37: A story on the internet about somebody who's name is claimed to be Title Pavel is almost always fictitious. It is a reference to the Dark Knight Rises cold open
I’m not surprised or disappointed by point 33. Tolerating people with weird kinks is different than tolerating people advocating for real-life harmful things, so r/forcedbreeding seems 0% hypocritical to me.
> unusually obese Russian soldier (which doesn’t show up in reverse image search)
They don't mention which reverse image search they tried (presumably the Google one). Google is thought to intentionally cripple it's search results for privacy reasons. Russian search engine Yandex has a much better one, you could find people's social network profiles just by a pic taken in public transport. In fact, they mention Yandex later in the chain, but they should have tried reverse image search there too.
Unemployment to population ratio has stayed the same, but the age-range is what is important there. I cannot begin to describe the amount of 54+persons I saw leave the workforce over the last two years.
Budget deficit is lower mainly because Trump got the TCJA passed in his year for all his needs, but Biden failed with the BBB. Had Biden succeeded, the deficit would (as it does) continue to trend worse.
No idea what explains the increase in net worth. The three-fold increase over 4 years seems ridiculous
23. Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. Cheaper housing means people can potentially do successful household formation earlier, which usually means more children. That was the big deal with the Baby Boom of the Postwar Era - marriage age dropped and people formed households earlier because of affordable housing and good paying work.
37. It gets even worse. IIRC the high-temperature superconductors have a much lower current they can tolerate before they lose superconductivity than copper. I guess that means you'd really have to ramp up the voltage with them?
I know about that because there's sort of a thing now in speculative futurist megastructures, where they're supposed to get to gargantuan sizes because you design them around using compressive strength and "active support" structures (IE something like a magnetic bearing scaled up enormously). High-temperature superconductors would really help with that.
3 - Without reading the study I am calling bullshit. May change my mind later.
4 - Is true, but agree his color choices were poor. He should have used gray for 2015-2019 and colored only the last 3 years. If you are wondering about lag in data, up through week 23 (6/11) we have 97% data collected, and the twelve week stretch from 3/19 gives us our first 12 week run in 2.5 years with 3 months of no excess deaths. The data after early June is incomplete, but I would guess will give us another 2 months of zero excess deaths. Fall and winter is anyone's guess.
6 & 8 - Of course
10 - "Oh dear god!" - Holy shit
11 - Love Stuart Ritchie, hope he has a follow-up to Science Fictions soon.
12 - I'm still kinda bummed computers finally beat us in Go
17 - Is this a real thing?
20 - Subscribed. Interesting piece on a topic I had never considered.
25 - Don't like charts where time frames seem selectively chosen to make a point and not directly comparable is first take without replicating the data. The KPI chose don't mean much to me. I can only say where I live (Cleveland), things cost more and everyone is short staffed.
3: I have a hard time with the plausibility of this. If it were just that more people were going to college, there would be less assortment of individuals by IQ. Thus you'd expect a decrease over time in IQ among the high educational attainment groups and an increase in the "high school" group. What we see is decreases across all groups.
Additionally, IQ scores have increased generally over the period something like 10-20 points as documented by the Flynn effect. So I just don't see how you could get decreases in all groups as the only one that isn't shown is "no or incomplete high school."
Given that they are doing an IQ proxy, not real IQ, I'd bet that there is something going very wrong under the hood. Happy to be proven wrong if they write up something rigorous.
25. A combination of COVID deaths reducing the workforce, older people taking earlier retirement, and reduced immigration relative to economic growth would seem to explain it. That also seems to explain why unemployment in Europe is at historic lows.
#21/robustness- ratio of glia to neurons in the human brain is ~4:1 and whenever AI comes up I think how I definitely see the opposite of that kind of investment in infrastructure by SDEs and I'm excited for how absurd/poorly executed the next 40 years are going to be
Re 25. They aren't saying if it's median or average. Say a quarter to a half of bottom 50% households owns a home. In the past 4 years or so, average home price seems to have gone up something like 100K. So that would have an average bottom 50% household gain 25K to 50K.
I imagine the median value has either gone down or stayed about the same, so they are probably listing the average value to make it look good.
This seems to agree with households in 50th to 90th percentile gaining 100K, since presumably most of them own a home.
I'd be equally suspicious of the rest of the numbers, even if technically accurate. Most obviously, I can believe that the hourly rate went slightly up, but the prices of everything consumable (and of many non-consumable goods as well) have gone way up, so everyone is getting way less for a bit more money.
I don’t think I agree with Jacob Steinhardt’s framing that adversarial robustness is best thought of as “safety” rather than “capabilities”, at least not in the avoiding-AGI-apocalypse sense of safety. (Clearly it is safety in the sense that a self-driving car needs it to avoid crashing into things.)
Consider: if an object detector can be confused into labeling a rifle as a watermelon by the presence of a label in the image that says “watermelon”, isn’t that a shortfall in some essential capability? Would you be worried about a putative AGI that fell for things like that taking over the world?
24. Looks like in other countries, they had to look for a compromise that is at least temporarily acceptable by most. In America, it was "decided" by judicial fiat and the side that won declared it case closed, now and forever. Except turns out it wasn't. But by now both sides are polarized to the extremes and aren't willing to talk to the other side, so there would be a lot of fighting there.
25. Real net worth figure looks wildly out of place. No way it grew over 2x in 4 years.
32. I'm not sure what would be the theory of $500 making permanent improvement in a poor family's life. I mean, there could be certain cases, but wouldn't it be that in the majority of cases there are deeper reasons for the poverty that one-off $500 could ever fix?
I know I can google it and I have and learned the basics, but can anyone point me towards more resources to get a better understanding of AI alignment? I've been going through Alignment Forum quite a bit but I was wondering if anyone knows a good summary + further resources. Thanks in advance!
There are plenty of natural experiments on breastfeeding and IQ since different (rich European) countries have vastly different cultures around breastfeeding. Despite these different breastfeeding levels there are no significant IQ differences between countries in continental Western Europe. An indication as good as any that breastfeeding has at most a minuscule effect on cognitive ability.
14: Sadly, knowing the reason for this will literally get you called racist by a meaningful number of people on the left. Which is kind of funny when you think about it: "racist" people are constantly called "ignorant", and yet being *too* informed (i.e. not ignorant) will also get you called racist.
And before anyone replies "No it's racist because you dont understand the historical causes of black crime rates", yes, I know. Specifically I know that's the narrative you take when some inconvenient facts rear their ugly heads.
But not only is there no real evidence for this (historical factors being the cause of black crime), it wasn't even the question being answered. Even if you somehow tie slavery or segregation or "systematic racism" to black crime, the cause is STILL not republican state governments (as implied by Newsom) - even in a more expansive sense of causation, black crime is just as high or higher in many blue states, its just that southern red states have the highest proportion black populations in the country, so "republican state governments being (uniquely) systematically racist to black people" still can't be the explanation, and calling people racist here is a way of slandering people for disagreeing with you.
23: The chart he posted is literally just a correlation. Absolutely nothing was done to this data to control for any other factors, it's just the raw data. It's not even from the part of the paper where they attempt to control for confounders. Even if there little to no causal relationship at all, we could still reasonably expect to see the exact same correlation. And yet this tweeter boldy proclaims a direct causal relationship based on that chart. Worse, it's the state level data, not the county data. Maybe he read the whole paper, maybe he understood the regression (unlikely). But his conclusion cannot be drawn from the chart he posted, and I can see no reason for posting that chart except to convince people of a causal relationship on the basis of the correlation, so its a bad tweet and he shouldn't have posted the chart.
#3. is misleading — this doesn’t adjust for adjustments in the IQ test due to the Flynn effect. Over the last century, the average person has gotten much smarter, and so the creators of the IQ test (who set 100 as the population-level mean) have had to repeatedly move the goalposts in response. As other commenters note, graduating high school is simply much more common now than 60 years ago, and not graduating is far less common over the same timeframe, meaning many people in the original sample were not represented.
I'm dividing my comments up into smaller groups per suggestion. Let me know if this is annoying and I can adjust:
3.) Last I checked the GSS doesn't include an IQ test. It includes something called WORDSUM which has a .71 correlation with IQ but is fundamentally a vocabulary test. I expect things like knowing what sedulous means are more class correlated than a general IQ test. In a more direct sense this makes me think that our language education might be getting worse.
5.) A man so interesting he ripped off Dollar Shave Club's aesthetic and makes everyone call him God King in what definitely isn't an attempt to salve crippling insecurity. Possibly because his wife isn't a doctor.
7.) I prefer practical applications like this. Too many people get caught up in the future and fail to run instead of crawling.
8.) It's covid and Ukraine. "The economy isn't worth human lives" ignores that the economy is how everyone gets food. Africa and the Middle East get a lot of their food from Russia/Ukraine because it's cheap and all that. Fortunately, both regions are famous for their stability and this is expected to have no serious effects... More seriously, Turkey has been trying to get Russia to allow continued exports, partly because they make money and partly because instability in their neighborhood isn't great. Russia agreed and then bombed grain distribution centers the next day because Russia has decided to be this season's heel. South/Southeast Asia might also have some issues due to economic problems but they fundamentally still have open lines of trade mostly and their agricultural centers haven't been bombed.
But yeah, this is temporary. But people die in temporary food shortages. Governments are overthrown. We were somewhat saved by the fact the harvest was good. But when you embargo and or invade a third of the world's export grain market things are structurally at issue. There are things that can be done to increase production but most of the countries that could help are food secure enough this won't affect them. So this is the rare case where awareness might actually be an answer.
9.) This is a common trick in p-hacking. Data isn't giving you what you want? Pre-committed to a set methodology? Just add more data!
12.) I don't understand how these two things correlate. Why would exponential to linear effects in computing correlate to the ideas getting harder to find thesis?
14.) Yeah, that was my thought to. I won't say the phrase to avoid the search engines picking it up but they have a pre-canned response to this. Has anyone seen such spaces? What's the ratio of people who are insane to just normal conservatives? Newsom remains, in my opinion, pretty bland. But that seems like the Democratic brand at the moment, to be frank. Far left policy (at least against the American median) backed by bland politicians. Freddie had a piece saying as much about Fetterman.
15.) Did anyone else watch ReBoot? This reminds me of that aesthetic which was pretty accurate to the computer generation of the time.
16.) While I don't know about this specific subject this is real in a general sense. One thing Britain has been trying to achieve for years is what they call reciprocal accreditation. Basically the idea is that if you're a trained doctor or stock broker from the UK then the US should just let you work in the US. And in exchange you can work in the UK. The issue is the deal's lopsided: access to the US is worth much more than access to the UK. You see similar things with Mexico and Canada. Interestingly, a fair number of British right wingers seem to have decided this is a good idea and totally different from an organization like the EU. Left wingers just want to rejoin the EU.
17.) The thing is that balance isn't interesting. You can read a few dozen papers doing a deep anthropological dive on the practices of the Haudenosaunee and learn about a fascinating and complicated culture. Or you can make up something and then wrap it in a bunch of accreditation when people are too polite (or politically motivated) to point out you're making stuff up. Memetically the latter gets passed around as "checkmate, bigots!" or whatever. People have a powerful ability to convince themselves of what they want to believe. Not to mention once any impoverished group gains interest from such a source they have every incentive to play along as a way to get sympathy and/or money. Do you think the Mosuo would be getting anywhere near as much tourism or an airport built if not for the whole matriarchy thing?
18.) I strongly suspect it was some Q-Anon believer.
19.) You don't have an inner circle? That's exactly what someone with an inner circle would say! More seriously, I'm unsurprised. Musk doesn't seem like an EA type and he especially doesn't seem like he'd like playing in someone else's sandbox. (Also: you do have an inner circle and a similar story about you would say something similar about, say, the Grants Program.)
