> [Boris Johnson] a shockingly good writer. I’d long since absorbed that bad people can be good-looking, or charismatic speakers. But I guess I implicitly thought of good writing as some sort of protected sphere only available to people with unusual clarity of thought. Nope, seems like skilled politicians can come across as hyper-likeable in their writing ...
Wait, what? What kind of non-sequitur is that? Why do you assume that Johnson isn't actually highly intelligent and – yes! - clear-thinking in matters unrelated to politics? The effective practice of politics might just rely on difficult skills largely unrelated to intelligence and clarity of thought, as we judge the those things in other areas of life.
>16: The Confederate States of America needed a navy, but they didn’t have much of an ironworking or shipbuilding industry. And if all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail. Thus was born the cottonclad warship.
Strangely, the first submarine to successfully sink an enemy ship was built by the CSA!
There's also a vague pop culture trend in fiction where the Confederacy is associated with weird futuristic contraptions (The Great War series by Harry Turtledove, that crappy Wild Wild West movie starring Will Smith). Any reason for this, or is it just that they're usually the villains and thus enjoy a technological edge (as per TVTropes' "Technologically Advanced Foe" trope)?
> the government has lots of techniques for strong-arming companies into getting what they want.
This is hardly limited to social media companies. The government has great power to strong-arm all sorts of companies to do what it wants, regardless of the law. This power is much greater if the target company is large - there are more pressure points the government can threaten, and there are fewer competitors to refuse to do what the government wants. Most people seem to assume that the government tries to keep companies from becoming "too large", but it seems the government generally prefers large companies that are more subject to government influence.
About item 4, IQ and positive life outcomes: I read only the abstract of the cited article, but it sounds like when they calculated correlation between IQ and positive life outcomes they did not consider the problem of IQ being correlated with a bunch of other things that probably also predict each other, and predict IQ.
"We found that ability measured in youth has a positive association with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life."
Don't you think that if they had treated IQ as one of their dependent variables instead of the independentone they would have found that parental education [or income] has a positive association with child's IQ later in life and with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life?
Or that child's health, measured in youth, has a positive association with childhood IQ and with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life?
The point is, there are all these good things that stick together: IQ, parental education (no doubt pretty highly correlated with kid's eventual education level, parental wealth ( no doubt pretty highly correlated with kid's eventual wealth), occupational outcomes, health, social outcomes. No doubt there is causality operating both ways for many of them. If your parents are poor you are less likely to get various kinds of enrichment activities, such as time with parents, travel, great toys, great preschools, etc. That alone probably makes you less likely to be able to give the correct answer on various IQ test items. Lower IQ means on average lower education level and income. If you're poor, you're likely to be less likely to be healthy as a kid, and probably later as a grown-up as well. If you have a low IQ you're less likely to be healthy when you grow up, because you will probably also be poorer, and less able to find and understand good info about measures that preserve health. Etc. Etc.
I'm not sure what the solution is regarding how so many of the good things are glommed together, but ignoring the glomming surely isn't it. And I don't see how you can make inferences about causality in a situation like this.
Although, that article is using it in a more restrictive way, whereas the sense given in the linked Wikipedia article includes things that are more legitimate.
Re: the Belgian genocide-inciter - 8 years in prison seems really light for inciting genocide! According to Wikipedia he was sentenced to 12 years because he agreed to testify against other suspects who incited genocide, and then went to serve his sentence in Italy (where he was a citizen because his dad was Italian) and was released early against international law.
The most conclusive studies re: polyamory will (or might) be if it continues as a high-status orientation long enough for researchers to identify if lifestyle-desistance rates correlate with age, having children, home purchase, career advancement, etc. Anecdotally, there are couples who continue to identify as poly even after ceasing to be “active,” as it were. To what degree does it mimic the 60s counterculture “free love” movement? And/or to what degree is it a convenient political-seeming identifier in a sexual marketplace that was already trending toward acceptance of dating multiple partners simultaneously before you “committed” to someone?
>Robert Bigelow who owned Skinwalker Ranch is the same guy who founded Bigelow Aerospace, an exciting-sounding private spaceflight company about which I suddenly have many more doubts.
Bigelow Aerospace no longer exists in any sense but on paper. Their IP and assets, including the BEAM module on the ISS, were bought by NASA and competitors (I've heard Lockheed and Sierra).
Re #28: Boris Johnson started his career as a journalist and was primarily known for that before he went into politics, so him writing well should be no surprise because that was literally his job. Incidentally, this is something he shares in common with Winston Churchill, who was known for his articles and books even before his first stint of political prominence in WWI.
Wow I'm in a linkpost! But I must correct: I did NOT help decorate the Inn, and furthermore I have never worked for Lightcone! I don't know why everyone always thinks this... (Oli, next to me: "You don't work for Lightcone, you are just married to Lightcone.")
#1 - Holiday World is actually pretty legit - (been there a few times, including just over a year ago). Free parking, free drinks (soda/water/etc), free sunscreen, food isn't horribly overpriced.
Not a ton of rides, by theme park standards, but the ones they do have (including 4 full sized roller coasters) are pretty good.
It's no Cedar Point, but it's genuinely a pretty nice park.
The Ars Longa, Vita Brevis movie is really nice work, but I kept noticing things that looked anachronistic to me and realizing that various objects in the environment were clearly modern machine-made items (which should probably not have been available in this setting). ROT13 examples: gur nypurzvfg'f pybguvat frrzf gb or znqr bs cynfgvp, yvxr n cynfgvp enva cbapub, juvyr gur fbyqvre'f pybguvat unf n mvccre. And also gur wnef naq furyirf ybbx fb erthyne naq flzzrgevpny gung gurl frrz gb unir orra pyrneyl znqr ol n znpuvar. And also gur nypurzvfg'f zrqnyyvba vf pyrneyl ynfre-cevagrq. And other things...
Maybe this is one of those examples about how having higher resolution videos makes things look unrealistic that would have been totally fine at a lower resolution. Maybe with a lower-quality video, we just would not have been able to see these details, so there would be no apparent conflict with the setting.
In the interest of empiricism, I just tried re-watching a few scenes at the lowest video quality available on YouTube, and I actually found that it did look much more convincing! Maybe I should suggest this to people who want to watch it, and you can just try to convince yourself that something about difficult relations between Russia and other countries led to this fine movie somehow only being available in low resolution. (Or, it was recorded by the alchemist's magic security camera hundreds of years ago...)
This is really not meant as a slight against the film-makers' efforts. I agree with Scott that this is impressive and I thought the acting and cinematography were great. The set and costumes are kind of great too, it's just that, when you look at them closely enough, they're not convincingly "period".
Forget about Culture Wars this here is the most controversial thing Scott ever said. I hope he has an anti-fork vest because italians are going to be mad.
8. Genghis Khan, like Alexander the Great, is mainly so well liked because generations of succeeding rulers legitimized their rule through descent from him. This lasted into the 20th century. So you have centuries of propaganda about how great he is. In contrast, Hitler lost and even fascist movements aren't eager to claim descent from his ideas.
The more interesting case is Attila who went from being a similar figure in medieval Europe (he shows up in a lot of sagas and stories) to being forgotten as his use as a tool of legitimacy disappeared. And then when historians turned back to the Classics he became the widely loathed figure he is today.
23. The idea this was a display of power is a bit reaching. There's no reason to believe that this isn't simply some local government diverting part of the fireworks budget to a more modern show. East Asians love fireworks at festivals and I'm sure the people who watched this loved it too. But the idea it's some kind of military display is... weird.
The drone light show was invented in the EU by a bunch of artists, the industry is still concentrated in the west, and the technology is widespread, common, and can be openly purchased. And it's never used cutting edge drones or anything that would be all that useful militarily. Which is how, for example, the Gulf States got them. It's also being pushed in a lot of big cities worldwide as being more environmentally friendly.
Unless I'm missing something this is a bit like saying, "Cities all over China are stockpiling large amounts of gunpowder devices near Lunar New Year. What could they be planning!?" I guess fireworks or drone shows might have some incidental application to military power. But I have a hard time seeing it.
27. It gets better. The German Black Bee was a pure invention. In reality it's the same species they have in Poland and the surrounding nations. But they invented a new breed to say it was totally different. However, they also carved out an exemption for the Catholics to keep their Carniolans. And as a result post-pandemic the repopulation was done partly through crossbreeding and partly through Carniolans propagating north. There's probably some metaphor in there.
As you might expect, this was a way for the Party to insert itself into this industry. The racial purity laws as applied to agriculture served as a form of control for Nazi Party members in the countryside as well as giving opportunities for control and to reward favored constituents through breeding licenses and other favors. The Nazis wanted to assert Party control over every aspect of the economy.
28. Boris Johnson is a somewhat well known Classicist and literary figure. Nothing huge. But enough that before he was a Brexiteer or much more than a minor politician he was participating in debates and exchanges about those subjects. It doesn't surprise me he's good at it. It's a skill like any other.
One of the things I am grateful for early on is the degree to which all the art teachers I knew always hammered in: Yes, gifted people exist, but at the end of the day it's mostly a skill. And even gifted people need a lot of training. There's this weird myth (and a very old one) that art springs naturally from the soul rather than being a craft and, to put it even more prosaically, a job.
31. I do sometimes feel like we're living after the gold rush. There's a few stars getting made out there but it seems like the height of Scott Alexander style blogging fame was about a decade ago when places like Vox or content creators like Channel Awesome really seemed (for all their flaws) like they were doing something that could succeed more traditional media. Now it seems like all the long form content producers have been around for a decade and the rising stars are the short formers doing TikToks etc.
I have no direct evidence any of that's true. Just a feeling. But it is worth noting that one thing Vine, TikTok, etc have is discoverability and the ability to go viral. And it seems like Twitter, FB, even Instagram are just less discoverability platforms. I'm not sure if there's a good method for longform to go that route outside of Youtube/TikTok clipping.
#10 is a great example of helicopter parenting becoming a de-facto legal requirement, to the great harm of both the parents and children, but also yet another opportunity to criticize city design that makes ANYONE walking ANYWHERE into borderline dangerous activity. America is gonna have to take an L here, I'm afraid.
I'm surprised to see that you would link to that silly "Italian food is actually American" article.
It's a classic: some random historian wants to get their name out their so they come up with a controversial sounding theory and get published in all the papers. Then a bunch of other historians come out and say no, that's stupid, but the publicity is already gained.
Except in this case no one really cares that much about food history, and people don't really like snobby Italian foodies so this nonsense has just persisted and I see this link used as evidence all the time.
