not expecting a rick roll, let me tell ya.
Agree with this, particularly given the reference to Chesterton's Lepanto (which I love and have memorized).
Delighted to hear that. I memorised the first chapter of Ballad of the White Horse a while ago, and found it really enjoyable to have it in my head.
Also a wonderful poem. First heard it read at Hillsdale.
"Before the gods that made the gods had seen their sunrise pass..."
"Out of the mouth of the Mother of God
Like a little word come I;
For I go gathering Christian men
From sunken paving and ford and fen,
To die in a battle, God knows when,
By God, but I know why.
"And this is the word of Mary,
The word of the world's desire
'No more of comfort shall ye get,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.'"
That and Lepanto are great to say aloud! Chesterton gets things turned around, I was very sorely puzzled in my teens trying to work out the battle formations because he had Alfred's troops facing one way and then in another part swapped them round, but that's not important. It's the imagery and the language and the rhythm that are important 😁
Like Pringles, once you start quoting, you can't stop:
"Lifting the great green ivy
And the great spear lowering,
One said, "I am Alfred of Wessex,
And I am a conquered king."
And the man of the cave made answer,
And his eyes were stars of scorn,
"And better kings were conquered
Or ever your sires were born.
"What goddess was your mother,
What fay your breed begot,
That you should not die with Uther
And Arthur and Lancelot?
"But when you win you brag and blow,
And when you lose you rail,
Army of eastland yokels
Not strong enough to fail."
..."And the two wild peoples of the north
Stood fronting in the gloam,
And heard and knew each in its mind
The third great thunder on the wind,
The living walls that hedge mankind,
The walking walls of Rome.
Mark's were the mixed tribes of the west,
Of many a hue and strain,
Gurth, with rank hair like yellow grass,
And the Cornish fisher, Gorlias,
And Halmer, come from his first Mass,
Lately baptized, a Dane.
But like one man in armour
Those hundreds trod the field,
From red Arabia to the Tyne
The earth had heard that marching-line,
Since the cry on the hill Capitoline,
And the fall of the golden shield."
I had the sound off when I clicked it, thought "that's pretty and kind of cool I guess" and then was about a minute in when I saw it and switched the sound on.
> nine people in a family in Scotland have a mutation in the RIMS1 gene, which makes them go blind in their twenties and also apparently adds 20 IQ
(annoyed at the description of addition on a non linear curve without a starting point)
it looks like 100 to 120; n of 8
verbose nonsense(tables, brain scans, oh my) and not like descriptions of how they gave the iq test(did they test the "control" with written and verbal iq tests to look for differences at all?), protental life differences (maybe several of the sighted family members worked in a job with some poison) does the family agree with the assessment? Whats the family estimated iq of the missing data?
An untested "outsider"(II:3) is the parent of the 150's(III:1/2)
Alternative theory, II:3 is a good parent of an family with a baseline of 115-130 iq that had historical difficulties(potato famine? the troubles? idk), II:6 and II:7(being presumed younger) copied parenting techniques
Also the coordinates don't make sense in reference to the NM_ entry they reference at or before the date of publication. (NM_014989)
If you look ay the 844th position in all versions before their date of publication the described change is incoherent.
We can't even say what mutation they're even describing.
Did you find out about George Psalmanazar by reading R. F. Kuang's novel Babel?
That book inspired many wiki walks for me.
It inspired me to throw the book across the room. (and pity for the author, I suppose)
I'm not surprised that consistent-pseudonymous comment sections are best: persistent identities allow consequences for bad behaviour, and pseudonyms free people up to say things that they wouldn't want to show up under a casual Google search for their real name.
Also, I could see people viewing a persistent pseudonym as a sort of blank slate of how people see them, so they may want to put their best foot forward to craft a good image. Maybe people see their real identity as already somewhat "tarnished" and set, so feel it's not worth trying to put forward an "inauthentic but better" persona
True! And also, it's harder to rely on argument from authority when nobody can check your credentials.
Seriously, I have no idea why anyone here thinks that thinks it's a good idea to use your real name on the internet. They do realize that the whole reason this blog exists is because its author got doxxed, right?
Unfortunately there are plenty of people who think it's a good idea to force *other people* to use their real names on the Internet.
Advertising is a strong force on the internet, and advertisers like it when they know the identity of their targets.
For me that's a plus. It makes it more likely that people will try to sell me things I want to buy, less likely that they will call me up to offer to refinance my nonexistent mortgage.
Unfortunately, as a side effect, people sometimes lose their jobs, when the things they said somewhere online are too easily connected to their identity.
I was responding to the point about advertising. Some people see to see advertisers finding out that you are a potential customer as a negative, I see it as a positive. Obviously there are other reasons to avoid using your real name.
My wife used to worry that someone offended by one of my arguments online — that was in the days of Usenet — would throw a brick through our window but it never happened.
Because the only fair way to run the world is to either doxx everybody or to doxx nobody.
"Nobody" is my preferred outcome but to get there we may need to go through a moment where everybody is equally exposed, and some of us have the balls to make that happenby stepping up to the plate and unabashedly exposing ourselves, no matter how uncommon our viewpoint or character.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/the-beginning-of-the-final-50-year
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/the-beginning-of-the-final-50-year
Another example of "fairness" being unnecessary then.
Yeah, that's not going to happen. Some people genuinely have more to lose than others.
I've been using my real name online for forty or fifty years and arguing about lots of things. One reason to do so is that I have a good deal of published writing, much of it available online, and sometimes want to refer to it. My wife used to argue that some day someone angry at my arguments would throw a brick through our window but it hasn't happened yet.
When I set up my web page about thirty years ago I thought about whether it should cover both my professional work and my hobbies, whether I should worry that a potential employer — I'm an academic economist — would be less likely to hire me if he knew I spent substantial time and effort researching medieval cooking and making rope beds and medieval tents. I decided that a department that saw that as a substantial negative was probably not the best place for me to be.
To be fair, I've had a pretty easy life, might feel differently if I thought knowledge of my activities online would be a serious threat to my well being, as for some people it surely is. But not for all.
We are also aware that this blog's author lives in the Bay Area and is deeply embedded in the tech/rationaliist culture.
I *want* people I meet in real life to recognize me for my writings here, and elsewhere on the internet. It rarely happens except at SSC-adjacent meetups or the like, but it's pretty much always a plus when it does. I want to be able to reference my work elsewhere, when talking to people on the internet. I'm proud of what I've contributed here, and I'm proud of what I have contributed in meatspace, and I want to enjoy the reputation that comes from all of that combined.
I also *don't* like in the Bay Area or work in "tech", or anywhere else where I would plausibly be subject to real-world "cancellation". I mean, if I really offend someone here, they're welcome to call the Space Force and say they'll boycott GPS if they don't have me fired, see how far that gets them.
Persistent pseudonyms for anyone who needs them or benefits from them, sure - I'm not saying they should be prohibited. But neither are they the One True Way.
they are the one true way for people who don't have power, though. And many more people don't.
sort of a big issue here where people don't realize how wealth and privilege lets you escape things. Yes, you yourself could get fired too but you'd need to offend vastly more powerful people than others. But not everyone is indispensable ir can get jobs like that.
A lot of things are like this. Urbanists don't get that cities suck for the poor; public school haters don't get that its easy to make homeschooling work when you are rich enough to afford a stay at home parent and tutors/enrichment opportunities.
wealth insulates you from things.
"Wealth" and "power" are not the variables that matter here. Donald Sterling and Brendan Eich had both, and both had to worry about being "cancelled" for wrongspeak. An Appalachian hillbilly with forty acres, a mule, and a two-bit meth lab has very little wealth or power, but doesn't need to worry about people being mad at him for something he said on the internet. Other counterexamples should be obvious, and considering them broadly should perhaps give you insight into what *does* matter here
I can express views here in my areas of expertise that I never would under my real name (my LinkedIn is very, very boring).
Yes. There's also the example of many great writers throughout history using pseudonyms for analogous reasons. For example, Mark Twain, Poor Richard, and Scott Alexander.
I was going to start my own thread saying this, almost verbatim.
This seems like exactly the outcome I would expect.
I am still sad that Facebook took the inchoate internet and found a way to monetize it so thoroughly that pseudonymous infrastructure never took off.
I'm more annoyed with whoever decreed that Google+ would allow wallet names only. Huge unforced error, that kept many who otherwise would have been enthusiastic early adopters away. Maybe Google could never have killed Facebook, for whom social media is life-or-death, but they shouldn't have handicapped themselves like that.
Meh. Their attempt to claim social was when they started giving different search results to different people. That was the beginning of the end for a company that until then was pretty darned ethical and reliable.
Yes. Here, we are free to have civil discussions with people whom we would not risk engaging under our real names. Also, depending on our situation, we can engage with other people without having them be tarnished by association with our real names.
When the outside environment is hostile enough, people build greenhouses. When the hostile environment is because of social pressure to conform, pseudonyms provide insulation.
I agree with their conclusion: it's about who our audience really is.
(Although, I also think some of it may be to the human-equivalent of what happens when we prompt an LLM to be smart, to act like it's an expert.)
To expand on that point, persistent pseudonyms allow many people to participate who otherwise could not. People from repressive regimes, people with jobs that ban them from expressing their views (e.g. national security, neutral civil servants), it lets people do low-level leaking (comments like "I work for a Big Tech Corp and..." would get them fired if they were identifable), teens with conservative parents can be out as LGBT+ or whatever. To pick an example pertinent to our host, psychiatists can comment without risk of their patients finding the comments.
I think the study is weak and we shouldn't draw strong conclusions about the quality of real names vs pseudonymous. For those who didn't actually click the link, they are examining one site that changed policies over 2(3) years 2013-2015. They have 2 different measures swearing and complexity of language. Based on the summary they observe swearing decreased after removing anonymous comments. For real name they allowed users to use their facebook accounts and noticed that complexity of language decreased from the previous psudonymous level. Note this is confounded by time (people commenting in 2015 are different from people commenting in 2013 and also the tenor of discussion can change) and ease of posting (people logged into Facebook find it easier to comment).
Yes, these are all good points!
" Did you know: the Gaza Strip has (had?) a higher GDP per capita than India. I’m not sure what to think upon learning this." One might perhaps want at least to consider the possibility that everything we were told about the Palestinians in Gaza ("open air prison," etc) before October 7 was a complete lie. A sort of willing suspension of disbelief, not unlike accepting the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry "statistics" on civilian deaths.
Nope, they just receive vast amounts of aid
Australia?
What about it?
The answer to the puzzle in #3
Wait, what? How? If you start at the latitude of Seattle and travel across the Atlantic, the first country you reach is France. I just checked it on a globe. What am I missing?
You can't travel at constant latitude without turning from a straight line.
Unless you start on the Equator.
Seems like a trickster question then.
I don't think so. I live in eastern Canada, and if you build a directional shortwave antenna directed due east, it points towards Africa and not Europe.
'41: How bad is it to marry a cousin? New study suggests offspring of cousin marriages live on average three years less than expected.'
An important limitation of the study is that they didn't have data on what the people died of. They even say it:
"To evaluate how marrying a cousin affects the health of offspring, we use as an outcome their years of life (‘longevity’). Since genealogical profiles do not contain direct information on health, such as diseases, disability, or cause of death, we treat longevity as a proxy for overall, life-time health."
One of the other studies they cited, "Consanguinity and child health" (2008) by A. Saggar, A. Bittles,
found that the risk of offspring having recessive genetic disorders unsurprisingly had a positive correlation with the degree of relatedness between their parents. 30% of children conceived through incest had at least one recessive genetic disorder, and 3-6% of children conceived through first-cousin marriages had it. If the parents are unrelated, the odds of their children having such a disorder are less than 1%.
This makes me suspect that the average life expectancy of children of first cousins is dragged down by the 3-6% of their cohort who have recessive disorders. Maybe the other 94-97% have normal lifespans.
It raises the prospect that it might be perfectly safe for first cousins or even family members more closely related than that to have children through IVF and embryo screening.
Interesting - that seems to imply that those 3-6% had dramatically reduced lifespans.
IVF embryo screening is (reportedly) done by eyeballing the embryos and picking the one that "looks the healthiest". This will only catch an extremely small portion of the reinforced recessives.
My understanding is that can pull a cell out of the embryo and test it for whatever genetic disorders they are checking for. I don't know if that always happens or if some is what you describe.
They *can* do what you suggest, but that risks damaging the embryo, so they usually don't. (It also adds time and expense.)
OTOH, my information is a decade or two old.
So is mine. I'm going off what I remember from _Remaking Eden_ by Lee Silver, published in 1998.
>This makes me suspect that the average life expectancy of children of first cousins is dragged down by the 3-6% of their cohort who have recessive disorders. Maybe the other 94-97% have normal lifespans.
Hmm... I'd expect that for any _given_ recessive disorder, there is a nice clear all-or-nothing behavior. But I wouldn't be surprised if there are a bunch of alleles where a recessive pairing gives you sort-of-subclinical-but-crappier-than-usual consequences. I'd like to see whether the distinction between the 3-6% and the 94-97% is crisply bimodal - or something fuzzier.
Also, there might be some survivor bias: An embryo which is not viable because it has two defective copies of some essential gene will probably not show up in lifetime statistics.
Also, this should really depend on the prior amount of inbreeding going on. If both parents had 1024 different ancestors ten generations ago, then it is likely that any recessive gene defects their ancestors had were not selected against. If they went through generations of inbreeding, they will be less likely to carry fatal gene defects. I mean, the Targaryens are doing just fine :-P
Eugenicist Georg, who lives in cave & kills over 10,000 children of cousin marriages each day, is an outlier adn should not have be counted.
So are blind people more likely to answer the riddle in 3 correctly?
Is there a link for the A16Z claim? I would love to understand what happened.
See here: https://twitter.com/edardaman/status/1744453999695176046 tl;dr a16z submitted written evidence to the House of Lords Communication and Digital Select Committee, claiming that "recent advances in the AI sector have resolved [the issue of black-box models]". That's not even close to true and they damn well ought to have known that. Unfortunately there appear to be essentially no consequences for lying to a Parliamentary Select Committee.
> That's not even close to true and they damn well ought to have known that.
Can't disagree with that.
> Unfortunately there appear to be essentially no consequences for lying to a Parliamentary Select Committee.
I have more mixed feelings about this. Is it really better to criminalize lying to the government than not to?
I dunno: knowingly providing false information to the country's legislative body, which will then use that information to make hugely consequential decisions, seems pretty bad.
But knowingly providing information that a court might conclude was false possibly not. Given an imperfect court system criminalizing that might be a way of keeping the legislators from learning unpopular facts.
Any law can be criticized on the grounds that a court might get it wrong, punish an innocent man who was doing a good thing, and so frighten other innocent doers of good things. Most of us do not turn anarchist because of this.
If the law prohibits "knowingly providing false information", as opposed to "providing information that we subsequently determine is false", that I think puts it in the same category as all of the other laws most of us accept in spite of the certainty that courts will occasionally get it wrong. It's roughly equivalent to the current law against perjury, which is relatively noncontroversial. And it does result in a high barrier to enforcement, which is fine - you can't win them all, but you could win some good fights with this one (as you can with perjury laws).
Yes, there's an important difference between "lying" and "being wrong".
This isn't the government, it's the legislature, whose function is partly to hold the goverment, and other powerful interests, to account. These committees often require government ministers to give evidence to inquiries, which is a kind of quasi-judicial function.
In fact Select Committees do have the power to punish lying in evidence, which is a species of 'Contempt of Parliament', in a similar way to 'Contempt of court'. They just don't use it very often (usually it is used to compel testimony in the first place).
Dominic Cummings was found in contempt of parliament, with no apparent consequences.
<mild snark>
If there were _summary_ punishment for lying to Parliament, would they need to create a position of "fact-checker-at-arms"? :-)
</mild snark>
> This isn't the government, it's the legislature
So... you don't know what common words mean?
I'm guessing their point was that lying while testifying under oath to the legislature is different from lying to the government in general, and they just worded it very badly.
He's talking about Britain; I think "government" has a specific meaning over there? (Like the way we in America have bizarre ideas of what "nation" and "state" mean. Or like the way everyone has contradictory ideas about what "liberal" means.)
