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.
That's the Anglosphere's default mainstream social media culture for people in a certain age band. To get away from it you have to actively avoid it -- build yourself a better bubble. If you're on Reddit, look for unusually nice, well-moderated subreddits (which will usually not be the most popular); if you're on Twitter, follow only people who put nice tweets on your timeline (who will usually not be the most famous); and so on.
I used to be a subscriber, and this is a good recommendation. Niche hobby subreddits can be great. Any subreddit where you can get 1000 upvotes will be part of the same hivemind as the rest of Reddit.
The inverse of this is 4chan. Maybe the explanation is as simple as, people who both A) have a lot of free time and B) choose to spend it complaining on the internet usually suck. Self-selection.
I think that this is probably wrong. In particular I think that having weird kinks is probably correlated with wanting websites to be more permissive about what content they allow, for obvious reasons.
Based on subreddit overlap, forcedbreeding appears to be *heavily* red-aligned; lefties just aren't into raceplay, sorry. Feel free to update your priors.
The overlap with non-sex subs begins with creepypms, survivinginfidelity, various games (all of which skew Left, the former notably and the latter two in the general Reddit way), continues with some pro-trans subs (*super* Left), takes a brief detour to mentalhealth and some weed + shrooms subs (the Right is notoriously high-strung and pro-drug, right?), goes on to adviceanimals and antiwork (do you even have to ask?), and... scrolling... scrolling...
...okay, I finished the list and still haven't found any especially "red" subs, with the single probable exception of firearms — near the bottom (1.18).
So... I think it's probably bullshit to suggest the subreddit is Right-leaning, as its stated positions would obviously suggest anyway.
> is different than tolerating people advocating for real-life harmful things,
There's no *way* anyone could possibly believe that a ""fetish"" page about the most depraved acts of violence against women could possibly have any negative real world impact, you know, like making women who see it feel unsafe or hated, or encouraging weirdos to act out depraved fantasies or generally be aggressive towards women IRL. It's just a fetish, bro.
And if you disagree, then you necessarily must also be 100% fine with the exact same fetish page except all the men are white and all the women are black and they get called the n-word constantly. Because the only way this could be doing any real world harm is in the ways I described above, meaning they're either both harmful or both harmless.
And I'm really curious though what harm you imagine a "pro-russian" subreddit is having in the real world (other than the kinds of things I described above).
To be clear, I am an asexual woman who is so extremely repulsed by the idea of pregnancy that I got myself sterilized (despite the fact that I don’t have sex). I can scarcely imagine a fetish that could possibly be more aversive to me. I don’t know how problematic r/forcedbreeding is in practice, because I never want to look there. Maybe they actually do have a terrible separation of real life from fantasy, IDK.
However, I do know that the vast majority of people with fetishes, even really weird ones, are perfectly capable of knowing what is and isn’t appropriate in reality. Moreover, they typically aren’t trying to convert other people to any particular political position or course of action.
On the other hand, anti-vax misinformation often DOES advocate for people to take IRL harmful courses of action. Pro-Russian posts are often propaganda to get people to stop supporting the defense of Ukraine. Obviously there’s nuance to this as well; Russia is not 100% wrong, and vaccines do actually have sometimes concerning side effects. My impression is that subreddits/posters that get banned for these topics usually do post actual false or highly misleading information, but if they don’t, I wouldn’t want them banned just for having unpopular political opinions.
Still, my personal opinion on either topic isn’t the point. My point is that it’s perfectly consistent to tolerate disturbing kink spaces but not tolerate people advocating worrying courses of action IRL.
this juxtaposition is not necessarily philosophically inconsistent, but it does show the r/forcedbreeding people to have terrible judgment
disturbing sex weirdo communities, no matter how unobjectionable IRL and how good their separation of real life from fantasy, can only survive and continue on the back of a broad social tolerance
deliberately undermining that tolerance, as by demanding the deplatforming of other people's objectionable speech, will inevitably turn back and rebound on the sex weirdos sooner rather than later
every censorship trend of the modern era fell first and hardest on people who were considered sexually immoral
It depends on where the wind is blowing. One of the latest trends in social justice is kink acceptance, the current frontier being whether it has place in parades and textbooks. It’s a good opportunity for controversial fetish communities to earn mainstream social media allies, and the way to do it is by aligning with them on issues they care about. By my observation, the more aggressive and seemingly out of place the activism is, the more traction it gets.
Can the culture war bite them in the ass once the wind changes? It might. But not only trying to raising universal tolerance for objectionable communities is very hard and often counterproductive, it’s also much, much more damning, because this is what a truly bad community trying to exploit liberals’ tolerance would do.
all of this depends partly on how “weird” unpacks. this particular weird sex community is into a what arguably is a very exaggerated version of the predominant hegemony, as opposed to a transgression or subversion that destabilizes people’s subconscious premises and assumptions, so the weirdness coefficient is maybe not actually that high in the big picture. i don’t think they’re gonna be first, second, or fifth in line when the puritans come for the weird sex. at the moment it seems like the ascendant right wing puritans are mostly going after LGBTQ and the ascendant left wing puritans are mostly going after people they’ve decided are doing LGBTQ wrong
It's impossible to be tolerant of literally everything. Tolerating weird fetishes but not blatant misinformation strikes me as entirely reasonable and consistent.
Honestly, I like Facebook's compromise on this. You're still allowed to post fake news and misinformation - you won't get banned for it and the post won't get deleted - but the site will put a notice in front of the post saying that the information is wrong and explaining why it's wrong. People can still see it, and they can still choose to believe it, but at least they won't believe it by default. It puts them in a position where they have to exercise some critical thinking, either to say "ok, my friend is probably wrong on this one" or "FB is wrong, this is actually true despite the notice," rather than accepting it uncritically.
It's not a perfect solution: Sometimes the notices really are wrong, either because the mainstream media itself is incorrect on an issue, or FB's fact-checkers made a mistake when checking mainstream media sources, or because the automated algorithm applied the notice in the wrong context. But I think it's still better than either deleting suspected misinformation outright, or simply doing nothing and leaving it be. Sure, the anti-censorship crowd still thinks it's just another top-down method of control, and the anti- misinformation crowd thinks it's useless half-measure that doesn't actually do anything to meaningfully prevent the spread of fake news. But as the old saying goes, a good compromise is one that leaves every side partly dissatisfied.
Yeah, if you go on that sub there's a post that references Dobbs, and the top voted comments on it are all along the lines of "Whoa, this is just a kink, let's keep it that way, we don't want this IRL" . To the point where the OP had to pop in and explain that the post was just their way of working through some trauma from a sexual assault and of course they didn't really mean it and didn't want to upset anyone.
It’s just tribal identification all the way down. My guess is the same people who posted the condemnation of anti-vaxers would even more furiously condemn someone who wanted society to temporarily pause gay orgies to control the spread of monkeypox
You could say the same thing about pro-vax misinformation. It advocates for people whose cost-benefit analysis is clearly negative to get the vaccine anyway, increasing their risk of heart inflammation, brain blood clots, and death.
Forced breeding doesn't even strike me as that weird or depraved. A significant fraction of women I have been with were in to light BDSM/power play type and obviously impregnation/breeding being sort of the telos of sex is an obvious thing to fixate on. And in particular at least as construed on that sub, the focus is not really on violating consent, and more on sort of being overwhelmed by a primal urge to procreate (the fantasy seems to be that the woman wants to be breeded, not that you are literally forcing her to)
On the other hand there were some actual rape fetish kinks that were in fact banned on reddit (even though many women do have that kink to, sometimes even as a way of coping with trauma)
Ironically, having actually looked at the reddit page in question... It looks like 90+% of the posts are actually by women - usually women posting pictures of themselves with some variation of 'Breed me Daddy' or the like. Not what I would have expected, but I suppose it makes some sense.
Umm, r/forced breeding is producing pro-rape content whatever pro-Russian subreddit is out there is producing pro-Putin content, if you hold the typical belief in the magical powers of internet content to determine behavior that underlies pro censorship arguments then both would be harmful. In fact the pro-rape content far more so.
I’m guessing that a lot of the r/forcedbreeding people would be:
a. Very in favor of censoring subreddits that advocate raping people IRL.
b. Fine with subreddits that were pro-Russian in the sense that they celebrated fictional Russian characters, or enthused about Baklava recipes, or really anything that wasn’t spewing propaganda about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
It’s important to note that not all speech is even protected by the First Amendment. The typical example is “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater”, because it involves giving out false information that can cause panic/harm. Private sites can restrict speech much more than that, of course, but certainly a good starting point is… false information that can cause panic/harm.
I’m someone who has had some life-threatenly bad reactions to vaccines, and as such, the COVID vaccine was the first time I got vaxxed since I was 2. It would be REALLY NICE if I could ever read vaccine-critical posts that WEREN’T blatantly false conspiracy theories (or worse, subtly false conspiracy theories). There are certainly such posts out there, but the presence of all the junk ironically makes it much harder to learn about vaccine-critical stuff than it would be if there was more censorship of the topic.
Charitably, it's only an analogy, albeit a rather-troubled one ("fire in a crowded theatre" comes from a SCOTUS decision upholding bans on, um, protests against conscription).
The pattern I'm mostly relating here is avoiding to be meek. If you act like you ask for permission to exist you're more likely to be seen as prey, so some amount of aggression is actually adaptive.
I *am* disappointed though by the failure to generalize the concept of tolerance. "It should apply to me but not to you" is pretty much the classic mistake.
Yes, what people who invoke the so-called "Paradox of Tolerance" fail to do is take the argument to its logical conclusion. "If I am tolerant of [outgroup], then they might gain power and be intolerant of me, therefore it is justified for me to be preemptively intolerant of them first" - but then [outgroup] could invoke that same principle to justify being intolerant of the first group, since they know that if they gain power they will be intolerant of them, thereby justifying their initial intolerance. This is a preemption game, a well-known concept in game theory.
By invoking the "paradox," it actually becomes rationally justified for *both* groups to be intolerant of each other, and at that point, the entire premise of liberalism is basically dead and it's just the friend-enemy distinction all the way down.
Or, like EY likes to say, we could get together and agree to do Something Which Is Not That. Like setting a meta-rule that we can debate individual ideas until we get hoarse, but will shop short of canceling them. Which is how liberalism came to be.
It clearly isn't; if that's an average then circa 50% of graduates will be below that threshold, so you clearly don't need a three-digit IQ to graduate with a Bachelor's these days.
seems simple that if more people are going to college, the avg IQ of non college will drop, even if the 'needed' is entirely unchanged between 1960 and now. the only way you could even hypothesise 'needed' is if the groups included *all* graduates, not just ones that didnt get higher degrees.
also seems to make sense that 1960 high school was about average population iq, and today college grad is about avg
Doesn't sound like it. I think the chart just shows the average/median/whatever IQ for people who topped out at a certain level of education. It's not a requirement, it's just a statistic. That's why we shouldn't call it "needed."
I would like to see this data disaggregated by discipline. Have requirements for STEM degrees declined? How below average can one be and still get a MEd?
Probably start at "Education level needed/advantageous for [Job]" and work backward from there to IQ would be better. Civil Engineer -- Teacher -- Trial Lawyer -- Medical Doctor require in my area 4 -- 5 -- 7 -- Between 11 and 15 years of education respectively; and while there are very smart Civil Engineers they rarely go back and get another 1-7 years of education to "catch up," they get the education they need and stop.
If at different times different amounts of education were required or advantageous for different careers, we'd see different education levels achieved by people who wanted to pursue those careers. Rather than a model of X has IQ^y >>> X Maximizes the level of education they can reach based on IQ^y; the model goes X has Career Ambition Z >>> X reaches the level of education necessary for Career Z as long as their IQ^y can get them there.
> 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.
I was suspicious at the time and tried to internet-sleuth it myself (failed), I didn't know Yandex had reverse image search - that would have been ideal, but I can add tineye to the list of reverse image searches that had nothing helpful.
/If you can't trust an undisclosed senior intelligence source, what can you trust?
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
If it's net worth for the lower 50% of the population, then it's something to do with house prices/homeownership/mortgage equity. The deficit will also partly be due to the magical combination of low interest rates and 10% inflation.
I don't think the lower half owns a lot of homes. I just looked up home ownership rates, and it's around 65% for the whole country, and I imagine most of that is in the upper half. It could be around 100% for the upper half and around 30% for the lower half.
"Lower half by income" includes some people who were previously in higher income brackets, but who are now retired, long-term unemployed, underemployed, or on unpaid sabbatical.
If a lot of people have retired early over the last few years, I could definitely see that inflating the mean net worth of "lower-income" households.
Yep, when looking at income buckets this is always a good thing to keep in mind. Almost everyone spends at least a year in a poverty income bracket at some point (usually when they are 18/19/a student or when they retire).
In theory, someone who inherited millions of dollars but has no income would be in this bucket. Also, someone who makes millions a year but has a terrible gambling problem and lots of debts would be in the opposite bucket and skew that number downward.
Overall i think its pretty useless to compare the net worth of various income brackets without having lots of caveats or more filters (probably for age - looking at only prime working age would help this stat be more useful).
Agreed that looking at income buckets as static and/or as a tight mapping onto functional wealth is overplayed. I believe the stat is that 12% of American households spend at least one year in the top 1% of income earners in their lifetime. And 56% spend at least one year in the top 20%. (I forget the year these stats are from without pulling a book off my shelf.)
Yes but it’s an average figure over the whole bottom 50%, not the median. If 65% of the country owns homes that means 30% of the bottom half does (15/50). Those 30% have seen a huge increase in home equity since 2018. That would have a big impact on the arithmetic average
We dumped lots of money into households with stuff like the CARES Act. Bottom 50% includes lots of people who had essentially zero net worth so it's not surprising that number went up a lot. (They were also forbidden from a lot of spending during the shutdown.)
Way more money was dumped onto people during Trump's term than during Biden's so trying to give Biden credit for this one just reveals how BS the whole thing is.
Most of those raw numbers look like "it's 4 years later. Number went up" or they are citing the 50% of economic stats that improved, and omitting any that didn't.
It does, if true, mean things haven't gotten worse - which is the point. It's a refutation to "Biden sucks" claims.
But why would the fact that a bunch of old people have retired be treated as an indicator that the economy isn't good? As clearly demonstrated by the stats on the other demographics, the reason why they are retired now is something other than a bad labor market now
Two key things with net worth are 1) it's very steeply sloping, especially in the bottom half: 40th percentile is about half the median, 20th is about half of 25th 2) It is sharply negative at the bottom.
This means that slight shifts in the percentiles move the number around a lot. My guess is actually that the change in bottom 50th percentile wealth might be as related to trends in student loans as anything else--house ownership isn't common in the bottom 50th percent of households, but student loans are. ($100k in negative net worth is quite frequently related to an new profesisonal degree.)
The CBO attribute the budgetary deficit reduction to “spending in response to the coronavirus pandemic—mostly for the recovery rebates (also known as economic impact payments), unemployment compensation, pandemic relief through the Small Business Administration (SBA), and the Coronavirus Relief Fund—and because revenues were lower".
The lower revenues, they attribute to lower nominal wages (and thus lower income/payroll taxes) during the pandemic and the payroll tax deferrals provisioined the CARES Act (if I understand it correctly, some of these were accounted for in 2022).
Eyeballing the CBO graph, total budget deficits for 2021 - 2022 (Biden) seems larger than those of 2019 - 2020 (Trump).
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.
>Cheaper housing means people can potentially do successful household formation earlier, which usually means more children.
Obviously. But, there's a long way between that and the claim that zoning laws explain the bulk of differences in housing affordability between places in the country, or that housing affordability is the root cause of the bulk of the decrease in fertility rate. All things being equal, sure, but all things aren't equal.
>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.
Are you so sure? The baby bom was a boom compared to the great depression and WW2. The peak baby boom fertility rate was actually lower than it was before 1920.
But the country was a lot more rural before 1920 than in 1946-1964. During the Baby Boom there was a lot less need for children to work on the family farm than there had been at the beginning of the 20th century.
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.
> Without reading the study I am calling bullshit. May change my mind later.
Why bother writing this? You "call bullshit" and haven't even read the study. Why?
And if it weren't bad enough to do this generally, it's even more so for this specific example. The percent of the population getting highschool and college diplomas has signficantly risen in the past 60 years, so unless there is no relationship between getting a diploma and how intelligent one is, then significant falls in mean IQ for each education level is to be expected.
I retract my previous statement. I went through my forecast and realized it was undercounting because of how many more accidental deaths we have since 2020 (accidents, homicides, suicides). These are the last deaths to get fed into CDC datasets.
We went from a yearly average of 250K up to 290K in 2020 and 314K in 2021 for accidental deaths.
I said previously we had 97% of data collected up through 6/11 but probably closer to 94% now that a larger number of deaths are lagged (these take 6-12 months to become fully complete - we just got complete 2021 data last week or so).
I think the excess death dashboard you linked is reasonable assuming the accidental deaths continue on the 2020-2021 trend and therefore we probably will have 690,000 deaths in that 3 month stretch (mid march - mid june) instead of the 675,000 forecasted.
I'm not so optimistic about the excess deaths picture. Excess deaths for 2022 looks a bit too much like 2021 for me to have confidence to pop the cork on the champaign bottle just yet. It's good that the raw number of deaths is lower than last year, but I haven't seen anyone make good precise predictions about the path of deaths beyond a couple of weeks.
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.
(1) They are probably using that-year IQ scores for each year, which is why you don't see a Flynn effect
(2) The IQ of all 3 groups can go down if the upper 2 groups each become easier to complete but still hard enough to complete that there's an IQ cut-off, observe:
1960s:
G: 115
C: 110, 105
H: 100, 95, 90
2010s:
G: 115, 110
C: 105, 100
H: 95, 90
So basically there's still assortment of individuals by IQ, but the minimum thresholds of graduate school and college have dropped.
EDIT: Also, there's a population of "never completed high school" that went from "significant" in the 1960s to "very small and very low IQ" in the 2010s
(1) They are not actually using IQ. I don't think the (poor) proxy that they are using is normed by year.
(edit) You may have hit on it here. I didn't realize that 60% of people in the 60s had less than high school attainment compared to 10% now. The graph only covers 40% of the highest educated people in the 60s but it covers 90% of the population in the present.
The proprotion of people getting a high school diploma significantly increased since 1960, and much of that increase was for black students, who have a significantly lower mean IQ than white students, meaning that this effect was magnified. This is also true to a lesser extent with hispanics (but mainly that large numbers of hispanics immigrated to the US over this time period, not that they were here but not getting HS displomas).
There's been a big increase in the percentage of Hispanics getting high school degrees since the 2008 recession. Up through 2007, it was not uncommon for Latino boys to drop out of high school to work construction, but then the Great Crash meant a lot more had nothing better to do than stick around school to graduate and maybe try community college.
This is just a classic Simpsons Paradox - if the education groups are completely sorted by IQ, and then the highest members of each group move up to the next education group, then all education groups will have a decrease in average IQ, even if populationwide average IQ increases.
There was once an Australian politician that complained about New Zealanders moving to Australia and lowering the average IQ of both countries (or maybe it was a New Zealand politician complaining about Australians moving there).
They aren't using IQ per se. The General Social Survey (GSS) does not include an IQ test. They're using the "wordsum" question, which is a 10-item vocabulary test where individuals find a synonym to a listed word from four choices, I believe.
These numbers are somehow transformed to IQ scores, but the very brief amount of google searching suggests a correlation of wordsum and IQ of ~ 0.7. Good, not perfect. Verbal intelligence, but how correlated are verbal and numerical intelligence?
A few stray observations:
1. Folks could only have 11 IQ values if the wordsum variable ranges from 0-11, right? Not sure how fine-grained you can get with that re. IQ scores.
2. Do folks' vocabularies develop as they age? Not sure. But if so, this might be a chart showing that older people are older than younger people.
3. Could also be measuring ESL over time. Presumably a larger percentage of post-graduate degrees are held by Asian immigrants, for example. In that case, relatively high vocabulary knowledge of your second language is arguably more impressive than slightly higher vocabulary scores of your first language.
The use of the 10 word Wordsum vocabulary quiz on the General Social Survey isn't a real IQ test, but for something that quick and dirty, the results are strikingly reasonable in almost all the applications I've seen of Wordsum over the last 15-20 years.
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'm "pro-choice", but I can't help but notice that a lot of Democrats talked a big game while Trump was in office, saying how he is acting unconstiutionally and how he has no respect for the constiution. Now he's gone and I don't recall seeing a single constitutional argument against this ruling being made by any halfway prominent Democrat.
Look I'm pretty cynical about law and constitutionality but the best argument that reversing Roe was unconstitutional is that when we talk about constitutional norms, we're talking about a broad range of ideas, but almost no one would dispute that *stare decisis* is part of how the constitution has been interpreted for centuries. Once a decision has been made, that's it- matter is more or less over. You can very slowly chip away at it over many decades or centuries till it's effectively dead letter, or you can amend the constitution, but otherwise that's meant to be it. A future court just saying "actually that was wrong" negates the whole idea of a supreme court.
Of course it's insane to give any supreme court, undemocratically elected, that level of power over such a vague document as the constitution and bill of rights. But that's what the constitution does, and respect for the constitution requires respect for constitutional precedent.
I've not read the entire US Constitution; is there anything in there actually implying stare decisis? Roe was hilariously unconstitutional (mootness and making shit up), so you could argue that SCOTUS upholding it would still be unconstitutional.
And SCOTUS going "we stuffed up" has happened a lot of times before (e.g. Lawrence v. Texas directly overruling Bowers v. Hardwick after 17 years, or the kinda-vaguely-defined end of Lochner but still definitely less time than Roe stood for).
> is there anything in there actually implying stare decisis
Nope, and can't be. It'd be insane - even the Constitution itself has amendment process (and they literally started amending it immediately after signing it). How would you expect to bind future generations to the will of people long dead and never modify it? It just can't work this way. One can try design the process so good that the future generations would rather follow it than try to design a new one entirely from scratch, but if your process is so inflexible that you expect the future generations to abide by the decisions taken centuries ago and never be able to challenge them - the descendants would just say "screw you, dead man" and refuse to follow it. That's why there should be fine tuning between change being hard (we don't want to emphasize everyday squabbles and let the legal system to be swayed by it too much) and change being possible (otherwise people would just abandon this system or ignore what you wanted and change it anyway).
"Would it be wonderful if, under the pressure of these difficulties, the Convention should have been forced into some deviations from that artificial structure and regular symmetry which in an abstract view of the subject might lead and ingenious theorist to bestow on a constitution planned in his closet or his imagination."
Actually, Roe Vs Wade wasn't necessarily as unconstitutional as one might think.
But the best (or only) argument I found would have been with the unenumerated rights: when the US constitution was adopted, abortion used to be legal and widely available.
(The constitution by itself only binds the federal government, but there have been some later maneuvers to bind the states as well.)
> when the US constitution was adopted, abortion used to be legal and widely available
Was it? Without any limits up to the moment of birth? I find it a bit hard to believe, given the Christian churches' position on the matter. I can find references to abortion being legal "before quickening" - i.e. the same 15-16 week boundary which we find in many cases today - but I can't find any source that claims there was no limits for abortion on demand at that time. Could you provide a source to these claims?
In addition to that, I think embracing the argument of "something that has been legal in 18th century can't be regulated or prohibited now" would have much larger consequences than either side would be willing to accept. For starters, we know some examples of things being legal then that we don't really want back - like slavery or racial discrimination...
But there's also precedent for the Supreme Court overriding itself.
According to the first reference I found (which may not be the final word on the matter) the Supreme Court between 1789 and 2020 issued 25,444 judgements, and overruled itself 145 times. A general argument that the court must *always* follow stare decisis would be inconsistent with the meta-precedent that the court can overrule itself.
1954 Brown overturned the 1896 Plessy ruling. About the same time frame as 2022 Dobbs overturning 1973 Roe. I wouldn't consider 50+ years sudden. There's jurisprudence in between that indicated the legal reasoning behind Roe was troubled too, e.g. Casey ...
This whole conversation was discussed in the SCOTUS 2022 Dobbs opinion. The problem with Casey was that it waved vaguely in the direction of 'stare decisis' while itself muddying the waters of what the term meant. Saying it stood on precedent, it then went on to reject half of Roe and define a new set of principles it pulled from thin air. It was a weird way to invoke stare decisis.
Dobbs, OTOH, was careful to lay out a definite framework for how it thought stare decisis should be applied, and had been applied in the past. Sure, the dissents disagreed with some of their reasoning/framework, but if we're comparing Dobbs with Casey, it's clear that of the two decisions Dobbs at least tries to strengthen stare decisis - clearly defining our expectations of when it should hold - while Casey wasn't as interested in whether its unique approach to the principle would create more problems down the road.
As to whether other modern precedents also ride on the Dobbs decision, I agree that revisiting Roe creates the potential to revisit other decisions conservatives don't like. But I'm not convinced those are likely to be overturned anytime soon. For a few reasons:
Conservatives worked for decades to bias the court in favor of overturning Roe (likewise on the other side). There's not the same drive from the Right over Obergefell or other precedents. The 'unborn holocaust' argument endured for strong political reasons. (Dobbs even mentioned how Roe's holding had influenced SCOTUS appointments for decades - something that's hopefully in the past.) More likely, conservatives will want go back to asking their appointees whether they'll protect against 'legislating from the bench'. It's harder to drive political will toward abolishing substantive due process.