"Man of one Study" should be enough on its own to instinctively distrust anything like this, and this guy doesn't even have a study! He just has this one interview and a history of trolling Italians. It's amusing, but I really wish people would stop spreading it like gospel
#11: in Os Maias, the best-known Portuguese realist novel, written in 1888 by Eça de Queiroz, one of the plot points is the opposition between "English" (supposedly based on outdoorsiness, exercise, contact with nature, and overall autonomy and exploration) and "Portuguese" (supposedly based on physical protection, lack of contact with the outdoors, memorization) ways of bringing up children. Protagonist Carlos receives the former, while his father Pedro and secondary character Eusebiozinho receive the latter.
8. There's a history of libertarianism I can't find efficiently (hour long from reason.com) which says that libertarianism started as an abolitionist movement, but was mysteriously silent during the civil rights movement. Perhaps there is some explanation for why toxic conservatives are attracted to libertarianism these days.
10. In Switzerland kids are supposed to got to school and even oldest year on kindergarten by themselves starting at about 6. It’s not just permitted, it is customary. Kids can take trains and buses by themselves.
Of course these are raw data, and direct comparisons to the US (which has a higher overall death rate) aren't really possible. And fortunately road traffic deaths have declined in recent years; though in part this may be due to increasingly protective parents.
Re #8, I find the level of Napoleon worship and apologism on the modern internet extremely offensive. No doubt, Napoleon was an extremely able man, both as a soldier and an administrator, and the economic reforms he imposed generally upon Europe were vastly for the better.
But, his wars slaughtered millions and inflicted incalculable suffering on millions more. These wars were largely borne from his ego and his inability to tolerate neutral powers.
And yet, the extent to which ‘the kids’ (if you’ll forgive the very imprecise term) now idolize him makes me think the likes of Hitler and Stalin might be next, or if not them then their most brilliant subordinates, no heroes any of them.
> as another example my department does PhD admissions on a point system and being from a favored race has historically brought an automatic and hefty point bonus. Next year I can walk into graduate admissions committee and say ‘we cannot do this, its illegal.’ [from the DSL link]
That was explicitly illegal before. It isn't more illegal after the recent ruling. If anything, this example suggests that the ruling has no effect. (Since, obviously, the earlier ruling that awarding a numeric bonus for certain racial statuses is illegal had no effect.)
> 7. [...] Seems like a good time to remind everyone that all good “Italian” food was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters.
The linked article is paywalled, so could someone please fill me in whether this is a case of
a) American hubris combined with ignorance about the rest of the world, or
b) Americans preferring American variations of a dish and therefore the best dishes must be American inventions; e.g., California rolls => sushi is American.
28: (boris Johnson writing) - yes, that’s in part why he was PM. His columns in the telegraph were famously well written, and often quite funny. He also used to appear on Tv a lot, including game shows and quizzes, or comedic reports on the weeks politics. These shows tend to need razor sharp wit, and while Johnson wasn’t as smart as the comedians he held his own, or engaged in that endearing (and probably fake) self depreciation, along with his trademark stutter.
I don’t like the Tories and think he’s a buffoon now, but I liked him well enough then.
"The Court also ruled that colleges and universities may consider in admissions decisions 'an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.' We will certainly comply with the Court’s decision."
>8: If it’s bad to romanticize the Nazis, why do people still romanticize Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes? One possible answer: there’s still some tail risk of a Nazi resurgence, but the Mongols have disappeared from history so thoroughly that nobody can imagine them presenting a renewed threat, leaving us free to wax poetic about them as a symbol of savage manliness or whatever.
I hear that the Mongol Empire did provide some pretty substantial benefits via safe long-distance land commerce (though this may have worsened the Black Death as well). The Nazis weren't really around long enough to do that, and also highwaymen were basically dead by then anyway.
The other real-talk answer is "Mongols were mostly in Asia and thus fargroup dynamics". You look at Eastern media and there's not nearly the same Nazi taboo.
Re: 2. When I was a student I had a quick stint as a telemarketer. Typical humor during lunch breaks would involve who had gotten the most outrageous name on the line.
I grew up in the western US, and my families on both sides are heavily into agriculture. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that Italy doesn't have a lot of factory farming with regard to meat production. I've mostly paid attention to cattle - Wyoming kid. They tend not to be grazed, unless we are talking about those released in the summer in the Alps. I have *never* seen a large feedlot here, and I live in the Po Valley, the breadbasket of Italy.
That said, the kneejerk reaction of Italians to ban new tech/things is on target.
"I think of this in the context of the US COVID vaccine prioritization effort; not only did it cause hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths by giving vaccines to young healthy low-risk members of favored groups before old sick high-risk members of disfavored ones"
Hundreds of thousands as in > 200,000 (more than a sixth of total official COVID deaths)? Can you explain how you get this? It seems implausible to me because 1) the entire period of vaccine scarcity was only about four months 2) the US vaccinated 2/3 or 65+ in those months so the upside from better targeting seems limited. The link itself doesn't make this claim as far as I can tell.
> all good “Italian” food was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters.
The link is very interesting, but it does not say that.
(also, it contains at least one error: Tiramisù is made with Savoiardi, which are centuries old, and not Pavesini which indeed are from the postwar period)
Are we allowed or encouraged to cite other links in these threads? I'll take a chance, and post a link to a news article about someone in the UK who was encouraged by his "AI girlfriend" to attempt to commit murder, well treason actually as his intended target was the late Queen!
"Jaswant Singh Chail, 21, outlined his plan to an artificial intelligence-generated chatbot, before setting out on Christmas Day in 2021 to target the monarch.
The Replika app, which is marketed as an 'AI companion who cares', encouraged the then-teenager, saying his plan was 'very wise', before motivating his fantasy by telling him: 'You can do it' and 'we have to find a way'."
I predict with high confidence that Italy banning lab meat is only the beginning of a huge worldwide disruption and conflict. Parts of nearly all economies, and some entire economies, depend on meat production.
In fighting their downfall, they'll inevitably use names like "clone meat", "fake meat" and the like, as opposed to their own "real meat" or "natural meat". And their opponents will inevitably respond with names like "torture meat" or "murder meat", as opposed to their own "clean meat" or "modern meat" or so. Mutual denigration makes for bitter conflict, and huge economic disruption fuels it.
So it's another huge culture war, on a global scale, on top of the increasing AI disruption.
> But I guess I implicitly thought of good writing as some sort of protected sphere only available to people with unusual clarity of thought.
Did you never encounter Malcolm Gladwell? He's a world-class writer. He might be a world-class thinker too, but in, shall we say, the other direction.
The other example that would leap to my mind of someone whose good writing disguises shoddy thinking is Eliezer Yudkowsky, but I wouldn't expect that opinion to be widely shared here.
Re. #13 Despite the Eye of Sauron's much increased attention, in Russia it's basically business as usual. Shitty czars and shitty wars have been around since the beginning of times, and being too worried about that doesn't do anybody much good.
> Here are various articles talking about how anyone who is against this system lacks context on how it won’t work that way, plus also it already works this way so nothing will change, plus it will revolutionize health equity so you’d have to be a monster to object, plus it will make no difference so anyone who protests is just manufacturing fake outrage.
"Yet another study finds a monotonic relationship between IQ and positive life outcomes, ie there isn’t some point where IQ stops being good (or turns bad). I will keep hammering this in until people stop promoting that one bad Swedish study that found the opposite."
I was just over on the sub-reddit and there's a post there about loneliness, and a not insignificant number of the comments are from people claiming to be Hikikomori (unemployed, socially isolated). That seems to imply a much higher rate in this community than I'd expect you'd find in most other communities.
I also can't help thinking about Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, the French existentialist and everybody else that fits the sad philosopher stereotype. Newton was also a weird maladapted guy, and was far from unique among great physicists in that regard.
It's just difficult to believe outlier intelligence isn't sometimes damaging to people, or at least correlated with some negative outcomes.
Something I haven't seen pointed out is that if you 'believe the science' that FTL travel is impossible and aren't engaged in magical thinking of 'wormholes' or other ways of getting around that impossibility, doesn't that pretty much negate the possibility of UFOs, or at the very least severely limit what kind of threat they can be?
Regardless of the last few years, the algorithm on Twitter for Substack links has certainly changed in the last few months, as Musk was incredibly mad at the release of the (obviously inconsequential) Notes. Musk made it so we can’t embed Tweets on Substack, and image previews are still purposefully prevented for Substack posts. I think the search for the word “Substack” (which used to turn up actual Substack links) might still be down. And anecdotally, the surest way to make something not go viral is to include a Substack link. Meanwhile, Threads, an actual competitor, is allowed up AFAIK
Really feeling the downsides of chronological comments sorting today. I have longer thoughts on these points, yet waiting until after work today pretty much guarantees they get buried anyway. So here's the slapdash version after only half-reading the relevant links:
> 9: [...] I appreciate the What Is To Be Done section. Relevant breaking news: judge issues preliminary injunction banning Biden administration officials from meeting social media site representatives.
First Amendment protections in the US are very strong, and I'm generally in favor of making them stronger. That said, there are a wide range of plausible policies for how government officials ought to be allowed to interact with media companies and I'm deeply skeptical that any policy designed for immediate implementation will do more than strike against current political enemies.
> 19: [...] but only in the sense that Nevada Senator Harry Reid threw lots of money and government-sponsored prestige at random crazy people in his state, because he was either gullible or corrupt).
I need to read more about the details, but prima facie I strongly object to calling this corruption - that's a term better reserved for when a politician uses their power for personal enrichment, and no, "making people like them so they get re-elected" doesn't count. This is a question of systemic weakness rather than personal failings: democracy is vulnerable to concentrated gains paid for with distributed losses, and voters in general react far more strongly to the threat of losing something than to reward patronage. Soaking the country's coffers to throw random money at your constituents is a basic strategy and you should expect politicians to use it without reference to personal characteristics.
(Yes, this is "pork". And at a step deeper, banning pork can sometimes cause worse problems than it solves because it removes a tool for negotiating consensus whose absense we're now feeling. And ofc if any of those randos were Reid's cousin or whatever this goes back to being Grade-A corruption.)
>21: This month in social justice
I think I've settled to the stance that I'm categorically against any form of affirmative action that refuses to quantify (or at least try to document) the magnitude of the preference. I can support the concept in theory, but seeing the size of the effect in college admissions is a notable case of where my opinion on a political topic was sharply changed by empirical data.
>26: Line-Item Veto
Classic case where I'm offended by the abuse of an executive power, and for the sake of consistency I support a ban on the practice to begin in the immediate unpredictable future.