Yes, "the government" in the UK refers to the executive. Eg, "government business" in parliament are measures proposed by the executive.
> Like the way we in America have bizarre ideas of what "nation" and "state" mean.
We think they're synonymous. The top-level internal divisions of the US are also called "states", but this clearly conflicts with the normal use of the term; it is a vestige of the idea that American states held sovereignty over their own territory.
Having internal entities with an inappropriate historical name isn't the same thing as having a strange idea of what that name refers to. Compare how, in other countries with other labels for their internal divisions, those of the US are still called by the local term "states". Similarly, we refer to French "departments" regardless of the ordinary meaning of the word, because that's what they're called.
As far as "nation" goes, our idea is certainly not compatible with the historical meaning, but it's less obvious to me that it differs from the current meaning assigned in other countries.
To be equally snarky: you don't know British English.
For that to be valid, you would need to assume, as Ajb seems to have, that when I comment in American English on an American blog, I was really intending to use British English.
It's not "lying to the government", it's "lying while under oath" (or should be).
There are many cases where people should uncontroversially not be allowed to lie to the government. If you lie to a court, that could result in an innocent person going to jail. If you lie on your tax return, the government doesn't get the money it needs. In general, the government needs the ability to gather truthful information to do its job.
That said, I think it's also important to distinguish "This is Official Testimony where you will face punishment for knowingly lying, proceed with caution" and "We're looking for comments from our citizens, don't be afraid to tell us what you think" and (not being a UK citizen) I don't know which bucket their statement falls into, legally.
> If you lie to a court, that could result in an innocent person going to jail.
This is already punishable without the law against lying to the government, because you hurt someone.
> If you lie on your tax return, the government doesn't get the money it needs.
This cannot be described as "uncontroversial" with a straight face.
> In general, the government needs the ability to gather truthful information to do its job.
That's true of everything; why give special treatment to the government?
>>In general, the government needs the ability to gather truthful information to do its job.
>That's true of everything; why give special treatment to the government?
That's a good point. Some of our more powerful corporations have internal procedures (often kafkaesque!) for punishing customers or suppliers that they don't like. Do any of them punish the corporate version of "perjury"?
The second: if they think they are lying, they will call them in and place them under oath and ask them to repeat the statement; if they then decline, well, the committee knows what to think. If they persist (and it is a lie) then they can have them prosecuted for perjury. If they refuse to turn up, they can be prosecuted for contempt of parliament. If they refuse to answer the question, the same.
Note: testimony given in parliament under oath is a parliamentary proceeding and so has absolute privilege, ie cannot be used as evidence against you in court, which means there is no protection against self-incrimination, so the UK equivalents of the Fifth Amendment don't apply.
Thank you!
Evidence to a parliamentary select Committee is not normally under oath. If the Committee thinks you're lying, they can place you under oath. Then you can be prosecuted for perjury.
Right, but AFAICT placing witnesses under oath is extraordinarily rare in practice.
Once every few years.
I know that the Wiki article says Palestinian architecture for some reason, but I would have gone for 1st Century Judaean architecture, given that was actually the country at the time. Saying Palestinian is misleading and kinda ahistorical
Yes, Jerusalem was then part of the Roman province of Judea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaea_(Roman_province)
I suppose I'm mildly surprised people haven't heard of the Holy House of Loreto, but then again, it is old-school Catholicism and I imagine even a lot of younger Catholics have no idea about it.
I read about it years ago, when I was a young Catholic in Poland, but even then I didn't get the sense it was common knowledge. If you asked the average person on the street about the Virgin Mary's house, you'd probably get a blank stare.
See here for a modern telling of this tale, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
https://youtu.be/zzSJaLbc9GM?feature=shared
I'll use this opportunity to plug my recent interview with Tracing Woodgrains, albeit on unrelated topics: https://youtu.be/Lv9ibJpk3tw?si=wz6VluMNzn3MfNJG
36: It doesn’t surprise me that consistent-pseudonym comments are no worse than real-name ones, but I don’t understand why they would be better
You have skin in the game with the community in question, but you can take on a persona that is disassociated from other parts of your life, and that persona can signal differently than you may need/want to (for various social reasons) with your real name.
Case Study: I heard a rumor that Scott Alexander prefers pseudonyms and finds that it lets them be more honest/vocal about their beliefs than if they were using their real name, which would mix their personal/work life with their online discourse.
The person who is Deiseach seems to have a reputation and a recognisable persona. Is this the same as the real life person? Who can say, but one thing I can tell you is that I wouldn't give half or even a quarter of the opinions I do were I going under my real name that could be traced back to real me in my real life.
Seems pretty obvious to me.
"Sometimes grumpy, far more religious/conservative than I am, very intelligent and interesting to read, likes to quote Chesterton and C.S. Lewis at length" is certainly a reputation and recognizable persona! 😊
100% agree with you on "I give opinions that I would not want to be the first thing people knew about me if they met me IRL."
I go by my real life name, but I have the advantage of being retired, so the usual cancellation attack of "get their employer to fire them" doesn't apply.
I also suspect that real name commenting encourages engagement in tribal coded discourse, being unnecessarily combative and inflexible as the sense of participating publicly in a fight is heightened
Yeah this seems like a surprising thing for Scott Alexander to be surprised about, given his history with writing pseudonymously.
I came here to write pretty much the same thing. By writing under the same name I have a reputation to uphold (even if no one here remembers me, they might look me up later). By not using my real name I can say more than if I had to consider real life implications.
I suspect there are also huge selection effects. First, there could be a reason a site decided to go real-name-only (eg terrible comment section). Second, the only examples I can think of are newspapers and a couple of mainstream-conservative websites, which have the same ease-of-access problems as Facebook when it comes to commenter quality.
Shockingly (to me, at least), there appear to be essentially no consequences for lying to a Parliamentary Select Committee: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jul/22/phone-hacking-lying-to-select-committee
> The House of Commons is not believed to have fined anybody since 1666 and has not "committed anyone to custody", apart from temporarily detaining them, since the 19th century.
Going to the linked article, I think they're covering themselves with the wiggle room of "we're only stating our beliefs about AI". Oh, they were wrong? Well, we told you them in all sincerity, how dare anyone imply we were deliberately lying!
It isn't really possible for someone to hold that belief sincerely.
Michael! I am putting my hand on my chest and gazing in shocked amaze at you! Do you really mean that a company that wants to get in on the magic money fountain and swim in an ocean of cash might fib to a regulatory body?
How very untrusting of the free market and its impeccable correctness you are!
They're either lying or staggeringly incompetent.
Is that even a meaningful distinction? The consequences are exactly the same.
Strategic lying is probably easier to deter via disincentives than honest incompetence.
I don't think so, though it depends on your purposes. A competent-but-evil a16z might be a good guide to investment (as long as you look at their actions rather than their public statements). An incompetent a16z would be useless.
There are routinely no consequences for lying in court, either. Our society is very lenient with liars of all kinds.
When I was 25, and far more associated with the effective altruism movement than I am now, I attempted to do an undirected kidney donation. It was, hands down, the most painful experience of my life. Not the donation, that never actually happened, but trying to navigate the bureaucracy and sheer cluelessness of every single person even tangentially connected to the organ donation.
I started out talking to a doctor, they were very confused about why anyone would do this, and how you might even start out (they ended up doing a general blood screening test largely out of a feeling of obligation and to get rid of me). I then went on to try to communicate with all hospitals in my area with a kidney donation service, to absolutely no success - I couldn't even get them to return my calls or e-mails. I had no more luck with the various donations who worked *specifically* in this area. When I could get someone to talk to me, they were universally confused about the very idea of non-directed donations, despite the foundations and hospitals having pages on their websites on exactly that topic.
After weeks and weeks, I finally managed to bully the foundation to getting a phone call with the one of the people responsible for sourcing donors. They told me, flat out, that I was too young (remember, 25 years old), and while they appreciated my enthusiasm I should try again when I was at least 40 (yes, that was exactly as patronising as I make it sound).
I concluded that they actually don't need kidneys, and remain skeptical to this day.
They do need kidneys, that's for sure.
The concept of kidney exchanges has slowly gained popularity over the last few years. Nowadays, they use top trading cycles or similar algorithms to find groups of matches even when pairs of matches don't exist. An undirected donation injects slack into these systems, and can result in much more than 1 additional successful donation. The record for longest chain of exchanges stands at something like 70, which is mind-boggling.
source: I used to work in the general academic field (market design). The kidney exchange stuff was pioneered in large part by Al Roth, who I mentioned just recently regarding the ethical difficulties of creating markets in domains where payments are taboo. EAs desperately need to be more aware of that stuff!
I've heard that, of course - that was the motivation to even try, and to keep pushing. But I feel like there's more to the analysis than that.
Let us assume, for a moment, that all the things you list are 100% true, and that a given person (Bob) is able to do so without undue risk, financial burden etc. That does not, in itself, constitute the entirety of the analysis. Because Bob's decision is not just 'should I donate a kidney', it's also 'do the organisations I need to deal with let kidney donations happen'. Maybe part of the reason kidney donations are so needed is because the gatekeepers only let 1% of willing/able donors actually donate, and if they allowed a wider fraction then we'd be swimming in them. Now, you could argue that Bob should try, because expected value, but that assumes it's just a matter of volume - we need to jam more potential donors through so sufficient make it through their insane process.
However, I would argue that the problem there is not enough people donating, but the gatekeepers not letting people donate, and since people who are realistically able/willing to donate is not huge, engaging with that system is ultimately futile. Especially if the things you list are not true - I notice all those numbers come from the US, which apart from being very strange in a lot of ways, has a very particular healthcare system which really doesn't generalise to the rest of the world. For example, if the gatekeepers allow 1% of willing/able donors to actually donate, then I would be shocked if the marginal impact of an actual donation on further donations was detectable at all, which sharply limits the good done by the donation.
And I think there's a revealed preferences aspect to be considered here. Let us assume that the gatekeepers - hospitals, foundations, whatever - are in some way accountable to either private shareholders or the government or popular opinion or whatever. In that case, if they are doing such a lousy job in the face of *actual* need, then it raises the question of why that situation has been allowed to continue. This is by no means a knockdown argument, there's a few reasons it could be the case, but none paint the gatekeepers in a light which makes them appear remotely trustworthy. They are, at best, hamstrung by rules which they are powerless to change (more likely), and at worst outright liars who perpetuate a narrative to facilitate financial donations and social prestige (very unlikely).
Regardless of your analysis, if I *can't* donate because of gatekeepers despite being willing, it doesn't really matter that much why in terms of outcome for purposes of analysis.
I'm too lazy to dig for data right now, but IIRC there are a bunch of people on the waitlist for organ donation. So I'll ascribe it to institutional incompetence rather than the kidneys not actually being needed.
Keep in mind that the whole idea of donor chains and so on has only started to be implemented maybe 15 years ago? Depending when you tried donating, you were very close to the cutting edge. It takes new knowledge and techniques time to percolate through institutions, to become the new normal. On top of that, economists think about the ethical issues very differently than doctors, who often have a more narrow, conservative concept of what it means to do no harm, and a tendency to bristle at utilitarian style arguments (for good / understandable reasons IMO).
I'm really sorry to hear this.
I just got approved for donation at Georgetown University Hospital. It was super easy, they were friendly and accommodating, have things streamlined to get all the testing done in one day, and didn't bat an eye my request (a la Scott) to get an MRI instead of a CAT scan.
I think "works closely with the NKR" might be a good filter for finding a hospital to work with..
Eh, it is what it is. I won't go into detail for privacy reasons, but I will say I worked with both the largest hospital in my city (I think it's one of the biggest in my state? I'd certainly heard about it when I was living in a different part of the state), and the national kidney body, assuming that they would be best-placed to manage it, advise me etc. Both were about equally useless, although from memory the person who told me I was too young was from the national body.
#15 The capital of Uzbekistan is Tashkent, not 'Tashent.'
Thans.
“He unexpectedly reached his letter “k” quota for the month of February due to this being a leap year”
+1
I lie the way you thin
'k
There are other communist/ex-communist countries in Africa (Eritrea split from Ethiopia after the end of communism, Angola has an AK-47 on its flag) that haven't done that well. James Scott used land reform in socialist Tanzania as one of his negative examples in "Seeing Like a State".
Richard Hanania noted that IVF was overwhelmingly endorsed in surveys by the 70s, I speculated that there was more far-mode opposition before it arrived:
https://twitter.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1761237605083992211
One of my favorite facts is that the Elo rating system, named for Arpad Elo, was actually invented by Zermelo, whose name also ends in “elo”.
This comment deserves at least a 2000 rating.
Interesting. http://www.glicko.net/research/preface-z28.pdf goes into more depth. This is by Mark Glickman, inventor of the Glicko rating system. He says that the Elo system "had a basis" in the methods in Zermelo's paper, while not being sure if Elo actually knew about that paper.
Re 15:
Another Kruschev anecdote from Marvin Kalb’s ‘The Year I Was Peter the Great 1956: Kruschev, Stalin’s Ghost and a Young American in Moscow’
After the death of Stalin finally sunk in, Kruschev began to talk publicly about how awful Stalin had been:
“Another story heard in the Moscow market had one troubled delegate jumping to his feet and shouting, “Well then, why didn’t you all get rid of him?”
Khrushchev, interrupted by the question, looked slowly around the chamber. “Who said that?” he asked.
No one answered. “Who said that?” he repeated more forcefully.
But again there was no answer, only a sudden chill and silence. Khrushchev grinned. “Now you understand why we didn’t do anything,” he said drily before continuing his speech.”
That's a good one.
Anybody else on mobile and #3 completely fails to reveal the answer? No? Then tell me what the answer is
Same problem on PC (don't have an account). I guess it's a trick question. Seattle is kind of to the north, and if the latitude was adversarially chosen (hint: it was) then the straight line might miss a bunch of countries by a hair's breadth and go way into nordic territory. My blind guess is Russia (Kaliningrad), or perhaps Sweden.
Nope. See https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1744059290120245347.html. The path you're imagining isn't straight.
Thanks, I saw the other discussion here after I wrote this.
See this: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1744059290120245347.html. (It's AUSTRALIA! Non-Euclidean geometry is counterintuitive.)
34 (long COVID prevalence): This is a big *relative* increase. Still waaay out of line with what the catastrophists were saying a few years ago. I remember I had to call BS on claims of double-digit long COVID prevalence. That was indeed "I can look out the window and immediately see your theory is BS" territory.
I'm prepared to believe that we have something like 0.2% prevalence (eyeballing from your graph). For that, covid doesn't even need to be particularly special. That might follow just from base rates of post-viral syndrome, combined with an immuno-naive population.
Yeah, this is also what immediately came to my mind. The problem is that the only people who are talking about long covid (somewhere where people see them talking about it, ie. not just the studies) are long covid activists, who keep jocking completely ludicrous numbers for long covid prevalence (10-20 % etc), ie. numbers where most of those outside the community seeing them will instantly go "but I don't know anyone who has long covid myself and all my friends seem to be as active as previously, adjusting for age" and stop listening to them.
Also, when it comes to statistics like these, we'll probably also in the coming years have the split where a third of those who still care about the issue will see the statistic and go "See? It can't be anything other than Covid!" while another third will go "See? It can't be anything other than the vaxx!"
I haven't looked at that post, but looking at this blog's other posts, the author is clearly obsessed with COVID and having and spreading anxiety as an ideology. So I wouldn't be surprised if they obsessively looked for the statistic that makes long COVID look like a big problem the most.
Yep. Given the author's dodgy theory of immunology (the immune system should be thought of as a bag of 100 snakes which viruses steal and "any other explanation you might hear is propaganda to keep you grinding away in the system"), I'm not much inclined to take their long Covid assessment very seriously.
(https://www.donotpanic.news/p/this-is-how-your-immune-system-works)
Remember this graph would be assuming that everyone with long covid is applying for disability, which is certainly not the case. Maybe not double digit prevalence but certainly higher than these #s would suggest
And in the other direction, the pandemic might have incentivized a bunch of people on the edge of employability to get out of the job market entirely. "Maybe not double digit prevalence" is a huge understatement. There's a factor 20 of slack here! Every single statistical error your can come up with would need to point in the same direction for double digits to be even remotely on the table. Extremely unlikely. (Also, as I already said in the OP: look out the window. Do you see a society where a double digit fraction of jobs suddenly aren't getting done due to lack of workers? That would be economic collapse in most places. Empty store shelves, businesses shuttering left and right)
The FRED graph is not based on people applying for disability benefits.