21.) Speaking of this, I recently heard almost no one is working on AI cybersecurity. As apparently the local rationalist skeptic this is one area I actually think is really important and valid. You don't need to think the singularity is coming to imagine an AI that can break encryption or something. I fear AI research really could usher in a new era of computer viruses in the endless arms race between the two. Is this true? Who's the Pope of EA/AI Alignment that I can send a petition to in order to get this funded?
22.) Is this surprising? When one culture has a norm of marrying young and attaches much more social prestige to children and that culture is broadly Republican of course those things correlate.
24.) Thank you for giving me a link to back up something I've been saying and getting push back on this entire time... The US is in a weird position where both our parties are extreme on abortion issues relative to peer countries. (Of course, the US remains far to the left of the world average.)
25.) The Democrats are trying to pretend the economy isn't ailing going into the mid-terms. It is. Though it must be said we're dealing with something rather more mild than, say, 2008. At least so far. It could get worse.
The budget deficit is lower because income taxes receipts have increased in part due to inflation and in part due to tax increases. Unemployment rate doesn't include people not seeking employment and the stats for employment to population ratio is hacked by excluding people over 54. A disproportionate share of people who stayed home were older. They chose this statistic over the Labor Force Participation Rate because that doesn't prove what they want it to prove: it was higher under Trump.
This is the same trick they pull with real wages for production non-supervisory workers. In other words, they chose a specific sector that produces a lot of durable goods which did well during the pandemic and find a modest increase while real wages have otherwise fallen. And the net worth thing is because people spent two years spending less and saving more or investing in durable assets like couches instead of trips to Disney. Though the statistics I found mostly have lower absolute numbers roughly doubling is what I've seen. Real GDP is higher... but it's been declining since Q4 2021.
This is just partisan propaganda. If the "hold my beer" wasn't obvious. Lots of cherrypicking.
32.) UBI experts always predict it will go well and it never goes as well as they predict. It's also totally unnecessary and continues to be unaffordable. We live in an economy undergoing profound changes but the decreased demand for labor is not an actually observed phenomenon. The idea that we're in some future where people are going to be unnecessary remains completely unproven. If you really want to see how ridiculous it is go read some 19th century Russian anarchists. They'll tell you late 19th-early 20th century Russia is so rich that work is barely necessary anymore. Industrialization was about to eliminate all need for work etc etc. And objectively, they were correct that 19th century Russia was leaps and bounds wealthier than previously. I don't expect modern assertions of the same thing (substitute the time period and "industrialization" for "automation") to survive better than they did.
33.) Kink types are all either extreme progressives or libertarians in my experience. I've seen people making the case that universal healthcare and UBI was necessary to be kink friendly so women could stay home and be fetish bimbos instead of needing to work. Which ties back into the "how people will spend their time" part of UBI.
34.) Yeah, diviners can and do definitely fudge results. Fun fact: I've been to Delphi in Greece and they let you stand in the room the priests snuck into so they could hear the questions in secret. I'm still surprised you thought the entire process was "honestly" random. I'm not sure humans are capable of that. It's why we need to use space noise or lava lamps to generate really random activity. And even that's just because we can't model it correctly. But even setting that aside: you presumably know scientists, priests, etc all fudge results in the direction they want. Why wouldn't people back then?
35.) It's more a typical case of: left wing government spends itself into poverty on social programs and infrastructure ("infrastructure") then refuses to take painful but necessary corrective steps. Then an economic crisis hits and they invite in "experts" who do things like write about how this is all the fault of racism and ignore the actual farmers when they object because they're greedy landlords or whatever. And then the policy blows up in their face. Seriously, I cannot believe how some left wing governments think something like a critique of social patterns in post-imperial countries will magically make food grow better. It's literally magical thinking: we are the indingenous people of the land so we automatically know better even if we've never farmed before. (I am specifically thinking of Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka here.) Fortunately Sri Lanka has a decent civil society so hopefully the country comes out stronger because of it.
The Elo ranking is a logarithmic scale (400 Elo points corresponding to a factor of 10 in odds of winning), so the computing power requirements shown by the equation on the plot aren't even quite quadratic, let alone exponential.
#34: I'm not really impressed by this part of the criticism:
> Moore believed that because this procedure resulted in randomizing the areas where hunters searched for game, it prevented them from being so successful in finding caribou that they would overhunt and deplete the caribou herds.
> [But Moore] falsely assumed that caribou respond to human predation by changing their location.
That assumption sounds safe to me. But the bigger problem is that the description of what Moore thought says the opposite - that in the absence of randomization, caribou would be so easy to find that they would all be quickly wiped out.
Joseph Heinrich didn't use that example, though, he used an example of bird augury in determining where to grow rice. And his argument was that copying other people's paddy-locating choices was maladaptive, whereas the argument attributed to Moore is that copying other people's where-to-hunt choices was excessively *adaptive*. That does tend to suggest that that argument isn't worth much. But not for the reasons stated in Sick Societies.
1) made me snort coffee on the keyboard, but may I be the first to say: scumwit, dipgoblin, libsucker, dirthat, trumpnozzle and wankclown? More worrying, around 1,000 uses of the compound 'assass' ?? Presumably in 'assassin' etc may we have an independent assassment from your inner circle?
17: Reminds me of the recent debate around the claim that Louisa May Alcott was actually a trans man and would have identified as such if society at the time had that concept. https://twitter.com/peytonology/status/1516612189687324673
25: I think that wild doubling net worth figure has something to do with house price growth which might account for some of the 'feels like the economy is bad' sentiment even though a lot of people are technically richer.
14) These sort of talking points (statistics about education/welfare/whatever) in the South were really big in the Bush era, then kind of stopped; I'd always assumed that was when everyone worked it out.
22) This is something Steve Sailer has been banging on about for decades now, but you can easily explain it all away. Unmarried (and more likely to be childless) white women vote heavily democratic, people who live in cities have fewer kids (so coastal states with big cities have lower TFR), fertility is inversely correlated with income and Utah's a red state.
3) Big If True, also "Sad!". More ammunition for Bryan Caplan's Case Against Education. I am reminded of all those memes along the lines of You Couldn't Pass A High School Exit Exam From 1890 or whatever. The usual handwave was "irrelevant arcane minutinae, not Actual IQ", but if it really does take less and less thinkoomph to achieve a degree...I dunno, at some point the charade's gotta get out of the bag? When no one is allowed to fail at getting an Employability Certificate, the certificate doesn't say much anymore.
[copy-paste obligatory paragraph about importance of vocational education here]
It would be __fascinating__ to see a more detailed breakdown of Minimum Viable IQ-For-Degree at school "tier" level. I wonder if this is an across-the-board distributional shift (e..g. today's Yalies/UC__/__SU/... aren't as brainy as yesteryear's Yalies/UC__/__SU/...), or there's some variance.
Also interesting to contrast this with Flynn Effect, though I know that's maybe slowed or stopped, allegedly. If MVI had not gone down, or in fact had *risen*, would graduation rates have stayed approximately the same/decreased rather than rising? (controlling for increasing enrollment, obviously) In other words - IQ is definitely correlated with educational outcomes - but maybe there's more to this story besides just a relaxing of standards. Sounds like it'd be a fun Stop Confounding Yourself deep dive.
I would definitely use "Romani" or "Roma" instead of "gypsies", which is still used a racial slur and widely seen as pejorative by the Romani community. Until quite recently, I was not aware that the term not only had negative connotations, but historically sometimes had a different and broader referent (people who in various ways were considered a threat to society's order). Reading about present day discrimination against the Romani and realizing how common it and Anti-Romani prejudices and stereotypes are, convinced me that we should avoid using the term if possible.
32. A continuation of the idea that you can intervene in somebody elses life, take away some of their independence, agency, and dignity and expect them to benefit and be grateful.
It's one of the most frustrating features of the EA ideology (and the broader ratrionalist movement in general) People who have a good understanding of human beings know that this kind of do-gooding always has negative aspects, but because the givers are entirely unable to see this, will continue, forever to inflict these negative aspects on unsuspecting poor people.
Even worse is that -
"the researchers had asked experts to predict the results of this experiment, and they had all guessed that it would go well"
By my definition these aren't experts, they're idiots, and the fact that the researchers thought otherwise does them no credit whatsoever. An expert would be someone who had endured being the recipient of this kind of intervention and therefore had just a glimmer of an understanding of why an enlightened human being would never inflict it on somebody else. I assume these so-called 'experts' were academics for which - in this example - a perfect synonym is 'irrelevant'.
On the criticism X3 post I used the analogy of socialism to shine a light on the deficiencies of EA. For those of us who think socialism is a very bad idea, it's painful to hear the catalogue of excuses for why the latest central planning experiment has caused such unadulterated misery. The enthusiast will never, for a fraction of a second, consider the possibility that the misery is a consequence of socialism itself. Merely that it wasn't implemented properly, or hard enough, or whatever.
Similarly with these supposedly 'altruistic' interventions. The ideology run so deep that it never occurs to the believer that the suffering stems from the intervention itself, from what it takes away, from how it demeans and reduces.
If you wonder why EAs can never see this, I'd first answer that without experience of it, it is indeed not obvious that people giving you free stuff, and taking away some necessity for you to work or make effort will diminish you and make you worse off. But there is a hint of the depth of the ideology in the reluctance of EAs to let go of their 'giving'.
My guess is Scott would consider divorce, abandoning his blog and strangling a few innocent kittens as soon as give up his donations to charities. If true, that is an enormous motivation to find ways to see EA as essentially beneficent - it doesn't matter how many examples of the misery caused come to light - each and every one will be blamed on specific problems, never the intervening in other peoples lives.
Just as an aside, you would be correct to assume that I think UBI to be the most pernicious idea yet generated by the non-understanding portion of humanity.
Re 4: on mobile, twitter zooms into the center of the image, omitting the labels on the y axis (which does not start at zero), badly distorting the meaning. Also, if people have to start their graph axis at nonzero, start them a bit below the minimum data point. Including the 40k-45k range just makes it look more like a non-truncated axis.
Also, colors? Going for four shares of red/brown might not be necessary if there are still untapped primary colors like green around.
Besides the graph design, I think at the moment it looks consistent with COVID not being the big killer any more, but we will know for sure in December.
Re: 3 - we need to be careful here, this seems like the kind of thing at risk of Simpson's Paradox. When more groups who used to just get High School diplomas now go to college instead, and groups who didn't finish high school now do, then the average could decrease in each group without the total average decreasing.
(Possibbly the total average *has* decreased, the way it has in Sweden (we have excellent statistics from conscription tests), but the graphics could still be misleading.)
12 seems wrong, at least when it comes to computer Chess. After all, while throwing more compute at the problem obviously does help and engines play better with access to greater resources, the advancements in playing strength, particularly in the last decade or two, have been about better engines more so than anything else. Consider the progress of Stockfish for example (https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/64992190/179047597-62d5051f-ffa8-47e0-bb10-71c1bbb5fe75.png): that's an increase of 800 Elo points (the difference between Magnus Carlsen and a Candidate Master, so top 2000ish player). Or, if you were to trace its performance scaling from available operations per second back in time, it would have reached top GM level on a 1990 personal computer.
One of the graphs also plots playing strength against the number of positions evaluated, but this depends widely on the approach taken by the engine: neural network based GPU engines evaluate mere 10k positions a second but can reach overwhelmingly superhuman performance, and the latest Stockfish running on contemporary single CPU hardware actually evaluates roughly as many positions as Deep Blue did (around a hundred million a second), but is something in the order of 1000 Elo points stronger, to the extent that differences that large are even meaningful. This is accomplished by better evaluation function and better ability to discard lines not worth investigating further. And of course Deep Blue itself, while running on an outlier supercomputer hardware, exhibited a myriad of algorithmic advances made by researchers over the course of decades.