> 30: Amtrak Pricing
Amtrak is like airlines in that prices fluctuate dramatically based on timing. IME prices start to significantly rise two weeks before travel date; it's not hard to get tickets for the NYC-BOS route for well under a hundred if you plan accordingly. There's also a wrinkle in that if someone buys a particular seat in advance for a low price but then cancels, that seat will go up for sale (temporarily?) at the price they paid for it at the time.... so it's entirely possible to get a business-class ticket for $60 the night before if you get *really* lucky.
Kayak makes their edge by buying in volume in advance, but the end customer pays for it through a loss of flexibility. You buy from a third party, good luck getting customer support from Amtrak. Same deal as for airlines.
Regarding #10, I think it depends on whether the town has any laws on the book limiting kids walking around unaccompanied.
If there are (stupidly) laws against that, then the usual caveats against blatantly breaking stupid laws apply. If there aren't, I guess that there is little the cops can do besides driving them home.
Also, I would be reluctant to call the US cops into any situation which does not call for more guns. (I don't think they would be likely to shoot an unarmed six year old, but also don't think they are well-trained to handle such situations).
If I were the type of person to notice a distressed lone four year old (which is a situation which calls for some intervention), I guess I would find a nearby woman and ask her to talk to them. If one wanted to involve the state, Child Protective Services would be the obvious branch. (Yes, they may in turn involve the police, but they likely have more experience in the typical outcomes.)
Regarding #26, Wisconsin, this seems totally bollocks. If you allow the governor to turn 2024-2025 into 2045 (why not go for year 20242025 while you are at it?), what is to stop them from selectively striking out letters and blanks in some bill to form some arbitrarily different, shorter text?
Even if you don't allow the striking of parts of words, in equilibrium the legislative will optimize for laws which meanings can not be maliciously altered by omitting words (so, no "nots").
If you have to have vetos, I think the ability to nope an entire bill should be sufficient (if you disallow mixing budget bills with random unrelated legislation). If the executive wants any changes to the bill, let them cut a deal with the legislative about it.
4. "monotonic relationship between IQ and positive life outcomes"
--High IQ allows one to navigate society with greater wealth and fewer restrictions(due to IQ and $$$). Some end up suffering 'affluencenza.'
--If we define "positive life outcomes" as stemming from healthy relationships how much advantage do smarts actually provide? Are such folks more inclined to be *durably* empathic and moral?
--I have read over the years and am open to disagreement that smarties tend to be more invested in ego and have larger 'blind spots.' False generalization?
"Boris Johnson on semaglutide. Posted not because his opinion is especially good (although honestly it’s better than many people’s), but because he’s a shockingly good writer."
Well, yes; Boris isn't stupid, he's just an idiot (that is, ambitoius, power-hungry, lacking in scruples or principles and cursed with a bonus extra-large helping of 'politician can't keep his trousers zipped', to the point where nobody, not even BoJo, is sure how many kids he has/had/might have had were it not for the abortion). He's 'Eton and Oxford' and that's not just because of legacy admissions or family connections.
Much as I dislike him, he is (sigh) one of my co-religionists (again, at least for now) and he is capable of performing academically:
9. "government has lots of techniques for strong-arming companies"
If, as I'm suggesting, the U.S. is more oligarchy than democracy then who's calling the shots?
The elite(top 10% progressively, Turchin '23), amongst which are the high IQ and those that employ & fund such. See #4 as "positive life outcomes" defined as power and comfort.
Drone shows are pretty common these days - I've seen two in person, in the US and Australia. The one in your video is nicely produced, with complicated paths for the drones, but it's hardly a demonstration of technological might.
> They did send me a single giant .txt file which contained a badly-mangled version of the blog posts, each one repeated three or four times in the file and filled with weird characters and broken formatting; I rescued a couple of posts, and each time it took me north of four hours.
For anyone who has a problem like this: this is the sort of constrained task that GPT-3/4 excels at - where it's 'obvious' what you mean but also the garbage is too varied to fix with some regexps or by hand. Whether it's bad YouTube auto-transcriptions or mangled PDF OCR, a quick "Fix the bad formatting" in a GPT prompt will work wonders, and then you can give it a quick skim to check that it didn't over-prosify or screw up some especially unusual technical vocabulary, and you're g2g. Forget 4 hours, it'll be more like 4 minutes.
Regarding #10, it doesn't just take one person calling the police on a 6 year-old walking to school for it to be impossible. It also depends on neither the 911 service nor the police nor anyone else telling that person off for wasting their time when there is actual crime to attend to.
>10: I used to work as a school bus driver. As a matter of school district policy, I was prohibited from dropping off first graders (6-7 year olds) unless there was a guardian present at the stop. Even if that "stop" was the bottom of their own driveway. And no, older siblings on the same bus didn't count as a "guardian" (although to make it all even more arbitrary, middle school age siblings I had dropped off earlier did).
The article on Italian food is quite clear in the details that the dishes originate from Italy but with misunderstood histories. Interpreting them as being really American in origin is the same nonsense rewriting of the past but for America's benefit. It's also not really about Italian cuisine but about a small number of dishes that are familiar to Americans who don't know much.
10. They must have been quick on the draw *and* persistent, because that is a short walk.
7. On this topic, I recommend the book Delizia!: The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food by John Dickie. He argues from the outset that the casting of familiar dishes as rural tradition is a marketing fabrication, that Italian food as we know it is "city food" (However, while some dishes are American in origin, many are not). The segments covering medieval Italy were particularly interesting (in part because of how unrecognizable it is from modern Italian) and full of amusing anecdotes about influential cooks of the time.
So ... I have acquired my first SubStack subscriber! I am very excited! But I also don't have a Substack of my own (I just read and comment ...) so I don't know what is going on. A bot? Anyone have any ideas?
Are cottonclads necessarily a stupid idea? Coincidentally, I was reading "Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down" the other day. There's a passage at the end of Chapter 6 on whether protecting US army vehicles with chicken feathers might be a good idea.
I think the appeal of Genghis Khan is that the Mongols still have a reputation as sort of “noble savages” in terms of their lifestyle. There’s a masculine appeal to the idea of roaming around on your trusty horse, slinging arrows, hunting with golden eagles, etc. (American Indians were similarly romanticized, but that’s become “problematic” in a way that hasn’t caught up to the much more fargroup Mongols).
Whereas the Nazi or Soviet utopias would have been hyper modern ones, so there is less to romanticize there.
14. Given the legal issues that all the charter cities projects have run into, I'm genuinely curious what the convincing pitch is. Every one of them has eventually run aground upon a government change that brings more hostile political leadership to power.
19. Bigelow Aerospace is dead now. It basically shut down in 2020 and laid off all the employees, and then later transferred ownership of the remaining ISS module to NASA. Maybe if they'd stuck it out longer they'd be doing better (what with the talk now of commercial space stations), but they either didn't or couldn't - maybe Bigelow's money ran out.
A few skilled writers who were bad people: V.S. Naipaul (liked to beat his wife), Normal Mailer (stabbed his), William S. Burroughs (shot his, and also fucked children). Probably also bad: Rousseau, Celine, Verlaine, Pound, Wilde.
There have probably been thousands of bad people (by the morality of their own time and ours) who were very skilled writers.
On 4, for those of us without journal subscriptions, do you have the IQ range they looked at outcomes for and what the quantitative dose/response relationship actually was for the outcomes measured? Personally, I would not have expected worse outcomes at any level of high IQ, but the abstract is talking about 120+ and I was under the impression when people are talking about geniuses being lonely and crazy, they're talking more like 160+. I would personally expect diminishing returns because everything should have diminishing returns, but not negative returns.
There's also the problem that sample sizes start getting pretty small at the truly high end, though. The outcomes of all 10 people in the world or whatever who are over 180 might not mean much.
I think this discussion gets clouded a bit by people not having a clear idea of what positive life outcomes means. They see the world's richest people being reasonable smart, but not apparently super-geniuses as far as I can tell. But this is clearly confounded by the fact that the very richest people are all either fund managers or business founders. No matter your IQ, you have to actually go into those fields to ever become that wealthy. You kind of need to stratify your analysis by career choice, as in, the world's wealthiest people likely don't have the world's highest IQs, but do they at least have among the highest IQs of people who choose to found businesses?
"Although I appreciated the personal story, I’m more interested in the claim that Twitter’s algorithm changed sometime in the past few years in a way that prevents stories from “going viral” in the way that they used to; does anyone know more about this?"
I don't but it matches my anecdotal impression: I feel like Twitter used to be a good place to find things to read later, via Instapaper, and now it's not.
As I keep trying to point out, the religious police of the Anglo (and thus indirectly the whole) world, ie the Social Scientists and Humanities, have as their theological touchstone the WW2 and specifically the Nazis. (Japanese should be in there as well, but they raise too many complicated problems that twist the hierarchy of castes into a Klein bottle…)
This means they rigorously police any and everything related to Nazis but care much less about Mongols. In much the same way that, say, the Saudi religious police care an awful lot what you say about Allah, and very little about Christological disputes as to, eg, whether Christ’s suffering was genuine or docetic.
#16: you would think these could be defeated fairly easily with some flaming tar or something, like the Greeks used to do with their built-for-ramming ships. More Union incompetence, I wager.
#21: Ibram Kendi approves. The only way to create equality is through overt discrimination that counteracts the very carefully measured impact of covert discrimination.
I know nothing about Boris Johnson. But my first consideration if any political figure wrote a book, or a story, or a pamphlet, or a warning on a mattress tag is to ask "to what extent did they actually write it themselves?"
This kind of post, for me, is the most useful that have ever come out of rationalist community. Not various kinds of models about how to think better, because I am like most of the people, that is very resistant to change. Changing how I think is a long-term problem and I'm not even sure that a solvable one. However, those little life hacks about how to live better, especially if you have some sort of a underlying dysfunctionality, which seems to be pretty frequent in rationalist circles, is so very useful, because this is kind of a lot of proven advice that I don't have to hunt over the internet, and it's readily applicable for everyone and anyone. More of this, please.
Re 30, about the intercity Uber - I did this once when my 11 pm flight from DFW to College Station was canceled after we had spent two hours on the runway waiting for fog to clear. I don't remember what excuse they had to not buy us a hotel room, but we would often prefer not to deal with the hotel they book, because it's a 30 minute drive from the airport, and they put you on the 8 am flight, and make you get to the airport 90 minutes before the flight. When we discovered that the rental car shortage meant that it was impossible to get a one-way car rental from DFW to College Station, and saw that the hotels on the airport were well over $300, we realized that it was actually cheaper to call a Lyft to drive us home (and we got a couple hours of sleep in the back seat).