It is based on the Current Population Survey (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/technical-documentation/questionnaires.html), I believe questions DS1-DS6 of the Labor Force items.
> But it’s also no surprise that societies built on supremacist foundations and eugenicist tales of the strong conquering the weak are unable to look honestly at physical, bodily deterioration.
> It’s no surprise that ableist societies are disabling themselves.
> A genocidal mindset is coming home to roost.
> The truth is our relative privilege as citizens of the imperial core could only ever last so long.
Maybe it's wrong, but this kind of rhetoric makes me *extremely* wary - the author clearly started with a ideologically-driven conclusion and found evidence to support it. In this case, I think other commenters are basically right - the evidence presented supports the view that a very small percentage of people have long-term consequences of a COVID infection, but is presented in a maximally alarmist fashion to drive an agenda of anxiety.
I wish this country was as eugenicist as they say it is.
Eugenics covers a bunch of ideas, some clearly good (registers of carriers of Tay-Sachs disease) and some clearly evil (forcibly sterilising people with Down's syndrome), but it's caught in a vicious circle where it's strongly associated with the evil ones, which scares off most non-evil people, and so it's mostly evil people use the word to describe what they want.
Screening embryos for Down's is available on the NHS, which a) I think is a good thing, b) clearly meets my definition of eugenics, and c) is popular. But most of the people who support it would react with instant suspicion and hostility to people openly advocating for eugenics, *and they're right to do so* because of who does and doesn't use the word to describe their beliefs.
This strikes me as regrettable but hard to fix, and probably not catastrophic.
Polygenic screening really is a motte-and-bailey example. The motte is "we only want to ensure healthy babies, who could possibly object to that? do you *want* babies to be born with conditions that mean they will have bad lives and suffer horribly? what kind of monster are you?"
Indeed, who could object to healthy babies? But the bailey will be (and I have no expectation that there will *never* be a settlement in the bailey, given how all other such cases have gone):
"Well, we're already selecting for no-disease, we're already doing negative screening. What about positive screening? Who could object to babies who will grow up to be smarter and happier?" Any objections from us heartless knuckle-draggers are met with the retreat to "but healthy babies with no disease!" motte, until it is safe to creep back out to the bailey once more.
And the definition of "positive screening" creeps more and more, so that "better" takes on a whole range of the undesirable, bad old connotations once more: breeding humans like cattle to get the better race, grading offspring to see who is worthy or not, the unworthy sequestered away and not permitted to marry or reproduce (and that's only the milder pipe dreams of previous eugenicists).
And then in time we get the full horrors of "but who could possibly have foreseen that would happen?" when the skulls are piled up in heaps all round us.
Personally I think a lot of that is people giving up. In the U.K. it’s relatively easy to get disability - mental issues would do.
Completely agree. The trigger in this latest increase was lockdowns and home working rather than long Covid, in conjunction with the long march of chronic illnesses and expanding definitions of sickness. The amount of people I know who have mentally checked out is worrying. They either sincerely believe that their relatively minor ailment is grounds to not work again, or are cynically lying because they don't want to go back to the 9-5.
At least in the UK there's a lot of skepticism about disability numbers. Many people on disability claim to have vague forms of mental illness or depression or otherwise have an inability to work, but the criteria and assessment are amazingly lax. Recently they have even pushed to reclassify the menopause as a disability worthy of state payouts.
State capacity and effectiveness collapsed dramatically in the last few years in the UK, in part because the left managed to take control of the civil service from the government and the (notionally but not really) right wing ministers just gave up trying to control them. Given that context it can easily be a purely political issue rather than anything "real".
Governments don't have a lot of incentive to reduce the number of dodgy disability claims either, because most of them would otherwise be pumping up the unemployment numbers and making the government look bad.
A couple of decades ago it used to be said that 5% was the theoretical minimum for unemployment, but nowadays we regularly reach the low 3% range in good times. Why? Probably because we have shifted the 2% of most marginally employable people (the slightly crazy or very lazy) from a state of perpetually hopping in and out of jobs to a state of sitting around getting disability benefits for some semi-fictitious condition.
The left took control of the civil service in the last few years? That's quite a claim.
I accept that left and right are relative (you clearly have a different baseline to me if you think Johnson, Truss, and Sunak are "not really" right wing) but the idea that there was a recent leftwards lurch sounds like it could do with some evidence.
You have a lot of recent cases of this, like when the head of the border force retired and stated he had never believed in "bloody borders" anyway. Or the way the police and CPS are super-keen on prosecuting hate speech but have lost interest in burglary and other such boring physical-world crimes.
The criteria and assessment are not amazingly lax; they are amazingly incompetent. They will routinely classify people who are literally bed-bound (as in "have to use a bedpan") as able to work, while also classifying people with vague mental illnesses as unable to do so.
The worst stories told by both the left and right wing press are true: the problem is that neither is representative, because there is no such thing as a representative anecdote of a system with such enormous variations in outcome.
It may have a similar effect (people will try it on and hope they get incompetent laxity rather than incompetent strictness), but causal explanations and efforts to fix the problem are completely different.
There’s a load of cofounders here, including the induced hypochondria of long covid panic, general mental health decline and quiet quitting.
The US graph doesn’t even increase until 2021, after half the covid deaths had already occurred.
I find myself wondering whether there's a way to separate the "covid" effect from the "stuck in lockdown (with nothing to do but feed my hypochondria on the Internet)" effect.
Also the UK data shows that it is at least in part mental health related: https://www.health.org.uk/publications/long-reads/what-we-know-about-the-uk-s-working-age-health-challenge (figure 8)
Can you explain what you mean? Looking at the UK graph, it looks like the number of long term sick goes from ~2m to ~2.8m. 0.8m people out of 65m in the country is 1.2%. (I'm being generous here and assuming that 100% of the population got COVID and also assuming that that line levels off immediately, which it shows no sign of doing.) That's the people who are so sick they're economically inactive. Doesn't seem unreasonable that that number might just be 10% of all the people suffering with the condition.
Maybe you're referencing people who were predicting double digit percentage of people being so sick as to be economically inactive. If so, I agree those people are off by an order of magnitude (assuming the numbers don't keep getting worse). But I think a lot of people who were once labelled as doomsayers will be feeling quite vindicated by these stats.
We are in rough agreement here. It's so frustrating because in some groups I have to take the role of the alarmist, and in other groups I'm trying to calm people down. Long covid is a real and serious condition, understudied, underdiagnosed, and will have a noticeable impact on our society. But it's not earth-shatteringly bad either. Quite a large population of people unable to work already existed. This newest illness is just a very visible member of this previously invisible group.
Yeah, post-viral syndrome / ME / chronic fatigue syndrome / Long covid, whatever the fuck it is, is clearly real, and clearly debilitating. I have a friend who has it and is almost wholly reliant on her powered wheelchair, not because she can't stand up / walk, but because more than three or four steps leaves her utterly exhausted and gasping for breath. She was an active woman with several kids and then went into this serious decline after a viral infection about 15 years ago.
It's been around for a long time, but covid meant that a lot of people got a serious viral infection in a short period of time, so a lot more people got it all at once, and that's resulting in a lot more of the medical profession taking it seriously and starting to study and diagnose it better.
Please put an epilepsy warning in links to videos with flashy or otherwise bizarre frame transitions! We don't know how good companies are (or will be) at RLHFing dangerous characteristics out of these videos.
It gets harder to be anti-conspiracy-theorist when you discover people are pulling convoluted bullcrap like 22 (the FAA discrimination questionnaire) for reasons that aren't even ambitious. Maybe that's why it flew under the radar (ha!) for so long?
Why do you want to be anti-conspiracy-theorist?
... because conspiracy theorists are wrong on *most* things? Because they have terrible epistemics? You bite the bullet on some unpopular opinions regarding covid or something, and next thing you know your allies are weird naturopaths who think Bill Gates put microchips into the vaccines.
Low wit - believes all conspiracies.
Mid wit - believes none.
Wit - believes the believable ones.
High Wit - believes the believable ones while signalling non-membership of the low wit club.
No the high wit (I’m using wit interchangeably with high wit) hates on the mid wit.
Twas always thus.
Believe whatever's convenient for me
Are they wrong about most things? How would you measure that? What's the denominator in that fraction, the count of all possible things?
I believe in a lot of conspiracy theories. This is because there are a lot of conspiracies. Why so many; well, a society that ostracizes anyone who points out conspiracies against the public clears the way for those who want to engage in them. There have been an amazing number of those in recent years.
The weird naturopaths as you call them are a curious example to pick. Many of the things that happened with COVID vaccines were being described as conspiracy theories mere months before they actually happened. For example vaccine passports may have used QR codes on a phone rather than the (real, existing) Gates Foundation proposal for "quantum dot" tattoos, but that's a trivial difference in the grand scheme of things. The core of the idea - that people would be forced to take vaccines by giving everyone unforgeable marks - was correct.
The denominator would be the number of reasonably popular conspiracy theories out there.
Equating covid passports with injected microchips is weaksauce though. If a QR code on a smartphone is an "unforgeable mark", then so is every government record ever, including your id card. By the way, people are forced to take vaccines by exotic mechanisms known as *laws*, which are needed to implement something like covid passports. I'm with you that there's an ick factor and a slippery slope towards informal / unjustified use, but ultimately people were forced to take vaccines because most other people wanted them to.
I hadn't heard about the quantum dot proposal, seems pretty obvious that's where the conspiracy theories came from. Again, I agree with the ick factor and I really hope it's never implemented.
>I hadn't heard about the quantum dot proposal
Here's a link: https://news.rice.edu/news/2019/quantum-dot-tattoos-hold-vaccination-record
I'm not sure I'd call it a conspiracy. This looks quite open, a press release, not a secret cabal in hiding. (In retrospect, I think I vaguely recall seeing something about them in science news some years ago.) When I first saw the headline, my reaction was: Wait a minute, quantum dots? Aren't those usually things like cadmium selenide, which are rather toxic? In the press release they mention that these dots are a copper compound, so toxicity is much less of an issue.
Re the ick factor
Umm, why? Its just a record keeping device, driven by the fact that in undeveloped countries records tend to get lost more easily than in the 1st world.
Also, _most_ of medicine has an "ick" component, particularly for any new practice. Surgery looks gory. Blood transfusion looks vampirish. Transplants look Frankenstinian.
I think of "ick", of disgust, as folk microbiology. It is better than _not_ having an "ick" reaction to actions that could spread pathogens, but it isn't as good as _actual_ microbiology.
The conspiracy is that (a) Bill Gates or the Gates foundation are actually doing this, as opposed to thinking about doing it (b) not doing it at the behest of a government, but out of their own initiative and in secret (c) it's a compound actually added to the vaccine itself. Let alone the confusing idea that this is some microchip they use to control you.
Of course the reasonable version of the theory sounds reasonable. The whole point is that it's *not* a secret cabal doing this against your will.
Eh, there's something weird happening in this thread whereby you "debunk" me calling something a conspiracy theory by changing the facts claimed by the conspiracy to a more innocent version. Classic motte and bailey.
Believing some conspiracy theories is better than believing in none.
Is that a conspiracy theory?
But this was never a conspiracy theory. To be a conspiracy theory, it first has to be a *theory*, which in common usage means something widely suspected of being true but not known to be true. It also has to be a *conspiracy*, which by law is an agreement to commit a crime - common usage may stretch that one to things that the community in question generally believes to be Seriously Evil even if nobody has enacted a statute yet.
The FAA's nonsense here isn't criminal, though it may be tortious. It's not something generally considered Seriously Evil. And it's not a theory, having jumped directly from something almost nobody suspected to something everyone paying attention knew was true (even if we don't all agree about whether it is tortious or otherwise mildly evil).
There's good reason to be extra suspicious of claims that meet both the "conspiracy" and "theory" label, which mostly don't apply to this sort of bureaucratic unpleasantness.
Well, in fairness, I think the conspiracy theory Nobody is talking about is that there is a widespread coordinated effort to do this to every major institution, and there has been considerable gaslighting trying to convince us that it isn’t true.
Common interest and environment is not conspiracy. It doesn't require "coordination" for the leadership of Harvard to say "We're going to face a shitstorm of controversy and protest if we don't hire a DEI czar and give them free reign; who has time for that?", and for the leadership of Stanford to come to the same conclusion. Nor does it require coordination for the students of Harvard and Stanford to both incite controversy if they see their school's leadership as insufficiently woke in its approach to DEI.
Common interest and environment leads to groupthink, whether or not there are Secret Masters telling the group what to think. And groupthink gets you all the rest. Accusations of "conspiracy!" are emotionally satisfying, but they make the accusers look foolish.
Maybe we need a new word for the case where they’re all doing something skeevy (out of common interest and groupthink) but they all deny that they’re doing it (out of common interest and groupthink).
You know the old saying: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is common interest and groupthink.
"Groupthink" pretty much is that word. I get that you're concerned with collective action and not just collective thinking, but we don't generally talk about groupthink until the groupthinkers have demonstrated it through action.
“Groupthink” doesn’t capture the gaslighting that the stuff we see going on with our own eyes isn’t really happening. I think that aspect of the current era is what suggests conspiracy to many.
I accept that it’s just part of the current groupthink that denying it is good and effective . But more central examples of “groupthink” are those in which it just never occurs to the group thinkers that anybody would disagree.
Researchers preventing use of their data for polygenic risk screening may be in violation of NIH funding agreements if they were funded by the NIH, which undoubtedly many will be.
NIH now requires that data be generally made available
https://oir.nih.gov/sourcebook/intramural-program-oversight/intramural-data-sharing/2023-nih-data-management-sharing-policy
Their research was publicly funded and the NIH generally requires publicly funded data is publicly available.
I should add a caveat that perhaps the researchers would argue that only have the obligation to provide data in its raw form--im not sure about that--but at the least, if it's published, it should be provided in a form that justifies the publication.
There must also be various safeguards for protecting subject anonymity, dual use tech, etc, and certainly there's risky gain-of-function research which none of us want to be made generally available.
But I don't think researchers are entitled to put arbitrary conditions on the use of their data just so its use can be confined to their own arbitrary philosophical beliefs about embryo selection.
See also https://sharing.nih.gov/genomic-data-sharing-policy/about-genomic-data-sharing
Hmmm, while the NIH genomic data usage policy doesn't necessarily give researchers discretion on use to their data, usages do have to be approved by the NIH. And who knows what the government's philosophical beliefs about embryo selection will be!
If you can't argue against hereditarianism, just block their research.
The story of the statue in #50:
"Are you not happy, King Midas?" Hermes asked. "You have all the gold you could ever want!"
"Oh, curse my gold!" sobbed King Midas. "Give me back my little daughter and I shall never long for gold again!"
"Very well, O King," replied Hermes, "I will do so, but first, you must do me a service."
"Anything!"
"There is a terrible monster called the Medusa, in the form of a woman with writhing serpents on her head. All she looks upon are instantly turned to stone. Many heroes have attempted to kill her, and all have failed. But with your golden touch, you can sneak up on her and turn her to gold. I will take you to her now."
King Midas agreed, and Hermes took him to where the Medusa was. As silently and cautiously as he could, the King tiptoed up to the Medusa, reached out his hand and touched her... and the monster turned into a magnificent golden statue. The people were grateful to Midas for freeing them from the monster, but he cared not; all he wanted was his daughter back. Hermes kept his promise; he took away the King's golden touch and gave him back his daughter, and Midas lived happily ever after.
I thought that the image depicted a mutual kill: Midas turned Medusa to gold; Medusa turned Midas to stone, simultaneously.
Not only does the image depict a stone Midas, but he's in front of her, looking at her face.
"I'm so hard now."
(I stole that one.)
OK, how's this then: King Midas agrees to kill Medusa, knowing that he himself will be turned to stone in the process, on the condition that after he's dead, Hermes will bring his daughter back to life? Then the King's grieving daughter has the Medusa/Midas statue transported to her palace, where it is discovered many centuries later.