That's putting aside the real elephant in the room, namely that Elo rating is calculated using normal or logistic distribution.
Real GDP is a straight line pointing upwards, *of course* it's higher than before, it usually is. Same goes for real wages of production employees.
Low unemployment is a short-term effect due to excessive NGDP growth, which is a bad thing. It would be overall better to have lower NGDP/inflation and higher unemployment.
So those numbers are somewhere between nonsense and cherry-picked. Not sure about the budget deficit — I don't understand that area as well as I would like — or househould net worth — suspicious number, as others have pointed out, likely cherry-picked in some way.
On 25, what's the confusion? The US economy has been red hot for a while now, inflation has taken a major bite out of people's feeling about it because it's such a tangible indicator but when you take a look at the broad macroeconomy, it's extremely strong. Who knows what the future brings, but looking backward, the economy has been pretty awesome. In the context of the near-apocalyptic effect of the pandemic, broad fiscal support has been pretty resoundingly vindicated, and this isn't a partisan thing: Trump and Biden both printed money and shoveled it out the door and the results have been mostly great. If anything, this is a knock on Obama: the anemic response to the financial crisis and ensuing deficit fetishism was clearly a massive error.
It's notable that it's not that there isn't enough food, but rather it cannot be delivered to the places that need it most. It's not mentioned in the link, but the Tigray region of Ethiopia is struggling horrendously at the moment due to a combination of drought and conflict (similar to Yemen in this regard). Coupled with the situation in Ukraine and reduced grain exports, one imagines this will get worse unless developed states ever so slightly increase their contributions to the UN and NGOs operating in these areas. I don't believe (89%) that the UN will declare a famine in these areas (i.e. Horn of Africa), but that's more due to not being able to send inspectors, lobbying, the fact they didn't last year despite the criteria ostensibly being met, and some chance of improvement in the coming months.
If the situation does worsen and aid deliveries still can't get through by road I wonder whether any developed state would chance a 'Berlin Airlift' style relief drop, much like the UK and US (one presumes others) did for the Yazidis in 2014.
"match anything that starts with a or ends with z" yields "^(a|z)" [Bad]
"match anything that starts with an a or ends with a z" yields "^a|z$" [Good]
"match any real name" yields "[A-Z]{1}[a-z]+" [Pretty good. Does not match "Mary Anne" or "Mary-Anne". There is however no general agreement as to what constitutes a legal name.]
For Germany, the sudden color switch in the comparison figure seems wrong. Of the reasons listed below the figure, 1, 2 and 5 are implied in the text, and 4 is afaik often counted as 5.
For cross-country comparisons with regards to trisomy-21 abortions, also see dw.com from 2017:
Harvard's 2022 gains are north of $11 billion. Their tuition fees are less than 3% of their annual gains. It's fair to say that Harvard doesn't need any tuition whatsoever, but being a non-profit institution means they are taxed far lower than other hedge funds.
Another fact I found interesting his Harvard article: 43% of whites admitted to harvard are either athletes, legacies, kids of donors or on the "dean's list". I suspect a great number of them are privileged.
This is an aspect of affirmative action that seldom gets talked about. It's not just about race but also class. There is a silent bias in favor of the rich but dull kids. I see very little discussion about this either in left-wing or right-wing media.
14: The claim that "all Trump supporters are racist" may or not be true, but for the direct matter at hand, the relevant question is how many Trump supporters are racists who know about (or are at least not too lazy to Google) the racial demographics of more than a couple of states
Regarding 28. (Economic stats in the US, Trump vs. Biden), economist Thomas Sowell points out that household income may drop with prosperity as adult children move out of their parents' homes to their own homes.
Apparently paradoxical initially, but it makes sense if the number of people per household is not controlled for.
re 25: Scott's quibbles in general are valid, however the question "and why is the budget deficit lower?" is the easiest question in the world to answer to those of us who've been paying attention to what goes on with the budget deficit for a while
It strikes me as I was reading Dynomight on abortion laws across the world that he’s a better journalist than pretty much anybody employed as a journalist these days. The NYT might have run a piece like that in the Sunday supplement a few decades ago - dispassionate, informative and non ideological but it’s rare now.
>32: After some past studies (eg here) showed benefit of cash transfers (think UBI, but much smaller and shorter term), a newer study of $500 to $2000 given to poor families one time only fails to show any benefit to bank account balances, self-rated financial well-being, or self-rated happiness four months later
So, I think one likely factor here is, if you give significant but not transformative quantities of money like this to random people in poor communities, a lot of them are going to end up stressed out because acquaintances are going to hear that they got money out of nowhere, and are going to come asking them for favors and assistance, and it's going to lead to a whole bunch of pressure and stress about how much of their money they're obligated to spend on other people. So it's likely not just the one-time nature of the payment which might lead to poor results, but the targeting, paying out to a random selection of poor people, because this means the money is mostly going to people in communities with high expectations of social sharing of windfalls, where most of the community members aren't also receiving money.
Many possibilities. Lower spending due to shutdowns, cash transfers, house value growth. I think the latter is probably very important, houses are a big part of any homeowners net worth and often highly levered. House values (and rents) went way up, moreso than other components of the CPI basket.
Many possibilities. Lower spending due to shutdowns, cash transfers, house value growth. I think the latter is probably very important, houses are a big part of any homeowners net worth and often highly levered. House values (and rents) went way up, moreso than other components of the CPI basket.
Importantly the educational attainment graph doesn't show average IQ *needed* to get a degree by decade. That framing assumes school is getting easier which isn't necessarily the case, it could be that you never needed more than a 100 to get a degree and the thing that has changed is how much we encourage 100-110 IQ people to go to college.
Point 3: This is something economists have studied extensively. The consensus is that the average ability of college students rose from the 1900 to the 1920 birth cohorts. It's been roughly constant since. The average ability of those who do not attempt college has indeed declined substantially. See for example Figure 1b https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304393214000208. The literature review documents sources finding similar things with fewer data points since the 1970s.
You might wonder how the ability of college students has remained constant if college has expanded so much. The answer is that prior to the 1930-1940 birth cohorts, students seem to have been shockingly poorly selected on test scores or grades. They were instead mostly sorted on family income or socioeconomic status: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20190154
24. I understand that overview graphs might need some oversimplification, but dark blue for fully 'on demand' seemed weird in the German case.
As dynomight later explains: 'In Germany, abortion is always illegal (sort of) but simply not punished in the first 14 weeks.' I actually don't know where the 'sort of' comes from.
The 'illegal, but not punished' flows from the acknowlegdement that there are basic rights involved on both sides; basic rights that are all crucial and cannot really be satisfactorily combined: the right of the unborn (also before week 12) to life and bodily integrity, and right of the mother to bodily autonomy. In the area of politics, where one interpretation is so often cast to 'win' over the other, I found this almost wise.
It came into being not by the will of our politicians, but by a ruling of the Supreme Court. Which has a good track record of dealing with the subject matter and not being interested much in politics.
And, as dynomight says, there are also exceptions eg. in the case of rape or a danger for the mother's health.
Is #12 evidence against the 'AI go foom' hypothesis?
If something as simple as chess requires exponential increases in computing power for linear improvements, Is it possible that 'improving the intelligence of a supercomputer' is just as hard?
> 5: This month in nominative determinism: conservative radio commentator Jeremy Boreing.
Oh, on this I must protest! He has quite the personality. The man calls himself the God-King of the Daily Wire, and has cut one of the most entertaining ads (for his razors) that I've seen in a while: https://youtu.be/s92UMJNjPIA
I'm pretty sure this is a solid counterexample to nominative determinism. Whatever else Jeremy Boreing is, he's not *boring*.
#1. Amazing. Who would have thought that "wankwaffle" was even a thing? Now if this analysis could be repeated for Twitter...
#3. Seems like there could be different explanations for this. Are curricula being degraded to make them easier for less-intelligent students, or are less-intelligent students getting more study help these days, or does it have to do with finances or opportunities or something else entirely?
#7. Seems useful but I'd want to check its output very carefully.
#13. Interesting that DALL-E seems to know about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
#17. Not surprised. You mostly hear about this stuff from people who know nothing at all about Native American cultures. I'm sure an article could be written in favor of Two Spirits = transgender, and another against it, and they could easily be of equal scholarship and accuracy.
#19. Can we just stop talking about Elon Musk? He's like a smarter version of Trump; he loves being the center of attention.
#22. This is well explained by the first few minutes of the movie Idiocracy.
#38. Yes. And another thing everyone ought to already know: Did you know that the word "gyp" is also a reference to Gypsies? It derives from the negative stereotype that Gypsies always cheat their customers, similar to the way the old-time expression "Jew down" ("He tried to Jew me down") is based on the stereotype that Jews are cheap and will always try to haggle even when the seller is asking a fair price.
#39 sort of makes sense at first but gradually loses the plot. The AI clearly does not actually understand what the image is about. But why should we expect it to?
2) My immediate thoughts on the soldiers using their weapons piece as someone who once read a lot of military history:
i) That definitely didn't happen in Napoleonic times and before because people were in a big line and the peer pressure would have been immense, and the officers would have noticed. General running was always an issue though, especially if under perceived threat/encirclement.
ii) There are lots of times when groups of soldiers ran out of ammo in WWI/WW2, this seems unlikely if very few people are shooting.
iii) People are lazy/scared, I don't doubt that as combat tactics involved people in smaller groups I don't doubt that some groups/individuals used that as an opportunity to slack/hide/etc.
iv) I highly doubt tons of soldiers didn't use their weapon at all. It would be interesting to have some data on how many were really trying to fire effectively, versus just do the minimum firing/exposure possible to reduce their risk of getting shot while not eliciting the ire of their peers/officers. I can see a lot of wild, inaccurate shooting. But I wouldn't hazard a guess on percent.
#2, household formation -- Millennials are marrying and every time that happens we trade two households with $30K net worth for one with $60K (or something).
> a newer study of $500 to $2000 given to poor families one time only fails to show any benefit to bank account balances, self-rated financial well-being, or self-rated happiness four months later
Noting that this is an ex-post analysis, this is consistent with the idea that poor people are "rational" economic actors in the sense of traditional, expectations-based analysis. This would contradict the stories of both left-leaning (Marxist-derived, but obviously no longer Marxist) and right-leaning (moralizing, "Protestant work ethic") sociologies.
The "homo economicus" model is that people are relatively indifferent to their current situation and instead look at the long-term; this is most apparent in the Permanent Income Hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_income_hypothesis). In the strict reading this is obviously false for people living paycheque-to-paycheque, but it becomes much more true at the wealthier end, when liquidity is not a real concern.
Under the PIH, the value of $2,000 isn't exactly $2,000, it's the long-term income that $2,000 would represent. Taking a very generous view that poor families see an effective interest rate of 10% (i.e. $2,000 could repay debt otherwise permanently held at a 10% rate), the largest transfer there corresponds to $200/yr in income; the smaller $500 transfer would be just $50/yr in income (before inflation adjustment, but so was the interest rate).
As a permanent transfer, we would expect both of those incomes to provide a benefit, but we would expect the benefit to be very small, probably unmeasurable against noise.
Gavin Newsome may have a little fun trying to troll Red-tribe people on the Trump social network. He may not see much success in converting people by that kind of argument.
Specifically with respect to murder rates: when I look for lists of cities in the United States, sorted by murder rates, I find blue-tribe cities in blue-tribe States, blue-tribe cities in red-tribe States, and cities-of-uncertain-tribal-dominance in either blue-tribe States or red-tribe States.
The State-by-State numbers show that Southern states have worse murder rates. City-by-city numbers show dense urban areas with lots of poor minorities tend to have worse murder rates.