It turns out that in Texas, lots of Uber/Lyft drivers are totally happy to get the intercity ride, because that guarantees them work for half of the long period, rather than several short rides with long gaps between them.
Hey Scott, does the observation about good writers not necessarily being decent people apply to the War Nerd? I mean, he is a great writer, but I get the impression that he would be a bit obnoxious in real life. Have you ever met him?
Posting awesome Chinese propaganda is kind of bad. Fortunately, an anti-CCP group called Shen Yun (which the Chinese Government accuses of being a cult just because they are kind of actually a cult) also produces awesome, colorful, artistic propaganda that one could link to.
To add some context on Māori health in NZ (note I am no expert and am steelmanning the position of race-conscious healthcare here)
-- While one way of viewing this from the US context is covid vaccination prioritisation, you could also view it in the context of something like the Indian health service, which is perhaps a more familiar but also much more comprehensive allocation of government resources towards a particular ethnic group's health.
-- It is likely that Māori and Pacific people, like many formally isolated indigenous groups, are genetically susceptible to various diseases.
-- There is widespead support for the view that beyond any practical concerns about efficiency we must redress previous wrongs to Māori given NZ's history. For example Treaty of Waitangi settlements (basically reparations) have fairly broad support accross the political spectrum. Health resources and equity are significant in the sense that in many cases provision of health (hospitals) and education (schools) were explicitly traded by tribes in exchange for land, to the government of the time (generally this provision was inadequate or non-existant).
I am similarly sceptical about this implementation, and definitely agree it seems advocates are weaselly wanting to have it both ways ('it's absolutely essential for equity', but 'it will also have almost no impact'). If it's going to happen authorities should be open about it and explicit about the rules and likely impact. For example, another controversial thing occuring in NZ is that Māori and Pacific are eligible for free flu vaccination at a younger age (55+) compared to everyone else (65+), but this seems much more acceptable to me, given evidence that flu susceptibility in Māori and Pacific people has a strong genetic component.
I don't know about the notion that if AARO had Title 50 authority, they could "demand" classified information from the intelligence community (IC). Well, I guess they could demand it, but IC members can still not share it. Also, the IC can (and does) share lots of information with the DOD (which is mostly Title 10) all the time. That webpage looks like it was written by someone who doesn't understand how all the inside baseball works. It's not like they'll suddenly get a golden key to the secrets. IC members don't even share everything with each other (or internally). They share some things and not others. Likewise, they share some things and not others with the DOD.
I don't know anything about the AARO, but it's not clear to me that they wouldn't already have Title 50 authorities, seeing as they were created under 50 U.S. Code § 3373 and they report to the PDDNI (as well as somewhere in the DOD). It wouldn't be surprising if they had both. The NSA, for example, can operate under either authority, depending on the situation.
Unless I've seriously misunderstood the news reports, the situation with ethnic priority on surgery waitlists in New Zealand is quite funny, in that:
Ethnicity was Already a factor taken into account in the algorithm for these surgery waitlists. This latest change makes ethnicity Less important in the algorithm than was previously the case, and raises importance of other various poverty indicators. But because this is the first most people have heard of it, so it has had a huge impact in the news and political spheres.
All of which is not to say anything in particular about it on the object level, but it's funny how these things end up happening.
Dan Carlin in his Mongol empire series explores the question of Hitler vs Ghengis Khan. If i remember correctly, he pretty much chalks it up to the amount of time that has passed, which seems very reasonable to me. Who knows what people will think of the Nazis in 600 years, although I feel like the fact that we have photos definitely changes the way we’re going to look at history in the distant future.
The War Nerd mention reminded me of my favorite War Nerd quote
"The truth about the clash of civilizations you hear people discussing is that it’s all the other way: The Mall is invading Islam, the Mall is taking over. "
In Boris Johnson's article he says he was losing 4 to 5 pounds a week. That's a lot. Too much in fact. Healthy weight loss can't really outpace 2 pounds a week. I wonder if his side effects were caused by Ozempic-induced undereating which didn't become noticeable until he lost enough weight that it became difficult for his fat stores to make up the deficit in real time.
I've suspected this may be a risk for semaglutide for a while but haven't looked to see if it's addressed anywhere.
Glad to see that I achieved the height of rationalist interior design sophomore year of college. If anyone is actually interested in architecture and interior design (and city planning) from what could be argued is a rationalist point of view, I suggest A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein. A bit idealistic and of its time (1977) but some really good ideas and a useful way of thinking about the topic.
"After 40 years of moral failure, 40 years of weakness in the face of temptation — of akrasia — I was going to acquire a new and invincible chemical willpower."
That's maybe the most mainstream context I've seen the word "akrasia" used in, I thought that was mostly rationalist jargon still.
China is a country with lots of people who, like normal people in any other country, like to make cool things. I think it's unnecessary to link a random drone show to political drama just because the CCP is what Americans primarily associate China with.
Isn't there also an increased chance of insanity with greater IQ? Is this reflected in the "positive" outcome results?
Re: lab grown meat
I cannot see how anything thinks lab grown meat is somehow safer, cleaner, more environmentally friendly, etc than actual meat. I've repeatedly noted that the overhead costs and supply chain issues associated with lab growing anything are enormous. The capability is nil. The possibility of fuckery is enormous - real world meat actually requires a functional animal whereas lab grown meat just requires a mass of cells. Cancer cells grow really fast, don't they?
I think the main reason not to believe Grusch on aliens is this: "Grusch claimed the first UFO case he was briefed on involved a vehicle downed in Italy in 1933; the Mussolini government had allegedly kept it in storage until near the end of World War II. Pope Pius XII “back-channeled” the existence of the object to the United States, which obtained it in 1944 or 1945." https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/the-ufo-whistleblower-is-back-with-more-crazy-claims.html
Re: 8: I think context is another big component of the difference in historical legacies. The Mongols weren't actually that much worse (by modern moral standards) than contemporary states, just more successful. Yes, if you found yourself on the pointy end of the conquest, you would have a very bad day and end up dead, but that was true no matter which empire was doing the conquering. Their policies concerning conquered territories were quite fair for the day, and in some respects their conquests were better off than under nearly any contemporary alternative. I would even argue that Genghis's policy of blanket religious freedom was among the most liberal policies ever instituted by any state prior to the industrial period (though the competition for that includes things like "fine, you heathens can exist but we're going to tax you extra" or "we will pretend you don't exist as an alternative to having you all killed," so this is more an indictment of religious freedom policy in pre-industrial states). Possibly by accident, their warmaking philosophy also dovetails with the modern understanding (at least, by people who understand war, as opposed to people who complain about it existing on Twitter) - that war is a fundamentally and inescapably awful thing, that trying to unilaterally make it cuddly and nice just prolongs the suffering, and that it's thus better to start out being exactly as brutal as you need to be to win quickly.
By contrast, the Nazis were not only much worse than their contemporaries, but (especially in hindsight) notably worse than nearly any historical precedent. The Mongol Empire was, in broad strokes, a monarchy conquering other monarchies; Nazi Germany was an authoritarian state invading mostly democratic states. The Mongol Empire mostly stopped killing people on a systematic level once the conquest was over; Nazi Germany very famously did the opposite of that. The only real points of commonality is that they were both expansionist empires (which... isn't actually very unusual in history, because everyone wants more stuff) who killed a bunch of people.
> the Mongols have disappeared from history so thoroughly that nobody can imagine them presenting a renewed threat
Hmmm:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM8dCGIm6yc
> [Boris Johnson] a shockingly good writer. I’d long since absorbed that bad people can be good-looking, or charismatic speakers. But I guess I implicitly thought of good writing as some sort of protected sphere only available to people with unusual clarity of thought. Nope, seems like skilled politicians can come across as hyper-likeable in their writing ...
Wait, what? What kind of non-sequitur is that? Why do you assume that Johnson isn't actually highly intelligent and – yes! - clear-thinking in matters unrelated to politics? The effective practice of politics might just rely on difficult skills largely unrelated to intelligence and clarity of thought, as we judge the those things in other areas of life.
>21 seems so opposed to the Supreme Court ruling its hard to believe they occurred at about the same time
>16: The Confederate States of America needed a navy, but they didn’t have much of an ironworking or shipbuilding industry. And if all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail. Thus was born the cottonclad warship.
Strangely, the first submarine to successfully sink an enemy ship was built by the CSA!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Hunley_(submarine)
There's also a vague pop culture trend in fiction where the Confederacy is associated with weird futuristic contraptions (The Great War series by Harry Turtledove, that crappy Wild Wild West movie starring Will Smith). Any reason for this, or is it just that they're usually the villains and thus enjoy a technological edge (as per TVTropes' "Technologically Advanced Foe" trope)?
I wonder if Boris Johnson really wrote all of that.
> the government has lots of techniques for strong-arming companies into getting what they want.
This is hardly limited to social media companies. The government has great power to strong-arm all sorts of companies to do what it wants, regardless of the law. This power is much greater if the target company is large - there are more pressure points the government can threaten, and there are fewer competitors to refuse to do what the government wants. Most people seem to assume that the government tries to keep companies from becoming "too large", but it seems the government generally prefers large companies that are more subject to government influence.
About item 4, IQ and positive life outcomes: I read only the abstract of the cited article, but it sounds like when they calculated correlation between IQ and positive life outcomes they did not consider the problem of IQ being correlated with a bunch of other things that probably also predict each other, and predict IQ.
"We found that ability measured in youth has a positive association with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life."
Don't you think that if they had treated IQ as one of their dependent variables instead of the independentone they would have found that parental education [or income] has a positive association with child's IQ later in life and with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life?
Or that child's health, measured in youth, has a positive association with childhood IQ and with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life?
The point is, there are all these good things that stick together: IQ, parental education (no doubt pretty highly correlated with kid's eventual education level, parental wealth ( no doubt pretty highly correlated with kid's eventual wealth), occupational outcomes, health, social outcomes. No doubt there is causality operating both ways for many of them. If your parents are poor you are less likely to get various kinds of enrichment activities, such as time with parents, travel, great toys, great preschools, etc. That alone probably makes you less likely to be able to give the correct answer on various IQ test items. Lower IQ means on average lower education level and income. If you're poor, you're likely to be less likely to be healthy as a kid, and probably later as a grown-up as well. If you have a low IQ you're less likely to be healthy when you grow up, because you will probably also be poorer, and less able to find and understand good info about measures that preserve health. Etc. Etc.