I like this one. No only a better fit for the picture, but a better story.
Why would anyone care that Medusa is dead? They still can't go to that island because of Stheno and Euryale, and it's not like they're one third of the way to making the island habitable because those two are immortal.
This "links for [month] [year]" series is great mainly because Scott can write about basically whatever the fuck he wants.
However, I think we could get even more quality if we ramp up the freedom even more. If Scott sees a quote he likes, he should be able to let everyone see it. There's a gold mine of quotes in the new "best of Lesswrong" series https://www.lesswrong.com/leastwrong
Obviously there's constraints here. e.g. if he references Unsong too frequently, there's risk that a lot of people will leave due to the cringe self-promotion (even though Unsong is free just like HPMOR).
Somewhere around here I have an SQLite database wherein I scraped all quotes from the old rationality quotes posts LW used to do along with their upvote ratings. I'll have to do something with that one of these days...
35. Things unexpectedly named after people. Church Street in Elmira NY which, even though it has five churches, was named after Mr. Church. Also, Pink Schoolhouse Road south of Canton NY was not named for the color of the schoolhouse, but instead after Mr. Pink, who was the schoolteacher.
The Earl of Sandwich plus Lord and Lady Douchebag
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C6XF4RxU7xQ
Two fictional examples, both sounding ridiculous: the WB show Smallville tried to tell us that Smallville was named after founder Henry Small, as opposed to (in reality) being named as a counterpart to Metropolis. NOT BUYING IT.
Obscure old-person entry: in the 1970/80s show Trapper John MD (sequel to MASH, but for copyright reasons, sequel to the book, not the TV show), the hospital is named Riverside Hospital. Because of where it's located? No: because the founding benefactor was the Riverside family, including the vaguely-Frank-Burns-ish regular character Dr. Charles Riverside.
Night City, the setting of the Cyberpunk games, is named after its founder Richard Night.
As far as nominative determinism goes in the DC universe, that has to be the most minor example.
I do want to know whether "Batman" was derived from the British "batman". I picture some American reading the word and thinking "that sounds so cool" and then learning what it actually means and being incredibly disappointed, and then vowing on the grave of his parents that no one will ever be that disappointed again!
Longyearbyen in Svalbard is named after John Longyear, rather than being a reference to the length of the days and nights above the arctic circle.
This part from #9 blew my mind: "Almost all countries in Africa have higher death rates from obesity than in Western Europe and the USA"
I suppose it makes sense if we consider that food (including high-caloric-density, processed food) is a lot cheaper than medical care (hello Baumol, my old friend!). So, I can see a scenario in which a poor-ish country is just rich enough for some people to afford a lot of processed food and to get fat, but then those people can't afford/obtain medical care for any associated diseases, and so they die at higher rates than people in rich countries do, even though rich countries obviously have much higher obesity rates.
Is this true, or is there something else to it?
This is true and I would go even further: only *some* rich countries like the US have much higher obesity rates. In other rich countries (e.g. here in Switzerland) obesity is actually much lower, on top of having better health care.
I 100% believe you that Switzerland has much lower obesity rates than the US does, for many reasons.
I'm less convinced that Switzerland has lower obesity rates than literally every country in Africa, including desperately poor and unstable countries like the DRC. I'm not saying it can't be so, stranger things have happened, but I would like to see some data.
I don't want to see data badly enough to go digging for it (sorry), but I can attest to some related facts by comparing countries I've actually lived in: Chile has both higher obesity and worse healthcare than Switzerland. I expect something similar to be true for many (not all) African countries.
Our World in Data had Switzerland at 21% obese, higher than any country in sub-saharan Africa except South Africa (The African nations on the Mediterranean all had higer obesity).
I do wonder just how much foreign aid is shipping food and giving it away vs paying doctors to treat patients.
It's much simpler than that: death rates are just generally high in most African countries, this just happens to pick out one group which we don't associate with Africa. Your death rate for any given age or characteristic will be much higher than the Western baseline, so even with lower obesity rates the overall higher death rates make that easy to achieve.
I wonder what happens if you measure it as percentage of deaths instead of deaths per capita.
I think the data is just wrong, or "deaths attributed to obesity" is measured inconsistently.
The data here https://ourworldindata.org/obesity is inconsistent with the data here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_rate ... for instance the CIA Fact Book tells us that only 1% of the Ethiopian population is obese but Our World In Data claims that 3.8% of deaths are due to obesity.
Are you sure? Our World In Data is showing me 14,961 people died of obesity in Ethiopia in 2019, which was only 2% of their deaths. Both the Wikipedia page and Our World In Data show an obesity rate of 4.5% for Ethiopia in 2016.
On 12 (reactions to Supreme Court affirmative action ruling), I don't deny that some respondents might be misunderstanding the facts of the case, but there are certainly plausible reasons why younger blacks might be genuinely in favor:
1) Racial preferences lead to racial resentment, which is bad for everybody
2) Savvy employers have wised up to affirmative action and so might (rationally?) discount the school admission of a black applicant; banning affirmative action is one step towards getting away from this. This point in particular might be more relevant to younger blacks at the lots-of- job-applications stage of their careers.
3) The affirmative action system which was struck down favored certain categories of black people, mostly the kids of middle or upper class ones from good school districts. Moving to zip code admissions, which colleges are still allowed to do, will give an awful lot of black people a better chance of getting into a decent school.
(Are they? I hope so - it'd better handle the problem affirmative action was implemented to address - but money rules everything in this world and universities may value "not giving out more financial aid" a lot more than they value diversity, and use the SCOTUS decision as cover)
I have my doubts about schools using something like zip codes. Many people seem to think that Ivy schools were using AA as cover for bringing in rich immigrants. They get the benefits of bringing in minorities without actually bringing in underperforming or poor families.
Harvard could easily give preferences for poor students and always could, but managed to imply that they were while instead bringing in a different class of rich students.
> Moving to zip code admissions, which colleges are still allowed to do, will give an awful lot of black people a better chance of getting into a decent school.
Won't people simply buy an "official" residence in the ghetto that they can put on their kids' college applications, then? (Can't wait to see the knock-on effects of that particular distortion on the property market.)
Hmm, would they even need to prove they own or rent a residence, or could they just claim that they do on the application? Seems easy to game regardless of how you do it. Easiest I can think of is to pay $200 for a landlord to vouch for you.
>(Are they? I hope so - it'd better handle the problem affirmative action was implemented to address - but money rules everything in this world and universities may value "not giving out more financial aid" a lot more than they value diversity, and use the SCOTUS decision as cover)
It's not just money though
The poorest black people are the ones least capable of getting through college
"Good school districts" are the places where the smartest black people tend to live
People of any race with an IQ of 85 have no business being at anything beyond a community college
Having most of your black students drop out, or having to engage in even more gratuitous affirmative action in grading/passing students to avoid this, and having ever less capable graduates on average, is a pain in the ass compared to just letting in the smarter ones who cause less headaches in this regard
Approximately 38% of Americans graduate college. IQ is intentionally set up where 100 is the average. This implies that college graduates are, or should be, above 100 IQ (if intelligence alone is the reason people go, though it's often not).
You don't need to go to college at all to have a good life or make a good living. People with 85 IQs can do okay in the modern economy. Most likely they should not even be looking at community college, though. That's a waste of money in a country where even inflated numbers of people going to college doesn't get us to 50%. Nobody should start out life in debt for a degree they either don't get or never use.
>1) Racial preferences lead to racial resentment, which is bad for everybody
I would bet every cent I own that this isn't the primary factor.
>This point in particular might be more relevant to younger blacks at the lots-of- job-applications stage of their careers.
Well, not going to college is also going to hurt their job chances, so this can't possibly be a primary factor either.
Care to provide an alternative explanation then?
Did you click the link? It wasn't just the healine binary question, there were questions exploring reasons.
37% of respondents 18-39 believed that abolishing affirmative action would make it *easier* for black people to attend university (62% 18-39 think the SCOTUS decision was a good thing for comparison)
This is simply being too dumb and/or too ignorant to understand how affirmative action works
48. The Mappa Mundi text is actually in Venetian/Italian, not Latin.
Anyone else surprised that the map is oriented south=up? When did north=up become the convention in Europe (or elsewhere)?
Also enjoyed noticing that there is a mention of Prester John in the comments near the Southern tip of Africa.
It definitely confused me at first. Wikipedia says south-pointing compasses were common at that time, and Fra Mauro had worked a lot on navigaitonal stuff. And there are a lot of early maps (Peutinger Table, T-O maps) with east at the top.
Yes, since the sun rose in the East for a long time it was considered the direction to orient yourself by: thus the name "Oriental" for eastern lands.
Other way around. Eastern is the original meaning. Western is "Occidental".
That is true -- "oriens" and "occidens" are Latin for "being born" and "setting down".
9. It still doesn't follow that quite the similar fertility translation would have happened in China without 1CP, since China would not have otherwise been as exposed to the general West-oriented family planning and fertility control discourse as Taiwan due to the Great Firewall and general greater avoidance of Western memes. Taiwan also had its own top-down family planning policies aiming for 2-child families (https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2020/06/14/2003738180) - of course the means were softer than in PRC, but it's very possible that it took 1CP to achieve in PRC the same as was achieved through softer family planning policies and Western meme exposure to environmentalism etc. in Taiwan.
The One-Child Policy started in 1979, so I'm not sure the Great Firewall is relevant here. It sounds like the Taiwanese version started in the early 70s, but I'm not as sure what kind of Western cultural exposure the general Taiwanese population was getting at the time.
I just meant to use the Great Firewall as an example of the lesser flow of information from West to China through the traditional soft power channels.
2. Wikipedia's source for the "Angelos" explanation is as follows:
"In May 1900, papal physician Giuseppe Lapponi indicated that he had read in the Vatican archives..."
But it seems nobody has subsequently been able to confirm Lapponi's alleged discovery. (The conspiracy theory is that Vatican archivists are hiding the evidence because they want us to keep believing in the angelic miracle.)
https://www.famigliacristiana.it/articolo/la-casa-di-loreto-e-la-parte-che-manca-a-nazaret.aspx
http://www.perfettaletizia.it/archivio/servizi/loreto/scheda.html
8. I don't understand what point about plagiarism literalbanana is trying to make here. (I'm not on Twitter, so I may be missing thread context.) Anyone care to explain?
11. An interesting irony of the Psalmazanar story is that there were in fact genuine records of Formosan languages in Europe at the time. The Dutch missionary Daniel Gravius had introduced European script to Formosa in the seventeenth century and translated portions of the Bible into the Siraya language. (The peoples of southern Formosa continued to use the European script in their contracts with the Chinese in bilingual documents until the early 19th century, the so-called "Sinkang manuscripts.")
> 8. I don't understand what point about plagiarism literalbanana is trying to make here. (I'm not on Twitter, so I may be missing thread context.) Anyone care to explain?
The point is that the plagiarism is like Al Capone's tax evasion. The real reason lots of plagiarists should be fired is that their research is sloppy or fraudulent, but that's more abstract and harder to prove than just showing some duplicated paragraphs from someone else's work.
Ouch! I'm kind-of sympathetic, but this relies on the people _selecting_ the sloppy and/or fraudulent researchers (privately, without due process) to be accurate and not too biased in who they then get fired for plagiarism. I'd rather see the more serious offenses directly attacked, even if it takes more work. I'm not thrilled to have the academic equivalent of more-or-less dead letter laws nominally in place, to be used when someone with the power to do the equivalent of prosecuting sees fit to unearth them.
I think the point is that there's a close correlation between "lots of copy-paste in the write-up of the research" and "research is sloppy or fraudulent" - both are associated with the underlying "lazy person who doesn't want to do all the work required".
So by catching the first one, you indirectly catch lots of the second.
Many Thanks! I agree that there is a correlation. Note, though, that in this very post there is an example of a _non_plagiarist fraud,
>11: George Psalmanazar (1679 - 1763) was “a Frenchman who claimed to be the first native of Formosa (today Taiwan) to visit Europe”. He explained away his white skin by saying that Taiwanese people lived underground. Psalmanazar invented an incredibly elaborate fake Taiwanese language, mythology, and custom
Thanks for shouting out our piece on Scaling Phage Therapy!
A minor correction: It was published by us (Asimov Press), not Works in Progress.
For point 13, I can just picture someone at A16Z asking ChatGPT "Is AI interpretability still a problem?" and ChatGPT just responding, "Yep! Everything is OK with that, chief!"
10 is about a claim that psi effects (don’t) decline in individuals over time, not that they (didn’t) decline in the research with better methods. Completely different thing.
After actually reading the paper I have to disagree with this, and I think Scott's statement is correct.
Also from that map:
"In this island of Hibernia, which is most extraordinarily fertile, it is said that there is a water in which, if you immerse wood, after a while that part of the wood which is in the earth becomes iron, whilst that in the water becomes stone, and that above the water remains wood. And if one believes this thing, one can also believe in the lake of Andaman."
Infinite gold hack left as an exercise for the reader.
And:
"If someone finds incredible certain of the previously-unheard things which I have noted above, he should not submit them to the judgement of his own reason but rather list them amongst the secrets of Nature. We know only a small part of the innumerable things that Nature does, and those that we know by constant experience are not really held in consideration - even if they are admirable - whilst those which seem to us to be unusual we do not believe. This occurs because Nature goes beyond the human intellect; and those who do not have an elevated intellect cannot grasp even the things of constant experience, let alone those which are unusual. Thus, those who want to understand must first believe in order to then understand"
9. I've seen a suggestion that Africa has more need of aid with diabetes and heart disease than with tropical diseases.
So effective altruists should be buying sugar-free candy for Africans instead of bed nets? Big news if true.
I have no idea how helpful sugar-free candy is. It can make some people quite sick.
In addition, I have no idea what the most cost effective intervention for diabetes heart disease, and maybe cancer would be.
My gut reaction is that in the West I'd say semaglutide or something similar is probably the most cost-effective way to save lives lost due to diabetes (and similar obesity-related illnesses). Maybe that's the best route in Africa as well, although I don't know if other health interventions would be more useful/cost-effective. Are there simple lifestyle changes/habits that could be changed? Are there cheaper medications that would be helpful if they were more widely used? I don't know.
I know this is tongue in cheek, but: Only if obesity and diabetes are more tractable than tropical diseases, which is unlikely given that problems which still impact rich people are likely to be difficult to solve
Semaglutide (as soon as it gets cheap enough).
What don't they need help with?
I suspect this depends a lot on what you mean by "need of aid". If you mean, diabetes and heart disease cause more loss of life and health than tropical diseases, that is extremely plausible, with or without high obesity. If you mean, aid will do more to decrease deaths if targeted to diabetes and heart disease, that's less clear, since it's harder to prevent death from diabetes or heart disease.
It might also depend on whether you say "sub-Saharan Africa" - I think the Arab world is high obesity, and something like 10% of the population of Africa is Egyptian Arabs.
Psalmanazar reminds me of Princess Caraboo... actually Mary Baker of Devonshire, who in 1817 somewhat similarly claimed to be a princess from Javasu ... though she didn't go to quite the same degree of trouble in inventing a fictional alphabet.
"Claim: nine people in a family in Scotland have a mutation in the RIMS1 gene, which makes them go blind in their twenties and also apparently adds 20 IQ points."
There are some theories that torsion dystonia is something similar. It's a low penetrance genetic disorder ~exclusive to Ashkenazim that causes (in the unlucky ~30% who develop it) painful and progressive muscle contractures, and also might have a 10 point IQ gain compared to matched controls. The studies on these are really old, and I'm not sure if they've...been redone, or replicated? As someone whose areas of psychology/psychiatry/genetics often lead me down "needing to read a ton of 60s/70s studies" rabbit holes, my default response to stuff claimed from 60s/70s studies (as the torsion dystonia thing is) is "oh God". Not "no, that can't be true" -- "oh God, I hope you're right, but I know how those guys think and I'm not optimistic".
Some other later studies on childhood dystonias suggest lower average IQs, or impairments in particular cognitive skills. TD is not the be-all-end-all of childhood dystonias, so, who knows. (Secondary dystonias, i.e. not a purely dystonic syndrome, are more associated. You'd expect this in general; secondary or syndromic developmental disorders are very unlike their more classical forms. To avoid turning this into a rant about syndromic autism, I'll just gesture at the direction that we're currently diagnosing a whole lot of genetic disorders as autism when they probably aren't.)
