"Throughout"? Nay, that was weeks beforehand. It takes time to book an appointment with a psychologist, get the gender dysphoria diagnosis, go to the pharmacy, etc.
Additionally, the contents of the post detail collected impressions over quite a long period of time, from late 2021 to present. It would have been impractical/expensive to confound this with something short lasting like ketamine!
I thought it was an interesting comment even if a bit over the top. For most people these kind of things are too passive and habituated into the background of everyday for them to notice, but for someone with psychedelic experience its no surprise a powerful hormone would alter senses in a noticeable way. You would probably hear watered down descriptions loosely akin to this pre and post E asking many MtFs with enough psychonautic experience and interest.
17. Seems hard to draw much of any conclusions about when the trend started given the massive gap in data before 1910 and between 1930 and 1980. What the hell happened to poetry at those times?
25. You will however go to hell for being a Cubs fan.
Yeah, the data in #17 seem incredibly fishy. Looks like just fitting to artefacts.
Looks like a random spread before 1930 (though with suspicious peaks at 0/25/50/75/100), then virtually nothing until 1980, then a vast amount of un-rhyming poetry collected since ~2010 or so pulling the average down. And why was there loads of poetry in one year (maybe 2015)? It's all so bizarre.
Like, look at the actual data from 1930-1980. In what world is that red trend line a fit to those dots?
The dots are individual poems. Poems with strict rhyme schemes score round numbers. ABAA is 75%. 25% is weirdly low, though.
It would be good to look at other averaging methods, like dichotomizing < 25% or maybe <= 25%, which is probably what people mean, not a switch from ABAB to ABCB.
Copyright issues for the 1930-1980 gap? And maybe people are just less likely to put those pre-1910 poets like Robert Bridges online than they are Pound and Eliot.
To Scott's point, non-rhyming doesn't equal modernism. Regular meter might be an interesting thing to measure like this, although it might be tough. Poems in iambic pentameter are going to have plenty of lines with variations, so it might be harder to see a pattern over time.
Gap is likely explained in this way: Before a certain year, poems are in the public domain and easily findable via book archives. After a certain year, poems are commonly published online. Between that is all the stuff that was published in print, but is still under copyright, and so is less available for automated searches.
17 seems like a good opportunity to pound my hobby horse that song lyrics are by far the most popular and pervasive form of poetry from the 20th Century on and it's silly to talk about poetry in general and popular poetry especially without including them.
I bow to none in my love for Pink Floyd, but shorn of David Gilmour's guitar, Roger Waters's bass, Richard Wright's keyboards, Nick Mason's drums, plus the intense studio production to which these are subjected and some occasional supplemental musicians, Pink Floyd lyrics, in and of themselves, are frankly nothing to write home about. (At least if one is writing home about *poetry*).
Pink Floyd's lyrics do work brilliantly in the specific context of their music, but genuine poetry works 𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐰𝐧. On a cold winter night, one might sit by the fire in a quiet house and read from a volume of Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, or Robert Frost. This doesn't work with the bare lyrics to "Wish You Were Here" or "Echoes", however excellently those lyrics suit Pink Floyd's music.
Music has the power to transform mediocre verse into something deeply moving. This is hardly surprising, since music can be deeply moving in and of itself. On the other hand, the greatest poetry often resists being set to music, and when people attempt to do it, the results are usually disappointing.
One often sees this surprising fact in classical music. Schubert's greatest songs, for example, tended to be settings of quite mediocre poetry that is remembered today only because of what Schubert found in it - and to which he added his own genius. In and of themselves, the poems would not have survived.
Again, I write this with no disrespect to Pink Floyd (or Bob Dylan for that matter). I love them. Just yesterday, in fact, I was enjoying the live disc from Ummagumma in my car. But I think you are making a category error here - as did the committee that awarded Dylan the Nobel for *literature* a few years ago.
If there were a Nobel Prize for *Songwriting*, Dylan would make an excellent laureate!
I'd forgotten about that, but yes, he did win a Pulitzer in 2008 for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”
Obviously the quality is going to vary pretty wildly- pop art can be uneven at the best of times and all the more so when melody and other factors can compensate for bad lyrics. But it's not like popular poetry was universally good in other eras either.
Instead, the parents who name their children Steven should learn to spell! Also, Stephen Curry's parents should have looked into the correct pronunciation of the name they gave their child.
#23. This is also true of skateboarding and has been for over two decades. Jordan’s shoe deal reworked this category and sneaker heads amplify. Consider only two people have dedicated shoe facilities at Nike. Jordan and Janoski.
It’s an interesting meeting point for urban culture and sport.
#10: Frankly this isn't very surprising to me. I'd imagine this graph correlates very strongly with the popularity of figures like Andrew Tate and etc with this age group. The amount of internet celebrities popular with teenage boys that express this kind of sexist attitude really started to take off ~2020. Would be interesting if there is any data on the popularity of those figures over time.
Supporting a society in which women get paid less than men for the same work is one thing, but actively believing that it’s actually better to pay women less for doing the same thing seems more egregiously sexist than I can believe 20% of people are.
I feel like that question is really just measuring how important boys think it is to virtue-signal that they aren’t gay liberal cucks, and apparently it has become noticeably more important to them since 2018.
IIRC the difference drops down to something like 3-5% when controlling for roles and industries, which is probably differences in negotiation.
There are things about modern feminism that annoy me (mostly how acceptable both joking and serious misandry are) but if MeToo is actually what flipped a lot of men against it, I think that says not so great things about the men that flipped.
I don't. I count myself among those that went from "feminism is overreaching and has become annoying" to "they're just outright power-hungry, openly adversarial to men, and not operating in good faith". I think that view is well justified.
Can you explain why the MeToo movement specifically made you feel that way? As far as I remember the whole point was encouraging women to speak more openly about harassment by showing just how high the percentage of women who have been harassed, molested, etc is. That doesn't seem very powerful hungry to me.
I think the common sentiment from skeptics is that MeToo uncovered about three real villains but gave hundreds or thousands of sociopaths a weapon they could use to strike at enemies and promote their own interests.
It was a moral panic, which in my view is the hallmark of a political movement which is consolidating power. Purges are always the final step.
> "the whole point was encouraging women to speak more openly"
That's just the rhetorical gloss, akin to the "national security" rationalization of McCarthyism's ideological witch hunts. The reality of MeToo is that it was effectively feminism's ensconcement of feminine social norms as legal principles. It became a kind of moral tribunal where the rules were vague and the penalties were extreme. A lot of the men taken down didn’t break any laws, or if they did, it was for things that used to be considered awkward or sleazy, not criminal. What changed is that women’s subjective feelings about male behavior got elevated into moral law, and that law was enforced with real power. In the context of the longstanding feminist political and social ratchet, MeToo was the moment when the movement took off its mask to reveal a striving for domination rather than equality. When you can destroy person's life not for violence but for making someone feel uncomfortable, that’s not justice. It's control.
There's a several factors that you can control for that shrinks the gap to fairly small, but real, including this. If you take all that at face value, the correct assertion is more, "Women only get paid slightly less than men for doing the same work."
That said, controlling for roles and industries is selecting for a confound in the standard feminist critique as part of the argument is that what society considers valuable work, particularly in public service roles, both in terms of compensation and prestige varies partially in relation to how much it is associated with women doing it. Saying, "Yeah, well, job X just gets paid less" doesn't fully address the arguments here.
The same holds true for the argument that child-rearing harms women's earning potential. That's partially downstream of social expectation women invest more time and effort into child rearing as their natural function.
Okay, but the reasonable policy responses are very different to those three things. For example, if the problem is that women get paid less than men for identical work, then equal-pay laws might make sense as a response. If the problem is that women went into less well-paid fields, that won't help a bit, but maybe better career counseling or outreach or something will. And if the problem is that women end up with fewer years of experience/seniority due to child rearing, then neither of those will help but maybe there's some other policy that would.
Quoting the 67 cents to the dollar statistic is great for rhetoric (especially if you can silence any annoying literal-minded types who point out why it's a kind-of meaningless statistic), but it does a really poor job of leading anyone to a sensible conclusion. Like many other "directionally correct" or "socially true" statistics that aren't literally true, they mislead anyone who takes them seriously.
People who talk about the pay-gap generally understand it is multi-causal and promote multiple solutions. Desiring more equality in child care expectations is quite common in these spaces. Policy responses that outlaw overt discrimination aren't harmful even if they are only addressing one element of disparate outcomes.
That said, "career counseling" is a tin-eared response here to the idea that work associated with women tends to have lower social value that has knock on effects for compensation. The problem being suggested there is that where women congregate, low social value follows. You can't fix that by advising them to go somewhere else. You have to address underlying attitudes.
I dont think thats exactly what the question asks. Its asking the inverse "should they always be paid the same"
2019 the US women won the world cup and there was a noisy clash with Trump. The women used the win to launch and win an equal pay movement regarding world cup fees. I remember thinking at the time, good for them to use that leverage for a financial win, but the wider movement will be hurt by this. Everyone gets why women athletes get paid less even though on some level that looks only at inputs, its equal work. If the women athletes become the poster child for the equal pay movement it will delegitimize the whole thing.
I dont think that exactly explains it, but I dont think its egregiously sexist to answer no to this question if you are doing so because you doubt its premise. Equal inputs do not necessarily warrant equal pay.
If you define an athlete’s work as drawing a crowd, then you’re already claiming they didn’t “do the same work” so I don’t see how that’s a reason to answer “no” to the question as posed.
Not everyone is a strict logician, certainly not 8th grade boys. I am answering disagree because I think there are cases where men can be paid more for work others insist was equal is a perfectly reasonable way for 20pct of ppl to respond
There is in no way "equal work" with soccer. A women's world class soccer team gets beaten by 15 and under teams. This occurs on a regular basis.
Women's world class soccer is a joke (they really just need a smaller field, and possibly a "slightly different game" like softball, which yes, men play as well -- women get tired on the large field, and then the other side runs up the score).
Even if there is such a correlation, it wouldn't answer whether those figures are causing these beliefs, or becoming more popular because they're validating the beliefs people are picking up for other reasons.
I wonder if based on the questions some of it is "fighting" with the survey team. I'm reminded of the classic Onion article "1 in 5 Americans believe Obama is a cactus": with some of these questions you can recognize "ah this is one of those *woke* questions, I'm gonna give them the *based* answer just to piss them off!" I remember reading a while back on how ~10% of high school boys report being certified submarine captains.
A way to confirm or refute this theory would be with a somewhat more oblique question or experiment that tries to get at someone's "real" views on gender. Maybe one of those money-negotiating experiments (like the Ultimatum Game) where you experimentally manipulate the name + photo of the person you are negotiating with, to see if these "I hate women" survey boys actually try to give less money to girls (even at the cost of money for themselves.
Kind of a tangent, but when they actually interviewed a panel of official submarine captains and asked them what they most fear down there, the number one answer (by far) was, of course, “dogs”.
Living on a submarine seems like an efficient way to get away from dogs. I'd hazard you're getting a lot more rural folks in the Navy, as that's where "dog fear" tends to come from -- rural dogs are a normal hazard for "kids on bikes." Friend of mine had a stick just for bonking lunging dogs.
>with some of these questions you can recognize "ah this is one of those *woke* questions, I'm gonna give them the *based* answer just to piss them off!"
...and, of course, the other way around: I've seen a lot of surveys with "woke" point of views made where I suspect that a fair amount of respondants have responded in a maximum-woke way either to piss off the chuds or to "balance out" the presumed conservative answers they're expecting such a survey to get.
I was going to say something like this; the Lizardman's Constant post talks about it:
>Some pollsters are starting to consider these sorts of things symptomatic of what they term symbolic belief, which seems to be kind of what the Less Wrong sequences call Professing and Cheering or Belief As Attire. Basically, people are being emotivists rather than realists about belief. “Obama is the Anti-Christ” is another way of just saying “Boo Obama!”, rather than expressing some sort of proposition about the world.
Certainly, the mid-to-late 2010s were SJ's apex of power (you can see the spike when it shows up), and the Twitter sale is responsible for the cliff-jump from 2022 to 2023.
It's not surprising, just like it's not surprising that figures like Tate are popular when we just spent 20 years telling boys (especially white ones) that they are evil, useless, and should be discriminated against. Of course they are going to lash out at the people vilifying them.
Including a literal statement telling a man that he can not be a victim because he is a man, and the response to being called on it was to repeat it and tell him to sound it out.
Looking at that thread, I'm pretty sure the intended meaning was not "you can't be a victim, because you're a man" but "the reason why you're a victim is something other than the fact that you're a man", and the condescending response after he complained was because she thought he was being stupid not to understand that.
(For the avoidance of doubt: I don't think he was being stupid, I think she was being needlessly unclear. But I _don't_ think she was saying "men can never be victims".)
These boys are fully aware that girls are not surveyed on their attitudes towards males, that whatever views they have, the consensus is that they always be perfectly justified and entitled to them. They're told that it's equality, yet the expectations of respect go in only one direction.
Nobody here is looking at the origin of the graph for #10, which has a lot more input. It writes, “Religion is one factor that actually shows some promise in explaining why belief in gender equality has lost ground with boys. Views of gender equality among boys who say religion is not important in their life have not decreased by nearly as much in the past five years. The share of boys agreeing completely that women deserve equal job opportunities fell 22 percentage points, from 60% in 2018 to 38% in 2023. Complete agreement with equal pay for women also fell by 21 percentage points, from 71% to 50%.”
A lot of the other predictions get debunked by other data on the page.
47. But did you know that this effect comes almost entirely from daughters?
I really really struggle to believe this. Unfortunately the post is paywalled, but I'm pretty sure I did read it, or a similar post; and the study it's based on is not very big- around 400 women total (200 bearing daughters).
They look at only the gender of the first child, but ignore the evidence (which they do cite, but don't account for) that first born girls are more likely to be followed by a sibling than first born boys. That is, the effect could be entirely that the mothers of first born daughters have larger families, and hence reduced employment. They kind of sweep it under the rug by saying "if parents anticipate building a larger family, they may be more likely to specialize, with one more focused on market work and the other on home production."
in and of itself that’s an interesting finding. i wonder why that’s the case. maybe the desire to have a boy to carry on the last name? maybe girls are easier as toddlers so you’re more likely to have another?
Just speculating, but there's at least a cliche out there that fathers want to have sons, whereas mothers are less concerned about the gender of their children. Though also could be that daughter toddlers are easier.
As the father of an easy daughter who just got a second (not quite as easy) daughter to join her, I'm totally willing to believe that easy children encourage more kids. It's probably not a huge effect though.
Disagree, anecdote isn't data but my sister wanted a big family, had a very difficult time with her first child with his behaviour and resulting impact her mental health and didn't have any more. My wife and I were neutral all of our children have been relatively easy and we have ended up with 3.
EDIT: To be clear I disagree about "not a huge effect", I think it's a very large effect. My rule of thumb is people keep having kids until either they run out of money/space or they run out of (perceived) capacity to care for additional children with the latter being the greater constraint in practice.
It sounds like you are in agreement, not disagreement -- all of these anecdotes suggest that parents are more likely to stop conceiving once they feel overwhelmed, and conversely are more likely to keep going if they have easy kids, and that boys are more likely on average to be difficult and kind of overwhelming to deal with. That is definitely true among my social circle!
Among everyone I know with two kids (which is a ton of families), if I had to rank the pairs of kids from most challenging to least challenging to babysit for an afternoon, all the hardest ones that come to mind would be two-boy families and all the easiest are two-girl families. We've been in a co-op preschool for years and while I know all the parents love all the kids, I am highly confident that if you made the parents take a secret poll doing such a "challenge to babysit" ranking, they would come quite close to what I described, of essentially first sorting into groups based on the number of boys.
The challenging boy preschoolers are just so so much harder to handle than the average kid, so it doesn't surprise me that many of them would have been enough of a handful on their own for some parents to say "You know what? I'm tapped out."
I don't have time to read the paper, but do they control for how long the mothers left the workforce? How about for multiple kids? People always say daughters are easier to raise when they are young, so I could see mothers of daughters being more likely to spend more time with them before returning to work. I could also see families that start with a daughter being more likely to have extra kids because the father wants a son.
#5 Would you let a dead spider, controlled by AI robotics, perform surgery on your eyeball? If the alternative was going blind? No. I would rather go blind.
#9 - Come back 20 years from now and the following sentence will have aged like milk: “Looking at . . . the current state of Meta’s VR universe, it is absolutely impossible to imagine a world where this kind of thing is ever going to succeed.”
Once you spend enough time trudging through the internet's gamer communities, you realize that there are millions of people out there who would drop everything real in their lives if they could "live" in virtual worlds, embodying a perfect version of themselves (often an all-powerful character) and creating romantic links with other people's avatars. Meta's strategy with VR has been to buy everything and everyone who does anything remotely interesting in that space - until the technology catches up (GPUs that can render realistic worlds, systems that suppress motion sickness and improve real world mobility -> virtual mobility) that technology looks like a massive failure on all fronts because there's almost no revenue to be found, and people who already have a dislike for video games find the whole concept extremely virgin-coded (they aren't wrong).
>Once you spend enough time trudging through the internet's gamer communities, you realize that there are millions of people out there who would drop everything real in their lives if they could "live" in virtual worlds, embodying a perfect version of themselves (often an all-powerful character) and creating romantic links with other people's avatars.
ETA: Second Life is still there, alive and well, in case that wasn't clear, and currently celebrating its 22nd birthday. The film I linked to is a celebration of what is, not a lament for what was.
A guy decided to check out an old virtual reality game from the mid-2000s that was still running. At first it seemed like no one was there, but then he ran into some users. It went places I didn’t expect and in the end I got a little verklempt.
Second life is still alive and well, but has mostly been totally supplanted in the VR space by VRChat! VRC is basically the modern day second life, with a few million people owning it and tons and tons and tons of active users. It is what i imagine Meta wanted it's metaverse to be, but i don't think Meta wants all the gay furries.
Of course the concept of living in cyberspace has been around since at least William Gibson. But most people don't want to just sit and interior decorate, and definitely not with PS2 level assets. They want something to do, a world to explore and a game to play. Then they also want to be doing the popular thing that other people are doing. What does it mean to be "an all powerful character" in Horizon Worlds?
In their defense most of the money is probably going to hardware development of the headsets which have real engineering challenges. But if you wanted to make a virtual world that people live in, really you don't need VR, you need to seamlessly merge the gaming space with a discord-like multimedia sharing app, with social media, and then with outside corps and organizations. People already basically do live in that cyberspace it just isn't integrated as it likely could be.
> But if you wanted to make a virtual world that people live in, really you don't need VR, you need to seamlessly merge the gaming space with a discord-like multimedia sharing app, with social media, and then with outside corps and organizations.
FYI Horizon Worlds is available as a mobile app as well, and the avatars are integrated with Instagram. I can't see the appeal myself, but they're certainly trying.
The thing is VRChat is still just chugging along - I just wander around weird worlds random people have created about once a week. It's an amazing experience that's completely at odds with Meta's culture and business model, and I say this as a former Meta engineer.
The metaverse kind of exists - but only for a small population of weirdos. Something like 60% of them are furries, and there's not much money in it aside from independent digital creatives selling custom avatars.
I think VR will persist as a niche weird thing for the foreseeable future. If Meta abandons it I expect a few other companies to fill the gap, albeit with less excessive subsidies. Valve is a private company beholden only to the whims of a handful of nerds with access to a free money printer and a demonstrated interest in making stuff that they want to make in VR.
If meta made VR chat with the GDP of the country I grew up in behind it instead of worse second life, I would really feel the urge to get inside the GiveUp-Machine.
If Meta did that it wouldn't have the qualities that make VRChat what it is. VRChat works because it's completely dominated by a small set of weirdos and has little mainstream appeal. This protects it from the profit incentives that would lead to metric-maxing optimization, and then you get what every mainstream social media converges towards.
You want enough capitalism to push people to make better stuff but not so much that "exploit every weakness of human psychology at industrial scale" becomes a strategy worth pursuing.
The idea behind gaming is to escape the real world (in a certain sense). I don't pay close attention to Meta tbh, but from what I remember, they seem all too eager to bring the real world with all its irritations to the virtual one.
Doesn't it have huge implications for non-virgin coded non-video game applications? Enterprise stuff, realistic essential worker trainings and so forth.
"you realize that there are millions of people out there who would drop everything real in their lives if they could "live" in virtual worlds, embodying a perfect version of themselves "
Until that becomes an actual option, we really don't know. Millions of hippies swore they were willing to drop anything to live in a commune *if only*...
"Meta's strategy with VR has been to buy everything and everyone who does anything remotely interesting in that space - until the technology catches up"
Except, there is no guarantee the technology ever catches up. Also having a VR set, even much better than the current ones, is still not quite "Ready Player One". How many technologies have been 2 years away for 30 years? And how many technologies that were believed to be the next Industrial Revolution just became a niche hobby little influence on most people's lives? 3D printing is an obvious examples
#26: perhaps link to the story on substack: https://alexsalvinews.substack.com/p/the-election-of-pope-leo-xiv , to avoid the dozens of clicks required to read it on X? I'm sure there's a way to "unroll" the thread on X, but a webpage where that's already done for you seems good.
In general, it’s really annoying to see a link to a Tweet, figure there’s probably more to it than just one Tweet, and then realize that there’s probably a thread, and you’re just not allowed to read a thread if you aren’t logged in to a Twitter account.
"Then universities borrow money now against that future windfall. What goes wrong?"
The same thing that goes wrong if I go borrow a million quid based on "next week for sure I will win the lottery so I definitely will be able to pay you back, honest!"
"I thought you weren’t allowed to do any of this, and certainly not talk about doing any of it, on pain of excommunication?"
We're Catholics. You seriously expect us to stick to the rules? 😁
The difference is that you probably aren't going to win the lottery, but it's overwhelmingly likely that Democrats will have unified control of the U.S. federal government at some point in the next several decades. Not saying there aren't reasons why this might not work, but that isn't one.
Of course they will, the right hates everything about this. The whole argument (which, again, is not entirely free of holes) is that the Democrats will eventually have the opportunity to pass legislation on a party-line basis over the right's objections.
It won't just be the right, I wouldn't like to be the Democrat official charged with explaining why a moneybags Ivy League college is getting taxpayer money to repay their borrowings, while [insert issue here: housing crisis, potholes in the roads, systemic racism, healthcare costs, etc.] are crying out for funding.
Oh, the Democrats are likely to get back into power. But when they do, will the promised money be there? Or will it be spent on other, more "worthy"/"needy" causes? Suppose Harvard borrows against the promised payout, do you really think there won't be outcry from the more lefty side of the coalition about rich endowment white privilege colleges getting a government bailout instead of state schools., or black colleges, or any of the rest of the list of "more urgent social needs"?
See Biden's student loan forgiveness, yes it did happen, but not as broadly as people thought it would:
"Despite failing to deliver his promise for broad student loan forgiveness, President Joe Biden has now overseen the cancellation of student loans for more than 5 million Americans — more than any other president in U.S. history.
In a last-minute action on Monday, the Education Department canceled loans for 150,000 borrowers through programs that existed before Biden took office. His administration expanded those programs and used them to their fullest extent, pressing on with cancellation even after the Supreme Court rejected Biden’s plan for a new forgiveness policy."
1. Loan forgiveness was severely curbed by the courts (fortunately, imho). Unlike the current admin, the previous one was in the habit to respect sentences
2. We are not talking about huge sums, at least when compared to the national budget. For the left to be able to block a 0.x% addition to the budget, that the center-left campaigned on and publicly promised, they'd need a level of control not even remotely close to the one they have
3. The left (as in, the Squad) has been pretty vocal about the selective grant cancellations and has repeatedly framed it as an attack on research rather than on Harvard. Nobody guarantees consistency obviously, but to completely renege their current position for no appreciable reason would be deeply misguided and there is no reason to think they would.
The previous one that literally summoned the supreme court back to town, because it was doing EOs behind the supreme court's back? (I think that was the student loans, too...)
Are you seriously referring to an appeal as "summoning the supreme court back into town"? The admin lost. It appealed. When it lost the appeal, they stopped forgiving debt. Any other characterization is obviously sophistic
No, that's not what I'm remembering. What I'm remembering is the Supreme Court saying "no" (to something), and the Biden administration saying "Okay, Executive Order time! we're going to run this right up until the Supreme Court gets back in town." (so, um, this could have been student loans, or it could have been something like rent-free housing).
> Democrats will have unified control of the U.S. federal government at some point in the next several decades
I disagree. While I do agree that *some* left-leaning party will have unified control at some point in the future, the present-day Democrats have decayed past any point of recovery. Their putatively successful political descendants will have to deliberately distance themselves from present-day Democrats to such an extent that making high-confidence predictions about their policies is difficult (if not outright impossible).
Are you saying that there'll be an ideological realignment like in the 20th century, or are you literally saying that the United States Democratic Party will never again have unified control of the federal government? If the latter, well, I think that's less than 20% likely and would bet accordingly.
I wouldn't say "ideological", I'd say "political" or perhaps "messaging" realignment (as I doubt that politicians have anything resembling a consistent ideology). And there will likely be an organization *named* "US Democratic Party" that may, in the next 10..30 years, gain full control of the US Government. But that organization's internal structure, policies, messaging, strategies, financing priorities, etc., will be so different from the current Democratic Party that making confident predictions about their behaviour is premature. Otherwise, they'd have no hope of taking any kind of control over anything.
> But that organization's internal structure, policies, messaging, strategies, financing priorities, etc., will be so different from the current Democratic Party that making confident predictions about their behaviour is premature.
I read a discussion of the internal operation of the Democratic Party that made me surprised it was able to continue in any coherent form. ("Internal dissent is rewarded with additional formal power.")
We're already in the midst of an ideological realignment. I mean, it's almost as if you didn't notice the last administration hired "dick cheney's protegee" -- and let her do actual work.
I'm pretty sure I hear it every single election cycle. Whichever party just lost is totally never coming back. Then four years later it's like "ooh neck and neck" again.
I hate to sound like a cliche, but I really think this time the situation is different. Trump had reforged the political landscape by demonstrating quite clearly that all of the long-standing political rules -- each and every one of them -- are merely guidelines. You don't have to follow them unless you want to, or unless someone more popular than you can stop you. Present-day Democrats are simply not ready for that, and their institutional baggage prevents them from every getting ready, IMO.
I expect that every precedent Trump has set that involves centralizing power will be picked up immediately by the next Democrat in the white house. That may not involve giving money to Ivy League colleges, but it will certainly involve taking advantage of any missing bits of fence Trump has knocked down.
It changed by 2016. Remember how the Democrats thought they could, by including military spending in a shutdown deal, make the Republicans unwilling to countenance a shutdown? And the Republicans let it shut down?
We actually got a huge ideological realignment among Republicans in the intervening 12 years. The modern Republicans have a very different set of policies they support than Mitt Romney or George W Bush.
Oh, boy, buckets, yes. The Neocons are being hired by the Democrats, it's gotten so bad. We'll just note that the Republicans somehow turned into the "party of peace" (largely on the strength of military voters).
Something like this happened in the 1960s-80s, where white Southern voters mostly became Republicans, nearly all blacks became Democrats, and religious and socially conservative people mostly ended up on the Republican side in an uneasy alliance with free-marketeers (who mostly DGAF what you do in your bedroom as long as taxes and regulation are low) and cold-warriors (who also mostly don't care about what you do in your bedroom and only care about taxes to the extent they're needed to pay for missiles and aircraft carriers). Both parties in 1985 looked *very different* from what they looked like in 1955.
The problem is planning for a sure thing, and planning for a time period. If the Democrats regain control of the federal government in 2028, that looks very different for a university carrying large loads of debt than it does if Democrats regain control in 2036. Also, maybe the Democrats don't back pay any grants, or at a lesser percentage than full, or even decide that it worked out pretty well and don't even add new grants. Then the universities are in a really bad position. This would be a very bad bet to make.
Any bet made at the whims and capability of elected officials to do something that they may or may not even want to do is a bad bet. There is no guarantee that Democrats as a whole would make such a change, let alone individual Democrat politicians. There is even less guarantee that they would have the ability to do it, such as failing to get all three branches, having too small of a majority to pass disputed legislation/filibuster, etc.
Maybe, but there is nothing stopping them from selling state-contingent claims (x$ will be paid to the bearer *if* Dems win AND make good on their word). If they trade at 10c on the dollar, too bad, it's not Harvard's problem as long as they have buyers.
Also, once these state-contingent claims are on the market, they create a natural, powerful constituency pressuring Dems to in fact make good on their word.
The other problem is: what's in it for the Democrats of the present? They don't want to reduce the pain of the Trump presidency for anyone, that just lowers their chances of winning in 2028.
Not really. The only ones suffering immediately from research funding cuts are the researchers themselves, who already vote D with Assad margins. The rest of the US (and the world) does not directly suffer, they just enjoy lower innovation (and thus living standards etc) than they would otherwise. I doubt this kind of counterfactual reasoning would sway many votes, and the few ones thinking in these terms would probably really really appreciate the DNC for indirectly funding research anyway.
It'd be a good electoral move, beyond being a good action in itself. It's just that the party is now in disarray and there is no real leadership, so...
Any such law written with even a thin veneer of generality would outlaw betting, a good chunk of the financial industry, and make illegal for all kind of firms to sign the contracts they routinely sign with their clients and suppliers. And also could not possibly be retroactive, so the labs would still pocket the money they have already raised.
Sure, they could pass a law written spefically to be contra personam and retroactive, but that would be crossing the Rubicon and fully erase five centuries of legal tradition. If it were to happen, I doubt it'd happen over this.
This depends on a much longer chain of hypotheticals than that.
For this scheme to work, it's necessary that 1. Ds regain unified control sometime in the next decade or two (pretty likely), then 2. those Ds retain enough respect for commitments made today that they make a serious effort to pay out the (probably very large) back funding, and 3. that effort successfully beats out all other competing demands for funds, in an increasingly strained budget environment.
Then there's the whole question of timing. This bet looks very different depending on whether you anticipate the payout in 4 years, vs 8, 12 or 16. The further into the future it is that Ds regain control, the less likely that points 2 and 3 above will succeed. Then, of course, there's the time cost of money to consider.
Meanwhile, this policy requires a very public commitment and funding negotiations; thus, it can't be done quietly. Trump has all kinds of ways to interfere with this process, from going after the lenders in various ways (all banks are extremely vulnerable to USG pressure) to using other levers against the universities.
Think about this as if you are the prospective private lender. Would you be willing to pay out $billions to universities, with repayment contingent on someone else fighting and winning a thankless political struggle in an unclear number of years? I am pretty sure that would not pass any conventional underwriting process.
Yeah, there are going to be some really tough budgeting decisions in the next decade or two, and Harvard is not going to be in the top 20 most sympathetic or vote-getting choices of where to spend the limited money a future president and Congress will have.
No, it's not overwhemingly so likely. There are a lot of cases where something akin to the current US Democratic Party does not take power any time soon.
1) AI X-catastrophe before 2029. There is no USA.
2) Civil war that the Democrats lose (again). Party apparatus forcibly dismantled.
3) Nuclear war. Most Democratic voters are now dead.
In #2 and #3 there's probably eventually some kind of fracture in the Republican Party and one of the sides quietly absorbs the remnants of the Democratic base, but it'd have to name itself something else and would have to steer well clear of flagship Democrat policies, as the Democrats themselves would be widely despised.
4. The current Democratic party fractures and shifts as the Republican one has, and we get a very different Democratic party--perhaps along AOC/Mamdani lines, perhaps along entirely different lines.
Whereas my comparison would be paying in US Dollars during the War for Independence, or in Confederate dollars during the Civil War. It's yet another dangerous escalation in the political landscape.
44: Ultimately, I think the most concise way to think about "The purpose of a system is what it does", is to see that most people are split into two diametrically opposite interpretations of it:
1) What a system does must be the purpose that was intended by its designers
2) The "purpose" of a system is a concept that can, and should, be described independently of any intent or design
And the way to resolve this is to realise that POSIWID itself is a very confusing sentence out of context, and Stafford Beer (presumably) never intended it to confuse people, so:
Under interpretation 1), POSIWID is a self-contradiction;
Under interpretation 2), POSIWID proves itself - its a meme that perpetuates discussion of itself by the conflict between both interpretations, and it's useful to imagine that as its "purpose" in the context of asking how it sticks around.
If a system is sufficiently "bad" it will be torn down. I think that's the best way to hear POSIWID. Democracy, worldwide, is used as a tool to let the CIA/United states government influence elections and policy in other countries.
It seems like what people ordinarily point to when using the word "purpose" is the ways in which a thing promotes some given terminal goal- so not just the intent of a designer, but also not really independent of intent.
Most of the people doing the pointing, however, don't actually have a solid grasp of terminal goals as a property of agents and distinct from instrumental goals, so the way people end up conceptualizing purpose tends to be more like "the ways in which a thing promotes [unnamed, half-formed concept]". People aren't sure whether that half-formed concept is an objective property of reality or something subjective, so we get lots of very confused memes like "the meaning of life" that assume purpose can exist independently of any agent.
Reading through the linked blog post, it sounds like those early cyberneticists noticed that anything a thing does could constitute its purpose to some hypothetical agent with some particular terminal goal. But they also didn't really have a solid concept of terminal goals and were operating under this confused cultural assumption that purposes are properties of things that can exist independently of agents, so the observation just looked to them like "anything a thing does could constitute its purpose"- phrased even more confusingly as POSIWID.
#15: yeah, someone whose funding gets cut and loses their academic position is most likely to look for a job in industry, not to start a startup. Launching a startup (at least in biotech) usually requires preliminary data which you can't get if you don't have a lab.
When we recently hired for a PhD-level position we got over 300 applicants the first day alone.
#16: an interesting idea, but what if the Republicans win in 2028?
I don't know, Stephen Fry also seems like the kind of person to be into this. The surprise is that he chose to spend his weirdness points this way given that he has fewer to spend as a much more mainstream figure.
George Church should not be surprising because he is a founding advisor to Tegmark's Future of Life Institute. Not every advisor to FLI endorsed it, but they all signed up for a decade of lobbying by Tegmark.
#8 - I can get 1/100th of the karma of saving a life by simply praising good deeds? This does not seem remotely play-tested. Surely praising good deeds a hundred times is easier than saving someone's life. If paying someone to praise good deeds on my behalf counts, I'm sure I can hire someone to do that at a much more effective rate than it would cost to spend the money saving lives.
And "adopting an orphan", something that brings with it daily obligations for years, is just 50 karma! I'm never going to adopt any orphans with this scoring scheme. (Though maybe it made more sense in Ming China, where children may have been economic investments rather than money sinks. But still.)
On the other hand, saving lives is *also* surprisingly cheap. GiveWell generally gives estimates of $3500-$5000 in the modern world, and perhaps it was even cheaper in Ming China due to more people near you living close to the subsistence threshold.
On the other, other hand, you don't merely have to pay someone to praise good deeds; praising is the easy part. You have to pay them to identify good deeds! Which is such a thorny proposition that modern philosophers still have not solved it.
I think it's about $2 to keep a child from going blind. That may not be saving their life (or it might be, consider orphans and other destitute), but it's certainly keeping them as "valued members of society."
I always like to run that as a metric for "How Much does this charity deserve to be funded?"
Look at the link below... Looks like we still need more money/effort on this front, hundreds of thousands of children are still going blind (and that's with a 50% mortality rate after blindness).
Do you have a citation? Usually when cost numbers are that low, someone is conflating 'cost per treatment' with 'cost per preventing negative outcome', which are only the same if 100% of treated people would have the negative outcome without the treatment and 0% would have it with the treatment.
We have upwards of 200,000 children a year going blind (with a mortality rate of 50% in the first year alone after blindness). This is after distributing 400 million doses per year.
"Globally, VAD is estimated to affect about one-third of children under the age of five, causing an estimated 670,000 deaths in children under five annually.[8][9] It is most prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa (48 percent) and South Asia (44 percent).[8]"
Yes, this is cost per treatment (vitamin A shots). To "fully prevent" Vitamin a Deficiency you need a shot a year...