I'm not sure what the solution is regarding how so many of the good things are glommed together, but ignoring the glomming surely isn't it. And I don't see how you can make inferences about causality in a situation like this.
All good Italian food was made in America? And I thought the delusional West Coast Americans couldn’t get any more delusional.
How much time have you spent out of the United States?
Note that "jawboning" is an existing term, that article didn't invent it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_suasion#Jawboning
Although, that article is using it in a more restrictive way, whereas the sense given in the linked Wikipedia article includes things that are more legitimate.
Re: the Belgian genocide-inciter - 8 years in prison seems really light for inciting genocide! According to Wikipedia he was sentenced to 12 years because he agreed to testify against other suspects who incited genocide, and then went to serve his sentence in Italy (where he was a citizen because his dad was Italian) and was released early against international law.
Man, how can you mention AARO and not mention what it stands for -- the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. What a cool name.
If you want to read more about this, J.B. Crawford over at Computers are Bad wrote three recent articles about it:
https://computer.rip/2023-02-14-something-up-there-pt-I.html
https://computer.rip/2023-02-17-something-up-there-pt-II.html
https://computer.rip/2023-06-07-something-up-there---nasa-and-uaps.html
The most conclusive studies re: polyamory will (or might) be if it continues as a high-status orientation long enough for researchers to identify if lifestyle-desistance rates correlate with age, having children, home purchase, career advancement, etc. Anecdotally, there are couples who continue to identify as poly even after ceasing to be “active,” as it were. To what degree does it mimic the 60s counterculture “free love” movement? And/or to what degree is it a convenient political-seeming identifier in a sexual marketplace that was already trending toward acceptance of dating multiple partners simultaneously before you “committed” to someone?
>Robert Bigelow who owned Skinwalker Ranch is the same guy who founded Bigelow Aerospace, an exciting-sounding private spaceflight company about which I suddenly have many more doubts.
Bigelow Aerospace no longer exists in any sense but on paper. Their IP and assets, including the BEAM module on the ISS, were bought by NASA and competitors (I've heard Lockheed and Sierra).
Re #28: Boris Johnson started his career as a journalist and was primarily known for that before he went into politics, so him writing well should be no surprise because that was literally his job. Incidentally, this is something he shares in common with Winston Churchill, who was known for his articles and books even before his first stint of political prominence in WWI.
Wow I'm in a linkpost! But I must correct: I did NOT help decorate the Inn, and furthermore I have never worked for Lightcone! I don't know why everyone always thinks this... (Oli, next to me: "You don't work for Lightcone, you are just married to Lightcone.")
#1 - Holiday World is actually pretty legit - (been there a few times, including just over a year ago). Free parking, free drinks (soda/water/etc), free sunscreen, food isn't horribly overpriced.
Not a ton of rides, by theme park standards, but the ones they do have (including 4 full sized roller coasters) are pretty good.
It's no Cedar Point, but it's genuinely a pretty nice park.
The Ars Longa, Vita Brevis movie is really nice work, but I kept noticing things that looked anachronistic to me and realizing that various objects in the environment were clearly modern machine-made items (which should probably not have been available in this setting). ROT13 examples: gur nypurzvfg'f pybguvat frrzf gb or znqr bs cynfgvp, yvxr n cynfgvp enva cbapub, juvyr gur fbyqvre'f pybguvat unf n mvccre. And also gur wnef naq furyirf ybbx fb erthyne naq flzzrgevpny gung gurl frrz gb unir orra pyrneyl znqr ol n znpuvar. And also gur nypurzvfg'f zrqnyyvba vf pyrneyl ynfre-cevagrq. And other things...
Maybe this is one of those examples about how having higher resolution videos makes things look unrealistic that would have been totally fine at a lower resolution. Maybe with a lower-quality video, we just would not have been able to see these details, so there would be no apparent conflict with the setting.
In the interest of empiricism, I just tried re-watching a few scenes at the lowest video quality available on YouTube, and I actually found that it did look much more convincing! Maybe I should suggest this to people who want to watch it, and you can just try to convince yourself that something about difficult relations between Russia and other countries led to this fine movie somehow only being available in low resolution. (Or, it was recorded by the alchemist's magic security camera hundreds of years ago...)
This is really not meant as a slight against the film-makers' efforts. I agree with Scott that this is impressive and I thought the acting and cinematography were great. The set and costumes are kind of great too, it's just that, when you look at them closely enough, they're not convincingly "period".
"all good “Italian” food was invented in America"
Forget about Culture Wars this here is the most controversial thing Scott ever said. I hope he has an anti-fork vest because italians are going to be mad.
8. Genghis Khan, like Alexander the Great, is mainly so well liked because generations of succeeding rulers legitimized their rule through descent from him. This lasted into the 20th century. So you have centuries of propaganda about how great he is. In contrast, Hitler lost and even fascist movements aren't eager to claim descent from his ideas.
The more interesting case is Attila who went from being a similar figure in medieval Europe (he shows up in a lot of sagas and stories) to being forgotten as his use as a tool of legitimacy disappeared. And then when historians turned back to the Classics he became the widely loathed figure he is today.
23. The idea this was a display of power is a bit reaching. There's no reason to believe that this isn't simply some local government diverting part of the fireworks budget to a more modern show. East Asians love fireworks at festivals and I'm sure the people who watched this loved it too. But the idea it's some kind of military display is... weird.
The drone light show was invented in the EU by a bunch of artists, the industry is still concentrated in the west, and the technology is widespread, common, and can be openly purchased. And it's never used cutting edge drones or anything that would be all that useful militarily. Which is how, for example, the Gulf States got them. It's also being pushed in a lot of big cities worldwide as being more environmentally friendly.
Unless I'm missing something this is a bit like saying, "Cities all over China are stockpiling large amounts of gunpowder devices near Lunar New Year. What could they be planning!?" I guess fireworks or drone shows might have some incidental application to military power. But I have a hard time seeing it.
27. It gets better. The German Black Bee was a pure invention. In reality it's the same species they have in Poland and the surrounding nations. But they invented a new breed to say it was totally different. However, they also carved out an exemption for the Catholics to keep their Carniolans. And as a result post-pandemic the repopulation was done partly through crossbreeding and partly through Carniolans propagating north. There's probably some metaphor in there.
As you might expect, this was a way for the Party to insert itself into this industry. The racial purity laws as applied to agriculture served as a form of control for Nazi Party members in the countryside as well as giving opportunities for control and to reward favored constituents through breeding licenses and other favors. The Nazis wanted to assert Party control over every aspect of the economy.
28. Boris Johnson is a somewhat well known Classicist and literary figure. Nothing huge. But enough that before he was a Brexiteer or much more than a minor politician he was participating in debates and exchanges about those subjects. It doesn't surprise me he's good at it. It's a skill like any other.
One of the things I am grateful for early on is the degree to which all the art teachers I knew always hammered in: Yes, gifted people exist, but at the end of the day it's mostly a skill. And even gifted people need a lot of training. There's this weird myth (and a very old one) that art springs naturally from the soul rather than being a craft and, to put it even more prosaically, a job.
31. I do sometimes feel like we're living after the gold rush. There's a few stars getting made out there but it seems like the height of Scott Alexander style blogging fame was about a decade ago when places like Vox or content creators like Channel Awesome really seemed (for all their flaws) like they were doing something that could succeed more traditional media. Now it seems like all the long form content producers have been around for a decade and the rising stars are the short formers doing TikToks etc.
I have no direct evidence any of that's true. Just a feeling. But it is worth noting that one thing Vine, TikTok, etc have is discoverability and the ability to go viral. And it seems like Twitter, FB, even Instagram are just less discoverability platforms. I'm not sure if there's a good method for longform to go that route outside of Youtube/TikTok clipping.
#10 is a great example of helicopter parenting becoming a de-facto legal requirement, to the great harm of both the parents and children, but also yet another opportunity to criticize city design that makes ANYONE walking ANYWHERE into borderline dangerous activity. America is gonna have to take an L here, I'm afraid.
I'm surprised to see that you would link to that silly "Italian food is actually American" article.
It's a classic: some random historian wants to get their name out their so they come up with a controversial sounding theory and get published in all the papers. Then a bunch of other historians come out and say no, that's stupid, but the publicity is already gained.
Except in this case no one really cares that much about food history, and people don't really like snobby Italian foodies so this nonsense has just persisted and I see this link used as evidence all the time.
"Man of one Study" should be enough on its own to instinctively distrust anything like this, and this guy doesn't even have a study! He just has this one interview and a history of trolling Italians. It's amusing, but I really wish people would stop spreading it like gospel
About #18: There used to be whatsbetter.com with the same idea. E.g. the Backstreet Boys are better than stomach cancer: https://web.archive.org/web/20041225003404/http://whatsbetter.com:80/display.pyt?item=100&item=16082
Oh, and PS, here's their top ten list: https://web.archive.org/web/20050204084900/http://whatsbetter.com/ranklist.pyt
1. The Best Thing You Can Imagine (724)
2. Love (647)
3. Being Loved (644)
4. Sex (627)
5. The Big O (580)
6. A Stack Of $100 Bills (576)
7. A Sense of Humor (502)
8. Romance (495)
9. Monty Python The Holy Grail (490)
10. Free Money (490)
Elo Everything reminds me of Earth Reviews. https://neal.fun/earth-reviews/
#11: in Os Maias, the best-known Portuguese realist novel, written in 1888 by Eça de Queiroz, one of the plot points is the opposition between "English" (supposedly based on outdoorsiness, exercise, contact with nature, and overall autonomy and exploration) and "Portuguese" (supposedly based on physical protection, lack of contact with the outdoors, memorization) ways of bringing up children. Protagonist Carlos receives the former, while his father Pedro and secondary character Eusebiozinho receive the latter.
8. There's a history of libertarianism I can't find efficiently (hour long from reason.com) which says that libertarianism started as an abolitionist movement, but was mysteriously silent during the civil rights movement. Perhaps there is some explanation for why toxic conservatives are attracted to libertarianism these days.
10. In Switzerland kids are supposed to got to school and even oldest year on kindergarten by themselves starting at about 6. It’s not just permitted, it is customary. Kids can take trains and buses by themselves.
I'm in favour of children having independence when they're ready for it, but perhaps worth pointing out that the UK, where most children start travelling to school independently from around 10, has a much higher proportion of pedestrian deaths as a total of total child road deaths (a majority are pedestrian deaths.) And of course these peak with school start and ending times. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/442236/child-casualties-2013-data.pdf
Of course these are raw data, and direct comparisons to the US (which has a higher overall death rate) aren't really possible. And fortunately road traffic deaths have declined in recent years; though in part this may be due to increasingly protective parents.
