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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
" 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.
'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.
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
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 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.
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.
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:
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.”
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.")
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
30 : both side might be right if the "issues that matter to them" are not the same and they're all cursed to only win victories they don't really care about. It makes a lot of literary sense (probably false though but you can't have it all).
32 : worth noting the first American edition of book Lolita was 1958 (it was first published in 1955 by a fly-by-night porny French publisher), which looks a lot more like the base of the peak than the movie premiere. The novel is indeed more sympathetic to Dolores than the movie.
On a more funny note the 1997 flop with Jeremy Irons does not seem to make a blip on the graph.
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.
" 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
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!
" 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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
> 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.
> 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).
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.
#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.
>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.
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.
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.
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?
Nitpick on 2: the usage of the name palestina (originally as Syria palestina) dates to the second century at the earliest.
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.
> 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.
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.
FYI -- when you link to threads on X, only the first post of that thread is visible if someone doesn't have an account.
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
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).
V rkcrpgrq n evpxebyy rira yrff guna V hfhnyyl rkcrpg gubfr! Jryy cynlrq. (https://rot13.com/)
Was not expecting a rick roll, let me tell ya.
> 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
Did you find out about George Psalmanazar by reading R. F. Kuang's novel Babel?
That book inspired many wiki walks for me.
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.
" 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.
Australia?
'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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
#15 The capital of Uzbekistan is Tashkent, not 'Tashent.'
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”.
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.”
Anybody else on mobile and #3 completely fails to reveal the answer? No? Then tell me what the answer is
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
48. The Mappa Mundi text is actually in Venetian/Italian, not Latin.
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.
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.")
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.
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.
9. I've seen a suggestion that Africa has more need of aid with diabetes and heart disease than with tropical diseases.
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.
#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!
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.
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.
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).
If the formula is redistribution + liberalization, how did Great Britain avoid needing mass stealing to kickstart their economic development?
30 : both side might be right if the "issues that matter to them" are not the same and they're all cursed to only win victories they don't really care about. It makes a lot of literary sense (probably false though but you can't have it all).
32 : worth noting the first American edition of book Lolita was 1958 (it was first published in 1955 by a fly-by-night porny French publisher), which looks a lot more like the base of the peak than the movie premiere. The novel is indeed more sympathetic to Dolores than the movie.
On a more funny note the 1997 flop with Jeremy Irons does not seem to make a blip on the graph.
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.
" 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
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!
" 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.)
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/
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.
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.
> 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".
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
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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
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.
#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.
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.
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
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.
On 26, what about Buddha Blocks?
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?
Oof, my guess on #3 was South Africa.