OK, let's assume that it takes 4 shots then, to fully prevent VAD (since this is largely a <5-year-old issue.)
Your paper doesn't give blindness stats (which I know was the initial claim), but it does give all-cause mortality improvement. It drops all-cause mortality from 2.6% to 2.3%. That's 3 lives per thousand treated children, or per 4000 doses, or about $1,333 per life saved. Very, very efficient!
But... while this doesn't give blindness data, note that 50% of kids die within a year of developing blindness. That caps the # of blindnesses prevented at twice the number of deaths prevented (which would be true if all the mortality improvement was due to preventing blindness; unlikely.) That means that you have to pay at least $666 per case of blindness prevented (and probably quite a bit more.)
Still a bargain; but not wildly implausible like $2 apiece would be.
GiveWell's rough estimate is more like $6,000 apiece.
Each treatment costs $2.70 ($1.35 per shot, but you need two shots). Divide that by the probability that the child would have gone blind without the treatment but won't with it, which they calculate by multiplying the following numbers together:
- 1.3% prevalence of night blindness in Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Mali
- 10% of cases of night blindness progress to full blindness (there apparently are no studies of this so this number is a guess but they think it's a generous one)
- 68% chance the treatment works
- 50% chance of surviving early childhood after going blind (as your comment accounts for)
They then go on to calculate DALYs (divide by 0.187 disability weight for total blindness, and by 25 more years of average life expectancy for a blind child who doesn't die right away) and conclude that blindness prevention through vitamin A supplementation costs about $1,200 per DALY. This is worse than giving cash, which they estimate improves lives at a rate of $1,000 per DALY. So ultimately not the most good you can do.
They recommend Helen Keller International because of the mortality benefits, for which the numbers are better ($3,500 per life saved, not sure the exact conversion factor to DALYs but it's obviously way better than cash).
I think it's clearly written for a different society, where words had more weight, anonimity was not an option, and if you told a butcher to their face they had to change job you could have been in for an unpleasant retort.
Presumably, as both the material impact and the cost of praising good deeds and harassing butchers decreased, the karma points would decrease in proportion
There's also opportunity for arbitrage. If a married woman comes onto you, you can turn her down and then go have sex with like ten prostitutes and still come out far ahead.
#1 - Scott, you say that post helped you crystallize some thoughts on what good writing and good taste are in general. Sounds like the perfect topic for you to write about - will we get a glimpse?
I am looking forward to this to. Am expecting something in the general direction of the priest hood abhors cliche. The layfolk dont mind it so much as they are not exposed enough to notice the cliche. Its not an entirely arbitrary set of elitists preferences, but the priesthood has its own internal divisions on cliche and anyways probably over update to the avant garde given over exposure.
Despite having a successful therapy, VERV stock really didn't do well over the last 4 years. They recently got acquired by Eli Lily for $1.3B but this is down from about $2B in 2022 (and recently it was as low as $300M).
I personally lost about $15k on this. Just goes to show that biotech is hard to make money in.
That is odd. It seems like the stock should be higher than that. Any idea why it's so low? Even on the day the results were announced (April 14, 2025), the stock only went up ~$0.90 to ~$4, off from a peak of >$70 four years ago.
> looks like the rhyme decline started well before then.
Paradise Lost, an epic poem published in 1667 by John Milton doesn't rhyme. I gather many people were critical of it at the time for that reason. My only complaint about Milton's poetry generally is the plethora of ancient Greek characters, divine or otherwise, who pop up in it. Presumably readers in the 1600s would have been familiar with these references, but most people today find them obscure and baffling. Piers Plowman, written towards the end of the 1300s, doesn't rhyme either.
Doesn't Milton treat rhyming as newfangled? My understanding is that English poetry didn't rhyme early on (Beowulf used alliteration, Shakespeare used patterns of stressed syllables), and that rhyming was introduced via French poetry.
AFAIK, classical Greek and Roman poetry doesn't rhyme either -- it's based on metric structure, like Old English and Sanskrit poetry (which suggests it's an Indo-European thing). Poetry in Latin starts rhyming consistently in the Middle Ages.
> AFAIK, classical Greek and Roman poetry doesn't rhyme either -- it's based on metric structure, like Old English and Sanskrit poetry
That's not a statement I'd be comfortable with.
1. You're right that poetry in Greek and Latin doesn't rhyme, ever.
2. You're also right that poetry in Greek and Latin is based on metric structure.
3. You're wrong that poetry in Old English is based on metric structure. Old English poetry has no rhyme and barely any meter. It is defined by alliteration; the metrical concern is only that there is conceptually a caesura cutting each line in half, which encourages the presence of a sharp prosodic break in each line. (A caesura is ideally a "real" prosodic break, but since they are required by the poetic form, they can be read in to what would otherwise be a smooth flow of words, in the same way that although dactylic hexameter formally requires the last syllable of each line to be metrically long, in practice it is free to be short, because the end of the line counts as a kind of length for the syllable there.)
(Though on point 1, it is now my turn to disagree. Classical Latin poetry might never rhyme, but *Medieval* Latin poetry frequently does. See Dies Irate, the Carmina Burana, or De Contemptu Mundi:
"Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt — vigilemus.
Shakespeare doesn't predate the initial burst of English rhyming poetry, he came in towards the end of it - his sonnets with their ABAB CDCD scheme were a compromise away from the ABBA ABBA Petrarchan sonnets that had a vogue in the 1500s (which are far easier to write in the very rhyme-friendly Italian lexicon than the English one).
Yes, rhyming was from French poetry. As with all barbaric, agglomerating English -- rhyming is much, much more difficult in English than languages that do it natively.
Oh, it definitely shows the "trade language" activity of English. Orange, after all, doesn't rhyme with anything.
It, of course, obscures the actual point of rhyming, which was to aid memorization (when the word was never written) -- same as alliteration, which Germanic Languages use in spaces.
#48: Bret Deveraux notes that the "strategic" effects of the air campaign against Iraq, i.e. strikes on leadership, communications, electric power etc., were minimal.
> The DoD’s own report, issued in 1993 (Cohen and Keaney, Gulf War Air Power Survey (1993)) noted first that only some 15% of strikes were against ‘strategic’ targets, while strikes against Iraqi ground forces consumed 56% of strikes; as Coalition air forces exhausted their list of strategic targets, they switched over to strikes against ground forces.
> Despite effectively running out the entire list of strategic targets, Cohen and Keaney nevertheless conclude that strategic effects were broadly not achieved. Despite striking the Iraqi communications network with more than 580 strikes, “the Iraqi government had been able to continue launching Scuds” and “sufficient ‘connectivity’ persisted for Baghdad to order a withdrawal from the theater [Kuwait] that included some redeployments aimed at screening the retreat.” Consequently, “these attacks clearly fell short of fulling the ambitious hope” to “put enough pressure on the regime to bring about its overthrow and completely sever communications between Baghdad and their military forces.”
So no, strategic air power was neither a necessary nor a sufficient reason why the Iraqi army crumbled. They crumbled because the Coalition forces represented the undisputed peak of modern warfare on a perfect battlefield (flat desert) whereas the Iraqi forces had neither the equipment, nor the training, nor the doctrine to resist effectively. There is no reason to assume that an invasion of Taiwan would be the first proof of the effectiveness of strategic airpower after a century of failed tests.
I would generally caution against using Deveraux as an authoritative source outside his area of expertise, i.e. Roman era military history. The post about strategic bombing draws on WWII for a lot of the material, where bombing was highly inaccurate and the belligerents had strategic goals not clearly linked to military objectives like "bomb the civilians to make the enemy regime collapse" (which definitely didn't work). Anyway, what #48 is proposing isn't strategic bombing in the sense Deveraux is talking about, where air power alone is the deciding factor. He's talking about a combined arms approach where the enemy forces are crippled by precision strikes taking out key assets - so that a ground force can then overwhelm the disorganized enemy. The ground force is key here. But it doesn't matter for Taiwan because the ground force has to be lifted across an ocean for a contested amphibious landing, which is an entirely different type of operation.
I'm not sure what the rest of the ACOUP post has to do with my objection. I presented a specific quote from the post, not the entire post, because that quote dealt with the question of whether you can use air power to disrupt an army to the point that it simply breaks down at the slightest pressure. That was the theory developed for the 1990 Gulf War, it was tested in that war, and unless you're saying Deveraux misquoted or misunderstood the DoD report, the answer seems to be "no, that theory didn't work". The #48 tweet repeated that disproven theory, elevated it to fact, and builds its argument on that faulty foundation. That is why I object to #48.
I think your objection is quite correct in response to the tweet. Either the OP or the Chinese plan is claiming to win against Taiwan with precisions strike, either alone or in conjunction with a blockade, limited assault or full invasion. All but the last option is the exact thing that has been proven not to work. However, this is not what was intended to happen or indeed what did happen in the Gulf War. The goal there was always to disrupt the enemy army to the point that is simply breaks down *under the pressure from a simultaneous ground attack*. Which confused me somewhat when I first read the tweet and he talks about the Chinese doing the same thing as the US in Iraq and then... talks about doing a different thing.
As to the effectiveness of the strategic bombing element in Desert Storm, the section Deveraux quotes mentions that they failed to complete the ideal objectives of totally cutting communications, preventing all SCUD launches, etc. But how close did they come? Were they just a hair away from total collapse of Sadam's regime, or not even close? The report helpfully concludes that the bombing certainly degraded all of the targeted areas but can't come to any firm conclusions with the available materials. So, uh, that really clears things up.
Another facet here are the ethical/political constraints on the coalition forces. Iraqi airplanes operating in the central area of the country could simply flee to Iranian airspace within a 15 minute flight, where they were not allowed to be pursued. The coalition was reluctant to target cultural sites like mosques, which the Iraqis took advantage of by placing their fragile assets nearby. There was an incident where a bunker buster was dropped on a command bunker that happened to be in use as a bomb shelter, causing hundreds of civilian casualties. The coalition then suspended all strikes on command bunkers until the last few days of the war. I seriously doubt China would be similarly constrained during a war with Taiwan.
>Another facet here are the ethical/political constraints on the coalition forces.
Ultimately, it doesn't really matter why the strategic bombing failed its objectives. Maybe these constraints you mention don't allow bombing the correct targets to the necessary degree. Maybe they failed to select the correct targets. Maybe there are no correct targets that, once destroyed, bring about the objectives.
I believe the ACOUP post is overall correct in that strategic bombing has been tested extensively since WW2 in various forms. No iteration of it brought the results it promised, and not for lack of trying. It's approaching a level of madness (even in a rational, military sense rather than just ethical) to keep trying to salvage the theory when it involves so much killing and destruction, with relatively little to show for it.
>The goal there was always to disrupt the enemy army to the point that is simply breaks down *under the pressure from a simultaneous ground attack*.
The ground attack was not planned to be simultaneous, but the last phase of the overall campaign. Don't conflate the tactical use of airpower (CAS, interdiction) which was very successful with the strategic use of targeting leadership etc.:
> Iraqi airplanes operating in the central area of the country could simply flee to Iranian airspace within a 15 minute flight, where they were not allowed to be pursued.
That doesn't really matter - as long as they are out of the fight, the objective has been achieved. If and when they return to Iraqi/Kuwaiti airspace, they are again legitimate targets. Also, page 13: https://imgur.com/vvvUxWl
> As to the effectiveness of the strategic bombing element in Desert Storm, the section Deveraux quotes mentions that they failed to complete the ideal objectives of totally cutting communications, preventing all SCUD launches, etc. But how close did they come? Were they just a hair away from total collapse of Sadam's regime, or not even close?
Does it matter? The outcome evidently did not come about after hitting all the intended strategic targets. "Almost" doesn't count here. The regime did not collapse, and neither did their ability to fight, at whatever low level the Iraqi army may have been able to fight at to begin with.
> The coalition was reluctant to target cultural sites like mosques, which the Iraqis took advantage of by placing their fragile assets nearby.
> I seriously doubt China would be similarly constrained during a war with Taiwan.
Well, the CCP hates imperialism more than anything and might be happy to destroy the National Palace Museum. But that would come at a huge political cost, and besides that political cost the benefit of undermining imperialism has to be balanced against the cost of undermining resistance to Western culture. It's hard to do one of those without the other.
The Chinese theory of war against Taiwan is identical to the Russian theory of war against Ukraine: we're bringing our brothers and sisters back into the fold. You don't want to destroy all of 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 best cultural monuments while you do that. How are Kiev's monuments doing?
Yes, that's the point. That is very different from the imagined strategic use of airpower, i.e. to basically win the war entirely from the air rather than by providing boring old ground support.
#9 - Reporting on how much money Meta has lost on "the metaverse" often conflates their crappy-looking VR game Horizon Worlds with their entire Reality Labs division. It's the division that's lost $70 billion, but it also makes VR headsets and does all sorts of pie-in-the-sky VR/AR research.
Horizon worlds has by all accounts been horribly mismanaged, with developers that refuse to actually put on a headset and test the game, but not quite to the level of spending 50 Star Citizens worth of money.
The brute fact of software engineering being extremely inconvenient to do while wearing a VR headset may be the single biggest obstacle the technology faces.
# 17, the poetry data from the economist could equally support the hypothesis that rhyming poetry has survived better. They clearly have a lot more data for recent poetry, and the dataset is short on unrhyming poetry from the past. They also clearly have a lot of rhyming poetry from today, but it’s getting overwhelmed by the unrhyming stuff.
That was absolutely my reaction as I read it too. I thought it was interesting and wondered what other bespoke efforts to reach his specific point of view might be made across the coming three point whatever years.
#1 - Some points seem similar to the old discussions about AI Dungeon prose quality and the new sampling tricks to force LLMs to stop repeating the same cliches. I wonder if there are more in-depth writings about both history and state of the art of AI writing, including the new experiments and tricks.
I'm curious about the karma thing. Why is it virtuous to persuade someone not to abandon their village during a famine?
Seems to me that if food is scarce and someone leaves, there's one less mouth to feed and more food to go around for the rest of the village. What is the moral calculus that deems this not a good thing?
Just a guess but it might be something to do with family obligations especially to ancestors. I believe making offerings to ancestors graves was considered important at the time and this might not be possible if you leave.
Speculation: because those people wind up going somewhere else, with marginal famine conditions, where they'll eat the limited food supply and create more famine. Meanwhile the limited food production capacity of their home village is not coming back on line due to lack of labour. Chinese agriculture (ie rice) is very labour intensive and you can't just bugger off for a year and hope that the crops grow back.
In famine conditions the best thing overall is for everyone to stay in their village and work as hard as they can to grow whatever food they can.
As I said it's all speculation. But I can easily imagine situations where waves of refugees fleeing famine in one part of the country just cause an ever-increasing famine elsewhere.
#19 - Mifepristone is the "abortion pill", not the "morning-after pill". The morning-after pill (Plan B) is a large dose of (iirc) estradiol - basically a large dose of regular birth control.
Morning after pill is levonorogestrel, a progesterone receptor agonist. Birth control is reliant on progesterone to limit ovulation, although most formulations contain some estrogen.
> I’d always heard modernism was a reaction to the trauma of the World Wars, but it looks like the rhyme decline started well before then.
It's also well to keep track of the language; I think it's not a universal phenomenon, but a regional one. At least, intuitively the more modern Russian-language poetry is much more rhymey than its English counterpart. (If you suffer from a need of rhyming poetry, go ahead and learn Russian and I'll share some of my favorites.) I've been re-reading Sorokin's novel "the norm" (1980-ies) recently, which is all postmodernist / countercultural / in-your-face-reader, and the verses there rhyme — that's the one tradition Sorokin doesn't break. (Although of course Russian vers-libre also exists.)
(Also, how would war trauma induce rhymeless verse? Did the wars include rap battles?)
I think Brodsky, who was both a Russian and an English (well, American) poet, had quite a few things to say about that - in particular, not just that Russian was linguistically more suited to thymes, but also that Russian poetry was much younger and still hadn't grown out of its formal stage.
I'm not even sure what it means for poetry to have a formal stage. A stage where significance is placed upon the form of a poem? As opposed to what, not noticing form, not having form? The words in which a poem is written are still part of it, it doesn't matter what conventions it does or doesn't follow — you still can't get away from the fact that the words are light or heavy, or curt, or clumsy, or whatever. If you happen to speak Russian (which I though you might?), this is one of my favorite Russian free verses (by Ivan Akhmetyev):
русская поэзия катилась
на ритмических салазках
пока не выехала на советский асфальт
веррлиббрр
No rhyme, no regular rhythm, and it wouldn't work without the form. When Kharms and Vvedensky were dismantling all previous literary conventions of their literature, were they writing rhyming verses because they hadn't outgrown a stage? What does it even mean? If they had a working tool that contributed to their unique styles, why were they supposed to outgrow it?
***
Actually, now I'm a little worried and confused: when a connoisseur of English poetry reads, I don't know, Walt Whitman, do they just not notice the texture of the material that their hand touches because it's just form?
I don't think it's a technical term, but I meant with it poems with a specific rhyme scheme and rhythm, yes. I assume most of the rhymed poems in 1900 in that Economist graph also had a fixed rhythm.
Honestly, I'm not a connoisseur of poetry, English or otherwise, and am not able to answer any of your questions (or even understand some of them). Except that I think it's generally accepted that in most of art, there are periods when certain things are done, and then periods when they are cast out. Scott has written a lot on architecture, for example, and you really couldn't write a novel with Victorian-style chapter summaries nowadays without it coming off as a parody. Of course most manifestations aren't as clear-cut, but I think it's pretty clear that the corresponding graph for Russian rhymed poetry would be shifted right by at least 50 years, probably more.
I see. My point is that the history of Russian poetry includes some events of throwing out all previous conventions and "things were done this way" (the Oberiu group is a salient example), but the fact of rhyming remains preserved because it still works as a tool in terms of the artistic impression it makes on the reader, even when other conventions are broken, so it can't be thought of in terms of "someone just reusing the same tools because they didn't think to try anything else". Breaking with tradition is something of a common theme in the history of Russian literature.
I don't disagree with that - I just vaguely remembered Brodsky saying something on the lines that Russian poetry hasn't been using rhymes as long as English poetry, and so they still worked just fine, which I think is what you say as well.
Sorry if I did a bad job putting that into words...
In any case, modernism in all the arts clearly starts before the world wars. In music, there’s clear breakdown of tonality and meter in Debussy at the turn of the century, and even some Wagner and Liszt in the 1880s, and you have very obviously modernist music like Pierrot Lunaire and The Rite of Spring just before the First World War. In visual art, you’ve again got the post-impressionists at the turn of the century, the impressionists a couple decades earlier (who are clearly modernist, even if they no longer trigger anti-modernist viewers) and before the First World War you’ve got works like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Kandinsky’s Improvisations. Literature may have been slower to turn to clear modernism, but people like Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Jules Verne all have elements that seem modernist well before the world wars.
#31 Ross Douthat interviews J D Vance. - Well, I guess I guess I can quit wondering if I’m being locally transgressive by linking to a piece in that particular source.
It seems they didn't "fire someone" exactly, they terminated their funding for that person's organization (the Mill Institute). Still pretty clear that UATX's dedication to free speech means "free speech for people who agree with me." i.e. they are just picking the opposite pole in the culture war from where most of academia sits, not actually trying to create an open ideological space.
This isn't true at all. My impression is most free speech people are happy to support free speech for their enemies or for both sides; it's become a meme that whenever someone asks them "I bet you wouldn't support free speech for X!" they link to an example of them supporting free speech for X. F.I.R.E. is especially good at this; I would also look at the various people who have supported free speech both for right-wing causes and Palestinians.
F.I.R.E is a significant counterexample, but it still feels like the exception rather that the rule in an era when even the ACLU had a memo about dropping support for repugnant speech. I concede that "almost exclusively" is probably overstatement, but not so much that I agree it's directionally incorrect.
I think it's highly confounded based on political leanings - speaking generally:
1. Conservatives - frequently pay lip service to FS, but rarely are consistent in support beyond their own preferred speech.
2. Liberals - infrequently support FS nowadays, but when they do they are mostly consistent
3. Libertarians (heterodox liberal) - frequently support FS, and are generally consistent
4. Libertarians (heterodox conservative) - mostly the same as actual conservatives (This includes the large number of people I know who identify as libertarian, but by revealed preference are conservatives who just want to smoke weed)
5. Leftists - infrequently support FS, and those that do often are not consistent.
I expect your social graph is several standard deviations more libertarian/heterodox-liberal than the norm, so I believe your impression is correct based on your experience.
In general, though, principled libertarians are an extreme minority in broader politics, so category two, and to a lesser extent four, by far outnumber the others. They're the ones I encounter most frequently online, and they're the basis for my statement above.
That said, I'm probably biased because I'm more sensitive to perceived hypocrisy, and ideological consistency rarely goes viral or gets coverage.
University of Austin joins Elon Musk on the long list of evidence for my thesis "Self-identified Free Speech advocates very rarely* support actually Free Speech (they just want different things to be censored)".
*Scott, afaict, is one of the few exceptions that does, but even he does comment moderation - and I maintain that "moderation" and "censorship" are just different words for the same action with different emotional valences . (This is, of course, a good thing! Scott's moderation has a positive effect on the transmission of knowledge)
When you say "moderation" are you referring to the actions of moderators in comments sections/social media/forums/etc? When I first read your comment, I thought it was a criticism of moderates.
Also, the episode in question also, I think, provides evidence that some self identified free speech advocates aren't actually just asking for other groups to get censored (the Mill Center who got pushed out of UATX). They just don't control any major institutions. But please don't abandon our asymmetric weapons:
Talking about freedom of speech, or any other freedom, is meaningless without using the word "without".
Should X be allowed to say controversial, offensive or immoral things?
Should bookshop-owner Y be allowed to punish X for saying controversial, offensive or immoral things by refusing to stock the book in which they say them, or their other books?
Should individual Z be allowed to punish bookshop Y by boycotting them, and encouraging their friends to do the same?
Should A,B, and C be allowed to be rude about Z and end their friendship because of that boycott?
And so on.
You just can't answer these questions without "without". Clearly, all these people should be free to do these things *without* legal punishment, but in some cases thy should not be free to do them without lesser "punishments" like the things further down the list.
"Without" also lets you resolve all sorts of apparent contradictions. For example I think that:
:- People should be able to express controversial opinions with which I agree without anyone dissenting or thinking less of them for it, but not controversial opinions with which I disagree - this is a level at which content-specific response is wholly appropriate.
:- Even though people "should" be able to express opinions I consider good without push-back, in most cases people should be able to wrongly push back on those opinions without more than minor social sanction.
A lot of people who describe themselves as "in favour of freedom of speech" don't try to articulate their principles in terms of "without", which means that they don't and can't have consistent principles.
On a separate point, I think there's at least a connotational difference between "moderation" and "censorship": moderation is specifically "you can't say that in this particular, narrow forum", whereas censorship has connotations of a broader or more important channel or collection of channels..
I mean, it's true that that issue does muddy the discussion in general, but that's not really relevant here.
U of A was pretty clearly not objecting to legal punishments for conservatives in the academic environment, since no one's gone to jail for being a conservative professor. The worst that has happened is them being fired, which is exactly what makes their actions here hypocrisy.
Re: censorship vs. moderation:
I mean, yeah, I basically said the difference was *only* in connotations. But for this specially, while I agree that might be true in a broad sense...
In practice, people very much do cry "censorship" for being removed from a single platform; and all the large and "important" online platforms do moderation, and even beyond that, they more or less converge on the same kinds of moderation across the board.
When it comes down to it, it's not a distinction based on concrete differences which "cleaves reality at the joint", it's based on people's *feelings* of what's "acceptable" and "normal" speech to suppress, and what isn't.
Strange that folks can believe that father's could be biased toward sons but not that mothers might be biased toward daughters. That would also explain the difference: mothers preferring to spend time at home with daughters more than with sons.
54 - The FDA regulation in question just lets you avoid FDA regulation. You would still be violating the US patents, and a court can (and would) order the importation to cease.
Your understanding of the regulations is incorrect and would make the program largely pointless if true. If a court shoots down Florida importing, say, generic epinephrine, and that holds up, I'll stand corrected. But I seriously doubt it will, as the underlying regulations are very clear that there's no patent issue to speak of with generic imports.
Anyway, under the current FDA with its order to deprioritize regulatory action and its lack of staffing, there would almost-certainly not be a block on imports in the event of a court case. They could choose to act that way, but they have no legal obligation to.
>It would be convenient if there were seem deep synergy between the Jewish religion and psychedelia. But there isn’t. So they can either drop the issue, or else confabulate something.
I am kinda surprised. To me Judaism would be the second least psychedelic religion after Islam. First because it revolves heavily around "lawyering". Second because it focuses on text, not visual imagination.
Of the religions popular around here, I would nominate Orthodoxy as the most psychedelic - the concept of theoria.
A large mainline branch of Orthodox Judaism, Hasidism, is heavily grounded in mystical works attempting to describe the relationship between Man and G-d and the nature of reality, a lot of it using geometric symbology. Fertile psychedelic ground, and there is in fact a growing movement on the fringes to incorporate psychedelics into religious practice.
VR: I thought nobody is using this anymore, and then I found out it still has a fringe following among people who like to see themselves in non-human bodies. Which means... Zuck spent $50Bn to build... Furry Heaven.
Beyond the humorous aspects, can someone tell me how are people like this rich? Muh super efficient meritocratic markets?
> Beyond the humorous aspects, can someone tell me how are people like this rich? Muh super efficient meritocratic markets?
He's spending Meta's money... and I think this is a pretty reasonable choice for humanity, if not necessarily for Meta. They've pushed the frontier on VR/AR tech quite a bit, both in fidelity and cost-efficiency. I don't know how that pays off for humanity in the future, but it seems like a pretty good bet that it will, eventually.
I know multiple people that use a Quest instead of a monitor when working because they like being able to have a variable number of "monitors". Also, a lot of kids have a quest and play the games, so it's something that I think will gain user share as people that grew up with it age.
#43 I have always thought militant anti-colonialism was odd and not in tune with the public in most places. The implication of anti-colonialism is that pre-colonial feudal kings who might still be foreign were better than European liberals who built roads, trains and had some form of rule of law.
Note that the question seems to be asking about the modern influence of the former colonizer, not about whether the colonization itself was good or bad. You can believe that the 1930s Germany that invaded your country was literally Hitler while still believing that modern Germany has a positive influence on your country.
The two countries with the highest positive view of their former colonizer, Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe, have a very large migrant community living in the territory of that former colonizer, Portugal.
A quick back of the envelope calculation tells me that the equivalent of 20% of São Tomé and Príncipe's population (40k compared to 200k) lives in Portugal, and the figure is 17% for Cabo Verde.
I suspect that for countries with a large community living in the former colonizer, and where most people would know at least someone living there, the answer might have more to do with the general image they have of the country (Portugal) than with the actual political and economic influence of the former colonizer.
Cabo Verde was uninhabited before the Portuguese showed up. No Africans at all are indigenous to it. The island was colonized, but no group of people were "colonized" in the political sense of the word. There's only African-descended people there at all for the same reason they're in Alabama. That's a pretty unique case, it appears to have been swept up by the marxist pan-African fantasies of some guys in the 60s but it was never really of a kind with the other nations in that poll.
The world had a log-normal distribution of income in 1820, but had formed a pretty dramatic bimodal distribution by 1975 between colonizer and colonized nations, and then since 1975 has returned to a log-normal distribution: https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-inequality. This strongly suggests that colonialism did hold back the Global South on average. The absence of colonialism doesn’t necessarily mean those countries would have had feudal kings forever; they could have modernized better through trade with the developed countries, rather than being colonized, like Meiji Japan did.
I disagree, Finland, S Korea, Taiwan, Norway, Poland, Canada etc were colonies, the richest states in Europe like Switzerland, Sweden, Luxembourg had no colonies.
There is no correlation between colonialness and current GDP. We can easily test the hypothesis with neighbouring countries with different histories.
I don't think you can infer that colonialism held back the Glibal South based on that data. Inequality is not a measure of economic growth, and levels of growth at any particular strata cannot be inferred from Inequality data bc growth is not zero-sum.
Anyhow I can recommend two interesting books on the subject:
"This strongly suggests" - I do not think you can infer causality from this observation. It is also consistent with some countries inventing/adopting super efficient technologies/institutions, becoming richer because of that, and then a smaller subset of these countries, namely maritime ones, colonising some of the overseas countries lagging in adoption. This model has the advantage of explaining Swiss or Hungarian prosperity which your model fails to do.
#2 I love the fact that 664 Texans apparently weren't satisfied with the choice on the ballot presented to them (Allan Shivers the Democrat nominee vs. Allan Shivers the Republican nominee) and went for a write-in candidate, Allan Shivers.
#18: I don't really understand what you got out of the Dylan Black articles. Your argument about Tegmark's Mathematical Universe was the correct response to the fine-tuning argument. What Dylan Black says seems between straight-up wrong and missing the point.
He's using a very specific formalization of probability theory from Andrey Kolmogorov from 1933. I think there has in fact been some progress in the field of probability theory since then. For example, it's totally possible to have a uniform prior over the natural numbers (or even the real line): it's called an improper prior [0] and can be rigorously defined. The Beta(0,0) distribution is another example of an improper prior which is often used.
Or take this example in his article:
"Problem Statement: You're presented with an urn. I tell you nothing about this urn. You reach in, and draw one red ball. What is the probability that it contains 50% red balls? If you feel uncomfortable, good. You should. This isn't a hard problem or an imprecise problem. It's not a problem at all. It's a grammatically correct but meaningless arrangement of mathematical symbols, it is ill-posed."
I mean sure, the problem is underspecified if you want to calculate an objective number, but one of the central points of books like E.T. Jaynes' *Probability Theory* (2003) is that it all depends on what prior information you have. A human does have prior information about what kind of things are stored in urns in mathematics departments. And so, gun-to-their-head, they could give some probability for the above question. A superintelligence could use some approximation of Solomonoff induction to give an even better probability in answer to this question.
I didn’t read the Tegmark or Black, but the post you’re replying to doesn’t mention Kolmogorov complexity in any way. Kolmogorov’s foundational work on probability comes years before Turing’s idea of computation was described, let alone Kolmogorov and others using that to develop theories of complexity.
Improper priors do exist as mathematical objects. But they have lots of problems that make them behave in ways that are bad for epistemology. They violate conglomerability (ie, there are events that are more likely conditional on every element of a partition than they are unconditionally - eg, the probability of a number being square conditional on being a power of n is 1/2 for every n, even though the unconditional probability of a number being square is 0), and they allow for simultaneous confirmation of every single alternative (moving from a uniform distribution over the naturals to a geometric distribution makes every single number more likely).
Jaynes gives no argument that there is some sort of objective probability when background evidence is specified - he just identifies some conditions under which he can calculate what this probability would have to be like to obey certain symmetries, and then assumes that background evidence must always provide some set of symmetries of this sort.
> moving from a uniform distribution over the naturals to a geometric distribution makes every single number more likely
This can't be true; there is no way to move from a uniform distribution over the naturals to a geometric distribution, because there is no uniform distribution over the naturals.
Say that a set S of natural numbers is "eventually-periodic" iff there exists an N and a k, such that for all n>N, n is in S iff n+k is in S. It is straightforward to see that the set of eventually period sets is an algebra (though obviously not a sigma-algebra). Let j be the number of members of {N+1, N+2, ..., N+k} that are in S, and say that the "density" of the set is j/k.
Consider the function P from the eventually-periodic sets to the reals such that P(S) is the density of S. It is straightforward to check that this function satisfies all the axioms of probability other than countable additivity.
We can even define a function P(A|B) by saying that it is the fraction of elements of B that are also in A, if B is finite, and if B is infinite, looking at the eventually-periodic part of the intersection A\cap B and seeing what fraction of the corresponding stretch of B it is. This function satisfies most of the features of conditional probability (though as I mention above, not countable additivity or conglomerability).
Maybe you don't want to count this function as a "distribution". That's fine. I call it a "distribution", but say that it doesn't actually represent "probability" in any meaningful sense, but you could use the terms differently if you prefer.
The point I was making in the passage you reacted to was as follows.
Consider the function P' such that P'(S) is the sum of 2^-i, for all i in S.
It's straightforward to see that for any partition of the natural numbers into a collection of finite sets, every member of that set gets a higher value under P' than under P, and thus I claim that P and P' can't both be considered "probability functions" (because moving from P to P' to the other confirms every element of the partition).
> It's straightforward to see that for any partition of the natural numbers into a collection of finite sets, every member of that set gets a higher value under P' than under P
Yes, since P(S) must be zero for all finite S, but the elements of a partition are nonempty, P'(S) will exceed P(S) for all S that are members of a partition of the natural numbers into finite subsets.
What's interesting about P? Why are we working with these eventually-periodic sets? Why do we then segue to finite sets that are eventually-periodic only in a trivial way? Why is P' named "P'" when it bears no relation to P? Why is P given a definition other than "P(S) = 0", given that you only ever apply it where it is guaranteed to be 0?
What is it that you're trying to show?
> It is straightforward to check that this function satisfies all the axioms of probability other than countable additivity.
Well, there are two other axioms:
1. The probability function P must be nonnegative everywhere. Check.
2. The probability assigned to the total space must be equal to 1. The total space would appear to be the set of all eventually-periodic subsets of ℕ. It is trivial to show that summing P(S) over all such sets will exceed 1: P(ℕ) is 1, P(ℕ \ {1}) is 1, P(ℕ \ {2}) is 1, P(ℕ \ {1, 2}) is 1...
How is this second axiom being satisfied? Are you defining it into being true? Without countable additivity, there does not appear to be any way to show what "the probability assigned to the space" might or might not be.
The space here is ℕ, and the eventually-periodic sets are an algebra of subsets of ℕ - the ones to which P assigns a value (which the defenders of finite additivity call "probability", but I don't). This is supposed to represent the "probability" that a "randomly chosen natural number" is a member of the set.
Not every set has a "probability", just the sets that are eventually-periodic - but this is common with infinite probability spaces (we usually only assign probability to Lebesgue-measurable sets of real numbers when thinking of processes that generate real numbers, even when using probability measures that aren't the Lebesgue measure, like a normal distribution - though there are other probability measures on the real numbers defined over different algebras of subsets).
The axioms of probability, as Kolmogorov phrases them, are:
Non-negativity: that P must be non-negative on every input (which is satisfied)
Finite additivity: that the value of P on two disjoint sets must sum to the value of P on the union of those sets (for instance, the set of even numbers gets value 1/2, and the set of odd numbers gets value 1/2, and the set of all natural numbers gets value 1; a finite set of numbers that aren't divisible by 3 gets value 0, the set of multiples of 3 gets value 1/3, and the union of these two sets also gets value 1/3)
Normalization: that P applied to the whole space is 1 (which is obvious, because ℕ is the whole space, and as you note, P(ℕ)=1)
Continuity: that for a countable sequence of nested sets, P applied to the union is the limit of P applied to each set (this fails for P defined as above, because P({1})=0, P({1,2})=0, P({1,2,3})=0, ..., but P(ℕ)=1).
Some other axiomatizations just list countable additivity as a single axiom, but I think it's helpful that in Kolmogorov's system this is decomposed into finite additivity and continuity.
P satisfies all of these axioms other than continuity. It's important that P is *not* 0 on every set, because then it wouldn't satisfy Normalization - there needs to be "probability" 1 that some natural number is picked. For the people that want to think of this as "uniform probability" on the natural numbers, it's nice that this function says there is probability 1/2 that some even number is picked, and 1/4 that some multiple of 4 is picked, and so on, even though every individual number has "probability" 0.
Lebesgue measure on the Lebesgue algebra of real numbers between 0 and 1 satisfies all four of these axioms - because the space it is defined on is uncountable, it's possible for every element of the space to have probability 0 even though the whole space has probability 1.