Re #8, I find the level of Napoleon worship and apologism on the modern internet extremely offensive. No doubt, Napoleon was an extremely able man, both as a soldier and an administrator, and the economic reforms he imposed generally upon Europe were vastly for the better.
But, his wars slaughtered millions and inflicted incalculable suffering on millions more. These wars were largely borne from his ego and his inability to tolerate neutral powers.
And yet, the extent to which ‘the kids’ (if you’ll forgive the very imprecise term) now idolize him makes me think the likes of Hitler and Stalin might be next, or if not them then their most brilliant subordinates, no heroes any of them.
As to Humphrey Appleby:
> as another example my department does PhD admissions on a point system and being from a favored race has historically brought an automatic and hefty point bonus. Next year I can walk into graduate admissions committee and say ‘we cannot do this, its illegal.’ [from the DSL link]
That was explicitly illegal before. It isn't more illegal after the recent ruling. If anything, this example suggests that the ruling has no effect. (Since, obviously, the earlier ruling that awarding a numeric bonus for certain racial statuses is illegal had no effect.)
> 7. [...] Seems like a good time to remind everyone that all good “Italian” food was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters.
The linked article is paywalled, so could someone please fill me in whether this is a case of
a) American hubris combined with ignorance about the rest of the world, or
b) Americans preferring American variations of a dish and therefore the best dishes must be American inventions; e.g., California rolls => sushi is American.
28: (boris Johnson writing) - yes, that’s in part why he was PM. His columns in the telegraph were famously well written, and often quite funny. He also used to appear on Tv a lot, including game shows and quizzes, or comedic reports on the weeks politics. These shows tend to need razor sharp wit, and while Johnson wasn’t as smart as the comedians he held his own, or engaged in that endearing (and probably fake) self depreciation, along with his trademark stutter.
I don’t like the Tories and think he’s a buffoon now, but I liked him well enough then.
22: Seems like Harvard doesn't expect to be changing much. They sent this maximally cynical email hours after the decision: https://twitter.com/EdWhelanEPPC/status/1674446843311423489?s=20
"The Court also ruled that colleges and universities may consider in admissions decisions 'an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.' We will certainly comply with the Court’s decision."
>8: If it’s bad to romanticize the Nazis, why do people still romanticize Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes? One possible answer: there’s still some tail risk of a Nazi resurgence, but the Mongols have disappeared from history so thoroughly that nobody can imagine them presenting a renewed threat, leaving us free to wax poetic about them as a symbol of savage manliness or whatever.
I hear that the Mongol Empire did provide some pretty substantial benefits via safe long-distance land commerce (though this may have worsened the Black Death as well). The Nazis weren't really around long enough to do that, and also highwaymen were basically dead by then anyway.
The other real-talk answer is "Mongols were mostly in Asia and thus fargroup dynamics". You look at Eastern media and there's not nearly the same Nazi taboo.
Re: 2. When I was a student I had a quick stint as a telemarketer. Typical humor during lunch breaks would involve who had gotten the most outrageous name on the line.
I grew up in the western US, and my families on both sides are heavily into agriculture. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that Italy doesn't have a lot of factory farming with regard to meat production. I've mostly paid attention to cattle - Wyoming kid. They tend not to be grazed, unless we are talking about those released in the summer in the Alps. I have *never* seen a large feedlot here, and I live in the Po Valley, the breadbasket of Italy.
That said, the kneejerk reaction of Italians to ban new tech/things is on target.
Re Wisconsin veto: why bother with crossing out the 20? I think it would have been even funnier to prolong the school funding until the year 202425.
"I think of this in the context of the US COVID vaccine prioritization effort; not only did it cause hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths by giving vaccines to young healthy low-risk members of favored groups before old sick high-risk members of disfavored ones"
Hundreds of thousands as in > 200,000 (more than a sixth of total official COVID deaths)? Can you explain how you get this? It seems implausible to me because 1) the entire period of vaccine scarcity was only about four months 2) the US vaccinated 2/3 or 65+ in those months so the upside from better targeting seems limited. The link itself doesn't make this claim as far as I can tell.
> all good “Italian” food was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters.
The link is very interesting, but it does not say that.
(also, it contains at least one error: Tiramisù is made with Savoiardi, which are centuries old, and not Pavesini which indeed are from the postwar period)
Some more views on affirmative action!
https://clarkecollegeinsight.substack.com/p/affirmative-action-is-probably-mostly
Are we allowed or encouraged to cite other links in these threads? I'll take a chance, and post a link to a news article about someone in the UK who was encouraged by his "AI girlfriend" to attempt to commit murder, well treason actually as his intended target was the late Queen!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12270187/Moment-self-styled-assassin-tried-kill-late-Queen-arrested.html
Brief extract:
"Jaswant Singh Chail, 21, outlined his plan to an artificial intelligence-generated chatbot, before setting out on Christmas Day in 2021 to target the monarch.
The Replika app, which is marketed as an 'AI companion who cares', encouraged the then-teenager, saying his plan was 'very wise', before motivating his fantasy by telling him: 'You can do it' and 'we have to find a way'."
I predict with high confidence that Italy banning lab meat is only the beginning of a huge worldwide disruption and conflict. Parts of nearly all economies, and some entire economies, depend on meat production.
In fighting their downfall, they'll inevitably use names like "clone meat", "fake meat" and the like, as opposed to their own "real meat" or "natural meat". And their opponents will inevitably respond with names like "torture meat" or "murder meat", as opposed to their own "clean meat" or "modern meat" or so. Mutual denigration makes for bitter conflict, and huge economic disruption fuels it.
So it's another huge culture war, on a global scale, on top of the increasing AI disruption.
> But I guess I implicitly thought of good writing as some sort of protected sphere only available to people with unusual clarity of thought.
Did you never encounter Malcolm Gladwell? He's a world-class writer. He might be a world-class thinker too, but in, shall we say, the other direction.
The other example that would leap to my mind of someone whose good writing disguises shoddy thinking is Eliezer Yudkowsky, but I wouldn't expect that opinion to be widely shared here.
Re. #13 Despite the Eye of Sauron's much increased attention, in Russia it's basically business as usual. Shitty czars and shitty wars have been around since the beginning of times, and being too worried about that doesn't do anybody much good.
> Suspicious detail: the colonel saying UFOs are real is named “Karl Nell”.
OK, what piece of context am I missing? Why is that suspicious?
> the Mongols have disappeared from history so thoroughly that nobody can imagine them presenting a renewed threat
Anyone remember SN-risk?
> Here are various articles talking about how anyone who is against this system lacks context on how it won’t work that way, plus also it already works this way so nothing will change, plus it will revolutionize health equity so you’d have to be a monster to object, plus it will make no difference so anyone who protests is just manufacturing fake outrage.
Kettle logic at its finest! 😂
"Yet another study finds a monotonic relationship between IQ and positive life outcomes, ie there isn’t some point where IQ stops being good (or turns bad). I will keep hammering this in until people stop promoting that one bad Swedish study that found the opposite."
I was just over on the sub-reddit and there's a post there about loneliness, and a not insignificant number of the comments are from people claiming to be Hikikomori (unemployed, socially isolated). That seems to imply a much higher rate in this community than I'd expect you'd find in most other communities.
I also can't help thinking about Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, the French existentialist and everybody else that fits the sad philosopher stereotype. Newton was also a weird maladapted guy, and was far from unique among great physicists in that regard.
It's just difficult to believe outlier intelligence isn't sometimes damaging to people, or at least correlated with some negative outcomes.
Something I haven't seen pointed out is that if you 'believe the science' that FTL travel is impossible and aren't engaged in magical thinking of 'wormholes' or other ways of getting around that impossibility, doesn't that pretty much negate the possibility of UFOs, or at the very least severely limit what kind of threat they can be?
Regardless of the last few years, the algorithm on Twitter for Substack links has certainly changed in the last few months, as Musk was incredibly mad at the release of the (obviously inconsequential) Notes. Musk made it so we can’t embed Tweets on Substack, and image previews are still purposefully prevented for Substack posts. I think the search for the word “Substack” (which used to turn up actual Substack links) might still be down. And anecdotally, the surest way to make something not go viral is to include a Substack link. Meanwhile, Threads, an actual competitor, is allowed up AFAIK
Really feeling the downsides of chronological comments sorting today. I have longer thoughts on these points, yet waiting until after work today pretty much guarantees they get buried anyway. So here's the slapdash version after only half-reading the relevant links:
> 9: [...] I appreciate the What Is To Be Done section. Relevant breaking news: judge issues preliminary injunction banning Biden administration officials from meeting social media site representatives.
First Amendment protections in the US are very strong, and I'm generally in favor of making them stronger. That said, there are a wide range of plausible policies for how government officials ought to be allowed to interact with media companies and I'm deeply skeptical that any policy designed for immediate implementation will do more than strike against current political enemies.
> 19: [...] but only in the sense that Nevada Senator Harry Reid threw lots of money and government-sponsored prestige at random crazy people in his state, because he was either gullible or corrupt).
I need to read more about the details, but prima facie I strongly object to calling this corruption - that's a term better reserved for when a politician uses their power for personal enrichment, and no, "making people like them so they get re-elected" doesn't count. This is a question of systemic weakness rather than personal failings: democracy is vulnerable to concentrated gains paid for with distributed losses, and voters in general react far more strongly to the threat of losing something than to reward patronage. Soaking the country's coffers to throw random money at your constituents is a basic strategy and you should expect politicians to use it without reference to personal characteristics.
(Yes, this is "pork". And at a step deeper, banning pork can sometimes cause worse problems than it solves because it removes a tool for negotiating consensus whose absense we're now feeling. And ofc if any of those randos were Reid's cousin or whatever this goes back to being Grade-A corruption.)
>21: This month in social justice
I think I've settled to the stance that I'm categorically against any form of affirmative action that refuses to quantify (or at least try to document) the magnitude of the preference. I can support the concept in theory, but seeing the size of the effect in college admissions is a notable case of where my opinion on a political topic was sharply changed by empirical data.
>26: Line-Item Veto
Classic case where I'm offended by the abuse of an executive power, and for the sake of consistency I support a ban on the practice to begin in the immediate unpredictable future.