Indeed, there's a strong 'libertarian conservative' movement inside the party that's less interested in legislating conservative ideas on morality (which tend to lose at the polls) and more interested in protecting free expression of those ideas. With the current ideological makeup of the court, you'd need to swing farther to the Right to overturn something like Obergefell. Put someone like DeSantis in office from 2024-2032, and I still don't think you'd get it overturned.
Dobbs relied on the idea that the State has a pre-birth interest in the life of the unborn. That interest was recognized initially in Roe and affirmed in Casey, when they created viability-based arguments. That weakened the case from, "constitutionally-protected right" to "only within limited circumstances determined by SCOTUS" (trimester/viability). In other words, Roe/Casey created limits to the abortion right they defined, and that's the wedge SCOTUS used to break the whole framework apart. The end result was always going to have to land on either 'legal until birth' or 'no constitutional protection'. That same vulnerability embedded in Roe/Casey from the beginning doesn't apply for the other precedents Thomas & co. want to revisit.
Not a lawyer or law professor either, but I have heard about SCOTUS overturning previous decisions - including conceptual frameworks - before. E.g. the whole approach to questions of race changed quite a lot over time. How much the government is allowed to meddle in economics has changed. Approach to freedom of speech (remember the infamous "fire in crowded theater"?) changed too. It's not unheard of.
Of course, people disliking a particular decision would always claim it's absolutely beyond acceptable and the Court had never fallen so deeply as when it disagreed with them. But it's just self-serving rhetoric, nothing more.
>it's insane to give any supreme court, undemocratically elected, that level of power over such a vague document as the constitution and bill of rights
The Supreme Court is unelected and unrepresentative on purpose - read Federalist #51, 78-81. The whole point is that the judicial branch is a check on majority passions of the moment because the majority has a tendency to get carried away with whatever shiny thing they want right now and ride roughshod over the minority. The U.S. Constitution is not vague - it is a document that says what powers the government has, it's not a document that sets out laws (laws are Congress' job). The Bill of Rights is not vague at all, they are definitive statements about what the government cannot do.
> but almost no one would dispute that *stare decisis* is part of how the constitution has been interpreted for centuries
Actually, a lot of people would dispute it, including members of SCOTUS itself. Overturning previous decisions is not an easy step and should not be taken lightly, but it happens, and it happens routinely in many cases.
In fact, this is the only way the Court can stay relevant today. If all the Court could do is recite what people in 18th-19th century decided, without ever being able to change anything, then people today would reasonably argue that such Court is useless - we don't live in 18th century anymore. Times changed, needs changed, morals and mores changed. If the Court is never allowed to change, it'll just become irrelevant fossil.
Of course, one does also have to be wary of the opposite extreme - the "living document" doctrine, which essentially says there's no meaning in Constitution outside our opinion, and it's just an empty shell to be filled with anything we desire today. There are certain principles and ideas we want to keep, and the deeper the change goes, the harder it should be and more consideration should be taken before doing it. Neither "never change" or "nothing is fixed, everything is up for grabs anytime we want" is workable. Finding a reasonable middle ground is the responsibiity we entrust SCOTUS members to bear.
It's a good point that SCOTUS that followed prior decisions would be unable to legislate from the bench. They would have to depend on congress for legislation. \S
Unfortunately, SCOTUS can override Congress, unless it's a Constitutional amendment, so that would require an amendment to correct any mistake SCOTUS made in the past. I think that would make the system much less useful - and make SCOTUS way overpowered. Imagine some SCOTUS decision you don't think was right - I'm sure no matter what your politics is, you could find one - and imagine there's absolutely no way to change it without passing a constitutional amendment - which is not going to happen because half of the states will always be against it.
This is true and not true. For example, with a normal law, Congress could have defined human life to begin at 2 months. That would be a profound enough change to force a revisitation of RvW (because after 2 months abortion would now legally be murder). SCOTUS could then balance the two rules without merely overruling RvW.
It is worth noting that my original post was snark/sarcasm. ( see the \S)
"If you completely deny that a right to privacy exists in the Constitution, that destroys not just the right to abortion but many other Supreme Court decisions such as the ones that protect gay marriage, sodomy, contraception, and miscegenation" is definitely a constitutional argument, and one that I've heard plenty of.
(Also, I generally hate "people aren't focusing on the argument that I personally would find most persuasive, therefore they don't believe this" as a line of argument. You are not the only person in the country who needs convincing, and overturning Roe has plenty of terrible consequences to point to without getting into the weeds of constitutional interpretation.)
I feel like "if this argument is wrong then we don't get the desirable result" looks more like a logical fallacy than an argument. I mean, even if I agreed that keeping gay marriage legal is a good thing, that doesn't mean the privacy argument is right - even if gay marriage has been made legal under it. It could as well be that the privacy argument is wrong, and they'd have to come up with some other argument to support the legality of gay marriage (or just have the legislature to do their work for once and pass the law to make it so). Arguing from the desired result is what we will often see from a trial lawyer, but that's not what we want to see in a judge, especially a SCOTUS judge.
Looking at increase in net worth as a multiplication by 2 is probably misleading. Net worth is assets minus debts, and if a significant number of people (say, homeowners with mortgages) have substantial assets *and* debts, then a slight appreciation of assets while debts remain constant can easily result in a doubling of the difference.
Net worth including house would be hugely misleading metric to start (usually primary residence is excluded) but even then given covid it is very suspicious that it just over than doubled in a very short period of time.
True. I guess one has to exclude mortgage on primary residence too, but the downpayment - which is 20% standard in the US - will still skew the picture.
That said, for example, the "accredited investor" standard uses this metric - to be considered "accredited investor", you need to have $1M+ net worth excluding primary residence (with the caveat that if your house is "underwater", the remaining debt still dings your net worth). For this particular case, however, under-counting assets is OK.
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.
Your conclusion wouldn't be true if there are genetic differences between countries, and genes for high IQ also lead to lower breastfeeding (eg, because it's less compatible with pursuing high education). Similarly for various other possibilities, such as cultural differences affecting both IQ and breastfeeding rates.
Now, if IQ is really almost the same in different countries, such hypotheses would require an unlikely near-exact cancellation of effects. But how close are the different countries really? I'd think one could only use non-linguistic tests for this, since otherwise differing language would surely produce some artifactual difference.
You are entirely right. It could be that, for example, the French actually are genetically smarter than other Europeans but spoil their entire advantage on not breastfeeding.
Within countries, breastfeeding and maternal IQ are highly positively correlated.
A way to get around the problem with between country-differences in IQ would be to study people within the same country with different years of birth instead. Differences in breastfeeding rates between decades really are astonishing.
Or just use a large enough collection of countries such that the odds of genetic and breastfeeding IQ contributions cancel approaches nil (barring the fairly absurd possibility that genetically IQ superior races all tend to breastfeed less).
Industrial dyes and then plastic making all the colors of the rainbow possible for products was really a 50s thing, and even into the 80s you have neons becoming a new fad. But eventually you hit a limit and super colorful stuff becomes associated with cheap products, and so there is a retreat back towards basics.
Here is the source for the first graph. It's mainly about the replacement of wood. Note that blue and green have increased in the last couple decades, at the same time they have become less common for cars.
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.
According to the left, the cause is "white supremacy", which republicans stubbornly refuse to condemn every waking hour, and therefore are complicit in.
Invented pretty much from whole cloth by Evelyn Beatrice Hall for her 1906 book "The Friends of Voltaire" which was a rather fanciful sorta-biographical sketch
#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.
Flynn effect is very different depending on which test is used. Flynn effect is large on Raven's matrices and near-zero (and now turning negative) on vocabulary (which WORDSUM variable in GSS is)
Tuddenham effect (erroneously called Flynn effect) is not on g. Simply speaking, people are getting better at doing IQ tests, but don't have higher general intelligence. General intelligence is actually declining.
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.
> 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.
This is a misunderstanding. There is no such thing as "correlation with IQ". IQ tests correlate with each other, usually at around 0.8 (some considerably less, like Draw-A-Man); that's enough to say that WORDSUM is an IQ test. You might ask how g-loaded it is.
And your concern about vocabulary testing in general is not well motivated; most famously, the infamous "regatta" analogy on the SAT was investigated (because it looked so unfair) and found to be unbiased.
Could you cite me the investigation on 'regatta' please? I can only find people talking about it generally rather than a specific investigation of its biased-ness
The point here is that IQ isn't actually a thing, it's a shorthand that's useful for some purposes and misleading for others.
A wide range of measurable mental abilities are correlated with one another, so it's useful to have a shorthand for "how good at most of those things are you?"
If you really want to, you can take a basket of those measures, apply them to a bunch of people, run principle component analysis on your results to find the dominant eigenvector, and call that "IQ".
But no one basket of measures has any more underlying validity than any other.
Compare and contrast with sizes of dogs. There are lots of ways to measure a dog - length, height, weight etc. Those are strongly but not perfectly correlated. "Size" is a useful shorthand, but reifying it and arguing about whether a long thin whippet is larger than a shorter, heavier mastiff, or claiming that length, height and weight are all imperfect reflections of some underlying hidden variable called "size", would be dumb!
Some baskets of measures help you get better at finding a General Factor of intelligence or dog size or whatever. Other factors help you know something specific and important that's not all that correlated with the g factor: e.g., 3-d imagination correlates less with the factor than most IQ subsections, but it's a useful skill for mechanics, plumbers, engineers and the like.
General Factors show up in a lot of fields. For example, consider the general factor of sedans that distinguishes a BMW 3 series from 5 series from 7 series on a whole lot of measures, or a BMW C from E from S class.
It's easy to make a mediocre IQ test, hard to make a really good IQ test. Wordsum functions as a surprisingly solidly mediocre IQ test but it's not a good IQ test. In particular, watch out for biases on wordcel vs. shape rotator issues when working with Wordsum data.
Well, for what it's worth I sat the (rather short) WORDSUM test. It placed my IQ slightly lower than more thorough IQ tests I've taken but in the same general range. The same standard deviation and all that.
At any rate, I don't claim to be an expert on this kind of thing. But I use GSS data a lot and I wanted to point out the potential issue.
> Let me know if this is annoying and I can adjust
Yes, seven or eight times a short post by the same person in a row feels kind of excessive. I felt it made reading/scrolling unnecessarily slower, especially as it's just smaller chunks of things numbered anyway. Seperate points would have been easily recognizable as seperate also in a longer post. My perception, don't know about others. Two posts would have been fine. Also, not a point against diving comments in general - I've seen for example different questions asked in a row in different comments each, and in that case I find it helpful.
I used to do it like that and a couple of people said they found it harder to engage with. We'll see what the consensus is. The long superpost is actually easier for me but engagement is nice so... I don't know. Apologies for the annoyance.
I like it. Very long posts are a pain to navigate. The smaller chunks are easier and more practical. I can just stop off at a place where I want to engage.
The links post is an extra-special case: I think a top-level comment there should refer to exactly one item, so that responses will be neatly partitioned.
Or to put it another way, I'm less likely to engage with a comment if it's about lots of different links.
I think one topic per comment (or maybe a small set of related topics per comment) and many comments is better than any grouping, but if you’re going to group, then it would make the most sense to group all into a single comment.
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?
> Why would exponential to linear effects in computing correlate to the ideas getting harder to find thesis?
He's not even showing exponential-to-linear - he's showing exponential-to-exponential and just calling one of the axes "linear" for no reason. ELO is not a linear measure of ability, nor was there any reason to believe that it might be.
The lesson here is "before you call something 'linear gains', be sure you know what you're talking about".
Re 8: I do think a utilitarian EA approach means looking very carefully at food supply. I remember reading about crops rotting on the vine in 2020 and thinking that whatever specific distancing measures produced this effect were net killing people. Putting biofuels in gas at a time like this should be viewed as tantamount to napalming village in Africa.
I was having a discussion with someone who was involved in food relief efforts. I mentioned off hand that I'd heard food was rotting in the fields in Ukraine. They replied that couldn't be an issue because it wasn't fall when the harvest happened. Which, if you know the first thing about wheat agriculture, is a shockingly bad statement. This supposed food relief expert didn't know winter wheat even existed! When I asked them where they thought the tens of millions of tons of grain had come from they'd thought it had all just been stored for six months. Which is a hilariously bad idea of how grain logistics works too. This is just one of many, many stories I could tell.
A lot of the NGO complex would never, ever be caught dead in a rural area for anything more than a photo op and it really shows in how they (fail to) tackle these problems. I have a pet theory it also cripples them in places where rural society is still a large segment of the population. Which is a lot of the places they want to help.
Which is a roundabout way of saying: Food is extremely important and should be an interest area. But I'm deeply skeptical that EA has the social connections or domain knowledge to get or create the relevant experts.
Russia didn’t bomb grain distribution centers they bombed military targets in Odessa. Apparently including storehouses of U.S and NATO supplied weapons located at the Odessa port.
This is the current Russian party line. However, the day of the attack they claimed it wasn't them and then changed their story. It's just a disinformation campaign. They also claim the Ukrainian footage of burning civilian goods was caused by Ukrainians shelling their own positions to make the Russians look bad.
Just because it’s the Russian “party line” doesn’t mean it’s not true. The grain agreement is to the advantage of the Russians which is why they signed it (and to the disadvantage of the US which doesn’t need grain but does need propaganda points). It makes zero sense for them to violate it, but a great deal of sense for them to strike military targets in Odessa
Sure. But I am generally suspicious of anyone who goes, "It wasn't us!" and then throws out conspiracy theories (as the Russians did initially). And when the evidence emerges showing they're lying it changes to, "Okay, it was us, but they deserved it!" Of course that evidence is from Ukraine. But we've already agreed that just because it's one side's "party line" doesn't mean it's not true.
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.)
EA would love to fund more things like this, I think they are short of people/projects worth funding rather than money or awareness that it would be a good idea. If you know any, let me know and I'll pass them on.
> You don't need to think the singularity is coming to imagine an AI that can break encryption or something.
Nothing would cause more rapid development of techniques to describe what an AI is doing internally than one that could do that. It would be of extreme mathematical interest.
Indeed. Also we've locked a lot, and I mean A LOT, of important things behind "Neener neener you can't solve this hash algorithm!" (Or whatever.) And so far that's true. But it's not logically impossible and if an AI could do it then it is legitimately no exaggeration to say they could break the majority of modern infrastructure. And it doesn't have to be intelligent at all. It just effectively needs to solve extremely complex math which is very much a weak AI thing.
> Also we've locked a lot, and I mean A LOT, of important things behind "Neener neener you can't solve this hash algorithm!" (Or whatever.) And so far that's true. But it's not logically impossible
This claim ("it's not logically impossible") is, itself, an open question, not something that's known to be true or false. To my eyes, you would appear to be... "dramatically overconfident" in your position.
> It just effectively needs to solve extremely complex math which is very much a weak AI thing.
> This claim ("it's not logically impossible") is, itself, an open question
It is not. It's simply not logically impossible. It might be PRACTICALLY impossible. We might not be able to do it. But there's no hard and fast reason an AI couldn't, say, discover a new form of math that allows it to radically increase the speed of prime factorization to the point it can brute force through certain common security measures.
> And I don't understand this claim at all.
The AI does not need to be generally intelligent (strong AI) to do something damaging.
The standard assumption (or perhaps "hope" is more accurate) is that those things are theoretically impossible, in the same sense as it is theoretically impossible to solve NP-hard problems in polynomial time if P !=NP.
There are lots of problems where it doesn't help if you throw an infinite amount of intelligence at them. Reverse hashing may or may not be among them.
Of course, there are tons of caveats. The hash function is usually not the weak point of a crypto system. There are many weak human and non-human factors surrounding that hash function.
>> This claim ("it's not logically impossible") is, itself, an open question
> It is not. It's simply not logically impossible. It might be PRACTICALLY impossible. We might not be able to do it. But there's no hard and fast reason an AI couldn't, say, discover a new form of math
Again, whether that's true is an open question, not something known one way or the other. You've managed to confuse mathematics with magic. We don't know whether or not it's possible to discover a new form of math that makes factorization easy.[1] But we do know that it might not be possible; the fact that you can describe something happening doesn't mean that that thing is possible.
[1] We do know that factorization is already easy if you can exploit some pecularities of quantum mechanics at large scales. I'm comfortable calling this method, which relies on artifacts of the physical world, "not a kind of mathematics", but reasonable opinion can differ.
Don't said algorithms have proven lower bounds of computational power required to crack them? I'd expect at least some of them to have these, with considerably higher bounds as conjectures.
Regarding AI style cryptanalysis, why do you believe that continuous methods like stochastic gradient descent are likely to help in the one truly discrete domain we have studied intensively? The most effective application of AI has been the use of SAT solvers to look for weaknesses in systems, but even that has only yielded small advances. In cryptography there are massive incentives and so I with high confidence believe either that there really isn't any low hanging fruit, or that someone who does have a better fruit picking machine is not going to publicize it.
In the short term I don't think it will. This is a longtermism thing which is why I am addressing my petition to the Pope of EA/AI Alignment and not something more conventional. The threat isn't that Russian hackers will tomorrow break all our encryption. The threat is that as AI research advances we might eventually find something that can do things we can't currently do and some of those things might break encryption pretty fundamentally. Mitigating that risk, and importantly mitigating the risk it's someone ill intentioned, is important in my view.
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.
I like the way your explanation of how #25 is partisan cherrypicking is in-and-of-itself, an excellent example of partisan cherrypicking. Brilliant!!! \S
This comment adds no value to the discussion. If you want to explain why unemployment for people 25-54 (which is not age of first job or retirement!) is better than labor force participation then I think we'd all like to hear it. Instead your content free sarcasm condemns your preferred party.
My comment was intentionally sarcasm (thus the \S at the end of it).
I am not at all sure that you are wrong in your assertion that those numbers are biased. I, nonetheless, stand by my snark. You picked 4 of their 8 points to contest. 2 you hand waived and 1 you said, "sure their two metrics are valid but here is one that isn't." That is as cherrypicking-ish as one can get. You could have just said, "This disagrees with my priors."
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.
32 - your point about UBI experts reminds me of Keynes predicting that everybody would soon be working 15 hour weeks. And strangely Hayek suggesting that everybody could be given enough to cover all their basic needs, so nobody would have to work!
Both ideas are so utterly insane that I'm surprised we give their proponents the time of day. For me as a Hayekian this is something of a painful problem, but there we go.
Keynes was just extrapolating. And he didn’t predict it happening “soon”, he predicted a few decades hence. The 40 hour work week was largely established then, down from twice that or more in the 19C.
For an economist charting a fundamental change in working practices "A few decades hence" is tantamount to "soon". And I think that 'just extrapolating ' is about as dumb as it's possible to be - it displays an utter ignorance of human beings, how they function, and what matters to them.
I looked it up and said 100 years or so. Which doesn’t meet anybody’s definition of soon.
Why is the 40 hour week so important to humans? It was double that a century before him. Why not a 30 hour week?
Clearly he was overestimating but it’s interesting that we stopped reducing working hours. I expect this is more to do with the reduced power of Labour rather than an inmate desire to work hard.
I hadn't heard about Hayek. But yeah, it was a bad idea because people obviously have a strong preference to live better more than to work less. To be fair the idea that new products would motivate people to work for higher standards of living would have been going against consensus at the time. Then again, if you can't see the reality behind consensus I'm not sure how much you get credit for being visionary.
> people obviously have a strong preference to live better more than to work less.
Do they? The evidence I hear is usually something like "everyone wants a smartphone, duh", but smartphones are actually quite cheap.
To me it seems more like a multiplayer Prisonner's Dilemma. If everyone works X hours a week, the things become exactly so expensive that the average person needs to work X hours a week in order to afford them.
I suspect that if you somehow made 60-hour workweek a law, people's lives wouldn't become even better. Instead, the hourly wage would somewhat decrease and things would get somewhat more expensive, until the new balance is reached and people would need to work for 60 hours a week in order to afford things that we have now.
> Do they? The evidence I hear is usually something like "everyone wants a smartphone, duh", but smartphones are actually quite cheap.
This is the simplistic version of it. The more complicated version is that people are choosing to work more hours to obtain a higher standard of living instead of choosing to work less hours at a lower standard of living. So yes, people are acting that way. If you want to live at the lifestyle of the average person in 1950 it's cheaper now than it was then. The difference in affordability is solely the fact that you live much better than they did. Bigger house, nicer car, better tv, computers, etc.
> To me it seems more like a multiplayer Prisonner's Dilemma. If everyone works X hours a week, the things become exactly so expensive that the average person needs to work X hours a week in order to afford them.
> I suspect that if you somehow made 60-hour workweek a law, people's lives wouldn't become even better. Instead, the hourly wage would somewhat decrease and things would get somewhat more expensive, until the new balance is reached and people would need to work for 60 hours a week in order to afford things that we have now.
You seem to have an incorrect belief that there's a fixed amount of wealth that's unrelated to the amount people work and people work simply to access it. This isn't true. People work not to access some pre-existing amount of wealth but to generate the wealth itself. If everyone worked sixty hours a week there would be a lot more stuff and it would be cheaper. If everyone banded together and agreed to work 30 hours a week then there would be less stuff and it would be more expensive. This is because the work itself is part of what generates the stuff.
In your thought experiment if everyone started working 60 hours a week the question of whether the hourly wage would go down would depend on if their productivity went down per average hour. So if hours 41-60 are less productive than the first forty then the average hourly wag would go down because the average hour is less productive. If productivity stayed the same then it wouldn't. Further, things would get cheaper because that increased productivity would generate more wealth and push prices down. You can see examples of this in East Asia or Europe. In Europe they work less and things are more expensive despite higher per hour productivity. In Asia they work more and things are cheaper despite lower per hour productivity.
> if everyone started working 60 hours a week the question of whether the hourly wage would go down would depend on if their productivity went down per average hour. So if hours 41-60 are less productive than the first forty then the average hourly wag would go down because the average hour is less productive.
Yes, this is exactly what I would expect, at least in white-collar jobs. People would be tired and paying less attention. Those who can would probably just browse internet at work. Or maybe they would have more meetings, because hey, 60 hours is enough time to have dozen meetings and still get the work done. The total amount of wealth would not increase significantly.
So some people would be like "I bet I could get the same work done in 40 hours, especially if we somewhat reduced the useless meetings... and then I could be with my family or having a hobby". But most employers would be like "most employees are okay working 60 hours, this is a red flag, the guy seems kinda lazy, I am not going to hire him".
Or maybe the total productivity would be somewhat higher and things somewhat cheaper, but that would be compensated by necessity of paying for things that you previously did for yourself but now you don't have enough time for that anymore. Like, people working 60 hours would probably never cook for themselves, etc.
You're correct that the per hour productivity goes down. You're empirically wrong that the overall productivity doesn't go up. Your expectation is just wildly out of step with observed reality: working longer hours increases aggregate productivity because the decline in per hour output in later hours never becomes zero or negative or even close to it.
I think this is something you WANT to be true rather than having actually investigated. Mainly because you throw out various theories (all wrong) with the same conclusion. As if the conclusion is more important than the empirical reality.
I don't actually think UBI will go well, and I've explained why many times before. But the arguments that it *could* go well, are all tied to it being something people can count on in the long term. By which I mean approximately a lifetime, or at least a generation. Anything less, and people are just going to hedge their bets, keep doing exactly what they have been doing because that's the only way to be sure they won't wind up living on the streets when the windfall goes away, and figure out how to spend or maybe save a modest windfall.
So I find it baffling that UBI proponents seem to actually *want* these sorts of little, short-term experiments, rather than saying "no, don't do that, it won't work and it will make the whole idea look bad!"
I'm generally skeptical of any argument that says, "It failed because we didn't do it hard enough." It's an unfalsifiable argument that's a ready made excuse for any failure. You do sometimes get inflection points where level 10 acts really different from levels 1-9. But it's rare and you should be able to demonstrate it before I believe it doesn't have a more normal gradient effect.
Yes, but for just about any goal, there's going to be an effort that's clearly *not* hard enough. I'm just baffled as to why people point to clearly-not-hard-enough efforts as proof of concept. It's like filling a balloon with lukewarm air in an attempt to show that man can fly.
Fair point. Personally I've long thought that the behavior of aristocrats is probably the best test case for what people do with guaranteed income. Which doesn't exactly recommend it. And also shows that there's work to be done even then.
Who can give a guarantee of UBI lasting a lifetime? Because no nation state has the capacity to guarantee _its own existence_ on that timescale, nevermind the state of its economy, the viability of its currency, and the supply of basic goods to exchange for that currency.
The existence of Social Security and Medicare clearly have a strong impact on how Americans save for retirement, and I think the same is true in most other first-world nations. It's theoretically possible for Social Security to go away or be massively reduced, and at this point I think more than just a theoretical possibility. But most Americans make their retirement plans (or lack thereof) based on the assumption that Social Security will be there for them in its current form.
So I expect that if a first-world nation with a few generations of governmental stability under its belt were to implement a broad UBI, say "this is for real and it's permanent", and keep it in place for an election cycle or two, most of its citizens would act as if UBI were nigh-inevitable.
Which then brings up the question of how a true UBI would make people act, but we don't even get to that question until we have such a UBI.
> most Americans make their retirement plans (or lack thereof) based on the assumption that Social Security will be there for them in its current form
That says a lot about people's gullibility, and not much about the chance Social Security will in fact survive the demographic catastrophe.
FWIW, in Poland literally every young person is sure that the pension system will collapse before we ever get any money out of it. We're just paying the bare minimum into it because we have to, and because it's better than letting old people starve in the streets.
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.
ELO is logarithmic in odds of winning, but it's highly doubtful that odds of winning is linearly related to intelligence/skill/ability. You don't have to be 10 times smarter than your opponent in order to achieve a 90% chance of winning against them.