P' also satisfies all four of these axioms, and it can be extended to the full algebra of all subsets of ℕ, if you prefer to do that rather than sticking with the algebra of eventually-periodic sets.
Why did I use the name P'? I wanted to use the letter P to suggest "probability" for both of them, but I needed to give the two functions different names, so I put a prime on one of them. In some branches of math there are canonical relations between functions that people use the prime to indicate (like differentiation in calculus), but in other branches of math, the prime is just used to distinguish another object of the same type as the first, with no suggestion of any connection between them.
Why did I stick with the algebra of eventually-periodic sets for P? For the same reason we stick with the Lebesgue algebra for Lebesgue measure - there are difficulties extending the function to sets outside this algebra while keeping the translation invariance and additivity properties.
#56: that paper is ancient. But so's this other one I found on Gwern's server somewhere, one of my favorites next to that German one about fucking vacuum cleaners: https://gwern.net/doc/technology/1958-bain.pdf
This initially seems like an industrial design study, but soon gets into unintended psychology: some children, when trapped in a fridge, do nothing. Plus the summary in Interlingua is a cute historical touch.
Wouldn't the D-notes just be the collateral for the loans? As time goes by without the D-notes getting paid off, the banks would automatically come to own the D-notes.
They can just trade state-contingent claims. The neat thing is that since the state they are contingent on is a political decision the bearers of the claims can influence, the more claims are emitted, the more likely the state is to be fulfilled.
Even if some non-Trump Republic will succeed him, it's hard to imagine he'd resist the pressure forever
While I don't know enough about the technical details to point out specific potential failure modes, this gives me a strange sense of "let's counter Trump's eponymous cryptocurrency by establishing our own bespoke, ethically-dubious financial instrument for influence-laundering," which does not exactly inspire optimism.
Call me old school, but I think it matters whether
a) The money goes to someone's private coffers or to research to cure cancer
b) It is given in exchange of non specified, unknown favors or it is backed by the promise to do something that is obviously in the remit of Congress or the Executive and is already aligned with one's political programs.
If one guy's burning half the house down to line his pockets and own the libs, that's very bad, yes. If somebody else sets fire to the other half in order to rescue some puppies... the differences do matter, but "cool motive, still arson."
Getting even more money even more openly involved in politics - and research! - to the point of "betting the farm" so to speak on explicit policy commitments as part of a factional spoils system, seems to me like it would be a terrible idea in terms of societal collateral damage, even if it were likely to succeed at its nominal primary goals.
I write, and almost exclusively read, poetry that rhymes. I also spend a decent chunk of time looking for modern poets who do the same, people like Chelsea Rathburn, A. E. Stallings, and Faith Thompson. I know there's a famous tweet (once linked to on this newsletter) that says something like, "People want poetry that rhymes. But we won't give it to them." So why aren't the three people I just named more famous? They're brilliant. Maybe it's the lack of interest in poetry in general. It's certainly not a new state of affairs.
People also want poetry to be set to music. It's the norm now and it always has been. There's not a shortage of rhyming poetry; it's as common as dirt.
What is true is that there's a small group of annoying people who keep telling everyone else that they should stop liking rhyming poetry; everyone ignores them.
“Patient Histories” was my first taste and it really got to me. There’s a vid of James Marsters reading it if you like vid/aud. He’s done a fair amount of work in tight form (and experimental supertight form … what if sonnet but every line ended on literally the same syllable, like a ghazal?) as well as some great blank verse.
36. This are valid points but his waving away the concerns about diversion doesn't quite convince me
"Well, the Israeli government says it's because of large-scale aid diversion by Hamas. But they have never once provided evidence of that, publicly or privately"
(notice "large-scale" btw)
There is some evidence but I don't want to get into that discussion. From a purely Bayesian perspective, what are the odds that Hamas didn't exercise some kind of control over the old process? Does he seriously think that they didn't get food for their fighters?
I couldn’t believe when I got to that part. He doesn’t think the government of a polity which is currently being starved-out in a war for survival would commandeer resource shipments? If Hamas *wasn’t” using food aid to feed its troops, shouldn’t every Hamas soldier have starved by now? It’s absurd.
If hypothetically Hamas wasn't stealing food, couldn't Hamas members just show up at the aid distribution site dressed as regular people and get food like any other person?
1. One has to show that there is still a significant number of Hamas "soldiers" around after 2 years of war
2. Even then, they are not really soldiers, they are irregulars. They can very well just tell their people to get food on their own, much like any other guerriglia force did.
3. At this point (actually, it's been more than one year), Hamas cannot keep criminals in prison, cannot prevent them from raiding armories, and formely incarcerated gangsters such as Yasser Abu Shabab are openly claiming territory for their gangs and looting aid on their own. It is not hard to believe that Hamas might be unable to seize aid simply because other local actors have disloged them
Well, they are still able to fight the IDF, kill Abu Shabab militants and GHF staff, not to mention keeping the hostages, so their control over Gazans might have degraded a bit but it's still very substantial.
I'll add that GHF workers have been killed or tortured by Hamas (https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/06/29/hamas-places-bounty-on-aid-workers-ghf/), which (even aside from any Israeli evidence) implies pretty strongly that Hamas has reasons to not want aid distributed through them. I can't think of an explanation for this that isn't that it's because they control the alternate means of aid distribution.
It's also worth noting here that UN (and affiliated aid orgs) have been suspiciously quiet about this (see e.g. https://www.jns.org/ghf-lack-of-un-condemnation-of-hamas-killing-of-aid-workers-shows-bodys-underbelly/ ). There's a range of how we can interpret this - from somewhat benign ("they don't want to piss off Hamas in order to keep their neutrality) to amorally greedy (they don't want anyone else cashing in on their aid bucks project) to outright hostile (they hate Israel and don't want anything that can help Israel reduce Hamas's power).
But whichever interpretation you go with, the underlying fact that UN aid orgs are incredibly politically hostile to GHF stands, and UN aid insider criticism of them should be seen in that light.
I could think of any number of explanations - they see GHF as enemy combatants (as they are run and mostly manned by the US government which is also supplying Israel with weapons) while the UN not, or they (like many humanitarian orgs) see the GHF as an attempt at ethnic cleansing, or they fear the GHF will shift the populace away from Hamas strongholds and deprive them of human shields...
There's also no reason to assume the Israeli government is nefariously trying to starve anyone instead of just regular incompetence, which is at least partly caused by the regular UN aid experts boycotting this org (e.g. the experienced guy who was originally supposed to be in charge bowed out after pressure from the UN not to help).
"There's also no reason to assume the Israeli government is nefariously trying to starve anyone..."
Excuse me, what? The political entity that is nearly two years into a blockade of a region with 2 million people *isn't* trying to starve anyone? Well then I guess they're doing a pretty impressive job of starving people by accident.
Or do you mean that they're not *nefariously* trying to starve anyone? Like that all the starving that has occurred thusfar has been a completely virtuous and exemplary use of systematic food-denial against a civilian population.
This evidence doesn't go in the direction you think. If they at all wanted to starve anyone - or even didn't work incredibly hard to actively support aiding them - then after a two-year war there would have been acute famine. That this hasn't happened is pretty conclusive proof that the Israeli government really, *really* doesn't want it to.
The Israeli leadership doesn't want mass starvation (in the sense of mass death), but they do want mass punishment in Gaza. From a practical standpoint, it reduces popular support for Hamas and makes it harder for Hamas (and everything else in Gaza) to function. From a less practical practical standpoint, Israelis are angry and don't like Palestinians. I've had too many friends and relatives tell me all Gazans are terrorists. This viewpoint has really surged since October 7th.
"This evidence doesn't go in the direction you think."
Oh, it doesn't. If you were to estimate the average Palestinian calorie intake for the month of May 2025, and then do the same estimate for May 2022, which number would you expect to be higher? By how much?
" If they at all wanted to starve anyone - or even didn't work incredibly hard to actively support aiding them..."
The. Government. Of. Israel. Has. Been. Actively. Blockading. Gaza. That has caused food shortages. That has caused human beings in Gaza *to starve.* Some of them fatally, many, many others to the point of serious harm but not (yet) death. That was certainly a known and foreseen consequence of the policies the government implemented--and even if it somehow *hadn't* been foreseen, there has been nearly two years in which to realize and account for it. Now it's possible that the Israeli government has no *intrinsic* preference for starving the people of Gaza and instead merely finds it to be a convenient and minimally objectionable way to achieve their goals[1]. But it's useless to claim that they are not doing it, or aren't doing it knowingly: both claims are clearly, plainly, incontestably false.
When you knowingly and deliberately harm another human being, you don't somehow absolve yourself of that responsibility by pointing out that you could have harmed them more and didn't. When people defend the Israeli government by pointing out that it has only committed *some* genocide instead of *complete* genocide, I honestly have to wonder if they believe it themselves. After all, if a mere 60,000 Palestinians killed (and hundreds of thousands of others displaced, injured and malnourished) is nothing to fuss about, then one wonders why a paltry 1300 Israeli deaths was even worth the IDF getting out of bed for.
[1] Which, let's note, is a really, really low bar. It's pretty rare for one human to want another human dead *as a fundamental end goal*. Generally people kill people to achieve something else they want. Genocide, in particular, is almost always a product of one group not wanting to share the same territory with another group--not the result of some fundamental preference for mass death.
Why don't you apply this to Ukraine? Or is your argument that somehow Egypt is not starving, even though Ukrainian soldiers are bleeding out of their eyes, because of the sheer number of rats/mice eating all the grain? (The Russians brought cats. So, so many cats).
If they were starving Palestine, then there would be starving Palestinians. Their population continues to climb. This must be the most incompetent genocide in human history, besides maybe what Hamas and like-minded Muslims have been trying to do jews for decades.
People seeing this talking point may as well assume it's being written by bots at this point: it was a pretty unserious argument even before 2023, and the fact that now being plainly and obviously incorrect hasn't dampened its popularity speaks volumes.
The risk is that it makes Hamas stronger and more able to continue fighting. Especially if they not just divert some aid for themselves but also use their control over the aid to control the society. Pretty much every guerrilla group has to control the population within which it acts, at least to prevent them from informing their enemies. You can't run an effective guerrilla campaign if people are not scared of you, even if they generally support you. Otherwise at least some would be tempted to collaborate with the occupier. Every guerrilla movement worth its name set up some kind of informal taxation system and dealt harshly with collaborators.
I'm not saying that this makes GHM approach the right one, I'm just annoyed that people don't acknowledge obvious trade-offs.
Diverting some of the aid and being able to *control* aid (ie. diverting all of the aid) are two very meaningfully different claims though.
If Hamas can distribute some food but those who don't get food from them can easily get food directly from aid workers, that doesn't really give them any power over the populace.
The IDF press release says Hamas planned to confiscate 15% of the aid packages. Some extremely back-of-the-napkin calculation: the GHF says it distributed 55K aid boxes in about 4 months. Per this article [1] and ChatGPT, a box is worth about $30 in the US, and picking a random item (flour), it's about 200x more expensive in Gaza [2] (though I find that hard to believe, that would mean a kg of flour costs about half the monthly wage of the average Gazan, so where would the money come from?), so 15% of the aid packages would be worth about $50M, or $150M if extrapolated to a full year. That's substantial but not decisive, given Hamas' alleged annual budget of $2B. [3]
I'm not sure about this calculation. The $2B figure is from early 2023, that is, before the war, when the situation was quite different.
More importantly, the physical control of food distribution would be more important than having money. Hamas might collect money from various charities and allies as described in the National Post article. However you can't just wire this money to Gaza or Israel and buy supplies, at any price.
It just passed the Senate 51–50, with Vance breaking the tie. I expect it'll start getting coverage now that it has to pass the House again, since many prominent people highlighted this is reason they'd vote it down.
#3 - I think this is a good test between people who truly understand physics, biology, chemistry, etc, and people who simply memorize facts.
If a chess master is burning as much chemical heat energy as a professional athlete, then where does all the energy go? Dry skin in a room temperature environment is unable to radiate heat at a 6000 calorie/day burn rate. Chess players would have to sweat like basketball players if the claim were true.
I don't think this is necessarily true, because there's a lot of variability in how concentrated heat-generating activity can be to achieve a rate of 6000 calories/day. Basal metabolic rate is roughly 100 calories per hour. Working out in a cool room, I sweat heavily at caloric expenditures of 800 calories per hour, but not at 400 per hour. A chess tournament can last much longer than a basketball game, and with the activity distributed enough, the participants would not necessarily become particularly sweaty. Also, my understanding is that some chess players do become quite sweaty at tournaments, if not as sweaty as basketball players. Personally, I tend to sweat when I concentrate intensely, so I'd be surprised if that weren't the case for at least some chess players.
The issue I think is harder to square is that chess players don't seem to *breathe* as heavily as is associated with even modest cardio exercise. They might sweat heavily due to stress, but if they're engaging in increased respiration, they'd have to take in more oxygen.
"The issue I think is harder to square is that chess players don't seem to *breathe* as heavily as is associated with even modest cardio exercise. They might sweat heavily due to stress, but if they're engaging in increased respiration, they'd have to take in more oxygen."
Did you actually check out the link? The whole thing started with someone observing rapid breathing from chess players in tournaments (for short periods of time), and someone else extrapolating (poorly) on how many calories they could burn with that much extra oxygen.
To be slightly more precise they report the chest movement rate (from impedance pneumography) and interpret it as breathing rate- since your chest can move for reasons other than breathing and they do not specify a method for filtering the data it is not clear that the maximum signal they reported should even be considered a breathing rate in the first place
I didn't; I'd heard the claims of chess players burning 6000 calories per day, and then followup claims of that not being true, without investigating deeply into either, before the links page was posted.
At the time when I heard the first claim, I thought it might be within the realm of plausibility, if the tournaments last a very long time, but that if so, the players would probably show signs of physical exertion commensurate with that. But in all the videos I've seen since of people participating in chess tournaments, that hasn't appeared to be the case.
Exactly. Weirdly on-point anecdote but my ex had taken Sapolsky's class at Stanford and casually repeated this claim to me many years ago. I have a physics degree and my immediate reaction was "no f-ing way, show me the evidence" and made exactly that waste-heat argument.
Ha! Thank you for this comment. I didn't think to explicitly search through Sapolsky's lectures, but sure enough, it's in lecture 1 of the recorded version of his Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology (albeit just "thousands", not 6000). Note that this video has over 18 million views.
> You have two humans, two individuals, who are going through a ritual. They are sitting at a table. They're absolutely silent. They're making no eye contact, and they do nothing more physically taxing than every now and then, one of them picks up their hand and moves a little piece of wood on the table. And if these happen to be the right two individuals in the middle of a chess grandmaster tournament, these people are maintaining blood pressure for six hours running that you only see in a marathon runner. **These people are going through thousands of calories a day doing nothing more than thinking. And this is outrageous.** Because you look at one of these chess grandmasters who's just taken down an opponent, took down their queen or whatever, and they will have the exact same physiology as some male baboon on the Savannah who's just ripped the stomach open of his worst rival. And we're doing it there just with thought.
I love physics majors. "If you want a mask that works, strap a plastic bag to your head." (This was in advocation of "heavily forced air-filtration, ala IQAir or other low-clean-room grade filters").
As I recall, 2015 was the low point for crime, and for a couple years it seemed that there might be a slight increasing trend, though only the immediate post-pandemic years had a clear spike. I think we haven’t got back down to 2015 levels yet.
#13 Note that the huge income tax "cuts" in the BBB is mainly just maintaining the current tax rates! No one actually gets lower taxes than they currently pay.
This counts as a tax cut because the original bill only lowered taxes for the next 10 years, when rates would go back up.
This is done to make the official forecasts look good, but the intention was to keep the new rates in the future, which is now.
I'm not saying this is good (or bad) policy, but it's important to understand that taxes largely stay the same, even though it is in a technical sense a tax cut.
What's the text of the tip exemption? As soon as it's formally enacted, it might well favor the rich. The first effect of making one kind of income exempt from income taxes is that as much income as possible is recharacterized as belonging to the exempt category.
Thanks for posting this. I came to learn only this week that the 'tax cuts' which people have spilled a lot of ink over are 'the same tax policy we've had for the majority of the last decade'. Maybe I'm dumb but this feels like an underdiscussed point.
It's still important though because, when the original tax cuts were passed, the entire deficit/impact forecast and subsequent conversation at _that_ point was under the assumption that would expire the way that they were meant to. This is the bait and switch that is continually getting played (by both sides). Get what you want now, minimize the projected impact by giving it an expiration date in order to reduce public backlash and criticism, and then, when it comes time to actually let it expire, convince everyone that "oh this is just the status quo, it's not that big a deal to let it continue and cancel the expiration". So now, we are at the point when the lie of the expiration is finally being made explicit. So, relative to what was promised when they got passed, this _is_ additional tax cuts.
If you want to argue from the perspective that this is nothing new and just status quo, then I hope that the next time someone proposes something with such an expiration, you demand a forecast assuming it won't expire, and take your view based on that forecast.
I am, if anything, inclined to penalize this even more than usual specifically to try and discourage this bait and switch tactic.
I don't disagree that the TCJA's original proponents made their arguments in bad faith, what has been weird for me is the framing. I feel like both sides are selling this as a major tax cut, with the republicans hoping that people will like that and the democrats hoping that people won't like that because it includes/favors rich people. But, unless you are on medicare or frequent a medical provider with a high percentage of medicare beneficiaries, nothing about your life is likely to change if this bill passes. Like, I don't understand how the bill's authors expect it to win them in any votes in the midterm, given that it makes no-one's life better and some people's worse than the status quo. Democrats can and are pointing to people losing out from benefits being cut, but they will not be able to point to a rich CEO making more money from the bill, because the CEOs will be paying the same as they were in 2019.
If the republicans were not so committed to donor enrichment they could have just let the 199A deduction expire, not touched benefits, and said "SEE DEMOCRATS WANT TO RAISE YOUR TAXES" and the democrats would have had to get an argument with the ref, both in the style you've gestured at. But no one has done either of those things, so the rhetoric hasn't matched the situation and I don't see how it will pay off for them a year from now.
> But, unless you are on medicare or frequent a medical provider with a high percentage of medicare beneficiaries, nothing about your life is likely to change if this bill passes.
A) It's estimated that 11 million people will lose health coverage (or up to 17 million if you include the effects of ending ACA provisions). That's a LOT of people.
B) At that scale, there's lots of knock-on effects. Rural hospitals will close because they've lost a critical mass of paying patients. That means that even non-medicaid recipients will find it harder to get care. Likewise, individual health insurance plans are likely to get a lot more expensive.
Additionally, the bill is likely to make ordinary people's lives worse in other ways too, such as rising interest rates from the ballooning debt and increasing electricity prices, although those will probably be subtle enough that it won't get people on the streets the way that killing Medicaid does.
If 11 million people lose health care I imagine that means a noticeable increase in homelessness, which is certainly annoying for everyone. Especially if it’s preventable
> But, unless you are on medicare or frequent a medical provider with a high percentage of medicare beneficiaries, nothing about your life is likely to change if this bill passes.
You mean Medicaid. No politician would dare touch Medicare.
> I feel like both sides are selling this as a major tax cut, with the republicans hoping that people will like that and the democrats hoping that people won't like that because it includes/favors rich people.
That would be a little weird of the Republicans. On the fundamentals, people are far, far more angry about having their taxes raised - the actual effect of letting the TCJA provisions expire - than they are happy about having their taxes lowered. Why would you characterize an issue that's amazing for you as if it were only moderately good for you?
> It's still important though because, when the original tax cuts were passed, the entire deficit/impact forecast and subsequent conversation at _that_ point was under the assumption that would expire the way that they were meant to.
No, this isn't a new phenomenon. We knew about official budget forecasting at the time.
> So now, we are at the point when the lie of the expiration is finally being made explicit.
We reached that point decades ago.
Though I am curious about one point. Official budget forecasts don't consider anything more than 10 years out. From the forecast's perspective, there is no difference between a program that is enacted with an expiration date 10 years in the future and one that is enacted for all of time. The TCJA has some provisions that expire in 2025, which is inside the budget window.
But it also has some provisions that expire in 2028, which is the end of the budget window. Why?
Well, under current law, the top rate this year will be 39.6 percent, whereas under the bill it will be 37 percent. It seems perfectly reasonable to describe that as a tax cut.
10: The explanation for this that I've always heard is that sometime during Trump's first term, social media algorithms changed to start pushing the manosphere much harder to teenage boys, realizing it was a good way to get them really hooked into the social media systems. I haven't done any research into whether or not this is true, that's just what I've heard.
33: "I guess this is good (the verdict wasn’t dependent on a few ignorant or dishonest people), but maybe also bad (shouldn’t being familiar with the best evidence for one side or the other make you believe that side more?)" Isn't this what you should expect from a healthy scientific field? The experts in a subject matter who don't know the details of a specific topic still know whose opinion they should trust, and thus end up converging on the truth? This sort of shortcut is exactly how science is supposed to work, right?
#20 Wonderful timing. The Roman Catholic lectionary cycles through much of the Old Testament every few years, and today's Old Testament reading features the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah!
#1 - The way that the author identifies the relatively small set of emotive words the AIs consistently alight on (ghost, whisper, echo, buzz, hum, pulse, etc.) reminded me of a common observation about another poorly-trained artificially intelligent storytelling entity, the modern Walt Disney Corporation. It's an in-joke in theme park fandom that Disney only knows about a dozen words (dream, fantasy, wish, enchantment, adventure, magic, etc.) and combines them in various ways to serve every possible purpose.
Other corporate entities surely have their own favored vocabularies (synergy, sustainability, difference, etc.) just as AIs bent toward nonfiction do, but something about narrowing the domain to the production of fiction makes them even easier to surface.
It makes me think of the "start to Clench" races for Stephen Donaldson books, where everyone opens a different book to a random page and sees how long it takes until the word "clench" is used.
(In trying to find that article again, I've discovered Google lists no blogs or articles called 'Rickety Fiction', which seems like a fun enough name that SOMEONE would have used it.)
Re #3: Man, that's really disappointing about Sapolsky. I really respect him and though he was a responsible scientist, but this is pretty irresponsible. Now I will have to take every claim from him under suspicion. I wonder how many of the stories in A Primate's Memoir were embellished or even made up.
I just want to add that one thing I really like about Scott is that he is not a bullshiter. I really dislike bullshiters. I think Scott is about as honest as people come, and I really respect that.
Thanks. I think relatively few people are bullshitters, and it's more of a question of how careful your back-of-the-envelope calculations are. It looks like Sapolsky's issue was that someone said chessmasters breathed three times as fast (at one point), and he seems to have assumed breathing was a perfect correlate for metabolic rate so you could multiply daily metabolic expenditure by 3x. I can imagine making this mistake if I filed this fact away in my head as "something something 3x something metabolism chess" and then remembered it while writing an essay about something else and rolled a critical failure while trying to recall it.
I have probably done things approximately this stupid; when I don't, I'm protected less by careful source tracking, and more by a good enough mental model of how metabolism works that if I felt tempted to say something like this, I would think "no, that's crazy, I know that an active brain doesn't consume that many more calories than an inactive brain" and then check my source.
I don't think Sapolsky deserves too much disapproval for having gotten the calculation wrong. I think he deserves a lot of disapproval for, once it became clear that it was wrong, going around falsely telling people that it was a journalistic misrepresentation of what he said, instead of admitting that he made a mistake. I think that you would not have done that.
I think bullshitting is a spectrum, and I think almost everyone does it to a certain extent. I also think that there is a continuum between genuine mistakes and intentional bullshitting. The question then is, how likely are you to make a mistake about a fact or an inference from given facts, based on your commitment to truth and your love of bullshitting? In this case, and of course this is speculation, but as an intellectual, would it not be seductively attractive that thinking burns as many calories as athletic competition? Someone committed to truth would be wise to stop and take a step back, when such a seductive fact presents itself. But if you are prone to exaggeration, you will dismiss such thoughts.
Perhaps I am being too harsh, and I am sorry about that. But even in the most generous interpretation, this reveals a carelessness that I find off putting in a scientist. I still like Sapolsky and will continue to enjoy his books. I will just approach his writing with more skepticism, which I suppose is not a bad thing.
17) "I’d always heard modernism was a reaction to the trauma of the World Wars," No, it was a reaction to the glutinous over-reach of late 19C art. The more every new building is ornately Gothic, the more you're likely to dream of clean Bauhaus lines merely as a refresher. The problem is that then the reaction went even more overboard than what it was reacting to.
Useful to remember that Virginia Woolf wrote, "On or about December 1910, human nature changed."
56) I also hated dogs as a child, still do. And not for any psychological displacement reasons. Dogs attack strangers, they bark, they bite, they knock you over. Nothing used on the child in this story would have worked on me at all. Isn't there a reason for signs reading "Beware of dog"? You don't see any signs reading "Beware of cat" or "Beware of goldfish."
You don't have a permanent hole in your skull (visible on an MRI) from a cat whose claw got into your (still soft) bones. (That person, on the other hand, likes cats).
I'm not Big Swan, but I assume they meant to imply that the (radical?) left's support of Palestine is mostly about "decolonization", i.e, that they're fully on board with terrorism against Israel, support 10/7, etc. And that this has nothing to do with the recent occupation of Gaza by Israel.
ETA: to be clear, I'm merely relaying claims I've heard from rightists about the supposed true motives of leftists.
I would interpret it as "the system was not intended to distribute aid effectively, it was intended to create a volatile situation where the IDF can freely attack civilians while claiming that it is simply protecting the aid mission."
And like, I'm not saying I fully endorse that view, but Gaza has had a very long list of "unfortunate accidents" and at some point you're allowed to start asking if they are actually accidental, or if there's some sort of deliberate policy that's making them accident-prone.
I just wrote a reply to Scott - I think the real purpose is to concentrate Gazans in the south of the strip for eventual removal. I am hesitant to say that the intention is to create a situation where civilians can be freely fired upon because it's just too pointlessly evil and I don't think the Israeli government currently has the charisma points to spend on something like that.
The fact that the GHF relies very heavily on armed private security (which is apparently headed by a guy who previously trained Nicaraguan contras, known for their brutality against civilians) did give me pause, but I hope and suspect that this is more of a "when you only have a hammer..." type thing: the Israeli government doesn't like the UN and the UN won't use food distribution to concentrate the Gazans south, so they had to run it themselves, but they don't know how to run a food distribution organization so they handed it off to paramilitary groups because that's what they DO know. You put a bunch of mercenaries who don't know what they're doing in charge of a food distribution system that is not primarily intended to distribute food and as soon as they run into a problem they're going to solve it the way they know how (by shooting), simple as that.
And since the Israeli government doesn't particularly care whether the Gazans get food or get shot, the situation continues and no one cares to fix it.
No, I'm saying the same thing that the author of the twitter thread that you linked to is saying: the main purpose of the GHF is to draw Gazans south, towards the Egyptian border, where the can be better concentrated for eventual removal. (https://x.com/JeremyKonyndyk/status/1927489293280551405)
Smotrich has said much the same thing, that the aid is a figleaf, which (besides drawing Gazans away from the north of the strip for eventual removal while the rest of the area is destroyed completely) was also meant to take international pressure off of the Israeli government after the three month blockade. (https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/1924501462807089208)
Was there anyone involved in this that wanted the distribution to go well? Likely, but I don't think they're in control of the project: the original executive director of the GHF resigned before the distribution started, saying that "it was not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence." He had previously said that he "would participate in no plan in any capacity if it was an extension of an I.D.F. plan or an Israeli government plan to forcibly dislocate people anywhere within Gaza.”
I do think it's a vibe based question (IMO most teenagers are going to answer surveys based on vibes and will probably have a higher lizardman constant), but there are definitely enough people to hit 20% on that question. The replies on that link are completely full of people arguing the premise - IE "if women did the same work they should get paid the same, but women don't do work as well as men" and things like that. The age they're surveying is particularly susceptible as well, I personally remember being pretty shitty at that age and growing out of it in college with exposure to more people and becoming friends with more women.
I think it was always a vibe question for most people. You ask "did humans evolve from apes," and a small number of literal-minded people answer the literal question ("Technically, no, the great apes and we have a common ancestor....") but the normies just give the related "whose side are you on" or "directionally correct" answer.
13. Trump's BBB "lowers taxes (especially on the rich)"
1. Most of the so called lowering consists of making permanent provisions that were enacted in 2017 and were scheduled to expire later this year. I have been a tax professional for 50 years, during that time there have been major revisions to the tax law in almost every administration. Any thing that is in effect for 8 years should be viewed as permanent. Taxes are imposed on a dynamic economy. We do not know what the effect of most changes are until years after they are put in place. A real reform would be leaving things the same for long stretches.
2. It is a tax on income. People who do not have much income do not pay much taxes. The standard deduction for a married couple filing jointly is not $29,200. Any decrease is mostly going to be a decrease for those who are better off.
3. The US has had an income tax system for more than a century now. it has not affected the distribution of wealth or income in any meaningful way. It probably cannot. The distribution is determined by factors that are not related to taxation. The wealthiest people in the country, Musk, Bezos, Gates, Ellison, Page, Brin, all made their money by exploiting a new technology. In the gilded age it was railroads, now its the internet. The real impact of taxes is imposed by the forces of supply and demand. Any tax that on a growing segment will simply be passed along as a consumer cost. Taxes should be designed to collect revenue cheaply and and easily. Getting the most feathers from the goose wit the least amount of hissing.
If you're going to say that temporary tax cuts should be treated as permanent, then the Congressional Budget Office should score them that way, so that Congress and the people can be honestly informed about their impact on the deficit over the long term.
If you pass a tax cut and say "it's not going to be too bad for the deficit because it's just temporary," and then a few years later you say "well, they've been in place for so long it's not really changing anything if we make it permanent," then your previous claims about the deficit are now retroactively lies. And if you *know* that you're going to make the cuts permanent if you stay in power for long enough, then they're lies from the very start.
>it has not affected the distribution of wealth or income in any meaningful way. It probably cannot.
Perhaps it can't affect the distribution of before-tax income, but it certainly can affect the distribution of after-tax income, which is kind of the whole point of the debate.
Let's think about a corner case to illustrate what I mean. Let's think about LeBron James, NBA Star, who many think is the GoAT of basketball. He is paid around $50 million a year to play basketball. Forget the union contract and the salary cap for a moment. How is his pay determined? Simple, Jeanie Buss, calls him up and says we hope that you want to play for the Lakers in 2025/26, how much are you looking for in your contract. LeBron says $50 million. Ms. Buss says, great, we are so excited that you want to come back. I will shoot you a contract proposal toot suite.
A few days later, LeBron meets with his people to review the proposal. The accountant speaks up and says Congress just changed the tax law. Under the old law, if you made $50 million, you paid $20 million of that in taxes and took home $30 million. Under the new law you will pay $25 million in taxes and take home $25 million. LeBron is upset, even for him $5 million is not couch change. The agent speaks up and says don't worry we will just get the Lakers to increase the contract to $60 million.
The agent calls the Lakers and makes the new demand. They have a staff meeting to discuss it. Marketing says that if LeBron retires our ticket sales and tv advertising will tank. The accountant runs the numbers and tells them the bad news is the team's owners will also be paying higher taxes but the good news is that the increased contract will be deductible. He also reports that a 3% increase in ticket prices and a 2% increase in advertising rates would get the team to net out to the same place they were at under the old tax rates. Marketing says that should not be a problem. The Governor says make it so.
The moral of this story is that people with market power will make sure their after tax net remains the same. Of course this a corner case. For lots of people demanding a pay increase to cover a tax increase is a request to be replaced by ChatGPT. But the economy is composed of hundreds of millions of individual actors who work under different constraints. There is simply no a priory way of knowing where the incidence of the tax will fall.
But, you can take it as a given that the rich are rich because they have market power and poor are poor because they don't. Tax increases actually fall those who do not have market power. Taxes will not affect the distribution of wealth or income over the whole society.
If the team had the ability to raise ticket prices 3% and advertising rates 2%, without losing sales of tickets or advertising, why did they wait until this hypothetical scenario to make these price increases?
Similar to vectro's point, if LeBron could demand $60 million and receive it, why would he not be doing that already? Surely he'd prefer $36 million take-home to $30 million.
This whole argument seems very strange. If it *truly* made no difference to the people paying the highest tax bills, one would hardly expect them to fight so hard to lower their taxes. I'm sharply reminded of all of the "deficit hawks" who screamed that ballooning deficits were *the most important thing* until just a few months ago, when large deficits being a big problem became politically inconvenient. So too do we suddenly learn that changes to tax rates don't *really* matter: and curiously, we learn it just when it's most convenient for them not to matter.
I agree with your main points, I just wanted to pipe in that, as a true deficit hawk(*), I had almost no company a couple of months ago. In fact, in this policy area, I have been lonely for decades.
(*) Even I am not a "true" deficit hawk if the requirement is believing that deficit reduction is always the highest policy priority. There's a lot more nuance and complexity than could fit on a legible bumper sticker.
Vectro: In the real world there are salary caps etc. In game theory world, I can cop out that the IRS changed the rules of the game which changes the outcomes.
In a game theoretic world, players who have frequent low stakes transactions are motivated to not extract the last dollar. Customer good will is a real thing with real value. Sports teams have fan bases. The fans supply all kinds of revenue streams such as merch and broadcast fees.
in markets where there are fewer repeat transactions price negotiations will be tougher. Compare car buying and grocery shopping.
agrajagagain: The players on sports teams have lots of constraints. Their biggest revenue may be from endorsements and advertising. Another one, and i can think of examples of this like Mahomes, is that in team sports even the biggest stars need competent teammates. Its no good to be the highest paid player in the league if all your team can afford after paying you is rookies and washed up veterans.
I think more examples come from the world of auction design. Flower markets with repeat players and daily transactions use designs like the lowest market clearing price Dutch auction. Art markets use a competitive highest bidder system that can produce the winner's curse.
It's unfortunately paywalled, but here's my summary of his argument: It's a cohort effect. Most millennials came of age in the late 2000s or early 2010s, which was when the coolness of progressivism peaked. The conservative establishment had three huge high-profile political failures in short order (the Global War on Terror, the Great Recession, and same-sex marriage), which created a sense that the right was just bad and wrong about everything. The election of Barack Obama was the most exciting thing in ages and put tons of cultural momentum on the progressive side. And the cultural hegemony of scoldy Christian moralists was in just the right phase of its decline: recent enough that millennials remembered it as the uncool establishment to rebel against, but too advanced to push back effectively against that rebellion.
Now, as Yglesias's title says, those progressive millennials are old and uncool. The new cohort that's now coming of age is doing so in an environment where the left hasn't been doing so hot, and grew up being scolded by *woke* authority figures and so thinks of wokeness as the moralistic establishment that's cool to rebel against.
Also Democrats used to benefit from the decreasing share of the white vote, but that's stopped working as the right has gotten better at appealing to racial minorities. I'm not sure to what extent it makes sense to think of that as the same trend, though.
>Also Democrats used to benefit from the decreasing share of the white vote, but that's stopped working as the right has gotten better at appealing to racial minorities
It is perhaps more accurate to say that it has worked less well. Democrats still get the lion's share of non-white voters, so they will continue to benefit from the demographic shift.
Right now, I don't think that's true, as the Republican share of the nonwhite vote is rising much faster than the nonwhite share of the electorate (see https://catalist.us/whathappened2024/). Of course, it can't keep rising this fast forever, so I suppose the question is what level it plateaus at.
Your summary of the social media consensus is wrong (to be clear, that's because the reporting and tweeting on this by the authors was misleading). I'm not sure what the plot is from (not the preprint), but the study did a Delphi process and it looks like this is the stage 1, not the final vague statements that they had consensus on (see third link).
A representation of the final consensus, although the first author of the preprint (Capraro) says the best representation is the table in the preprint.