Re: the RIMS1 gene
I roll to disbelieve.
First, it's from the dark ages. 2007? most of the resources related to genetic data didn't even exist then so this next bit is going to be a pain. They give no coordinate vs any human reference genome. (This is why i hate papers by protein guys, they think coordinates within a protein are immutable)
It claims the genetic change is Arg844His in the RIMS1 gene... I wish I could explain easily to non genetics people how imprecise that description is. Lets start trying to translate it into a modern reference.
Arg844His, so at the 884th position in the protein produced by the RIMS1 gene it goes from Arg(R) to His(H)
Looking at all the modern isoforms of the gene... none have an Arg(R) amino at position 844
Fortunately they do give an NM number.
NM_014989
At the time of publication the accepted version of the gene was NM_014989.2
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NM_014989.2 (PRI 20-AUG-2006)
But that version of the protein has E(Glu) at position 844
Maybe they were painfully out of date and were using the older version of the protein.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NM_014989.1 (PRI 05-OCT-2003)
But this still isn't right, that version of the protein has T(Thr) at position 844
So they got the basics wrong to start off.
Maybe the suplemental data will include the sanger sequence from around the site... nope
So they had the wrong sequence for the protein, from the paper it's not straightforwardly possible to work out what mutation they're even talking about because their addressing doesn't match the NM code they reference.
their idea of where it was in the protein was wrong and even the association with vision problems was probably wrong.
Honestly you'd be better trusting a hypothesis smeered on the mens room wall.
Thanks for the thorough explanation!
#12: Regarding so many young blacks being against affirmative action, has their voice been heard in the media? What are some of their arguments?
> Vincent Geloso’s commentary
I can't tell you how great it is to be able to read this whole thing without having a twitter (X) account. Twitter links appear to only go to single tweets now, so you can see the first tweet but not any replies/chains. And tools like nitter seem not to work anymore. (I struggle to express how much I despise the fact that large amounts of important public commentary happens there. How the hell did so many people look at a platform that, originally, had an extremely tight character limit per tweet, and decide that this is the way to communicate long, detailed, nuanced issues???)
Also, speaking of X, why is the entry between 36 and 37 simply numbered as "X"?
This is nitpicky but you got #22 about the FAA slightly wrong. The code words and the biographical questionnaire were two different things.
There were 2 different tests for qualification, an eight hour cognitive test and a biographical questionnaire. The biographical part was multiple choice and eliminated 90% of potential applicants.
The National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE) had people telling their members exactly what to answer on it to get through that screening.
The code words were a different thing about an algorithm that was being used to scan resumes and put ones that had certain buzzwords at the top. Someone formerly at HR gave the list to NBCFAE so their members could game the algorithm.
On #23, I have my doubts that buzzwords are the best indicator considering the power of a social movement like this, since political lexicons can change all the time. “Wokeness” is now a hackneyed term signaling conservative backlash much as “political correctness” became in the 90s and early 2000s. It seems to me that a measure of institutional control like “how many corporations have DEI departments and what kind of powers do they wield” is far more revealing of the state of success of this movement than use of cultural signifier terms in articles. Use of terms in the NYT assuredly isn’t all just noise, either, but I think that it’s more revealing of the cultural face rather than the sociopolitical belly.
Many thanks for the link drop in #40, I think that many here will find much of what I wrote about on Azerbaijan interesting and relevant to some recent discussions in the community here!
The use of buzzwords is a pretty good measure: for example, the New York Times ran 8.8 times as many articles including the word "racism" in 2020 as in 2011. It's unlikely that there was 8.8 times as much racism in 2020 as in 2011, so that suggests a moral panic, a media campaign, or the like.
One methodological issue is that new words come into fashion. Rozado has an excellent list of 2010s fad words, but less so of 2020 fad words. For example, "equity" -- one of the fad words of this decade -- is not included, nor is "racial reckoning." (Equity also raises the issue of what to do with words that have non-woke meanings: the New York Times back in non-woke 2011 ran a huge number of articles mentioning "equity" relating to the stock market or home ownership.)
If anybody can think of how to handle this problem of how to fairly incorporate new buzzwords to measure whether wokeness is declining, Professor Rozado would appreciate hearing your suggestion.
> It's unlikely that there was 8.8 times as much racism in 2020 as in 2011, so that suggests a moral panic, a media campaign, or the like.
To be fair, it could also be that the NYT circa 2011 was racist, in that they failed to adequately cover all the other racism in the world.
I think the exercise-depression discourse is all messed up. It’s been tainted by drug metaphors from people who already exercise and don’t do drugs. Terms like “runners high” etc make it seem like an immediate payoff, and just in my personal life and on the internet I’ve seen more people lamenting the fact that they recently started exercising and it hasn’t helped at all. Combine that with the people who see studies like this and immediately conclude that anti depressants are a scam.
Excercise is the low hanging fruit of long term goal setting for people. It requires minimal financial or time investment, and there are no special skills required of you to get started. Literally any person can get fit. It’s simple, but it’s fucking *hard*. Setting and working towards a long term goal, especially a difficult one like gaining muscle mass, is always going to boost self esteem. I’m sure learning guitar has similar effects.
This is why even if anti depressants are half as effective as exercise, you can still make a good case for them for the same reason you can make a case for them over learning to paint water color to treat your depression.
Tbf, obviously exercise has positive mental effects in and of itself, but I think they’re greatly exaggerated and the benefit is mostly in the long term.
> “why should we force people to stay dependent on expensive, inconvenient, and side-effect medication when we can just not do this?”
Because we can't. At least not yet. Polygenic selection is a fantastic idea with a pretty nebulous implementation and hitherto unknown long-term risks. Medication is a pretty crappy idea with a proven success ratio and well-understood long-term risks. I think that polygenic selection is definitely very promising, but switching to it wholesale is premature. We're not playing around with software here, but with the human genome, which is going to be a lot harder to restore from backup.
I'll ask this question here since it is somewhat relevant to your comment even though I'm not addressing it to you directly.
Decades ago I was taught in Health Class that sperms racing to impregnate an egg was part of ensuring, or at least improving the odds, that the sperm that got there first was a healthy sperm. Is there something to that or was Coach Daniels wrong?
It's basically correct, but "healthy" in this case doesn't mean anything more than "undamaged." A damaged sperm wouldn't be able to reach an egg and fertilize it, which is good since damaged sperm contain damaged DNA and would result in a fetus with genetic defects.
But that's the extent of the selection effect. In a race between undamaged sperm, there's no mechanism to ensure the one with "better" genes wins out. It's not like the genes associated with faster running speed would affect how fast a sperm swims.
34. Call me a mass disabling event denialist. Unfortunately, the SSA doesn't list Long COVID as a category in its annual report. So we don't know how many SSA disability applications for Long COVID were processed or approved. However, In 2021, SSA field office applications increased somewhat after falling for the previous eight years. It's worth noting that field office applications rose ~170% between 2001 and 2011, peaking in 2011 (Full disclosure, I don't know what caused this peak). But between 2012 and 2020 SSA FO applications fell back to 2004 levels before inclining upward again in 2021. As of the end of 2023, the raw numbers were at 2005 levels...
But here's the kicker — given US population growth, the current per capita rate of SSA FO applications is 17% below the 2000 rate.
A quick eyeball estimate of the data suggests that there were approximately 1.25 million MORE claims from 2021-2023 than if the decline in field office claims had continued at its previous rate. Since the US population has not grown significantly in that period, the per capita application rate *has* increased during that period. Is this a Long COVID signal in the macro data?
If we assume that all the apparent 1.25 million difference was due to applications for Long COVID disability, and if we assume that roughly 230 million Americans were infected w/ COVID as 1Q 23 (Per CDC, 70% of blood bank donors had the N protein marker, indicating that they had been infected), then *at max* only half a percent of the infected are applying for disability.
I presented a subthread on this in my 2024 epidemiological week 2 update on Twitter. Pretty charts and graphs there...
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1746755913804075100?s=20
> Many say that on this island there is a lake in which, if you immerse iron, it becomes gold. I say this just to do justice to the testimony of many people.
This sounds like it was written by someone named Trumpius Maximus or something.
I understand (I think) why this blog doesn't allow us to "like" or otherwise "react" to posts but it means I am sometimes at a loss how to respond to posts that (like this one) simply make me laugh.
Seconded!
Thirded, and the post is still making me laugh a day later.
If I'm delighted enough, I get my phone out and like it on the app.
Re: 34. Are we confident the increase in disability isn't due to fraud / poor audit of claims? Lots of anti-fraud processes in the government got suspended intentionally (anti-eviction rule by the CDC) or unintentionally (pandemic checks fraud). I wouldn't be surprised if people simply started applying for disability under the guise of Long COVID and the government simply hasn't audited their claims properly just yet.
In Czech Republic the number of people with some form of disability didn't change at all since COVID started: https://tn.nova.cz/zpravodajstvi/clanek/476517-stat-chce-setrit-na-invalidech-zlobi-se-urednice-v-cesku-klesa (418,983 in Dec 2019 => 412,747 in Sep 2022).
The US SSA data paints a very different from the UK ONS data. I crunched the numbers in a reply to 34 above. There's been a slight uptick in SSA field office initial claims since 2021, but if that's all due to Long COVID, it doesn't look like a mass disabling event to me! However, with US population growth over the past 24 years, per capita, initial claims for SSA disability (as of the final quarter of 2023) are significantly below 2000 rates.
If the formula is redistribution + liberalization, how did Great Britain avoid needing mass stealing to kickstart their economic development?
Indeed, in Great Britain the "mass stealing" went in the other direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
I suppose the answer is that Britain didn't have to compete against other countries that had industrialized earlier.
There's bit in the Wealth of Nations of how aristocrats set the stage for a market society by trading their inheritance for "silver shoe buckles," which strikes me as an unforced redistribution of land. There really are no new ideas!
45 -- The scrolls burnt in the Vesuvius eruption seem to be from a home library of someone who might have been an Epicurean (that is, you know, a follower of Epicurus, not a devotee of fancy food) At least the recovered portion seems consistent with that. If they are Epicurean works, that might be pretty significant as much of the Epicurean writing of antiquity was destroyed by religious authorities who made a concerted effort to stamp it out. And also tried to smear Epicurus and his followers as some kind of ultra sensual hedonists when that's not at all what they actually meant by pursuit of pleasure. If the library turns out to be mostly Epicurean it might be a treasure trove for those of us who recognize Epicurean thought as major contribution to western history.
I would be amused if it turned out the documents revealed that Epicureans actually were heavily sensual hedonist, if only to once again observe the cycle of "nuh uh" "ya huh" "nuh uh" again. But generally I'm just really excited following this project, I find it extremely cool.
The idea that ancient philosophical works, and particularly the works of the Epicureans, were deliberately destroyed by religious authorities is a popular myth, but it has little historical evidence to back it up. Tim O'Neill has a great write up on this on his blog, but here's a relevant section:
>"...there is actually no evidence of any such “systematic” or even sporadic but extensive attempt at extinguishing ancient learning. And if this had happened as Grayling claims, we would indeed have plenty of such evidence. After all, it is not like the Christian emperors of the fourth to sixth centuries were shy about letting everyone know of which ideas, people and works they disapproved. Grayling points to Theodosius as the point of origin of this imagined campaign of destruction, and Theodosius’ laws and edicts as collected in the Theodosian Code certainly do contain some references to books and writings he decreed were to be found, gathered and destroyed. But these were the Christian writings of those deemed “heretics”, not pagan philosophers and playwrights...Similarly Theodosius and other emperors of the time condemned divination and astrology and ordered astrological books to be burned (see C Th. 9.16.12). But nowhere in this compendium or in any subsequent collections of imperial edicts do we find any injunctions to burn pagan learning. Nor do we find any references to any such orders anywhere else, even in the writings of enthusiastic anti-pagan Christian polemicists, who celebrated any examples of the humiliation of their former persecutors. Grayling says “they smashed a lot of temples” and this is more or less true (though often wildly overstated), but it does not follow that they also deliberately destroyed pagan learning as well, for the reasons discussed in more detail below."
https://historyforatheists.com/2020/03/the-great-myths-8-the-loss-of-ancient-learning/
" Claim: a study finds that completely anonymous comments sections are bad for discourse, real-name comments sections are better, and consistent-pseudonym comments sections (like Substack) are best of all! It doesn’t surprise me that consistent-pseudonym comments are no worse than real-name ones, but I don’t understand why they would be better, and I don’t feel like this link really explains it."
Best guess that isn't just selection effects: You can get a surprising amount of signal from a real name. Also, sites that use real name identification are much, much more likely to include a location and/or small profile pic of the person commenting next to the picture, so you can see if, for example, Mike Smith from Greatlakesdrive Michigan is a sunglass and MAGA hat wearing boomer who takes his profile shot from inside his pick-up truck, and formulate a lot of conclusions about his entire personality and political ideology that isn't implied just by a pseudonym. So you can see how comment sections would sort themselves tribally very, very quickly
^^ this. Pseudonyms allow us to larp as public intellectuals, so we do our best work. Complete anonymity prevents the hope of reputation.
Oh... And if everyone knew I was Joe Schmoe from Nowheresville, I also couldn't larp as a public intellectual. That makes sense. Prophets get honored everywhere except their home, but if no one knows where my home is...
Re 36, the most obvious thing to me is selection effect: the only people who are comfortable broadcasting their political opinions under their real name (beyond their social circle) are either people with entirely boring opinions or people who don't mind if everyone who Googles them finds out all their opinions. This rules out the best commenters on many blogs.
(Of course, our host is the last person who needs anyone to mention that hypothesis.)
Is no one going to talk about #17? I was quite surprised, that was fun.
#26 (religious versions of LEGO)
"But my favorite is Mormonism with - wait for it - Brick’em Young (h/t @seanw_m)"
/groan
"(also, no offense to Islam, but the Kaaba is the most boring possible building to make a LEGO set for, sorry)"
True that, but there's plenty of magnificent Muslim architecture that would make awesome LEGO sets. How about the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, or Alhambra, or the Great Mosque of Djenne? Collect them all!
The Taj Mahal too!
( Does the Alhambra get an extra endorsement from crystallographers for all the 2-D lattices? :-) )
There already is a real (not knockoff) LEGO Taj Mahal set! Behold: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/taj-mahal-21056
Many Thanks!
Alas, it's not a spaceship, but that's OK. A spaceship can crash into it, and then the minifigs can build a new and cooler spaceship from the combined wreckage!
" Sebastian Jensen at CSPI looks into the dysgenic hypothesis: are we getting dumber because more intelligent people are less likely to have children? Answer: this is happening more in poorer countries, less in richer ones. IQ decline per decade “ranges from as low as 0.01 points in the Estonia and Switzerland to 0.65 points in Panama, Romania, and North Macedonia”."
... I browsed the paper to see if the authors discuss the possible importance that some countries are still in the middle of the hierarchical-diffusion-of-low-fertility associated with being in the middle of the demographic transition (such as Turkey), compared to countries where the hierachical diffusion process is mostly finalised (such as Scandinavia). As far as I can see, they do not discuss if this could be important.
If it is important, the observed IQ decline in countries like Turkey (where poorly educated rural mothers still have more children than highly educated urban mothers) might taper off and become negligible if and when Turkey catch up with the roughly-same-low-fertility-across-all-regions-and-socioeconomic- groups characterizing Scandinavian countries. (Assuming here at least a weak correlation between urban/rural & low/high education level, and intelligence.)
You assume that this will happen, but it's not universal for developed countries including the US.
If you know of any country among the 193 countries and self-ruled territories in the world where there is not a long-term tendency for fertility to fall, please give me references. (Not a rhetorical question - I would be genuinely interested. I have seen perhaps 2-3 countries where the jury might still be out, but that's it.)
Also, if you know of any country where the internal process do not resemble hierarchical diffusion, i.e. educated urban women from ethnic majorities first reduce their fertility, less educated rural women from ethnic minorities last reduce their fertility, plesase give me references. I know of none.