It's also not really clear what "10 times smarter" would even mean.
If you define performance improvements at chess as being able to search one additional layer of depth in the game tree, then it's a tautology that you'll need exponential improvements in computing power to get linear improvements in performance.
#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.
Sure, it should say "average IQ of those getting degrees".
On the subject of thresholds, I still find interesting an observation I saw made a while ago: if college attendance is mostly done by people above an IQ threshold, and "failure" to attend is mostly done by people below the threshold, then lowering the threshold for attending college will lower the mean IQ of both groups, the degree holders and the failures. Mechanically, it means removing a bunch of people from the top of the no-attendance distribution and adding them to the bottom of the yes-attendance distribution.
Not Scott, but regex is used by many non-devs to do fuzzy search. Also Excel has regex, so anyone who uses it is just one frustrated string-related search away from a regex trick.
Vaccines are going into arms in Colorado, New York, Illinois. I’m looking around in Texas, but at the moment it sounds like only people with known exposures are allowed to get it. The supply is still too low compared to demand, but I suspect demand is currently only high in a small fraction of the relevant target population.
If anyone is curious how the system is *supposed* to work (not how it actually does, necessarily), there is a thing called the "Pharmaceutical Inspection Convention and Pharmaceutical Inspection Co-operation Scheme" (PIC/S) that does the following (quoted from wikipedia):
"PIC/S has a number of provisions intended to establish the following:[4]
- Mutual recognition of inspection between member countries, so that an inspection carried out by officials of one member country will be recognized as valid by other members.
- Equivalent principles of inspection methodology, so that it is understood that inspectors in each member country will be following the same best practices when carrying out inspections.
- Mechanisms for the training of inspectors.
- Harmonization of written standards of Good Manufacturing Practices.
- Lines of communication between member country inspectors/inspectorates."
Denmark and the USA are both members of PIC/S, and so the USFDA should be able to accept the results of any Danish inspections as if it were their own inspectors.
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.
As I’ve said in other comments here - “doubling net worth” isn’t as impressive if you’ve got a large asset and a large debt (like a house and a mortgage) as it sounds when you imagine someone with just small assets and no debts.
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.
> were really big in the Bush era, then kind of stopped
Don't worry, they'll be back the next time the Republican presidential candidate is a southerner. Politics lies upstream of culture; or rather, culture lies downstream of the immediate electoral needs of the Democrat Party.
I found this in late 2004. You get an even higher correlation with GOP share of Presidential vote than with white women's fertility with white women's average years married between age 18-44.
It worked extraordinarily well in 2000 and 2004, somewhat less well in 2008 (with McCain), extraordinarily well in 2012 (with Romney), pretty well with Trump in 2016.
Here's Andrew Gelman of Columbia talking about my finding in 2008:
It has to do with housing prices, which have much to do with how close the metropolis in a state is too deep water or high mountains. E.g., Dallas can expand almost 360 degrees, but San Francisco is hemmed in by the Pacific, the Bay, various mountain ranges and much worse weather in the Central Valley. So, land is cheaper around Dallas than around San Francisco. I call this the Dirt Gap. Where homes are cheaper, people get married younger, have more legitimate children, and vote more for what used to be called the family values party.
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.
Is "gypsy" an actual ethnic group or just a lifestyle? If a gypsy chose to settle down and live a law-abiding lifestyle would they still be considered a gypsy?
There should be a word for the lifestyle, which includes quite different ethnic groups. I was fascinated about some similarities of irish travellers with classical european sinti and roma though they come from completely different backgrounds. Many good boxers, early marriages, for example.
I don't think so, but it's just my experience from the german uses of "Bohemien", mostly reserved for people with some artistic ambition and no strong kinship bonds. If it fits in English, fine. Does it really?
As always, this gets complicated. Some "gypsies" get annoyed by the "Roma" tag, as they consider themselves as non-Roma ("Roma are those guys, not us", basically).
Wikipedia: "Roma is a term primarily used in political contexts to refer to the Romani people as a whole.[7][8] Still, some subgroups of Romani do not self-identify as Roma, therefore some scholars avoid using the term Roma as not all Romani subgroups accept the term.[9]"
"Today, the term Romani is used by some organizations, including the United Nations and the US Library of Congress.[6] However, the Council of Europe and other organizations use the term Roma to refer to Romani people around the world, and recommended that Romani be restricted to the language and culture: Romani language, Romani culture.[11][12][13]"
It's a bit of a mess. Much the same goes for "Inuit", where some peoples tagged with it don't think it applies to them.
I have a friend who works in the prison system, and his comment was "working here, suddenly all the things you thought were just prejudices prove to be true".
They are, and at the same time the prejudices are not helping. "Go adopt the values of the wider society" is a hard sell when the wider society actively hates you. Try finding a job when your nationality became basically synonymous with theft and fraud.
I wonder, is there any society in the world that figured out how to integrate a premodern traveller culture into a modern social order?
For sure true and helpful are not the same thing. I wouldn't contend otherwise.
People just so often get worked up enough about "stereotypes" and the perceived ethics around them, that they throw out the "reality/pattern matching" baby with the "thoughtcrimes are bad" bathwater. A sizable portion (plurality?) or all things people learn about other humans and animals are in some sense fundamentally stereotypes.
'Romani' can be confused with Romanians (the source of the name); 'Roma' with Romans. Some sort of clarification, like 'Indians (Native Americans)' in the US, is helpful.
Two scholars' books from 2015 use 'gypsies' in their title. I haven't heard of Diane Tong before, but Yaron Matras is one of the best-known scholars of the Romani (and his book has been on my to-read list for years). Here's what their books say about terminology:
Diane Tong. Gypsies: An Interdisciplinary Reader.
> Terms such as 'Gypsies' or 'Tsygane' are used to describe almost any traveling people, such as Irish Travellers, who are also not Roma.
Yaron Matras. The Romani Gypsies.
> The scarcity of resources and extreme poverty in the aftermath of the war contributed to the emergence of other traveling populations such as itinerant bricklayers and smiths, couriers, musicians, seasonal workers, hawkers and peddlers, and professional beggars. All these were increasingly associated with 'Gypsies.' During the eighteenth century terms such as the German word Zigeuner and French Tsiganes came to denote an itinerant lifestyle irrespective of the origin, culture, or occupation of the individual group or family concerned.
It seems like 'traveling people(s)' is an overarching term, too bland (and with too many syllables) to ever find itself on the treadmill towards becoming a slur.
The problem with this term is recognition. Imagine Scott had written 'the Romani (the most numerous of the traveling peoples)'. I expect few ACX readers would understand, and even fewer among the general population.
I'm in favor of hesitating before we cancel yet another word. Especially since the only argument is that it's sometimes used as a slur - I'm pretty sure "American" is sometimes used as a slur in certain parts of the world.
I think it's fair to give peoples ONE shot at selecting a new name for their ethnicity, when the former one was selected for them by outsiders and in many cases (Eskimo, but not Gypsy) also had derogatory meaning.
You know, pattern is very familiar to the programmer in me, even though it's a very human one. The idea sounds... reasonable. Even good. In the face of it, how can I even argue? It's about a little more justice in the world, versus... well, NOT a little more justice in the world. It may not solve everything, but let's do a bit at a time, right?
Maybe. The cost is not "nothing". Like Scott said in reply to another comment here, the cost is all the disruption in setting up the new rule, which is paid not just in time and fuss, but in actual intense negative feelings felt by those "caught" not using the proper language. This is how it's supposed to be enforced, right? Shame.
This makes me realize a pretty big weakness of democracy as a system to aggregate preferences. If you ask a bunch of people in a minority if they'd prefer the old name or the new, you might well get a 51% majority. But that's a mere preference - in all fairness, quite a lot of them may not have any feelings about the issue, and just answered the Correct response by reflex. In forcing your will and shame on a majority, I'd very much like something more than "yeah, I'd probably like Roma more".
This probably generalizes pretty widely on a host of other issues. Mere electoral democracy a pretty bad tool, as a preference-to-enforcement transformer. Blunt edge and sharp handle.
Ah, and just to complete the pattern - because by now it's a common pattern. The most vocal advocates for the nomenclature change aren't even from that minority.
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.
The problem is that there is no plausible alternative for rationalist altruist types. Volunteering at soup kitchen-style charity is seen as too inefficient and parochial, and you can't spend your crypto billions on it, and just doing nothing is too uncomfortable when literal millions are dying of hunger/malaria/etc.
Many famines can be described as: Population heavily dependent subsistence farming have a bad harvest or several compounded bad harvests and either they lack access to income-generating work to buy food to replace or there is a logistical issues getting enough food to local markets of the affected areas at a price they can afford. Feedback loops that make everything worse are also possible. (Subsistence farming isn't a necessary condition but a common feature.)
Wouldn't investments in the logistical networks and economy of hunger prone countries resolve this problems permanently in the way food aid won't?
I don't know about malaria, but if the malaria nets are so awesome, there must be some reason why the people in malaria affected areas are not doing their best to get malaria nets by themselves. Most people don't want to get sick or die, after all.
The justification for not volunteering at a soup kitchen may be that it is too inefficient and parochial. However the experience of it, its unpleasant reality and the hard work unrewarded by much gratitude is what stop people doing it - hence the necessary justification. The preference is then for the kind of intervention where the 'altruist never, ever meets the recipient.
"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."
That's because the misery and the potential alleviation of misery are both incidental to the enthusiast's enthusiasm for the central planning; the latter makes a good excuse, is all. The actual purpose is to give the enthusiast along with his wider social class control over the rest of society, with the attendant career and status opportunities (as well, of course, as the pure rush of power that nobody who's ever dealt with an HR flak will be able to deny is a factor). As such, "more control, harder intervention" is the only response that makes sense from these people's perspective.
Unfortunately, they've succeeded very well. I don't approve of the right-wing militias who want to overthrow the whole system by force of arms, but I understand them.
EDIT: I forgot to add the actual point which is that I think EA just *looks like* this, and is not in fact actuated by the same motives at all.
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.)
>(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.)
If your conscription tests are anything like Finnish conscription test, I would be suspicious of them: IQ test has remained the same, but population and their motivations have changed During the 1980s, the service length was either 8 or 11 months; doing well on IQ test would put you on either NCO or officer training track, which took longer.
Today, the shortest service period (no NCO or officer training) is 6 months (because of gov't savings) but NCO/officer track is still 11 months (actually, a bit more). Many people have adapted and it is a well-known meme to avoid performing too well on your IQ test if you don't want to spend extra 5+ months in the army (as opposed to previous <3). Additionally, the prestige of officer training has decreased, because civilian service has become more popular in the "intellectual elite", and for a good reason: it has changed from "demeaning job peeling potatoes in kitchen" to "opportunity to land an unpaid internship in university lab or good corporation that will advance your career": several capable university students choose civil service because it can be genuinely better career move (thus they are not recorded making the IQ test).
"The IQ gains of the 20th century have faltered. Losses in Nordic nations after 1995 average at 6.85 IQ points when projected over thirty years. On Piagetian tests, Britain shows decimation among high scorers on three tests and overall losses on one. The US sustained its historic gain (0.3 points per year) through 2014. The Netherlands shows no change in preschoolers, mild losses at high school, and possible gains by adults. Australia and France offer weak evidence of losses at school and by adults respectively. German speakers show verbal gains and spatial losses among adults. South Korea, a latecomer to industrialization, is gaining at twice the historic US rate.
When a later cohort is compared to an earlier cohort, IQ trends vary dramatically by age. Piagetian trends indicate that a decimation of top scores may be accompanied by gains in cognitive ability below the median. They also reveal the existence of factors that have an atypical impact at high levels of cognitive competence. Scandinavian data from conventional tests confirm the decimation of top scorers but not factors of atypical impact. Piagetian tests may be more sensitive to detecting this phenomenon."
Their Table 1 is a bit weirdly presented, but reading directly from horse's mouth http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/dutton2013.pdf and it is a perfect match with Finnish conscription length changes: decline mostly happens right during years 1997-1998, the same year the conscription system changed. Noticeably the drop is largest in words and numbers test, the shapes test scores fall much less, and all are almost stable from 1998 to 2009.
Swedish data show no difference, because there isn't such data since 1992. From Norwegian and Danish military I know less, but they had bunch of changes during and after the 1990s. I don't recall exactly when the change happened, but today both Danish and Norwegians practically have "volunteer conscription" (yearly quota can be mostly filled from volunteer enlistees so not many people are drafted by force.)
In a more recent publication about the Danish conscription data, the only major change they notice is a noticeable tick when the paper-and-pen test was replaced by a computer test: https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-hegelund.pdf There the authors mention that maybe the draft board excludes more low-IQ enlistees ("this group generally seemed to be worse off with regard to characteristics correlated with intelligence test scores") and there were some changes in some characteristics between 1988 cohort and 1996 cohort. It is plausible there could have been such changes that affect the earlier cohorts, too.
I find it easier to believe the non-Nordic test-retest studies mentioned your linked paper, and I agree that a continuation of Flynn effect / IQ score growth is not supported by the data. I am less certain they are truly "excellent statistics" of a general decrease in scores.
I guess the same question applies as to Madeleine comment.
If you chat with three friends about killing your neighbour or chat with 300 people about burning down area x of your city, let's say where all the immigrants live, is this all legal?
So there is nothing like if you had a closed forum of 100 persons where everybody was chatting about hating and lynching blacks, it would be illegal? Without *planning* it I mean.
In my country it'd be illegal to eg. chat about hating and killing jewish people, even with no concrete activities following.
It would be legal, yes. I don't know where you live, but in terms of freedom of speech, the US is one of the most liberal countries in the world. There are a very few kinds of speech that are illegal, including threats, fraud, and libel, but there's no law against fictional stories or roleplay.
Yeah, I know that US is liberal in terms of freedom of speech, but I don't know in all instants how this translates in reality.
Fictional stories or roleplay is fine in my place as well.
In my country there is however a law against 'Incitement of the people'. Basically you're not allowed to call for stuff that would violate the rights of whole groups of people.
Especially with the internet of course there are lots of cases where it's unclear where exactly the line is drawn, and I'm not an expert on this. I'm living in Germany.
I copypaste the first part of the law below:
Incitement of the people.
Whoever, in a manner likely to disturb the public peace,
1. incites hatred, violence or arbitrary action against a national, racial, religious or ethnic group, against a section of the population or against an individual on account of his or her membership of a designated group or section of the population; or
2. attacks the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously disparaging or defaming a aforementioned group, part of the population or an individual because of his or her membership of aforementioned group or part of the population,
shall be punished by imprisonment for a term of three months to five years. (www.DeepL.com)
Edit: there are more paragraphs in this law, and I don't know if this specifically would apply to the forum ... just introducing here to give you an idea.
You live in a country where thousands of people coordinated large scale violent attacks on even urban center for an entire summer using hundreds of millions of dollars in NGO funding, so yeah its legal, as long as your politics are "right."
Naming your neighbor or naming the area of the city would make it sound like conspiracy to commit actual acts. But playing dungeons and dragons or war games where you pretend to slaughter thousands of innocent civilians is considered perfectly innocuous.
I agree, (leaving aside for the moment that there is quite a debate about violent video games).
But then there is something that is inciting hateful behaviour against a certain group of people, usually due to their nationality, ethniticy, sex or sexual preference or such. It's different that *planning* a terrorist attack or something, but it also differs from a video game.
Indeed much broader in my place. I'm copying two examples I just came across:
A man from Stendal posted a picture of Adolf Hitler on Facebook and wrote the following: "Filthy Syrian pack, just slaughter the pigs, our taxes are being squandered and we have to pay food money for our children". Because in this case the criminal offence of incitement of the people and the use of signs of unconstitutional organisations was fulfilled, the district court of Stendal sentenced him on 09.03.2016 to a fine of 130 daily rates of 30 euros each (3,900 euros).
The NPD had some election posters that were very controversial. For example, one poster depicted three oriental-looking men on a carpet, which read "Have a safe flight home". The incident was reported to the police and charges of incitement of the people were brought against the responsible persons. In the last instance, the Munich Higher Regional Court (OLG) ruled on 9 February 2010 that although the matter was xenophobic, the criminal offence of incitement to hatred was not fulfilled (ruling of 9 February 2010, ref. 5St RR II 9/10). . The judges ruled that this was a sharp and exaggerated statement which was protected by Article 5 of the Basic Law. Just like the slogans "Jews out", "Foreigners out" or "Turks out", the slogan "Have a safe flight home" was not, according to its wording, an invitation to others to take certain measures against the groups of persons mentioned.
In Switzerland and Germany, it's illegal. Any form of porn with minors, with animals or with "Gewalt" is forbidden. (Not sure how to translate "Gewalt". Coercion? Violence? In any case, it covers rape.) This includes every type of porn, for example fictional written stories about rape, or drawings of underage anime characters having sex. (I have always wondered how to tell the age of fictional characters...)
I don't think these laws are enforced in such cases. I hate them nevertheless, because it is just stupid that they exist. Or rather, that the laws on porn don't make the distinctions they should make.
They're not actually enslaving, raping, or forcibly impregnating anyone, and they're not trying to incite anyone to do those things, so their weird porn is protected by the First Amendment, as it should be.
If they were writing about randomly shooting people on the street, killing Blacks, killing Jews, raping children or whatever else you want to think of, would it be the same?
Maybe by making "We are completely opposed to real rape/ethnic violence/whatever, and anyone who advocates those things outside the context of a story or roleplay will be banned" the first rule.
I remember Scott describing how the only place committed to not do witchhunts will end up with three liberals and all witches. I'm inclinded to think that a reddit forum despite a nice first rule risks to be the same.
Legally, by the absence of any reference to specific real-life people who were to be killed or raped, specific real-life people who were going to do the killing or raping, or any specific real-life time or place where this was going to occur. Nothing can happen in real life without those elements, so the legal presumption is that if you don't have those elements, you're not planning anything real.
There are already people who write about those kinds of topics (for a variety of reasons, many of which are pretty innocuous), and making it illegal would be a massive overreach and violation of free speech. Even if someone was very obviously gleeful about how they wrote fiction about killing black people/Jewish people/raping children, then I would probably choose not to associate with that person, but I wouldn't want them to be arrested just for writing fiction.
Yes, obviously there is literature - factual and fictional - about all kinds of topics, including the most horrible ones. I'm not talking about banning all those.
I find it interesting, how the notion of 'fiction' comes up several times already. I understand that talking about ideas is different from planning. But then just saying 'oh, I'd love to kill all X' or 'those bastards, let's kill all X', even if not planning, is also not 'fiction', right?
The first one is clearly fiction, you are using "would", so you're clearly fantasising about something in your head. The second one will depend on the context and the law of the land, but twitter, for an example, allowed feminists to spread a "kill all men" hashtag some number of times. "yes all men" is another catchphrase popular in all feminist spaces, shortened from "yes all men are rapists".
It would be awfully one-sided and unfair to allow feminists and their weird kinks about men and not rape play enthusiasts and their weird kinks about women. At least the latter actually make it clear they don't hate the object of their fantasies.
There's a musical genre (well, subgenre) that talks about things like shooting people on the street: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangsta_rap . Not everyone is a fan, but people don't go to jail for any of this.
It's worth noting that it matches to (milder, or maybe not so milder) preferences in a large portion of the general public, outside of the impregnation part. See Aella's surveys.
It's harder to get outraged about things that sound kind of hot.
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.
Yep, you can define a player's "strength" as 10^(Elo/400) and it works exactly the obvious way (i.e. the expected score per game of player A is (strength of A)/(strength of A + strength of B) and vice versa). By this definition, the strength is only slightly sublinear in the computing power.
How are engine ELOs calculated, though? Surely there's a problem with engines and human GMs belonging to completely disjoint player pools. I would concede that the top engines are very obviously at least ~400 points higher than Carlsen, but beyond that I'm not sure the data exists to confirm or deny.
Edit: never mind, I misread this comment. The data is that the engine itself gained 800 rating points, not that it's 800 points higher than Carlsen.
Coincidentally, contemporary top engines probably are 800ish Elo points better than Carlsen. Of course, as you note, there's no one Elo rating but there's Lichess Elo, FIDE Elo, Computer Chess Championship Elo, Computer Chess Rating Lists Elo, etc, and these are indeed disjoint: Carlsen hasn't been playing BO10000 showmatches against Stockfish to figure out if their supposed 674 Elo difference (FIDE vs CCRL) in fact would result in the one expected Carlsen win and 180 draws.
However, I suspect it happens to be pretty much correct. The ability of players to beat each other isn't exactly transitive but it's close enough and there's human GM level engines in the engine rating pool, and there was a time when engine ratings in fact were calibrated against humans and we can resurrect the old versions and make them play games against contemporary engines. We can also look at what kind of compensation (pawn and a move or two pawns sort of deal) is required for human super-GMs to have fair matches against engines and it's the same sort of compensation as the best human players can afford to play with against much lower rated human peers. I suspect (although in the absence of that kind of BO10000 series can't confirm) that the biggest issue isn't really calibration of ratings but assumptions of probability distribution in the tails, namely that the chances of overwhelmingly lesser players are overestimated, at least in the context where one of the players can't blunder.
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.
It's not that high unemployment is preferable; rather, healthy economic conditions also come with somewhat less employment than times of unchecked inflation like right now; this employment boost is only temporary and not sustainable.
Inflation is not a unitary phenomenon, you can't generalize like that. High inflation from a supply shock to energy is different from inflation caused by, say, capital flight and a currency crisis. But they're both "inflation" on paper.
Of course, I'm aware, which is why I said NGDP in the first place, and tossed inflation in there to make it clearer to most people what I'm talking about; (especially since inflation caused by overly expansionary monetary policy is the current issue)
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.
Extremely strong? There was the covid recession in 2020, there’s a quarterly “recession” in the US now, which seems to be driven by rising costs. In between was merely catch-up. The rise in wages might have been believed to be because some people retired, or gave up, but the same statistics show that Labour participation is up. And housing increases would benefit the top 50% more than the bottom 50%, and in any case House inflation has been moderate. I have no idea, except to suspect the figures.
Extremely strong is the only accurate way the characterize the last two years, post covid shock. Compare with other countries, where the recovery has been anemic. The US did it right, and the Fed waited until it saw the whites of inflation's eyes before hiking. All in all, a stunning string of success in the face of a catastrophic macroeconomic shock. Plenty of credit to go around, from Kelton and Powell to Biden and yes, even Trump gets a little credit for knowing better than to fret about deficits when the global economy, and his own approval numbers, were on the line.
Well all countries rebounded. Central banks were hardly going to raise interest rates during covid, and the ECB didn’t either. The US is in a recession now, as it was in 2020, and I don’t think interest rate hikes are finished as inflation is external. The average American isn’t actually happy with his lot right now, and that’s about to get worse.
We're probably 3-5 years away from knowing whether the "broad fiscal support" will be vindicated or not. A very reasonable view might be that the excess fiscal support caused our inflation problems on the supply side.
If we're going to be intellectually honest, it's too early for the lessons learned on the fiscal package.
Either way, the confusion is that consumers and small business owners are very historically bearish on the economic future and this infographic wants us to believe things are great and will continue to be great. Perhaps!
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.]
There is no regex for email addresses (as per RFC 5322) as the rules regarding double quotes make it irregular but context-free. The closest you'll get is something like
I don't know the rules of quotes in e-mail addresses, but note that many (so-called) regex formats are actually more powerful than formal regular expressions, and can recognize some irregular languages.
"Match text containing all English vowels, in any order" → "[aeiou]{5}" (Bad. Note that this sort of thing is tricky to do with regex.)
"Match text containing at least one capital letter, at least one small letter, and at least one number" → " /^(?=.*?[A-Z])(?=.*?[a-z])(?=.*?[0-9]).+$/" (Bad, but only because the + near the end instead of a *)
all English vowels: Yeah, tricky. I can't think of a way except an alternation of terms like "a.*e.*i.*o.*u" for all 120 permutations of aeiou. Is there a better trick?
I blame it less for getting it wrong if it's not a thing one would ever try to do with a regex in the first place. Still, if it won't say "That's a dumb thing to use a regex for"...
Your example shows that even statistically-impressive text-generation is far from intelligence. A human trying to answer that prompt might well fumble about producing crap like "[aeiou]{5}" but would take the next step of trying it out on a test case or two.
Mind blown. TIL about lookahead assertions in regex. A nice generalization of ^ $ and word-start and -end, but I learned my regex through classic sed and grep.
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.
I have long suspected that if anyone bothered to collect data on & split white people out by ethnicity, the "poorer"/"lower-class"/more-recent immigrant whites (Italian, Irish, etc.) would be underrepresented in the same places that the traditional underrepresented minorities are, but no one cares about that
I should have been clearer, when I said more-recent immigrants, I meant the early 20th century wave, which tended to be poorer opportunity seekers and whose college-attending descendants would be upper middle class, as opposed to the relatively established money of the earlier immigrants, who would be typically English or German and more likely to be legacies/donors/upper class
The way it actually works, I think, is that whites who mostly migrated to the Northeast Corridor tended to end up with more income/education than those who migrated elsewhere. I'd suspect Italian-Americans as a group are overrepresented relative to English-Americans at places like Harvard, for the simple reason that English are everywhere while Italians and Irish ended up disproportionately in the Northeast.
Why is “dean’s list” included there? That’s people who have above a particular GPA, and seems more in line with people’s stated ideas about admissions than the others.
Principia probably the college dean writing up a list, not the high school dean (which is not a title often used in high school). Compare the Harvard Z-list
I've never heard of anyone use the phrase "dean's list" to refer to a list that a dean actually writes - I've always heard it used for something like the set of full-time students whose GPA passes a particular threshold, or who are in the top X% of GPA (wikipedia generally agrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean%27s_list ).