#10: Although the woke movement peaked in 2022, specific lines of woke argument peaked long before then. One of these is the alleged 23% gender-based pay gap. Although it was debunked by mainstream outlets in 2012, the myth persisted among feminists for *years*. I remember seeing new videos and articles decrying the pay gap in 2017, and perhaps as late as 2019.
For some data points about the history of this debate, see section 6 on this page:
My first hypothesis was that some boys took the "reversed stupidity" response to the pay gap claim. Feminists claimed "Women should not earn 23% less than men", and although many boys inverted the claim correctly ("Women *do not* earn 23% less than men"), some of them inverted it incorrectly ("Women *should* earn 23% less than men). This explanation seems plausible in principle, but I think the timing is wrong.
My next hypothesis is that it's related to the MeToo movement, which began in 2017. The movement may have contributed to the proliferation of workshops and other programs about sexual consent. (Presumably, these would have began 1-2 years later.) Many of the boys would have felt like they were being blamed, profiled, or punished for bad things that they didn't do.
In addition to stoking a general feeling of resentment in the boys, I suspect that some of the boys also responded with solidarity toward adults who actually did mistreat women. Both of these psychological factors could contribute toward the development of sexist attitudes.
My bet is on MeToo. It peaked in 2018 and I believe exhausted many men's tolerance for modern feminism. For me personally I know that's when I switched from considering it a little nutty to outright adversarial and in bad faith.
13. What I find interesting about this is that it was largely the religious right that drove this over concerns about pornography and child protection. It's also a good reminder that one reason prediction is hard is that success or failure can come from basically exogenous factors to the narrow area you're examining.
16. Decker is not as smart as he thinks he is. No bank would lend on the promise of a political party, in part because the Democrats can neither credibly promise to win the next election nor that they will pass that bill. You could calculate the risk discount rate but it would be huge. You'd need to discount that they'd win the presidency and both houses which, even if they're individually favored in all three, would net out to a lower than half chance. Then you'd need to discount they actually fulfilled the promise.
Giving some fairly favorable assumptions:
P(Presidency win) = 60%
P(House win) = 55%
P(Senate win) = 55%
P(Passing the bill even with control) = 70%
You get about 87% discount rate. That is insanely high. That's 4x the discount rate that VC gets for investing in companies that don't exist yet. That's higher than the discount rate given to Zimbabwe during its crisis.
That math isn't right because it assumes that the three electoral outcomes are uncorrelated, and because it represents the probability of *any given* election resulting in unified Democratic control, without accounting for their getting another chance every two years.
The math is simplified for sure. If you want to assume they're positively correlated and produce a P(Unified Gov) that does increase your chances but it still ends up at like 40%. Which produces a discount rate of like 73%. Which is still gigantic. And that's in a good year, if they have a less than 50% chance of winning it drops.
They get a new chance every four years, not two, because they need the presidency. But you're right that's the biggest simplification: you'd need to calculate the time value. You get an expected wait of 3.7 cycles through that, rounding to 16 years. Multiply them together and you get 89% even with the higher correlated number.
I'm not sure I'm following your discount-rate math. If (we assume for the sake of argument) the banks will have to wait 16 years in expectation to get paid back, then can't you just apply the normal interest rate to figure out how much they have to charge? The concern would be the possibility that they never get paid back at all, and I'm not sure how your back-of-the-envelope calculation purports to calculate that.
No, because the bank is not trying to give the universities the lowest possible interest rate. It needs to take into account default risk, political risk, time horizon uncertainty, etc. This means the cost of capital converges to the risk adjusted rate, not the prime interest rate.
What I think you're kind of feeling is the universities have other, cheaper sources of capital already. Which is true.
Somewhat that, but also I'm literally just trying to understand your math; I don't work with financial math that frequently. When you say "89% discount rate", does that mean that a lender would have to charge 669% APR to break even on expectation? If not, what does it mean? And can you show how that number is derived from the probability of unified government per election?
36. While I'm sympathetic to the idea that experts tend to know things, I'm also sympathetic to the idea that experts have a vested interest in finding whatever replaced them failed. There's no mention of the reason the GHF concentrated in a few checkpoints: because they were under military guard after Hamas supporters attacked those more distributed checkpoints.
He also does not mention the reason the UNRWA and other aid organizations were able to disperse aid checkpoints is because they paid off Hamas. Now, maybe he just doesn't think this is worth mentioning, but I think he knows the optics of "we paid Hamas so they would allow us to feed starving Gazans" would harm already waning support for UNRWA. And so on and so forth. This is a narrow selection of facts that veer into speculation, memetically fit but not a mature discussion of the situation.
48. The Gulf War was fought over land though which meant that the US could sweep in hammer after the degredation including actual, hard fighting. China's hammer would need to go over a rough sea. There's also the problem that the Gulf War, which is widely regarded as rapid, took six months. That's plenty of time for even a relatively unprepared America, Japan, etc to get itself together and intervene. And once they decide to intervene China has no option but a slugging match with no clear diplomatic exist. Of course, "a slugging match with no clear diplomatic exit" is also how I would have described Ukraine.
Another important fact is that neither Ukraine nor Iraq could retaliate against the home territory of the attacking country. Taiwan absolutely can.
Sure, maybe China can hope for the victory to be so quick, and the Taiwanese military so rational and dispassionate, that they just negotiate a dignified surrender rather than ravaging Xiamen in defiance. But it's an additional risk they're taking compared to Russia and the US.
Can you expand on that first thought? Ukraine has been (with some difficulty) striking targets in Russia for some time, and I'd have thought Chinese air superiority would make similar strikes by Taiwan at least as difficult? Or am I underrating Taiwan's offensive capability?
55. China has had various institutes for understanding and controlling the effects of AI. It was seen as a natural extension of their control of other forms of technology and information production. I would bet the point of making an AISI that's modeled on the western ones is not to signal a new commitment to AI safety but to provide a Chinese voice in such conversations abroad. They do this a lot, having an internal version that controls domestic affairs and an external version that's meant to push the Chinese point of view in international organizations or create commitments China itself is not bound by.
A key tell: can you get commitments from actual Chinese regulators and are they sending over top party officials? Do they actually make laws and regulations that are enforced internally? Are they allowed to advocate for it openly inside China in Mandarin? Or are they just sending over people who are mostly specialized in dealing with foreigners with little domestic power? So far the CnAISDA style outreach has been the latter.
That said, I stand by my comment China invests more into AI alignment research than anyone else in the world. They just want to align it with the CCP.
Compare the image manipulation retraction of the Sodom & Gomorrah paper to the image manipulation retraction of the Alzheimer's amyloid beta paper. The archaeology paper was published in 2021 and immediately had concerns about repetitive elements. The Alzheimer's paper also had concerns in 2021, but was published in 2006. And my understanding is that no one looked at it merely because it was an influential paper, widely known to be unreplicable garbage, maybe widely believed to be fraud, but only because they were doing general sweeps, having discovered > 1% image fraud rate.
Why didn't the Alzheimer's paper get any attention to its images? Because no one thought it would be easy to prove fraud? Or because no one thought proving fraud was worth the personal career risk of being a whistle-blower? If image manipulation fraud is so common, why aren't there any whistle-blowers testifying to having witnessed it? Do the people doing systematic studies of fraud have a secret origin story of witnessing fraud but don't want to throw their mentors under the bus?
22. So it’s sorta like Cameo, but for dorks like us?
23. I’m surprised it’s only 32 players. I thought the general practice was to take any player of prominence and slap his name on a random athletic shoe design.
#1 - Is the quick and easy answer for why AI writes like that simply because the training data for fiction writing is overwhelmingly things like tumblr posts, mediocre mass-market stuff, and, perhaps most significantly, fan fiction? When I was reading the AI output it reminded me most of all of cringe-inducing tumblr posts and that time in high school (I've fruitlessly tried to erase from memory) when I went to see what all the fanfic fuss was about.
Aren't there lots of traditionally published books and journalism and stuff in the training corpus? Also, I don't see why fanfic in particular would be more than a small percentage of it, most user-generated text on the public internet isn't fanfic.
I'm not familiar enough with what's in the AI corpus, nor do I understand how much training on non-fiction (most of the internet, I assume) informs an AI's fiction stylings. But a very quick search indicates that fanfic, specifically, numbers in the lower 8-digits, and the number of traditionally-published fiction books is in the high 5-digits yearly. How many of those are available for AI training? I have no clue.
Self-publishing (mostly e-books), which probably has some overlap with fanfics, as I assume people often publish to both fanfic sites and create e-books of their works, numbers roughly 3-4x traditional publishing. I'd hazard to guess most of that, in terms of quality, is closer to the fanfic average than the traditional average. But, of course, the traditional publishing average is probably closer to the fanfic average than it is to "great" writing.
But it seems obvious to me that it will be extremely hard or impossible to get AI to produce great fiction, given that it's something of an aggregation machine. Nearly all humans can't write great fiction either!
That said, the particular stylistic quirks shown in the article resemble a particular style of internet writing, at least to my eyes. I'm not confident in this argument at all, as you can probably tell.
Nearly all humans can't solve IMO problems either, but LLMs manage that. This seems very much like a prompting issue--the capability to write, maybe not great fiction, but closer to the style of great fiction, is certainly present. Writing anything actually good probably also requires a lot more than just a one-shot attempt. Humans write lots of crap before they come up with something good. The best ones also discard lots of crap ideas without even starting to write them. And I suspect many of the best stories come from a nugget of thought inspired by real-world observations. We don't usually give the LLM any of those, let alone a wide enough variety for it to pick out a combination of interesting ideas.
I don’t think this is sufficient explanation. There’s much more training data that isn’t any sort of attempt at literary fiction. To the extent that the prompt is able to get it to focus on attempted literary fiction, it should be able to focus on the better examples.
I suspect this is more about what sorts of traits are easy to generalize from literary fiction, when imitating the output, without any attempt at going through the design process of planning what you want to achieve with the work, and then how to construct it so that it achieves those goals.
It would be interesting to test this more explicitly by training a model on a dataset that doesn’t include mediocre fiction - just non-fiction and a highly curated fiction dataset. (This seems hard to do though.)
Don't exclude the mediocre stuff outright, just clearly label it as such in some way the machine can recognize. Maybe hire an office block full of literary critics to do RLHF, rating text samples on a zero to 100 scale where, say,
zero is formatting errors (e.g. hexadecimal numbers which contain occasional words by coincidence) and similar unmitigated gibberish,
20 is intelligible text with semantic content but no artistic merit whatsoever,
"Doom: Repercussions of Evil" is somewhere around a 30,
and anything above a 90 is 'couldn't finish reading, broke down in tears, too beautiful.'
Then, don't just ask the resulting AI to spew high-rated content. Set up an adversarial system to hunt for flaws in the model, and to generate tricky problems for it like "a single paragraph which reviewer A will rate at 53 and reviewer B will rate at 27" or "improve this text as much as possible by removing up to two words and adding one."
LLMs only every predict the next word, i.e. they think "one word at a time", and don't really plan ahead that much. When you give them a prompt, you basically give them a todo list, and with every word they output, they try to get closer to clearing some entry of that todo list. I think most quirks in that blogpost can be explained by the LLM only ever thinking about the next couple words, and how they can help with clearing the todolist.
There are ways to counter this behavior to some degree (e.g. reasoning/CoT), but the "one word at a time"-ness will always be there, because that is how they work at the core.
I'm not terribly familiar with Cremieux's take on the lead/crime hypothesis -- I think he has mostly argued that cohort studies are heavily confounded by race and class, so you can't just compare violence rates in high blood lead neighborhoods against low blood lead neighborhoods.
Meta-analysis of such studies and their confounders is difficult, but there are many other reasons why the lead/crime hypothesis fails to be some kind of unified theory for the rise and fall of crime across the western world in the second half of the 20th century:
In short, the lead/crime hypothesis fails for many other countries: Japan, Hong Kong, Mexico, Brazil, etc. The lead/crime hypothesis also fails in the US, if you divide the data up by age groups -- the rise in violence in the 1960's was a period effect, not a cohort effect, as you'd expect if this were an issue of subsequent generations getting lead poisoned in youth.
The rough synchronization of crime trends across western countries is fascinating, but may ultimately have simpler explanations. Demographics is one of them -- these countries all had a post war baby boom and then a decline as birth control became more widely available in the 60's/70's. A proper analysis would, at the very least, age adjust the data before just noticing the bump in the murders per capita graph.
There does remain a plausible theory that blood lead levels are one small factor in the bigger picture of crime rates, and that leaded gasoline did raise crime somewhat (10-20%?), all else equal. A sufficiently careful analysis of cohort studies and their confounders might be able to find whether this effect exists, and how large it is. But that's a hard thing to tease apart from the data and separate from other variables that did have an effect on the 80's crime wave and subsequent decline. Other strong factors may include: demographic changes, crack cocaine, mass incarceration, changes in policing, and medical changes that reduced the lethality of gun shots:
"Related: Cube_Flipper on his (?) experience taking estrogen. “What did change was my sense of space. This one’s quite subtle – it was the kind of thing that was more noticeable when I experimented with deliberately spiking my hormones. I’ll do my best to explain. It’s as if I took the entire volumetric representation of the space around me and increased the degree to which every point within that could influence the location of every other point, recursively. This allows everything to elastically settle into a more harmonious equilibrium. This effect is basically identical to what a small dose of psychedelics can do, specifically a tryptamine like psilocybin or DMT.”"
Might be an absolutely wild thing to say but I've been thinking this for a while, a big difference between women and men is that women are basically constantly microdosing on LSD/psychedlics. Thats there experience of the world
17. My pet theory is that the "decline of rhyming poetry" is largely an illusion caused by the rise of sound recording and broadcast media. There is still a ton of rhyming poetry being written, and much of it is extremely popular and commercially successful, but we call it "song lyrics" rather than "poetry" because it comes to us as audio/video recordings of the poem being performed set to music. Even for genres where the lyrics are often spoken rhythmically than sung (certain subgenres of folk, blues, and rap), we still think of it as music rather than poetry.
Before phonographs and radio became widespread, lyrics were commonly composed and published without any particular music being intended, and people could read them as poems or set them to whatever tune they liked that fit the meter of the poem. And poetic forms were standardized enough that you had a large menu of tunes to choose from for any given poem. Especially for "common meter" or "ballad meter", which is both very specific and very widespread, and is why you can sing the lyrics of the Gilligan's Island theme song to the tune of Amazing Grace and vice versa. One major and very popular form of poetry/music in the 19th century was "broadsheet ballads", poems written in ballad meter and published in broadsheet format (basically a single sheet of a full-sized newspaper).
It would be interesting to do statistics on the formal properties of song lyrics! Do they rhyme as often as 19th century poetry? Do they stick to standardized meters as well? Which genres differ from each other in these ways?
"Chess Grandmasters Do Not Burn 6000 Calories Per Day"
There is a reddit post with the exact same title from a deleted account, is it your post? Also, more generally how good is substack for search engine optimization. I dont think its very good, I cant find your post on google, limiting the value of correcting this misninfo. I've had this problem with other substacks as well
I think it depends on how you define poetry. If you limit yourself to the academic journals, maybe yes. But, I think that is snobbery. I think the great mass of poetry these days comes from in the form of lyrics and rap, both of which are deemed to be musical genres.
Didn't the august body that awards the Nobel Prize for literature concede my point by giving the laurel to Bob Dylan? He characterized himself as a poet when young:
Though you might hear laughing, spinning,
swinging madly across the sun.
It's not aimed at anyone.
it's just escaping on the run.
And before the sky there are no fences facing
And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time
It's just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn't pay it any mind
It's just a shadow you're seeing,
that he's chasing
Rap of course rhymes. I detest it because of its coarseness and vulgarity, but it does often rhyme.
The thing about musical lyrics is that they have an unfair advantage. There's something about hearing words set to a tune you like that changes how you process them. For instance in song, phrases or sentences are often repeated, sometimes over and over with no other phrases intervening, and not only is that not tedious, it is often very powerful. For instance I love hearing the Talking Heads' sing "take me to the river, drop me in the water" over and over. Or there's the end of a hallelujah chorus -- "forever and ever" & "hallelujuh" over and over. But it's not just repetition we experience differently in song. Cliches are much more tolerable -- can sound heartfelt and obviously true -- .and so are phrases that don't make sense. I've often looked up the lyrics of songs I love and felt taken aback by how lame they are with the tune stripped away.
>Or there's the end of a hallelujah chorus -- "forever and ever" & "hallelujuh" over and over.
This one I disagree with; I dislike most church songs because they're this very sort of grating repetition.
As for cliches being more tolerable in music, I'd say that's more about how often we interact with the two; music is so prevalent you have to make an effort to avoid it, while poems are rare things you have to actively seek out, and it's the level of effort investment that makes cliches less tolerable.
Probably why the ancient Greeks played music while reciting or singing their lyric poetry and the priests of the Jerusalem Temple sang the Pslams, as worshipers still do. Nothing changes.
Allan Shivers did not "beat himself" in the election. His vote share from each party line was pooled together to make his total vote share. It wasn't like there was a competition over whether he gets elected as a Democrat or as a Republican. It's also not unprecedented for candidates to be nominated by both major parties. e.g. Earl Warren won both major party's nominations for CA Governor in 1946. Robert Heinlein wrote a book about his experiences in politics, in which he complained about how he had very narrowly lost an election in which everyone told him they wouldn't bother helping him because he had no chance; I fact-checked this and discovered that he had in fact narrowly lost the Democratic primary to the Republican incumbant. In New York, candidates still can get listed on multiple parties' ballot lines, and it is common for the Democratic and Working Families parties to nominate the same candidates. It's no longer common for both major parties to endorse the same candidate, but Simcha Felder did get both major parties' endorsements for his NY State Senate run in 2024.
Until the Top 2 Primary ballot measure took effect (in 2012, IIRC), California still had a weak back-door ballot fusion system. You could only be a listed candidate on the primary ballot for one party, but you could register as a write-in candidate for other party primaries for the same office. I don't remember if you got separate ballot lines if you won more than one nomination, like in NYC, or if you had to choose one (so the benefit would just be less competition on the general election ballot), or if you got one line with both parties listed on it.
I know about this because in 2010, I was peripherally involved in a Congressional campaign in a safely Democratic district where there was a relatively strong Libertarian candidate and no qualified candidates for the Republican nomination. The Libertarian, Edward Gonzales, tried to use the process to also get the Republican nomination. It didn't work: the local Republican party organization recruited and endorsed a different write-in candidate who won the primary by a large margin, and the Democratic incumbent (Zoe Lofgren) was reelected by an enormous margin (69% to 24% to 7.8%) in the general election.
Did Texas operate with the New York “fusion” system, or did it operate with separate lines? What did the law say would happen if Shivers - D got 33%, Shivers - R got 33%, and someone else got 34%? In New York, that would be a clear win for Shivers, but I don’t think it’s obvious how the Texas system worked in 1952.
#10 (fewer boys believe in gender equality): the explanation seems clear to me, 2018 was the year #MeToo peaked. Weinstein got arrested, the Golden Globes was a public MeToo rally with celebrities wearing black, the phrase "believe women" gained currency, and the Kavanaugh hearings happened. It pushed a certain subset of men to conclude that the 'equality' movement was just rhetorical cover for a zero-sum political gender war. So "gender equality" got (appropriately, in my view) re-coded as "anti-man" by many men and so they stopped supporting it.
46. Very interesting. This offers a lesson about prior restraint reverberating through the ages. José Clemente Orozco famously self-sabotaged in the same fashion when painting his tremendous mural "Prometheus" (aka "the hunk without the junk"), located in Pomona College's Frary dining hall.
When I was a student, I heard that Prometheus' penis had been removed or obscured by a third party. It was understood to have been due to puritanical inclinations, but one can't dismiss considerations of appetites might have played a role.
At any rate, I haven't thought of Prometheus in a while, so I looked it up and was surprised to learn that Orozco had actually omitted the titanic genitals himself!
However, seemingly filled with regret, "He attempted to add one when he visited Pomona several months after initially completing the mural, but it did not adhere properly to the wall."
#43: So portuguese have been pretty cool about their colonialism? Good catholics who know about humility. At least, by a glance, germans seem to score better than english and french. I wonder what african view on china may look like a century from now.
I think it’s a stretch to read the goodness or badness of colonial practices directly off the reported opinions of current people in these societies - it might be that the French were better at instilling a do-it-yourself anti-colonial attitude in people while the Portuguese instilled a “yes master” attitude! (Probably not actually this, but I would want to try several things to disentangle this.)
Portugal fought rebels seeking independence in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, but of those three, only Angolans were surveyed. For this reason, and for the reason Kenny mentions in another reply to you, I recommend not updating much on Portuguese colonization just from this survey.
Ok, you’re probably right. Ethnic sympathies are strange anyways. Especially when people express friendly feelings for germans enthusiatically because of nazis. Hard to stay polite to them sometimes as a german.
#35 - I'm impressed by the problem solving strategy the LLM is using. It seems like it's either a novel strategy that others aren't using, or it's using one of the most advanced existing strategies. Are there other domains where LLMs are coming up with novel ways to go about solving a problem? Right now it seems like LLMs serve as quickly-responding encyclopedias of known problem-solving strategies. Are there domains where LLMs are producing novel problem-solving strategies without expert prompt engineering? If/when this starts happening, I wonder which domains it will happen in first and how it will spread across domains/topics.
48: "T. Greer on China’s strategy for invading Taiwan."
The Chinese strategy described sounds just like the Russian strategy for invading Ukraine. The Ukrainians are a lot more like Taiwan than the Houthis, who are tribesmen wandering around a desert.
But the all time champions of fighting off invading armies of larger countries are the Israelis. And that is who the Taiwanese should model themselves after, if they are serious about staving off the CCR regime. Of course, it would need to triple its spending, start producing its own armaments, and institute mandatory universal military training and reserve service.
But, if they do something like that, their prospects aren't that bad. The Island is 380 km long and only 130 km wide, but, the eastern two thirds of the country is quite mountainous, The mountains can be a shelter from attack and a defensive redoubt. Given time and money the Taiwanese can defend themselves. they have the money. The questions are whether they have the time and the will.
Israel fights off larger armies by having technological superiority, which Taiwan can't count on (especially if the US won't get off its duff and sell them F-35s).
I think argument-by-analogy is pretty fraught in this area. Taiwan is nothing like Ukraine, nor Israel, nor the Houthis. In any future war the most important factors will be the wide strait separating it from the mainland and the willingness or otherwise of Western allies to get directly involved.
Technological superiority is available to Taiwan. Remember their super power is being the home of the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing in the world. They have the engineering capacity, and the money. And one of Israel's leading exports is high tech weaponry. Taiwan's problems are time and will power.
"the most important factors will be the wide strait separating it from the mainland and the willingness or otherwise of Western allies to get directly involved."
The strait is much to Taiwan's advantage. Defenders love a clear field of fire. Geography is one of their advantages.
As for the willingness of Western allies to get involved is probably a very small consideration. Neither Israel nor Ukraine has had much other than supplies from their western allies. Given the size of the Chinese air force and navy, last minute shipments of weaponry cannot be assumed. they need to stockpile weapons in caves in their eastern mountains. Besides, would you depend on Trump?
Taiwan can defend itself from China, but they have to want to.
Being good at semiconductors doesn't automatically make you good at fighter jets. Things like stealth technology have been developed by the US over a period of decades through a lot of very expensive trial and error.
They're a small country and not that rich, they have the population of Australia and the GDP of Ohio.
I object that Bentham got "Eulered" there. If you're going to try to make an argument that is so heavily mathematical in nature, it is entirely correct to point out any issues with the math. Math provides a high level of certainty (or at least, the impression such) *due to the unrelenting demand of rigorous argument.* The issues that Dylan Black raises are pretty core to the use of probability on infinite sets. If you don't understand them, you probably shouldn't be making arguments (especially in favor of something as complex as God!) that rely on the mathematics of probability theory.
That seems like a pretty big overreaction. I updated a small amount away from Cremieux, but:
- That chart wasn't the only bit of evidence Cremieux cited.
- I don't even know what Higney could have meant when he wrote "For some reason [Cremiuex] cut off the bottom of that chart" - Higney posted a different chart! (https://x.com/AnthonyHigney/status/1867163809267507628) If there's room for legitimate disagreement about the relative value of PCCs and elasticity, the entire basis for Lexer's (and Higney's) criticism vanishes in a puff of smoke. As an outsider, I asked some LLMs about it and Claude said "If lead exposure leads to small PCCs but high elasticities, it suggests the relationship might be nonlinear, confounded, or noisy, leading to weak correlations." If that's correct, it's not necessarily diabolical to downplay elasticities, particularly if you think they are due to confounders.
- The interpersonal drama Lexer brought up seems completely irrelevant to me. But at best it's a draw, in my book. Higney called Cremieux "a bad faith actor", which is a rather damning thing to say about someone, imo, so even though I don't fully understand Cremieux responding by calling Higney "surly, reactive, and untrustworthy", it seems in-bounds given the level of interaction they were having.
#10 is unsurprising; male socialization for teenage boys is even more fucked up than it usually is on the interpersonal level (source: anecdotes and vibes) and there was a big organic push from anti-woke influencers over the past X years which the party and the money put their shoulders behind, from hoi-polloi types like Rogan and Walsh to intelegencia blogs like this one.
This seems like the result one would expect if they knew 12 years ago that the anti-woke side of the culture war would be making gains.
#8 I prototyped a video game with some friends when I was in college where you would earn karma by performing good deeds and lose karma by performing evil deeds, and whenever your character dies she'd reincarnate as a different animal, with different abilities, according to the current karma level. The backstory was that the protagonist was a member of an order of monks grinding good deeds to attain enough karma to ascend to a mythical creature after reincarnation, but was tricked into deicide, the most heinous crime, by a demon king, and lost enough karma to be on the threshold between humans and monkeys. But since she got the power to immediately reincarnate and retain her memories she's the only one who can use the powers of all the creatures to resurrect the godess she had killed and get the karma back to ascend to the higher entity and defeat the demon king.
The gameplay loop was full of contrived trolley-problem-style situations where you'd gain or lose karma and then kill yourself (or allow yourself to get killed) to reincarnate as whatever creature the platforming situation called for.
If I had known at the time about this Ming dynasty guide to karma bounties, I would have used it verbatim, this is hilarious.
> 30: Twitter and Bluesky both seem to be losing users...
On X, I've noticed that lately I'm being swamped with posts from obnoxious rightwing crazies. I block and block, but the X algorithm keeps throwing them at me.
OTOH, everyone on Bluesky is just too fecking nice. I need a little more drama to keep me engaged, but not toooo much drama!
I miss the old Twitter where was a nice balance between interesting people and assholes.
And my Facebook feed is filled with AI-generated groups that swamp the posts from my friends. I'm wondering if there's any future for social media.
When I check Facebook I only use the feeds option. The key to using social media is to avoid the algorithm whenever possible. I have curated a decent group on twitter and only read the accounts I follow. The Facebook friends feed is also the only way to go.
Yes, I know about the feeds, but my feeds is full of ads, events, and groups. Granted, many of them seem to be things that my friends liked or clicked on. Almost none of what I see in my feeds is content that I would call "primary" posts from my friends. And strangely, it's only a small subset of friends whose posts end up in my feeds. There are a bunch of friends who are posting away, but I would never see their posts except that I make a point to search for them on Facebook.
I haven’t seen an ad on Facebook in years, same on twitter. The key is to use the web sites instead of the apps and use an ad blocker. My friends feed only has posts from my friends. I haven’t checked to see if I am missing posts though. I check Facebook about once or twice a month so it’s quite possible that I’m being cheated in my friends feed.
After posting this, I haven't seen any ads on my main Facebook feed in the past three days. And Facebook has stopped shoving groups at me that it thinks I'll want to join. On one hand, I'm happy the storm is over. OTOH, I can't help but wonder if there's no coincidence here. I'm now concerned about MetaAI's ability to observe my non-Facebook activities.
But every Reel it's offering me is now of AI-generated women in swimsuits with unnaturally large breasts. Oh, well.
#6 Cate Hall's conclusion strikes me as very strange. She were deficient in testosterone for her own sex. Once the levels were brought up to what was typical for her sex, she did much better.
Men don't automatically feel 10 times sharper and more energetic because they have 10 times the testosterone. They feel similarly sluggish if their T is low for their biology (which would still be a very high number for a woman in most cases).
I think the conclusion here is "having a hormonal profile that's out of whack as compared to what's normal for your sex will have negative effects", not "men run life on easy mode".
Have you ever taken testosterone? It's a magical nectar. Men automatically do feel sharper and more energetic with more T, yes.
Men obviously don't play life on easy mode, that's a preposterous perspective you can only achieve with a woman's privilege or an extremely lucky man's.
A person might feel better on T supplements but that's not what I'm arguing. I'm saying a man with average male T levels is not going to be 10 times more energetic than a woman with the average female T levels. So what matters is where your T is as related to the base line for you sex, not the absolute levels. So to conclude somehow that men feel sharper and more energetic than women because they have so much more T in absolute terms is not valid.
I've taken clomid to raise my endogenous testosterone production from 351 ng/dL (low-normal male levels) to 724 ng/dL (high-normal male levels). It had some marginal beneficial effects to energy levels and took a little edge off my migraines, but absolutely was not magical nectar for me. It made my actual mood somewhat worse in terms of anxiety and depression, symptoms although I was a bit better able to power through the symptoms and get things done. I gave up on it after a couple years.
My testosterone is currently 14 ng/dL and I have never felt better. It's estrogen that's "magical nectar" for me, and mine was 312 pg/dL last I checked, up from 37.5 back when I was on clomid. I have been on feminizing HRT for about 2.5 years now, first oral estrodiol and later injections plus spiro as an anti-androgen. My energy and focus are way better than "natural" or on clomid, my mood has gotten enough better that I have discontinued antidepressant use (Lexapro and Wellbutrin) and not missed them, my emotions overall are much "brighter" (position emotions more intense and frequent, sadness more cathartic and less distressing, and anger and frustration easier to cope with calmly and constructively). And I have been very much enjoying all the features my body has had locked behind a paywall all this time.
OTOH, a friend of my who is trans in the other direction has expressed sentiments that pretty much accord with yours about testosterone. He doesn't show any signs of missing being estrogen-dominant.
Overall, my experience and the anecdotes I've heard from many quarters seems to add up consistently to the subjective effects of sex hormones being dependent on your internal gender, not uniform across all humans or dependant on your physical sex at birth except to the extent that the latter correlates strongly with internal gender (i.e. 95-99% of the population is comfortably and unambiguously cisgender). Testosterone feels great for men, both cis and trans. And estrogen feels great for women, both cis and trans. Most adults regardless of gender seem to feel like crap if they're low on both (although young children seem to do fine without much of either hormone), and may report feeling somewhat better with either one supplemented. #6 is the only enthusiastically positive endorsement of testosterone I have ever heard from a cis woman.
Actually, quite a few cis women enthusiastically endorse testosterone supplementation, if they were significantly deficient in testosterone to begin with. That's what happened in #6, and somehow the author conflated treating major deficiency with "more testosterone is always better".
Interesting, I'll dig into that more. Come to think of it, I also haven't heard anything about cis woman trying T and disliking it or finding it indifferent, nor have I heard anything at all about cis men trying E regardless of reaction. So 6 being the only positive anecdote doesn't tell me much besides a demonstration that it's possible.
Even better would be if I could find accounts that specify dosage and blood levels.
Cis men trying E isn't a thing because they need to be advertized to try it. So, I mean, you'll hear dozens and dozens of cis men voluntarily drinking pseudo estrogens. They just don't know they're on E, and have moobs because of it.
My understanding is that there were some studies in the 80s and 90s that suggested that high doses of concentrated phytoestrogens might have feminizing effects on lab rats, and one in 1998 that found some possible but weaker effects in an n=24 trial on postmenopausal women. But more recent research has generally found weak or no effects in humans, except maybe for a minor endocrine disruption effect where the body reduces endogenous sex hormone production somewhat in response to phytoestrogens.
Phytoestrogen supplements do get marketed to both cis and trans women, but they're generally regarded as scams. I'm inclined to agree with this, since actual human estrogen compound (or even other mammalian estrogen products, such as premarin) have such dramatic effects that there would be no missing it if phytoestrogens had a similar effect.
This is interesting to read, since trans people have a brain that mismatched the body, a transwomen is essentially a female brain in a male body. It makes sense it would respond to the female sex hormone profile much better.
I wonder if this could be used as a diagnostic issue, would transmen see a boost from extra T that cis women don't? Or transwomen from extra E that cis men don't?
That's the conventional wisdom I've seen in online trans communities. Unfortunately (as I went into in some detail in my response to Cjw below), it's understudied. We have a fair amount of published evidence that suggests the conventional wisdom, but nowhere near enough to be a rigorously validated diagnostic test.
"my experience and the anecdotes I've heard from many quarters seems to add up consistently to the subjective effects of sex hormones being dependent on your internal gender"
This seems rather dubious. The effects of exogenous estrogen on (adult) genetic-males have been known fairly well since Benjamin's studies in the 60s: it causes gynecomastia, a reduced libido, and a moderate calming effect. The other commonly reported effects are typically vague, variable, and unverifiable. In fact, comparing this to the visual and reported effects of testosterone on genetic-females, one can't help but feel a little sorry for the MtF transexuals that their treatments are so less effective and dramatic than the other way round. Regardless, I haven't seen anything suggesting there is an "internal gender" which doesn't match your genetic sex that governs which hormones to which you'd respond better. (I'm not making the broader claim that there isn't such a thing at all, only that it isn't in play here.) The limited physical changes caused by exogenous estrogen would happen to any genetic male who took it, whether transwoman or cis-male, so the only place we might hunt for this "internal gender" reaction would be in variable magnitudes of the calming effect produced. But for obvious reasons, if you did try to ascertain this, the data would be unreliable and placebo effects would abound in the transwoman sample. On top of which, there would be chemical evidence of the hormones interacting differently with the body across the two groups.
>The effects of exogenous estrogen on (adult) genetic-males have been known fairly well since Benjamin's studies in the 60s: it causes gynecomastia, a reduced libido, and a moderate calming effect.
Do you happen to have a citation for that? I just spent some time looking for Benjamin's research on the subject and came up almost completely dry. The closest things I could find were the title of an article he published about 1946 about using combinations of steroid hormones to treat aging symptoms in men (couldn't find the full text or even an abstract or someone else quoting from or summarizing it) and mention in his book "The Transsexual Phenomenon" that estrogen acts as a "biological tranquilizer" in transgender women (or "transsexual men" as he calls us, since he followed the then-standard practice of referring to trans people according to physical sex at birth).
There are at least two fairly recent studies showing that elevated endogenous levels of estrogen are correlated with increased depression and anxiety scores in men. Of course, the causal link could be in either direction (depression/anxiety somehow affecting hormone levels) or from a common cause (maybe stress or diet causing both mood disturbance and abnormal hormone profiles).
There are a number of studies on exogenous estrogen on trans women and exogenous testosterone on trans men, and they generally show positive results for mental health and quality of life metrics, although the individual studies tend to be pretty small and low-powered. Of course, these are also not blinded or randomized, and they don't necessarily distinguish between direct effects of hormones on mood, indirect mental benefits from physical changes, and placebo effects. Here are two survey papers:
Neither survey found significant differences between findings for trans men and trans women in terms of reducing depression and psychological distress or improving quality of life scores. Baker et. al. (the second link) also found no significant difference in findings about anxiety, while Doyle et. al. found stronger evidence for reduced anxiety in trans men.
Standard feminizing HRT aims to (and usually mostly succeeds at) lowering testosterone to normal female levels as well as increasing estrogen, through combinations of separate anti-androgen medications and estrogen itself suppressing endogenous testosterone production. My understanding is that it's pretty well established by both observational studies and controlled and blinded clinical trials (for both treatment of low testosterone and intentionally inducing it to treat hormone-sensitive prostate cancer) that low testosterone in cis men tends to trigger depression, anxiety, fatigue, etc, and it doesn't sound like you're disputing that. But given that, unless estrogen has substantial positive effects on mood in trans women, one would expect suppressed testosterone levels to lead to significantly worse mood symptoms. Available evidence suggests the opposite.