Granted, once you reach below the magic number of 2.1. children on average per women, fertility at some point stabilises or starts to a limited extent to fluctuate up and down, sometimes reaching 2.1 an odd year or two, but it does not long-term reach 2.1. again. The US is no exception, according to the data I have seen. Last year registered by Our World in Data (2021), total fertility rate (TFR) in the US was 1.66 children per woman on average. It went below 2.1 children per woman in 1972.
Lord's cricket ground is named after a Mr. Lord not god or anything related to nobility or the House of Lords.
For #46, Gaza has a much higher literacy rate and is more urbanized. Gaza has higher human capital. They score better on PISA and other tests than than the average Indian. The Levant and the Ottoman Empire regions have historically always had more average wealth and income (average wages etc.) than India.
https://genderdata.worldbank.org/indicators/hd-hci-hlos/
So Ottoman >> Mughal? (They were both great Muslim cannon empire)
32: Is it possible that real-life incidents happen with semi-popular names like "Monica" and fictional incidents happen with oddball names like "Damien"? (At the very least, real-life incidents should happen more often with popular names, whereas there's no reason for this to be true in fiction, and maybe some reason for it to be false.)
If a very popular name is linked with something negative, we expect its popularity to crater, since most people will no longer want to give their kids that name. On the other hand, if a rare name is linked to something negative, but 1% of parents decide that it's cool anyway, the added boost in popularity from that 1% could be enough to make a difference.
Sudden peaks and troughs in a name's popularity are weird, and really do seem to be more about visibility than nature. Real-life incidents happen with very unfamiliar names all the time -- one of the biggest popularity spikes of the last decade was "Daleyza", a name invented by a Hispanophone reality TV star that immediately rocketed from zero to persistent popularity. ("Nevaeh" has a similar pattern, but is something people can independently derive more.) While presidential names haven't had meaningful baby impacts for decades, names of people associated with presidents can ("Melania" was a much more popular name just after Trump's election). The intensity of a spike doesn't seem much associated at all with how high-profile the event itself was, or how central the name was to the event.
It's hard to explain, but there seems to be something strongly vibes-based about name trends that grasps for the metaphor "collective unconsciousness". Names for given cohorts are *very similar* stylistically. A name which is right or wrong for a cohort can have substantial swings from coverage, and these can persist. The Stat Significant article actually understates the effect quite a bit -- it discusses more temporary spikes, but some of these last decades and produce super-popular juggernaut names. ("Madison" as a female name was invented as a joke for a now-forgotten 80s romcom.)
Plenty of people remember Splash!
Absolutely. Where I fell in love with Daryl Hannah!
(And breakthrough movie role for Tom Hanks. “Mr Mango on my shoulder…”)
Damien isn't really an oddball name, it's an ordinary alternative (more French) spelling of Damian, which was already on a big upswing in the 1970s. The release of The Omen seems to have made the Damien spelling more popular than Damian for a few years. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=damian+vs+damien
The other thing nobody is talking about in those plots is that after Regan's burst of post-Exorcist popularity it suddenly collapsed in 1980 and came back in the 1990s. I'm guessing that Regan suddenly sounded a lot like Reagan, and even if you were a Reagan supporter you probably wouldn't want everyone thinking you named your daughter after him.
In general, Americans aren't all that pop culture fad prone when it comes to baby names.
For example, I can recall when "Dylan" became a fashionable first name in the 1980s a couple of decades after Bob Dylan became famous.
Mostly, parents like names that are similar to but slightly different sounding from names that were in fashion a few years ago.
Laura Wattenberg has written about this pattern for years. Whether a name catches on is much more about whether it fits current name styles than whether the name comes from something positive or negative. Real-world events usually feature people whose names are 20-30 years out of date, while fictional events (particularly supernatural or fantasy ones) involve names invented by people who are involved in setting current styles.
One test she noted is that "final girls" from horror movies are less likely to produce baby name bumps than many other types of characters - but this is related to the fact that "final girls" often have names that are cutesy by means of being out-of-date.
https://namerology.com/2019/10/24/where-are-the-scream-queen-baby-names/
The history of land reform in China is pretty interesting. IIRC the Maoists took all the land away from the landlord class and gave it to the peasants, then reversed course and "collectivised" all the land, i.e. took it back from the peasants and established the Communist Party as a new and far more brutal landlord class. There's a bit about it in How Asia Works. Fascinating that the exact same thing apparently happened in Ethiopia.
Which always makes me laugh when self described maoists today say they want to kill the landlords and give land to the people
> Big age gap; older black people are mostly against, younger mostly for.
This is a little ambiguous; unclear whether it means "against affirmative action" or "against the ban on affirmative action".
How you possibly think that? The sentence before this is literally " black people approve of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to ban affirmative action at universities".
Almost no native English speakers with an IQ above 90 would not be able to tell that "against" means "against the supreme court's decision". Why would you not assume that the next sentence would be talking about the exact same thing as the previous sentence when nothing else was talked about in the interim?
This seems unnecessarily harsh.
Calm down. It was ambiguous.
Apart from the incredibly condescending way you made your point, you also implicitly dismissed all non-native speakers as irrelevant and not worth the effort to write clear sentences for.
Your post fails on kindness, according to Peasy on truth, and frankly I wouldn't even call it necessary.
24. Yep, people are thinking of Alzheimer's as a prion disease in the sense that it involves misfolded proteins encouraging other copies of the protein to misfold. This doesn't mean the prions are contagious (unless you inject them straight into someone's brain)—we don't think people with Alzheimer's are catching it like mad cow disease, just that Aβ and tau go prion-y over time, as you say.
Lots of neurodegenerative diseases probably act like this: there's a whole family of "tauopathies" that seem to be caused by tau protein acting like a prion. Some people think the important differences between these tauopathies are which neural network the prion starts spreading through first and what exact shape the prion templates. Here is a cool paper (with some good background in the intro) about how you can induce different neurodegenerative pathologies in mice by infecting them with different misfolded shapes of the very same tau protein: Sanders '14, doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2014.04.047. Other neurodegenerative diseases may have similar mechanisms but with different prions, like α-synuclein in Parkinson's.
There's definitely more to discover. If Aβ and tau are ready to go prion-y, why do they sometimes do it at age 40 and sometimes at 70 and sometimes not even at 90? Is it just a question of when an unfortunate spark starts the slow burn, or is it variation in the protein folding homeostasis machinery that keeps things under control better in some people than others? Are the prion aggregates best thought of as the cause of these diseases or as a symptom of an underlying protein folding problem? And once we figure all this out, what can we do to help?
A New York Magazine article about secularization in Iran that puts the 2020 survey into context:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/iran-secular-shift-gamaan.html
Also, a link to a PDF of the paper written about the survey that gives all of its results and explains how the survey was done:
https://gamaan.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GAMAAN-Iran-Religion-Survey-2020-English.pdf
The theory behind the study was that people would answer more honestly in an anonymous Internet-based poll than they would if the Iranian government could tell whom gave what answer.
The most important sentence:
> The sampling methods were multiple chain-referral sampling (or multiple virtual
snowball sampling) through social media (Telegram, Instagram, WhatsApp,
Twitter, and Facebook)
Without knowing who was passing this around and why, the whole survey seems pretty suspect.
Researchers who do snowball sampling are well-aware of the possibility of bias. The popular reporting of their paper probably doesn't dive deep into the methods section where they discuss how they attempted to correct for this, but they usually do make some good attempts.
Not my experience, unfortunately.
Nitpicks:
5. Isn't Ethiopia currently in a state of collapse due to the splintering of tribal groups? Feels weird to read about previous growth while ignoring what is going on now.
20. Doesn't it seem more likely that Panama, Romania and North Macedonia are decreasing in IQ due to classic drain brain/emigration than fertility effects?
32. Lolita is not negatively portrayed in the movie.
37. I doubt that the Uzbekistan National Baseball Team is a professional team.
I don't know whether "negatively" vs "positively" is the right question to be asking about Lolita, but it's fair to say that she is not a model of the sort of thing that most parents would want of their own daughter.
Besides, even Lolita wasn't actually named Lolita, she was Dolores. Lolita was a nickname.
Maybe it matters more whether the character is shown in a positive or negative situation than whether the character is judged positively or negatively.
And yes, Lolita is a diminutive form of Lola, which itself is a common infantile corruption* of Delores.
*the kind of situation where a very young child cannot quite pronounce an adult name or title--like "Beto" for Roberto, "Memo" for Guillermo, "Peggy" for Margaret, "Bubba" for brother, etc--and everyone in the family thinks it's cute and the name sticks.
> Lolita is not negatively portrayed in the movie.
No one names their kid Cain. But no one names their kid Abel either.
And yet, I worked with both a Kain and an Abel at the same time, at a relatively small company.
...did they get along?
Abel is a pretty popular name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel_(given_name)
>13: Claim: venture capital firm A16Z testified to the British House of Lords that AI interpretability has been “resolved” and the logic behind AI decisions is now fully transparent. No AI researcher would support this claim (despite some recent promising first steps), suggesting A16Z either doesn’t understand even the very basics of the field it’s investing in, or else that they’re committing perjury.
There's a more charitable reading of this quote, if you include the context of it. Here's a cliff notes version of his argument.
1. If you write a regulation that open-source models cannot comply with, then there will be no open-source models.
2. With many other pieces of software, like Linux, open-source software is more secure than closed-source competitors, because given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
3. Advocates for AI safety guidelines say that point #2 is not important, because AI models are fundamentally inscrutable.
4. But actually, lots of useful AI interpretability work has been done on model internals, such as glitch tokens or polysemanticity, which would've been impossible if researchers had no access to internal model activations and weights. Therefore, the normal arguments for open source software being better apply.
I believe the length of this post may be evidence Scott isn't getting as much sleep as he used to, before becoming a parent.
The FFA scandal is one of the most obviously evil, stupid, unfair and DANGEROUS manifestations of DEI ideology, and predictably it will lead to ZERO people on the left updating their views at all.
But what do you expect? Several threads ago, a number of DEI supporting commenters were defending DEI as simply a way of countering pro-white/anti-minority bias in hiring and therefore it leads to more meritocratic outcomes. But every single instance of DEI is the exact opposite of this and nobody cares. They don't because ACTAULLY, the only thing that matters is advancing the ingroup and hurting the outgroup, and if this endangers society then so be it.
And the more "reasonable" on the left will simply wave it aside as some isolated event, while supporting 100% some only slightly less egregious from of DEI.
There's a whole meme about it!
Re: 51:
>> Sotonye Jack, along with his other writing, interviews interesting people in tech, blogging, and academia. This month he interviewed me.
Scott: In that interview you said...
"...if you look at the lucid dreaming community, they've been saying forever that the two easiest ways to realize you're in a dream are mangled hands and mangled text."
Do you have references for your assertion? As a fairly lucid dreamer I've been trying to train myself to read in my dreams, and I've had some success. One of the frustrations of my dreaming life was going into dream bookstores (which happens frequently) and not being able to read the books on the shelves. The breakthrough came a few years back when I was driving through a dream forest when I came to a crossroads. At the intersection was a stop sign, and I read the letters STOP. I was so excited that I read the letters and could see them clearly that I woke up. Since then, I've been trying to carefully direct my focus to the words in dream books, staring at them without letting my attention waver. Right now, I seem to be at a third-grade reading level in my dreams. The words have to be simple for me to concentrate on them. Also, I have to dream that they're written in large block letters. This is what I read the other night in a book that I opened: "The shore has always been a snake [that] slides between two worlds. It has been doing this from the time before life arrived from the seas..." Unfortunately, I lost my attention to the text. I woke up and I wrote down what I read on the notepad that I keep by my nightstand. AFAICT my dreaming self didn't plagiarize this, but I don't feel like I'm the author, either.
As for mangled hands, I can't remember looking at my hands in my dreams. I'll make a point of trying the next time I remember to do this in my dreaming. But my to-do notes to my dreaming self require a lot of repetition (self-hypnosis?) to get across the waking consciousness/dreaming consciousness membrane.
I've always wondered how common the "can't read while dreaming" thing is too, because I often dream where I'm simultaneously reading the dream and experiencing it, and I can very clearly see words and read them.
I guess this could be an artifact of being a lifelong and extremely bibliovoracious reader, but it always seemed weird to me that people would say words were gibberish in their dreams.
Yeah, I can read in dreams too. A lot of the time it will be in complete, relatively grammatically correct sentences as well. I can't lucid dream at all so I've also chalked it up to being a lifelong reader.
I was wondering if this might be more common among certain age cohorts thanks to being on the internet when much of it was text, in the same way there's a cohort that dreams in black and white possibly because of black and white television, but I think the pivot to video was too quick to be able to tease out something like that.
I'm beginning to think it should be "normal people can't read in dreams" because a few nights ago I was reading in a dream with a beautifully laid out, headings in different colour, flipping back and forth looking up references between different paragraphs and comparing them, periodical.
So, ahem, yeah. The perils of being hyper literate/hyper lexia? You can not alone read in dreams, you are self-publishing magazines and books?
I've never looked at my hands in dreams, though. That was an exercise that Don Juan gave to Castaneda, though, to enhance his dreaming skills. I'll need to tackle that dream project next.
I've heard that the reading test in dreams is to read something, look away then read it again. In a dream, the words will always change from what you read the first time. I, at least, have found that to be true.
Also a dream reader here. Without any particular effort on my part to learn to read in dreams, I had one dream where I read a newspaper headline saying "Beef named the London of Cambridgeshire; most depressing news since the Holocaust."
> But there’s some reason to think that many of them didn’t entirely understand the ruling and thought it banned pro-white racism or something; a majority of young black adults think the decision will make it easier for blacks to attend university.
Aren't they correct? My understanding was that the universities reacted to the ruling by changing their admissions system to focus on things correlated with being black, until the numbers went back to how they were before the ruling, thus making actual lower-class black people in mostly-black neighbourhoods able to attend, as opposed to, eg, recent Nigerian immigrants, or wealthy people with one black great-grandparent, etc.
30: For completeness’s sake, worth noting that it’s at least theoretically possible for both parties to be simultaneously correct that they are losing “on the issues to matter to them” if the parties care about different issues. Not entirely crazy as a partial factor: If the parties really care most passionately about policies strongly favored by their own bases but unpopular in the electorate as a whole (e.g., the most extreme social justice issues for Democrats or the Mexico wall for Republicans), each party could correctly think it is losing on those issues that matter most to themselves.
(Correction: The Mexico wall is actually quite popular now among the electorate, with majority support. It dropped when Trump started supporting it, and has been climbing since he left office. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/27/border-wall-has-never-been-more-popular/ )
That’s fair. In my defense, it was just a hypothetical to illustrate a more general point.
14. Wiki page says, one of the conditions was "People must abandon witchcraft, incest, and adultery". Clearly, this is where it all went wrong.
22. The scary part here is that almost nobody is talking about it, and those who do are talking about it just because of an unusual situation that some people that were discriminated against had an unusually good claim by being part of specific FAA-endorsed schools. In general, when you rely on the services supposedly and previously highly-specialized highly-trained professionals, you have no way of verifying if they actually still the same professionals as before, or they were hired because they checked some diversity boxes and they are fire-proof for the same reasons. Obviously, if somebody is a bad traffic controller, it will eventually show up by the raise of the number of bad incidents etc. - but that would not be any consolation for people who would in the meantime be part of those incidents. I feel like there's a complex system of making the mechanisms of modern technology work safely, and certain movements work very hard at dismantling those for ideological reasons. And in many cases we can't even see it.
34. Can it be just people learning that being on disability is better than working, and learning to game the system - or the system's resistance to being gamed significantly lowering (just as COVID money distributions were plagued by gargantuan amount of fraud and nobody really cared)? After all, if the government mostly gave up, for example, on border protection - why we can't consider they also gave up on disability fraud protection?
46. Gaza has been not doing that badly before October 7. They had a lot of money coming in, there were a lot of permits for work in Israel allowed, and the import restrictions weren't that severe. There's a lot of push to present Gaza as some kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape, because that'd easily explain why Hamas is so popular there without going into the dark depths of human capability for evil that no one wants to look into. It's much easier to say "well, of course since they are uniquely poor and live in uniquely squalid conditions, they support the only movement that promises them to lift them out of these conditions and given them normal middle-class life". The reality is the conditions weren't uniquely poor and squalid, especially compared to other Arab Middle-Eastern countries not having oil spewing out of every hole in the ground, and the support of Hamas is as strong in a middle-class and rich population as it is in the poor one. And a lot of money invested in Gaza failed to improve situation and often went to construct Hamas tunnels and Hamas rockets and Hamas headquarters inside hospitals.