This leads to a predictable red-tribe argument ("a number of blue-tribe cities have extraordinarily high murder rates"), and a predictable blue-tribe argument ("a solid block of red-tribe States have the highest murder rates in the nation").
12: This is one of the things that makes me extremely skeptical of the AI takeoff scenarios. Working in CS you quickly learn that basically everything you ever want to do turns out to be NP-hard and you just have to muddle by with heuristics that push down the exponential growth for a while.
Almost every conversation I've had about AI risk involves my counterparty asserting that the AI will be simulating extremely complex systems and solving inverse problems related to those systems. E.g. "what if the AI in a box simulates your brain and solves backwards to effectively mind control you", "what if it suddenly deduces the way to make nanobots which take over the planet" (without any empirical trial and error the way every human invention in history has been made), "what about once it breaks all modern encryption and has control of every software system". I find these very implausible, since mostly we think P != NP and the best you can do is delay your defeat at the hands of the exponential.
27: Based on a trove of research (and my anecdotal experiences), it's all about the nervous system. The thing to treat is the nervous system. What I recognize is missing from that claim is a full picture detailing the mechanisms by which nervous system dysregulation measurably causes chemical imbalances, this is evolving and initial research is promising for this hypothesis.
It is worth noting that the imbalances can be treated, but the underlying dysregulation will continue to exist and the treatment can suppress symptoms in a way that makes addressing the root cause of dysregulation more difficult.
Scott, I'd love to read a book review written by you on Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk
I'm interested in Scott's casual use of the "G-word" to describe Romani. I wonder if he's either unaware that in SJW circles its considered a slur now or he just doesn't care. I'm more sympathetic to that circle myself so I've stopped using it, but with that one it was never clear whether any actual person of that ethnic ancestry was really upset by that word, or whether this was one of those things that the culture randomly added to the list of taboos. I would be interested, generally, in Scott's breakdown of what exactly makes something a slur (in that sense that he would not feel comfortable using it), but this seems like the sort of culture war posting he doesn't do as much of anymore, and also the sane answer is probably just something along the lines of "normative cascade."
"Penny Mordaunt has dropped out of the race to become Prime Minister"
Isn't it more appropriate to say she "lost" having come in third in mp vote.m? The regular party members to vote over the next month or so between 1st and 2nd finishers.
17: Fundamentally, the interpretation of “two-spirit” / “third gender” cultures by modern progressive activists has never made sense to me.
As in, I am supposed to see two-spirit / third gender as a sign of how enlightened these cultures were on gender, and how accepting they were of alternative gender presentation.
But really, having a third gender strikes me as a sign of a culture with strict, not loose, gender roles. As in “our gender roles are iron-clad, so the only way we can tolerate gender nonconforming weirdos is to invent a third even more restrictive gender role, or make up some superstition about them literally having two souls”.
In loosely gendered societies, you’d just say “Bob likes wearing dresses. That’s interesting I guess. When is lunch?”
For #3, note that it's split by "highest degree attained". So it's not the "average college graduate", or "average high school graduate", it's the average graduate who didn't go on to get a higher degree.
Probably not a big difference for college graduates, since the numbers for "graduate degree" and undergraduate degree" are fairly close. But it has a big effect when you're talking about high school graduates. I suspect a lot of the drop there is because each decade, a greater percentage of people with above average IQs have completed college.
"...institute a one world language, do eugenics, and reduce the world population by >90%..."
I won't try to defend eugenics (which I actually do favor), but I think that there's a lot of confusion about the other two commandments.
Lots of people seem to think that reducing population size requires massive culling. Of course, it doesn't. Indeed, population seems to be (temporarily) dipping naturally on its own, without the need for anything like deathcamps.
And lots of people seem to think that the adoption of a universal language requires the death of other languages. It doesn't. It would simply amount an agreement to teach a single language as a secondary language in all schools as part of their normal language requirement. That's why they're often called international *auxiliary* languages.
3: You describe this as average IQ "needed to get" a degree, but the label on the graph says its the average IQ of all people who HAVE a degree, which strikes me as importantly different. (Presumably many of the people who have a degree were smarter than strictly necessary to do that.)
(I also find myself wondering whether and how they attempted to compensate for the Flynn effect, which seems important for interpreting the graph.)
1. Most soldiers in modern armies never fire their weapons at the enemy because most soldiers in modern armies are truck drivers, supply clerks, helicopter mechanics, etc.
2. Most soldiers in modern armies who are primarily riflemen, will point their weapons in the general direction of the enemy and fire a bunch of shots whenever the enemy is around. The highly-publicized "research" which said otherwise, turns out to be as bogus as most anything else you'll find in the social sciences.
3. Most riflemen will *not* go anything like Full Terminator, deliberately aiming their rifle at enemy soldiers one after another and firing until they go down. Because that shit will get you killed; by definition it means exposing yourself to enemy fire long enough for one of them to deliberately aim at and shoot *you*. Keep your head down, and put enough fire on the enemy to keep their heads down, and everybody gets to go home. That's way better than being the dead hero who killed two enemy soldiers.
4. It's possible to shift the equilibrium a little bit from 2 to 3 with better training, and better sights, but don't expect miracles.
5. Soldiers operating crew-served weapons do quite a bit better at the "aim at the enemy and shoot until they go down" part, because humans are social animals and don't want to let their buddies down.
Re #18: I don't think it's fair to say that the Georgia Guidestones call for the extermination of 90% of humanity. The Guidestones were created during the Cold War / Silent Spring / Population Bomb era, by someone(s) concerned about the obviously-imminent apocalypse and hoping to provide guidance to the survivors. So "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature" is likely starting from a presumed population of <5E8 humans. Obviously they didn't read bean's essay on nuclear war, but most people in that era didn't.
The rest, seems to be generically apolitical "be nicer to each other, and don't do the stupid stuff that brought on the apocalypse" advice. The guy who paid for it was nominally Christian, but the text is nonsectarian. It's possible to cherrypick bits of it and see right-wing fundamentalists, hippie eco-freaks, or New World Order conspiracy theorists all trying to do something nefarious, but I don't think any of those are fair readings.
As useful guidance for post-apocalyptic survivors, I think it is kind of lame and useless. But destroying monuments intended to provide guidance for post-apocalyptic survivors, is several steps below lame and useless.
Autoregex gave "ass not followed by hat" as `(?!ass)hat`, which is actually "hat not preceded by ass". As you'd expect from an AI trained on pre-existing data, it can't look ahead, it can only look behind
Oh my gosh the GSS thing is so cool because it's rare to see an Okie paradox this big! By shuffling people between groups, it's possible to significantly increase the overall mean while significantly reducing the mean within each group. Essentially, imagine that educating someone increases their IQ by 5 points; also, let's pretend that the average person in each group has an IQ 6 points higher than the person in the next-highest educational group, because we also have 1 point of IQ that comes from a signaling or filtering effect.
Then, taking the smartest high school student and putting them through college will increase their IQ by 5 points, but decrease the average IQ of both groups--their new IQ is 1 point below that of the average college graduate.
This is actually what's happening when you look at the data more closely (I've worked with GSS data before and the average performance on this task is definitely increasing over time). It's also why you can't just "control" for every variable you have and get something meaningful--this is a great example of how "controlling for confounders" (in this case, education) can create incorrect inferences!
7. Cool, not sure how useful. There are some alternative ways to format regexes with worded statements. This will be faster than any of them, but also not sure if always accurate, might be hard to detect errors with some complicated patterns (you'll end up having to think hard about regex anyway then).
What's interesting is I tried it in other language. From Polish it just gave me translation to English (not regex, just translation of what I wrote). So I tried some other phrases and it was actually a good translator (didn't test too much, didn't create account for more usage). Also tried with Japanese but it just gave whatever characters I wrote inside / /
3: why didn’t you include the link to the source, The Unz Review? You’re all about Steve Sailer and friends these days - funny that you would leave it out.
17: there’s a lot of interesting backstory here, but the idea that “two-spirit” is a modern and contested term is right at the top of the Wikipedia page, so this isn’t Revealing Inconvenient Truths, just arguing against the strawman of overly simplistic memes people copy and share off of Twitter.
‘Two-spirit (also two spirit, 2S or, occasionally, twospirited) is a modern, pan-Indian, umbrella term used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe Native people in their communities who fulfill a traditional third-gender (or other gender-variant) ceremonial and social role in their cultures.
The term Two Spirit (original form chosen) was created in 1990 at the Indigenous lesbian and gay international gathering in Winnipeg, and "specifically chosen to distinguish and distance Native American/First Nations people from non-Native peoples". The primary purpose of coining a new term was to encourage the replacement of the outdated and considered offensive, anthropological term, berdache. While this new term has not been universally accepted—it has been criticized as a term of erasure by traditional communities who already have their own terms for the people being grouped under this new term, and by those who reject what they call the "western" binary implications, such as implying that Natives believe these individuals are "both male and female"—it has generally received more acceptance and use than the anthropological term it replaced.’
Assume that if 30% of the population has a 4+ year degree, the dumbest member of this sub-population has an IQ on exactly the 30th percentile, and do the same for HS grads. Conclusion, in 1960, when 59% of the population did not have a HS degree, and only 7.7% had 4+ years of college, the IQ of the lowest HS grad was 103, and of the lowest 4+ year college student was 121. In 2020, when only 8.93% of the population did not have an HS degree, and 37.9% had 4+ years of college, the IQ of the lowest HS grad is 80, and of the lowest 4+ year college student is 105. I couldn't be fucked to find the median here.
Links For July
37: A story on the internet about somebody who's name is claimed to be Title Pavel is almost always fictitious. It is a reference to the Dark Knight Rises cold open
I’m not surprised or disappointed by point 33. Tolerating people with weird kinks is different than tolerating people advocating for real-life harmful things, so r/forcedbreeding seems 0% hypocritical to me.
is it fair to call that 'IQ needed'?
> unusually obese Russian soldier (which doesn’t show up in reverse image search)
They don't mention which reverse image search they tried (presumably the Google one). Google is thought to intentionally cripple it's search results for privacy reasons. Russian search engine Yandex has a much better one, you could find people's social network profiles just by a pic taken in public transport. In fact, they mention Yandex later in the chain, but they should have tried reverse image search there too.
#25
Unemployment to population ratio has stayed the same, but the age-range is what is important there. I cannot begin to describe the amount of 54+persons I saw leave the workforce over the last two years.
Budget deficit is lower mainly because Trump got the TCJA passed in his year for all his needs, but Biden failed with the BBB. Had Biden succeeded, the deficit would (as it does) continue to trend worse.
No idea what explains the increase in net worth. The three-fold increase over 4 years seems ridiculous
23. Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. Cheaper housing means people can potentially do successful household formation earlier, which usually means more children. That was the big deal with the Baby Boom of the Postwar Era - marriage age dropped and people formed households earlier because of affordable housing and good paying work.
37. It gets even worse. IIRC the high-temperature superconductors have a much lower current they can tolerate before they lose superconductivity than copper. I guess that means you'd really have to ramp up the voltage with them?
I know about that because there's sort of a thing now in speculative futurist megastructures, where they're supposed to get to gargantuan sizes because you design them around using compressive strength and "active support" structures (IE something like a magnetic bearing scaled up enormously). High-temperature superconductors would really help with that.
1 - Brilliant
3 - Without reading the study I am calling bullshit. May change my mind later.
4 - Is true, but agree his color choices were poor. He should have used gray for 2015-2019 and colored only the last 3 years. If you are wondering about lag in data, up through week 23 (6/11) we have 97% data collected, and the twelve week stretch from 3/19 gives us our first 12 week run in 2.5 years with 3 months of no excess deaths. The data after early June is incomplete, but I would guess will give us another 2 months of zero excess deaths. Fall and winter is anyone's guess.