That leaves the hypothesis that maybe estrogen also improves mood in androgen-deprived cis men as well as in trans women. There is research on using either estradiol or esterol (another form of human estrogen, which has much less of a feminizing effect than estradiol) as an adjunct to androgen deprivation therapy to try to mitigate side effects. It seems to be moderately successful at mitigating bone loss and cardiovascular side effects, but I can't find anything suggesting that it mitigates the negative mood effects of androgen deprivation. I suppose this might be dose dependent, though: cis men are unlikely to tolerate the physical effects of the levels of estradiol typically taken by trans women.
I did find one tiny (n=16) double-blind controlled study of giving cis men transdermal estradiol for a 24-48 hour period and then measuring physiological stress responses. The doses were in the range used for feminization by trans women, and the time period was (barely) long enough for the blood levels of estrogen to reach female levels. The study found statistically significant increased stress reactions in the treatment group relative to the control group.
> Re 45: Conception beliefs among Australian aborigines. Did you know that pre-contact aborigines didn’t know that sex caused conception?
It wasn't until the 1920s that Western medicine had a complete and testable hypothesis about the role of ovulation and the necessity of fertilization with sperm at the correct time in the menstrual cycle for conception to occur. And that hypothesis wasn't tested and confirmed until a decade later.
Although 19th-century scientists had come to the conclusion that sperm was somehow necessary for conception, in the 18th century, there were angry debates between the Spermists and Ovists. Neither side would concede that both were necessary for conception. So, it's no surprise that pre-Enlightenment societies didn't understand conception.
From the chapter you mentioned...
> By contrast Arnold van Gennep, the eminent French folklorist, considered it to be little different from the ignorance of procreative mechanisms still prevailing among the masses of Europe.
> Although 19th-century scientists had come to the conclusion that sperm was somehow necessary for conception, in the 18th century, there were angry debates between the Spermists and Ovists. Neither side would concede that both were necessary for conception
I don't think that's a fair summary of spermism or ovism or the general state of understanding of conception in the 18th century.
There were two schools of thought: "Preformism", where the body develops from (what we may unfairly call) a little homunculus which exists either in the sperm (spermism) or the egg (ovism), and "Epigenesis" which is closer to what actually happens. But all parties were well aware of the necessity of both side for conception.
The exact mechanism of conception, with the two cells meeting, would have to wait until 19th century microscopes, but the connection between sex and conception was well understood by the ancients and also by all primitive societies we've encountered... with the possible exception of the Australian Aborigines. Actually we probably shouldn't generalise about the Aborigines as if they're one society, there were hundreds of different language groups with very limited contact, and it's entirely likely that certain things were known to some groups and not others.
Yes, I oversimplified 18th-century conceptions about conception. Thanks for keeping me honest!
Upon further thought, I would suspect that all human cultures knew that penile-vaginal intercourse was necessary for conception. They may not have understood that sperm was necessary for conception. I no longer have a copy of Malinowski's _Sexual Life of Savages_ but a little Googling turned up this quote...
> The natives are quite ignorant of the physiological process of conception. They have no idea of the fertilizing virtue of the male sperm, nor of the existence of the female ovum. They believe that in order to make a woman pregnant, a spirit child, a baloma or koi (ghost), must enter her body, or rather, must be placed in her womb by another baloma. But they also believe that a woman must be opened up by sexual intercourse before the spirit child can enter.
Seems like they understood that there was a cause and effect, even if they didn't understand the necessity of sperm. (NB: my undergrad Anthro department chair was Malinowski's student, and this book was on our reading list.)
And come to think of it, I suspect van Gennep crack about the "masses of Europe" being ignorant about the procreative function was likely wrong. According to Partridge's _Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English_ "to stitch" was 17th-century slang for male penile penetration of the vagina. Thus, we get the saying: "A stitch in time saves nine" (i.e., a "stitch" at the right point in the menstrual cycle saves nine months of pregnancy). The common folk of England must have had at least some knowledge of the menstrual cycle and the likelihood of pregnancy.
Furthermore, there's a long history of arguments among Anthropologists about whether other Anthropologists understood the indigenous language of a culture accurately enough to convey what was going on their subjects' minds. And there are suspected cases where their native informants were unreliable.
> Thus, we get the saying: "A stitch in time saves nine"
I've only ever heard that used to refer to routine maintenance and minor repairs avoiding eventual need for a more elaborate and costly emergency. One stitch, in the literal textile-tailoring sense, to close up a small tear in fabric, can prevent ongoing wear from making the damage worse (as tensile forces concentrate at the edges of any hole, thus tending toward cascading failure), to a point where at least ten times as much effort - nine additional stitches - would then be required.
Got citations for either of those? I'm pretty sure there are also quite a few old sayings which someone relatively recently decided to invent a risqué or "secret" alternate meaning for, and pretend it had been there all along.
ChatGPT confirms that "Pickle" was used for the saline baths used to treat VD.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang lists an early usage (1741, U.K.): “Her new Lover being in a pickled Condition, communicated the Infection to her.”
As for "sauce"...
Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) and later editions of slang dictionaries list “sauce” or being “sauced” as meaning infected with VD.
ChatGPT says that I wrong, and there's no historical evidence that the nine in a stitch in time refers to pregnancy, but it admits that, in British slang, especially during the 18th and 19th centuries, "to get a stitch" or "to have a stitch" was sometimes used as a euphemism for having sex.
However, according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang, there’s a citation from a bawdy poem called _Cambridg Libell_ (1573)
“A cleark doth thread her needle often, / For she doth daylye stiche.”
Where “stiche” was clearly used as a euphemism for sex. Certainly, it seems like the nine could very well refer to nine months.
Another interesting sexual-belief tidbit...
It was commonly believed that children would be born on the same day of the week as the day they were conceived. A Puritan minister, Israel Loring of Sudbury, Massachusetts, refused to baptize children born on Sundays, citing that theory. He maintained this policy for years, going so far as to banish parents of children born on Sundays from his congregation—until his own wife gave birth to Sunday twins on the Sabbath.
>So, it's no surprise that pre-Enlightenment societies didn't understand conception.
no, they didn’t just not understand the mechanics -
They straight up didn’t know sex created pregnancy. Almost all societies knew this, if for no other reason than they observed it in the animals they farmed and used it for breeding purposes for thousands of years.
There are numerous questions and issues with the ethnographies conducted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Whether or not these criticisms are valid, post-1970s anthropologists recognized the need to be more cautious in their claims. I was an Anthro undergrad in the late 1970s, and many of my professors were concerned that the cultural and intellectual prejudices of previous generations of ethnographers colored how they viewed "savage" cultures. That's not to say all that was published back then is crap, but AFAIK we no longer have any cultures that have been "uncontaminated" by modern civilization—except for the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Islands—and they've killed any visitors who've circumvented the Indian government's ban on contacting them.
> Nuno Sempere (maybe with the rest of the Samotsvety team?) has launched askaforecaster.com
Nice! Yes, confirming that some Samotsvety people will help me answer if there is too much demand. In the meantime someone is asking good questions for $150:
> Change in non-engineering product-related roles in tech by 2030?
>
> Current AI tools are augmenting work for engineers at many technology companies. The same thing is happening for non-engineering product-related roles as well -- for instance, Product Designers are having AI included in design tools to create interface mock-ups faster; Product Managers are using LLMs to write drafts of briefs and memos; etc. Presumably, as these tools improve employee efficiency, companies will need to hire fewer and fewer employees to get the same amount of output.
>
> Specifically for these non-engineering product-related roles (which, you may have guessed, I fall into), I wanted a quick forecasting take on how employer demand for these roles may fall in the next 5 years. Is it more likely to expect a modest 10% fewer positions? Is a 30-50% re
duction possible? An industry-shattering 80-90%? And what factors might make a position more or less resilient?
The 50 billion figure is for *all of Reality labs*, including over a decade of cutting edge technology research, a long line of VR headsets, smartglasses, the failed Portal line, etc. Horizon Worlds is just a small part of that.
#10 - If a poll question is seen as linked to a major culture-war issue, a lot of people will answer based on their tribal affiliation rather than their pedantically literal interpretation of the question. E.g., there are a lot of Christians who believe God took His own sweet time making the earth, with room for continental drift and dinosaurs and all that before Adam and Eve - if you ask them "Did dinosaurs walk the Earth 65 million years ago" they can take that as a science question and say "yeah, that sounds about right" but if you instead (or even later in the same survey) ask "Did God create the Earth sometime in the past ten thousand years?", a lot of them will also answer "yes" because now they're interpreting the question as "Are you seriously for real a Christian?" and yes they are.
The sort of feminism that says women should mostly have the same opportunities as men and not be penalized for exercising those options, was pretty much baked in to American culture by 1990, and the more exotic and controversial sorts of feminism weren't a really big deal for a while afterwards.
But 2018 (really late 2017) is when the prime focus of Wokeness shifted dramatically from #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo. It seems very likely to me that this lead to a significant number of people shifting into a defensive "this question seems like it's asking whether I'm on Team Woke" stance on any feminism-related question, and giving the Obviously Not Woke answer regardless of their object-level beliefs on the literal question.
> a lot of people will answer based on their tribal affiliation rather than their pedantically literal interpretation of the question
Or alternatively, they will shape their pedantically literal interpretation of the question to produce their desired answer.
For example: "A woman should have the same job opportunities as a man? ... well no, I can think of at least one job that women shouldn't have, like playing Henry VIII in a movie, therefore no".
"She played female and male roles, including Shakespeare's Hamlet.
...In June 1867, she played two roles in Athalie by Jean Racine; the part of a young woman and a young boy, Zacharie, the first of many male parts she played in her career.
...Her next success was her performance in François Coppée's Le Passant, which premiered at the Odéon on 14 January 1868 playing the part of the boy troubadour, Zanetto, in a romantic renaissance tale. Critic Théophile Gautier described the "delicate and tender charm" of her performance. It played for 150 performances, plus a command performance at the Tuileries Palace for Napoleon III and his court. Afterwards, the emperor sent her a brooch with his initials written in diamonds.
...She formally returned to the Comédie-Francaise on 1 October 1872, and quickly took on some of the more famous and demanding roles in French theatre. She played ... the male role of Cherubin in The Marriage of Figaro by Pierre Beaumarchais
...In 1898, she had another success, in the play Lorenzaccio, playing the male lead role in a Renaissance revenge drama written in 1834 by Alfred de Musset, but never before actually staged. As her biographer Cornelia Otis Skinner wrote, she did not try to be overly masculine when she performed male roles: "Her male impersonations had the sexless grace of the voices of choirboys, or the not quite real pathos of Pierrot." Anatole France wrote of her performance in Lorenzaccio: "She formed out of her own self a young man melancholic, full of poetry and of truth."
...On 20 May [1899], she premiered one of her more famous roles, playing the titular character of Hamlet in a prose adaptation which she had commissioned from Eugène Morand and Marcel Schwob. She played Hamlet in a manner which was direct, natural, and very feminine. Her performance received largely positive reviews in Paris, but mixed reviews in London. The British critic Max Beerbohm wrote "the only compliment one can conscientiously pay her is that her Hamlet was, from first to last, a truly grand dame."
In 1900, Bernhardt presented L'Aiglon, a new play by Rostand. She played the Duc de Reichstadt, the son of Napoleon Bonaparte, imprisoned by his unloving mother and family until his melancholy death in the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. L'Aiglon was a verse drama, six acts long. The 56-year-old actress studied the walk and posture of young cavalry officers and had her hair cut short to impersonate the young Duke. The Duke's stage mother, Marie-Louise of Austria, was played by Maria Legault, an actress 14 years younger than Bernhardt. The play ended with a memorable death scene; according to one critic, she died "as dying angels would die if they were allowed to." The play was extremely successful; it was especially popular with visitors to the 1900 Paris International Exposition, and ran for nearly a year, with standing-room places selling for as much as 600 gold francs. The play inspired the creation of Bernhardt souvenirs, including statuettes, medallions, fans, perfumes, postcards of her in the role, uniforms and cardboard swords for children, and pastries and cakes; the famed chef Escoffier added Peach Aiglon with Chantilly cream to his repertoire of desserts.
...In 1903, she had another unsuccessful role playing another masculine character in Werther, a gloomy adaptation of the story by German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
...From 1904 to 1906, she appeared in a wide range of parts, including ...the part of the prince-poet Landry in a version of Sleeping Beauty by Richepin and Henri Cain, and a new version of the play Pelléas and Mélisande by symbolist poet Maurice Maeterlinck, in which she played the male role of Pelléas with the British actress Mrs Patrick Campbell as Melissande.
...followed on 27 January 1907 by Les Bouffons, by Miguel Zamocois, in which she played a young and amorous medieval lord.
...In New York, she created yet another scandal when she appeared in the role of Judas Iscariot in Judas by the American playwright John Wesley De Kay. It was performed in New York's Globe Theater for only one night in December 1910 before it was banned by local authorities."
#10- The thing that changed was probably that it became funny to say you didn't believe in women's rights. A similar thing happens with self identified transgenderism- a lot of the same age demographic will tell you that they are trans, but also that they eat no fruits in a week or have never seen a dentist. Relevant link: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1926128833947738321
Also, I think the COVID timing suggests it's something like the thing that affected many major surveys, except with a ~typically-sized blip for 2019. As an example of the general phenomenon of COVID-related survey worsening, David Shor noted that either people became much less authoritarian about punishment when COVID kicked off, or survey quality changed: https://x.com/davidshor/status/1669785205983289344
#41 is complete nonsense, but I can't comment there since the comments are locked to only paid subscribers, so I'll comment here instead. The blog author's strategy seems to be to launder their own misconceptions and misunderstandings into an argument that I am in the wrong. This is a common genre of post, but I wish it wasn't.
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"Crémieux says that after correcting for publication bias, the correlation between blood lead levels and crime is zero"
This is correct, and it is what the study shows. The correlational estimates go down to zero using trim-and-fill, FAT-PET, and FAT-PEESE. You can say some significant effect remains using FAT-PEESE, but this is a two-tailed p-value of 0.012—hardly convincing, especially given the minuscule magnitude of the effect. The other methods are not common, and are, indeed, far more contentious, helping to explain why they're relatively non-standard. For example, the AP in WAAP is personally selected, and there's no common 'go-to' step-function model.
This is the result that is relevant to my comment, which is for (1) correlations (i.e., Partial Correlation Coefficients, or PCCs, which I showed) in (2) the full sample of estimates. I see no reason to highlight results that come from subsets of the data, which is what the author wanted. Generally, the reason people want to look at subsets is because they're upset that they got a certain result in their full data when they wanted another one. That seems to be what happened here with the author of the article, as there is quite literally no good reason to prefer elasticities over correlations.
You get a similar result looking at Panel B, which is a select subsample that addresses endogeneity, for which the effect sizes are uniformly smaller than in Panel A. Why did I not highlight this result? Because it wasn't needed, as it achieved the same result as in Panel A. This is the only panel for which there is an overriding theoretical concern that can justify looking at a subset of the data, because its difference from Panel A is substantive: it's about estimates from studies that deal with endogeneity, and that's actually important.
The article quotes the lead (hehe) author seemingly accusing me intentionally removing the bottom of the chart to obscure something. This is curious. It makes it sound like there was malfeasance, but that is not really possible. The real reason I did not show the bottom of the chart was because I was posting a result to Twitter, and posting two stacked charts is not ergonomic, nor was it necessary. The study is open access and I linked it, so obviously nothing was hidden and anyone suggesting as much is in the wrong. The suggestion of error on my part here, from both the study author and the post author, is totally unwarranted and an insult not just to me, but to the readers of the post.
The next part where the lead author of the study and the author of that post go wrong is in assuming that there's any reason to pick the elasticities over the correlation coefficients. In fact, there's only good reason not to.
Firstly, why *might* we want the elasticities? For interpretability. That is pretty much it. If you apply any deterministic one-to-one transformation to an estimate—whether transforming z to r or r to an elasticity as you would change Celcius to Fahrenheit—this does not switch the estimand. This merely puts the estimate on a different reporting scale. There can be no justification for subsetting to the elasticity subsample unless these studies systematically differ in a way that informs us about something that differs in that subset. These studies would need to be different in a way that matters for us to justify preferring their results to the full-sample ones.
The lead author *never* justified that decision, nor did the authors of that study preregister anything that justified focusing in on the elasticity subsample. The convenience of interpreting and using elasticities is not a reason to prefer them for estimating an overall effect size, it is, instead, a convenient excuse to trick people into thinking there's a result when there isn't actually, by getting them to look at a rather arbitrary subset of the data.
Secondly, I said "pretty much it." To convert a PCC to an elasticity depends on the means and standard deviations from particular studies. The PCC and the elasticity will share the same sign, but the magnitudes can be inflated or deflated according to the relative size of the standard deviations in the studies.
In this case, there was likely inflation relative to the full sample, as the composition of the respective samples differed in ways that seem to be related to the scale of effect size changes. For example, individual-level studies have a different shift in effect sizes relative to area-level studies, and studies that address endogeneity are similar. The mean ratios will tend to deflate effect sizes, the SD ratio will tend to inflate effect sizes, and the residual SD ratio will tend to blow up effect size and be very fragile in the face of small errors (which will blow up effect sizes).
But does this even matter? The elasticities from the different studies are not comparable to one another. The meta-regressions don't fix this issue, as there's obviously not enough power or enough or even the right variables to control away all the relevant between-study heterogeneity, even assuming all the estimates are precise enough. Moreover, a meta-regression with converted elasticites is almost nonsense, as estimates are sensitive to controls first via the PCC, and again through the residual SD ratio. There's a lot more to this, but, basically, PCCs are preferable because they are unit-free, standardized, location-invariant, dispersion-invariant, insensitive to the control set except through the residual covariance, and they measure a linear association where the form is implicit and uniform. This means the PCCs deliver estimates of between-study heterogeneity that reflect genuine variation in association, whereas the functional form of elasticities is log-log and with level conversion, estimates are doubly incomparable. The extra heterogeneity from sample means and dispersions leads to prediction intervals that are wider and weights that are more uneven.
It's almost funny how badly the lead author of the paper eschewed thinking here. They said that "when we use elasticities rather than PCCs there is a clear effect". Is there?! It looks basically the same as the estimates with the PCCs for me, and the publication bias estimates mostly become useless with the elasticities! Why useless? Because the scale factor co-moves with study size, creating a mechanical association between effect magnitude and standard errors, that almost all bias tests interpret as publication bias. You can no longer cleanly interpret FAT-PET, FAT-PEESE, trim-and-fill, IV-Egger/SSc, WAAP, etc. Selection models are potentially still fine, but no one is selecting on your transformed quantity, so they're basically not applicable here when the goal there is to leverage conscious selection, so it's pretty much pointless.
I feel like this is already clear, but *why would we not prefer elasticities?* Because to compute them, we're needlessly subsetting to a non-preregistered sample that we know does differ from the rest, and for which the relevant controls to even attempt making this subset comparable are unavailable. You cannot even safely use controls for this without high precision, which this study does not have! The joke of a meta-regression (which includes a FAT estimate you now know is biased if you didn't already) ends up being like asking us to believe a subset PSM result with just a few common, minimally informative covariates for the matching. Or, perhaps closer to home for people who read a lot of the stuff I post, it's like adjusting for a handful of variables and leaving behind a bunch of residual confounding that won't disappear until you have a design that can take it out, like a twin-control (analogous design), but nevertheless thinking you're A-OK.
I'm not going to belabor this point: practically no thinking went into Higney's response, and absolutely no thinking went into the article this person wrote where they just catalogued Higney's nonsense response as if it was some sort of debunking of anything I said, instead of what it really was, which was thoughtless yammering.
The irony of this is that I was accused of cherrypicking, when I merely showed the full-sample result, which was given in the most readily interpretable metric available. This is ironic because, on the other side, there's no argument supplied for looking at a pretty random subset of the data, with results given in a metric for which we're not supplied sufficient information by the authors, and for which we know there's incomparability between studies. If you want to cherrypick, preregister and do a real, severe test; if you want to be honest, just quote the top-line results like I did.
"Crémieux has semi-retracted his tweet on lead and crime" is an odd statement. It's true that I do not trust the lead author because of their ineptitude and surliness and that I think a large portion of the study should be retracted because the methods are nonsense that never got properly justified. That I'm holding out judgment more strongly because of distrust is not much of a revision though—to get at that, they would need to have asked me how much it was. They could've likely understood this or even just been prompted to ask me if they clicked into the very next comment in my thread, where I said "Maybe it's fine. But I'll have to sit down with it and reassemble the data to make sure of that."
The lead author's ineptitude is visible from the use of inappropriate models, the unjustified preferencing of transformed estimates without an appropriate justification, and so on. The surliness was demonstrated by the defensiveness and the fact that they blocked me immediately upon seeing my initial tweet. They never actually interacted with me at all, never questioned anything I said to me, never asked me to revise anything, and they never even made an argument for using their preferred sets of estimates—ever! They just jumped to blocking me and then going 'No, if you use my likely cherrypicked estimates, then everything is good and they are wrong :)'.
Lexer wrongly assumed the surliness comment had to do with some additional discussion between Higney and I. I cannot, for the life of me, get how they came to that conclusion, or how they thought it was acceptable to publish their nonsense explanation given that they never asked me about this subject at all. I would've immediately told them about Higney senselessly getting combative when he's in the wrong, why he was wrong, and about his blocking me. *If they asked.*
The blogpost author summarizes:
- That they have reading comprehension problems. I posted the full-sample result corrected for publication bias, which is all I ever claimed to post. They claimed that I cited a study claiming the opposite of what I claimed it did, but they are obviously wrong. Go read the study. It's linked. Their first summary claim is impossible to support without acting in bad faith or being ignorant. Given all of the above, you can probably safely pick two.
- That they cannot imagine why someone would post an image to be clearer on Twitter, and that they are not willing to ask that someone their motivations for things they do before making poor assumptions that turn out to be incorrect and unwarranted.
- That they don't understand the meaning of cherrypicking and they live in an ironic world where the person who cherrypicks is in the right and the person who cites the full-sample estimate is actually doing the cherrypicking.
- Again, that they make a bunch of unwarranted assumptions. They could have tried asking me why I said what I did instead of making these silly assumptions.
This paper should have its cherrypicking sections retracted, and its main results kept, but only if the author also supplies the underlying data. If I had been a reviewer, I would have forced the authors to provide much stronger reasoning and far greater detail to justify the cherrypicking they seem to have engaged in, and I also would have requested they post the data to a public repository so people could re-analyze their work and the likely fragility of the elasticity transformations and their use, in particular.
As to my own errors, I have a public, continually updated errors page. If I make an error, people can always point it out to me and I'll update there if I actually did make an error. I did not make an error in this case, but the author of that post and the article did.
#6 - The Cate Hall post on testosterone really elides the distinction between "correcting a hormonal deficiency" (which she had, her T levels were low for a woman) and "hormonal sex differences". If you're anemic, taking an iron supplement will also improve your cognition and energy levels, but that doesn't mean that you can megadose iron to get superpowers. I like the pinned top comment on Cate's post:
>The difference in testosterone concentration between men and women is *enormous*. Even when women's testosterone peaks in their 20s, the concentration for women at the 90th percentile is only one-fifth of the concentration for men at the 10th percentile. The medians differ by a factor of ~15. For most intents and purposes, these distributions do not overlap...
> Despite this, the distributions of traits that are associated with testosterone--libido, aggression, and more--overlap considerably between men and women. This implies that men are less sensitive to testosterone.
> The proper lesson isn't "men play life on easy"; it's "healthy people play life on easy".
I really enjoyed 18, it's always nice to see when others share your perspective, aptly summarized in the first Black article: "Bentham’s Bulldog makes invalid arguments."
Re #9: That 50 billion figure is probably for *all* of Reality Labs, including stuff like smartglasses which are just starting to really take off. It's not like it all went to Horizon Worlds as lots of commenters tend to imply.
Not to say there weren't some failures along the way too of course, like the now-canceled Portal line or the Quest Pro.
> 16: Related from Decker: suppose that Democrats promise that, once they regain control of the government, they’ll pay universities all the counterfactual funding they would have gotten if Trump hadn’t cut their budget. Then universities borrow money now against that future windfall. What goes wrong?
One obvious issue is that there aren't any private companies able (and willing) to fund such a massive risky bet. The scale is way too big and it is very risky as well.
Another problem is that even if there were, the political economy of it sucks. Imagine how that looks. If it actually happened, it would look like "the government taxing you to give massive amounts of money to hedge funds for no reason" (to reward them for a risky bet in the past), which is one of the least popular things you could do.
Far from convincing me I had missed something, I came away from the post on POSIWID "only more sure of all I thought was true" -- namely, that POSIWID is a vague slogan which people who aren't predisposed to rigorous analysis seize on for basically aesthetic reasons. The worst thing about this particular defense of POSIWID is that it is, as Feynman liked to say, "not even wrong." "You can disagree with Beer’s argument," writes the author, and then summarizes that argument in Beer's words: "[The observer's] perception of purpose in any one system is ... a function of the relationships that he maintains across the complicated webs of interactive systems, one with another." Sorry, but did I miss something? I don't think there actually *is* an argument to disagree with here. This is such a vaguely stated hypothesis that there is no conceivable evidence that could invalidate it. But by another token, it is unlikely to offer anyone productive insights.
Beer challenges us to redefine the word "purpose" -- and then what? Where does this model take us? About five feet to the left, I claim, and no further. The problem with POSIWID is that, if taken as a concrete claim, it is obviously untrue, and if taken as a vague suggestion (a "lens"), it is banal.
Basically, POSIWID is exactly the sort of brainworm which invades the brains of smart people and makes them spout nonsense. It's exactly the sort of brainworm which Rationalism was right to try to destroy.
#19 links an article from 2006. I asked o3 and after a couple of back and forth this is his conclusion: back in 2006 researchers suggested that blocking the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) might offer a new way to treat depression. Nearly two decades later that insight still holds water, yet the path forward has proved narrow. So far the antidepressant signal we see from GR antagonists is only modest, and it seems to appear mainly in biologically distinct sub-groups—patients whose illness is clearly driven by an overactive stress-hormone system.
#39: I think this misunderstands the labor force participation link to fertility in two ways.
First, to say that female labor force participation is a primary driver of TFR is not to say it’s the only or predominant one. Definitely my favorite example is Iran’s successful decrease of fertility rates from over 6 to under 2 within about 20 years of the Islamic Revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Iran#Islamic_Republic_of_Iran), which was mostly due to a concerted governmental program, especially after Khomeini died in 1989 (https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2017/12/iran-in-transition-the-implications-of-the-islamic-republics-changing-demographics?lang=en). I actually hadn’t realized that because of the Iran-Iraq war, in the first years after the revolution women had a heightened role in the domestic labor force (as well as serving as soldiers). But I think most agree that the free contraception etc. was more responsible, and the revolution included a lot of restrictions on female labor force participation, though I had trouble finding exact numbers. In both Iran and India it’s hard to ignore the huge decrease in child mortality (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN?locations=IN-IR); in India between 1993 and 2021 under-5 mortality went from 116 per 1,000 live births to 31 (!), and there’s the classic explanation that you have fewer kids when you are less worried that they’ll all just die.
The second thing I think is missed here is the intensive margin— women who are already working having fewer kids. As wages grow, opportunity cost of having children increases even for working mothers, given the time (and reductions in advancement opportunities) childcare requires even if you stay in your job. GDP per capita in India rose almost fourfold between 1993 and 2021 (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locations=IN) so this seems like an important factor even outside the labor force participation rate channel.
I don't see the opportunity cost argument. At higher wages, you lose more money by having children and working less in a formal job, but also, money is worth less at the margin. A, say, 30% reduction in income (or a, say, 60% reduction in per-family-member income) hurts about as much if you're poor as if you're richer, perhaps more if you're poor. That is, well-being is roughly logarithmic in income, except it's near vertical at the bottom where you starve to death if you have less money, and it flattens out at the top.
Keep in mind that each kid you have "stretches" your utility from money. Because it now needs to cover more people. So more kids has a push and pull on labor market participation. Robust support for working families (paid leave, child care solutions, health care) could help. The US is at 1.6 without any of those things. Of course it would mean higher taxes so unlikely to happen here anytime soon
It's true that the marginal utility of money increases if there are more family members (when considering per-family income rather than per-family-member income); to put it in another way, the per-family-member income decreases if there are more children even beyond the decrease caused by working less in a formal job.
As for the rest of your comment: If you want to incentivize more children, why give money (or services costing money) to *working* families, rather than to families with (many) children in general? If a family finds that they prefer to work less in formal jobs and do the childcare work themselves, as opposed to both parents working a lot in formal jobs and having others do childcare for them, that's fine too and shouldn't be disincentivized compared to the latter.
most traits are considerably hereditary (see ACX for IQ) - "giving mostly to mothers with more kids" will proportionally more increase kids from mothers who can not hold a job worth keeping. While tax breaks for kids will increase kids for parents who can and do. If you ONLY want more kids - idk to send them to the trenches or organ-harvesting or what? - paying those poor+without job-prospects+revealed fertility inclination is the obvious way to go. Or source internationally. Wherever women offer their bodies for the surrogacy - or just go bag-ladies/"gypsies" of div. ethnics/women from Mali/Niger/Somalia. On the other hand, you can just let the babies grow up there and let them get into your country when they are 18. Heard that is somehow unpopular even among MAGAs.
There's a point in incentivizing families with more earning ability to have more children, but specifically subsidizing working mothers with children (i.e. deciding based on actual choice to earn in the formal economy, rather than ability to earn) also incentivizes mothers with fixed abilities to keep working in the formal economy rather than do childcare themselves, even if otherwise the latter would be more preferable. In other words, it can make them keep a job even if it would otherwise not be worth keeping. If you want to subsidize families with high abilities with children, decide based on something like their income before they had children (some countries do that in some form), the income of the parent that keeps working full time, or some other way that's closer to measuring ability to earn (and willingness to work) rather than whether they choose to do the childcare work themselves, or do more formal work and pay others to do care for their children.
Measuring average incomes is not easy, measuring hypothetical ones … invites fraud and lots of other 2nd order effects. Real tax exemptions on actually earned(+declared) income - much better. We get around 10k $ a year for our kids, if I’d get 10k less tax instead: hey, I might even start to work full-time. Instead I get considerable additional savings (free kindergarten) for keeping my salary low. I react to incentives, sue me. - In real life, aka politics, not paying the basic bills of single woman who could neither keep a partner nor a job while taking care of her kid(s) - will never happen. With the known results.
Wow: "'giving mostly to mothers with more kids' will proportionally more increase kids from mothers who can not hold a job worth keeping."
I think a more accurate framing is that "giving mostly to mothers with more kids" will proportionally more increase kids from mothers who like mothering, which is linked to better mothering and better outcomes for kids.
Most families prefer to have a stay-at-home parent for their young children. Very few jobs seem "worth keeping" to a mother of a new baby. It's mostly financial hardship that forces mothers of babies to go back to work early.
Daycare also causes worse outcomes for kids, even controlling for income etc. So why would we want to subsidize an option that most people hate and that's worse for most people? Let's just subsidize kids in general instead.
I agree, it will lead to (relatively) more mothers who prefer getting paid say 1k/month for having kids (idk about their mothering) than for paid work. Which will be relatively more true for women who do not expect to ever get a 6-digit-income. Those who actually dislike being mothers will probably still choose not to become one, one hopes. I like to quote Nick Hornby’s review:
The book "Random Family" by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is partly about overpopulation – in the Bronx. Coco and Jessica have so many babies, by so many fathers, and their children have so many half-siblings, that at times it’s impossible to keep the names straight. By the time the two women are in their early thirties, they have given birth to Mercedes, Nikki, Nautica, Pearl, LaMonte, Serena, Brittany, Stephany, Michael, Matthew, Torres, Puma, Willy, Kodak, Wishman and Frankie. … (I) was remembering my first pregnancy scare that helped me to fully understand the stupidity and purposelessness of rants about fecklessness .... It was the summer before I went to college, and my girlfriend’s period was late, and I spent two utterly miserable weeks convinced that my life was over. (W)e were terrified: I would just as soon have gone to prison as started a family. What 'Random Family' explains, movingly and convincingly and at necessary length, is that the future as Coco and Jessica and the fathers of their children see it really isn’t worth the price of a condom, and they’re right. I eventually became a father for the first time around the same age that Jessica became a grandmother. - (Nick Hornby ‚Stuff I’ve Been Reading‘ Sept. 2003)
I'm always a fan of taking changing marginal utilities at different levels of income into account, but this just implies a certain "drag" on the effect, where the increased wages provide a higher opportunity cost (in dollar terms) for having children but maybe the marginal utility of each dollar is decreased because you're richer. It doesn't tell you what the net effect is. Enough of a wage increase will still be worth more in utility terms than a lower wage at lower income levels. Either way it's enough to push back on the idea that a flat labor participation rate with a declining fertility rate *necessarily* means that there's no causal relation between labor market conditions and fertility.
Also, given that India's GDP per capita is still $10,000/year, they're definitely nowhere near the truly flat part of that utility curve-- more money has a very high utility here. Less than at $2,000, sure, but these are still some very poor people.
(Apologies for the different profiles, for some reason my original comment was with an outdated profile)
I'm pretty sure that having your income decrease by x%, while having to support y times more family members, always hurts at least as much at a lower starting income as at a higher one.
In a bit more detail: Simply considering the reduction in total family income, or in per-family-member income, doesn't tell the whole story, because having more family members increases living costs, but less than linearly. We can define something like an "equivalent family size", where a two-adult household has, say, 1.7 times the living costs of an adult living alone at a given standard of living, 2 adults and 2 children have 2.9 times the cost, 2 adults and 4 children 3.7 times the cost etc. My point isn't the exact numbers, but that I think the "equivalent family size" of a given number of adults and children stays roughly the same at different income levels, and a family's standard of living is a function of its income divided by the equivalent family size (with money spent on external childcare providers like daycare or babysitters subtracted from the income to make things comparable between families doing their own childcare vs. paying external providers).
So if having 4 children instead of 2 increases the equivalent family size by 28% (as in my example numbers), and reduces family income by, say, 20% because the parents have to do more housework/childcare, then it reduces the per-equivalent-family-member income by 37%, and that hurts at least as much if they start with a lower income as with a higher one.
The most Rationalist sentence ever: "Michael J Sandel and I are mortal ideological enemies, except for the part where we reluctantly agree on most facts."
If the police weren't defunded, which they were not, how did Defund the Police affect the murder rate? Were a bunch of people going to commit murder until they remembered that they like the police now?
I think the theory is something like what this article (from 2020) points to:
Even though it’s early to speculate about the extent to which police are disengaging or being less proactive, it seems clear that people are becoming more distrustful of police. Not all people, by any means, but the daily drumbeat of protests and social media complaints about police violence is bound to have an effect. “The community, or certain communities, are drawing further from the police as a result of anger, frustration and fear,” Rosenfeld says. “They’re less likely to call police and more likely to take disputes into their own hands.”
Gang members don’t call police to settle disputes, but people around them might. Communities have now adopted an ethos of “no snitching,” Ture says, citing the still-raw emotions surrounding the killing of George Floyd
Another way to phrase this argument is that the police quit doing their jobs because they got their feelings hurt she thousands of people died as a result
This is not what the quoted part of the article says. It says that people trust the police less as a result of George Floyd, call them less, and crime ensues.
Also, you seem to be angry at me, when I am just trying to answer your questions. I didn't express an opinion on this theory at all (and don't have one)
Have you seen "Seattle is dying"? Police quit doing their jobs is MUCH less likely than a selection of "the police who like beating up on anyone who bothers them" are the only ones who stay in cities that actively hostile to cops doing their actual jobs.