> 30: Amtrak Pricing
Amtrak is like airlines in that prices fluctuate dramatically based on timing. IME prices start to significantly rise two weeks before travel date; it's not hard to get tickets for the NYC-BOS route for well under a hundred if you plan accordingly. There's also a wrinkle in that if someone buys a particular seat in advance for a low price but then cancels, that seat will go up for sale (temporarily?) at the price they paid for it at the time.... so it's entirely possible to get a business-class ticket for $60 the night before if you get *really* lucky.
Kayak makes their edge by buying in volume in advance, but the end customer pays for it through a loss of flexibility. You buy from a third party, good luck getting customer support from Amtrak. Same deal as for airlines.
Re: #7,
Neapolitan/NYC >> Detroit.
That is all.
Regarding #10, I think it depends on whether the town has any laws on the book limiting kids walking around unaccompanied.
If there are (stupidly) laws against that, then the usual caveats against blatantly breaking stupid laws apply. If there aren't, I guess that there is little the cops can do besides driving them home.
Also, I would be reluctant to call the US cops into any situation which does not call for more guns. (I don't think they would be likely to shoot an unarmed six year old, but also don't think they are well-trained to handle such situations).
If I were the type of person to notice a distressed lone four year old (which is a situation which calls for some intervention), I guess I would find a nearby woman and ask her to talk to them. If one wanted to involve the state, Child Protective Services would be the obvious branch. (Yes, they may in turn involve the police, but they likely have more experience in the typical outcomes.)
Regarding #26, Wisconsin, this seems totally bollocks. If you allow the governor to turn 2024-2025 into 2045 (why not go for year 20242025 while you are at it?), what is to stop them from selectively striking out letters and blanks in some bill to form some arbitrarily different, shorter text?
Even if you don't allow the striking of parts of words, in equilibrium the legislative will optimize for laws which meanings can not be maliciously altered by omitting words (so, no "nots").
If you have to have vetos, I think the ability to nope an entire bill should be sufficient (if you disallow mixing budget bills with random unrelated legislation). If the executive wants any changes to the bill, let them cut a deal with the legislative about it.
The link for Santa Claus, Indiana, goes to Santa Claus, Georgia. And Holiday World in Santa Claus, Indiana, is great!
Your response on polyamory and happiness is straight up No True Scotsman.
Not happy with the lifestyle? Well that's because you're only a lukewarm polyamorist. The ~real~ polyamorists I know are all perfectly happy.
4. "monotonic relationship between IQ and positive life outcomes"
--High IQ allows one to navigate society with greater wealth and fewer restrictions(due to IQ and $$$). Some end up suffering 'affluencenza.'
--If we define "positive life outcomes" as stemming from healthy relationships how much advantage do smarts actually provide? Are such folks more inclined to be *durably* empathic and moral?
--I have read over the years and am open to disagreement that smarties tend to be more invested in ego and have larger 'blind spots.' False generalization?
[ARGUMENT WITHDRAWN]
"8: If it’s bad to romanticize the Nazis, why do people still romanticize Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes?"
Plausible parallel: Why didn't we hold the Soviets responsible for genocide as we did 30s Germany? Russia won. So did G. Khan.
"Boris Johnson on semaglutide. Posted not because his opinion is especially good (although honestly it’s better than many people’s), but because he’s a shockingly good writer."
Well, yes; Boris isn't stupid, he's just an idiot (that is, ambitoius, power-hungry, lacking in scruples or principles and cursed with a bonus extra-large helping of 'politician can't keep his trousers zipped', to the point where nobody, not even BoJo, is sure how many kids he has/had/might have had were it not for the abortion). He's 'Eton and Oxford' and that's not just because of legacy admissions or family connections.
Much as I dislike him, he is (sigh) one of my co-religionists (again, at least for now) and he is capable of performing academically:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k448JqQyj8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzJQ0TcBmqU
He is also one-eighth Turkish, through his great-grandfather Ali Kemal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxYSkyP9HrQ
9. "government has lots of techniques for strong-arming companies"
If, as I'm suggesting, the U.S. is more oligarchy than democracy then who's calling the shots?
The elite(top 10% progressively, Turchin '23), amongst which are the high IQ and those that employ & fund such. See #4 as "positive life outcomes" defined as power and comfort.
Drone shows are pretty common these days - I've seen two in person, in the US and Australia. The one in your video is nicely produced, with complicated paths for the drones, but it's hardly a demonstration of technological might.
Freddie DeBoer:
> They did send me a single giant .txt file which contained a badly-mangled version of the blog posts, each one repeated three or four times in the file and filled with weird characters and broken formatting; I rescued a couple of posts, and each time it took me north of four hours.
For anyone who has a problem like this: this is the sort of constrained task that GPT-3/4 excels at - where it's 'obvious' what you mean but also the garbage is too varied to fix with some regexps or by hand. Whether it's bad YouTube auto-transcriptions or mangled PDF OCR, a quick "Fix the bad formatting" in a GPT prompt will work wonders, and then you can give it a quick skim to check that it didn't over-prosify or screw up some especially unusual technical vocabulary, and you're g2g. Forget 4 hours, it'll be more like 4 minutes.
Regarding #10, it doesn't just take one person calling the police on a 6 year-old walking to school for it to be impossible. It also depends on neither the 911 service nor the police nor anyone else telling that person off for wasting their time when there is actual crime to attend to.
On link 9.
https://hartmannreport.com/p/how-trump-putin-and-the-gop-plan-fd2?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Elo Everything: Which do you rank higher, Bayesian Statistics or Utopia?
Me: They're the same picture.
>10: I used to work as a school bus driver. As a matter of school district policy, I was prohibited from dropping off first graders (6-7 year olds) unless there was a guardian present at the stop. Even if that "stop" was the bottom of their own driveway. And no, older siblings on the same bus didn't count as a "guardian" (although to make it all even more arbitrary, middle school age siblings I had dropped off earlier did).
The article on Italian food is quite clear in the details that the dishes originate from Italy but with misunderstood histories. Interpreting them as being really American in origin is the same nonsense rewriting of the past but for America's benefit. It's also not really about Italian cuisine but about a small number of dishes that are familiar to Americans who don't know much.
10. They must have been quick on the draw *and* persistent, because that is a short walk.
7. On this topic, I recommend the book Delizia!: The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food by John Dickie. He argues from the outset that the casting of familiar dishes as rural tradition is a marketing fabrication, that Italian food as we know it is "city food" (However, while some dishes are American in origin, many are not). The segments covering medieval Italy were particularly interesting (in part because of how unrecognizable it is from modern Italian) and full of amusing anecdotes about influential cooks of the time.
26. Thanks to this, I will be hearing Zager and Evans in my head all day.
The cottonclad warship reminds me of this question about splinter protection on wooden ships: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/68259/did-age-of-sail-fighting-vessels-have-any-anti-spall-technology
I wonder how effective it was at preventing that.
So ... I have acquired my first SubStack subscriber! I am very excited! But I also don't have a Substack of my own (I just read and comment ...) so I don't know what is going on. A bot? Anyone have any ideas?
Are cottonclads necessarily a stupid idea? Coincidentally, I was reading "Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down" the other day. There's a passage at the end of Chapter 6 on whether protecting US army vehicles with chicken feathers might be a good idea.
Here is Boris Johnson's speech to the UN - in 2019, shortly after becoming PM - about technological progress:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaN-MbGV4dY
I’ve ubered from Mexico City to Puebla before, which came in under 100 usd. If there’s a few of you, intercity Ubers are viable.
re #18 It's fun to see how the rankings on ELO Everything have changed after Scott set us loose on it:
#15 => #1: Intelligence (+14)
#24 => #2: Wisdom (+22)
#70 => #3: Truth (+67)
#79 => #4: Women's rights (+75)
#82 => #5: Mathematical optimization (+77)
#105 => #6: Transistor (+99)
#108 => #7: Rationalism (+101)
#111 => #8: Missionary position (+103)
#119 => #9: Justice (+110)
#127 => #10: Utopia (+117)
#136 => #11: Aurora (+125)
#140 => #12: Circumstellar habitable zone (+128)
#147 => #13: Social democracy (+134)
#149 => #14: School (+135)
#163 => #15: Bicycle (+148)
#168 => #16: Film (+152)
#183 => #17: Geothermal power (+166)
#185 => #18: Cat (+167)
#221 => #19: Infant (+202)
#224 => #20: Slate Star Codex (+204)
I hope that we see radiation-hardened laws, that'd be funny. Do they do this already?
I think the appeal of Genghis Khan is that the Mongols still have a reputation as sort of “noble savages” in terms of their lifestyle. There’s a masculine appeal to the idea of roaming around on your trusty horse, slinging arrows, hunting with golden eagles, etc. (American Indians were similarly romanticized, but that’s become “problematic” in a way that hasn’t caught up to the much more fargroup Mongols).
Whereas the Nazi or Soviet utopias would have been hyper modern ones, so there is less to romanticize there.
14. Given the legal issues that all the charter cities projects have run into, I'm genuinely curious what the convincing pitch is. Every one of them has eventually run aground upon a government change that brings more hostile political leadership to power.
19. Bigelow Aerospace is dead now. It basically shut down in 2020 and laid off all the employees, and then later transferred ownership of the remaining ISS module to NASA. Maybe if they'd stuck it out longer they'd be doing better (what with the talk now of commercial space stations), but they either didn't or couldn't - maybe Bigelow's money ran out.
A few skilled writers who were bad people: V.S. Naipaul (liked to beat his wife), Normal Mailer (stabbed his), William S. Burroughs (shot his, and also fucked children). Probably also bad: Rousseau, Celine, Verlaine, Pound, Wilde.
There have probably been thousands of bad people (by the morality of their own time and ours) who were very skilled writers.
On 4, for those of us without journal subscriptions, do you have the IQ range they looked at outcomes for and what the quantitative dose/response relationship actually was for the outcomes measured? Personally, I would not have expected worse outcomes at any level of high IQ, but the abstract is talking about 120+ and I was under the impression when people are talking about geniuses being lonely and crazy, they're talking more like 160+. I would personally expect diminishing returns because everything should have diminishing returns, but not negative returns.
There's also the problem that sample sizes start getting pretty small at the truly high end, though. The outcomes of all 10 people in the world or whatever who are over 180 might not mean much.
I think this discussion gets clouded a bit by people not having a clear idea of what positive life outcomes means. They see the world's richest people being reasonable smart, but not apparently super-geniuses as far as I can tell. But this is clearly confounded by the fact that the very richest people are all either fund managers or business founders. No matter your IQ, you have to actually go into those fields to ever become that wealthy. You kind of need to stratify your analysis by career choice, as in, the world's wealthiest people likely don't have the world's highest IQs, but do they at least have among the highest IQs of people who choose to found businesses?