6 & 8 - Of course
10 - "Oh dear god!" - Holy shit
11 - Love Stuart Ritchie, hope he has a follow-up to Science Fictions soon.
12 - I'm still kinda bummed computers finally beat us in Go
17 - Is this a real thing?
20 - Subscribed. Interesting piece on a topic I had never considered.
25 - Don't like charts where time frames seem selectively chosen to make a point and not directly comparable is first take without replicating the data. The KPI chose don't mean much to me. I can only say where I live (Cleveland), things cost more and everyone is short staffed.
33 - .... wow
40 - That's incredible!
3: I have a hard time with the plausibility of this. If it were just that more people were going to college, there would be less assortment of individuals by IQ. Thus you'd expect a decrease over time in IQ among the high educational attainment groups and an increase in the "high school" group. What we see is decreases across all groups.
Additionally, IQ scores have increased generally over the period something like 10-20 points as documented by the Flynn effect. So I just don't see how you could get decreases in all groups as the only one that isn't shown is "no or incomplete high school."
Given that they are doing an IQ proxy, not real IQ, I'd bet that there is something going very wrong under the hood. Happy to be proven wrong if they write up something rigorous.
25. A combination of COVID deaths reducing the workforce, older people taking earlier retirement, and reduced immigration relative to economic growth would seem to explain it. That also seems to explain why unemployment in Europe is at historic lows.
#21/robustness- ratio of glia to neurons in the human brain is ~4:1 and whenever AI comes up I think how I definitely see the opposite of that kind of investment in infrastructure by SDEs and I'm excited for how absurd/poorly executed the next 40 years are going to be
Re 25. They aren't saying if it's median or average. Say a quarter to a half of bottom 50% households owns a home. In the past 4 years or so, average home price seems to have gone up something like 100K. So that would have an average bottom 50% household gain 25K to 50K.
I imagine the median value has either gone down or stayed about the same, so they are probably listing the average value to make it look good.
This seems to agree with households in 50th to 90th percentile gaining 100K, since presumably most of them own a home.
I'd be equally suspicious of the rest of the numbers, even if technically accurate. Most obviously, I can believe that the hourly rate went slightly up, but the prices of everything consumable (and of many non-consumable goods as well) have gone way up, so everyone is getting way less for a bit more money.
I don’t think I agree with Jacob Steinhardt’s framing that adversarial robustness is best thought of as “safety” rather than “capabilities”, at least not in the avoiding-AGI-apocalypse sense of safety. (Clearly it is safety in the sense that a self-driving car needs it to avoid crashing into things.)
Consider: if an object detector can be confused into labeling a rifle as a watermelon by the presence of a label in the image that says “watermelon”, isn’t that a shortfall in some essential capability? Would you be worried about a putative AGI that fell for things like that taking over the world?
24. Looks like in other countries, they had to look for a compromise that is at least temporarily acceptable by most. In America, it was "decided" by judicial fiat and the side that won declared it case closed, now and forever. Except turns out it wasn't. But by now both sides are polarized to the extremes and aren't willing to talk to the other side, so there would be a lot of fighting there.
25. Real net worth figure looks wildly out of place. No way it grew over 2x in 4 years.
32. I'm not sure what would be the theory of $500 making permanent improvement in a poor family's life. I mean, there could be certain cases, but wouldn't it be that in the majority of cases there are deeper reasons for the poverty that one-off $500 could ever fix?
Great roundup this month!
I know I can google it and I have and learned the basics, but can anyone point me towards more resources to get a better understanding of AI alignment? I've been going through Alignment Forum quite a bit but I was wondering if anyone knows a good summary + further resources. Thanks in advance!
The link on breastfeeding and IQ spurred me to write my own post about IQ and breastfeeding.https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/sweden-is-smarter-than-france-or
There are plenty of natural experiments on breastfeeding and IQ since different (rich European) countries have vastly different cultures around breastfeeding. Despite these different breastfeeding levels there are no significant IQ differences between countries in continental Western Europe. An indication as good as any that breastfeeding has at most a minuscule effect on cognitive ability.
Charts showing that people are using less color in the past few decades or possibly century
https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1551976051860963333
14: Sadly, knowing the reason for this will literally get you called racist by a meaningful number of people on the left. Which is kind of funny when you think about it: "racist" people are constantly called "ignorant", and yet being *too* informed (i.e. not ignorant) will also get you called racist.
And before anyone replies "No it's racist because you dont understand the historical causes of black crime rates", yes, I know. Specifically I know that's the narrative you take when some inconvenient facts rear their ugly heads.
But not only is there no real evidence for this (historical factors being the cause of black crime), it wasn't even the question being answered. Even if you somehow tie slavery or segregation or "systematic racism" to black crime, the cause is STILL not republican state governments (as implied by Newsom) - even in a more expansive sense of causation, black crime is just as high or higher in many blue states, its just that southern red states have the highest proportion black populations in the country, so "republican state governments being (uniquely) systematically racist to black people" still can't be the explanation, and calling people racist here is a way of slandering people for disagreeing with you.
23: The chart he posted is literally just a correlation. Absolutely nothing was done to this data to control for any other factors, it's just the raw data. It's not even from the part of the paper where they attempt to control for confounders. Even if there little to no causal relationship at all, we could still reasonably expect to see the exact same correlation. And yet this tweeter boldy proclaims a direct causal relationship based on that chart. Worse, it's the state level data, not the county data. Maybe he read the whole paper, maybe he understood the regression (unlikely). But his conclusion cannot be drawn from the chart he posted, and I can see no reason for posting that chart except to convince people of a causal relationship on the basis of the correlation, so its a bad tweet and he shouldn't have posted the chart.
I'm pretty sure that even the "original" Voltaire quote was a paraphrase by a 1950s biographer.
3, inverse problem: ignoring Flynn effect, use the chart to plot degree inflation over time.
#3. is misleading — this doesn’t adjust for adjustments in the IQ test due to the Flynn effect. Over the last century, the average person has gotten much smarter, and so the creators of the IQ test (who set 100 as the population-level mean) have had to repeatedly move the goalposts in response. As other commenters note, graduating high school is simply much more common now than 60 years ago, and not graduating is far less common over the same timeframe, meaning many people in the original sample were not represented.
I'm dividing my comments up into smaller groups per suggestion. Let me know if this is annoying and I can adjust:
3.) Last I checked the GSS doesn't include an IQ test. It includes something called WORDSUM which has a .71 correlation with IQ but is fundamentally a vocabulary test. I expect things like knowing what sedulous means are more class correlated than a general IQ test. In a more direct sense this makes me think that our language education might be getting worse.
5.) A man so interesting he ripped off Dollar Shave Club's aesthetic and makes everyone call him God King in what definitely isn't an attempt to salve crippling insecurity. Possibly because his wife isn't a doctor.
7.) I prefer practical applications like this. Too many people get caught up in the future and fail to run instead of crawling.
8.) It's covid and Ukraine. "The economy isn't worth human lives" ignores that the economy is how everyone gets food. Africa and the Middle East get a lot of their food from Russia/Ukraine because it's cheap and all that. Fortunately, both regions are famous for their stability and this is expected to have no serious effects... More seriously, Turkey has been trying to get Russia to allow continued exports, partly because they make money and partly because instability in their neighborhood isn't great. Russia agreed and then bombed grain distribution centers the next day because Russia has decided to be this season's heel. South/Southeast Asia might also have some issues due to economic problems but they fundamentally still have open lines of trade mostly and their agricultural centers haven't been bombed.
But yeah, this is temporary. But people die in temporary food shortages. Governments are overthrown. We were somewhat saved by the fact the harvest was good. But when you embargo and or invade a third of the world's export grain market things are structurally at issue. There are things that can be done to increase production but most of the countries that could help are food secure enough this won't affect them. So this is the rare case where awareness might actually be an answer.
9.) This is a common trick in p-hacking. Data isn't giving you what you want? Pre-committed to a set methodology? Just add more data!
12.) I don't understand how these two things correlate. Why would exponential to linear effects in computing correlate to the ideas getting harder to find thesis?
14.) Yeah, that was my thought to. I won't say the phrase to avoid the search engines picking it up but they have a pre-canned response to this. Has anyone seen such spaces? What's the ratio of people who are insane to just normal conservatives? Newsom remains, in my opinion, pretty bland. But that seems like the Democratic brand at the moment, to be frank. Far left policy (at least against the American median) backed by bland politicians. Freddie had a piece saying as much about Fetterman.
15.) Did anyone else watch ReBoot? This reminds me of that aesthetic which was pretty accurate to the computer generation of the time.
16.) While I don't know about this specific subject this is real in a general sense. One thing Britain has been trying to achieve for years is what they call reciprocal accreditation. Basically the idea is that if you're a trained doctor or stock broker from the UK then the US should just let you work in the US. And in exchange you can work in the UK. The issue is the deal's lopsided: access to the US is worth much more than access to the UK. You see similar things with Mexico and Canada. Interestingly, a fair number of British right wingers seem to have decided this is a good idea and totally different from an organization like the EU. Left wingers just want to rejoin the EU.
17.) The thing is that balance isn't interesting. You can read a few dozen papers doing a deep anthropological dive on the practices of the Haudenosaunee and learn about a fascinating and complicated culture. Or you can make up something and then wrap it in a bunch of accreditation when people are too polite (or politically motivated) to point out you're making stuff up. Memetically the latter gets passed around as "checkmate, bigots!" or whatever. People have a powerful ability to convince themselves of what they want to believe. Not to mention once any impoverished group gains interest from such a source they have every incentive to play along as a way to get sympathy and/or money. Do you think the Mosuo would be getting anywhere near as much tourism or an airport built if not for the whole matriarchy thing?
18.) I strongly suspect it was some Q-Anon believer.
19.) You don't have an inner circle? That's exactly what someone with an inner circle would say! More seriously, I'm unsurprised. Musk doesn't seem like an EA type and he especially doesn't seem like he'd like playing in someone else's sandbox. (Also: you do have an inner circle and a similar story about you would say something similar about, say, the Grants Program.)
21.) Speaking of this, I recently heard almost no one is working on AI cybersecurity. As apparently the local rationalist skeptic this is one area I actually think is really important and valid. You don't need to think the singularity is coming to imagine an AI that can break encryption or something. I fear AI research really could usher in a new era of computer viruses in the endless arms race between the two. Is this true? Who's the Pope of EA/AI Alignment that I can send a petition to in order to get this funded?
22.) Is this surprising? When one culture has a norm of marrying young and attaches much more social prestige to children and that culture is broadly Republican of course those things correlate.
24.) Thank you for giving me a link to back up something I've been saying and getting push back on this entire time... The US is in a weird position where both our parties are extreme on abortion issues relative to peer countries. (Of course, the US remains far to the left of the world average.)
25.) The Democrats are trying to pretend the economy isn't ailing going into the mid-terms. It is. Though it must be said we're dealing with something rather more mild than, say, 2008. At least so far. It could get worse.
The budget deficit is lower because income taxes receipts have increased in part due to inflation and in part due to tax increases. Unemployment rate doesn't include people not seeking employment and the stats for employment to population ratio is hacked by excluding people over 54. A disproportionate share of people who stayed home were older. They chose this statistic over the Labor Force Participation Rate because that doesn't prove what they want it to prove: it was higher under Trump.
This is the same trick they pull with real wages for production non-supervisory workers. In other words, they chose a specific sector that produces a lot of durable goods which did well during the pandemic and find a modest increase while real wages have otherwise fallen. And the net worth thing is because people spent two years spending less and saving more or investing in durable assets like couches instead of trips to Disney. Though the statistics I found mostly have lower absolute numbers roughly doubling is what I've seen. Real GDP is higher... but it's been declining since Q4 2021.
This is just partisan propaganda. If the "hold my beer" wasn't obvious. Lots of cherrypicking.