When your DA keeps on letting the people wielding violent skateboards and setting themselves on fire via molotovs off the hook, and you're on the hook if the "antifa pets" get hurt, at all, while you're "nicely" throwing them in the pokey....
Free "get out of jail" cards for distributing meth and raping women sound like a reason to figure you'd get off scot free for murder. (Aka soros' DAs).
So I don't think this second one is true. As I understand it, there's good evidence that more police lead to fewer crimes overall, and it would seem surprising if that didn't include murder.
The TLDR is that the expert consensus (though not at all universal) seems to be that increasing police funding decreases crime. Interestingly ,if you look at individual responses, many of the experts (both those who agreed and disagreed that raising funding for police decreased crime) qualified their answers--yes if that means increasing number of police, no if that means raising salaries or something like that.
It's plausible that having more police around would decrease the rates of property crime, but murder is comparatively very rare, impulsive and often committed in private. The average murder is not "gangbanger shoots gangbanger" but "man shoots wife, girlfriend, or wife's boyfriend"
I'd expect more police to lead to fewer gang shootouts, fewer personal beefs turning into knife/gun fights, and fewer 7/11 clerks shot secondary to fewer armed robberies. This doesn't do anything for domestic violence murders, but it can still lower the total murder rate by a reasonable amount.
How many police would you need to have, in order to have a sub-2 minute response time to get to all 7/11s in your jurisdiction? (Armed robberies work because the guy gets away, and hides for a while -- if you aren't arresting them on the spot, you aren't really having "police" help the issue.)
Police side jobs wind up stopping "personal beefs from turning into gun fights", by creating neutral zones. Police themselves rarely create neutral zones as part of their job. Patrols do not do this.
I was under the impression that the average murder in the US, and definitely in large cities, really is gangbamger shoots gangbanger. And if not, the marginal murder that might be prevented or not is.
#10: Perhaps, some of these young men simply started realising what implementation of "gender equality" means for them in practice. A good recent illustration is this tweet from a pretty moderate and non-woke Economist: https://x.com/TheEconomist/status/1933297786562265189 "For decades a big story in education has been the ascent of girls. They now outperform boys in most subjects. But one subject remains a problem" . So the moderate take on "equality" is that boys must lose all positional goods and keeping even one is a problem that needs to be solved. Of course, calling this "equality" is a cheap orwellian rip-off, hence my use of quotation marks. More radical woke and feminist takes are, not suprisingly, even less appealing to young men. So why would one expect them to continue supporting this?
A better term to use is “association”, predictor is sometimes used in papers but it can easily confuse a lay audience since we don’t know the nature of the association
#7 - the author's admission that they were taking ketamine throughout the "trip report" seems like a major confounder.
"Throughout"? Nay, that was weeks beforehand. It takes time to book an appointment with a psychologist, get the gender dysphoria diagnosis, go to the pharmacy, etc.
Additionally, the contents of the post detail collected impressions over quite a long period of time, from late 2021 to present. It would have been impractical/expensive to confound this with something short lasting like ketamine!
I thought it was an interesting comment even if a bit over the top. For most people these kind of things are too passive and habituated into the background of everyday for them to notice, but for someone with psychedelic experience its no surprise a powerful hormone would alter senses in a noticeable way. You would probably hear watered down descriptions loosely akin to this pre and post E asking many MtFs with enough psychonautic experience and interest.
17. Seems hard to draw much of any conclusions about when the trend started given the massive gap in data before 1910 and between 1930 and 1980. What the hell happened to poetry at those times?
25. You will however go to hell for being a Cubs fan.
Yeah, the data in #17 seem incredibly fishy. Looks like just fitting to artefacts.
Looks like a random spread before 1930 (though with suspicious peaks at 0/25/50/75/100), then virtually nothing until 1980, then a vast amount of un-rhyming poetry collected since ~2010 or so pulling the average down. And why was there loads of poetry in one year (maybe 2015)? It's all so bizarre.
Like, look at the actual data from 1930-1980. In what world is that red trend line a fit to those dots?
The dots are individual poems. Poems with strict rhyme schemes score round numbers. ABAA is 75%. 25% is weirdly low, though.
It would be good to look at other averaging methods, like dichotomizing < 25% or maybe <= 25%, which is probably what people mean, not a switch from ABAB to ABCB.
Here's the economist article the graph is from: https://archive.is/CP8rW
Copyright issues for the 1930-1980 gap? And maybe people are just less likely to put those pre-1910 poets like Robert Bridges online than they are Pound and Eliot.
To Scott's point, non-rhyming doesn't equal modernism. Regular meter might be an interesting thing to measure like this, although it might be tough. Poems in iambic pentameter are going to have plenty of lines with variations, so it might be harder to see a pattern over time.
Gap is likely explained in this way: Before a certain year, poems are in the public domain and easily findable via book archives. After a certain year, poems are commonly published online. Between that is all the stuff that was published in print, but is still under copyright, and so is less available for automated searches.
Not hell for the Cubs fan, only 108 years in purgatory.
17 seems like a good opportunity to pound my hobby horse that song lyrics are by far the most popular and pervasive form of poetry from the 20th Century on and it's silly to talk about poetry in general and popular poetry especially without including them.
I've heard this point made by an actual published poet, and it makes sense to me.
Bob Dylan's Nobel prize should really have hammered that in.
(and some of what I'd consider among the best poems in any language ever are Pink Floyd lyrics)
I'm a fan of Funkytown by Lipps Inc, personally.
I bow to none in my love for Pink Floyd, but shorn of David Gilmour's guitar, Roger Waters's bass, Richard Wright's keyboards, Nick Mason's drums, plus the intense studio production to which these are subjected and some occasional supplemental musicians, Pink Floyd lyrics, in and of themselves, are frankly nothing to write home about. (At least if one is writing home about *poetry*).
Pink Floyd's lyrics do work brilliantly in the specific context of their music, but genuine poetry works 𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐰𝐧. On a cold winter night, one might sit by the fire in a quiet house and read from a volume of Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, or Robert Frost. This doesn't work with the bare lyrics to "Wish You Were Here" or "Echoes", however excellently those lyrics suit Pink Floyd's music.
Music has the power to transform mediocre verse into something deeply moving. This is hardly surprising, since music can be deeply moving in and of itself. On the other hand, the greatest poetry often resists being set to music, and when people attempt to do it, the results are usually disappointing.
One often sees this surprising fact in classical music. Schubert's greatest songs, for example, tended to be settings of quite mediocre poetry that is remembered today only because of what Schubert found in it - and to which he added his own genius. In and of themselves, the poems would not have survived.
Again, I write this with no disrespect to Pink Floyd (or Bob Dylan for that matter). I love them. Just yesterday, in fact, I was enjoying the live disc from Ummagumma in my car. But I think you are making a category error here - as did the committee that awarded Dylan the Nobel for *literature* a few years ago.
If there were a Nobel Prize for *Songwriting*, Dylan would make an excellent laureate!
Do I hear dogs barking on that thing?
I do.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1enfo8zn3_g
Ah, WKRP in Cincinnati!
Thanks, I hadn't seen that.
Didn't he win the Pulitzer for his songwriting?
I'd forgotten about that, but yes, he did win a Pulitzer in 2008 for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”
That sounds entirely reasonable to me.
The first mainly rhyming Nobel laureate since, what, Kipling?
Steven Allen would disagree, and he actually would do comedy reading popular songs as poetry. Turns out without the music they sound a lot worse.
Obviously the quality is going to vary pretty wildly- pop art can be uneven at the best of times and all the more so when melody and other factors can compensate for bad lyrics. But it's not like popular poetry was universally good in other eras either.
They're also by far the most popular and pervasive form of poetry at all points before the 20th century.
28 is Stephen Fry, not Steven
I should just split the difference and call all these people "Stevhen" as a penalty for being unable to make up their minds.
You just convinced me to watch "Steven and the Stevens" again (Steven Universe episode; yes I'm autistic).
Instead, the parents who name their children Steven should learn to spell! Also, Stephen Curry's parents should have looked into the correct pronunciation of the name they gave their child.
Just call them all Esteban.
Why did they seek and then include a blurb from Mark Ruffalo? Who exactly is the intended audience for this book?
Well he did help fight Ultron.
#23. This is also true of skateboarding and has been for over two decades. Jordan’s shoe deal reworked this category and sneaker heads amplify. Consider only two people have dedicated shoe facilities at Nike. Jordan and Janoski.
It’s an interesting meeting point for urban culture and sport.
#10: Frankly this isn't very surprising to me. I'd imagine this graph correlates very strongly with the popularity of figures like Andrew Tate and etc with this age group. The amount of internet celebrities popular with teenage boys that express this kind of sexist attitude really started to take off ~2020. Would be interesting if there is any data on the popularity of those figures over time.
Supporting a society in which women get paid less than men for the same work is one thing, but actively believing that it’s actually better to pay women less for doing the same thing seems more egregiously sexist than I can believe 20% of people are.
I feel like that question is really just measuring how important boys think it is to virtue-signal that they aren’t gay liberal cucks, and apparently it has become noticeably more important to them since 2018.
2018 was the peak of MeToo and my guess is that flipped many males from "sure, feminism has a point" to "they're my enemy".
Women don't get paid less for the same work.
IIRC the difference drops down to something like 3-5% when controlling for roles and industries, which is probably differences in negotiation.
There are things about modern feminism that annoy me (mostly how acceptable both joking and serious misandry are) but if MeToo is actually what flipped a lot of men against it, I think that says not so great things about the men that flipped.
I don't. I count myself among those that went from "feminism is overreaching and has become annoying" to "they're just outright power-hungry, openly adversarial to men, and not operating in good faith". I think that view is well justified.
Can you explain why the MeToo movement specifically made you feel that way? As far as I remember the whole point was encouraging women to speak more openly about harassment by showing just how high the percentage of women who have been harassed, molested, etc is. That doesn't seem very powerful hungry to me.
I think the common sentiment from skeptics is that MeToo uncovered about three real villains but gave hundreds or thousands of sociopaths a weapon they could use to strike at enemies and promote their own interests.
It was a moral panic, which in my view is the hallmark of a political movement which is consolidating power. Purges are always the final step.
> "the whole point was encouraging women to speak more openly"
That's just the rhetorical gloss, akin to the "national security" rationalization of McCarthyism's ideological witch hunts. The reality of MeToo is that it was effectively feminism's ensconcement of feminine social norms as legal principles. It became a kind of moral tribunal where the rules were vague and the penalties were extreme. A lot of the men taken down didn’t break any laws, or if they did, it was for things that used to be considered awkward or sleazy, not criminal. What changed is that women’s subjective feelings about male behavior got elevated into moral law, and that law was enforced with real power. In the context of the longstanding feminist political and social ratchet, MeToo was the moment when the movement took off its mask to reveal a striving for domination rather than equality. When you can destroy person's life not for violence but for making someone feel uncomfortable, that’s not justice. It's control.
You had known liars who went to "liar school" being trotted out by Democrats to sell obvious lies about 10+ year old events.
Miss "I'm afraid of flying!" but flew to Hawaii... yeah, that's a long flight, if you're afraid of flying.
You had C grade candidates using "MeToo" to get rid of every single popular B grade candidate on the Democratic side...
There's a several factors that you can control for that shrinks the gap to fairly small, but real, including this. If you take all that at face value, the correct assertion is more, "Women only get paid slightly less than men for doing the same work."
That said, controlling for roles and industries is selecting for a confound in the standard feminist critique as part of the argument is that what society considers valuable work, particularly in public service roles, both in terms of compensation and prestige varies partially in relation to how much it is associated with women doing it. Saying, "Yeah, well, job X just gets paid less" doesn't fully address the arguments here.
The same holds true for the argument that child-rearing harms women's earning potential. That's partially downstream of social expectation women invest more time and effort into child rearing as their natural function.
Okay, but the reasonable policy responses are very different to those three things. For example, if the problem is that women get paid less than men for identical work, then equal-pay laws might make sense as a response. If the problem is that women went into less well-paid fields, that won't help a bit, but maybe better career counseling or outreach or something will. And if the problem is that women end up with fewer years of experience/seniority due to child rearing, then neither of those will help but maybe there's some other policy that would.
Quoting the 67 cents to the dollar statistic is great for rhetoric (especially if you can silence any annoying literal-minded types who point out why it's a kind-of meaningless statistic), but it does a really poor job of leading anyone to a sensible conclusion. Like many other "directionally correct" or "socially true" statistics that aren't literally true, they mislead anyone who takes them seriously.
People who talk about the pay-gap generally understand it is multi-causal and promote multiple solutions. Desiring more equality in child care expectations is quite common in these spaces. Policy responses that outlaw overt discrimination aren't harmful even if they are only addressing one element of disparate outcomes.
That said, "career counseling" is a tin-eared response here to the idea that work associated with women tends to have lower social value that has knock on effects for compensation. The problem being suggested there is that where women congregate, low social value follows. You can't fix that by advising them to go somewhere else. You have to address underlying attitudes.
I dont think thats exactly what the question asks. Its asking the inverse "should they always be paid the same"
2019 the US women won the world cup and there was a noisy clash with Trump. The women used the win to launch and win an equal pay movement regarding world cup fees. I remember thinking at the time, good for them to use that leverage for a financial win, but the wider movement will be hurt by this. Everyone gets why women athletes get paid less even though on some level that looks only at inputs, its equal work. If the women athletes become the poster child for the equal pay movement it will delegitimize the whole thing.
I dont think that exactly explains it, but I dont think its egregiously sexist to answer no to this question if you are doing so because you doubt its premise. Equal inputs do not necessarily warrant equal pay.
If you define an athlete’s work as drawing a crowd, then you’re already claiming they didn’t “do the same work” so I don’t see how that’s a reason to answer “no” to the question as posed.
Not everyone is a strict logician, certainly not 8th grade boys. I am answering disagree because I think there are cases where men can be paid more for work others insist was equal is a perfectly reasonable way for 20pct of ppl to respond
Furthermore, even if you disagree with that, athletic work is fundamentally defined by quality and not effort or time expenditure.
The mere fact that there are different divisions for men and women disproves the assertion that the work is equal.
Defining athletic work as "ability to draw audience" is already the maximally favourable position to women that remains logically tenable.
That's why Beach Volleyball exists and is a sport where women do well.
There is in no way "equal work" with soccer. A women's world class soccer team gets beaten by 15 and under teams. This occurs on a regular basis.
Women's world class soccer is a joke (they really just need a smaller field, and possibly a "slightly different game" like softball, which yes, men play as well -- women get tired on the large field, and then the other side runs up the score).
Not sure, who on this thread you think youre disagreeing with with this comment. This is well understood and implicit in my comment
Even if there is such a correlation, it wouldn't answer whether those figures are causing these beliefs, or becoming more popular because they're validating the beliefs people are picking up for other reasons.
I wonder if based on the questions some of it is "fighting" with the survey team. I'm reminded of the classic Onion article "1 in 5 Americans believe Obama is a cactus": with some of these questions you can recognize "ah this is one of those *woke* questions, I'm gonna give them the *based* answer just to piss them off!" I remember reading a while back on how ~10% of high school boys report being certified submarine captains.
A way to confirm or refute this theory would be with a somewhat more oblique question or experiment that tries to get at someone's "real" views on gender. Maybe one of those money-negotiating experiments (like the Ultimatum Game) where you experimentally manipulate the name + photo of the person you are negotiating with, to see if these "I hate women" survey boys actually try to give less money to girls (even at the cost of money for themselves.
Kind of a tangent, but when they actually interviewed a panel of official submarine captains and asked them what they most fear down there, the number one answer (by far) was, of course, “dogs”.
Not public speaking?
Living on a submarine seems like an efficient way to get away from dogs. I'd hazard you're getting a lot more rural folks in the Navy, as that's where "dog fear" tends to come from -- rural dogs are a normal hazard for "kids on bikes." Friend of mine had a stick just for bonking lunging dogs.
But they are surrounded by “sea dogs”
>with some of these questions you can recognize "ah this is one of those *woke* questions, I'm gonna give them the *based* answer just to piss them off!"
...and, of course, the other way around: I've seen a lot of surveys with "woke" point of views made where I suspect that a fair amount of respondants have responded in a maximum-woke way either to piss off the chuds or to "balance out" the presumed conservative answers they're expecting such a survey to get.
I was going to say something like this; the Lizardman's Constant post talks about it:
>Some pollsters are starting to consider these sorts of things symptomatic of what they term symbolic belief, which seems to be kind of what the Less Wrong sequences call Professing and Cheering or Belief As Attire. Basically, people are being emotivists rather than realists about belief. “Obama is the Anti-Christ” is another way of just saying “Boo Obama!”, rather than expressing some sort of proposition about the world.
Certainly, the mid-to-late 2010s were SJ's apex of power (you can see the spike when it shows up), and the Twitter sale is responsible for the cliff-jump from 2022 to 2023.
10% is the standard "crank" answer. 10% of people love Ebola. The only way you don't get 10% is if you're Joe Paterno (who got 2%).
It's not surprising, just like it's not surprising that figures like Tate are popular when we just spent 20 years telling boys (especially white ones) that they are evil, useless, and should be discriminated against. Of course they are going to lash out at the people vilifying them.
The responses to that comment are -- interesting.
Including a literal statement telling a man that he can not be a victim because he is a man, and the response to being called on it was to repeat it and tell him to sound it out.
Could you link what you're talking about?
https://xcancel.com/Death2Misogyny/status/1919738581028839730#m
Thanks.
Looking at that thread, I'm pretty sure the intended meaning was not "you can't be a victim, because you're a man" but "the reason why you're a victim is something other than the fact that you're a man", and the condescending response after he complained was because she thought he was being stupid not to understand that.
(For the avoidance of doubt: I don't think he was being stupid, I think she was being needlessly unclear. But I _don't_ think she was saying "men can never be victims".)
Nah, she was denying that he was a victim. Witness the way she started by cherry-picking the evidence to deny it.
There's a question here whether social media algorithms - whether intentionally or not - are partly to blame.
These boys are fully aware that girls are not surveyed on their attitudes towards males, that whatever views they have, the consensus is that they always be perfectly justified and entitled to them. They're told that it's equality, yet the expectations of respect go in only one direction.
Nobody here is looking at the origin of the graph for #10, which has a lot more input. It writes, “Religion is one factor that actually shows some promise in explaining why belief in gender equality has lost ground with boys. Views of gender equality among boys who say religion is not important in their life have not decreased by nearly as much in the past five years. The share of boys agreeing completely that women deserve equal job opportunities fell 22 percentage points, from 60% in 2018 to 38% in 2023. Complete agreement with equal pay for women also fell by 21 percentage points, from 71% to 50%.”
A lot of the other predictions get debunked by other data on the page.
47. But did you know that this effect comes almost entirely from daughters?
I really really struggle to believe this. Unfortunately the post is paywalled, but I'm pretty sure I did read it, or a similar post; and the study it's based on is not very big- around 400 women total (200 bearing daughters).
I assume it's this study: https://docs.iza.org/dp17817.pdf
Sample size: 441 mothers
They look at only the gender of the first child, but ignore the evidence (which they do cite, but don't account for) that first born girls are more likely to be followed by a sibling than first born boys. That is, the effect could be entirely that the mothers of first born daughters have larger families, and hence reduced employment. They kind of sweep it under the rug by saying "if parents anticipate building a larger family, they may be more likely to specialize, with one more focused on market work and the other on home production."
Haven’t looked at the paper yet but that seems like a huge confound (fitting username btw).
> (fitting username btw).
thx
in and of itself that’s an interesting finding. i wonder why that’s the case. maybe the desire to have a boy to carry on the last name? maybe girls are easier as toddlers so you’re more likely to have another?
Just speculating, but there's at least a cliche out there that fathers want to have sons, whereas mothers are less concerned about the gender of their children. Though also could be that daughter toddlers are easier.
As the father of an easy daughter who just got a second (not quite as easy) daughter to join her, I'm totally willing to believe that easy children encourage more kids. It's probably not a huge effect though.
Disagree, anecdote isn't data but my sister wanted a big family, had a very difficult time with her first child with his behaviour and resulting impact her mental health and didn't have any more. My wife and I were neutral all of our children have been relatively easy and we have ended up with 3.
EDIT: To be clear I disagree about "not a huge effect", I think it's a very large effect. My rule of thumb is people keep having kids until either they run out of money/space or they run out of (perceived) capacity to care for additional children with the latter being the greater constraint in practice.
It sounds like you are in agreement, not disagreement -- all of these anecdotes suggest that parents are more likely to stop conceiving once they feel overwhelmed, and conversely are more likely to keep going if they have easy kids, and that boys are more likely on average to be difficult and kind of overwhelming to deal with. That is definitely true among my social circle!
Among everyone I know with two kids (which is a ton of families), if I had to rank the pairs of kids from most challenging to least challenging to babysit for an afternoon, all the hardest ones that come to mind would be two-boy families and all the easiest are two-girl families. We've been in a co-op preschool for years and while I know all the parents love all the kids, I am highly confident that if you made the parents take a secret poll doing such a "challenge to babysit" ranking, they would come quite close to what I described, of essentially first sorting into groups based on the number of boys.
The challenging boy preschoolers are just so so much harder to handle than the average kid, so it doesn't surprise me that many of them would have been enough of a handful on their own for some parents to say "You know what? I'm tapped out."
I don't have time to read the paper, but do they control for how long the mothers left the workforce? How about for multiple kids? People always say daughters are easier to raise when they are young, so I could see mothers of daughters being more likely to spend more time with them before returning to work. I could also see families that start with a daughter being more likely to have extra kids because the father wants a son.
I think this wouldn't be hard to replicate in a larger longitudinal data set like the NLSY. The result seems unlikely to me as well.
#5 Would you let a dead spider, controlled by AI robotics, perform surgery on your eyeball? If the alternative was going blind? No. I would rather go blind.
By this power, you too will know man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.
#9 - Come back 20 years from now and the following sentence will have aged like milk: “Looking at . . . the current state of Meta’s VR universe, it is absolutely impossible to imagine a world where this kind of thing is ever going to succeed.”
Once you spend enough time trudging through the internet's gamer communities, you realize that there are millions of people out there who would drop everything real in their lives if they could "live" in virtual worlds, embodying a perfect version of themselves (often an all-powerful character) and creating romantic links with other people's avatars. Meta's strategy with VR has been to buy everything and everyone who does anything remotely interesting in that space - until the technology catches up (GPUs that can render realistic worlds, systems that suppress motion sickness and improve real world mobility -> virtual mobility) that technology looks like a massive failure on all fronts because there's almost no revenue to be found, and people who already have a dislike for video games find the whole concept extremely virgin-coded (they aren't wrong).
> Meta's strategy with VR has been to buy everything and everyone who does anything remotely interesting in that space
Turning a creativity based space into a monoculture is a surefire way to kill that space. Were they aiming for that?....
I bet not. They want the money and control, and don't care about the creativity.
>Once you spend enough time trudging through the internet's gamer communities, you realize that there are millions of people out there who would drop everything real in their lives if they could "live" in virtual worlds, embodying a perfect version of themselves (often an all-powerful character) and creating romantic links with other people's avatars.
Second Life? Meta seems to have never heard of it. Probably just as well. But for everyone else, here's a film about it: https://draxtor.substack.com/p/our-digital-selves-my-avatar-is-me
ETA: Second Life is still there, alive and well, in case that wasn't clear, and currently celebrating its 22nd birthday. The film I linked to is a celebration of what is, not a lament for what was.
A guy decided to check out an old virtual reality game from the mid-2000s that was still running. At first it seemed like no one was there, but then he ran into some users. It went places I didn’t expect and in the end I got a little verklempt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSMDb1CWD6Y
Second life is still alive and well, but has mostly been totally supplanted in the VR space by VRChat! VRC is basically the modern day second life, with a few million people owning it and tons and tons and tons of active users. It is what i imagine Meta wanted it's metaverse to be, but i don't think Meta wants all the gay furries.
I thought all the SV companies were super woke. What can be woker than gay furries?
You might or might not be surprised to hear about the gay furries that like Nazi uniforms. :/
Of course the concept of living in cyberspace has been around since at least William Gibson. But most people don't want to just sit and interior decorate, and definitely not with PS2 level assets. They want something to do, a world to explore and a game to play. Then they also want to be doing the popular thing that other people are doing. What does it mean to be "an all powerful character" in Horizon Worlds?
In their defense most of the money is probably going to hardware development of the headsets which have real engineering challenges. But if you wanted to make a virtual world that people live in, really you don't need VR, you need to seamlessly merge the gaming space with a discord-like multimedia sharing app, with social media, and then with outside corps and organizations. People already basically do live in that cyberspace it just isn't integrated as it likely could be.
> But if you wanted to make a virtual world that people live in, really you don't need VR, you need to seamlessly merge the gaming space with a discord-like multimedia sharing app, with social media, and then with outside corps and organizations.
FYI Horizon Worlds is available as a mobile app as well, and the avatars are integrated with Instagram. I can't see the appeal myself, but they're certainly trying.
The thing is VRChat is still just chugging along - I just wander around weird worlds random people have created about once a week. It's an amazing experience that's completely at odds with Meta's culture and business model, and I say this as a former Meta engineer.
The metaverse kind of exists - but only for a small population of weirdos. Something like 60% of them are furries, and there's not much money in it aside from independent digital creatives selling custom avatars.
I think VR will persist as a niche weird thing for the foreseeable future. If Meta abandons it I expect a few other companies to fill the gap, albeit with less excessive subsidies. Valve is a private company beholden only to the whims of a handful of nerds with access to a free money printer and a demonstrated interest in making stuff that they want to make in VR.
If meta made VR chat with the GDP of the country I grew up in behind it instead of worse second life, I would really feel the urge to get inside the GiveUp-Machine.
If Meta did that it wouldn't have the qualities that make VRChat what it is. VRChat works because it's completely dominated by a small set of weirdos and has little mainstream appeal. This protects it from the profit incentives that would lead to metric-maxing optimization, and then you get what every mainstream social media converges towards.
You want enough capitalism to push people to make better stuff but not so much that "exploit every weakness of human psychology at industrial scale" becomes a strategy worth pursuing.
A lot of that money is going to hardware research.
It’s “Meta” because “Dystopia” is too hard to spell.
==============
Decentraland started in 2015. The following from 2023 shows how well it has "progressed".
https://youtu.be/EiZhdpLXZ8Q?si=7NTUVCLWjKtWX41w
(kinda long.)
The idea behind gaming is to escape the real world (in a certain sense). I don't pay close attention to Meta tbh, but from what I remember, they seem all too eager to bring the real world with all its irritations to the virtual one.
Doesn't it have huge implications for non-virgin coded non-video game applications? Enterprise stuff, realistic essential worker trainings and so forth.
I'm actually long on this. I think it'll pan out.
"you realize that there are millions of people out there who would drop everything real in their lives if they could "live" in virtual worlds, embodying a perfect version of themselves "
Until that becomes an actual option, we really don't know. Millions of hippies swore they were willing to drop anything to live in a commune *if only*...
"Meta's strategy with VR has been to buy everything and everyone who does anything remotely interesting in that space - until the technology catches up"
Except, there is no guarantee the technology ever catches up. Also having a VR set, even much better than the current ones, is still not quite "Ready Player One". How many technologies have been 2 years away for 30 years? And how many technologies that were believed to be the next Industrial Revolution just became a niche hobby little influence on most people's lives? 3D printing is an obvious examples
Another issue is that, as far as I can tell, the 50 billion figure isn't just VR. It also includes smartglasses and those are flying off the shelves.
What's great about this critique is the time horizon is so long literally no one, not even the commentator, will remember it even ten years from now.
But "virgin-coded" almost made me laugh out loud.
#26: perhaps link to the story on substack: https://alexsalvinews.substack.com/p/the-election-of-pope-leo-xiv , to avoid the dozens of clicks required to read it on X? I'm sure there's a way to "unroll" the thread on X, but a webpage where that's already done for you seems good.
Thanks, fixed.
Another linking problem:
#18: the third and the fourth link are identical; I think the third link should have been this: https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/a-measured-response-to-benthams-bulldog
Thanks, fixed.
In general, it’s really annoying to see a link to a Tweet, figure there’s probably more to it than just one Tweet, and then realize that there’s probably a thread, and you’re just not allowed to read a thread if you aren’t logged in to a Twitter account.
Nitter is back from the dead and fixes this.
I'm not sure if this is the best or the worst news I've heard in months.
"Then universities borrow money now against that future windfall. What goes wrong?"
The same thing that goes wrong if I go borrow a million quid based on "next week for sure I will win the lottery so I definitely will be able to pay you back, honest!"
"I thought you weren’t allowed to do any of this, and certainly not talk about doing any of it, on pain of excommunication?"
We're Catholics. You seriously expect us to stick to the rules? 😁
The difference is that you probably aren't going to win the lottery, but it's overwhelmingly likely that Democrats will have unified control of the U.S. federal government at some point in the next several decades. Not saying there aren't reasons why this might not work, but that isn't one.
The right will call it a "bailout for Harvard!"
Of course they will, the right hates everything about this. The whole argument (which, again, is not entirely free of holes) is that the Democrats will eventually have the opportunity to pass legislation on a party-line basis over the right's objections.
It won't just be the right, I wouldn't like to be the Democrat official charged with explaining why a moneybags Ivy League college is getting taxpayer money to repay their borrowings, while [insert issue here: housing crisis, potholes in the roads, systemic racism, healthcare costs, etc.] are crying out for funding.
Oh, the Democrats are likely to get back into power. But when they do, will the promised money be there? Or will it be spent on other, more "worthy"/"needy" causes? Suppose Harvard borrows against the promised payout, do you really think there won't be outcry from the more lefty side of the coalition about rich endowment white privilege colleges getting a government bailout instead of state schools., or black colleges, or any of the rest of the list of "more urgent social needs"?
See Biden's student loan forgiveness, yes it did happen, but not as broadly as people thought it would:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/despite-collapse-of-his-forgiveness-plan-millions-had-student-loans-canceled-under-biden
"Despite failing to deliver his promise for broad student loan forgiveness, President Joe Biden has now overseen the cancellation of student loans for more than 5 million Americans — more than any other president in U.S. history.
In a last-minute action on Monday, the Education Department canceled loans for 150,000 borrowers through programs that existed before Biden took office. His administration expanded those programs and used them to their fullest extent, pressing on with cancellation even after the Supreme Court rejected Biden’s plan for a new forgiveness policy."
I seem to recall he was able to cancel loans for those who had entered into government employment, which may have satisfied his base.
> Or will it be spent on other, more "worthy"/"needy" causes?
Perhaps if we all started tweeting "giving money to Harvard is racist", the universities would realize this risk and stop borrowing?
1. Loan forgiveness was severely curbed by the courts (fortunately, imho). Unlike the current admin, the previous one was in the habit to respect sentences
2. We are not talking about huge sums, at least when compared to the national budget. For the left to be able to block a 0.x% addition to the budget, that the center-left campaigned on and publicly promised, they'd need a level of control not even remotely close to the one they have
3. The left (as in, the Squad) has been pretty vocal about the selective grant cancellations and has repeatedly framed it as an attack on research rather than on Harvard. Nobody guarantees consistency obviously, but to completely renege their current position for no appreciable reason would be deeply misguided and there is no reason to think they would.
The previous one that literally summoned the supreme court back to town, because it was doing EOs behind the supreme court's back? (I think that was the student loans, too...)
Are you seriously referring to an appeal as "summoning the supreme court back into town"? The admin lost. It appealed. When it lost the appeal, they stopped forgiving debt. Any other characterization is obviously sophistic
https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/student-loan-forgiveness-update-timeline/
No, that's not what I'm remembering. What I'm remembering is the Supreme Court saying "no" (to something), and the Biden administration saying "Okay, Executive Order time! we're going to run this right up until the Supreme Court gets back in town." (so, um, this could have been student loans, or it could have been something like rent-free housing).
> Democrats will have unified control of the U.S. federal government at some point in the next several decades
I disagree. While I do agree that *some* left-leaning party will have unified control at some point in the future, the present-day Democrats have decayed past any point of recovery. Their putatively successful political descendants will have to deliberately distance themselves from present-day Democrats to such an extent that making high-confidence predictions about their policies is difficult (if not outright impossible).
Are you saying that there'll be an ideological realignment like in the 20th century, or are you literally saying that the United States Democratic Party will never again have unified control of the federal government? If the latter, well, I think that's less than 20% likely and would bet accordingly.
I wouldn't say "ideological", I'd say "political" or perhaps "messaging" realignment (as I doubt that politicians have anything resembling a consistent ideology). And there will likely be an organization *named* "US Democratic Party" that may, in the next 10..30 years, gain full control of the US Government. But that organization's internal structure, policies, messaging, strategies, financing priorities, etc., will be so different from the current Democratic Party that making confident predictions about their behaviour is premature. Otherwise, they'd have no hope of taking any kind of control over anything.
> But that organization's internal structure, policies, messaging, strategies, financing priorities, etc., will be so different from the current Democratic Party that making confident predictions about their behaviour is premature.
I read a discussion of the internal operation of the Democratic Party that made me surprised it was able to continue in any coherent form. ("Internal dissent is rewarded with additional formal power.")
I'd be interested in other people's thoughts.
We're already in the midst of an ideological realignment. I mean, it's almost as if you didn't notice the last administration hired "dick cheney's protegee" -- and let her do actual work.
In other news, Pax Americana is dead, dead, dead.
These are certainly related
This is what people thought of the Republicans in 2013 and the Democrats in early 2005.
I'm pretty sure I hear it every single election cycle. Whichever party just lost is totally never coming back. Then four years later it's like "ooh neck and neck" again.
I hate to sound like a cliche, but I really think this time the situation is different. Trump had reforged the political landscape by demonstrating quite clearly that all of the long-standing political rules -- each and every one of them -- are merely guidelines. You don't have to follow them unless you want to, or unless someone more popular than you can stop you. Present-day Democrats are simply not ready for that, and their institutional baggage prevents them from every getting ready, IMO.
I expect that every precedent Trump has set that involves centralizing power will be picked up immediately by the next Democrat in the white house. That may not involve giving money to Ivy League colleges, but it will certainly involve taking advantage of any missing bits of fence Trump has knocked down.
By Bugmaster's standards, it would be true. The Republican party of 2021 is a completely different party than the Republican party of 2016.
It changed by 2016. Remember how the Democrats thought they could, by including military spending in a shutdown deal, make the Republicans unwilling to countenance a shutdown? And the Republicans let it shut down?
The Tea Party was a big shift, but the Trump takeover was a much more significant and through transformation.
We actually got a huge ideological realignment among Republicans in the intervening 12 years. The modern Republicans have a very different set of policies they support than Mitt Romney or George W Bush.
Oh, boy, buckets, yes. The Neocons are being hired by the Democrats, it's gotten so bad. We'll just note that the Republicans somehow turned into the "party of peace" (largely on the strength of military voters).
Something like this happened in the 1960s-80s, where white Southern voters mostly became Republicans, nearly all blacks became Democrats, and religious and socially conservative people mostly ended up on the Republican side in an uneasy alliance with free-marketeers (who mostly DGAF what you do in your bedroom as long as taxes and regulation are low) and cold-warriors (who also mostly don't care about what you do in your bedroom and only care about taxes to the extent they're needed to pay for missiles and aircraft carriers). Both parties in 1985 looked *very different* from what they looked like in 1955.
2005 led to Howard Dean's 50-state idea. And a lot of new blood.
Said new blood is now working for Trump.
The problem is planning for a sure thing, and planning for a time period. If the Democrats regain control of the federal government in 2028, that looks very different for a university carrying large loads of debt than it does if Democrats regain control in 2036. Also, maybe the Democrats don't back pay any grants, or at a lesser percentage than full, or even decide that it worked out pretty well and don't even add new grants. Then the universities are in a really bad position. This would be a very bad bet to make.
The question is whether any banks or hedge funds or whatever would be interested in bearing that risk for the right price.