35) Southern Blot (a technique for isolating fragments of DNA) is one of my favorites. Especially because, subsequent to Dr. Southern developing his technique, others developed similar methods for RNA, proteins, and metabolites and appropriately named them Northern, Western, and Eastern blots, respectively.
A few more than I didn't see listed:
Bridgestone (the tire brand) is actually the literal translation of the last name of the man who started it, Shojiro Ishibashi (technically the order is Stonebridge).
The graham cracker is named after its inventor, Sylvester Graham.
Ferris wheel (George Ferris). I had always thought it was somehow derived from the word fair.
> The graham cracker is named after its inventor, Sylvester Graham.
What's the "unexpected" part of that? Does "graham" have any meaning other than its use as a name?
I would have assumed they were named that way because they're made with graham flour, but upon looking into it graham flour is (unsurprisingly) also named after Sylvester Graham.
That seems like it goes both ways, then. Most words that aren't extremely basic parts of human existence going back millennia probably came from a name somewhere down the line.
But most names are derived from ordinary terms, too, especially last names.
Let us not forget Mr. Crapper, the inventor of the toilet.
"From this day forth, all the toilets in this kingdom shall be known as ... Johns!"
Oh Jeez. I know this is from somewhere but can’t remember where. Help?
Robin Hood: Men in Tights
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107977/characters/nm0001772
>King Richard : [taking Prince John's crown] You are no longer worthy to wear this sacred symbol of authority.
>Prince John : Oh, please have mercy on me, brother. It wasn't my fault. I got some really bad advice from Rottingham.
>Blinkin , Ahchoo , Scarlet , Little John , Crowd : [coughs] Bullshit! Bullshit!
>King Richard : Brother, you have surrounded your given name with a foul stench!
>[to the crowd]
>King Richard : From this day forth, all the toilets in the kingdom shall be known as... Johns!
>[the crowd cheering]
>Prince John : [yelling] NO!
>King Richard : Take him away!
>[the Merry Men began to grabbing Prince John]
>Prince John : No, wait, wait!
>King Richard : Put him in the Tower of London! Make him part of the tour.
Ah, of course.
I was trying to put together a bit where the inventor is John Crapper, but with that twist on the end.
Many Thanks!
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-african-history/article/abs/soft-believers-and-hard-unbelievers-in-the-xhosa-cattlekilling/B5D7102F85FE6221777F57B335D9D88D
> A substantial minority, perhaps 15 per cent of all Xhosa, refused to obey the prophetess Nongqawuse's orders to kill their cattle and destory their cornl [sic]. This divided Xhosaland into two parties, the amathamba (‘soft’ ones, or believers) and the amagogotya (‘hard’ ones, or unbelievers).
For anyone who wants to make a slogan out of this, you'll probably need the singular of amagogotya: igogotya.
Re: 36: I assume pseudonyms are better for discussion because two categories of people will comment with their real name: those with utterly uncontroversial ideas (and even then, not the most careful of them), and those with very little care of what shit they leave online, which, I assume, correlates with behaviors detrimentals to the quality of discourse
36) I think the pseudonym effect may be confounded. If part of the purpose of switching to FB login was to expand the commenter base, maybe they got exactly that. I may have had a bit too much scotch, but I am struggling to think of times when lowering the barrier to entry has elevated the level of discourse.
15: Strongly reminds me of a plot from the great TV series The Games, a mockumentary about the preparations for the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. Unfortunately, it seems to have been too early to have clips available online, but consider this a strong recommendation to watch it if you're able. It's by the great John Clarke and Bryan Dawe of The Front Fell Off fame (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM)
Did Kruschev’s move work?
3. Travelling E from Seattle - The effect is even more surprising if one starts farther S, say at the Oregon-California border.
I don’t have the software to do this. Do you hit New Guinea?
In more "AI will change the world, use AI to be more productive and creative!" news, another example of people whose eyes were bigger than their appetites. Greedy or just foolish? You decide!
So, in Glasgow, some enterprising bunch decided to put on a Willy Wonka Fantasy Adventure Experience, that had an AI-generated script, and illustrations to match.
https://willyschocolateexperience.com/index.html
The reality was rather less fantastical. The AI can't be blamed for this, but the script and imagery did not translate over into anything achievable on a budget of "We're buying our supplies from Tesco".
I was made aware of this on Tumblr, but it's all over the place now.
When they couldn't even be bothered to correct the misspellings on the AI-generated art (or were unable to, or couldn't afford to), I think this indicates how the 'experience' would end up. You, lucky customer, can go through the Imagnation Lab and the 'Twilight Tunnel in Dim Tight for Encherining Entertainment, and by the sounds of it, the Entertainment was indeed Encherining. (But please not let's dwell on the Sweet Teats, I don't want to contemplate what that/those might be).
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/willy-wonka-experience-glasgow-oompa-loompa-b2505176.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/world/europe/willy-wonka-experience-glasgow.html
https://twitter.com/shockproofbeats/status/1762849884485353695
The script calls for "rivers of lemonade", this is what was provided:
https://twitter.com/shockproofbeats/status/1762850543074976101/photo/2
The lemonade was a quarter-cup of Tesco own-brand lemonade, and a single jelly bean, and then the jelly beans ran out:
https://www.tumblr.com/hatingongodot/743587392714424320/im-obsessed-obsessed
It's not clear that this is an AI problem.
There is quite a tradition in the U.K. of someone putting on an attraction that turns out to be underwhelming.
You didn't even mention the best part: the Oompa Loompa meth lab.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/765/340/22a.jpg
I do love that we're seeing headlines like "Angry Oompa-Loompa Breaks Silence".
But, but, where else but the twilight tunnel could one find such rare items as "ukxepcted twits"?
May their legal counsel rely heavily on GPT4 for the final word in advice.
It is hugely (and sadly) amusing that people just looked at the imagery and never read the text, but this just reinforces my opinion as to the real AI threat: stupid human tricks. We don't need smart AI that decides to take over the world, we'll hand it to them for a Willy Wonka Extravaganza in Glasgow.
Though someone did a great version of the Oompa-Loompa as the "Bar at the Folies-Bergere":
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2766329-oompa-loompa-bartender
Many Thanks!
>but this just reinforces my opinion as to the real AI threat: stupid human tricks. We don't need smart AI that decides to take over the world, we'll hand it to them for a Willy Wonka Extravaganza in Glasgow.
Certainly it is a nearer term problem - similar to what people have been doing with sort-of-crappy software for decades, but probably more of it, since it takes less "skill" to prompt GPT-4 or DALL-E and fail to look at the result than to use most older software.
I think the danger is in the push to get us all to accept the output unquestioningly. Older software, you could look at something and think "yeah that's been Photoshopped" or "this lump of text makes no sense".
But adoption of AI is being heavily shoved at us as "it's got all the knowledge of the Internet! it can do these routine tasks for you to free up time!" and we're supposed to accept that it doesn't need to be checked and whatever it produces is correct.
That's the thing that tripped up the Canadian airline: the lure of "sack even your cheap workers and replace them with free labour" meant that they ended up having to honour, thanks to the courts, a refund policy that their customer service chatbot hallucinated. It's clear nobody was checking "does this thing actually answer queries correctly?" Nope, it's AI, it's the latest thing, the machine is always right.
That was a small error, but imagine something incorporated into the likes of banking system, stock exchange or government department and hallucinating policies and answers. Indeed, we don't have to imagine it; the Fujitsu software scandal in the British Post Office for decades shows us exactly what goes wrong. People were ruined, imprisoned, even driven to suicide because the authority stubbornly would not concede that the software system it imposed could be at fault. "Private Eye" covered it for years and honestly, heads should have rolled at all levels. But even with the final revelation of the truth, the people in high office are untouched and not even seeing a day in jail, when they were liars and incompetents who killed people. And I don't say "killed people" lightly; I mean when your bullying tactics drove people to suicide, you are responsible for their deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
"Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office and the statutory authorities of the UK, including the CPS, the PPSNI, and the COPFS, proceeded against hundreds of subpostmasters in criminal prosecutions in magistrates' courts and the Crown Court when the Horizon accounting system showed money was missing from their post offices. Subpostmasters were also pursued through civil actions. In all, between 1999 and 2015, over 900 subpostmasters were prosecuted and 236 went to prison. The Post Office itself prosecuted 700 people. Once the Post Office had secured a criminal conviction, it would attempt to secure a Proceeds of Crime Act order against convicted subpostmasters, allowing it to seize their assets. In addition to those convicted, there were subpostmasters who were prosecuted but not convicted, and many more who, without being prosecuted, had their contracts terminated and lost money as they were forced to pay the Post Office for Horizon shortfalls. In all, over 4,000 subpostmasters had been identified as eligible for compensation by February 2024. The actions of the Post Office caused the loss of jobs, bankruptcy, family breakdown, criminal convictions, prison sentences and at least four suicides.
Alex Hern wrote in the The Guardian in January 2024:
"A 1984 act of parliament ruled that computer evidence was only admissible if it could be shown that the computer was used and operating properly. But that act was repealed in 1999, just months before the first trials of the Horizon system began. When post office operators were accused of having stolen money, the hallucinatory evidence of the Horizon system was deemed sufficient proof. Without any evidence to the contrary, the defendants could not force the system to be tested in court and their loss was all but guaranteed."
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justice-lost-in-the-post.pdf
Many Thanks! That was appalling. I'd thought that one could rely on the courts to have some measure of sanity. Evidently not - and for 16 years! Computer-assisted kafkaesque false accusations...
It was indeed appalling. The problem was that the Post Office, by some legal quirk, was able to bring prosecutions itself instead of going through the courts, and then the people in charge lied through their teeth. The Fujitsu suppliers lied about the software, and the people who made the decision that they needed to automate things lied about failure.
So the small post-office managers, faced with a national organisation that had plenty of money to drag cases out for years, got bad advice about "plead guilty so you won't end up in jail" and some did, and paid money they never owed. Others tried to fight, but were convicted on the grounds that well, a body like the Post Office would never lie about the facts for years, now would it?
All the past heads and some government ministers should be in jail, but of course they won't be.
30. "which matter to them" is an important qualifier here. The two sides may be talking about very different sets of issues. This observation may be consistent with 100% on both sides correctly calibrating the proportion of past wins//losses. One way one could get this result is when both parties are dominated by party elites that are achieving wins on issues important to them but easily concede issues that are important to rank-an-file partisans. Another way to get results like that is when an issue stops being important to one of the sides once it resolves in their favour. This is how people tend to think about many liberties - these are important while they are denied but may not be perceived as important if everybody is used to them.
> In support of this, Yaw says that "Ethiopia's rapid growth in comparison to many African nations is attributed to a significant increase in agricultural productivity".
You mean when people don't have to worry about their next meal due to abundance, they can get other things done, like making other goods and providing useful services? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.
> This is a response to the people saying polygenic selection is bad, because we should instead make parents have children with diseases, then treat the diseases with medication.
What a stupid argument. Yes, let's encourage society to become increasingly fragile rather than anti-fragile/robust. A major problem with fragile societies is that become inherently more risk averse in many ways, eg. projecting power or sabre rattling against other major military powers to keep each other in check.
> It doesn’t surprise me that consistent-pseudonym comments are no worse than real-name ones, but I don’t understand why they would be better, and I don’t feel like this link really explains it.
Maybe partly plausible deniability. Other people can share your real name, but your pseudonym typically really is quite unique, and is self-selected so it forms part of your online identity that you don't want to have to abandon.
33. Worked in phage for a few years. I suspect that the future is a combination of phage + antibiotic because it happens that bacteria often trade resistance to one at the expense of the other. In the event that a bacterium managed to balance both, I suspect this would come at the price of fitness loss somewhere else that would need to be exploited. Maybe pre/probiotics to allow synergists and commensals to better outcompete super-duperbugs.
Re 34: Prediction market on expert consensus in 2030 on whether COVID is a "mass disabling event": https://manifold.markets/Fion/was-covid-a-mass-disabling-event?r=Rmlvbg
You haven't said how many people would count as "mass".
Since almost everyone has had covid, a small percentage with long term symptom is still a lot of people.
Substack won't let me reply to others' comments for some reason, but as others noted, lots Gaza's GDP is probably going to destructive ends (digging tunnels/waging war) rather than making its citizens better off. I did originally guess that international aid might be playing a role, but according to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002219961730096X, aid is not counted as GDP (which makes sense, as usually GDP is limited to what is *produced* in a country):
> Second, we shift the focus to whether and how foreign aid is absorbed by the domestic economy. Aid, as a capital transfer, is not part of measured GDP.
So aid should make it seem like Gaza is actually richer than their GDP statistics show.
I don't actually know what the state of the average Gazans' life was like prior to the most recent war, but it seems like they had a reasonable amount of infrastructure (big apartment buildings, schools, etc) because I've seen a lot of news on such things being destroyed. I wonder if there was a sort of negative halo effect, where non-economic issues like an unstable government and unclear citizenship were assumed to also indicate poor economic productivity.
For pseudonymous comments being higher quality than real-name comments, I would guess the cause is selection bias for commenters in the real-name comment sections. I tend to use a lot of the ‘higher-quality’ (per the study’s criteria) marks such as qualifier words for the same reasons I avoid real-name comment sections: a fairly cautious mindset. The “average” real-name commenter posted far less than the “average” pseudonymous one; I’d guess that’s less of an even reduction and more of the more cautious portion disproportionately avoiding comments.
I asked Perplexity (free version) for more examples of unexpectedly eponymous names. I haven't checked if any of these are hallucinations or copied wholesale from Scott's link or anywhere else.
"Some examples of unexpectedly eponymous names include:
French Hill (neighborhood in Jerusalem) named after British general John French.
Snowflake, AZ named after Erastus Snow and William Jordon Flake.
Lake Mountain, Victoria named after George Lake, the Surveyor-General of the area.
German Chocolate Cake named after Samuel German, an English-American chocolate maker.
Baker's Chocolate named after Dr. William Baker.
Loop subdivision (CG term) named after its inventor Charles Loop.
Caesar salad named after Caesar Cardini, a restaurateur in San Diego and Tijuana.
Sideburns named after American Civil War general Ambrose Burnside.
These examples showcase how various things have been unexpectedly named after individuals, highlighting the diverse origins of eponymous names in different contexts."
Recently saw a video by a German living in the US showing that cake. Definitely not something that originated in Germany.
> the Gaza Strip has (had?) a higher GDP per capita than India
2 points:
1. This validates my hypothesis for 'GDP floors'. A nation's GDP floor can be directly inferred from the wealth of its neighbors and access to their labor market. Israel is a rich country and Gaza *had* moderate access to their labor market. Kerala (Indian State) has a similarlt elevated floor because of labor export to the gulf. This tells you nothing about the prductivity of the labor market. Another GDP floor is low-skill high margin argriculture.Along similar lines to Kerala, Gaza is entirely dependent on foreign remittances (aid) and the fertility of their soil. This allows them to grow high margin crops. Kerala fortunately, has a more forgiving water situation.
2. Points about aid being unfairly counted are dime a dozen. But, I have another point on aid. The UP-BIhar region of India has about 500 million Indians living in sub-saharan poverty. Not only have global aid organizations ignored this region, its recent turn around has been the center of Modi's popularity. Both states started off in a similar place to Bangladesh, with a low-skilled populace, no jobs and zero infrastructure. Bangladesh correctly relaxed labor laws and opened their nation up for exploitation. UP and Bihar continued down their criminal-socialist path, supported by the national govt's famously federal approach to state level governance. Strongmen like Modi and now UP's Yogi are a necessary evil to making a place governanble and reversing a deeply rooted cultural leaning towards povertarianism.
The playbook turning around an underdeveloped country remains unchanged:
1. Spawn your country with easy access to wealthy labor markets
2. Get a strong man to ensure functioning of basic systems
3. Open your market to any and all business
4. Become a democracy so grid lock disables backsliding.
> liberalized economy + land reform is the secret combination
By George! Maybe we should give his ideas a try.