32.) UBI experts always predict it will go well and it never goes as well as they predict. It's also totally unnecessary and continues to be unaffordable. We live in an economy undergoing profound changes but the decreased demand for labor is not an actually observed phenomenon. The idea that we're in some future where people are going to be unnecessary remains completely unproven. If you really want to see how ridiculous it is go read some 19th century Russian anarchists. They'll tell you late 19th-early 20th century Russia is so rich that work is barely necessary anymore. Industrialization was about to eliminate all need for work etc etc. And objectively, they were correct that 19th century Russia was leaps and bounds wealthier than previously. I don't expect modern assertions of the same thing (substitute the time period and "industrialization" for "automation") to survive better than they did.
33.) Kink types are all either extreme progressives or libertarians in my experience. I've seen people making the case that universal healthcare and UBI was necessary to be kink friendly so women could stay home and be fetish bimbos instead of needing to work. Which ties back into the "how people will spend their time" part of UBI.
34.) Yeah, diviners can and do definitely fudge results. Fun fact: I've been to Delphi in Greece and they let you stand in the room the priests snuck into so they could hear the questions in secret. I'm still surprised you thought the entire process was "honestly" random. I'm not sure humans are capable of that. It's why we need to use space noise or lava lamps to generate really random activity. And even that's just because we can't model it correctly. But even setting that aside: you presumably know scientists, priests, etc all fudge results in the direction they want. Why wouldn't people back then?
35.) It's more a typical case of: left wing government spends itself into poverty on social programs and infrastructure ("infrastructure") then refuses to take painful but necessary corrective steps. Then an economic crisis hits and they invite in "experts" who do things like write about how this is all the fault of racism and ignore the actual farmers when they object because they're greedy landlords or whatever. And then the policy blows up in their face. Seriously, I cannot believe how some left wing governments think something like a critique of social patterns in post-imperial countries will magically make food grow better. It's literally magical thinking: we are the indingenous people of the land so we automatically know better even if we've never farmed before. (I am specifically thinking of Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka here.) Fortunately Sri Lanka has a decent civil society so hopefully the country comes out stronger because of it.
36.) THE MISSING LINK! I found it!
Re: 12
The Elo ranking is a logarithmic scale (400 Elo points corresponding to a factor of 10 in odds of winning), so the computing power requirements shown by the equation on the plot aren't even quite quadratic, let alone exponential.
#34: I'm not really impressed by this part of the criticism:
> Moore believed that because this procedure resulted in randomizing the areas where hunters searched for game, it prevented them from being so successful in finding caribou that they would overhunt and deplete the caribou herds.
> [But Moore] falsely assumed that caribou respond to human predation by changing their location.
That assumption sounds safe to me. But the bigger problem is that the description of what Moore thought says the opposite - that in the absence of randomization, caribou would be so easy to find that they would all be quickly wiped out.
Joseph Heinrich didn't use that example, though, he used an example of bird augury in determining where to grow rice. And his argument was that copying other people's paddy-locating choices was maladaptive, whereas the argument attributed to Moore is that copying other people's where-to-hunt choices was excessively *adaptive*. That does tend to suggest that that argument isn't worth much. But not for the reasons stated in Sick Societies.
3: You write needed, but the chart says what they looked at was the mean. Very different things.
Honestly curious when you (as a non-developer) use regexes?
The monkey pox vaccine one is out of date and it is actually fine.
https://jabberwocking.com/monkeypox-vaccine-is-on-its-way-from-denmark/
1) made me snort coffee on the keyboard, but may I be the first to say: scumwit, dipgoblin, libsucker, dirthat, trumpnozzle and wankclown? More worrying, around 1,000 uses of the compound 'assass' ?? Presumably in 'assassin' etc may we have an independent assassment from your inner circle?
33. Aella's the top post on that subreddit, coincidentally enough.
17: Reminds me of the recent debate around the claim that Louisa May Alcott was actually a trans man and would have identified as such if society at the time had that concept. https://twitter.com/peytonology/status/1516612189687324673
25: I think that wild doubling net worth figure has something to do with house price growth which might account for some of the 'feels like the economy is bad' sentiment even though a lot of people are technically richer.
14) These sort of talking points (statistics about education/welfare/whatever) in the South were really big in the Bush era, then kind of stopped; I'd always assumed that was when everyone worked it out.
22) This is something Steve Sailer has been banging on about for decades now, but you can easily explain it all away. Unmarried (and more likely to be childless) white women vote heavily democratic, people who live in cities have fewer kids (so coastal states with big cities have lower TFR), fertility is inversely correlated with income and Utah's a red state.
!sort_By(alphanumeric)
32) Zvi wrote a nice analysis of that cash transfers study, for anyone more interested in picking it apart: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/when-giving-people-money-doesnt-help
3) Big If True, also "Sad!". More ammunition for Bryan Caplan's Case Against Education. I am reminded of all those memes along the lines of You Couldn't Pass A High School Exit Exam From 1890 or whatever. The usual handwave was "irrelevant arcane minutinae, not Actual IQ", but if it really does take less and less thinkoomph to achieve a degree...I dunno, at some point the charade's gotta get out of the bag? When no one is allowed to fail at getting an Employability Certificate, the certificate doesn't say much anymore.
[copy-paste obligatory paragraph about importance of vocational education here]
It would be __fascinating__ to see a more detailed breakdown of Minimum Viable IQ-For-Degree at school "tier" level. I wonder if this is an across-the-board distributional shift (e..g. today's Yalies/UC__/__SU/... aren't as brainy as yesteryear's Yalies/UC__/__SU/...), or there's some variance.
Also interesting to contrast this with Flynn Effect, though I know that's maybe slowed or stopped, allegedly. If MVI had not gone down, or in fact had *risen*, would graduation rates have stayed approximately the same/decreased rather than rising? (controlling for increasing enrollment, obviously) In other words - IQ is definitely correlated with educational outcomes - but maybe there's more to this story besides just a relaxing of standards. Sounds like it'd be a fun Stop Confounding Yourself deep dive.
Regarding 38:
I would definitely use "Romani" or "Roma" instead of "gypsies", which is still used a racial slur and widely seen as pejorative by the Romani community. Until quite recently, I was not aware that the term not only had negative connotations, but historically sometimes had a different and broader referent (people who in various ways were considered a threat to society's order). Reading about present day discrimination against the Romani and realizing how common it and Anti-Romani prejudices and stereotypes are, convinced me that we should avoid using the term if possible.
32. A continuation of the idea that you can intervene in somebody elses life, take away some of their independence, agency, and dignity and expect them to benefit and be grateful.
It's one of the most frustrating features of the EA ideology (and the broader ratrionalist movement in general) People who have a good understanding of human beings know that this kind of do-gooding always has negative aspects, but because the givers are entirely unable to see this, will continue, forever to inflict these negative aspects on unsuspecting poor people.
Even worse is that -
"the researchers had asked experts to predict the results of this experiment, and they had all guessed that it would go well"
By my definition these aren't experts, they're idiots, and the fact that the researchers thought otherwise does them no credit whatsoever. An expert would be someone who had endured being the recipient of this kind of intervention and therefore had just a glimmer of an understanding of why an enlightened human being would never inflict it on somebody else. I assume these so-called 'experts' were academics for which - in this example - a perfect synonym is 'irrelevant'.
On the criticism X3 post I used the analogy of socialism to shine a light on the deficiencies of EA. For those of us who think socialism is a very bad idea, it's painful to hear the catalogue of excuses for why the latest central planning experiment has caused such unadulterated misery. The enthusiast will never, for a fraction of a second, consider the possibility that the misery is a consequence of socialism itself. Merely that it wasn't implemented properly, or hard enough, or whatever.
Similarly with these supposedly 'altruistic' interventions. The ideology run so deep that it never occurs to the believer that the suffering stems from the intervention itself, from what it takes away, from how it demeans and reduces.
If you wonder why EAs can never see this, I'd first answer that without experience of it, it is indeed not obvious that people giving you free stuff, and taking away some necessity for you to work or make effort will diminish you and make you worse off. But there is a hint of the depth of the ideology in the reluctance of EAs to let go of their 'giving'.
My guess is Scott would consider divorce, abandoning his blog and strangling a few innocent kittens as soon as give up his donations to charities. If true, that is an enormous motivation to find ways to see EA as essentially beneficent - it doesn't matter how many examples of the misery caused come to light - each and every one will be blamed on specific problems, never the intervening in other peoples lives.
Just as an aside, you would be correct to assume that I think UBI to be the most pernicious idea yet generated by the non-understanding portion of humanity.
Re 4: on mobile, twitter zooms into the center of the image, omitting the labels on the y axis (which does not start at zero), badly distorting the meaning. Also, if people have to start their graph axis at nonzero, start them a bit below the minimum data point. Including the 40k-45k range just makes it look more like a non-truncated axis.
Also, colors? Going for four shares of red/brown might not be necessary if there are still untapped primary colors like green around.
Besides the graph design, I think at the moment it looks consistent with COVID not being the big killer any more, but we will know for sure in December.
Re: 3 - we need to be careful here, this seems like the kind of thing at risk of Simpson's Paradox. When more groups who used to just get High School diplomas now go to college instead, and groups who didn't finish high school now do, then the average could decrease in each group without the total average decreasing.
(Possibbly the total average *has* decreased, the way it has in Sweden (we have excellent statistics from conscription tests), but the graphics could still be misleading.)
33. > a fetish subreddit fetish about men enslaving, raping, and forceably impregnating women,
Yikes. Sorry to disappoint anybody ... but how is this even legal?
12 seems wrong, at least when it comes to computer Chess. After all, while throwing more compute at the problem obviously does help and engines play better with access to greater resources, the advancements in playing strength, particularly in the last decade or two, have been about better engines more so than anything else. Consider the progress of Stockfish for example (https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/64992190/179047597-62d5051f-ffa8-47e0-bb10-71c1bbb5fe75.png): that's an increase of 800 Elo points (the difference between Magnus Carlsen and a Candidate Master, so top 2000ish player). Or, if you were to trace its performance scaling from available operations per second back in time, it would have reached top GM level on a 1990 personal computer.
One of the graphs also plots playing strength against the number of positions evaluated, but this depends widely on the approach taken by the engine: neural network based GPU engines evaluate mere 10k positions a second but can reach overwhelmingly superhuman performance, and the latest Stockfish running on contemporary single CPU hardware actually evaluates roughly as many positions as Deep Blue did (around a hundred million a second), but is something in the order of 1000 Elo points stronger, to the extent that differences that large are even meaningful. This is accomplished by better evaluation function and better ability to discard lines not worth investigating further. And of course Deep Blue itself, while running on an outlier supercomputer hardware, exhibited a myriad of algorithmic advances made by researchers over the course of decades.
That's putting aside the real elephant in the room, namely that Elo rating is calculated using normal or logistic distribution.
25:
Real GDP is a straight line pointing upwards, *of course* it's higher than before, it usually is. Same goes for real wages of production employees.
Low unemployment is a short-term effect due to excessive NGDP growth, which is a bad thing. It would be overall better to have lower NGDP/inflation and higher unemployment.
So those numbers are somewhere between nonsense and cherry-picked. Not sure about the budget deficit — I don't understand that area as well as I would like — or househould net worth — suspicious number, as others have pointed out, likely cherry-picked in some way.
On 25, what's the confusion? The US economy has been red hot for a while now, inflation has taken a major bite out of people's feeling about it because it's such a tangible indicator but when you take a look at the broad macroeconomy, it's extremely strong. Who knows what the future brings, but looking backward, the economy has been pretty awesome. In the context of the near-apocalyptic effect of the pandemic, broad fiscal support has been pretty resoundingly vindicated, and this isn't a partisan thing: Trump and Biden both printed money and shoveled it out the door and the results have been mostly great. If anything, this is a knock on Obama: the anemic response to the financial crisis and ensuing deficit fetishism was clearly a massive error.