Any bet made at the whims and capability of elected officials to do something that they may or may not even want to do is a bad bet. There is no guarantee that Democrats as a whole would make such a change, let alone individual Democrat politicians. There is even less guarantee that they would have the ability to do it, such as failing to get all three branches, having too small of a majority to pass disputed legislation/filibuster, etc.
Hedge funds are in the business of betting on things that aren't guaranteed. It's just a question of at what price.
Maybe, but there is nothing stopping them from selling state-contingent claims (x$ will be paid to the bearer *if* Dems win AND make good on their word). If they trade at 10c on the dollar, too bad, it's not Harvard's problem as long as they have buyers.
Also, once these state-contingent claims are on the market, they create a natural, powerful constituency pressuring Dems to in fact make good on their word.
The other problem is: what's in it for the Democrats of the present? They don't want to reduce the pain of the Trump presidency for anyone, that just lowers their chances of winning in 2028.
Not really. The only ones suffering immediately from research funding cuts are the researchers themselves, who already vote D with Assad margins. The rest of the US (and the world) does not directly suffer, they just enjoy lower innovation (and thus living standards etc) than they would otherwise. I doubt this kind of counterfactual reasoning would sway many votes, and the few ones thinking in these terms would probably really really appreciate the DNC for indirectly funding research anyway.
It'd be a good electoral move, beyond being a good action in itself. It's just that the party is now in disarray and there is no real leadership, so...
Nothing until a law is passed making all such claims null and void and requiring immediate repayment in full.
Any such law written with even a thin veneer of generality would outlaw betting, a good chunk of the financial industry, and make illegal for all kind of firms to sign the contracts they routinely sign with their clients and suppliers. And also could not possibly be retroactive, so the labs would still pocket the money they have already raised.
Sure, they could pass a law written spefically to be contra personam and retroactive, but that would be crossing the Rubicon and fully erase five centuries of legal tradition. If it were to happen, I doubt it'd happen over this.
Nonsense. Contracts conditional on acts of government could be banned for the simple reason they encourage illegal election interference.
This depends on a much longer chain of hypotheticals than that.
For this scheme to work, it's necessary that 1. Ds regain unified control sometime in the next decade or two (pretty likely), then 2. those Ds retain enough respect for commitments made today that they make a serious effort to pay out the (probably very large) back funding, and 3. that effort successfully beats out all other competing demands for funds, in an increasingly strained budget environment.
Then there's the whole question of timing. This bet looks very different depending on whether you anticipate the payout in 4 years, vs 8, 12 or 16. The further into the future it is that Ds regain control, the less likely that points 2 and 3 above will succeed. Then, of course, there's the time cost of money to consider.
Meanwhile, this policy requires a very public commitment and funding negotiations; thus, it can't be done quietly. Trump has all kinds of ways to interfere with this process, from going after the lenders in various ways (all banks are extremely vulnerable to USG pressure) to using other levers against the universities.
Think about this as if you are the prospective private lender. Would you be willing to pay out $billions to universities, with repayment contingent on someone else fighting and winning a thankless political struggle in an unclear number of years? I am pretty sure that would not pass any conventional underwriting process.
Yeah, there are going to be some really tough budgeting decisions in the next decade or two, and Harvard is not going to be in the top 20 most sympathetic or vote-getting choices of where to spend the limited money a future president and Congress will have.
Harvard is reasonably sympathetic, but the hedge funds who funded this hypothetical bet certainly wouldn't be.
No, it's not overwhemingly so likely. There are a lot of cases where something akin to the current US Democratic Party does not take power any time soon.
1) AI X-catastrophe before 2029. There is no USA.
2) Civil war that the Democrats lose (again). Party apparatus forcibly dismantled.
3) Nuclear war. Most Democratic voters are now dead.
In #2 and #3 there's probably eventually some kind of fracture in the Republican Party and one of the sides quietly absorbs the remnants of the Democratic base, but it'd have to name itself something else and would have to steer well clear of flagship Democrat policies, as the Democrats themselves would be widely despised.
Okay, fair, I was assuming that American society continues to exist with post-Civil-War levels of continuity.
Alternatively:
4. The current Democratic party fractures and shifts as the Republican one has, and we get a very different Democratic party--perhaps along AOC/Mamdani lines, perhaps along entirely different lines.
Whereas my comparison would be paying in US Dollars during the War for Independence, or in Confederate dollars during the Civil War. It's yet another dangerous escalation in the political landscape.
#4 – this was likely Moderna's CMV vaccine candidate.
I'm glad they can detect this, because engineered CMV is one of the things that keeps me up at night.
44: Ultimately, I think the most concise way to think about "The purpose of a system is what it does", is to see that most people are split into two diametrically opposite interpretations of it:
1) What a system does must be the purpose that was intended by its designers
2) The "purpose" of a system is a concept that can, and should, be described independently of any intent or design
And the way to resolve this is to realise that POSIWID itself is a very confusing sentence out of context, and Stafford Beer (presumably) never intended it to confuse people, so:
Under interpretation 1), POSIWID is a self-contradiction;
Under interpretation 2), POSIWID proves itself - its a meme that perpetuates discussion of itself by the conflict between both interpretations, and it's useful to imagine that as its "purpose" in the context of asking how it sticks around.
If a system is sufficiently "bad" it will be torn down. I think that's the best way to hear POSIWID. Democracy, worldwide, is used as a tool to let the CIA/United states government influence elections and policy in other countries.
It seems like what people ordinarily point to when using the word "purpose" is the ways in which a thing promotes some given terminal goal- so not just the intent of a designer, but also not really independent of intent.
Most of the people doing the pointing, however, don't actually have a solid grasp of terminal goals as a property of agents and distinct from instrumental goals, so the way people end up conceptualizing purpose tends to be more like "the ways in which a thing promotes [unnamed, half-formed concept]". People aren't sure whether that half-formed concept is an objective property of reality or something subjective, so we get lots of very confused memes like "the meaning of life" that assume purpose can exist independently of any agent.
Reading through the linked blog post, it sounds like those early cyberneticists noticed that anything a thing does could constitute its purpose to some hypothetical agent with some particular terminal goal. But they also didn't really have a solid concept of terminal goals and were operating under this confused cultural assumption that purposes are properties of things that can exist independently of agents, so the observation just looked to them like "anything a thing does could constitute its purpose"- phrased even more confusingly as POSIWID.
But what's the point of redefining "purpose" like that? We already have a perfectly good way to say that concept: "What it does."
#15: yeah, someone whose funding gets cut and loses their academic position is most likely to look for a job in industry, not to start a startup. Launching a startup (at least in biotech) usually requires preliminary data which you can't get if you don't have a lab.
When we recently hired for a PhD-level position we got over 300 applicants the first day alone.
#16: an interesting idea, but what if the Republicans win in 2028?
#28 - they also got George Church! https://intelligence.org/2025/06/18/new-endorsements-for-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies/
28: I'm not as surprised at that one, he seems like the kind of person to be into this.
I don't know, Stephen Fry also seems like the kind of person to be into this. The surprise is that he chose to spend his weirdness points this way given that he has fewer to spend as a much more mainstream figure.
George Church should not be surprising because he is a founding advisor to Tegmark's Future of Life Institute. Not every advisor to FLI endorsed it, but they all signed up for a decade of lobbying by Tegmark.
#8 - I can get 1/100th of the karma of saving a life by simply praising good deeds? This does not seem remotely play-tested. Surely praising good deeds a hundred times is easier than saving someone's life. If paying someone to praise good deeds on my behalf counts, I'm sure I can hire someone to do that at a much more effective rate than it would cost to spend the money saving lives.
And "adopting an orphan", something that brings with it daily obligations for years, is just 50 karma! I'm never going to adopt any orphans with this scoring scheme. (Though maybe it made more sense in Ming China, where children may have been economic investments rather than money sinks. But still.)
On the other hand, saving lives is *also* surprisingly cheap. GiveWell generally gives estimates of $3500-$5000 in the modern world, and perhaps it was even cheaper in Ming China due to more people near you living close to the subsistence threshold.
On the other, other hand, you don't merely have to pay someone to praise good deeds; praising is the easy part. You have to pay them to identify good deeds! Which is such a thorny proposition that modern philosophers still have not solved it.
I think it's about $2 to keep a child from going blind. That may not be saving their life (or it might be, consider orphans and other destitute), but it's certainly keeping them as "valued members of society."
I always like to run that as a metric for "How Much does this charity deserve to be funded?"
This seems to good to be true, but in case it is, I'd be up for curing a number of kids.
Look at the link below... Looks like we still need more money/effort on this front, hundreds of thousands of children are still going blind (and that's with a 50% mortality rate after blindness).
Do you have a citation? Usually when cost numbers are that low, someone is conflating 'cost per treatment' with 'cost per preventing negative outcome', which are only the same if 100% of treated people would have the negative outcome without the treatment and 0% would have it with the treatment.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35294044/
We have upwards of 200,000 children a year going blind (with a mortality rate of 50% in the first year alone after blindness). This is after distributing 400 million doses per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_A_deficiency
Quoting from wiki:
"Globally, VAD is estimated to affect about one-third of children under the age of five, causing an estimated 670,000 deaths in children under five annually.[8][9] It is most prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa (48 percent) and South Asia (44 percent).[8]"
Yes, this is cost per treatment (vitamin A shots). To "fully prevent" Vitamin a Deficiency you need a shot a year...
OK, let's assume that it takes 4 shots then, to fully prevent VAD (since this is largely a <5-year-old issue.)
Your paper doesn't give blindness stats (which I know was the initial claim), but it does give all-cause mortality improvement. It drops all-cause mortality from 2.6% to 2.3%. That's 3 lives per thousand treated children, or per 4000 doses, or about $1,333 per life saved. Very, very efficient!
But... while this doesn't give blindness data, note that 50% of kids die within a year of developing blindness. That caps the # of blindnesses prevented at twice the number of deaths prevented (which would be true if all the mortality improvement was due to preventing blindness; unlikely.) That means that you have to pay at least $666 per case of blindness prevented (and probably quite a bit more.)
Still a bargain; but not wildly implausible like $2 apiece would be.
GiveWell's rough estimate is more like $6,000 apiece.
Each treatment costs $2.70 ($1.35 per shot, but you need two shots). Divide that by the probability that the child would have gone blind without the treatment but won't with it, which they calculate by multiplying the following numbers together:
- 1.3% prevalence of night blindness in Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Mali
- 10% of cases of night blindness progress to full blindness (there apparently are no studies of this so this number is a guess but they think it's a generous one)
- 68% chance the treatment works
- 50% chance of surviving early childhood after going blind (as your comment accounts for)
They then go on to calculate DALYs (divide by 0.187 disability weight for total blindness, and by 25 more years of average life expectancy for a blind child who doesn't die right away) and conclude that blindness prevention through vitamin A supplementation costs about $1,200 per DALY. This is worse than giving cash, which they estimate improves lives at a rate of $1,000 per DALY. So ultimately not the most good you can do.
They recommend Helen Keller International because of the mortality benefits, for which the numbers are better ($3,500 per life saved, not sure the exact conversion factor to DALYs but it's obviously way better than cash).
Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tIK6aJEzQReTq8PveyKk3o-JLwwWXquFr67_WrARXDc/edit?gid=373284575#gid=373284575, which is linked from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wuZC00Llw3SpvNFGCadCHNFBSqwo4wU3Elu80n6Cl6k/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.6icmli4ndtv4, which is linked from https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/vitamin-A#footnote248. Cost-per-life-saved number is from https://www.givewell.org/impact-estimates#Impact_metrics_for_grants_to_GiveWells_top_charities.
Thanks for running the numbers! I'm definitely on board (and helping) with yellow rice and other tricks to no longer need this particular charity.
is there somewhere I can donate for this cause?
So I'm lazy:
https://www.givewell.org/charities/helen-keller-international
I think it's clearly written for a different society, where words had more weight, anonimity was not an option, and if you told a butcher to their face they had to change job you could have been in for an unpleasant retort.
Presumably, as both the material impact and the cost of praising good deeds and harassing butchers decreased, the karma points would decrease in proportion
There's also opportunity for arbitrage. If a married woman comes onto you, you can turn her down and then go have sex with like ten prostitutes and still come out far ahead.
#1 - Scott, you say that post helped you crystallize some thoughts on what good writing and good taste are in general. Sounds like the perfect topic for you to write about - will we get a glimpse?
I hope so!
I am looking forward to this to. Am expecting something in the general direction of the priest hood abhors cliche. The layfolk dont mind it so much as they are not exposed enough to notice the cliche. Its not an entirely arbitrary set of elitists preferences, but the priesthood has its own internal divisions on cliche and anyways probably over update to the avant garde given over exposure.
#52 - I wrote about an earlier version of this therapy here: https://denovo.substack.com/p/base-editing-coming-soon-to-a-liver
Despite having a successful therapy, VERV stock really didn't do well over the last 4 years. They recently got acquired by Eli Lily for $1.3B but this is down from about $2B in 2022 (and recently it was as low as $300M).
I personally lost about $15k on this. Just goes to show that biotech is hard to make money in.
That is odd. It seems like the stock should be higher than that. Any idea why it's so low? Even on the day the results were announced (April 14, 2025), the stock only went up ~$0.90 to ~$4, off from a peak of >$70 four years ago.
> looks like the rhyme decline started well before then.
Paradise Lost, an epic poem published in 1667 by John Milton doesn't rhyme. I gather many people were critical of it at the time for that reason. My only complaint about Milton's poetry generally is the plethora of ancient Greek characters, divine or otherwise, who pop up in it. Presumably readers in the 1600s would have been familiar with these references, but most people today find them obscure and baffling. Piers Plowman, written towards the end of the 1300s, doesn't rhyme either.
Doesn't Milton treat rhyming as newfangled? My understanding is that English poetry didn't rhyme early on (Beowulf used alliteration, Shakespeare used patterns of stressed syllables), and that rhyming was introduced via French poetry.
Yes, it's possible that thyme in English is a cuiltural.cringe towards.The greeks.and romans.
AFAIK, classical Greek and Roman poetry doesn't rhyme either -- it's based on metric structure, like Old English and Sanskrit poetry (which suggests it's an Indo-European thing). Poetry in Latin starts rhyming consistently in the Middle Ages.
> AFAIK, classical Greek and Roman poetry doesn't rhyme either -- it's based on metric structure, like Old English and Sanskrit poetry
That's not a statement I'd be comfortable with.
1. You're right that poetry in Greek and Latin doesn't rhyme, ever.
2. You're also right that poetry in Greek and Latin is based on metric structure.
3. You're wrong that poetry in Old English is based on metric structure. Old English poetry has no rhyme and barely any meter. It is defined by alliteration; the metrical concern is only that there is conceptually a caesura cutting each line in half, which encourages the presence of a sharp prosodic break in each line. (A caesura is ideally a "real" prosodic break, but since they are required by the poetic form, they can be read in to what would otherwise be a smooth flow of words, in the same way that although dactylic hexameter formally requires the last syllable of each line to be metrically long, in practice it is free to be short, because the end of the line counts as a kind of length for the syllable there.)
https://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/tutorials/old-english-metre-a-brief-guide
Thanks for the correction on Old English!
(Though on point 1, it is now my turn to disagree. Classical Latin poetry might never rhyme, but *Medieval* Latin poetry frequently does. See Dies Irate, the Carmina Burana, or De Contemptu Mundi:
"Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt — vigilemus.
Ecce minaciter imminet arbiter ille supremus.
Imminet imminet ut mala terminet, æqua coronet,
Recta remuneret, anxia liberet, æthera donet.")
But that is "Latin" poetry written by people who don't speak Latin for an audience who also don't speak Latin. Why would you consider it Latin poetry?
Shakespeare doesn't predate the initial burst of English rhyming poetry, he came in towards the end of it - his sonnets with their ABAB CDCD scheme were a compromise away from the ABBA ABBA Petrarchan sonnets that had a vogue in the 1500s (which are far easier to write in the very rhyme-friendly Italian lexicon than the English one).
Yes, rhyming was from French poetry. As with all barbaric, agglomerating English -- rhyming is much, much more difficult in English than languages that do it natively.
Wouldn't the difficulty in rhyming show the sophistication or at least variability of the language compared to one with fewer and simpler phonemes?
Oh, it definitely shows the "trade language" activity of English. Orange, after all, doesn't rhyme with anything.
It, of course, obscures the actual point of rhyming, which was to aid memorization (when the word was never written) -- same as alliteration, which Germanic Languages use in spaces.
I know the rhyme for orange, but I charge a high price to reveal it.
Orange rhymes with door hinge.
Relevant smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rhymes
If you count Shakespeare plays as poetry (most of them are in meter) you get a very small fraction of rhyming lines.
And many of the rhymes are in songs and other lines where Shakespeare had the characters treat them as poetry *in universe*.
#48: Bret Deveraux notes that the "strategic" effects of the air campaign against Iraq, i.e. strikes on leadership, communications, electric power etc., were minimal.
https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower-101/
> The DoD’s own report, issued in 1993 (Cohen and Keaney, Gulf War Air Power Survey (1993)) noted first that only some 15% of strikes were against ‘strategic’ targets, while strikes against Iraqi ground forces consumed 56% of strikes; as Coalition air forces exhausted their list of strategic targets, they switched over to strikes against ground forces.
> Despite effectively running out the entire list of strategic targets, Cohen and Keaney nevertheless conclude that strategic effects were broadly not achieved. Despite striking the Iraqi communications network with more than 580 strikes, “the Iraqi government had been able to continue launching Scuds” and “sufficient ‘connectivity’ persisted for Baghdad to order a withdrawal from the theater [Kuwait] that included some redeployments aimed at screening the retreat.” Consequently, “these attacks clearly fell short of fulling the ambitious hope” to “put enough pressure on the regime to bring about its overthrow and completely sever communications between Baghdad and their military forces.”
So no, strategic air power was neither a necessary nor a sufficient reason why the Iraqi army crumbled. They crumbled because the Coalition forces represented the undisputed peak of modern warfare on a perfect battlefield (flat desert) whereas the Iraqi forces had neither the equipment, nor the training, nor the doctrine to resist effectively. There is no reason to assume that an invasion of Taiwan would be the first proof of the effectiveness of strategic airpower after a century of failed tests.
I would generally caution against using Deveraux as an authoritative source outside his area of expertise, i.e. Roman era military history. The post about strategic bombing draws on WWII for a lot of the material, where bombing was highly inaccurate and the belligerents had strategic goals not clearly linked to military objectives like "bomb the civilians to make the enemy regime collapse" (which definitely didn't work). Anyway, what #48 is proposing isn't strategic bombing in the sense Deveraux is talking about, where air power alone is the deciding factor. He's talking about a combined arms approach where the enemy forces are crippled by precision strikes taking out key assets - so that a ground force can then overwhelm the disorganized enemy. The ground force is key here. But it doesn't matter for Taiwan because the ground force has to be lifted across an ocean for a contested amphibious landing, which is an entirely different type of operation.
I'm not sure what the rest of the ACOUP post has to do with my objection. I presented a specific quote from the post, not the entire post, because that quote dealt with the question of whether you can use air power to disrupt an army to the point that it simply breaks down at the slightest pressure. That was the theory developed for the 1990 Gulf War, it was tested in that war, and unless you're saying Deveraux misquoted or misunderstood the DoD report, the answer seems to be "no, that theory didn't work". The #48 tweet repeated that disproven theory, elevated it to fact, and builds its argument on that faulty foundation. That is why I object to #48.
I think your objection is quite correct in response to the tweet. Either the OP or the Chinese plan is claiming to win against Taiwan with precisions strike, either alone or in conjunction with a blockade, limited assault or full invasion. All but the last option is the exact thing that has been proven not to work. However, this is not what was intended to happen or indeed what did happen in the Gulf War. The goal there was always to disrupt the enemy army to the point that is simply breaks down *under the pressure from a simultaneous ground attack*. Which confused me somewhat when I first read the tweet and he talks about the Chinese doing the same thing as the US in Iraq and then... talks about doing a different thing.
As to the effectiveness of the strategic bombing element in Desert Storm, the section Deveraux quotes mentions that they failed to complete the ideal objectives of totally cutting communications, preventing all SCUD launches, etc. But how close did they come? Were they just a hair away from total collapse of Sadam's regime, or not even close? The report helpfully concludes that the bombing certainly degraded all of the targeted areas but can't come to any firm conclusions with the available materials. So, uh, that really clears things up.
Another facet here are the ethical/political constraints on the coalition forces. Iraqi airplanes operating in the central area of the country could simply flee to Iranian airspace within a 15 minute flight, where they were not allowed to be pursued. The coalition was reluctant to target cultural sites like mosques, which the Iraqis took advantage of by placing their fragile assets nearby. There was an incident where a bunker buster was dropped on a command bunker that happened to be in use as a bomb shelter, causing hundreds of civilian casualties. The coalition then suspended all strikes on command bunkers until the last few days of the war. I seriously doubt China would be similarly constrained during a war with Taiwan.
> I seriously doubt China would be similarly constrained during a war with Taiwan.
Seems like Israel would be a better data point. The Iran strikes appear to have been successful, though only time will tell the ultimate effect.
>Another facet here are the ethical/political constraints on the coalition forces.
Ultimately, it doesn't really matter why the strategic bombing failed its objectives. Maybe these constraints you mention don't allow bombing the correct targets to the necessary degree. Maybe they failed to select the correct targets. Maybe there are no correct targets that, once destroyed, bring about the objectives.
I believe the ACOUP post is overall correct in that strategic bombing has been tested extensively since WW2 in various forms. No iteration of it brought the results it promised, and not for lack of trying. It's approaching a level of madness (even in a rational, military sense rather than just ethical) to keep trying to salvage the theory when it involves so much killing and destruction, with relatively little to show for it.
>The goal there was always to disrupt the enemy army to the point that is simply breaks down *under the pressure from a simultaneous ground attack*.
The ground attack was not planned to be simultaneous, but the last phase of the overall campaign. Don't conflate the tactical use of airpower (CAS, interdiction) which was very successful with the strategic use of targeting leadership etc.:
https://media.defense.gov/2010/Sep/27/2001329801/-1/-1/0/AFD-100927-061.pdf
Page 6: https://imgur.com/hrR2tE9
> Iraqi airplanes operating in the central area of the country could simply flee to Iranian airspace within a 15 minute flight, where they were not allowed to be pursued.
That doesn't really matter - as long as they are out of the fight, the objective has been achieved. If and when they return to Iraqi/Kuwaiti airspace, they are again legitimate targets. Also, page 13: https://imgur.com/vvvUxWl
> As to the effectiveness of the strategic bombing element in Desert Storm, the section Deveraux quotes mentions that they failed to complete the ideal objectives of totally cutting communications, preventing all SCUD launches, etc. But how close did they come? Were they just a hair away from total collapse of Sadam's regime, or not even close?
Does it matter? The outcome evidently did not come about after hitting all the intended strategic targets. "Almost" doesn't count here. The regime did not collapse, and neither did their ability to fight, at whatever low level the Iraqi army may have been able to fight at to begin with.
> The coalition was reluctant to target cultural sites like mosques, which the Iraqis took advantage of by placing their fragile assets nearby.
> I seriously doubt China would be similarly constrained during a war with Taiwan.
Well, the CCP hates imperialism more than anything and might be happy to destroy the National Palace Museum. But that would come at a huge political cost, and besides that political cost the benefit of undermining imperialism has to be balanced against the cost of undermining resistance to Western culture. It's hard to do one of those without the other.
The Chinese theory of war against Taiwan is identical to the Russian theory of war against Ukraine: we're bringing our brothers and sisters back into the fold. You don't want to destroy all of 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 best cultural monuments while you do that. How are Kiev's monuments doing?
Didn't tactical rather than strategic aircraft play a big role in destroying Iraqi armored vehicles? The A-10 "Warthog" comes to mind IIRC.
Yes, that's the point. That is very different from the imagined strategic use of airpower, i.e. to basically win the war entirely from the air rather than by providing boring old ground support.
A humble thread image suggestion: the greatest logo in Finnish team sports. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilves
That is amazing.
#9 - Reporting on how much money Meta has lost on "the metaverse" often conflates their crappy-looking VR game Horizon Worlds with their entire Reality Labs division. It's the division that's lost $70 billion, but it also makes VR headsets and does all sorts of pie-in-the-sky VR/AR research.
Horizon worlds has by all accounts been horribly mismanaged, with developers that refuse to actually put on a headset and test the game, but not quite to the level of spending 50 Star Citizens worth of money.
The brute fact of software engineering being extremely inconvenient to do while wearing a VR headset may be the single biggest obstacle the technology faces.
> It's the division that's lost $70 billion, but it also makes VR headsets and does all sorts of pie-in-the-sky VR/AR research.
It also makes smartglasses which are starting to take off thanks to the rise of AI.
# 17, the poetry data from the economist could equally support the hypothesis that rhyming poetry has survived better. They clearly have a lot more data for recent poetry, and the dataset is short on unrhyming poetry from the past. They also clearly have a lot of rhyming poetry from today, but it’s getting overwhelmed by the unrhyming stuff.
In other words, # 17 is survivorship bias.
#31. That comment surprises me: as I read AI 2027, I thought that if it was intended to be read by any one man, that man was the Vice President.
That was absolutely my reaction as I read it too. I thought it was interesting and wondered what other bespoke efforts to reach his specific point of view might be made across the coming three point whatever years.
#1 - Some points seem similar to the old discussions about AI Dungeon prose quality and the new sampling tricks to force LLMs to stop repeating the same cliches. I wonder if there are more in-depth writings about both history and state of the art of AI writing, including the new experiments and tricks.
I'm curious about the karma thing. Why is it virtuous to persuade someone not to abandon their village during a famine?
Seems to me that if food is scarce and someone leaves, there's one less mouth to feed and more food to go around for the rest of the village. What is the moral calculus that deems this not a good thing?
Perhaps because this person most likely become a highway robber.
Just a guess but it might be something to do with family obligations especially to ancestors. I believe making offerings to ancestors graves was considered important at the time and this might not be possible if you leave.
Speculation: because those people wind up going somewhere else, with marginal famine conditions, where they'll eat the limited food supply and create more famine. Meanwhile the limited food production capacity of their home village is not coming back on line due to lack of labour. Chinese agriculture (ie rice) is very labour intensive and you can't just bugger off for a year and hope that the crops grow back.
In famine conditions the best thing overall is for everyone to stay in their village and work as hard as they can to grow whatever food they can.
As I said it's all speculation. But I can easily imagine situations where waves of refugees fleeing famine in one part of the country just cause an ever-increasing famine elsewhere.
#19 - Mifepristone is the "abortion pill", not the "morning-after pill". The morning-after pill (Plan B) is a large dose of (iirc) estradiol - basically a large dose of regular birth control.
Thanks, fixed.
Morning after pill is levonorogestrel, a progesterone receptor agonist. Birth control is reliant on progesterone to limit ovulation, although most formulations contain some estrogen.
Thanks for the correction!
> I’d always heard modernism was a reaction to the trauma of the World Wars, but it looks like the rhyme decline started well before then.
It's also well to keep track of the language; I think it's not a universal phenomenon, but a regional one. At least, intuitively the more modern Russian-language poetry is much more rhymey than its English counterpart. (If you suffer from a need of rhyming poetry, go ahead and learn Russian and I'll share some of my favorites.) I've been re-reading Sorokin's novel "the norm" (1980-ies) recently, which is all postmodernist / countercultural / in-your-face-reader, and the verses there rhyme — that's the one tradition Sorokin doesn't break. (Although of course Russian vers-libre also exists.)
(Also, how would war trauma induce rhymeless verse? Did the wars include rap battles?)
I think Brodsky, who was both a Russian and an English (well, American) poet, had quite a few things to say about that - in particular, not just that Russian was linguistically more suited to thymes, but also that Russian poetry was much younger and still hadn't grown out of its formal stage.
I'm not even sure what it means for poetry to have a formal stage. A stage where significance is placed upon the form of a poem? As opposed to what, not noticing form, not having form? The words in which a poem is written are still part of it, it doesn't matter what conventions it does or doesn't follow — you still can't get away from the fact that the words are light or heavy, or curt, or clumsy, or whatever. If you happen to speak Russian (which I though you might?), this is one of my favorite Russian free verses (by Ivan Akhmetyev):
русская поэзия катилась
на ритмических салазках
пока не выехала на советский асфальт
веррлиббрр
No rhyme, no regular rhythm, and it wouldn't work without the form. When Kharms and Vvedensky were dismantling all previous literary conventions of their literature, were they writing rhyming verses because they hadn't outgrown a stage? What does it even mean? If they had a working tool that contributed to their unique styles, why were they supposed to outgrow it?
***
Actually, now I'm a little worried and confused: when a connoisseur of English poetry reads, I don't know, Walt Whitman, do they just not notice the texture of the material that their hand touches because it's just form?
I don't think it's a technical term, but I meant with it poems with a specific rhyme scheme and rhythm, yes. I assume most of the rhymed poems in 1900 in that Economist graph also had a fixed rhythm.
Honestly, I'm not a connoisseur of poetry, English or otherwise, and am not able to answer any of your questions (or even understand some of them). Except that I think it's generally accepted that in most of art, there are periods when certain things are done, and then periods when they are cast out. Scott has written a lot on architecture, for example, and you really couldn't write a novel with Victorian-style chapter summaries nowadays without it coming off as a parody. Of course most manifestations aren't as clear-cut, but I think it's pretty clear that the corresponding graph for Russian rhymed poetry would be shifted right by at least 50 years, probably more.
I see. My point is that the history of Russian poetry includes some events of throwing out all previous conventions and "things were done this way" (the Oberiu group is a salient example), but the fact of rhyming remains preserved because it still works as a tool in terms of the artistic impression it makes on the reader, even when other conventions are broken, so it can't be thought of in terms of "someone just reusing the same tools because they didn't think to try anything else". Breaking with tradition is something of a common theme in the history of Russian literature.
I don't disagree with that - I just vaguely remembered Brodsky saying something on the lines that Russian poetry hasn't been using rhymes as long as English poetry, and so they still worked just fine, which I think is what you say as well.
Sorry if I did a bad job putting that into words...
No worries, sorry if I came off as snarky or anything.
In any case, modernism in all the arts clearly starts before the world wars. In music, there’s clear breakdown of tonality and meter in Debussy at the turn of the century, and even some Wagner and Liszt in the 1880s, and you have very obviously modernist music like Pierrot Lunaire and The Rite of Spring just before the First World War. In visual art, you’ve again got the post-impressionists at the turn of the century, the impressionists a couple decades earlier (who are clearly modernist, even if they no longer trigger anti-modernist viewers) and before the First World War you’ve got works like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Kandinsky’s Improvisations. Literature may have been slower to turn to clear modernism, but people like Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Jules Verne all have elements that seem modernist well before the world wars.
#31 Ross Douthat interviews J D Vance. - Well, I guess I guess I can quit wondering if I’m being locally transgressive by linking to a piece in that particular source.
#49 - I couldn't find any evidence this happened, other than that one unsourced tweet. A reply to that tweet linked a blog that supposedly documented it, but it's behind a paywall (https://quillette.com/2025/05/16/is-the-university-of-austin-betraying-its-founding-principles/).
I think Quillette paywalls articles after a time delay, or something like that. Which means the Wayback Machine has it: https://web.archive.org/web/20250531165142/https://quillette.com/2025/05/16/is-the-university-of-austin-betraying-its-founding-principles/
It seems they didn't "fire someone" exactly, they terminated their funding for that person's organization (the Mill Institute). Still pretty clear that UATX's dedication to free speech means "free speech for people who agree with me." i.e. they are just picking the opposite pole in the culture war from where most of academia sits, not actually trying to create an open ideological space.
That is *almost exclusively* what it means when anyone says it, yeah.
This isn't true at all. My impression is most free speech people are happy to support free speech for their enemies or for both sides; it's become a meme that whenever someone asks them "I bet you wouldn't support free speech for X!" they link to an example of them supporting free speech for X. F.I.R.E. is especially good at this; I would also look at the various people who have supported free speech both for right-wing causes and Palestinians.
F.I.R.E is a significant counterexample, but it still feels like the exception rather that the rule in an era when even the ACLU had a memo about dropping support for repugnant speech. I concede that "almost exclusively" is probably overstatement, but not so much that I agree it's directionally incorrect.
I think it's highly confounded based on political leanings - speaking generally:
1. Conservatives - frequently pay lip service to FS, but rarely are consistent in support beyond their own preferred speech.
2. Liberals - infrequently support FS nowadays, but when they do they are mostly consistent
3. Libertarians (heterodox liberal) - frequently support FS, and are generally consistent
4. Libertarians (heterodox conservative) - mostly the same as actual conservatives (This includes the large number of people I know who identify as libertarian, but by revealed preference are conservatives who just want to smoke weed)
5. Leftists - infrequently support FS, and those that do often are not consistent.
I expect your social graph is several standard deviations more libertarian/heterodox-liberal than the norm, so I believe your impression is correct based on your experience.
In general, though, principled libertarians are an extreme minority in broader politics, so category two, and to a lesser extent four, by far outnumber the others. They're the ones I encounter most frequently online, and they're the basis for my statement above.
That said, I'm probably biased because I'm more sensitive to perceived hypocrisy, and ideological consistency rarely goes viral or gets coverage.
Thanks for the link. Disappointing stuff.
Thanks for rectifying that linkless "Link for July".
I can't say I'm surprised.
University of Austin joins Elon Musk on the long list of evidence for my thesis "Self-identified Free Speech advocates very rarely* support actually Free Speech (they just want different things to be censored)".
*Scott, afaict, is one of the few exceptions that does, but even he does comment moderation - and I maintain that "moderation" and "censorship" are just different words for the same action with different emotional valences . (This is, of course, a good thing! Scott's moderation has a positive effect on the transmission of knowledge)
When you say "moderation" are you referring to the actions of moderators in comments sections/social media/forums/etc? When I first read your comment, I thought it was a criticism of moderates.
Also, the episode in question also, I think, provides evidence that some self identified free speech advocates aren't actually just asking for other groups to get censored (the Mill Center who got pushed out of UATX). They just don't control any major institutions. But please don't abandon our asymmetric weapons:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
Talking about freedom of speech, or any other freedom, is meaningless without using the word "without".
Should X be allowed to say controversial, offensive or immoral things?
Should bookshop-owner Y be allowed to punish X for saying controversial, offensive or immoral things by refusing to stock the book in which they say them, or their other books?
Should individual Z be allowed to punish bookshop Y by boycotting them, and encouraging their friends to do the same?
Should A,B, and C be allowed to be rude about Z and end their friendship because of that boycott?
And so on.
You just can't answer these questions without "without". Clearly, all these people should be free to do these things *without* legal punishment, but in some cases thy should not be free to do them without lesser "punishments" like the things further down the list.
"Without" also lets you resolve all sorts of apparent contradictions. For example I think that:
:- People should be able to express controversial opinions with which I agree without anyone dissenting or thinking less of them for it, but not controversial opinions with which I disagree - this is a level at which content-specific response is wholly appropriate.
:- Even though people "should" be able to express opinions I consider good without push-back, in most cases people should be able to wrongly push back on those opinions without more than minor social sanction.
A lot of people who describe themselves as "in favour of freedom of speech" don't try to articulate their principles in terms of "without", which means that they don't and can't have consistent principles.
On a separate point, I think there's at least a connotational difference between "moderation" and "censorship": moderation is specifically "you can't say that in this particular, narrow forum", whereas censorship has connotations of a broader or more important channel or collection of channels..
Re: the bulk of your comment:
I mean, it's true that that issue does muddy the discussion in general, but that's not really relevant here.
U of A was pretty clearly not objecting to legal punishments for conservatives in the academic environment, since no one's gone to jail for being a conservative professor. The worst that has happened is them being fired, which is exactly what makes their actions here hypocrisy.
Re: censorship vs. moderation:
I mean, yeah, I basically said the difference was *only* in connotations. But for this specially, while I agree that might be true in a broad sense...