I've never heard of this "Z list" but it doesn't sound like something anyone would call the "dean's list".
But now that I've googled the phrase "ALDC", I see that this is about some "dean's interest list". I haven't read the original article that this statistic is drawn from to figure out precisely what that means, but it's not what people usually mean by the phrase "dean's list", which is a purely academic merit recognition.
re: Supposed bias in favor of whites in admissions, if you really want to go down that route, then fine: let's get a more comprehensive view of who would not have gotten in if only academics was taken into account, using Harvard's own analysis:
According to Harvard's analysis, if only academics were taken into account:
11% of whites who got in would have been rejected
74% of Hispanics who got in would have been rejected
83% of Native Americans who got in would have been rejected
93% of blacks who got in would have been rejected
If you want to talk "privilege", fine, but we have to see the whole story of who is getting what non-academic admission benefits. The impact of affirmative action is still vastly larger than athletes, legacies, and kids of donors combined. Furthermore, white legacies have significantly better academics than the average applicant: as Harvard's analysis shows, only 10% of white applicants who currently get in would be rejected if only academics were considered, so even if we assume that that 43% is the bottom 43% of the white applicant pool, over 75% of them would still get in on academics alone.
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
There don't have to be many though, when an accusation is made on social media, for a few people to offer up a snappy response, after which they'll *all* know.
And notwithstanding some recent fearmongering about how the Evil Republicans are stopping schools from teaching children about slavery, pretty much everybody is taught enough about American history to know that A: slavery was a thing and B: it was lots of black people who were the slaves, and C: that was in the South.
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
Not 100% sure what stubydoo was suggesting, but I think the claim is that deficits tend to increase/be larger when Republicans are in charge vs when Democrats are in charge.
A proposed explanation for this is the Republicans are extremely committed to cutting taxes and often enact tax cuts, but they are not actually committed to cutting spending at all (take a look at this graph of government spending/GDP over time: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=SlvZ ; if Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2, or Trump had any success cutting spending, it's certainly not obvious).
Whereas when Democrats increase spending, they often make an effort to raise taxes to pay for the increased spending (see the current, not-yet passed Inflation Reduction Act for an example of this).
You can decide for yourself if you think the claim holds up, but of course it's hard to say what changes in the deficit are due to the party in charge or due to other factors (for example, Clinton presided over an unusually long economic boom the during his presidency, and defense spending was able to shrink drastically due to the Cold War being over--both factors which allowed the deficit to shrink and eventually become a surplus).
As far as Trump vs. Biden, COVID is a huge confounding factor, and it may be too soon to say anyway.
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.
Even when I have very little interest in the subject Dynomight is writing about, I always enjoy reading their posts. Thoughtful, clear, insightful and quite gentle.
>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.
There was a real life test of the effects of giving poor people money in, of all places, Bosnia, during the NATO/SFOR deployment after the war. One of the favourite ways of getting money in a context where the economy had collapsed completely, was to arrange an "accident" with an SFOR vehicle. For political reasons, SFOR always paid compensation, whoever's fault it was. When this scam started, people went around telling their friends how clever they had been. This stopped when men with guns started turning up and taking the money away. Thereafter, though the scam continued, it got much less publicity. This is a slightly unusual case of the general rule that giving money to people first of all makes them vulnerable to the strong and ruthless.
I think it's worth remembering for cases like this that tests involving giving money to people in collapsed or undeveloped economies likely don't generalize to the results of giving people money in more developed economies. With tests in impoverished countries in Africa, they've seen a lot of cases of people starting business ventures and generating more money, but I think that giving money to poor people in America, you're very rarely going to see similar results, because the economic canopy isn't clear. It's really difficult for poor people in America to come up with business ideas which would realistically allow them to make money, since they have to compete with all the businesses which are already present around them. I've asked high school students in inner-city programs, if they had enough money to start a business, what they'd try doing with the money, and the only thing anyone I asked could come up with was buying up goods wholesale and selling them on the street. It's not just a lack of ambition, it's pretty much the only model of entrepreneurship they see around them, and the only option they have with a realistically attainable amount of money which isn't already being done better by other businesses they have access to.
The results you get from giving people money in one environment don't necessarily correspond to the results you get in other environments.
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.
Also, it looks impressive as a doubling of net worth, but it’s more likely something like a 10-20% increase in home value while debt stays constant, so the difference doubles.
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.
For the bottom 50%? I’d like to see the breakdown between renters and house owners, almost because definition the bottom 50% will have most of the renters.
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?
You still reach a point where a computer is 2x as smart as a human and thus can define the next faster computer in 1/Sqrt(2) the time, then 1/2 the time, then 1/2sqrt(2) the time....... AI go foom!
> 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?
What are the odds developed countries have been dysgenic for decades now? Is this peak civilization? Or are we going to get stratified into the few intelligentsia breeding amongst themselves and the masses?
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.
The theory is that "poverty traps" exist, wherein people are prevented from getting ahead in life by a simple lack of money. You're unemployed because you don't have transportation to get to a job, if only you had $1000 you could buy a bicycle and a suit for job interviews, and you'd permanently escape poverty.
Those things are probably quite common among poor people in poor countries, but uncommon among poor people in rich countries, who are already selected for being particularly bad at making decisions.
No, people in rich countries aren't always poor because they are particularly bad at making decisions. People can be poor because they prioritized something else over being rich, because of genuine bad luck (say, someone's untimely death or illness), because they are disabled, because it takes a lot of effort and money to move from a currently bad environment into a better one, because due to bad luck early in life they didn't get a good degree and that precludes them from having a higher-paying job of the kind they like, because the job they have that used to be a good one is no longer a good one.
The problem is, a one-time payment of $2000 doesn't solve any of the real problems. It isn't enough to help you move, it isn't enough to help you buy a car, it won't buy you a degree. It's enough for some medical or dental procedures, and I bet many people would use this money to get some of these done - but most of the time this wouldn't translate into a major change in their state.
I'm totally at loss as to why anyone thought that a one-time payment of $2000 would make a big difference to someone.
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.
And it's not just about computation. I have sometimes wondered whether for a super-intelligent AI, taking over the world is more or less difficult than an accurate weather forecast for 14 days. I'm genuinely not sure.
I'm a bit confused by what you're saying. Wouldn't AI taking over the world being easier than a weather forecast imply that you _are_ worried about AI takeoff?
What I wanted to say: predicting the weather for 14 days might be a *really, really* hard problem, and it might not get easier if you throw a lot of intelligence at it. It might just be a function that is too chaotic to compute. And I think the world is full of such chaotic functions, especially when it comes to social interactions.
So if someone wants to convince me that an AI can easily take over the world, then they should convince me that this is a much easier task than predicting the weather. Or rephrased, that it can be done with tools which do not include something as impossible as predicting the weather for 14 days.
Perhaps it is really easier to take over the world. But as you wrote in your post, I won't accept arguments that assert an AI which can solve arbitrary problems, especially not solving inverse problems related to complex systems.
This feels confused to me. Humans manage to have human level intelligence without computational complexity being a problem. Very smart humans manage to have above-average-human-level intelligence without computational complexity being a problem. Narrowly superhuman AIs (like AlphaGo) manage to play Go at far superhuman levels without computational complexity being a problem. In order to argue that computational complexity disproves superhuman AI, you'd need to posit that you start running into computational complexity concerns just as soon as you get past the smartest human who ever lived, except by coincidence this isn't true in any of the domains we've already passed human level in, but it is in all the others.
I'm not worried about some kind of hypercomputer AI that can solve NP-complete problems in an afternoon, I'm just worried about some boring AI that happens to have IQ 500 and think a thousand times faster than an average human.
The AI that ends up killing all humans will be the dumbest AI possible that's still smart enough to kill humans (since otherwise, that one would have killed us first). I don't know exactly which one that will be, but I think it happens well before hypercomputation.
(I don't think you need hypercomputation for nanobots, but if it turns out I'm wrong, then the dumbest AI capable of killing all humans will do something other than nanobots)
I'm having a lot of trouble expressing my difference in world-view here, but I took a shot.
First of all, I'm definitely not objecting to things like "a machine which is like von Neumann running on 10x speed." I totally believe that is a thing which could exist. What I'm saying is that I think a 10x or 100x von Neumann would display less godhood than people imagine.
The relevance of computational complexity here as I see it is that solving inverse problems for interesting systems is extremely difficult. The "AI which is supposed to toss strawberries kills everyone" scenarios always require the AI doing some secretive scheming/designing of nanobots/manipulation of humans etc.
What it means for something to be NP-hard is that (if NP-complete problems require exponential time), you'll never do asymptotically better than brute force. The world looks a lot like that to me. I'm a grad student, and looking around at everyone doing research, it looks a whole lot more like brute force than it looks like intelligences deriving solutions to things through pure reason.
Some concrete examples of what I'm saying are:
- Nanobot optimization is probably NP-hard. In order to make a nanobot which will function effectively in the world you probably need to try making a bunch of them, looking at what goes wrong, and iterating on your design. If my strawberry tossing robot is trying to kill the human race with nanobots so it can toss more strawberries, I'll notice the suspicious piles of metallic goop lying around.
- If it took 1 yottaflop of compute to train Human level AI #73, I expect it to require many yottaflops to find an algorithm which will train Human AI #74 to be 10% smarter. It looks to the outside observer like the AI field is zooming forward, but actually the amount of compute being invested for each subsequent advance is increasing at a rate which outpaces Moore's law. Not only that, but you only see the successes (GPT-3), and not the graveyard of failed ideas (which still cost compute). My main belief that's relevant here is that that graveyard _isn't optional_. You have to to try many ideas to find the good ones, and those trials will cost an insane amount of compute. I'm not worried about an overnight foom since I think the available hardware fundamentally prevents that.
- Solving for which sensory inputs will make a brain enter a given state is probably NP-hard, so I'm not worried about GPT-100 mind controlling me via text. That's unfair, since actually there are very successful human manipulators (e.g. cult leaders) who obviously aren't simulating their victims brains. However, those people probably needed practice, they did not derive their manipulation abilities via pure reason. I'm not worried about AI in a box scenarios, since I'll notice that my strawberry picking robot is spending a lot of time pissing off its coworkers when it should be tossing.
Basically, my main belief is that human (or any) intelligence requires tons of trial and error to learn to succeed in complex domains, and that this just represents pushing down an exponential difficulty curve which will always win in the end. Go is actually a pretty good example, since the AlphaGo algorithm can basically be described as "learn good heuristics which will find better solutions when searching this exponentially large tree."
Killing all humans is an extremely high bar to pass, unless you do something like hook your nukes up to an AI, which I would rather file under "nuclear weapon x-risk" than "AI x-risk."
Thanks, that makes sense. I still disagree though, for a few reasons:
--- Again, I think "predict exactly what sensory inputs would it take to hack this brain on a neurological level" is the wrong way to look at things. The great influencers of history (Hitler, Mohammed, Reagan, etc) weren't hypercomputing, they were just doing folk psychology really really well. Presumably this was through some kind of trial and error and studying what worked for other people. I would expect someone "more intelligent" than them (in some "social intelligence" sense) to be able to do the same with less training data, or better with the same amount of training, or vastly better with more training; I'm also imagining that eg "watch YouTube videos of every politician and see whether they succeeded or failed" with a little bit of "ask people on Mechanical Turk whether Pitch A is better than Pitch B" will be enough training, and then the AI can do better than all of these (very successful) influencers. Or maybe there's something sort of like hypnosis that works really well. If so, I think the AI would discover it not by simulating a brain atom-by-atom, but by noticing things sort of like it in the speeches of great political leaders, actors, etc, reverse-engineering it, and being able to do it properly. Or, again, I don't know, maybe it will do something magical and hacking-like, but I don't think we'll *need* that AI to be in trouble, we'll be in trouble with the rhetoric one or the hypnosis one or some other thing that I can't think of right now because I'm not superintelligent.
--- I agree I am a lot less worried about an overnight foom than I was ten years ago before I knew about deep learning or training. I am more worried about something like some lab creates something IQ 125, this is really exciting, the amount of investment into AI doubles, there's a bit of algorithmic progress, and then eighteen months later someone else creates something that's IQ 250, and it turns out that's enough to do something horrible. I think this would roughly mirror Go progress. Or they make thousands of copies of the IQ 250 AI and use it in all sorts of industrial/scientific/infrastructure applications, and working together, they do something horrible. Or everything goes fine but eighteen months after that some team (aided by a bunch of IQ 250 AIs) invents an IQ 500 AI, and *that one* is enough to do something horrible. I agree that there is some room to do alignment research in the eighteen months between the IQ 125 AI and the IQ 250 AI, but eighteen months sounds like not much time to invent a totally new field from scratch and I would be happier if they have lots of pre-existing work to draw on.
--- I am really not convinced that nanobot optimization will be NP hard, because back when I used to have this discussion in the 2010s, people claimed that protein folding would be NP-hard. But AIs solved protein folding (to a reasonable definition of "solve") before they solved writing coherent long blocks of text. This does not give me much confidence in people's ability to get the NP-hardness of different tasks right. I realize the sense in which AIs have solved protein folding is probably a slightly different sense than the one in which it is NP-hard, but I worry that if AIs solve nanobots, then people will protest that wasn't the sense in which they meant nanobots were NP-hard either.
I'll put aside the neurological stuff since I agree it's not necessary.
> with a little bit of "ask people on Mechanical Turk whether Pitch A is better than Pitch B"
I think this is the sort of thing I'm saying is necessary, and also makes it difficult/impossible for your AI to secretly augment itself with significantly higher capabilities. You don't need to worry as much about hidden ulterior motives if their execution requires using your credit card to run studies in English.
Regarding the "hypnosis/brainwashing/just being really convincing" threat in general, I think the world doesn't really look the way it would if there were a consistent vulnerability of that kind in human brains. (Unless it's one we haven't found, in which case once again the AI needs to do some suspicious looking experimenting).
> Or they make thousands of copies of the IQ 250 AI and use it in all sorts of industrial/scientific/infrastructure applications, and working together, they do something horrible
I'm not extremely worried about "many extremely smart but not individually dangerous AIs" scenarios, because:
1. The collaboration would be very visible (why is this virology lab robot DMing that robotics lab robot?).
2. It's very unlikely you'd be using exactly the same AI in both a machine shop and a chemistry lab. The evidence we have so far in deep learning is that generality can give you a good starting point, but specialists always beat generalists. This is tied into my point about computational difficulty in that being a specialist means you know a lot of domain specific heuristics. If the problem can't be fully solved, you want to allocate as much capacity as possible to the problem you care about, and throw out things you don't (i.e. optimal strawberry throwers shouldn't be storing information about how to play saxophone)
> but eighteen months after that some team (aided by a bunch of IQ 250 AIs) invents an IQ 500 AI
I don’t want to get too down in the weeds on your exact wording, since I assume you’re just using “500 IQ” as a stand in for “extremely smart.” However, if NP-complete problems turn out to require exponential time, that’s basically saying they’re not soluble to intelligence in some sense. You can put in exponentially more compute and only see linear gains.
> people claimed that protein folding would be NP-hard. But AIs solved protein folding (to a reasonable definition of "solve")
AlphaFold solved a prediction problem by training on a large number of experimentally determined structures. The relevance of the NP-hardness of the problem is that success was accomplished via the model finding helpful heuristics, not making a breakthrough which let it cleanly defeat the problem. (This can be seen from the fact that it makes plenty of mistakes still).
Threats of the kind “AI designs a novel technology which kills us” also sound much more like RL type settings than prediction problem ones. In every case where RL has outperformed humans (Go, other games, DeepMind’s fusion work), we’ve had access to a high-fidelity simulator for the target domain. That will not be the case for “make a disease which kills all humans”, or “make a nanobot which is robust enough to spread through many different environments and kill all humans.”
I worry that I’ll come off as using special pleading to get out of specific scenarios, when your mental model is that there are a large number of scenarios I haven't considered. On my end, it feels like all the threat models rely on unrealistic views of computing. (And also a bit like someone is threatening me with Pascal’s wager).
I do think we will have problems due to technology which was created with the aid of AI, but I think they'll be more of the "everyone has a bioweapon which their well-enough aligned AI designed for them when they asked it" variety.
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."
I think the process of taking the (not inherently derogatory) word everyone has used to describe a group since forever, reclassifying it as a slur, and then asking all group members to feel bad and humiliated each time it gets used, results in a lot of people actually feeling bad and humiliated, even if in the end everyone agrees to stop using it (and then the euphemism treadmill will ratchet up a level, and the group members will be told to feel bad and humiliated each time they hear the new version).
My policy is that once everyone has agreed that a word is a slur, I won't use it (since that makes people feel bad and humiliated, and doesn't do anything to fight the overall system of making more and more words badness and humiliation inducing) - but that I won't do anything that feels to me like being part of a preference cascade towards turning a previously standard word into a slur.
My understanding is that the preferred term is Romani because gypsy is short for Egyptian and the result of a historic mis classification. It would be odd to start calling Americans ‘Canadian’ but that has nothing to do with whether or not there’s something derogatory about implying someone is Canadian. The derogatory angle is weird to me. There’s a similar thing with calling people Jews. I’m inclined to think that the correct response to “{ethnic label} people are {bad trait}” is “no they aren’t!” not “don’t call anyone a {ethic label}”
Ironically, Gypsy has wide and obvious, and somewhat romanticized, cultural resonance. To less educated people, Romani sound like people from Romania, which I'd imagine is annoying to both parties of the confusion.
"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.
"Well, not so much 'on its own' but dipping due to..."
Well yes, everything has a cause, of course.
"And just because it's not being done via death camps doesn't make it admirable..."
Of course not. It's necessary for reasons other than simply not being evil, obviously.
"...or even not evil."
Everyone has a right to children, of course. But humans and their livestock now make up 98% of tetrapod biomass. So when would you say that we have too many humans? Never? Is the concept of "too many" itself "evil"?
"Who has the right to say that certain people are surplus to requirements?"
See? That's exactly my point. Population control doesn't require *eliminating* anybody. That's a straw man.
"Why is that bad?"
You spoke early of hope and spiritual health. Does open wilderness have *nothing* to do with that? Do you feel that there is *nothing* wrong about destroying wilderness?
"I will grant that there is a maximum carrying capacity to the Earth..."
Thank you. And rather obviously, terrestrial ecosystems are stressed when available biomass is whittled down to a mere 2%.
"The world's current shortages of food and resources are entirely self-inflicted."
False. As a single example, fish populations have crashed by 50% over the past four decades. Furthermore, to the degree that problems do arise from warfare and supply chain issues, these instabilities are exacerbated by large populations.
"...when you include the Solar System the concept isn't even meaningful."
Complete nonsense. How many millions do you plan to ship off to Mars (where they will live an utterly wretched life)? Why not simply preserve what we have here *and* explore the universe?
"I didn't know that 'available biomass' was a hard limit..."
Two points. First, it's mostly habitat loss that causes wildlife to decline, and not so much as carbon being directly stolen from wild biomes.
Second point: you've surely heard of the carbon cycle? The marginalization of wildlife (again, only 2% of all tetrapods) isn't a matter of mistakenly thinking it's a zero sum game (those stupid animals!). Available carbon is a real and concrete issue. Here's a serious study of total global biomass over geological history. It appears that the biosphere was already pressing against "hard limits" before humans even came along...
So we're agreed then that space colonization would do nothing to reverse population growth?
"We _can_, however, acquire resources we need in space..."
Which potentially eliminates the imprint of basically just industry and mining. That's it. And that would certainly be a huge positive (and I'm all for it). But the agricultural imprint remains the same. Or do you envision off-worlding all our agriculture as well...?
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.
I propose that ACX spam Reddit with carefully chosen insults to try to draw a specific shape on the graph.
There is. It's called "the skeptic community". They've moved on from atheism and just talk about Elon Musk now.
For college graduates it’s largely the increase in numbers going to college.
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
looks like you meant this to be about 37, not 38
thank you.
Actually I think I have been bamboozled as it was 38 when I wrote it and is still 38 in the substack email I received
Also people have mentioned 40, but there is no 40.
There was no 36 in the email version.
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.
Exactly. You could basically just say redditor at this point.
That's the Anglosphere's default mainstream social media culture for people in a certain age band. To get away from it you have to actively avoid it -- build yourself a better bubble. If you're on Reddit, look for unusually nice, well-moderated subreddits (which will usually not be the most popular); if you're on Twitter, follow only people who put nice tweets on your timeline (who will usually not be the most famous); and so on.
If you want to find nice people on Reddit, try r/slaythespire ;)
I used to be a subscriber, and this is a good recommendation. Niche hobby subreddits can be great. Any subreddit where you can get 1000 upvotes will be part of the same hivemind as the rest of Reddit.
Or No Man's Sky gaming community. One of the best I've found.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/
The inverse of this is 4chan. Maybe the explanation is as simple as, people who both A) have a lot of free time and B) choose to spend it complaining on the internet usually suck. Self-selection.
I think that this is probably wrong. In particular I think that having weird kinks is probably correlated with wanting websites to be more permissive about what content they allow, for obvious reasons.
Your PoliticalIdeology Is Not Okay
Pediatricians here catching strays in the comment section, LOL
Based on subreddit overlap, forcedbreeding appears to be *heavily* red-aligned; lefties just aren't into raceplay, sorry. Feel free to update your priors.
That's because it isn't *heavily* (or even just heavily) red-aligned at all: https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/forcedbreeding
The overlap with non-sex subs begins with creepypms, survivinginfidelity, various games (all of which skew Left, the former notably and the latter two in the general Reddit way), continues with some pro-trans subs (*super* Left), takes a brief detour to mentalhealth and some weed + shrooms subs (the Right is notoriously high-strung and pro-drug, right?), goes on to adviceanimals and antiwork (do you even have to ask?), and... scrolling... scrolling...
...okay, I finished the list and still haven't found any especially "red" subs, with the single probable exception of firearms — near the bottom (1.18).
So... I think it's probably bullshit to suggest the subreddit is Right-leaning, as its stated positions would obviously suggest anyway.
> is different than tolerating people advocating for real-life harmful things,
There's no *way* anyone could possibly believe that a ""fetish"" page about the most depraved acts of violence against women could possibly have any negative real world impact, you know, like making women who see it feel unsafe or hated, or encouraging weirdos to act out depraved fantasies or generally be aggressive towards women IRL. It's just a fetish, bro.
And if you disagree, then you necessarily must also be 100% fine with the exact same fetish page except all the men are white and all the women are black and they get called the n-word constantly. Because the only way this could be doing any real world harm is in the ways I described above, meaning they're either both harmful or both harmless.
And I'm really curious though what harm you imagine a "pro-russian" subreddit is having in the real world (other than the kinds of things I described above).
To be clear, I am an asexual woman who is so extremely repulsed by the idea of pregnancy that I got myself sterilized (despite the fact that I don’t have sex). I can scarcely imagine a fetish that could possibly be more aversive to me. I don’t know how problematic r/forcedbreeding is in practice, because I never want to look there. Maybe they actually do have a terrible separation of real life from fantasy, IDK.
However, I do know that the vast majority of people with fetishes, even really weird ones, are perfectly capable of knowing what is and isn’t appropriate in reality. Moreover, they typically aren’t trying to convert other people to any particular political position or course of action.
On the other hand, anti-vax misinformation often DOES advocate for people to take IRL harmful courses of action. Pro-Russian posts are often propaganda to get people to stop supporting the defense of Ukraine. Obviously there’s nuance to this as well; Russia is not 100% wrong, and vaccines do actually have sometimes concerning side effects. My impression is that subreddits/posters that get banned for these topics usually do post actual false or highly misleading information, but if they don’t, I wouldn’t want them banned just for having unpopular political opinions.
Still, my personal opinion on either topic isn’t the point. My point is that it’s perfectly consistent to tolerate disturbing kink spaces but not tolerate people advocating worrying courses of action IRL.
this juxtaposition is not necessarily philosophically inconsistent, but it does show the r/forcedbreeding people to have terrible judgment
disturbing sex weirdo communities, no matter how unobjectionable IRL and how good their separation of real life from fantasy, can only survive and continue on the back of a broad social tolerance
deliberately undermining that tolerance, as by demanding the deplatforming of other people's objectionable speech, will inevitably turn back and rebound on the sex weirdos sooner rather than later
every censorship trend of the modern era fell first and hardest on people who were considered sexually immoral
It depends on where the wind is blowing. One of the latest trends in social justice is kink acceptance, the current frontier being whether it has place in parades and textbooks. It’s a good opportunity for controversial fetish communities to earn mainstream social media allies, and the way to do it is by aligning with them on issues they care about. By my observation, the more aggressive and seemingly out of place the activism is, the more traction it gets.
Can the culture war bite them in the ass once the wind changes? It might. But not only trying to raising universal tolerance for objectionable communities is very hard and often counterproductive, it’s also much, much more damning, because this is what a truly bad community trying to exploit liberals’ tolerance would do.
all of this depends partly on how “weird” unpacks. this particular weird sex community is into a what arguably is a very exaggerated version of the predominant hegemony, as opposed to a transgression or subversion that destabilizes people’s subconscious premises and assumptions, so the weirdness coefficient is maybe not actually that high in the big picture. i don’t think they’re gonna be first, second, or fifth in line when the puritans come for the weird sex. at the moment it seems like the ascendant right wing puritans are mostly going after LGBTQ and the ascendant left wing puritans are mostly going after people they’ve decided are doing LGBTQ wrong
(and straight men who would like to date, of course. but that’s a sort of evergreen dating from the oughts and before, not an acute trend)
It's impossible to be tolerant of literally everything. Tolerating weird fetishes but not blatant misinformation strikes me as entirely reasonable and consistent.