Regarding 8 and the increase in world hunger.
It's notable that it's not that there isn't enough food, but rather it cannot be delivered to the places that need it most. It's not mentioned in the link, but the Tigray region of Ethiopia is struggling horrendously at the moment due to a combination of drought and conflict (similar to Yemen in this regard). Coupled with the situation in Ukraine and reduced grain exports, one imagines this will get worse unless developed states ever so slightly increase their contributions to the UN and NGOs operating in these areas. I don't believe (89%) that the UN will declare a famine in these areas (i.e. Horn of Africa), but that's more due to not being able to send inspectors, lobbying, the fact they didn't last year despite the criteria ostensibly being met, and some chance of improvement in the coming months.
If the situation does worsen and aid deliveries still can't get through by road I wonder whether any developed state would chance a 'Berlin Airlift' style relief drop, much like the UK and US (one presumes others) did for the Yazidis in 2014.
7: AutoRegex testing
"match anything that starts with a or ends with z" yields "^(a|z)" [Bad]
"match anything that starts with an a or ends with a z" yields "^a|z$" [Good]
"match any real name" yields "[A-Z]{1}[a-z]+" [Pretty good. Does not match "Mary Anne" or "Mary-Anne". There is however no general agreement as to what constitutes a legal name.]
Ad 24:
For Germany, the sudden color switch in the comparison figure seems wrong. Of the reasons listed below the figure, 1, 2 and 5 are implied in the text, and 4 is afaik often counted as 5.
For cross-country comparisons with regards to trisomy-21 abortions, also see dw.com from 2017:
https://m.dw.com/en/would-you-have-an-abortion-if-you-knew-your-baby-had-down-syndrome/a-38041648
For the more recent developments in Germany, see https://m.dw.com/en/germany-eases-access-to-abortions-in-telemedicine-pilot-project/a-60172718
Adding another link from the same guy who wrote that piece on Sri Lanka:
https://adriandsouza.substack.com/p/harvard-hedgefund
Harvard's 2022 gains are north of $11 billion. Their tuition fees are less than 3% of their annual gains. It's fair to say that Harvard doesn't need any tuition whatsoever, but being a non-profit institution means they are taxed far lower than other hedge funds.
Another fact I found interesting his Harvard article: 43% of whites admitted to harvard are either athletes, legacies, kids of donors or on the "dean's list". I suspect a great number of them are privileged.
This is an aspect of affirmative action that seldom gets talked about. It's not just about race but also class. There is a silent bias in favor of the rich but dull kids. I see very little discussion about this either in left-wing or right-wing media.
14: The claim that "all Trump supporters are racist" may or not be true, but for the direct matter at hand, the relevant question is how many Trump supporters are racists who know about (or are at least not too lazy to Google) the racial demographics of more than a couple of states
"...a fetish subreddit fetish..."
Either a typo, or the most meta fetish I've ever heard of.
Regarding 28. (Economic stats in the US, Trump vs. Biden), economist Thomas Sowell points out that household income may drop with prosperity as adult children move out of their parents' homes to their own homes.
Apparently paradoxical initially, but it makes sense if the number of people per household is not controlled for.
re 25: Scott's quibbles in general are valid, however the question "and why is the budget deficit lower?" is the easiest question in the world to answer to those of us who've been paying attention to what goes on with the budget deficit for a while
It strikes me as I was reading Dynomight on abortion laws across the world that he’s a better journalist than pretty much anybody employed as a journalist these days. The NYT might have run a piece like that in the Sunday supplement a few decades ago - dispassionate, informative and non ideological but it’s rare now.
>32: After some past studies (eg here) showed benefit of cash transfers (think UBI, but much smaller and shorter term), a newer study of $500 to $2000 given to poor families one time only fails to show any benefit to bank account balances, self-rated financial well-being, or self-rated happiness four months later
So, I think one likely factor here is, if you give significant but not transformative quantities of money like this to random people in poor communities, a lot of them are going to end up stressed out because acquaintances are going to hear that they got money out of nowhere, and are going to come asking them for favors and assistance, and it's going to lead to a whole bunch of pressure and stress about how much of their money they're obligated to spend on other people. So it's likely not just the one-time nature of the payment which might lead to poor results, but the targeting, paying out to a random selection of poor people, because this means the money is mostly going to people in communities with high expectations of social sharing of windfalls, where most of the community members aren't also receiving money.
Anyone who is very knowledgeable on stuff related to #3 can confirm / debunk it? Seems like a pretty big deal to me, I’d like to know more about it.
It looks like overall net worth growth accelerated from the beginning of covid even before inflation took off: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL192090005Q
Many possibilities. Lower spending due to shutdowns, cash transfers, house value growth. I think the latter is probably very important, houses are a big part of any homeowners net worth and often highly levered. House values (and rents) went way up, moreso than other components of the CPI basket.
It looks like overall net worth growth accelerated from the beginning of covid even before inflation took off: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL192090005Q
Many possibilities. Lower spending due to shutdowns, cash transfers, house value growth. I think the latter is probably very important, houses are a big part of any homeowners net worth and often highly levered. House values (and rents) went way up, moreso than other components of the CPI basket.
Importantly the educational attainment graph doesn't show average IQ *needed* to get a degree by decade. That framing assumes school is getting easier which isn't necessarily the case, it could be that you never needed more than a 100 to get a degree and the thing that has changed is how much we encourage 100-110 IQ people to go to college.
Point 3: This is something economists have studied extensively. The consensus is that the average ability of college students rose from the 1900 to the 1920 birth cohorts. It's been roughly constant since. The average ability of those who do not attempt college has indeed declined substantially. See for example Figure 1b https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304393214000208. The literature review documents sources finding similar things with fewer data points since the 1970s.
You might wonder how the ability of college students has remained constant if college has expanded so much. The answer is that prior to the 1930-1940 birth cohorts, students seem to have been shockingly poorly selected on test scores or grades. They were instead mostly sorted on family income or socioeconomic status: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20190154
24. I understand that overview graphs might need some oversimplification, but dark blue for fully 'on demand' seemed weird in the German case.
As dynomight later explains: 'In Germany, abortion is always illegal (sort of) but simply not punished in the first 14 weeks.' I actually don't know where the 'sort of' comes from.
The 'illegal, but not punished' flows from the acknowlegdement that there are basic rights involved on both sides; basic rights that are all crucial and cannot really be satisfactorily combined: the right of the unborn (also before week 12) to life and bodily integrity, and right of the mother to bodily autonomy. In the area of politics, where one interpretation is so often cast to 'win' over the other, I found this almost wise.
It came into being not by the will of our politicians, but by a ruling of the Supreme Court. Which has a good track record of dealing with the subject matter and not being interested much in politics.
And, as dynomight says, there are also exceptions eg. in the case of rape or a danger for the mother's health.
Is #12 evidence against the 'AI go foom' hypothesis?
If something as simple as chess requires exponential increases in computing power for linear improvements, Is it possible that 'improving the intelligence of a supercomputer' is just as hard?
> 5: This month in nominative determinism: conservative radio commentator Jeremy Boreing.
Oh, on this I must protest! He has quite the personality. The man calls himself the God-King of the Daily Wire, and has cut one of the most entertaining ads (for his razors) that I've seen in a while: https://youtu.be/s92UMJNjPIA
I'm pretty sure this is a solid counterexample to nominative determinism. Whatever else Jeremy Boreing is, he's not *boring*.
#1. Amazing. Who would have thought that "wankwaffle" was even a thing? Now if this analysis could be repeated for Twitter...
#3. Seems like there could be different explanations for this. Are curricula being degraded to make them easier for less-intelligent students, or are less-intelligent students getting more study help these days, or does it have to do with finances or opportunities or something else entirely?
#7. Seems useful but I'd want to check its output very carefully.
#13. Interesting that DALL-E seems to know about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
#17. Not surprised. You mostly hear about this stuff from people who know nothing at all about Native American cultures. I'm sure an article could be written in favor of Two Spirits = transgender, and another against it, and they could easily be of equal scholarship and accuracy.
#19. Can we just stop talking about Elon Musk? He's like a smarter version of Trump; he loves being the center of attention.
#22. This is well explained by the first few minutes of the movie Idiocracy.
#38. Yes. And another thing everyone ought to already know: Did you know that the word "gyp" is also a reference to Gypsies? It derives from the negative stereotype that Gypsies always cheat their customers, similar to the way the old-time expression "Jew down" ("He tried to Jew me down") is based on the stereotype that Jews are cheap and will always try to haggle even when the seller is asking a fair price.
#39 sort of makes sense at first but gradually loses the plot. The AI clearly does not actually understand what the image is about. But why should we expect it to?
2) My immediate thoughts on the soldiers using their weapons piece as someone who once read a lot of military history:
i) That definitely didn't happen in Napoleonic times and before because people were in a big line and the peer pressure would have been immense, and the officers would have noticed. General running was always an issue though, especially if under perceived threat/encirclement.
ii) There are lots of times when groups of soldiers ran out of ammo in WWI/WW2, this seems unlikely if very few people are shooting.
iii) People are lazy/scared, I don't doubt that as combat tactics involved people in smaller groups I don't doubt that some groups/individuals used that as an opportunity to slack/hide/etc.
iv) I highly doubt tons of soldiers didn't use their weapon at all. It would be interesting to have some data on how many were really trying to fire effectively, versus just do the minimum firing/exposure possible to reduce their risk of getting shot while not eliciting the ire of their peers/officers. I can see a lot of wild, inaccurate shooting. But I wouldn't hazard a guess on percent.
Re: #25 and especially real net worth for bottom 50%, two factors come immediately to mind:
#1, home equity -- I don't know what the rate of homeownership for the bottom 50% is, but it is 65% for the US, so at least 30% and I would guess higher. Average home equity is way up, would have to do more math to make sure it is enough to move the needle, but I suspect it could explain the difference on its own: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-09/average-u-s-homeowner-gained-57-000-in-equity-in-one-year#xj4y7vzkg
#2, household formation -- Millennials are marrying and every time that happens we trade two households with $30K net worth for one with $60K (or something).
> a newer study of $500 to $2000 given to poor families one time only fails to show any benefit to bank account balances, self-rated financial well-being, or self-rated happiness four months later
Noting that this is an ex-post analysis, this is consistent with the idea that poor people are "rational" economic actors in the sense of traditional, expectations-based analysis. This would contradict the stories of both left-leaning (Marxist-derived, but obviously no longer Marxist) and right-leaning (moralizing, "Protestant work ethic") sociologies.
The "homo economicus" model is that people are relatively indifferent to their current situation and instead look at the long-term; this is most apparent in the Permanent Income Hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_income_hypothesis). In the strict reading this is obviously false for people living paycheque-to-paycheque, but it becomes much more true at the wealthier end, when liquidity is not a real concern.
Under the PIH, the value of $2,000 isn't exactly $2,000, it's the long-term income that $2,000 would represent. Taking a very generous view that poor families see an effective interest rate of 10% (i.e. $2,000 could repay debt otherwise permanently held at a 10% rate), the largest transfer there corresponds to $200/yr in income; the smaller $500 transfer would be just $50/yr in income (before inflation adjustment, but so was the interest rate).
As a permanent transfer, we would expect both of those incomes to provide a benefit, but we would expect the benefit to be very small, probably unmeasurable against noise.
About number 14:
Gavin Newsome may have a little fun trying to troll Red-tribe people on the Trump social network. He may not see much success in converting people by that kind of argument.
Specifically with respect to murder rates: when I look for lists of cities in the United States, sorted by murder rates, I find blue-tribe cities in blue-tribe States, blue-tribe cities in red-tribe States, and cities-of-uncertain-tribal-dominance in either blue-tribe States or red-tribe States.