Someone should make a dating app that matches people who have similar answers to the elo everything app
"Although I appreciated the personal story, I’m more interested in the claim that Twitter’s algorithm changed sometime in the past few years in a way that prevents stories from “going viral” in the way that they used to; does anyone know more about this?"
I don't but it matches my anecdotal impression: I feel like Twitter used to be a good place to find things to read later, via Instapaper, and now it's not.
#13: When the English subtitles come, they will simply be the original story, near verbatim.
Re 8 (Nazis vs Mongols)
As I keep trying to point out, the religious police of the Anglo (and thus indirectly the whole) world, ie the Social Scientists and Humanities, have as their theological touchstone the WW2 and specifically the Nazis. (Japanese should be in there as well, but they raise too many complicated problems that twist the hierarchy of castes into a Klein bottle…)
This means they rigorously police any and everything related to Nazis but care much less about Mongols. In much the same way that, say, the Saudi religious police care an awful lot what you say about Allah, and very little about Christological disputes as to, eg, whether Christ’s suffering was genuine or docetic.
#16: you would think these could be defeated fairly easily with some flaming tar or something, like the Greeks used to do with their built-for-ramming ships. More Union incompetence, I wager.
#21: Ibram Kendi approves. The only way to create equality is through overt discrimination that counteracts the very carefully measured impact of covert discrimination.
You should include a NSFW warning for ELO Everything.
I know nothing about Boris Johnson. But my first consideration if any political figure wrote a book, or a story, or a pamphlet, or a warning on a mattress tag is to ask "to what extent did they actually write it themselves?"
Re: 17.
This kind of post, for me, is the most useful that have ever come out of rationalist community. Not various kinds of models about how to think better, because I am like most of the people, that is very resistant to change. Changing how I think is a long-term problem and I'm not even sure that a solvable one. However, those little life hacks about how to live better, especially if you have some sort of a underlying dysfunctionality, which seems to be pretty frequent in rationalist circles, is so very useful, because this is kind of a lot of proven advice that I don't have to hunt over the internet, and it's readily applicable for everyone and anyone. More of this, please.
Noah Smith is more flip floppy on libertarians than most in mainstream
Re 30, about the intercity Uber - I did this once when my 11 pm flight from DFW to College Station was canceled after we had spent two hours on the runway waiting for fog to clear. I don't remember what excuse they had to not buy us a hotel room, but we would often prefer not to deal with the hotel they book, because it's a 30 minute drive from the airport, and they put you on the 8 am flight, and make you get to the airport 90 minutes before the flight. When we discovered that the rental car shortage meant that it was impossible to get a one-way car rental from DFW to College Station, and saw that the hotels on the airport were well over $300, we realized that it was actually cheaper to call a Lyft to drive us home (and we got a couple hours of sleep in the back seat).
It turns out that in Texas, lots of Uber/Lyft drivers are totally happy to get the intercity ride, because that guarantees them work for half of the long period, rather than several short rides with long gaps between them.
Hey Scott, does the observation about good writers not necessarily being decent people apply to the War Nerd? I mean, he is a great writer, but I get the impression that he would be a bit obnoxious in real life. Have you ever met him?
Posting awesome Chinese propaganda is kind of bad. Fortunately, an anti-CCP group called Shen Yun (which the Chinese Government accuses of being a cult just because they are kind of actually a cult) also produces awesome, colorful, artistic propaganda that one could link to.
And... I mean... it's technically not a swastika.
To add some context on Māori health in NZ (note I am no expert and am steelmanning the position of race-conscious healthcare here)
-- While one way of viewing this from the US context is covid vaccination prioritisation, you could also view it in the context of something like the Indian health service, which is perhaps a more familiar but also much more comprehensive allocation of government resources towards a particular ethnic group's health.
-- It is likely that Māori and Pacific people, like many formally isolated indigenous groups, are genetically susceptible to various diseases.
-- There is widespead support for the view that beyond any practical concerns about efficiency we must redress previous wrongs to Māori given NZ's history. For example Treaty of Waitangi settlements (basically reparations) have fairly broad support accross the political spectrum. Health resources and equity are significant in the sense that in many cases provision of health (hospitals) and education (schools) were explicitly traded by tribes in exchange for land, to the government of the time (generally this provision was inadequate or non-existant).
I am similarly sceptical about this implementation, and definitely agree it seems advocates are weaselly wanting to have it both ways ('it's absolutely essential for equity', but 'it will also have almost no impact'). If it's going to happen authorities should be open about it and explicit about the rules and likely impact. For example, another controversial thing occuring in NZ is that Māori and Pacific are eligible for free flu vaccination at a younger age (55+) compared to everyone else (65+), but this seems much more acceptable to me, given evidence that flu susceptibility in Māori and Pacific people has a strong genetic component.
I don't know about the notion that if AARO had Title 50 authority, they could "demand" classified information from the intelligence community (IC). Well, I guess they could demand it, but IC members can still not share it. Also, the IC can (and does) share lots of information with the DOD (which is mostly Title 10) all the time. That webpage looks like it was written by someone who doesn't understand how all the inside baseball works. It's not like they'll suddenly get a golden key to the secrets. IC members don't even share everything with each other (or internally). They share some things and not others. Likewise, they share some things and not others with the DOD.
I don't know anything about the AARO, but it's not clear to me that they wouldn't already have Title 50 authorities, seeing as they were created under 50 U.S. Code § 3373 and they report to the PDDNI (as well as somewhere in the DOD). It wouldn't be surprising if they had both. The NSA, for example, can operate under either authority, depending on the situation.
Unless I've seriously misunderstood the news reports, the situation with ethnic priority on surgery waitlists in New Zealand is quite funny, in that:
Ethnicity was Already a factor taken into account in the algorithm for these surgery waitlists. This latest change makes ethnicity Less important in the algorithm than was previously the case, and raises importance of other various poverty indicators. But because this is the first most people have heard of it, so it has had a huge impact in the news and political spheres.
All of which is not to say anything in particular about it on the object level, but it's funny how these things end up happening.
Dan Carlin in his Mongol empire series explores the question of Hitler vs Ghengis Khan. If i remember correctly, he pretty much chalks it up to the amount of time that has passed, which seems very reasonable to me. Who knows what people will think of the Nazis in 600 years, although I feel like the fact that we have photos definitely changes the way we’re going to look at history in the distant future.
The War Nerd mention reminded me of my favorite War Nerd quote
"The truth about the clash of civilizations you hear people discussing is that it’s all the other way: The Mall is invading Islam, the Mall is taking over. "
https://web.archive.org/web/20160610033719/https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/jihad-hyperpanda/
>but the Mongols have disappeared from history so thoroughly that nobody can imagine them presenting a renewed threat
What about Mongolia, which is inhabited by - Mongols.
In Boris Johnson's article he says he was losing 4 to 5 pounds a week. That's a lot. Too much in fact. Healthy weight loss can't really outpace 2 pounds a week. I wonder if his side effects were caused by Ozempic-induced undereating which didn't become noticeable until he lost enough weight that it became difficult for his fat stores to make up the deficit in real time.
I've suspected this may be a risk for semaglutide for a while but haven't looked to see if it's addressed anywhere.
Glad to see that I achieved the height of rationalist interior design sophomore year of college. If anyone is actually interested in architecture and interior design (and city planning) from what could be argued is a rationalist point of view, I suggest A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein. A bit idealistic and of its time (1977) but some really good ideas and a useful way of thinking about the topic.
> 28: Boris Johnson on semaglutide
"After 40 years of moral failure, 40 years of weakness in the face of temptation — of akrasia — I was going to acquire a new and invincible chemical willpower."
That's maybe the most mainstream context I've seen the word "akrasia" used in, I thought that was mostly rationalist jargon still.
The first comparison I got for Elo Everything was Scott Aaronson vs. Scrotum.
China is a country with lots of people who, like normal people in any other country, like to make cool things. I think it's unnecessary to link a random drone show to political drama just because the CCP is what Americans primarily associate China with.
Re: IQ
Isn't there also an increased chance of insanity with greater IQ? Is this reflected in the "positive" outcome results?
Re: lab grown meat
I cannot see how anything thinks lab grown meat is somehow safer, cleaner, more environmentally friendly, etc than actual meat. I've repeatedly noted that the overhead costs and supply chain issues associated with lab growing anything are enormous. The capability is nil. The possibility of fuckery is enormous - real world meat actually requires a functional animal whereas lab grown meat just requires a mass of cells. Cancer cells grow really fast, don't they?
I think the main reason not to believe Grusch on aliens is this: "Grusch claimed the first UFO case he was briefed on involved a vehicle downed in Italy in 1933; the Mussolini government had allegedly kept it in storage until near the end of World War II. Pope Pius XII “back-channeled” the existence of the object to the United States, which obtained it in 1944 or 1945." https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/the-ufo-whistleblower-is-back-with-more-crazy-claims.html
Re: 8: I think context is another big component of the difference in historical legacies. The Mongols weren't actually that much worse (by modern moral standards) than contemporary states, just more successful. Yes, if you found yourself on the pointy end of the conquest, you would have a very bad day and end up dead, but that was true no matter which empire was doing the conquering. Their policies concerning conquered territories were quite fair for the day, and in some respects their conquests were better off than under nearly any contemporary alternative. I would even argue that Genghis's policy of blanket religious freedom was among the most liberal policies ever instituted by any state prior to the industrial period (though the competition for that includes things like "fine, you heathens can exist but we're going to tax you extra" or "we will pretend you don't exist as an alternative to having you all killed," so this is more an indictment of religious freedom policy in pre-industrial states). Possibly by accident, their warmaking philosophy also dovetails with the modern understanding (at least, by people who understand war, as opposed to people who complain about it existing on Twitter) - that war is a fundamentally and inescapably awful thing, that trying to unilaterally make it cuddly and nice just prolongs the suffering, and that it's thus better to start out being exactly as brutal as you need to be to win quickly.
By contrast, the Nazis were not only much worse than their contemporaries, but (especially in hindsight) notably worse than nearly any historical precedent. The Mongol Empire was, in broad strokes, a monarchy conquering other monarchies; Nazi Germany was an authoritarian state invading mostly democratic states. The Mongol Empire mostly stopped killing people on a systematic level once the conquest was over; Nazi Germany very famously did the opposite of that. The only real points of commonality is that they were both expansionist empires (which... isn't actually very unusual in history, because everyone wants more stuff) who killed a bunch of people.