> (36. Pseudonyms) It sounds like the "real names" phase was confounded by the Huffington Post outsourcing name/account management to Facebook, that is, to comment you needed not just your real name but a facebook account under your real name (and be willing to link your facebook account to your Huffington Post activity, I presume). Maybe that filtered out some people who otherwise could have made sensible contributions? It passes the "common sense" test for me because I and most of my friend group these days, although some of use still use facebook, wouldn't use it to link with accounts anywhere else.
People naming their child Lolita after the movie weren’t even getting it right, as her name is Dolores, so that’s really weird. They’re calling their kid what the pedophile called her, complete with the -ita suffix that is meant to imply young/small. I’ve only read the book, but I’m assuming that’s the same.
Very few people actually read the books or know more than "oh that sounds good to me". There were at least 9 babies named "Khaleesi" in Ireland since the Game of Thrones TV show, and in a former job I encountered one baby named "Daenerys":
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/name-of-thrones-babies-being-called-after-characters/38100975.html
Naming a character "Chardonnay" started as a joke reference to the kind of trashy glamour WAG type in a British TV drama "Footballers' Wives" but apparently some people really did start naming their children after that:
https://en.everybodywiki.com/Chardonnay_(name)
Interesting. A good illustration that the human mind works in mysterious ways.
I'm going to guess that's more "between episodes 2 and 7 of Game of Thrones" and not "since Game of Thrones". And I hope their parents gave them sensible middle names to fall back on.
Benioff and Weiss have got some 'splainin to do, and the cohort of young women demanding explanations will come of age in about eight years. They might want to invest in a private island hideout before then.
More proof that Germany and Austria have the right idea about naming babies.
#9 following the link- interesting fact number 7 on Greenland suicides: I’d like to propose an alternative hypothesis to the poor sleep. Perhaps they are depressed in the long winter and then with spring finally have the energy to do something about it. Similar to the early suicide peak when starting ssri’s.
That TracingWoodgrains FAA thing is fucking insane.
Affirmative action in the open is one thing, personally I do not like it, but I can tolerate it.
Subverting a supposedly meritocratic process is something totally different.
First, the an agency which seriously considers this is implying that qualifications don't matter, that it is all hoops of empty credentialism through which the applicants have to jump to land a cushy Homer Simpson job. So if anyone was on the fence if cheating in an FAA exam was morally okay, they can now be assured that it is, air traffic controllers being a bit more or less qualified is not a matter of life or death. If they can cheat to meet their diversity goals, why should you not cheat to meet your professional aspirations?
The second thing is the deafening silence in the media. If the conspiracy was meant to aid Privileged groups -- whites, males, etc -- then the NYT and the Guardian would be howling for the blood of everyone within a 1000 yards, the lobby organizations, the people making the decision, the ones recommending not to prosecute and the head of the agency out of general principle. "The White Supremacist conspiracy to keep Blacks from becoming Air Traffic Controllers".
And they would be right.
But invert the privilege, and everything becomes a-ok. Underhanded dealings to create a Juster World are fine, too bad that they got caught so. Better not report on it, because it would be in conflict with the Message.
And when fucking Trump wins another election, and liberal media whine about the decline in trust in both institutions and traditional media, and why do these stupid MAGA people prefer to read fake news on some Telegram channel instead of Trustworthy sources like the NYT, I will be playing a very sad song on the worlds smallest violin for them.
The ironic thing, as TracingWoodgrains discussed on Blocked and Reported, is that this policy existed for at least some of Trumps term, so the MAGA people failed to 1) notice or 2) stop it. I don’t like the policy, but this makes it hard to feel like I can vote about it in any way whatsoever.
Well, institutional inertia exists. It is not like when a new president is sworn in, all bureaucrats align themselves to them immediately, and report any policies which are now unaligned for revision.
One of the few things I am sure Trump is innocent of is underhanded deals to further racial equality. I have little doubt that the questionnaire policy originated from the woke drive to seek equality in outcomes.
Personally I am in the lucky position to be a foreigner and thus not having to decide which party is the lesser evil. (Even after this, I would say Biden. This is more of a statement on state of the GOP, though.)
I’m a touch more ambivalent about the correct political choice overall in this election, but mostly out of a desire to curse both sides (“a pox on both your houses!”). But, the reason I comment that is that if Trump’s team had even been looking this would have been the easiest, most enjoyable policy to overturn with an executive order. It’s hard for MSNBC to defend this level of crazy, so it would have been a clean, cheap political win, and they still didn’t do anything about it. It speaks to how hard it is for a “hostile” elected executive to control bureaucracy.
>but mostly out of a desire to curse both sides (“a pox on both your houses!”).
Seconded!
As with many of our (usa) elections, an appropriate election day victory chant should be:
"Lesser Evil! Lesser Evil! Lesser Evil!"
"It speaks to how hard it is for a “hostile” elected executive to control bureaucracy."
You really think Donald Trump knew about this, said "there's no way I can win against the bureaucracy and if I try I'll just look foolish", and did nothing?
I'm pretty sure this speaks mostly as to how out of touch Donald Trump was with the realities of actually being President of the United States and getting the job done.
Seconded. I'd say there were two issues: Trump's lack of ability and his lack of interest in actually accomplishing what his supporters wanted. It's hard to tell which one applies in any given instance.
Re
>28: Joe Carlsmith’s commentary on C.S. Lewis’ Abolition Of Man, with an EA and AI alignment bent.
One comment on one of Carlsmith's comments:
>That is, available power to predict and control the natural world will increase radically, to a degree that makes it possible to _steer_ _and_ _stabilize_ the future, and the values that will guide the future, in qualitatively new ways.
[emphasis added]
It is important to recall that one very major qualitative increase in power to steer the future is not in our future but in our _past_. The invention of literacy was a _huge_ increase in the duration that someone's words could span, in contrast to illiterate earlier civilizations. Some words have even literally been carved into stone. And, yeah, it has not been an unalloyed good. The dead hands of the authors of scriptures and ideological scripture-equivalents are still racking up victims every day.
I'm sort of disappointed, reading more of this person's writings which from the Lewis one I thought good, even if I don't fully agree.
He has an essay about facing reality and deep atheism and scout mindset, and in the midst of praising the virtue of fearlessly letting go and accepting whatever Reality may be, even if it's not how you wish it were or would like it to be, he drops in this lump of "our bubble beliefs that all right-thinking people know are True (just like those theists know God is True)" which disheartened me:
https://joecarlsmith.com/2024/01/04/deep-atheism-and-ai-risk
"But scout-mindset also risks the knowledge thing. And doing so gives it a kind of dignity. I remember the first time I went to a rationalist winter solstice. It was just after Trump’s election. Lots of stuff felt bleak. And I remember being struck by how clear the speakers were about the following message: “it might not be OK; we don’t know.” You know that hollowness, that sinking feeling, when someone offers comforting words, but without the right sort of evidence? The event had none of that. And I was grateful. Better to stand, in honesty, side by side."
God help us, even the Rationalists? The ones you would hope would try the "face reality without imposing expectations on it, try for the facts and not our emotional biases" were sitting around glooming about "it might be terrible now Orange Man Bad in power"?
That is *not* scout mindset, being all prepared that "of course it's going to be awful". If you DON'T KNOW that it might not be okay, then you also DON'T KNOW that it might be okay. And in this case, the easy, no-brain required response was the gloomy one, the *true* scout mindset of fearlessly going out to discover the facts of reality would have been "it might be okay!"
As I said, I'm disappointed. I like the rest of the writing, but this is (to me) such an obvious blindspot that of course it casts a doubt on the rest of his perceptions of "this is the correct conclusion" (the same way he doubtless would find that my uncritical recounting of a Eucharistic miracle would cast doubt on my perception of what is correct view of Reality).
Many Thanks! I, too, would emphasize the "DON'T KNOW". I'm not thrilled about how the
>“it might not be OK; we don’t know.”
was phrased. I would have preferred a more symmetrical phrasing, more like:
It might be ok. It might not be ok. We don't know.
In the same essay, a little further on, Carlsmith goes on at considerable length about the interaction between priors, and whether one is privileging a hypothesis by expecting mostly good or mostly bad.
In particular, he talks about how, if one only calls very special outcomes "good", then one will expect most outcomes to be "bad", and, if one only calls very special outcomes "bad" then one will expect most outcomes to be "good".
This is really just different language for the old saw about some folks seeing a glass as half full and others seeing the same glass as half empty.
I think that Carlsmith has some interesting and plausible things to say, albeit, as you said, there are cases where he swallows some of his tribe's judgements uncritically. I rather like one point he makes in the link from the post, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EHL9QJaEwHxNJXaNW/on-the-abolition-of-man
>And note, too, that to the extent that the slavery in question is just the slavery of living in a natural world, and having a causal history, at all, then we are really letting go of the other ethical associations with slavery – for example, the chains, the suffering, the domination, the involuntary labor. After all: pick your favorite Utopia, or your favorite vision of anarchy. Imagine motherless humans born of the churn of Nature's randomness, frolicking happily and government-free on the grass, shouting for joy at the chance to be alive. Still, sorry, do they have non-natural soul/chooser/free-will things that somehow intervene on Nature without being causally explained by Nature in a way that preserves the intuitive structure of agency re: choosing for reasons and not just randomly? No? OK, well, then on this story, they're slaves. But in that case: hmm. Is that the right way to use this otherwise-pretty-important word? Do we, maybe, need a new distinction, to point at, you know, the being-in-chains thing?
I agree with him. Freedom is not an absence of causality, but rather an absence of being threatened with punishment by some master, and the absence of chains or prison bars.
46.- Why is everyone equating "West Bank and Gaza" with Gaza?
The West Bank is more populated than Gaza (around 3 million compared to ~2 million) and per capita GDP of "West Bank and Gaza" probably overestimates Gaza's GDP and underestimates the West Bank's.
In fact the IMF says Gaza's GDP per capita is around half of the West Bank's: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/tracking-economic-growth-west-bank-and-gaza-2007
Good catch. The article does cite a source (the CIA World Factbook) for Gaza alone having a per capita GDP greater than India - but looking at the numbers, I'm pretty sure that's for PPP-adjusted GDP. Which has its uses, but in this case is akin to saying "The Gazans are doing better than you think; look how cheaply you can hire servants there!"
By nominal GDP, Wikipedia says $2612 for India, $1924 for the West Bank, and $876 for Gaza.
Seeing the Medusa statue reminded me of something that occurred to me a while ago, about how the legend may have arisen.
I hope and believe I've not posted here before on this topic, but I'm unable to check because for some reason substack comment pages can't be saved, in either Firefox or Chrome. Yet another Substack comment gripe. Something stops a save in its tracks. So I am unable to grep previous comments.
In the past, and I think until quite recently in India, certain religions funded the upkeep of their temples largely by prostitution. Young women (and possibly young men , not sure) would live with the religious community, which would benefit from the proceeds of their sexual services.
( Christians can scoff, but in the Middle Ages the Bishop of Winchester owned all the brothels in south London and took a major cut of their profits. So Christianity has also benefitted from the same source of funding! )
So what kind of women were chosen for this service? I'm not an expert, but I would guess it was mostly women who for whatever reason were considered unmarriagable. Perhaps they were orphans, with no father to provide a wedding dowry. But among others, it must also have included "wild childs" who would have been thought too much of a handful for any husband. Maybe they had been too free and easy with their favors, and would very likely be unfaithful. Or perhaps they were simply half mad and obviously quite dangerous. It does happen.
From statues and friezes of temple prostitutes in those days, it appears they usually had elaborate hairdos, what we might call beehives. As it would take considerable time and effort to prepare a hairdo like that, the chances are they would leave it intact for as long as possible between hairdressing appointments!
But as some women with beehive hairstyles fashionable in the 1960s found out the hard way, there are certain species of moth which like to lay eggs in tightly structured and undisturbed hair. After all, it is little different to wool. And once that happened then obviously before long small caterpillars would literally pop up and become visible.
In summary then, I propose that the original Medusa must have been some real-life temple prostitute, with a somewhat menacing glare, scary enough, her clients would joke, to figuratively turn people to stone, and in whose beehive hair could be seen moth caterpillars, later exaggerated to snakes.
Note that the Medusa of legend lived in an abandoned temple, at least if that film Jason and the Argonauts is to be believed. So that in itself is a temple connection.
Substack sign-in woes continue with a new twist. Now, it will allow "sign in with password" if you "complete the captcha".
The twist? There is no captcha.
Back to email signing-in, and I'd almost suspect this was a deliberate ploy to force us to remain signed-in, except I don't think Substack is that efficient (I say nothing as to whether or not they're that devious). I prefer to sign out of *everything* once I'm done, so I'll keep on signing out until this gets fixed.
Chortle! That's a new one. I have to go through a couple of "Complete your profile setup" each time I post, The twist being that there is nothing else in the profile that needs setting up, as far as I can see.
For me, the most vexing fault is that on a PC the blog page plus comments cannot be saved, in either Firefox or Chrome. Sometime I must run the page in a Javascript debugger and try to identify the impediment (which is probably deliberate, for some unfathomable reason! )
>For me, the most vexing fault is that on a PC the blog page plus comments cannot be saved, in either Firefox or Chrome.
Firefox lets me save a (somewhat mangled, but apparently complete) page if I
1) toggle reader view
2) save page as text
kludgy :-(
On 26, what about Buddha Blocks?
Not recommended; they do not attach to each other.
LOL! Many Thanks!
No, I was underthinking the problem, at least based on the more complex answers. I was thinking of heading due east, and visualized this as looking at a flat map. I first thought 'Seattle's what, about 47N? So what do you hit first after crossing the Atlantic - southern England? Likely too far north. So probably France.
And then, duh, I saw that it would actually be southern Ontario, which surprisingly extends slightly S of the northern border of California (42N).
Therefore, I meant that running into a part of Canada when travelling due E from the California-Oregon border is more impressive than when starting out from Seattle (in my flat Earth way of thinking).
I'm not sure I follow the fertility rate for China and Taiwan comparison, the two countries have very different GDP's and Westernization trajectories. Fertility rates also fell at a similar pace in South Korea, and I don't think the comparison shows any impact or lack thereof for the one-child policy.
I'm surprised at how absolutely no one has commented on 18 - Piketty and his diatribe on inequality have been at the forefront of the left crusade on capitalism and classical liberal style economics. And no one here finds the fact that Piketty et al were substantially incorrect worth comment?
I think it's obvious for anyone with a CS background to listen to Andreessen talk for 10mins and realize it's blatantly obvious he has no clue what he's investing in.
36: Aside from the obvious points other people got to first, there's the matter of Trolls.
Trolls bring down the level of discourse wherever they go, but it takes time and work to become an effective troll. If you come in guns-a-blazing, you're banned immediately, but if you insinuate yourself into the community first, it'll be harder to ban you and you can spend more time trolling (and riling up others) before you lose your platform. Having a real name reputation can help you bypass that work. If you troll in a culture war, people on your side see you fighting their enemy and become your unwitting ally. You can ride that reputation into their forum and bypass the work required to establish yourself as a member of the community.
Meanwhile, when fighting with trolls, a pseudonymous person can engage the devil's advocate with productive-but-controversial takes to somewhat mitigate the damage, whereas a person who has their real-name reputation at stake will stick with the tame and unproductive barbs like "shut up" or "go away" or "modmin pls ban", which do nothing to contribute to the discourse.
Culture war aside, Trolls may be less restrained in pseudonymous than real-name fora, but in both cases, they can be banned, returning the level of discourse to baseline, which for reasons mentioned elsewhere, favors pseudonyms.
Hot take implied above: feeding the trolls is good for the discourse, even though it is bad for individuals' sanity.
43: Re: exercise vs depression—I'm resistant to clicking those links because as one of those people for whom (trying to) exercise has never helped my depression (the one time it came close resulted in me finding out I'm bipolar), I find myself angrily biased against anyone who tries to tell me to do so. Can anyone tell me whether they adequately accounted for selection bias? i.e., people dropping out of the study (or not signing up) because they weren't able to stick to the required exercise regimen long enough for effects to be measured?
Oof, my guess on #3 was South Africa.
Not sure if I thanked you before, but thanks for sharing my article on Ethiopia!