Honestly, I like Facebook's compromise on this. You're still allowed to post fake news and misinformation - you won't get banned for it and the post won't get deleted - but the site will put a notice in front of the post saying that the information is wrong and explaining why it's wrong. People can still see it, and they can still choose to believe it, but at least they won't believe it by default. It puts them in a position where they have to exercise some critical thinking, either to say "ok, my friend is probably wrong on this one" or "FB is wrong, this is actually true despite the notice," rather than accepting it uncritically.
It's not a perfect solution: Sometimes the notices really are wrong, either because the mainstream media itself is incorrect on an issue, or FB's fact-checkers made a mistake when checking mainstream media sources, or because the automated algorithm applied the notice in the wrong context. But I think it's still better than either deleting suspected misinformation outright, or simply doing nothing and leaving it be. Sure, the anti-censorship crowd still thinks it's just another top-down method of control, and the anti- misinformation crowd thinks it's useless half-measure that doesn't actually do anything to meaningfully prevent the spread of fake news. But as the old saying goes, a good compromise is one that leaves every side partly dissatisfied.
Yeah, if you go on that sub there's a post that references Dobbs, and the top voted comments on it are all along the lines of "Whoa, this is just a kink, let's keep it that way, we don't want this IRL" . To the point where the OP had to pop in and explain that the post was just their way of working through some trauma from a sexual assault and of course they didn't really mean it and didn't want to upset anyone.
It’s just tribal identification all the way down. My guess is the same people who posted the condemnation of anti-vaxers would even more furiously condemn someone who wanted society to temporarily pause gay orgies to control the spread of monkeypox
You could say the same thing about pro-vax misinformation. It advocates for people whose cost-benefit analysis is clearly negative to get the vaccine anyway, increasing their risk of heart inflammation, brain blood clots, and death.
Forced breeding doesn't even strike me as that weird or depraved. A significant fraction of women I have been with were in to light BDSM/power play type and obviously impregnation/breeding being sort of the telos of sex is an obvious thing to fixate on. And in particular at least as construed on that sub, the focus is not really on violating consent, and more on sort of being overwhelmed by a primal urge to procreate (the fantasy seems to be that the woman wants to be breeded, not that you are literally forcing her to)
On the other hand there were some actual rape fetish kinks that were in fact banned on reddit (even though many women do have that kink to, sometimes even as a way of coping with trauma)
Ironically, having actually looked at the reddit page in question... It looks like 90+% of the posts are actually by women - usually women posting pictures of themselves with some variation of 'Breed me Daddy' or the like. Not what I would have expected, but I suppose it makes some sense.
Lots of them are trying to advertise OnlyFans accounts or similar things.
Umm, r/forced breeding is producing pro-rape content whatever pro-Russian subreddit is out there is producing pro-Putin content, if you hold the typical belief in the magical powers of internet content to determine behavior that underlies pro censorship arguments then both would be harmful. In fact the pro-rape content far more so.
I’m guessing that a lot of the r/forcedbreeding people would be:
a. Very in favor of censoring subreddits that advocate raping people IRL.
b. Fine with subreddits that were pro-Russian in the sense that they celebrated fictional Russian characters, or enthused about Baklava recipes, or really anything that wasn’t spewing propaganda about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
It’s important to note that not all speech is even protected by the First Amendment. The typical example is “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater”, because it involves giving out false information that can cause panic/harm. Private sites can restrict speech much more than that, of course, but certainly a good starting point is… false information that can cause panic/harm.
I’m someone who has had some life-threatenly bad reactions to vaccines, and as such, the COVID vaccine was the first time I got vaxxed since I was 2. It would be REALLY NICE if I could ever read vaccine-critical posts that WEREN’T blatantly false conspiracy theories (or worse, subtly false conspiracy theories). There are certainly such posts out there, but the presence of all the junk ironically makes it much harder to learn about vaccine-critical stuff than it would be if there was more censorship of the topic.
Basically, uncensored fiction != uncensored everything.
I'm not sure what American laws have to do with questions of ethics / morals?
Charitably, it's only an analogy, albeit a rather-troubled one ("fire in a crowded theatre" comes from a SCOTUS decision upholding bans on, um, protests against conscription).
Such as forcing people to get injected with vaccines that cause heart inflammation, brain blood clots, and death?
The pattern I'm mostly relating here is avoiding to be meek. If you act like you ask for permission to exist you're more likely to be seen as prey, so some amount of aggression is actually adaptive.
I *am* disappointed though by the failure to generalize the concept of tolerance. "It should apply to me but not to you" is pretty much the classic mistake.
Yes, what people who invoke the so-called "Paradox of Tolerance" fail to do is take the argument to its logical conclusion. "If I am tolerant of [outgroup], then they might gain power and be intolerant of me, therefore it is justified for me to be preemptively intolerant of them first" - but then [outgroup] could invoke that same principle to justify being intolerant of the first group, since they know that if they gain power they will be intolerant of them, thereby justifying their initial intolerance. This is a preemption game, a well-known concept in game theory.
By invoking the "paradox," it actually becomes rationally justified for *both* groups to be intolerant of each other, and at that point, the entire premise of liberalism is basically dead and it's just the friend-enemy distinction all the way down.
Or, like EY likes to say, we could get together and agree to do Something Which Is Not That. Like setting a meta-rule that we can debate individual ideas until we get hoarse, but will shop short of canceling them. Which is how liberalism came to be.
is it fair to call that 'IQ needed'?
I would need to be convinced that "IQ needed" really best explains this.
It clearly isn't; if that's an average then circa 50% of graduates will be below that threshold, so you clearly don't need a three-digit IQ to graduate with a Bachelor's these days.
Yeah, definitely should not be phrased IQ needed since that implies causation and all kinds of other effects that we don't know are the case.
seems simple that if more people are going to college, the avg IQ of non college will drop, even if the 'needed' is entirely unchanged between 1960 and now. the only way you could even hypothesise 'needed' is if the groups included *all* graduates, not just ones that didnt get higher degrees.
also seems to make sense that 1960 high school was about average population iq, and today college grad is about avg
Yes, if a group (like high school graduates) becomes almost universal, it's statistic properties will have to get close to the median.
Maybe they were the SAT cut-offs for admission, although I don't know how you apply the test to high school graduation.
Doesn't sound like it. I think the chart just shows the average/median/whatever IQ for people who topped out at a certain level of education. It's not a requirement, it's just a statistic. That's why we shouldn't call it "needed."
I would like to see this data disaggregated by discipline. Have requirements for STEM degrees declined? How below average can one be and still get a MEd?
Probably start at "Education level needed/advantageous for [Job]" and work backward from there to IQ would be better. Civil Engineer -- Teacher -- Trial Lawyer -- Medical Doctor require in my area 4 -- 5 -- 7 -- Between 11 and 15 years of education respectively; and while there are very smart Civil Engineers they rarely go back and get another 1-7 years of education to "catch up," they get the education they need and stop.
If at different times different amounts of education were required or advantageous for different careers, we'd see different education levels achieved by people who wanted to pursue those careers. Rather than a model of X has IQ^y >>> X Maximizes the level of education they can reach based on IQ^y; the model goes X has Career Ambition Z >>> X reaches the level of education necessary for Career Z as long as their IQ^y can get them there.
> 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.
I was suspicious at the time and tried to internet-sleuth it myself (failed), I didn't know Yandex had reverse image search - that would have been ideal, but I can add tineye to the list of reverse image searches that had nothing helpful.
/If you can't trust an undisclosed senior intelligence source, what can you trust?
#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
If it's net worth for the lower 50% of the population, then it's something to do with house prices/homeownership/mortgage equity. The deficit will also partly be due to the magical combination of low interest rates and 10% inflation.
I don't think the lower half owns a lot of homes. I just looked up home ownership rates, and it's around 65% for the whole country, and I imagine most of that is in the upper half. It could be around 100% for the upper half and around 30% for the lower half.
It’d be unusual to be sitting in the lower half of the country by income and have 60 grand in the bank though - I can’t think what else it would be?
"Lower half by income" includes some people who were previously in higher income brackets, but who are now retired, long-term unemployed, underemployed, or on unpaid sabbatical.
If a lot of people have retired early over the last few years, I could definitely see that inflating the mean net worth of "lower-income" households.
Yep, when looking at income buckets this is always a good thing to keep in mind. Almost everyone spends at least a year in a poverty income bracket at some point (usually when they are 18/19/a student or when they retire).
In theory, someone who inherited millions of dollars but has no income would be in this bucket. Also, someone who makes millions a year but has a terrible gambling problem and lots of debts would be in the opposite bucket and skew that number downward.
Overall i think its pretty useless to compare the net worth of various income brackets without having lots of caveats or more filters (probably for age - looking at only prime working age would help this stat be more useful).
Agreed that looking at income buckets as static and/or as a tight mapping onto functional wealth is overplayed. I believe the stat is that 12% of American households spend at least one year in the top 1% of income earners in their lifetime. And 56% spend at least one year in the top 20%. (I forget the year these stats are from without pulling a book off my shelf.)
Yes but it’s an average figure over the whole bottom 50%, not the median. If 65% of the country owns homes that means 30% of the bottom half does (15/50). Those 30% have seen a huge increase in home equity since 2018. That would have a big impact on the arithmetic average
We dumped lots of money into households with stuff like the CARES Act. Bottom 50% includes lots of people who had essentially zero net worth so it's not surprising that number went up a lot. (They were also forbidden from a lot of spending during the shutdown.)
Way more money was dumped onto people during Trump's term than during Biden's so trying to give Biden credit for this one just reveals how BS the whole thing is.
Most of those raw numbers look like "it's 4 years later. Number went up" or they are citing the 50% of economic stats that improved, and omitting any that didn't.
It does, if true, mean things haven't gotten worse - which is the point. It's a refutation to "Biden sucks" claims.
Biden still sucks. But he doesn't singlehandedly control the American economy. (Neither did Trump.)
But why would the fact that a bunch of old people have retired be treated as an indicator that the economy isn't good? As clearly demonstrated by the stats on the other demographics, the reason why they are retired now is something other than a bad labor market now
Two key things with net worth are 1) it's very steeply sloping, especially in the bottom half: 40th percentile is about half the median, 20th is about half of 25th 2) It is sharply negative at the bottom.
This means that slight shifts in the percentiles move the number around a lot. My guess is actually that the change in bottom 50th percentile wealth might be as related to trends in student loans as anything else--house ownership isn't common in the bottom 50th percent of households, but student loans are. ($100k in negative net worth is quite frequently related to an new profesisonal degree.)
As I pointed out above, if 65% of Americans own homes then home ownership is quite common in the bottom 50% — in fact 30% of the bottom half own homes
It might be more. The 30% figure only applies if anyone in the top 50% owns a home.
The CBO attribute the budgetary deficit reduction to “spending in response to the coronavirus pandemic—mostly for the recovery rebates (also known as economic impact payments), unemployment compensation, pandemic relief through the Small Business Administration (SBA), and the Coronavirus Relief Fund—and because revenues were lower".
The lower revenues, they attribute to lower nominal wages (and thus lower income/payroll taxes) during the pandemic and the payroll tax deferrals provisioined the CARES Act (if I understand it correctly, some of these were accounted for in 2022).
Eyeballing the CBO graph, total budget deficits for 2021 - 2022 (Biden) seems larger than those of 2019 - 2020 (Trump).
Source: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2022-06/58111-MBR.pdf
It seems obvious to me that cops killed most of the bottom 10% and thus the 50% point just shifted north increasing average wealth. \S
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.
>Cheaper housing means people can potentially do successful household formation earlier, which usually means more children.
Obviously. But, there's a long way between that and the claim that zoning laws explain the bulk of differences in housing affordability between places in the country, or that housing affordability is the root cause of the bulk of the decrease in fertility rate. All things being equal, sure, but all things aren't equal.
>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.
Are you so sure? The baby bom was a boom compared to the great depression and WW2. The peak baby boom fertility rate was actually lower than it was before 1920.
But the country was a lot more rural before 1920 than in 1946-1964. During the Baby Boom there was a lot less need for children to work on the family farm than there had been at the beginning of the 20th century.
> speculative futurist megastructures
Can you share some good links on this subject? I’m intrigued and my naive Google search gives non-technical stuff.
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!
> Without reading the study I am calling bullshit. May change my mind later.
Why bother writing this? You "call bullshit" and haven't even read the study. Why?
And if it weren't bad enough to do this generally, it's even more so for this specific example. The percent of the population getting highschool and college diplomas has signficantly risen in the past 60 years, so unless there is no relationship between getting a diploma and how intelligent one is, then significant falls in mean IQ for each education level is to be expected.
1) because it’s a tweet
2) IQ is a notoriously fragile metric
3) I suspect design flaws in sampling
re: 4: IS it true? Where are those numbers coming from, the numbers I see on https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm#dashboard don't match his graph.
Yes I’ll explain with more detailed sources (all from CDC) later tonight. Traveling today.
I retract my previous statement. I went through my forecast and realized it was undercounting because of how many more accidental deaths we have since 2020 (accidents, homicides, suicides). These are the last deaths to get fed into CDC datasets.
We went from a yearly average of 250K up to 290K in 2020 and 314K in 2021 for accidental deaths.
I said previously we had 97% of data collected up through 6/11 but probably closer to 94% now that a larger number of deaths are lagged (these take 6-12 months to become fully complete - we just got complete 2021 data last week or so).
I think the excess death dashboard you linked is reasonable assuming the accidental deaths continue on the 2020-2021 trend and therefore we probably will have 690,000 deaths in that 3 month stretch (mid march - mid june) instead of the 675,000 forecasted.
I'm not so optimistic about the excess deaths picture. Excess deaths for 2022 looks a bit too much like 2021 for me to have confidence to pop the cork on the champaign bottle just yet. It's good that the raw number of deaths is lower than last year, but I haven't seen anyone make good precise predictions about the path of deaths beyond a couple of weeks.
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.
(1) They are probably using that-year IQ scores for each year, which is why you don't see a Flynn effect
(2) The IQ of all 3 groups can go down if the upper 2 groups each become easier to complete but still hard enough to complete that there's an IQ cut-off, observe:
1960s:
G: 115
C: 110, 105
H: 100, 95, 90
2010s:
G: 115, 110
C: 105, 100
H: 95, 90
So basically there's still assortment of individuals by IQ, but the minimum thresholds of graduate school and college have dropped.
EDIT: Also, there's a population of "never completed high school" that went from "significant" in the 1960s to "very small and very low IQ" in the 2010s
(1) They are not actually using IQ. I don't think the (poor) proxy that they are using is normed by year.
(edit) You may have hit on it here. I didn't realize that 60% of people in the 60s had less than high school attainment compared to 10% now. The graph only covers 40% of the highest educated people in the 60s but it covers 90% of the population in the present.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2017/comm/americas-education.html
The proprotion of people getting a high school diploma significantly increased since 1960, and much of that increase was for black students, who have a significantly lower mean IQ than white students, meaning that this effect was magnified. This is also true to a lesser extent with hispanics (but mainly that large numbers of hispanics immigrated to the US over this time period, not that they were here but not getting HS displomas).
There's been a big increase in the percentage of Hispanics getting high school degrees since the 2008 recession. Up through 2007, it was not uncommon for Latino boys to drop out of high school to work construction, but then the Great Crash meant a lot more had nothing better to do than stick around school to graduate and maybe try community college.
This is just a classic Simpsons Paradox - if the education groups are completely sorted by IQ, and then the highest members of each group move up to the next education group, then all education groups will have a decrease in average IQ, even if populationwide average IQ increases.
There was once an Australian politician that complained about New Zealanders moving to Australia and lowering the average IQ of both countries (or maybe it was a New Zealand politician complaining about Australians moving there).
I think that's the Will Rogers effect, not Simpson's Paradox.
"When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states."
They aren't using IQ per se. The General Social Survey (GSS) does not include an IQ test. They're using the "wordsum" question, which is a 10-item vocabulary test where individuals find a synonym to a listed word from four choices, I believe.
https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/5305/vshow
These numbers are somehow transformed to IQ scores, but the very brief amount of google searching suggests a correlation of wordsum and IQ of ~ 0.7. Good, not perfect. Verbal intelligence, but how correlated are verbal and numerical intelligence?
A few stray observations:
1. Folks could only have 11 IQ values if the wordsum variable ranges from 0-11, right? Not sure how fine-grained you can get with that re. IQ scores.
2. Do folks' vocabularies develop as they age? Not sure. But if so, this might be a chart showing that older people are older than younger people.
3. Could also be measuring ESL over time. Presumably a larger percentage of post-graduate degrees are held by Asian immigrants, for example. In that case, relatively high vocabulary knowledge of your second language is arguably more impressive than slightly higher vocabulary scores of your first language.
The use of the 10 word Wordsum vocabulary quiz on the General Social Survey isn't a real IQ test, but for something that quick and dirty, the results are strikingly reasonable in almost all the applications I've seen of Wordsum over the last 15-20 years.
Most graduate degrees are in education and business. (Like almost 50%)
People seem to imagine the tweet is a statement about Physics PhDs.
Uh, no. Physical Sciences are like 1%. Engineering, CS and Biology together get you to about 10%.
So at least be aware what you are arguing for or against…
High school dropouts are less intelligent today than in 1935 or even in 1975.
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.
Covid deaths in workforce age should be an order of magnitude less than what you need to see this kind of effects.
Considering it's politically motivated "statistics", I wouldn't even bother check it. Just ignore out of hand, no matter which side it comes from.
#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?
Human fall for a lot of silly things, but they still managed to take over the world.
(However, I agree with most of your argument.)
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'm "pro-choice", but I can't help but notice that a lot of Democrats talked a big game while Trump was in office, saying how he is acting unconstiutionally and how he has no respect for the constiution. Now he's gone and I don't recall seeing a single constitutional argument against this ruling being made by any halfway prominent Democrat.
Look I'm pretty cynical about law and constitutionality but the best argument that reversing Roe was unconstitutional is that when we talk about constitutional norms, we're talking about a broad range of ideas, but almost no one would dispute that *stare decisis* is part of how the constitution has been interpreted for centuries. Once a decision has been made, that's it- matter is more or less over. You can very slowly chip away at it over many decades or centuries till it's effectively dead letter, or you can amend the constitution, but otherwise that's meant to be it. A future court just saying "actually that was wrong" negates the whole idea of a supreme court.
Of course it's insane to give any supreme court, undemocratically elected, that level of power over such a vague document as the constitution and bill of rights. But that's what the constitution does, and respect for the constitution requires respect for constitutional precedent.
I've not read the entire US Constitution; is there anything in there actually implying stare decisis? Roe was hilariously unconstitutional (mootness and making shit up), so you could argue that SCOTUS upholding it would still be unconstitutional.
And SCOTUS going "we stuffed up" has happened a lot of times before (e.g. Lawrence v. Texas directly overruling Bowers v. Hardwick after 17 years, or the kinda-vaguely-defined end of Lochner but still definitely less time than Roe stood for).
> is there anything in there actually implying stare decisis
Nope, and can't be. It'd be insane - even the Constitution itself has amendment process (and they literally started amending it immediately after signing it). How would you expect to bind future generations to the will of people long dead and never modify it? It just can't work this way. One can try design the process so good that the future generations would rather follow it than try to design a new one entirely from scratch, but if your process is so inflexible that you expect the future generations to abide by the decisions taken centuries ago and never be able to challenge them - the descendants would just say "screw you, dead man" and refuse to follow it. That's why there should be fine tuning between change being hard (we don't want to emphasize everyday squabbles and let the legal system to be swayed by it too much) and change being possible (otherwise people would just abandon this system or ignore what you wanted and change it anyway).
"Would it be wonderful if, under the pressure of these difficulties, the Convention should have been forced into some deviations from that artificial structure and regular symmetry which in an abstract view of the subject might lead and ingenious theorist to bestow on a constitution planned in his closet or his imagination."
James Madison
The Federalist No. 37
Actually, Roe Vs Wade wasn't necessarily as unconstitutional as one might think.
But the best (or only) argument I found would have been with the unenumerated rights: when the US constitution was adopted, abortion used to be legal and widely available.
(The constitution by itself only binds the federal government, but there have been some later maneuvers to bind the states as well.)
> when the US constitution was adopted, abortion used to be legal and widely available
Was it? Without any limits up to the moment of birth? I find it a bit hard to believe, given the Christian churches' position on the matter. I can find references to abortion being legal "before quickening" - i.e. the same 15-16 week boundary which we find in many cases today - but I can't find any source that claims there was no limits for abortion on demand at that time. Could you provide a source to these claims?
In addition to that, I think embracing the argument of "something that has been legal in 18th century can't be regulated or prohibited now" would have much larger consequences than either side would be willing to accept. For starters, we know some examples of things being legal then that we don't really want back - like slavery or racial discrimination...
Yes, before quickening. I did not intent to make any claims that there was no limit.
But there's also precedent for the Supreme Court overriding itself.
According to the first reference I found (which may not be the final word on the matter) the Supreme Court between 1789 and 2020 issued 25,444 judgements, and overruled itself 145 times. A general argument that the court must *always* follow stare decisis would be inconsistent with the meta-precedent that the court can overrule itself.
Yes but, so the argument goes, a turn around this big, blatant and sudden is unheard of.
Whether that's actually true or not, I know not. I have no background in Jurisprudence
I dunno, Brown v. Board of Education was pretty big.
1954 Brown overturned the 1896 Plessy ruling. About the same time frame as 2022 Dobbs overturning 1973 Roe. I wouldn't consider 50+ years sudden. There's jurisprudence in between that indicated the legal reasoning behind Roe was troubled too, e.g. Casey ...
This whole conversation was discussed in the SCOTUS 2022 Dobbs opinion. The problem with Casey was that it waved vaguely in the direction of 'stare decisis' while itself muddying the waters of what the term meant. Saying it stood on precedent, it then went on to reject half of Roe and define a new set of principles it pulled from thin air. It was a weird way to invoke stare decisis.
Dobbs, OTOH, was careful to lay out a definite framework for how it thought stare decisis should be applied, and had been applied in the past. Sure, the dissents disagreed with some of their reasoning/framework, but if we're comparing Dobbs with Casey, it's clear that of the two decisions Dobbs at least tries to strengthen stare decisis - clearly defining our expectations of when it should hold - while Casey wasn't as interested in whether its unique approach to the principle would create more problems down the road.
As to whether other modern precedents also ride on the Dobbs decision, I agree that revisiting Roe creates the potential to revisit other decisions conservatives don't like. But I'm not convinced those are likely to be overturned anytime soon. For a few reasons:
Conservatives worked for decades to bias the court in favor of overturning Roe (likewise on the other side). There's not the same drive from the Right over Obergefell or other precedents. The 'unborn holocaust' argument endured for strong political reasons. (Dobbs even mentioned how Roe's holding had influenced SCOTUS appointments for decades - something that's hopefully in the past.) More likely, conservatives will want go back to asking their appointees whether they'll protect against 'legislating from the bench'. It's harder to drive political will toward abolishing substantive due process.
Indeed, there's a strong 'libertarian conservative' movement inside the party that's less interested in legislating conservative ideas on morality (which tend to lose at the polls) and more interested in protecting free expression of those ideas. With the current ideological makeup of the court, you'd need to swing farther to the Right to overturn something like Obergefell. Put someone like DeSantis in office from 2024-2032, and I still don't think you'd get it overturned.
Dobbs relied on the idea that the State has a pre-birth interest in the life of the unborn. That interest was recognized initially in Roe and affirmed in Casey, when they created viability-based arguments. That weakened the case from, "constitutionally-protected right" to "only within limited circumstances determined by SCOTUS" (trimester/viability). In other words, Roe/Casey created limits to the abortion right they defined, and that's the wedge SCOTUS used to break the whole framework apart. The end result was always going to have to land on either 'legal until birth' or 'no constitutional protection'. That same vulnerability embedded in Roe/Casey from the beginning doesn't apply for the other precedents Thomas & co. want to revisit.
Not a lawyer or law professor either, but I have heard about SCOTUS overturning previous decisions - including conceptual frameworks - before. E.g. the whole approach to questions of race changed quite a lot over time. How much the government is allowed to meddle in economics has changed. Approach to freedom of speech (remember the infamous "fire in crowded theater"?) changed too. It's not unheard of.
Of course, people disliking a particular decision would always claim it's absolutely beyond acceptable and the Court had never fallen so deeply as when it disagreed with them. But it's just self-serving rhetoric, nothing more.
>it's insane to give any supreme court, undemocratically elected, that level of power over such a vague document as the constitution and bill of rights
The Supreme Court is unelected and unrepresentative on purpose - read Federalist #51, 78-81. The whole point is that the judicial branch is a check on majority passions of the moment because the majority has a tendency to get carried away with whatever shiny thing they want right now and ride roughshod over the minority. The U.S. Constitution is not vague - it is a document that says what powers the government has, it's not a document that sets out laws (laws are Congress' job). The Bill of Rights is not vague at all, they are definitive statements about what the government cannot do.
1. Any document that includes the phrase "reasonable" or "unreasonable" is extremely vague.
2. Yes, it was intentional, it was also insane.
This does ignore any issue of stare decisis 150 years before Roe.
If Roe v Wade overturned a 100 year old law, that was being enforced, why should the stare decisis clock start in 1973?
> but almost no one would dispute that *stare decisis* is part of how the constitution has been interpreted for centuries
Actually, a lot of people would dispute it, including members of SCOTUS itself. Overturning previous decisions is not an easy step and should not be taken lightly, but it happens, and it happens routinely in many cases.