The State-by-State numbers show that Southern states have worse murder rates. City-by-city numbers show dense urban areas with lots of poor minorities tend to have worse murder rates.
This leads to a predictable red-tribe argument ("a number of blue-tribe cities have extraordinarily high murder rates"), and a predictable blue-tribe argument ("a solid block of red-tribe States have the highest murder rates in the nation").
> I think this is the first AI-based app I might use in real life, good work.
Google?
"Having an inner circle sounds tiring and morally fraught, and I’m glad I’ll never be rich enough to have to worry about it."
Your outer circle though..... damnnnnnnnn!
12: This is one of the things that makes me extremely skeptical of the AI takeoff scenarios. Working in CS you quickly learn that basically everything you ever want to do turns out to be NP-hard and you just have to muddle by with heuristics that push down the exponential growth for a while.
Almost every conversation I've had about AI risk involves my counterparty asserting that the AI will be simulating extremely complex systems and solving inverse problems related to those systems. E.g. "what if the AI in a box simulates your brain and solves backwards to effectively mind control you", "what if it suddenly deduces the way to make nanobots which take over the planet" (without any empirical trial and error the way every human invention in history has been made), "what about once it breaks all modern encryption and has control of every software system". I find these very implausible, since mostly we think P != NP and the best you can do is delay your defeat at the hands of the exponential.
27: Based on a trove of research (and my anecdotal experiences), it's all about the nervous system. The thing to treat is the nervous system. What I recognize is missing from that claim is a full picture detailing the mechanisms by which nervous system dysregulation measurably causes chemical imbalances, this is evolving and initial research is promising for this hypothesis.
It is worth noting that the imbalances can be treated, but the underlying dysregulation will continue to exist and the treatment can suppress symptoms in a way that makes addressing the root cause of dysregulation more difficult.
Scott, I'd love to read a book review written by you on Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk
I'm interested in Scott's casual use of the "G-word" to describe Romani. I wonder if he's either unaware that in SJW circles its considered a slur now or he just doesn't care. I'm more sympathetic to that circle myself so I've stopped using it, but with that one it was never clear whether any actual person of that ethnic ancestry was really upset by that word, or whether this was one of those things that the culture randomly added to the list of taboos. I would be interested, generally, in Scott's breakdown of what exactly makes something a slur (in that sense that he would not feel comfortable using it), but this seems like the sort of culture war posting he doesn't do as much of anymore, and also the sane answer is probably just something along the lines of "normative cascade."
"Penny Mordaunt has dropped out of the race to become Prime Minister"
Isn't it more appropriate to say she "lost" having come in third in mp vote.m? The regular party members to vote over the next month or so between 1st and 2nd finishers.
I can't trust anyone who takes a blurry picture of their computer screen to post on twitter. Especially when the subject is data analysis.
17: Fundamentally, the interpretation of “two-spirit” / “third gender” cultures by modern progressive activists has never made sense to me.
As in, I am supposed to see two-spirit / third gender as a sign of how enlightened these cultures were on gender, and how accepting they were of alternative gender presentation.
But really, having a third gender strikes me as a sign of a culture with strict, not loose, gender roles. As in “our gender roles are iron-clad, so the only way we can tolerate gender nonconforming weirdos is to invent a third even more restrictive gender role, or make up some superstition about them literally having two souls”.
In loosely gendered societies, you’d just say “Bob likes wearing dresses. That’s interesting I guess. When is lunch?”
For #3, note that it's split by "highest degree attained". So it's not the "average college graduate", or "average high school graduate", it's the average graduate who didn't go on to get a higher degree.
Probably not a big difference for college graduates, since the numbers for "graduate degree" and undergraduate degree" are fairly close. But it has a big effect when you're talking about high school graduates. I suspect a lot of the drop there is because each decade, a greater percentage of people with above average IQs have completed college.
33: God how many subreddits does Aella have the top post on.
"...institute a one world language, do eugenics, and reduce the world population by >90%..."
I won't try to defend eugenics (which I actually do favor), but I think that there's a lot of confusion about the other two commandments.
Lots of people seem to think that reducing population size requires massive culling. Of course, it doesn't. Indeed, population seems to be (temporarily) dipping naturally on its own, without the need for anything like deathcamps.
And lots of people seem to think that the adoption of a universal language requires the death of other languages. It doesn't. It would simply amount an agreement to teach a single language as a secondary language in all schools as part of their normal language requirement. That's why they're often called international *auxiliary* languages.
3: You describe this as average IQ "needed to get" a degree, but the label on the graph says its the average IQ of all people who HAVE a degree, which strikes me as importantly different. (Presumably many of the people who have a degree were smarter than strictly necessary to do that.)
(I also find myself wondering whether and how they attempted to compensate for the Flynn effect, which seems important for interpreting the graph.)
Re #2, the TL,DR version is:
1. Most soldiers in modern armies never fire their weapons at the enemy because most soldiers in modern armies are truck drivers, supply clerks, helicopter mechanics, etc.
2. Most soldiers in modern armies who are primarily riflemen, will point their weapons in the general direction of the enemy and fire a bunch of shots whenever the enemy is around. The highly-publicized "research" which said otherwise, turns out to be as bogus as most anything else you'll find in the social sciences.
3. Most riflemen will *not* go anything like Full Terminator, deliberately aiming their rifle at enemy soldiers one after another and firing until they go down. Because that shit will get you killed; by definition it means exposing yourself to enemy fire long enough for one of them to deliberately aim at and shoot *you*. Keep your head down, and put enough fire on the enemy to keep their heads down, and everybody gets to go home. That's way better than being the dead hero who killed two enemy soldiers.
4. It's possible to shift the equilibrium a little bit from 2 to 3 with better training, and better sights, but don't expect miracles.
5. Soldiers operating crew-served weapons do quite a bit better at the "aim at the enemy and shoot until they go down" part, because humans are social animals and don't want to let their buddies down.
Apologies if this shows up twice.
Re #18: I don't think it's fair to say that the Georgia Guidestones call for the extermination of 90% of humanity. The Guidestones were created during the Cold War / Silent Spring / Population Bomb era, by someone(s) concerned about the obviously-imminent apocalypse and hoping to provide guidance to the survivors. So "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature" is likely starting from a presumed population of <5E8 humans. Obviously they didn't read bean's essay on nuclear war, but most people in that era didn't.
The rest, seems to be generically apolitical "be nicer to each other, and don't do the stupid stuff that brought on the apocalypse" advice. The guy who paid for it was nominally Christian, but the text is nonsectarian. It's possible to cherrypick bits of it and see right-wing fundamentalists, hippie eco-freaks, or New World Order conspiracy theorists all trying to do something nefarious, but I don't think any of those are fair readings.
As useful guidance for post-apocalyptic survivors, I think it is kind of lame and useless. But destroying monuments intended to provide guidance for post-apocalyptic survivors, is several steps below lame and useless.
Update on #16: The FDA has approved use of the monkeypox vaccine from the factory in Denmark, as of 3 days ago:
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3576490-fda-clears-additional-monkeypox-vaccines-from-denmark-plant/
Autoregex gave "ass not followed by hat" as `(?!ass)hat`, which is actually "hat not preceded by ass". As you'd expect from an AI trained on pre-existing data, it can't look ahead, it can only look behind
Oh my gosh the GSS thing is so cool because it's rare to see an Okie paradox this big! By shuffling people between groups, it's possible to significantly increase the overall mean while significantly reducing the mean within each group. Essentially, imagine that educating someone increases their IQ by 5 points; also, let's pretend that the average person in each group has an IQ 6 points higher than the person in the next-highest educational group, because we also have 1 point of IQ that comes from a signaling or filtering effect.
Then, taking the smartest high school student and putting them through college will increase their IQ by 5 points, but decrease the average IQ of both groups--their new IQ is 1 point below that of the average college graduate.
This is actually what's happening when you look at the data more closely (I've worked with GSS data before and the average performance on this task is definitely increasing over time). It's also why you can't just "control" for every variable you have and get something meaningful--this is a great example of how "controlling for confounders" (in this case, education) can create incorrect inferences!
Here's Wikipedia on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Rogers_phenomenon
Point 33 is reddit in a nutshell, upvotes, downvotes, and moderators make for incredibly unhealthy communities
3: I'm a little offended since I got my master's in 2019 but they don't list any graduate degrees for the 2010s.
7: Thank you!
I (a grumpy old professor of mathematical statistics) offer some grumpy comments about the paper in item 9 (probabilities of statistical significance) here: https://haggstrom.blogspot.com/2022/08/mixed-feelings-about-two-publications.html
7. Cool, not sure how useful. There are some alternative ways to format regexes with worded statements. This will be faster than any of them, but also not sure if always accurate, might be hard to detect errors with some complicated patterns (you'll end up having to think hard about regex anyway then).
What's interesting is I tried it in other language. From Polish it just gave me translation to English (not regex, just translation of what I wrote). So I tried some other phrases and it was actually a good translator (didn't test too much, didn't create account for more usage). Also tried with Japanese but it just gave whatever characters I wrote inside / /
3: why didn’t you include the link to the source, The Unz Review? You’re all about Steve Sailer and friends these days - funny that you would leave it out.
17: there’s a lot of interesting backstory here, but the idea that “two-spirit” is a modern and contested term is right at the top of the Wikipedia page, so this isn’t Revealing Inconvenient Truths, just arguing against the strawman of overly simplistic memes people copy and share off of Twitter.
‘Two-spirit (also two spirit, 2S or, occasionally, twospirited) is a modern, pan-Indian, umbrella term used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe Native people in their communities who fulfill a traditional third-gender (or other gender-variant) ceremonial and social role in their cultures.
The term Two Spirit (original form chosen) was created in 1990 at the Indigenous lesbian and gay international gathering in Winnipeg, and "specifically chosen to distinguish and distance Native American/First Nations people from non-Native peoples". The primary purpose of coining a new term was to encourage the replacement of the outdated and considered offensive, anthropological term, berdache. While this new term has not been universally accepted—it has been criticized as a term of erasure by traditional communities who already have their own terms for the people being grouped under this new term, and by those who reject what they call the "western" binary implications, such as implying that Natives believe these individuals are "both male and female"—it has generally received more acceptance and use than the anthropological term it replaced.’
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-spirit
RE: the claim soldiers didn't used to fire.
I did a deep dive on the data about trained vs. untrained shooters, and guerilla vs. proffessional snipers in various cultures...
Specifically the David Grossman/ SLA Marshall stuff about soldiers not firing in WW2 has been really comprehensively debunked
https://anarchonomicon.substack.com/p/the-effectiveness-of-rifle-fire-across?r=1b6v2r&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
3. I created a very stupid model based on Table A-1 here: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/educational-attainment/cps-historical-time-series.html
Assume that if 30% of the population has a 4+ year degree, the dumbest member of this sub-population has an IQ on exactly the 30th percentile, and do the same for HS grads. Conclusion, in 1960, when 59% of the population did not have a HS degree, and only 7.7% had 4+ years of college, the IQ of the lowest HS grad was 103, and of the lowest 4+ year college student was 121. In 2020, when only 8.93% of the population did not have an HS degree, and 37.9% had 4+ years of college, the IQ of the lowest HS grad is 80, and of the lowest 4+ year college student is 105. I couldn't be fucked to find the median here.
In other words, any actual effect will be completely swamped by the Will Rogers phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Rogers_phenomenon
19. [Sniff!] But I thought *we* were your inner circle!
8: After decades of decline, world hunger is rising again, hopefully this is just temporary due to COVID and Ukraine.
???
Due to Russia. Or Russian invasion of Ukraine, please.
I know it's not intentional mistake, but language matters. It's not like my country trying to starve someone...