In fact, this is the only way the Court can stay relevant today. If all the Court could do is recite what people in 18th-19th century decided, without ever being able to change anything, then people today would reasonably argue that such Court is useless - we don't live in 18th century anymore. Times changed, needs changed, morals and mores changed. If the Court is never allowed to change, it'll just become irrelevant fossil.
Of course, one does also have to be wary of the opposite extreme - the "living document" doctrine, which essentially says there's no meaning in Constitution outside our opinion, and it's just an empty shell to be filled with anything we desire today. There are certain principles and ideas we want to keep, and the deeper the change goes, the harder it should be and more consideration should be taken before doing it. Neither "never change" or "nothing is fixed, everything is up for grabs anytime we want" is workable. Finding a reasonable middle ground is the responsibiity we entrust SCOTUS members to bear.
It's a good point that SCOTUS that followed prior decisions would be unable to legislate from the bench. They would have to depend on congress for legislation. \S
Unfortunately, SCOTUS can override Congress, unless it's a Constitutional amendment, so that would require an amendment to correct any mistake SCOTUS made in the past. I think that would make the system much less useful - and make SCOTUS way overpowered. Imagine some SCOTUS decision you don't think was right - I'm sure no matter what your politics is, you could find one - and imagine there's absolutely no way to change it without passing a constitutional amendment - which is not going to happen because half of the states will always be against it.
This is true and not true. For example, with a normal law, Congress could have defined human life to begin at 2 months. That would be a profound enough change to force a revisitation of RvW (because after 2 months abortion would now legally be murder). SCOTUS could then balance the two rules without merely overruling RvW.
It is worth noting that my original post was snark/sarcasm. ( see the \S)
This is a somewhat bizarre argument. There are numerous examples of reversal of constitutional precedents in American law
"If you completely deny that a right to privacy exists in the Constitution, that destroys not just the right to abortion but many other Supreme Court decisions such as the ones that protect gay marriage, sodomy, contraception, and miscegenation" is definitely a constitutional argument, and one that I've heard plenty of.
(Also, I generally hate "people aren't focusing on the argument that I personally would find most persuasive, therefore they don't believe this" as a line of argument. You are not the only person in the country who needs convincing, and overturning Roe has plenty of terrible consequences to point to without getting into the weeds of constitutional interpretation.)
I feel like "if this argument is wrong then we don't get the desirable result" looks more like a logical fallacy than an argument. I mean, even if I agreed that keeping gay marriage legal is a good thing, that doesn't mean the privacy argument is right - even if gay marriage has been made legal under it. It could as well be that the privacy argument is wrong, and they'd have to come up with some other argument to support the legality of gay marriage (or just have the legislature to do their work for once and pass the law to make it so). Arguing from the desired result is what we will often see from a trial lawyer, but that's not what we want to see in a judge, especially a SCOTUS judge.
Looking at increase in net worth as a multiplication by 2 is probably misleading. Net worth is assets minus debts, and if a significant number of people (say, homeowners with mortgages) have substantial assets *and* debts, then a slight appreciation of assets while debts remain constant can easily result in a doubling of the difference.
Net worth including house would be hugely misleading metric to start (usually primary residence is excluded) but even then given covid it is very suspicious that it just over than doubled in a very short period of time.
Net worth excluding house would be a weird metric as well, since it drops dramatically when people buy their first houses.
True. I guess one has to exclude mortgage on primary residence too, but the downpayment - which is 20% standard in the US - will still skew the picture.
That said, for example, the "accredited investor" standard uses this metric - to be considered "accredited investor", you need to have $1M+ net worth excluding primary residence (with the caveat that if your house is "underwater", the remaining debt still dings your net worth). For this particular case, however, under-counting assets is OK.
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!
Have you had a look through the AGISF curriculum? https://www.eacambridge.org/technical-alignment-curriculum. It's quite good
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.
Good one. Just the last two sentences alone is good enough for me. I don’t need longitudinal studies now.
Your conclusion wouldn't be true if there are genetic differences between countries, and genes for high IQ also lead to lower breastfeeding (eg, because it's less compatible with pursuing high education). Similarly for various other possibilities, such as cultural differences affecting both IQ and breastfeeding rates.
Now, if IQ is really almost the same in different countries, such hypotheses would require an unlikely near-exact cancellation of effects. But how close are the different countries really? I'd think one could only use non-linguistic tests for this, since otherwise differing language would surely produce some artifactual difference.
You are entirely right. It could be that, for example, the French actually are genetically smarter than other Europeans but spoil their entire advantage on not breastfeeding.
Within countries, breastfeeding and maternal IQ are highly positively correlated.
A way to get around the problem with between country-differences in IQ would be to study people within the same country with different years of birth instead. Differences in breastfeeding rates between decades really are astonishing.
Or just use a large enough collection of countries such that the odds of genetic and breastfeeding IQ contributions cancel approaches nil (barring the fairly absurd possibility that genetically IQ superior races all tend to breastfeed less).
That's a good idea!
Charts showing that people are using less color in the past few decades or possibly century
https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1551976051860963333
Could just be rubber band effect.
Industrial dyes and then plastic making all the colors of the rainbow possible for products was really a 50s thing, and even into the 80s you have neons becoming a new fad. But eventually you hit a limit and super colorful stuff becomes associated with cheap products, and so there is a retreat back towards basics.
Here is the source for the first graph. It's mainly about the replacement of wood. Note that blue and green have increased in the last couple decades, at the same time they have become less common for cars.
https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer-vision-to-explore-the-science-museum-c4b4f1cbd72c
We get plenty of colors these days via screens, so maybe we don't care as much about colorful objects as in the past?
Cars are certainly less colorful than in, say, 1970. I don't know about clothes' colors.
Says the guy whose twitter avatar is a bare marble classical statue
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.
According to the left, the cause is "white supremacy", which republicans stubbornly refuse to condemn every waking hour, and therefore are complicit in.
I'm pretty sure that even the "original" Voltaire quote was a paraphrase by a 1950s biographer.
(Or perhaps that was the joke.)
Invented pretty much from whole cloth by Evelyn Beatrice Hall for her 1906 book "The Friends of Voltaire" which was a rather fanciful sorta-biographical sketch
Whoops, you're right! Weird, I thought for sure it was the Fifties. And you'd think I'd remember the author's name...
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.
It's not quite accurate to say people have gotten smarter as a result of the Flynn Effect. People are doing better on IQ tests in a specific way.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/s0160289613001761
Flynn effect is very different depending on which test is used. Flynn effect is large on Raven's matrices and near-zero (and now turning negative) on vocabulary (which WORDSUM variable in GSS is)
Tuddenham effect (erroneously called Flynn effect) is not on g. Simply speaking, people are getting better at doing IQ tests, but don't have higher general intelligence. General intelligence is actually declining.
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.
> 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.
This is a misunderstanding. There is no such thing as "correlation with IQ". IQ tests correlate with each other, usually at around 0.8 (some considerably less, like Draw-A-Man); that's enough to say that WORDSUM is an IQ test. You might ask how g-loaded it is.
And your concern about vocabulary testing in general is not well motivated; most famously, the infamous "regatta" analogy on the SAT was investigated (because it looked so unfair) and found to be unbiased.
Could you cite me the investigation on 'regatta' please? I can only find people talking about it generally rather than a specific investigation of its biased-ness
By this definition isn't any test that correlates with IQ an IQ test? That seems true in a sort of definitional way but it's a bit of a spherical cow.
As for the regatta thing: I don't know much about this subject so maybe I'm wrong.
The point here is that IQ isn't actually a thing, it's a shorthand that's useful for some purposes and misleading for others.
A wide range of measurable mental abilities are correlated with one another, so it's useful to have a shorthand for "how good at most of those things are you?"
If you really want to, you can take a basket of those measures, apply them to a bunch of people, run principle component analysis on your results to find the dominant eigenvector, and call that "IQ".
But no one basket of measures has any more underlying validity than any other.
Compare and contrast with sizes of dogs. There are lots of ways to measure a dog - length, height, weight etc. Those are strongly but not perfectly correlated. "Size" is a useful shorthand, but reifying it and arguing about whether a long thin whippet is larger than a shorter, heavier mastiff, or claiming that length, height and weight are all imperfect reflections of some underlying hidden variable called "size", would be dumb!
Some baskets of measures help you get better at finding a General Factor of intelligence or dog size or whatever. Other factors help you know something specific and important that's not all that correlated with the g factor: e.g., 3-d imagination correlates less with the factor than most IQ subsections, but it's a useful skill for mechanics, plumbers, engineers and the like.
General Factors show up in a lot of fields. For example, consider the general factor of sedans that distinguishes a BMW 3 series from 5 series from 7 series on a whole lot of measures, or a BMW C from E from S class.
It's easy to make a mediocre IQ test, hard to make a really good IQ test. Wordsum functions as a surprisingly solidly mediocre IQ test but it's not a good IQ test. In particular, watch out for biases on wordcel vs. shape rotator issues when working with Wordsum data.
Well, for what it's worth I sat the (rather short) WORDSUM test. It placed my IQ slightly lower than more thorough IQ tests I've taken but in the same general range. The same standard deviation and all that.
At any rate, I don't claim to be an expert on this kind of thing. But I use GSS data a lot and I wanted to point out the potential issue.
Hi Erusian,
> Let me know if this is annoying and I can adjust
Yes, seven or eight times a short post by the same person in a row feels kind of excessive. I felt it made reading/scrolling unnecessarily slower, especially as it's just smaller chunks of things numbered anyway. Seperate points would have been easily recognizable as seperate also in a longer post. My perception, don't know about others. Two posts would have been fine. Also, not a point against diving comments in general - I've seen for example different questions asked in a row in different comments each, and in that case I find it helpful.
I used to do it like that and a couple of people said they found it harder to engage with. We'll see what the consensus is. The long superpost is actually easier for me but engagement is nice so... I don't know. Apologies for the annoyance.
Yeah, I see the point. Let's see.
I like it. Very long posts are a pain to navigate. The smaller chunks are easier and more practical. I can just stop off at a place where I want to engage.
1 vote for perferring chunks over the one long post.
The links post is an extra-special case: I think a top-level comment there should refer to exactly one item, so that responses will be neatly partitioned.
Or to put it another way, I'm less likely to engage with a comment if it's about lots of different links.
I think one topic per comment (or maybe a small set of related topics per comment) and many comments is better than any grouping, but if you’re going to group, then it would make the most sense to group all into a single comment.
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?
> Why would exponential to linear effects in computing correlate to the ideas getting harder to find thesis?
He's not even showing exponential-to-linear - he's showing exponential-to-exponential and just calling one of the axes "linear" for no reason. ELO is not a linear measure of ability, nor was there any reason to believe that it might be.
The lesson here is "before you call something 'linear gains', be sure you know what you're talking about".
Re 8: I do think a utilitarian EA approach means looking very carefully at food supply. I remember reading about crops rotting on the vine in 2020 and thinking that whatever specific distancing measures produced this effect were net killing people. Putting biofuels in gas at a time like this should be viewed as tantamount to napalming village in Africa.
I was having a discussion with someone who was involved in food relief efforts. I mentioned off hand that I'd heard food was rotting in the fields in Ukraine. They replied that couldn't be an issue because it wasn't fall when the harvest happened. Which, if you know the first thing about wheat agriculture, is a shockingly bad statement. This supposed food relief expert didn't know winter wheat even existed! When I asked them where they thought the tens of millions of tons of grain had come from they'd thought it had all just been stored for six months. Which is a hilariously bad idea of how grain logistics works too. This is just one of many, many stories I could tell.
A lot of the NGO complex would never, ever be caught dead in a rural area for anything more than a photo op and it really shows in how they (fail to) tackle these problems. I have a pet theory it also cripples them in places where rural society is still a large segment of the population. Which is a lot of the places they want to help.
Which is a roundabout way of saying: Food is extremely important and should be an interest area. But I'm deeply skeptical that EA has the social connections or domain knowledge to get or create the relevant experts.
Russia didn’t bomb grain distribution centers they bombed military targets in Odessa. Apparently including storehouses of U.S and NATO supplied weapons located at the Odessa port.
This is the current Russian party line. However, the day of the attack they claimed it wasn't them and then changed their story. It's just a disinformation campaign. They also claim the Ukrainian footage of burning civilian goods was caused by Ukrainians shelling their own positions to make the Russians look bad.
Just because it’s the Russian “party line” doesn’t mean it’s not true. The grain agreement is to the advantage of the Russians which is why they signed it (and to the disadvantage of the US which doesn’t need grain but does need propaganda points). It makes zero sense for them to violate it, but a great deal of sense for them to strike military targets in Odessa
Sure. But I am generally suspicious of anyone who goes, "It wasn't us!" and then throws out conspiracy theories (as the Russians did initially). And when the evidence emerges showing they're lying it changes to, "Okay, it was us, but they deserved it!" Of course that evidence is from Ukraine. But we've already agreed that just because it's one side's "party line" doesn't mean it's not true.
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.
Yes, someone else watched ReBoot. Thank you for evoking those memories once again.
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.)
Maybe you could make it all one long comment, but start with a bullet list of the topics
. internet designs
. musk ea
. etc
That way anyone interestes in engaging can see if you hit one of their buttons, but everyone else could scroll.
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.)
I don't know exactly what you mean by "AI cybersecurity", but Nova Das Sarma is doing something like this - see https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nova-dassarma-information-security-and-ai-systems/ .
EA would love to fund more things like this, I think they are short of people/projects worth funding rather than money or awareness that it would be a good idea. If you know any, let me know and I'll pass them on.
> You don't need to think the singularity is coming to imagine an AI that can break encryption or something.
Nothing would cause more rapid development of techniques to describe what an AI is doing internally than one that could do that. It would be of extreme mathematical interest.
Indeed. Also we've locked a lot, and I mean A LOT, of important things behind "Neener neener you can't solve this hash algorithm!" (Or whatever.) And so far that's true. But it's not logically impossible and if an AI could do it then it is legitimately no exaggeration to say they could break the majority of modern infrastructure. And it doesn't have to be intelligent at all. It just effectively needs to solve extremely complex math which is very much a weak AI thing.
> Also we've locked a lot, and I mean A LOT, of important things behind "Neener neener you can't solve this hash algorithm!" (Or whatever.) And so far that's true. But it's not logically impossible
This claim ("it's not logically impossible") is, itself, an open question, not something that's known to be true or false. To my eyes, you would appear to be... "dramatically overconfident" in your position.
> It just effectively needs to solve extremely complex math which is very much a weak AI thing.
And I don't understand this claim at all.
> This claim ("it's not logically impossible") is, itself, an open question
It is not. It's simply not logically impossible. It might be PRACTICALLY impossible. We might not be able to do it. But there's no hard and fast reason an AI couldn't, say, discover a new form of math that allows it to radically increase the speed of prime factorization to the point it can brute force through certain common security measures.
> And I don't understand this claim at all.
The AI does not need to be generally intelligent (strong AI) to do something damaging.
> It might be PRACTICALLY impossible.
The standard assumption (or perhaps "hope" is more accurate) is that those things are theoretically impossible, in the same sense as it is theoretically impossible to solve NP-hard problems in polynomial time if P !=NP.
There are lots of problems where it doesn't help if you throw an infinite amount of intelligence at them. Reverse hashing may or may not be among them.
Of course, there are tons of caveats. The hash function is usually not the weak point of a crypto system. There are many weak human and non-human factors surrounding that hash function.
This is a fair critique of my somewhat sloppy wording. But I don't think it undercuts the point.
And yes, the biggest vulnerability is always between the chair and the keyboard. Unfortunately I'm not sure how AI could solve that.
>> This claim ("it's not logically impossible") is, itself, an open question
> It is not. It's simply not logically impossible. It might be PRACTICALLY impossible. We might not be able to do it. But there's no hard and fast reason an AI couldn't, say, discover a new form of math
Again, whether that's true is an open question, not something known one way or the other. You've managed to confuse mathematics with magic. We don't know whether or not it's possible to discover a new form of math that makes factorization easy.[1] But we do know that it might not be possible; the fact that you can describe something happening doesn't mean that that thing is possible.
[1] We do know that factorization is already easy if you can exploit some pecularities of quantum mechanics at large scales. I'm comfortable calling this method, which relies on artifacts of the physical world, "not a kind of mathematics", but reasonable opinion can differ.
Don't said algorithms have proven lower bounds of computational power required to crack them? I'd expect at least some of them to have these, with considerably higher bounds as conjectures.
Regarding AI style cryptanalysis, why do you believe that continuous methods like stochastic gradient descent are likely to help in the one truly discrete domain we have studied intensively? The most effective application of AI has been the use of SAT solvers to look for weaknesses in systems, but even that has only yielded small advances. In cryptography there are massive incentives and so I with high confidence believe either that there really isn't any low hanging fruit, or that someone who does have a better fruit picking machine is not going to publicize it.
In the short term I don't think it will. This is a longtermism thing which is why I am addressing my petition to the Pope of EA/AI Alignment and not something more conventional. The threat isn't that Russian hackers will tomorrow break all our encryption. The threat is that as AI research advances we might eventually find something that can do things we can't currently do and some of those things might break encryption pretty fundamentally. Mitigating that risk, and importantly mitigating the risk it's someone ill intentioned, is important in my view.
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.
I like the way your explanation of how #25 is partisan cherrypicking is in-and-of-itself, an excellent example of partisan cherrypicking. Brilliant!!! \S
This comment adds no value to the discussion. If you want to explain why unemployment for people 25-54 (which is not age of first job or retirement!) is better than labor force participation then I think we'd all like to hear it. Instead your content free sarcasm condemns your preferred party.
My comment was intentionally sarcasm (thus the \S at the end of it).
I am not at all sure that you are wrong in your assertion that those numbers are biased. I, nonetheless, stand by my snark. You picked 4 of their 8 points to contest. 2 you hand waived and 1 you said, "sure their two metrics are valid but here is one that isn't." That is as cherrypicking-ish as one can get. You could have just said, "This disagrees with my priors."
(edit valid=>supports their contention)
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.
32 - your point about UBI experts reminds me of Keynes predicting that everybody would soon be working 15 hour weeks. And strangely Hayek suggesting that everybody could be given enough to cover all their basic needs, so nobody would have to work!
Both ideas are so utterly insane that I'm surprised we give their proponents the time of day. For me as a Hayekian this is something of a painful problem, but there we go.
Keynes was just extrapolating. And he didn’t predict it happening “soon”, he predicted a few decades hence. The 40 hour work week was largely established then, down from twice that or more in the 19C.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day
For an economist charting a fundamental change in working practices "A few decades hence" is tantamount to "soon". And I think that 'just extrapolating ' is about as dumb as it's possible to be - it displays an utter ignorance of human beings, how they function, and what matters to them.
I looked it up and said 100 years or so. Which doesn’t meet anybody’s definition of soon.
Why is the 40 hour week so important to humans? It was double that a century before him. Why not a 30 hour week?
Clearly he was overestimating but it’s interesting that we stopped reducing working hours. I expect this is more to do with the reduced power of Labour rather than an inmate desire to work hard.
What is the evidence the work week was 80 hours in the early 1800s? This is not generally what I remember for the literature.
Factory work was 60-70 hours (I misremembered that) and of course “service jobs” were all day for in house servants.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/05/working-hours
I hadn't heard about Hayek. But yeah, it was a bad idea because people obviously have a strong preference to live better more than to work less. To be fair the idea that new products would motivate people to work for higher standards of living would have been going against consensus at the time. Then again, if you can't see the reality behind consensus I'm not sure how much you get credit for being visionary.
> people obviously have a strong preference to live better more than to work less.
Do they? The evidence I hear is usually something like "everyone wants a smartphone, duh", but smartphones are actually quite cheap.
To me it seems more like a multiplayer Prisonner's Dilemma. If everyone works X hours a week, the things become exactly so expensive that the average person needs to work X hours a week in order to afford them.
I suspect that if you somehow made 60-hour workweek a law, people's lives wouldn't become even better. Instead, the hourly wage would somewhat decrease and things would get somewhat more expensive, until the new balance is reached and people would need to work for 60 hours a week in order to afford things that we have now.
> Do they? The evidence I hear is usually something like "everyone wants a smartphone, duh", but smartphones are actually quite cheap.
This is the simplistic version of it. The more complicated version is that people are choosing to work more hours to obtain a higher standard of living instead of choosing to work less hours at a lower standard of living. So yes, people are acting that way. If you want to live at the lifestyle of the average person in 1950 it's cheaper now than it was then. The difference in affordability is solely the fact that you live much better than they did. Bigger house, nicer car, better tv, computers, etc.
> To me it seems more like a multiplayer Prisonner's Dilemma. If everyone works X hours a week, the things become exactly so expensive that the average person needs to work X hours a week in order to afford them.
> I suspect that if you somehow made 60-hour workweek a law, people's lives wouldn't become even better. Instead, the hourly wage would somewhat decrease and things would get somewhat more expensive, until the new balance is reached and people would need to work for 60 hours a week in order to afford things that we have now.
You seem to have an incorrect belief that there's a fixed amount of wealth that's unrelated to the amount people work and people work simply to access it. This isn't true. People work not to access some pre-existing amount of wealth but to generate the wealth itself. If everyone worked sixty hours a week there would be a lot more stuff and it would be cheaper. If everyone banded together and agreed to work 30 hours a week then there would be less stuff and it would be more expensive. This is because the work itself is part of what generates the stuff.
In your thought experiment if everyone started working 60 hours a week the question of whether the hourly wage would go down would depend on if their productivity went down per average hour. So if hours 41-60 are less productive than the first forty then the average hourly wag would go down because the average hour is less productive. If productivity stayed the same then it wouldn't. Further, things would get cheaper because that increased productivity would generate more wealth and push prices down. You can see examples of this in East Asia or Europe. In Europe they work less and things are more expensive despite higher per hour productivity. In Asia they work more and things are cheaper despite lower per hour productivity.
> if everyone started working 60 hours a week the question of whether the hourly wage would go down would depend on if their productivity went down per average hour. So if hours 41-60 are less productive than the first forty then the average hourly wag would go down because the average hour is less productive.
Yes, this is exactly what I would expect, at least in white-collar jobs. People would be tired and paying less attention. Those who can would probably just browse internet at work. Or maybe they would have more meetings, because hey, 60 hours is enough time to have dozen meetings and still get the work done. The total amount of wealth would not increase significantly.
So some people would be like "I bet I could get the same work done in 40 hours, especially if we somewhat reduced the useless meetings... and then I could be with my family or having a hobby". But most employers would be like "most employees are okay working 60 hours, this is a red flag, the guy seems kinda lazy, I am not going to hire him".
Or maybe the total productivity would be somewhat higher and things somewhat cheaper, but that would be compensated by necessity of paying for things that you previously did for yourself but now you don't have enough time for that anymore. Like, people working 60 hours would probably never cook for themselves, etc.
You're correct that the per hour productivity goes down. You're empirically wrong that the overall productivity doesn't go up. Your expectation is just wildly out of step with observed reality: working longer hours increases aggregate productivity because the decline in per hour output in later hours never becomes zero or negative or even close to it.
I think this is something you WANT to be true rather than having actually investigated. Mainly because you throw out various theories (all wrong) with the same conclusion. As if the conclusion is more important than the empirical reality.
I don't actually think UBI will go well, and I've explained why many times before. But the arguments that it *could* go well, are all tied to it being something people can count on in the long term. By which I mean approximately a lifetime, or at least a generation. Anything less, and people are just going to hedge their bets, keep doing exactly what they have been doing because that's the only way to be sure they won't wind up living on the streets when the windfall goes away, and figure out how to spend or maybe save a modest windfall.
So I find it baffling that UBI proponents seem to actually *want* these sorts of little, short-term experiments, rather than saying "no, don't do that, it won't work and it will make the whole idea look bad!"
I'm generally skeptical of any argument that says, "It failed because we didn't do it hard enough." It's an unfalsifiable argument that's a ready made excuse for any failure. You do sometimes get inflection points where level 10 acts really different from levels 1-9. But it's rare and you should be able to demonstrate it before I believe it doesn't have a more normal gradient effect.
Yes, but for just about any goal, there's going to be an effort that's clearly *not* hard enough. I'm just baffled as to why people point to clearly-not-hard-enough efforts as proof of concept. It's like filling a balloon with lukewarm air in an attempt to show that man can fly.
Fair point. Personally I've long thought that the behavior of aristocrats is probably the best test case for what people do with guaranteed income. Which doesn't exactly recommend it. And also shows that there's work to be done even then.
Who can give a guarantee of UBI lasting a lifetime? Because no nation state has the capacity to guarantee _its own existence_ on that timescale, nevermind the state of its economy, the viability of its currency, and the supply of basic goods to exchange for that currency.
The existence of Social Security and Medicare clearly have a strong impact on how Americans save for retirement, and I think the same is true in most other first-world nations. It's theoretically possible for Social Security to go away or be massively reduced, and at this point I think more than just a theoretical possibility. But most Americans make their retirement plans (or lack thereof) based on the assumption that Social Security will be there for them in its current form.
So I expect that if a first-world nation with a few generations of governmental stability under its belt were to implement a broad UBI, say "this is for real and it's permanent", and keep it in place for an election cycle or two, most of its citizens would act as if UBI were nigh-inevitable.
Which then brings up the question of how a true UBI would make people act, but we don't even get to that question until we have such a UBI.
> most Americans make their retirement plans (or lack thereof) based on the assumption that Social Security will be there for them in its current form
That says a lot about people's gullibility, and not much about the chance Social Security will in fact survive the demographic catastrophe.
FWIW, in Poland literally every young person is sure that the pension system will collapse before we ever get any money out of it. We're just paying the bare minimum into it because we have to, and because it's better than letting old people starve in the streets.
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.
ELO is logarithmic in odds of winning, but it's highly doubtful that odds of winning is linearly related to intelligence/skill/ability. You don't have to be 10 times smarter than your opponent in order to achieve a 90% chance of winning against them.
It's also not really clear what "10 times smarter" would even mean.
If you define performance improvements at chess as being able to search one additional layer of depth in the game tree, then it's a tautology that you'll need exponential improvements in computing power to get linear improvements in performance.
#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.
Sure, it should say "average IQ of those getting degrees".
On the subject of thresholds, I still find interesting an observation I saw made a while ago: if college attendance is mostly done by people above an IQ threshold, and "failure" to attend is mostly done by people below the threshold, then lowering the threshold for attending college will lower the mean IQ of both groups, the degree holders and the failures. Mechanically, it means removing a bunch of people from the top of the no-attendance distribution and adding them to the bottom of the yes-attendance distribution.
Honestly curious when you (as a non-developer) use regexes?
Not Scott, but regex is used by many non-devs to do fuzzy search. Also Excel has regex, so anyone who uses it is just one frustrated string-related search away from a regex trick.
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/
Vaccines are going into arms in Colorado, New York, Illinois. I’m looking around in Texas, but at the moment it sounds like only people with known exposures are allowed to get it. The supply is still too low compared to demand, but I suspect demand is currently only high in a small fraction of the relevant target population.
If anyone is curious how the system is *supposed* to work (not how it actually does, necessarily), there is a thing called the "Pharmaceutical Inspection Convention and Pharmaceutical Inspection Co-operation Scheme" (PIC/S) that does the following (quoted from wikipedia):
"PIC/S has a number of provisions intended to establish the following:[4]
- Mutual recognition of inspection between member countries, so that an inspection carried out by officials of one member country will be recognized as valid by other members.
- Equivalent principles of inspection methodology, so that it is understood that inspectors in each member country will be following the same best practices when carrying out inspections.
- Mechanisms for the training of inspectors.
- Harmonization of written standards of Good Manufacturing Practices.
- Lines of communication between member country inspectors/inspectorates."
Denmark and the USA are both members of PIC/S, and so the USFDA should be able to accept the results of any Danish inspections as if it were their own inspectors.
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.
Time is a flat 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.
As I’ve said in other comments here - “doubling net worth” isn’t as impressive if you’ve got a large asset and a large debt (like a house and a mortgage) as it sounds when you imagine someone with just small assets and no debts.
Net worths are up, which is good.
Prices are up and nowhere near as much as wages, which is bad.
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.
> were really big in the Bush era, then kind of stopped
Don't worry, they'll be back the next time the Republican presidential candidate is a southerner. Politics lies upstream of culture; or rather, culture lies downstream of the immediate electoral needs of the Democrat Party.
I found this in late 2004. You get an even higher correlation with GOP share of Presidential vote than with white women's fertility with white women's average years married between age 18-44.
It worked extraordinarily well in 2000 and 2004, somewhat less well in 2008 (with McCain), extraordinarily well in 2012 (with Romney), pretty well with Trump in 2016.
Here's Andrew Gelman of Columbia talking about my finding in 2008:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2008/11/06/affordable_fami/
It has to do with housing prices, which have much to do with how close the metropolis in a state is too deep water or high mountains. E.g., Dallas can expand almost 360 degrees, but San Francisco is hemmed in by the Pacific, the Bay, various mountain ranges and much worse weather in the Central Valley. So, land is cheaper around Dallas than around San Francisco. I call this the Dirt Gap. Where homes are cheaper, people get married younger, have more legitimate children, and vote more for what used to be called the family values party.
!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.
Is "gypsy" an actual ethnic group or just a lifestyle? If a gypsy chose to settle down and live a law-abiding lifestyle would they still be considered a gypsy?
There should be a word for the lifestyle, which includes quite different ethnic groups. I was fascinated about some similarities of irish travellers with classical european sinti and roma though they come from completely different backgrounds. Many good boxers, early marriages, for example.
"There should be a word for the lifestyle..."
-- Bohemian???
I don't think so, but it's just my experience from the german uses of "Bohemien", mostly reserved for people with some artistic ambition and no strong kinship bonds. If it fits in English, fine. Does it really?
As always, this gets complicated. Some "gypsies" get annoyed by the "Roma" tag, as they consider themselves as non-Roma ("Roma are those guys, not us", basically).
Wikipedia: "Roma is a term primarily used in political contexts to refer to the Romani people as a whole.[7][8] Still, some subgroups of Romani do not self-identify as Roma, therefore some scholars avoid using the term Roma as not all Romani subgroups accept the term.[9]"
"Today, the term Romani is used by some organizations, including the United Nations and the US Library of Congress.[6] However, the Council of Europe and other organizations use the term Roma to refer to Romani people around the world, and recommended that Romani be restricted to the language and culture: Romani language, Romani culture.[11][12][13]"
It's a bit of a mess. Much the same goes for "Inuit", where some peoples tagged with it don't think it applies to them.
But do those non-Roma gypsies prefer to be called gypsies, or something else altogether?
Presumably some other term altogether, I would imagine.
For instance, Germany uses the classification "Sinti and Roma".
Aren’t lot of the romani prejudices, you know, fundamentally true?
I have a friend who works in the prison system, and his comment was "working here, suddenly all the things you thought were just prejudices prove to be true".
They are, and at the same time the prejudices are not helping. "Go adopt the values of the wider society" is a hard sell when the wider society actively hates you. Try finding a job when your nationality became basically synonymous with theft and fraud.
I wonder, is there any society in the world that figured out how to integrate a premodern traveller culture into a modern social order?
For sure true and helpful are not the same thing. I wouldn't contend otherwise.
People just so often get worked up enough about "stereotypes" and the perceived ethics around them, that they throw out the "reality/pattern matching" baby with the "thoughtcrimes are bad" bathwater. A sizable portion (plurality?) or all things people learn about other humans and animals are in some sense fundamentally stereotypes.
'Romani' can be confused with Romanians (the source of the name); 'Roma' with Romans. Some sort of clarification, like 'Indians (Native Americans)' in the US, is helpful.
Two scholars' books from 2015 use 'gypsies' in their title. I haven't heard of Diane Tong before, but Yaron Matras is one of the best-known scholars of the Romani (and his book has been on my to-read list for years). Here's what their books say about terminology:
Diane Tong. Gypsies: An Interdisciplinary Reader.
> Terms such as 'Gypsies' or 'Tsygane' are used to describe almost any traveling people, such as Irish Travellers, who are also not Roma.
Yaron Matras. The Romani Gypsies.
> The scarcity of resources and extreme poverty in the aftermath of the war contributed to the emergence of other traveling populations such as itinerant bricklayers and smiths, couriers, musicians, seasonal workers, hawkers and peddlers, and professional beggars. All these were increasingly associated with 'Gypsies.' During the eighteenth century terms such as the German word Zigeuner and French Tsiganes came to denote an itinerant lifestyle irrespective of the origin, culture, or occupation of the individual group or family concerned.
It seems like 'traveling people(s)' is an overarching term, too bland (and with too many syllables) to ever find itself on the treadmill towards becoming a slur.
The problem with this term is recognition. Imagine Scott had written 'the Romani (the most numerous of the traveling peoples)'. I expect few ACX readers would understand, and even fewer among the general population.
I'm in favor of hesitating before we cancel yet another word. Especially since the only argument is that it's sometimes used as a slur - I'm pretty sure "American" is sometimes used as a slur in certain parts of the world.
I think it's fair to give peoples ONE shot at selecting a new name for their ethnicity, when the former one was selected for them by outsiders and in many cases (Eskimo, but not Gypsy) also had derogatory meaning.
You know, pattern is very familiar to the programmer in me, even though it's a very human one. The idea sounds... reasonable. Even good. In the face of it, how can I even argue? It's about a little more justice in the world, versus... well, NOT a little more justice in the world. It may not solve everything, but let's do a bit at a time, right?
Maybe. The cost is not "nothing". Like Scott said in reply to another comment here, the cost is all the disruption in setting up the new rule, which is paid not just in time and fuss, but in actual intense negative feelings felt by those "caught" not using the proper language. This is how it's supposed to be enforced, right? Shame.
This makes me realize a pretty big weakness of democracy as a system to aggregate preferences. If you ask a bunch of people in a minority if they'd prefer the old name or the new, you might well get a 51% majority. But that's a mere preference - in all fairness, quite a lot of them may not have any feelings about the issue, and just answered the Correct response by reflex. In forcing your will and shame on a majority, I'd very much like something more than "yeah, I'd probably like Roma more".
This probably generalizes pretty widely on a host of other issues. Mere electoral democracy a pretty bad tool, as a preference-to-enforcement transformer. Blunt edge and sharp handle.
Ah, and just to complete the pattern - because by now it's a common pattern. The most vocal advocates for the nomenclature change aren't even from that minority.
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.
The problem is that there is no plausible alternative for rationalist altruist types. Volunteering at soup kitchen-style charity is seen as too inefficient and parochial, and you can't spend your crypto billions on it, and just doing nothing is too uncomfortable when literal millions are dying of hunger/malaria/etc.
Many famines can be described as: Population heavily dependent subsistence farming have a bad harvest or several compounded bad harvests and either they lack access to income-generating work to buy food to replace or there is a logistical issues getting enough food to local markets of the affected areas at a price they can afford. Feedback loops that make everything worse are also possible. (Subsistence farming isn't a necessary condition but a common feature.)
Wouldn't investments in the logistical networks and economy of hunger prone countries resolve this problems permanently in the way food aid won't?
I don't know about malaria, but if the malaria nets are so awesome, there must be some reason why the people in malaria affected areas are not doing their best to get malaria nets by themselves. Most people don't want to get sick or die, after all.
The justification for not volunteering at a soup kitchen may be that it is too inefficient and parochial. However the experience of it, its unpleasant reality and the hard work unrewarded by much gratitude is what stop people doing it - hence the necessary justification. The preference is then for the kind of intervention where the 'altruist never, ever meets the recipient.
"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."
That's because the misery and the potential alleviation of misery are both incidental to the enthusiast's enthusiasm for the central planning; the latter makes a good excuse, is all. The actual purpose is to give the enthusiast along with his wider social class control over the rest of society, with the attendant career and status opportunities (as well, of course, as the pure rush of power that nobody who's ever dealt with an HR flak will be able to deny is a factor). As such, "more control, harder intervention" is the only response that makes sense from these people's perspective.
Unfortunately, they've succeeded very well. I don't approve of the right-wing militias who want to overthrow the whole system by force of arms, but I understand them.
EDIT: I forgot to add the actual point which is that I think EA just *looks like* this, and is not in fact actuated by the same motives at all.
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.)
>(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.)
If your conscription tests are anything like Finnish conscription test, I would be suspicious of them: IQ test has remained the same, but population and their motivations have changed During the 1980s, the service length was either 8 or 11 months; doing well on IQ test would put you on either NCO or officer training track, which took longer.
Today, the shortest service period (no NCO or officer training) is 6 months (because of gov't savings) but NCO/officer track is still 11 months (actually, a bit more). Many people have adapted and it is a well-known meme to avoid performing too well on your IQ test if you don't want to spend extra 5+ months in the army (as opposed to previous <3). Additionally, the prestige of officer training has decreased, because civilian service has become more popular in the "intellectual elite", and for a good reason: it has changed from "demeaning job peeling potatoes in kitchen" to "opportunity to land an unpaid internship in university lab or good corporation that will advance your career": several capable university students choose civil service because it can be genuinely better career move (thus they are not recorded making the IQ test).
This is the publication, if you want to check: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289617302787
Abstract:
"The IQ gains of the 20th century have faltered. Losses in Nordic nations after 1995 average at 6.85 IQ points when projected over thirty years. On Piagetian tests, Britain shows decimation among high scorers on three tests and overall losses on one. The US sustained its historic gain (0.3 points per year) through 2014. The Netherlands shows no change in preschoolers, mild losses at high school, and possible gains by adults. Australia and France offer weak evidence of losses at school and by adults respectively. German speakers show verbal gains and spatial losses among adults. South Korea, a latecomer to industrialization, is gaining at twice the historic US rate.
When a later cohort is compared to an earlier cohort, IQ trends vary dramatically by age. Piagetian trends indicate that a decimation of top scores may be accompanied by gains in cognitive ability below the median. They also reveal the existence of factors that have an atypical impact at high levels of cognitive competence. Scandinavian data from conventional tests confirm the decimation of top scorers but not factors of atypical impact. Piagetian tests may be more sensitive to detecting this phenomenon."
In what sense is decimation being used here?
Their Table 1 is a bit weirdly presented, but reading directly from horse's mouth http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/dutton2013.pdf and it is a perfect match with Finnish conscription length changes: decline mostly happens right during years 1997-1998, the same year the conscription system changed. Noticeably the drop is largest in words and numbers test, the shapes test scores fall much less, and all are almost stable from 1998 to 2009.
Swedish data show no difference, because there isn't such data since 1992. From Norwegian and Danish military I know less, but they had bunch of changes during and after the 1990s. I don't recall exactly when the change happened, but today both Danish and Norwegians practically have "volunteer conscription" (yearly quota can be mostly filled from volunteer enlistees so not many people are drafted by force.)
Looking at their other sources, Norwegians' arithmetic score had a gigantic drop since 1968 http://differentialclub.wdfiles.com/local--files/assigned-topics-iq/End%20of%20Flynn%20effect%202004.pdf ; their figure test scores never dropped, only flatlined since early 1990s. The Danish data is a bit sparse https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.737.920&rep=rep1&type=pdf but has a similar tendency. (The Danish study even mentions that they have questionnaire results that show high scoring gymnasium students have more negative attitude to military service, yet they for some totally inexplicable reason present this finding like it was a proof that "malingering" won't confound the results?!)
In a more recent publication about the Danish conscription data, the only major change they notice is a noticeable tick when the paper-and-pen test was replaced by a computer test: https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-hegelund.pdf There the authors mention that maybe the draft board excludes more low-IQ enlistees ("this group generally seemed to be worse off with regard to characteristics correlated with intelligence test scores") and there were some changes in some characteristics between 1988 cohort and 1996 cohort. It is plausible there could have been such changes that affect the earlier cohorts, too.
I find it easier to believe the non-Nordic test-retest studies mentioned your linked paper, and I agree that a continuation of Flynn effect / IQ score growth is not supported by the data. I am less certain they are truly "excellent statistics" of a general decrease in scores.
33. > a fetish subreddit fetish about men enslaving, raping, and forceably impregnating women,
Yikes. Sorry to disappoint anybody ... but how is this even legal?
Fiction is hard to illegalise in the US.
I guess the same question applies as to Madeleine comment.
If you chat with three friends about killing your neighbour or chat with 300 people about burning down area x of your city, let's say where all the immigrants live, is this all legal?
So there is nothing like if you had a closed forum of 100 persons where everybody was chatting about hating and lynching blacks, it would be illegal? Without *planning* it I mean.
In my country it'd be illegal to eg. chat about hating and killing jewish people, even with no concrete activities following.
It would be legal, yes. I don't know where you live, but in terms of freedom of speech, the US is one of the most liberal countries in the world. There are a very few kinds of speech that are illegal, including threats, fraud, and libel, but there's no law against fictional stories or roleplay.
Yeah, I know that US is liberal in terms of freedom of speech, but I don't know in all instants how this translates in reality.
Fictional stories or roleplay is fine in my place as well.
In my country there is however a law against 'Incitement of the people'. Basically you're not allowed to call for stuff that would violate the rights of whole groups of people.
Especially with the internet of course there are lots of cases where it's unclear where exactly the line is drawn, and I'm not an expert on this. I'm living in Germany.
I copypaste the first part of the law below:
Incitement of the people.
Whoever, in a manner likely to disturb the public peace,
1. incites hatred, violence or arbitrary action against a national, racial, religious or ethnic group, against a section of the population or against an individual on account of his or her membership of a designated group or section of the population; or
2. attacks the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously disparaging or defaming a aforementioned group, part of the population or an individual because of his or her membership of aforementioned group or part of the population,
shall be punished by imprisonment for a term of three months to five years. (www.DeepL.com)
Edit: there are more paragraphs in this law, and I don't know if this specifically would apply to the forum ... just introducing here to give you an idea.
You live in a country where thousands of people coordinated large scale violent attacks on even urban center for an entire summer using hundreds of millions of dollars in NGO funding, so yeah its legal, as long as your politics are "right."
Naming your neighbor or naming the area of the city would make it sound like conspiracy to commit actual acts. But playing dungeons and dragons or war games where you pretend to slaughter thousands of innocent civilians is considered perfectly innocuous.
The most notable SCOTUS case about this topic is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
I agree, (leaving aside for the moment that there is quite a debate about violent video games).
But then there is something that is inciting hateful behaviour against a certain group of people, usually due to their nationality, ethniticy, sex or sexual preference or such. It's different that *planning* a terrorist attack or something, but it also differs from a video game.
Okay, I see, interesting.
Indeed much broader in my place. I'm copying two examples I just came across:
A man from Stendal posted a picture of Adolf Hitler on Facebook and wrote the following: "Filthy Syrian pack, just slaughter the pigs, our taxes are being squandered and we have to pay food money for our children". Because in this case the criminal offence of incitement of the people and the use of signs of unconstitutional organisations was fulfilled, the district court of Stendal sentenced him on 09.03.2016 to a fine of 130 daily rates of 30 euros each (3,900 euros).
The NPD had some election posters that were very controversial. For example, one poster depicted three oriental-looking men on a carpet, which read "Have a safe flight home". The incident was reported to the police and charges of incitement of the people were brought against the responsible persons. In the last instance, the Munich Higher Regional Court (OLG) ruled on 9 February 2010 that although the matter was xenophobic, the criminal offence of incitement to hatred was not fulfilled (ruling of 9 February 2010, ref. 5St RR II 9/10). . The judges ruled that this was a sharp and exaggerated statement which was protected by Article 5 of the Basic Law. Just like the slogans "Jews out", "Foreigners out" or "Turks out", the slogan "Have a safe flight home" was not, according to its wording, an invitation to others to take certain measures against the groups of persons mentioned.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
In Switzerland and Germany, it's illegal. Any form of porn with minors, with animals or with "Gewalt" is forbidden. (Not sure how to translate "Gewalt". Coercion? Violence? In any case, it covers rape.) This includes every type of porn, for example fictional written stories about rape, or drawings of underage anime characters having sex. (I have always wondered how to tell the age of fictional characters...)
I don't think these laws are enforced in such cases. I hate them nevertheless, because it is just stupid that they exist. Or rather, that the laws on porn don't make the distinctions they should make.
They're not actually enslaving, raping, or forcibly impregnating anyone, and they're not trying to incite anyone to do those things, so their weird porn is protected by the First Amendment, as it should be.
If they were writing about randomly shooting people on the street, killing Blacks, killing Jews, raping children or whatever else you want to think of, would it be the same?
Sure, if everyone was clear that it was just a fantasy and doing those things in real life would be wrong.
Okay, I see the point, but I don't know how you'd assure that in a big anonymous forum?
Maybe by making "We are completely opposed to real rape/ethnic violence/whatever, and anyone who advocates those things outside the context of a story or roleplay will be banned" the first rule.
is this what is done on the reddit forum?
I remember Scott describing how the only place committed to not do witchhunts will end up with three liberals and all witches. I'm inclinded to think that a reddit forum despite a nice first rule risks to be the same.
Legally, by the absence of any reference to specific real-life people who were to be killed or raped, specific real-life people who were going to do the killing or raping, or any specific real-life time or place where this was going to occur. Nothing can happen in real life without those elements, so the legal presumption is that if you don't have those elements, you're not planning anything real.
Grand Theft Auto and war games where one person plays as Nazi Germany are actually pretty innocuous.
There are already people who write about those kinds of topics (for a variety of reasons, many of which are pretty innocuous), and making it illegal would be a massive overreach and violation of free speech. Even if someone was very obviously gleeful about how they wrote fiction about killing black people/Jewish people/raping children, then I would probably choose not to associate with that person, but I wouldn't want them to be arrested just for writing fiction.
Yes, obviously there is literature - factual and fictional - about all kinds of topics, including the most horrible ones. I'm not talking about banning all those.
I find it interesting, how the notion of 'fiction' comes up several times already. I understand that talking about ideas is different from planning. But then just saying 'oh, I'd love to kill all X' or 'those bastards, let's kill all X', even if not planning, is also not 'fiction', right?
The first one is clearly fiction, you are using "would", so you're clearly fantasising about something in your head. The second one will depend on the context and the law of the land, but twitter, for an example, allowed feminists to spread a "kill all men" hashtag some number of times. "yes all men" is another catchphrase popular in all feminist spaces, shortened from "yes all men are rapists".
It would be awfully one-sided and unfair to allow feminists and their weird kinks about men and not rape play enthusiasts and their weird kinks about women. At least the latter actually make it clear they don't hate the object of their fantasies.
There's a musical genre (well, subgenre) that talks about things like shooting people on the street: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangsta_rap . Not everyone is a fan, but people don't go to jail for any of this.
Weird fetishists are part of the Democratic Party coalition, so no.
It's worth noting that it matches to (milder, or maybe not so milder) preferences in a large portion of the general public, outside of the impregnation part. See Aella's surveys.
It's harder to get outraged about things that sound kind of hot.
If it helps, I feel about your comment the exact same way you feel about that subreddit.
We can have a society at each other's throats... or we can agree on a meta-rule to try for actual tolerance, and accept people are different.
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.
Yep, you can define a player's "strength" as 10^(Elo/400) and it works exactly the obvious way (i.e. the expected score per game of player A is (strength of A)/(strength of A + strength of B) and vice versa). By this definition, the strength is only slightly sublinear in the computing power.
How are engine ELOs calculated, though? Surely there's a problem with engines and human GMs belonging to completely disjoint player pools. I would concede that the top engines are very obviously at least ~400 points higher than Carlsen, but beyond that I'm not sure the data exists to confirm or deny.
Edit: never mind, I misread this comment. The data is that the engine itself gained 800 rating points, not that it's 800 points higher than Carlsen.
>Edit
Coincidentally, contemporary top engines probably are 800ish Elo points better than Carlsen. Of course, as you note, there's no one Elo rating but there's Lichess Elo, FIDE Elo, Computer Chess Championship Elo, Computer Chess Rating Lists Elo, etc, and these are indeed disjoint: Carlsen hasn't been playing BO10000 showmatches against Stockfish to figure out if their supposed 674 Elo difference (FIDE vs CCRL) in fact would result in the one expected Carlsen win and 180 draws.
However, I suspect it happens to be pretty much correct. The ability of players to beat each other isn't exactly transitive but it's close enough and there's human GM level engines in the engine rating pool, and there was a time when engine ratings in fact were calibrated against humans and we can resurrect the old versions and make them play games against contemporary engines. We can also look at what kind of compensation (pawn and a move or two pawns sort of deal) is required for human super-GMs to have fair matches against engines and it's the same sort of compensation as the best human players can afford to play with against much lower rated human peers. I suspect (although in the absence of that kind of BO10000 series can't confirm) that the biggest issue isn't really calibration of ratings but assumptions of probability distribution in the tails, namely that the chances of overwhelmingly lesser players are overestimated, at least in the context where one of the players can't blunder.
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.
If you want higher unemployment, you're welcome to lead by example and quit your job.
It's not that high unemployment is preferable; rather, healthy economic conditions also come with somewhat less employment than times of unchecked inflation like right now; this employment boost is only temporary and not sustainable.
Inflation is not a unitary phenomenon, you can't generalize like that. High inflation from a supply shock to energy is different from inflation caused by, say, capital flight and a currency crisis. But they're both "inflation" on paper.
Of course, I'm aware, which is why I said NGDP in the first place, and tossed inflation in there to make it clearer to most people what I'm talking about; (especially since inflation caused by overly expansionary monetary policy is the current issue)
Part of that comment would explain why economics is not a very popular discipline.
Honestly, not wrong. A lot of why monetary policy works the way it does wouldn't land well with most people.
Predictions based on an unemployment-inflation tradeoff (Phillips curve) have failed to hold up.
...In the long run, yes. In the short run, with unexpected inflation, the effect is there.
The 'unexpected' part is critical; fool me once &c.
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.
Extremely strong? There was the covid recession in 2020, there’s a quarterly “recession” in the US now, which seems to be driven by rising costs. In between was merely catch-up. The rise in wages might have been believed to be because some people retired, or gave up, but the same statistics show that Labour participation is up. And housing increases would benefit the top 50% more than the bottom 50%, and in any case House inflation has been moderate. I have no idea, except to suspect the figures.
Extremely strong is the only accurate way the characterize the last two years, post covid shock. Compare with other countries, where the recovery has been anemic. The US did it right, and the Fed waited until it saw the whites of inflation's eyes before hiking. All in all, a stunning string of success in the face of a catastrophic macroeconomic shock. Plenty of credit to go around, from Kelton and Powell to Biden and yes, even Trump gets a little credit for knowing better than to fret about deficits when the global economy, and his own approval numbers, were on the line.
Well all countries rebounded. Central banks were hardly going to raise interest rates during covid, and the ECB didn’t either. The US is in a recession now, as it was in 2020, and I don’t think interest rate hikes are finished as inflation is external. The average American isn’t actually happy with his lot right now, and that’s about to get worse.
(Europe is even worse right now)
Sri Lanka, Pakistan and there was one more country which I don't remember at the moment did not rebound.
The UK and Europe also provided broad fiscal support.
We're probably 3-5 years away from knowing whether the "broad fiscal support" will be vindicated or not. A very reasonable view might be that the excess fiscal support caused our inflation problems on the supply side.
If we're going to be intellectually honest, it's too early for the lessons learned on the fiscal package.
Either way, the confusion is that consumers and small business owners are very historically bearish on the economic future and this infographic wants us to believe things are great and will continue to be great. Perhaps!
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.]
I tried "email address" and it gave me something more like an IP address.
There is no regex for email addresses (as per RFC 5322) as the rules regarding double quotes make it irregular but context-free. The closest you'll get is something like
(?:[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+)*|"(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21\x23-\x5b\x5d-\x7f]|\\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])*")@(?:(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?|\[(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?|[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9]:(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21-\x5a\x53-\x7f]|\\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])+)\])
If an AI can think up a better regex I'll happily accept them as our new overlords.
I don't know the rules of quotes in e-mail addresses, but note that many (so-called) regex formats are actually more powerful than formal regular expressions, and can recognize some irregular languages.
"Match text containing all English vowels, in any order" → "[aeiou]{5}" (Bad. Note that this sort of thing is tricky to do with regex.)
"Match text containing at least one capital letter, at least one small letter, and at least one number" → " /^(?=.*?[A-Z])(?=.*?[a-z])(?=.*?[0-9]).+$/" (Bad, but only because the + near the end instead of a *)
all English vowels: Yeah, tricky. I can't think of a way except an alternation of terms like "a.*e.*i.*o.*u" for all 120 permutations of aeiou. Is there a better trick?
I blame it less for getting it wrong if it's not a thing one would ever try to do with a regex in the first place. Still, if it won't say "That's a dumb thing to use a regex for"...
Your example shows that even statistically-impressive text-generation is far from intelligence. A human trying to answer that prompt might well fumble about producing crap like "[aeiou]{5}" but would take the next step of trying it out on a test case or two.
Vowels: Yes, there is a better trick; you can see it in the second example I gave:
(?=.*a)(?=.*e)(?=.*i)(?=.*o)(?=.*u)
(ignoring case for simplicity)
Mind blown. TIL about lookahead assertions in regex. A nice generalization of ^ $ and word-start and -end, but I learned my regex through classic sed and grep.
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
As the link explains, abortions are illegal in the first trimester in Germany. But they aren't prosecuted for the first 14 weeks.
That's why it's so hard to easily compare things.
I don't disagree. But switching to 100% red afterwards is misleading.
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.
I have long suspected that if anyone bothered to collect data on & split white people out by ethnicity, the "poorer"/"lower-class"/more-recent immigrant whites (Italian, Irish, etc.) would be underrepresented in the same places that the traditional underrepresented minorities are, but no one cares about that
I'm pretty sure that Italians (and moreso Irish) are not recent immigrants in any meaningful sense of the word. You see few Slavs toh, that's true
I should have been clearer, when I said more-recent immigrants, I meant the early 20th century wave, which tended to be poorer opportunity seekers and whose college-attending descendants would be upper middle class, as opposed to the relatively established money of the earlier immigrants, who would be typically English or German and more likely to be legacies/donors/upper class
The way it actually works, I think, is that whites who mostly migrated to the Northeast Corridor tended to end up with more income/education than those who migrated elsewhere. I'd suspect Italian-Americans as a group are overrepresented relative to English-Americans at places like Harvard, for the simple reason that English are everywhere while Italians and Irish ended up disproportionately in the Northeast.
Why is “dean’s list” included there? That’s people who have above a particular GPA, and seems more in line with people’s stated ideas about admissions than the others.
Principia probably the college dean writing up a list, not the high school dean (which is not a title often used in high school). Compare the Harvard Z-list
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/4/3/the-legend-of-the-z-list/
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2002/6/6/the-back-door-to-the-yard/
I've never heard of anyone use the phrase "dean's list" to refer to a list that a dean actually writes - I've always heard it used for something like the set of full-time students whose GPA passes a particular threshold, or who are in the top X% of GPA (wikipedia generally agrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean%27s_list ).
I've never heard of this "Z list" but it doesn't sound like something anyone would call the "dean's list".
But now that I've googled the phrase "ALDC", I see that this is about some "dean's interest list". I haven't read the original article that this statistic is drawn from to figure out precisely what that means, but it's not what people usually mean by the phrase "dean's list", which is a purely academic merit recognition.
I apologize for answering your question.
re: Supposed bias in favor of whites in admissions, if you really want to go down that route, then fine: let's get a more comprehensive view of who would not have gotten in if only academics was taken into account, using Harvard's own analysis:
https://samv91khoyt2i553a2t1s05i-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Doc-421-134-February-2013-Report.pdf (slide 34)
According to Harvard's analysis, if only academics were taken into account:
11% of whites who got in would have been rejected
74% of Hispanics who got in would have been rejected
83% of Native Americans who got in would have been rejected
93% of blacks who got in would have been rejected
If you want to talk "privilege", fine, but we have to see the whole story of who is getting what non-academic admission benefits. The impact of affirmative action is still vastly larger than athletes, legacies, and kids of donors combined. Furthermore, white legacies have significantly better academics than the average applicant: as Harvard's analysis shows, only 10% of white applicants who currently get in would be rejected if only academics were considered, so even if we assume that that 43% is the bottom 43% of the white applicant pool, over 75% of them would still get in on academics alone.
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
There don't have to be many though, when an accusation is made on social media, for a few people to offer up a snappy response, after which they'll *all* know.
People who learned anything at all about American history know that the South had slavery and that's why the South has more black people day.
And notwithstanding some recent fearmongering about how the Evil Republicans are stopping schools from teaching children about slavery, pretty much everybody is taught enough about American history to know that A: slavery was a thing and B: it was lots of black people who were the slaves, and C: that was in the South.
"...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.
Right. And reverse if people moved back into houses. I think that’s part of the explanation.
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
Minor warning (25% of a ban): please don't say "the answer is obvious to anyone paying attention" and not give the answer, this is obnoxious.
Not 100% sure what stubydoo was suggesting, but I think the claim is that deficits tend to increase/be larger when Republicans are in charge vs when Democrats are in charge.
A proposed explanation for this is the Republicans are extremely committed to cutting taxes and often enact tax cuts, but they are not actually committed to cutting spending at all (take a look at this graph of government spending/GDP over time: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=SlvZ ; if Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2, or Trump had any success cutting spending, it's certainly not obvious).
Whereas when Democrats increase spending, they often make an effort to raise taxes to pay for the increased spending (see the current, not-yet passed Inflation Reduction Act for an example of this).
Here's a plot of the deficit as a fraction of GDP: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Slwo
You can decide for yourself if you think the claim holds up, but of course it's hard to say what changes in the deficit are due to the party in charge or due to other factors (for example, Clinton presided over an unusually long economic boom the during his presidency, and defense spending was able to shrink drastically due to the Cold War being over--both factors which allowed the deficit to shrink and eventually become a surplus).
As far as Trump vs. Biden, COVID is a huge confounding factor, and it may be too soon to say anyway.
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.
+1
Even when I have very little interest in the subject Dynomight is writing about, I always enjoy reading their posts. Thoughtful, clear, insightful and quite gentle.
>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.
Wasn’t this study also carried out in April 2020? Seems like there were some relevant confounds around then.
There was a real life test of the effects of giving poor people money in, of all places, Bosnia, during the NATO/SFOR deployment after the war. One of the favourite ways of getting money in a context where the economy had collapsed completely, was to arrange an "accident" with an SFOR vehicle. For political reasons, SFOR always paid compensation, whoever's fault it was. When this scam started, people went around telling their friends how clever they had been. This stopped when men with guns started turning up and taking the money away. Thereafter, though the scam continued, it got much less publicity. This is a slightly unusual case of the general rule that giving money to people first of all makes them vulnerable to the strong and ruthless.
I think it's worth remembering for cases like this that tests involving giving money to people in collapsed or undeveloped economies likely don't generalize to the results of giving people money in more developed economies. With tests in impoverished countries in Africa, they've seen a lot of cases of people starting business ventures and generating more money, but I think that giving money to poor people in America, you're very rarely going to see similar results, because the economic canopy isn't clear. It's really difficult for poor people in America to come up with business ideas which would realistically allow them to make money, since they have to compete with all the businesses which are already present around them. I've asked high school students in inner-city programs, if they had enough money to start a business, what they'd try doing with the money, and the only thing anyone I asked could come up with was buying up goods wholesale and selling them on the street. It's not just a lack of ambition, it's pretty much the only model of entrepreneurship they see around them, and the only option they have with a realistically attainable amount of money which isn't already being done better by other businesses they have access to.
The results you get from giving people money in one environment don't necessarily correspond to the results you get in other environments.
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.
Also, it looks impressive as a doubling of net worth, but it’s more likely something like a 10-20% increase in home value while debt stays constant, so the difference doubles.
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.
For the bottom 50%? I’d like to see the breakdown between renters and house owners, almost because definition the bottom 50% will have most of the renters.
The homeownership rate is about 2/3 so there are going to be a good number of homeowners in the bottom 50% even if they are more likely to rent.
Even then why in the last two years? Housing has been on an upward slope for years.
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?
You still reach a point where a computer is 2x as smart as a human and thus can define the next faster computer in 1/Sqrt(2) the time, then 1/2 the time, then 1/2sqrt(2) the time....... AI go foom!
> 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?
Listen here you little twatclown
#22. Idiocracy intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA
What are the odds developed countries have been dysgenic for decades now? Is this peak civilization? Or are we going to get stratified into the few intelligentsia breeding amongst themselves and the masses?
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.
The theory is that "poverty traps" exist, wherein people are prevented from getting ahead in life by a simple lack of money. You're unemployed because you don't have transportation to get to a job, if only you had $1000 you could buy a bicycle and a suit for job interviews, and you'd permanently escape poverty.
Those things are probably quite common among poor people in poor countries, but uncommon among poor people in rich countries, who are already selected for being particularly bad at making decisions.
No, people in rich countries aren't always poor because they are particularly bad at making decisions. People can be poor because they prioritized something else over being rich, because of genuine bad luck (say, someone's untimely death or illness), because they are disabled, because it takes a lot of effort and money to move from a currently bad environment into a better one, because due to bad luck early in life they didn't get a good degree and that precludes them from having a higher-paying job of the kind they like, because the job they have that used to be a good one is no longer a good one.
The problem is, a one-time payment of $2000 doesn't solve any of the real problems. It isn't enough to help you move, it isn't enough to help you buy a car, it won't buy you a degree. It's enough for some medical or dental procedures, and I bet many people would use this money to get some of these done - but most of the time this wouldn't translate into a major change in their state.
I'm totally at loss as to why anyone thought that a one-time payment of $2000 would make a big difference to someone.
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").
Virtually all cities are blue-tribe cities. Republicans are incapable of effective governance and governance is necessary at the city level.
> 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.
I second this.
And it's not just about computation. I have sometimes wondered whether for a super-intelligent AI, taking over the world is more or less difficult than an accurate weather forecast for 14 days. I'm genuinely not sure.
I'm a bit confused by what you're saying. Wouldn't AI taking over the world being easier than a weather forecast imply that you _are_ worried about AI takeoff?
What I wanted to say: predicting the weather for 14 days might be a *really, really* hard problem, and it might not get easier if you throw a lot of intelligence at it. It might just be a function that is too chaotic to compute. And I think the world is full of such chaotic functions, especially when it comes to social interactions.
So if someone wants to convince me that an AI can easily take over the world, then they should convince me that this is a much easier task than predicting the weather. Or rephrased, that it can be done with tools which do not include something as impossible as predicting the weather for 14 days.
Perhaps it is really easier to take over the world. But as you wrote in your post, I won't accept arguments that assert an AI which can solve arbitrary problems, especially not solving inverse problems related to complex systems.
Ah I see yeah we're in agreement then.
This feels confused to me. Humans manage to have human level intelligence without computational complexity being a problem. Very smart humans manage to have above-average-human-level intelligence without computational complexity being a problem. Narrowly superhuman AIs (like AlphaGo) manage to play Go at far superhuman levels without computational complexity being a problem. In order to argue that computational complexity disproves superhuman AI, you'd need to posit that you start running into computational complexity concerns just as soon as you get past the smartest human who ever lived, except by coincidence this isn't true in any of the domains we've already passed human level in, but it is in all the others.
I'm not worried about some kind of hypercomputer AI that can solve NP-complete problems in an afternoon, I'm just worried about some boring AI that happens to have IQ 500 and think a thousand times faster than an average human.
The AI that ends up killing all humans will be the dumbest AI possible that's still smart enough to kill humans (since otherwise, that one would have killed us first). I don't know exactly which one that will be, but I think it happens well before hypercomputation.
(I don't think you need hypercomputation for nanobots, but if it turns out I'm wrong, then the dumbest AI capable of killing all humans will do something other than nanobots)
I'm having a lot of trouble expressing my difference in world-view here, but I took a shot.
First of all, I'm definitely not objecting to things like "a machine which is like von Neumann running on 10x speed." I totally believe that is a thing which could exist. What I'm saying is that I think a 10x or 100x von Neumann would display less godhood than people imagine.
The relevance of computational complexity here as I see it is that solving inverse problems for interesting systems is extremely difficult. The "AI which is supposed to toss strawberries kills everyone" scenarios always require the AI doing some secretive scheming/designing of nanobots/manipulation of humans etc.
What it means for something to be NP-hard is that (if NP-complete problems require exponential time), you'll never do asymptotically better than brute force. The world looks a lot like that to me. I'm a grad student, and looking around at everyone doing research, it looks a whole lot more like brute force than it looks like intelligences deriving solutions to things through pure reason.
Some concrete examples of what I'm saying are:
- Nanobot optimization is probably NP-hard. In order to make a nanobot which will function effectively in the world you probably need to try making a bunch of them, looking at what goes wrong, and iterating on your design. If my strawberry tossing robot is trying to kill the human race with nanobots so it can toss more strawberries, I'll notice the suspicious piles of metallic goop lying around.
- If it took 1 yottaflop of compute to train Human level AI #73, I expect it to require many yottaflops to find an algorithm which will train Human AI #74 to be 10% smarter. It looks to the outside observer like the AI field is zooming forward, but actually the amount of compute being invested for each subsequent advance is increasing at a rate which outpaces Moore's law. Not only that, but you only see the successes (GPT-3), and not the graveyard of failed ideas (which still cost compute). My main belief that's relevant here is that that graveyard _isn't optional_. You have to to try many ideas to find the good ones, and those trials will cost an insane amount of compute. I'm not worried about an overnight foom since I think the available hardware fundamentally prevents that.
- Solving for which sensory inputs will make a brain enter a given state is probably NP-hard, so I'm not worried about GPT-100 mind controlling me via text. That's unfair, since actually there are very successful human manipulators (e.g. cult leaders) who obviously aren't simulating their victims brains. However, those people probably needed practice, they did not derive their manipulation abilities via pure reason. I'm not worried about AI in a box scenarios, since I'll notice that my strawberry picking robot is spending a lot of time pissing off its coworkers when it should be tossing.
Basically, my main belief is that human (or any) intelligence requires tons of trial and error to learn to succeed in complex domains, and that this just represents pushing down an exponential difficulty curve which will always win in the end. Go is actually a pretty good example, since the AlphaGo algorithm can basically be described as "learn good heuristics which will find better solutions when searching this exponentially large tree."
Killing all humans is an extremely high bar to pass, unless you do something like hook your nukes up to an AI, which I would rather file under "nuclear weapon x-risk" than "AI x-risk."
Thanks, that makes sense. I still disagree though, for a few reasons:
--- Again, I think "predict exactly what sensory inputs would it take to hack this brain on a neurological level" is the wrong way to look at things. The great influencers of history (Hitler, Mohammed, Reagan, etc) weren't hypercomputing, they were just doing folk psychology really really well. Presumably this was through some kind of trial and error and studying what worked for other people. I would expect someone "more intelligent" than them (in some "social intelligence" sense) to be able to do the same with less training data, or better with the same amount of training, or vastly better with more training; I'm also imagining that eg "watch YouTube videos of every politician and see whether they succeeded or failed" with a little bit of "ask people on Mechanical Turk whether Pitch A is better than Pitch B" will be enough training, and then the AI can do better than all of these (very successful) influencers. Or maybe there's something sort of like hypnosis that works really well. If so, I think the AI would discover it not by simulating a brain atom-by-atom, but by noticing things sort of like it in the speeches of great political leaders, actors, etc, reverse-engineering it, and being able to do it properly. Or, again, I don't know, maybe it will do something magical and hacking-like, but I don't think we'll *need* that AI to be in trouble, we'll be in trouble with the rhetoric one or the hypnosis one or some other thing that I can't think of right now because I'm not superintelligent.
--- I agree I am a lot less worried about an overnight foom than I was ten years ago before I knew about deep learning or training. I am more worried about something like some lab creates something IQ 125, this is really exciting, the amount of investment into AI doubles, there's a bit of algorithmic progress, and then eighteen months later someone else creates something that's IQ 250, and it turns out that's enough to do something horrible. I think this would roughly mirror Go progress. Or they make thousands of copies of the IQ 250 AI and use it in all sorts of industrial/scientific/infrastructure applications, and working together, they do something horrible. Or everything goes fine but eighteen months after that some team (aided by a bunch of IQ 250 AIs) invents an IQ 500 AI, and *that one* is enough to do something horrible. I agree that there is some room to do alignment research in the eighteen months between the IQ 125 AI and the IQ 250 AI, but eighteen months sounds like not much time to invent a totally new field from scratch and I would be happier if they have lots of pre-existing work to draw on.
--- I am really not convinced that nanobot optimization will be NP hard, because back when I used to have this discussion in the 2010s, people claimed that protein folding would be NP-hard. But AIs solved protein folding (to a reasonable definition of "solve") before they solved writing coherent long blocks of text. This does not give me much confidence in people's ability to get the NP-hardness of different tasks right. I realize the sense in which AIs have solved protein folding is probably a slightly different sense than the one in which it is NP-hard, but I worry that if AIs solve nanobots, then people will protest that wasn't the sense in which they meant nanobots were NP-hard either.
I'll put aside the neurological stuff since I agree it's not necessary.
> with a little bit of "ask people on Mechanical Turk whether Pitch A is better than Pitch B"
I think this is the sort of thing I'm saying is necessary, and also makes it difficult/impossible for your AI to secretly augment itself with significantly higher capabilities. You don't need to worry as much about hidden ulterior motives if their execution requires using your credit card to run studies in English.
Regarding the "hypnosis/brainwashing/just being really convincing" threat in general, I think the world doesn't really look the way it would if there were a consistent vulnerability of that kind in human brains. (Unless it's one we haven't found, in which case once again the AI needs to do some suspicious looking experimenting).
> Or they make thousands of copies of the IQ 250 AI and use it in all sorts of industrial/scientific/infrastructure applications, and working together, they do something horrible
I'm not extremely worried about "many extremely smart but not individually dangerous AIs" scenarios, because:
1. The collaboration would be very visible (why is this virology lab robot DMing that robotics lab robot?).
2. It's very unlikely you'd be using exactly the same AI in both a machine shop and a chemistry lab. The evidence we have so far in deep learning is that generality can give you a good starting point, but specialists always beat generalists. This is tied into my point about computational difficulty in that being a specialist means you know a lot of domain specific heuristics. If the problem can't be fully solved, you want to allocate as much capacity as possible to the problem you care about, and throw out things you don't (i.e. optimal strawberry throwers shouldn't be storing information about how to play saxophone)
> but eighteen months after that some team (aided by a bunch of IQ 250 AIs) invents an IQ 500 AI
I don’t want to get too down in the weeds on your exact wording, since I assume you’re just using “500 IQ” as a stand in for “extremely smart.” However, if NP-complete problems turn out to require exponential time, that’s basically saying they’re not soluble to intelligence in some sense. You can put in exponentially more compute and only see linear gains.
> people claimed that protein folding would be NP-hard. But AIs solved protein folding (to a reasonable definition of "solve")
AlphaFold solved a prediction problem by training on a large number of experimentally determined structures. The relevance of the NP-hardness of the problem is that success was accomplished via the model finding helpful heuristics, not making a breakthrough which let it cleanly defeat the problem. (This can be seen from the fact that it makes plenty of mistakes still).
Threats of the kind “AI designs a novel technology which kills us” also sound much more like RL type settings than prediction problem ones. In every case where RL has outperformed humans (Go, other games, DeepMind’s fusion work), we’ve had access to a high-fidelity simulator for the target domain. That will not be the case for “make a disease which kills all humans”, or “make a nanobot which is robust enough to spread through many different environments and kill all humans.”
I worry that I’ll come off as using special pleading to get out of specific scenarios, when your mental model is that there are a large number of scenarios I haven't considered. On my end, it feels like all the threat models rely on unrealistic views of computing. (And also a bit like someone is threatening me with Pascal’s wager).
I do think we will have problems due to technology which was created with the aid of AI, but I think they'll be more of the "everyone has a bioweapon which their well-enough aligned AI designed for them when they asked it" variety.
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
Your wish is granted! https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-keeps-the-score/
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."
I think the process of taking the (not inherently derogatory) word everyone has used to describe a group since forever, reclassifying it as a slur, and then asking all group members to feel bad and humiliated each time it gets used, results in a lot of people actually feeling bad and humiliated, even if in the end everyone agrees to stop using it (and then the euphemism treadmill will ratchet up a level, and the group members will be told to feel bad and humiliated each time they hear the new version).
My policy is that once everyone has agreed that a word is a slur, I won't use it (since that makes people feel bad and humiliated, and doesn't do anything to fight the overall system of making more and more words badness and humiliation inducing) - but that I won't do anything that feels to me like being part of a preference cascade towards turning a previously standard word into a slur.
My understanding is that the preferred term is Romani because gypsy is short for Egyptian and the result of a historic mis classification. It would be odd to start calling Americans ‘Canadian’ but that has nothing to do with whether or not there’s something derogatory about implying someone is Canadian. The derogatory angle is weird to me. There’s a similar thing with calling people Jews. I’m inclined to think that the correct response to “{ethnic label} people are {bad trait}” is “no they aren’t!” not “don’t call anyone a {ethic label}”
Ironically, Gypsy has wide and obvious, and somewhat romanticized, cultural resonance. To less educated people, Romani sound like people from Romania, which I'd imagine is annoying to both parties of the confusion.
History is annoying like that.
"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?”
Damnit, keep your hands off my 18 letter pronoun!!!
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.
Probably a LOT of the more niche porn subs (and some of the other non-niche ones too maybe)
"...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.
"Well, not so much 'on its own' but dipping due to..."
Well yes, everything has a cause, of course.
"And just because it's not being done via death camps doesn't make it admirable..."
Of course not. It's necessary for reasons other than simply not being evil, obviously.
"...or even not evil."
Everyone has a right to children, of course. But humans and their livestock now make up 98% of tetrapod biomass. So when would you say that we have too many humans? Never? Is the concept of "too many" itself "evil"?
"Who has the right to say that certain people are surplus to requirements?"
See? That's exactly my point. Population control doesn't require *eliminating* anybody. That's a straw man.
"Why is that bad?"
You spoke early of hope and spiritual health. Does open wilderness have *nothing* to do with that? Do you feel that there is *nothing* wrong about destroying wilderness?
"I will grant that there is a maximum carrying capacity to the Earth..."
Thank you. And rather obviously, terrestrial ecosystems are stressed when available biomass is whittled down to a mere 2%.
"The world's current shortages of food and resources are entirely self-inflicted."
False. As a single example, fish populations have crashed by 50% over the past four decades. Furthermore, to the degree that problems do arise from warfare and supply chain issues, these instabilities are exacerbated by large populations.
"...when you include the Solar System the concept isn't even meaningful."
Complete nonsense. How many millions do you plan to ship off to Mars (where they will live an utterly wretched life)? Why not simply preserve what we have here *and* explore the universe?
"...could fit very comfortably into a middling-sized American state."
But the ecological footprint would still be nearly the same. *Half* of Earth's habitable land area is already used for agriculture...
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
"We can simultaneously have wilderness and a larger population."
Clearly not...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study?CMP=share_btn_tw
"I didn't know that 'available biomass' was a hard limit..."
Two points. First, it's mostly habitat loss that causes wildlife to decline, and not so much as carbon being directly stolen from wild biomes.
Second point: you've surely heard of the carbon cycle? The marginalization of wildlife (again, only 2% of all tetrapods) isn't a matter of mistakenly thinking it's a zero sum game (those stupid animals!). Available carbon is a real and concrete issue. Here's a serious study of total global biomass over geological history. It appears that the biosphere was already pressing against "hard limits" before humans even came along...
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/file/index/docid/297542/filename/bg-3-85-2006.pdf
"We don't need to ship people off to Mars."
So we're agreed then that space colonization would do nothing to reverse population growth?
"We _can_, however, acquire resources we need in space..."
Which potentially eliminates the imprint of basically just industry and mining. That's it. And that would certainly be a huge positive (and I'm all for it). But the agricultural imprint remains the same. Or do you envision off-worlding all our agriculture as well...?
https://www.liquisearch.com/piersons_puppeteers/homeworld%e2%80%94the_fleet_of_worlds
IOW, are you willing to bet our fate on a quasi-religious belief in unlimited technological progress?
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
Yeah, but subreddits made the system trudge along for over a decade. Which is a lot more than any of its predecessors managed to do. Kudos for that.
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...