In practice, people very much do cry "censorship" for being removed from a single platform; and all the large and "important" online platforms do moderation, and even beyond that, they more or less converge on the same kinds of moderation across the board.
When it comes down to it, it's not a distinction based on concrete differences which "cleaves reality at the joint", it's based on people's *feelings* of what's "acceptable" and "normal" speech to suppress, and what isn't.
I was pleasantly surprised when FIRE passed that test, since as you mentioned, almost noone ever does.
Strange that folks can believe that father's could be biased toward sons but not that mothers might be biased toward daughters. That would also explain the difference: mothers preferring to spend time at home with daughters more than with sons.
54 - The FDA regulation in question just lets you avoid FDA regulation. You would still be violating the US patents, and a court can (and would) order the importation to cease.
Your understanding of the regulations is incorrect and would make the program largely pointless if true. If a court shoots down Florida importing, say, generic epinephrine, and that holds up, I'll stand corrected. But I seriously doubt it will, as the underlying regulations are very clear that there's no patent issue to speak of with generic imports.
Anyway, under the current FDA with its order to deprioritize regulatory action and its lack of staffing, there would almost-certainly not be a block on imports in the event of a court case. They could choose to act that way, but they have no legal obligation to.
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1934429722630373773
We aren't talking about generic imports, we're talking about imports on a molecule patented in the US.
>It would be convenient if there were seem deep synergy between the Jewish religion and psychedelia. But there isn’t. So they can either drop the issue, or else confabulate something.
I am kinda surprised. To me Judaism would be the second least psychedelic religion after Islam. First because it revolves heavily around "lawyering". Second because it focuses on text, not visual imagination.
Of the religions popular around here, I would nominate Orthodoxy as the most psychedelic - the concept of theoria.
A large mainline branch of Orthodox Judaism, Hasidism, is heavily grounded in mystical works attempting to describe the relationship between Man and G-d and the nature of reality, a lot of it using geometric symbology. Fertile psychedelic ground, and there is in fact a growing movement on the fringes to incorporate psychedelics into religious practice.
I'm guessing it's IQ mediated. Psychedelic users skew high-IQ and Jews are high-IQ.
"These magic mushrooms will help you see more dimensions"
*Gains Depth Perception*
Assumes this is what everyone meant.
VR: I thought nobody is using this anymore, and then I found out it still has a fringe following among people who like to see themselves in non-human bodies. Which means... Zuck spent $50Bn to build... Furry Heaven.
Beyond the humorous aspects, can someone tell me how are people like this rich? Muh super efficient meritocratic markets?
> VR: I thought nobody is using this anymore,
It's decent for (regular) porn, I guess.
> Beyond the humorous aspects, can someone tell me how are people like this rich? Muh super efficient meritocratic markets?
I use whatsapp, facebook and insta every day, many times a day. It's reasonably earned.
And he's not spending his pocket money, AFAIK he's CEO of Meta, so he's controlling more than his own purse. With the blessing of the stock owners.
> Beyond the humorous aspects, can someone tell me how are people like this rich? Muh super efficient meritocratic markets?
He's spending Meta's money... and I think this is a pretty reasonable choice for humanity, if not necessarily for Meta. They've pushed the frontier on VR/AR tech quite a bit, both in fidelity and cost-efficiency. I don't know how that pays off for humanity in the future, but it seems like a pretty good bet that it will, eventually.
I know multiple people that use a Quest instead of a monitor when working because they like being able to have a variable number of "monitors". Also, a lot of kids have a quest and play the games, so it's something that I think will gain user share as people that grew up with it age.
AFAIK the furries are still using VRChat, which isn't built in the Corporate Memphis style
#43 I have always thought militant anti-colonialism was odd and not in tune with the public in most places. The implication of anti-colonialism is that pre-colonial feudal kings who might still be foreign were better than European liberals who built roads, trains and had some form of rule of law.
Note that the question seems to be asking about the modern influence of the former colonizer, not about whether the colonization itself was good or bad. You can believe that the 1930s Germany that invaded your country was literally Hitler while still believing that modern Germany has a positive influence on your country.
The two countries with the highest positive view of their former colonizer, Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe, have a very large migrant community living in the territory of that former colonizer, Portugal.
A quick back of the envelope calculation tells me that the equivalent of 20% of São Tomé and Príncipe's population (40k compared to 200k) lives in Portugal, and the figure is 17% for Cabo Verde.
I suspect that for countries with a large community living in the former colonizer, and where most people would know at least someone living there, the answer might have more to do with the general image they have of the country (Portugal) than with the actual political and economic influence of the former colonizer.
Caveat: I'm including acquisitions of citizenship by Cabo Verdeans and Santomese (?) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Portugal#Immigration
Cabo Verde was uninhabited before the Portuguese showed up. No Africans at all are indigenous to it. The island was colonized, but no group of people were "colonized" in the political sense of the word. There's only African-descended people there at all for the same reason they're in Alabama. That's a pretty unique case, it appears to have been swept up by the marxist pan-African fantasies of some guys in the 60s but it was never really of a kind with the other nations in that poll.
It's not unique. Mauritus was also uninhabited before colonization. Of course Mauritus is also near the bottom of the list.
The world had a log-normal distribution of income in 1820, but had formed a pretty dramatic bimodal distribution by 1975 between colonizer and colonized nations, and then since 1975 has returned to a log-normal distribution: https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-inequality. This strongly suggests that colonialism did hold back the Global South on average. The absence of colonialism doesn’t necessarily mean those countries would have had feudal kings forever; they could have modernized better through trade with the developed countries, rather than being colonized, like Meiji Japan did.
I disagree, Finland, S Korea, Taiwan, Norway, Poland, Canada etc were colonies, the richest states in Europe like Switzerland, Sweden, Luxembourg had no colonies.
There is no correlation between colonialness and current GDP. We can easily test the hypothesis with neighbouring countries with different histories.
Sweden did have one (1), Saint Barthélemy.
Seems as likely the bimodal distribution of wealth caused colonization, not the other way around.
I don't think you can infer that colonialism held back the Glibal South based on that data. Inequality is not a measure of economic growth, and levels of growth at any particular strata cannot be inferred from Inequality data bc growth is not zero-sum.
Anyhow I can recommend two interesting books on the subject:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lineages-of-despotism-and-development-matthew-lange/1103374894?ean=9780226470702
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/colonialism-and-postcolonial-development-james-mahoney/1110865722?ean=9780511847141
"This strongly suggests" - I do not think you can infer causality from this observation. It is also consistent with some countries inventing/adopting super efficient technologies/institutions, becoming richer because of that, and then a smaller subset of these countries, namely maritime ones, colonising some of the overseas countries lagging in adoption. This model has the advantage of explaining Swiss or Hungarian prosperity which your model fails to do.
8) A karma system that punishes/rewards for unrealized thoughts is a pretty stupid karma system. It's more like a juju system.
How is karma distinct from juju
#2 I love the fact that 664 Texans apparently weren't satisfied with the choice on the ballot presented to them (Allan Shivers the Democrat nominee vs. Allan Shivers the Republican nominee) and went for a write-in candidate, Allan Shivers.
Maybe they were those for whom it was the only way to preserve the sense that they "voted for the man, not the party".
#18: I don't really understand what you got out of the Dylan Black articles. Your argument about Tegmark's Mathematical Universe was the correct response to the fine-tuning argument. What Dylan Black says seems between straight-up wrong and missing the point.
He's using a very specific formalization of probability theory from Andrey Kolmogorov from 1933. I think there has in fact been some progress in the field of probability theory since then. For example, it's totally possible to have a uniform prior over the natural numbers (or even the real line): it's called an improper prior [0] and can be rigorously defined. The Beta(0,0) distribution is another example of an improper prior which is often used.
Or take this example in his article:
"Problem Statement: You're presented with an urn. I tell you nothing about this urn. You reach in, and draw one red ball. What is the probability that it contains 50% red balls? If you feel uncomfortable, good. You should. This isn't a hard problem or an imprecise problem. It's not a problem at all. It's a grammatically correct but meaningless arrangement of mathematical symbols, it is ill-posed."
I mean sure, the problem is underspecified if you want to calculate an objective number, but one of the central points of books like E.T. Jaynes' *Probability Theory* (2003) is that it all depends on what prior information you have. A human does have prior information about what kind of things are stored in urns in mathematics departments. And so, gun-to-their-head, they could give some probability for the above question. A superintelligence could use some approximation of Solomonoff induction to give an even better probability in answer to this question.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_probability#Improper_priors
K complexity isnt even the only version of computational complexity, And assuming probability is computational complexity begs a lot of questions.
I didn’t read the Tegmark or Black, but the post you’re replying to doesn’t mention Kolmogorov complexity in any way. Kolmogorov’s foundational work on probability comes years before Turing’s idea of computation was described, let alone Kolmogorov and others using that to develop theories of complexity.
Improper priors do exist as mathematical objects. But they have lots of problems that make them behave in ways that are bad for epistemology. They violate conglomerability (ie, there are events that are more likely conditional on every element of a partition than they are unconditionally - eg, the probability of a number being square conditional on being a power of n is 1/2 for every n, even though the unconditional probability of a number being square is 0), and they allow for simultaneous confirmation of every single alternative (moving from a uniform distribution over the naturals to a geometric distribution makes every single number more likely).
Jaynes gives no argument that there is some sort of objective probability when background evidence is specified - he just identifies some conditions under which he can calculate what this probability would have to be like to obey certain symmetries, and then assumes that background evidence must always provide some set of symmetries of this sort.
> moving from a uniform distribution over the naturals to a geometric distribution makes every single number more likely
This can't be true; there is no way to move from a uniform distribution over the naturals to a geometric distribution, because there is no uniform distribution over the naturals.
Say that a set S of natural numbers is "eventually-periodic" iff there exists an N and a k, such that for all n>N, n is in S iff n+k is in S. It is straightforward to see that the set of eventually period sets is an algebra (though obviously not a sigma-algebra). Let j be the number of members of {N+1, N+2, ..., N+k} that are in S, and say that the "density" of the set is j/k.
Consider the function P from the eventually-periodic sets to the reals such that P(S) is the density of S. It is straightforward to check that this function satisfies all the axioms of probability other than countable additivity.
We can even define a function P(A|B) by saying that it is the fraction of elements of B that are also in A, if B is finite, and if B is infinite, looking at the eventually-periodic part of the intersection A\cap B and seeing what fraction of the corresponding stretch of B it is. This function satisfies most of the features of conditional probability (though as I mention above, not countable additivity or conglomerability).
Maybe you don't want to count this function as a "distribution". That's fine. I call it a "distribution", but say that it doesn't actually represent "probability" in any meaningful sense, but you could use the terms differently if you prefer.
The point I was making in the passage you reacted to was as follows.
Consider the function P' such that P'(S) is the sum of 2^-i, for all i in S.
It's straightforward to see that for any partition of the natural numbers into a collection of finite sets, every member of that set gets a higher value under P' than under P, and thus I claim that P and P' can't both be considered "probability functions" (because moving from P to P' to the other confirms every element of the partition).
> It's straightforward to see that for any partition of the natural numbers into a collection of finite sets, every member of that set gets a higher value under P' than under P
Yes, since P(S) must be zero for all finite S, but the elements of a partition are nonempty, P'(S) will exceed P(S) for all S that are members of a partition of the natural numbers into finite subsets.
What's interesting about P? Why are we working with these eventually-periodic sets? Why do we then segue to finite sets that are eventually-periodic only in a trivial way? Why is P' named "P'" when it bears no relation to P? Why is P given a definition other than "P(S) = 0", given that you only ever apply it where it is guaranteed to be 0?
What is it that you're trying to show?
> It is straightforward to check that this function satisfies all the axioms of probability other than countable additivity.
Well, there are two other axioms:
1. The probability function P must be nonnegative everywhere. Check.
2. The probability assigned to the total space must be equal to 1. The total space would appear to be the set of all eventually-periodic subsets of ℕ. It is trivial to show that summing P(S) over all such sets will exceed 1: P(ℕ) is 1, P(ℕ \ {1}) is 1, P(ℕ \ {2}) is 1, P(ℕ \ {1, 2}) is 1...
How is this second axiom being satisfied? Are you defining it into being true? Without countable additivity, there does not appear to be any way to show what "the probability assigned to the space" might or might not be.
I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying.
The space here is ℕ, and the eventually-periodic sets are an algebra of subsets of ℕ - the ones to which P assigns a value (which the defenders of finite additivity call "probability", but I don't). This is supposed to represent the "probability" that a "randomly chosen natural number" is a member of the set.
Not every set has a "probability", just the sets that are eventually-periodic - but this is common with infinite probability spaces (we usually only assign probability to Lebesgue-measurable sets of real numbers when thinking of processes that generate real numbers, even when using probability measures that aren't the Lebesgue measure, like a normal distribution - though there are other probability measures on the real numbers defined over different algebras of subsets).
The axioms of probability, as Kolmogorov phrases them, are:
Non-negativity: that P must be non-negative on every input (which is satisfied)
Finite additivity: that the value of P on two disjoint sets must sum to the value of P on the union of those sets (for instance, the set of even numbers gets value 1/2, and the set of odd numbers gets value 1/2, and the set of all natural numbers gets value 1; a finite set of numbers that aren't divisible by 3 gets value 0, the set of multiples of 3 gets value 1/3, and the union of these two sets also gets value 1/3)
Normalization: that P applied to the whole space is 1 (which is obvious, because ℕ is the whole space, and as you note, P(ℕ)=1)
Continuity: that for a countable sequence of nested sets, P applied to the union is the limit of P applied to each set (this fails for P defined as above, because P({1})=0, P({1,2})=0, P({1,2,3})=0, ..., but P(ℕ)=1).
Some other axiomatizations just list countable additivity as a single axiom, but I think it's helpful that in Kolmogorov's system this is decomposed into finite additivity and continuity.
P satisfies all of these axioms other than continuity. It's important that P is *not* 0 on every set, because then it wouldn't satisfy Normalization - there needs to be "probability" 1 that some natural number is picked. For the people that want to think of this as "uniform probability" on the natural numbers, it's nice that this function says there is probability 1/2 that some even number is picked, and 1/4 that some multiple of 4 is picked, and so on, even though every individual number has "probability" 0.
Lebesgue measure on the Lebesgue algebra of real numbers between 0 and 1 satisfies all four of these axioms - because the space it is defined on is uncountable, it's possible for every element of the space to have probability 0 even though the whole space has probability 1.
P' also satisfies all four of these axioms, and it can be extended to the full algebra of all subsets of ℕ, if you prefer to do that rather than sticking with the algebra of eventually-periodic sets.
Why did I use the name P'? I wanted to use the letter P to suggest "probability" for both of them, but I needed to give the two functions different names, so I put a prime on one of them. In some branches of math there are canonical relations between functions that people use the prime to indicate (like differentiation in calculus), but in other branches of math, the prime is just used to distinguish another object of the same type as the first, with no suggestion of any connection between them.
Why did I stick with the algebra of eventually-periodic sets for P? For the same reason we stick with the Lebesgue algebra for Lebesgue measure - there are difficulties extending the function to sets outside this algebra while keeping the translation invariance and additivity properties.
Is the right photo of Allan Shivers more faded or is that an optical illusion?
Illusion, I checked the page history and they're the same image.
#56: that paper is ancient. But so's this other one I found on Gwern's server somewhere, one of my favorites next to that German one about fucking vacuum cleaners: https://gwern.net/doc/technology/1958-bain.pdf
This initially seems like an industrial design study, but soon gets into unintended psychology: some children, when trapped in a fridge, do nothing. Plus the summary in Interlingua is a cute historical touch.
"A Gay Red Santa Claus Chimney"
...
This phrase went into a scientific paper.
16. That assumes the Democrats regain power soon. Historically, parties could be out of power for decades. This sounds a lot like like Gambler's Ruin.
That is rather an overstatement, but regardless, presumably that would be factored into the interest rate.
Not an overstatement. Before Gingrich's revolution in 1994, the Republicans hadn't had the House for the previous 40 years.
And yes, it would. I'm not saying they wouldn't be able to get loans: it's the repayment that risks ruin.
Yes, I am aware of that example. That’s what makes your claim "rather an overstatement", not a falsehood.
I wonder if banks would be willing to allow them to wait until the windfall comes in before repaying.
Probably, but I expect they'll eventually stop extending them further loans, and keep tacking on interest to what they already borrowed.
Wouldn't the D-notes just be the collateral for the loans? As time goes by without the D-notes getting paid off, the banks would automatically come to own the D-notes.
They can just trade state-contingent claims. The neat thing is that since the state they are contingent on is a political decision the bearers of the claims can influence, the more claims are emitted, the more likely the state is to be fulfilled.
Even if some non-Trump Republic will succeed him, it's hard to imagine he'd resist the pressure forever
While I don't know enough about the technical details to point out specific potential failure modes, this gives me a strange sense of "let's counter Trump's eponymous cryptocurrency by establishing our own bespoke, ethically-dubious financial instrument for influence-laundering," which does not exactly inspire optimism.
Call me old school, but I think it matters whether
a) The money goes to someone's private coffers or to research to cure cancer
b) It is given in exchange of non specified, unknown favors or it is backed by the promise to do something that is obviously in the remit of Congress or the Executive and is already aligned with one's political programs.
Alas, it won't happen, so...
If one guy's burning half the house down to line his pockets and own the libs, that's very bad, yes. If somebody else sets fire to the other half in order to rescue some puppies... the differences do matter, but "cool motive, still arson."
Getting even more money even more openly involved in politics - and research! - to the point of "betting the farm" so to speak on explicit policy commitments as part of a factional spoils system, seems to me like it would be a terrible idea in terms of societal collateral damage, even if it were likely to succeed at its nominal primary goals.
I write, and almost exclusively read, poetry that rhymes. I also spend a decent chunk of time looking for modern poets who do the same, people like Chelsea Rathburn, A. E. Stallings, and Faith Thompson. I know there's a famous tweet (once linked to on this newsletter) that says something like, "People want poetry that rhymes. But we won't give it to them." So why aren't the three people I just named more famous? They're brilliant. Maybe it's the lack of interest in poetry in general. It's certainly not a new state of affairs.
People also want poetry to be set to music. It's the norm now and it always has been. There's not a shortage of rhyming poetry; it's as common as dirt.
What is true is that there's a small group of annoying people who keep telling everyone else that they should stop liking rhyming poetry; everyone ignores them.
Another Stallings fan!
May I recommend Amit Majmudar?
Absolutely--I'm always on the lookout for modern meter and rhyme stuff, so I will check him out!
“Patient Histories” was my first taste and it really got to me. There’s a vid of James Marsters reading it if you like vid/aud. He’s done a fair amount of work in tight form (and experimental supertight form … what if sonnet but every line ended on literally the same syllable, like a ghazal?) as well as some great blank verse.
Thank you again for the recommendation. I'll start with "Patient Histories"!
36. This are valid points but his waving away the concerns about diversion doesn't quite convince me
"Well, the Israeli government says it's because of large-scale aid diversion by Hamas. But they have never once provided evidence of that, publicly or privately"
(notice "large-scale" btw)
There is some evidence but I don't want to get into that discussion. From a purely Bayesian perspective, what are the odds that Hamas didn't exercise some kind of control over the old process? Does he seriously think that they didn't get food for their fighters?
I couldn’t believe when I got to that part. He doesn’t think the government of a polity which is currently being starved-out in a war for survival would commandeer resource shipments? If Hamas *wasn’t” using food aid to feed its troops, shouldn’t every Hamas soldier have starved by now? It’s absurd.
If hypothetically Hamas wasn't stealing food, couldn't Hamas members just show up at the aid distribution site dressed as regular people and get food like any other person?
1. One has to show that there is still a significant number of Hamas "soldiers" around after 2 years of war
2. Even then, they are not really soldiers, they are irregulars. They can very well just tell their people to get food on their own, much like any other guerriglia force did.
3. At this point (actually, it's been more than one year), Hamas cannot keep criminals in prison, cannot prevent them from raiding armories, and formely incarcerated gangsters such as Yasser Abu Shabab are openly claiming territory for their gangs and looting aid on their own. It is not hard to believe that Hamas might be unable to seize aid simply because other local actors have disloged them
Well, they are still able to fight the IDF, kill Abu Shabab militants and GHF staff, not to mention keeping the hostages, so their control over Gazans might have degraded a bit but it's still very substantial.
I'll add that GHF workers have been killed or tortured by Hamas (https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/06/29/hamas-places-bounty-on-aid-workers-ghf/), which (even aside from any Israeli evidence) implies pretty strongly that Hamas has reasons to not want aid distributed through them. I can't think of an explanation for this that isn't that it's because they control the alternate means of aid distribution.
It's also worth noting here that UN (and affiliated aid orgs) have been suspiciously quiet about this (see e.g. https://www.jns.org/ghf-lack-of-un-condemnation-of-hamas-killing-of-aid-workers-shows-bodys-underbelly/ ). There's a range of how we can interpret this - from somewhat benign ("they don't want to piss off Hamas in order to keep their neutrality) to amorally greedy (they don't want anyone else cashing in on their aid bucks project) to outright hostile (they hate Israel and don't want anything that can help Israel reduce Hamas's power).
But whichever interpretation you go with, the underlying fact that UN aid orgs are incredibly politically hostile to GHF stands, and UN aid insider criticism of them should be seen in that light.
I could think of any number of explanations - they see GHF as enemy combatants (as they are run and mostly manned by the US government which is also supplying Israel with weapons) while the UN not, or they (like many humanitarian orgs) see the GHF as an attempt at ethnic cleansing, or they fear the GHF will shift the populace away from Hamas strongholds and deprive them of human shields...
There's also no reason to assume the Israeli government is nefariously trying to starve anyone instead of just regular incompetence, which is at least partly caused by the regular UN aid experts boycotting this org (e.g. the experienced guy who was originally supposed to be in charge bowed out after pressure from the UN not to help).
"There's also no reason to assume the Israeli government is nefariously trying to starve anyone..."
Excuse me, what? The political entity that is nearly two years into a blockade of a region with 2 million people *isn't* trying to starve anyone? Well then I guess they're doing a pretty impressive job of starving people by accident.
Or do you mean that they're not *nefariously* trying to starve anyone? Like that all the starving that has occurred thusfar has been a completely virtuous and exemplary use of systematic food-denial against a civilian population.
This evidence doesn't go in the direction you think. If they at all wanted to starve anyone - or even didn't work incredibly hard to actively support aiding them - then after a two-year war there would have been acute famine. That this hasn't happened is pretty conclusive proof that the Israeli government really, *really* doesn't want it to.
The Israeli leadership doesn't want mass starvation (in the sense of mass death), but they do want mass punishment in Gaza. From a practical standpoint, it reduces popular support for Hamas and makes it harder for Hamas (and everything else in Gaza) to function. From a less practical practical standpoint, Israelis are angry and don't like Palestinians. I've had too many friends and relatives tell me all Gazans are terrorists. This viewpoint has really surged since October 7th.
"This evidence doesn't go in the direction you think."
Oh, it doesn't. If you were to estimate the average Palestinian calorie intake for the month of May 2025, and then do the same estimate for May 2022, which number would you expect to be higher? By how much?
" If they at all wanted to starve anyone - or even didn't work incredibly hard to actively support aiding them..."
The. Government. Of. Israel. Has. Been. Actively. Blockading. Gaza. That has caused food shortages. That has caused human beings in Gaza *to starve.* Some of them fatally, many, many others to the point of serious harm but not (yet) death. That was certainly a known and foreseen consequence of the policies the government implemented--and even if it somehow *hadn't* been foreseen, there has been nearly two years in which to realize and account for it. Now it's possible that the Israeli government has no *intrinsic* preference for starving the people of Gaza and instead merely finds it to be a convenient and minimally objectionable way to achieve their goals[1]. But it's useless to claim that they are not doing it, or aren't doing it knowingly: both claims are clearly, plainly, incontestably false.
When you knowingly and deliberately harm another human being, you don't somehow absolve yourself of that responsibility by pointing out that you could have harmed them more and didn't. When people defend the Israeli government by pointing out that it has only committed *some* genocide instead of *complete* genocide, I honestly have to wonder if they believe it themselves. After all, if a mere 60,000 Palestinians killed (and hundreds of thousands of others displaced, injured and malnourished) is nothing to fuss about, then one wonders why a paltry 1300 Israeli deaths was even worth the IDF getting out of bed for.
[1] Which, let's note, is a really, really low bar. It's pretty rare for one human to want another human dead *as a fundamental end goal*. Generally people kill people to achieve something else they want. Genocide, in particular, is almost always a product of one group not wanting to share the same territory with another group--not the result of some fundamental preference for mass death.
Why don't you apply this to Ukraine? Or is your argument that somehow Egypt is not starving, even though Ukrainian soldiers are bleeding out of their eyes, because of the sheer number of rats/mice eating all the grain? (The Russians brought cats. So, so many cats).
If they were starving Palestine, then there would be starving Palestinians. Their population continues to climb. This must be the most incompetent genocide in human history, besides maybe what Hamas and like-minded Muslims have been trying to do jews for decades.
> Their population continues to climb
Who is doing censuses in Gaza right now?!
People seeing this talking point may as well assume it's being written by bots at this point: it was a pretty unserious argument even before 2023, and the fact that now being plainly and obviously incorrect hasn't dampened its popularity speaks volumes.
What's the risk in Hamas diverting some but not most of the aid? They're trying to shoot them, not starve them.
The risk is that it makes Hamas stronger and more able to continue fighting. Especially if they not just divert some aid for themselves but also use their control over the aid to control the society. Pretty much every guerrilla group has to control the population within which it acts, at least to prevent them from informing their enemies. You can't run an effective guerrilla campaign if people are not scared of you, even if they generally support you. Otherwise at least some would be tempted to collaborate with the occupier. Every guerrilla movement worth its name set up some kind of informal taxation system and dealt harshly with collaborators.
I'm not saying that this makes GHM approach the right one, I'm just annoyed that people don't acknowledge obvious trade-offs.
Diverting some of the aid and being able to *control* aid (ie. diverting all of the aid) are two very meaningfully different claims though.
If Hamas can distribute some food but those who don't get food from them can easily get food directly from aid workers, that doesn't really give them any power over the populace.
Yes, my point is that even diverting some food makes Hamas stronger and more able to continue fighting.
As to the measure of control, we can only speculate. The IDF has recently published some evidence but it's hardly a smoking gun https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-says-documents-show-hamas-has-been-confiscating-aid-as-a-matter-of-policy/
Still, it's definitely not true that under the old arrangement the aid was delivered by aid groups without any involvement of Hamas. They literally had their fighters guarding the aid trucks (that's per Palestinian sources, here is a photo of them https://www.timesofisrael.com/gaza-clans-deny-hamas-is-stealing-aid-after-israel-partially-halts-deliveries/).
The IDF press release says Hamas planned to confiscate 15% of the aid packages. Some extremely back-of-the-napkin calculation: the GHF says it distributed 55K aid boxes in about 4 months. Per this article [1] and ChatGPT, a box is worth about $30 in the US, and picking a random item (flour), it's about 200x more expensive in Gaza [2] (though I find that hard to believe, that would mean a kg of flour costs about half the monthly wage of the average Gazan, so where would the money come from?), so 15% of the aid packages would be worth about $50M, or $150M if extrapolated to a full year. That's substantial but not decisive, given Hamas' alleged annual budget of $2B. [3]
[1] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/what-inside-box-aid-distributed-gaza-humanitarian-foundation
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93qevdpzvqo
[3] https://nationalpost.com/news/world/israel-middle-east/hamas-money
I'm not sure about this calculation. The $2B figure is from early 2023, that is, before the war, when the situation was quite different.
More importantly, the physical control of food distribution would be more important than having money. Hamas might collect money from various charities and allies as described in the National Post article. However you can't just wire this money to Gaza or Israel and buy supplies, at any price.
#13. As of an hour ago, Reuters is reporting also that the AI state regulation provision is stripped:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-senate-strikes-ai-regulation-ban-trump-megabill-2025-07-01/
And Bloomberg:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-01/senate-removes-tax-bill-provision-limiting-state-ai-regulation?embedded-checkout=true
Kind of surprised this isn't getting more coverage!
It just passed the Senate 51–50, with Vance breaking the tie. I expect it'll start getting coverage now that it has to pass the House again, since many prominent people highlighted this is reason they'd vote it down.
#3 - I think this is a good test between people who truly understand physics, biology, chemistry, etc, and people who simply memorize facts.
If a chess master is burning as much chemical heat energy as a professional athlete, then where does all the energy go? Dry skin in a room temperature environment is unable to radiate heat at a 6000 calorie/day burn rate. Chess players would have to sweat like basketball players if the claim were true.
I don't think this is necessarily true, because there's a lot of variability in how concentrated heat-generating activity can be to achieve a rate of 6000 calories/day. Basal metabolic rate is roughly 100 calories per hour. Working out in a cool room, I sweat heavily at caloric expenditures of 800 calories per hour, but not at 400 per hour. A chess tournament can last much longer than a basketball game, and with the activity distributed enough, the participants would not necessarily become particularly sweaty. Also, my understanding is that some chess players do become quite sweaty at tournaments, if not as sweaty as basketball players. Personally, I tend to sweat when I concentrate intensely, so I'd be surprised if that weren't the case for at least some chess players.
The issue I think is harder to square is that chess players don't seem to *breathe* as heavily as is associated with even modest cardio exercise. They might sweat heavily due to stress, but if they're engaging in increased respiration, they'd have to take in more oxygen.
"The issue I think is harder to square is that chess players don't seem to *breathe* as heavily as is associated with even modest cardio exercise. They might sweat heavily due to stress, but if they're engaging in increased respiration, they'd have to take in more oxygen."
Did you actually check out the link? The whole thing started with someone observing rapid breathing from chess players in tournaments (for short periods of time), and someone else extrapolating (poorly) on how many calories they could burn with that much extra oxygen.
To be slightly more precise they report the chest movement rate (from impedance pneumography) and interpret it as breathing rate- since your chest can move for reasons other than breathing and they do not specify a method for filtering the data it is not clear that the maximum signal they reported should even be considered a breathing rate in the first place
I didn't; I'd heard the claims of chess players burning 6000 calories per day, and then followup claims of that not being true, without investigating deeply into either, before the links page was posted.
At the time when I heard the first claim, I thought it might be within the realm of plausibility, if the tournaments last a very long time, but that if so, the players would probably show signs of physical exertion commensurate with that. But in all the videos I've seen since of people participating in chess tournaments, that hasn't appeared to be the case.
Exactly. Weirdly on-point anecdote but my ex had taken Sapolsky's class at Stanford and casually repeated this claim to me many years ago. I have a physics degree and my immediate reaction was "no f-ing way, show me the evidence" and made exactly that waste-heat argument.
Ha! Thank you for this comment. I didn't think to explicitly search through Sapolsky's lectures, but sure enough, it's in lecture 1 of the recorded version of his Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology (albeit just "thousands", not 6000). Note that this video has over 18 million views.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&t=2262s
> You have two humans, two individuals, who are going through a ritual. They are sitting at a table. They're absolutely silent. They're making no eye contact, and they do nothing more physically taxing than every now and then, one of them picks up their hand and moves a little piece of wood on the table. And if these happen to be the right two individuals in the middle of a chess grandmaster tournament, these people are maintaining blood pressure for six hours running that you only see in a marathon runner. **These people are going through thousands of calories a day doing nothing more than thinking. And this is outrageous.** Because you look at one of these chess grandmasters who's just taken down an opponent, took down their queen or whatever, and they will have the exact same physiology as some male baboon on the Savannah who's just ripped the stomach open of his worst rival. And we're doing it there just with thought.
I love physics majors. "If you want a mask that works, strap a plastic bag to your head." (This was in advocation of "heavily forced air-filtration, ala IQAir or other low-clean-room grade filters").
#50 - the decline seems to have begun in 2022: https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2022-crime-in-the-nation-statistics
My current city experienced a 61% increase in homicide in 2016 over 2015. I looked up to see what the explanations then given were.
They said they didn’t know.
Covid wasn’t ready to hand as an answer.
As I recall, 2015 was the low point for crime, and for a couple years it seemed that there might be a slight increasing trend, though only the immediate post-pandemic years had a clear spike. I think we haven’t got back down to 2015 levels yet.
What city is that?
San Antonio
San Antonio's murder rate is awfully noisy https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/us/tx/san-antonio/murder-homicide-rate-statistics No surprise given the relatively low total numbers.
It’s very much a law and order town still, insofar as that means anything in the 21st century.
What does that have to do with the question of what causes homicide rates to fluctuate?
>law and order town
might have been addressing
>the relatively low total numbers.
rather than the (resultant) noise in the rates
#39 I wrote about the relation between FLFP and (higher) GDP in Latin America a couple of years ago, if anyone is interested.
"For Latin American countries it appears to be the case that the higher average income is, the less women feel compelled to work."
https://www.mangosorbananas.com/p/a-comparison-of-gender-equality-between
#13 Note that the huge income tax "cuts" in the BBB is mainly just maintaining the current tax rates! No one actually gets lower taxes than they currently pay.
This counts as a tax cut because the original bill only lowered taxes for the next 10 years, when rates would go back up.
This is done to make the official forecasts look good, but the intention was to keep the new rates in the future, which is now.
I'm not saying this is good (or bad) policy, but it's important to understand that taxes largely stay the same, even though it is in a technical sense a tax cut.
Aren't the "no tax on tips" and "no tax on overtime" new?
They are. The higher SALT cap is also a real tax cut.
These are comparatively small changes though.
Yes, though those don't favor the rich (the SALT changes do though).
What's the text of the tip exemption? As soon as it's formally enacted, it might well favor the rich. The first effect of making one kind of income exempt from income taxes is that as much income as possible is recharacterized as belonging to the exempt category.
Thanks for posting this. I came to learn only this week that the 'tax cuts' which people have spilled a lot of ink over are 'the same tax policy we've had for the majority of the last decade'. Maybe I'm dumb but this feels like an underdiscussed point.
It's still important though because, when the original tax cuts were passed, the entire deficit/impact forecast and subsequent conversation at _that_ point was under the assumption that would expire the way that they were meant to. This is the bait and switch that is continually getting played (by both sides). Get what you want now, minimize the projected impact by giving it an expiration date in order to reduce public backlash and criticism, and then, when it comes time to actually let it expire, convince everyone that "oh this is just the status quo, it's not that big a deal to let it continue and cancel the expiration". So now, we are at the point when the lie of the expiration is finally being made explicit. So, relative to what was promised when they got passed, this _is_ additional tax cuts.
If you want to argue from the perspective that this is nothing new and just status quo, then I hope that the next time someone proposes something with such an expiration, you demand a forecast assuming it won't expire, and take your view based on that forecast.
I am, if anything, inclined to penalize this even more than usual specifically to try and discourage this bait and switch tactic.
I don't disagree that the TCJA's original proponents made their arguments in bad faith, what has been weird for me is the framing. I feel like both sides are selling this as a major tax cut, with the republicans hoping that people will like that and the democrats hoping that people won't like that because it includes/favors rich people. But, unless you are on medicare or frequent a medical provider with a high percentage of medicare beneficiaries, nothing about your life is likely to change if this bill passes. Like, I don't understand how the bill's authors expect it to win them in any votes in the midterm, given that it makes no-one's life better and some people's worse than the status quo. Democrats can and are pointing to people losing out from benefits being cut, but they will not be able to point to a rich CEO making more money from the bill, because the CEOs will be paying the same as they were in 2019.
If the republicans were not so committed to donor enrichment they could have just let the 199A deduction expire, not touched benefits, and said "SEE DEMOCRATS WANT TO RAISE YOUR TAXES" and the democrats would have had to get an argument with the ref, both in the style you've gestured at. But no one has done either of those things, so the rhetoric hasn't matched the situation and I don't see how it will pay off for them a year from now.
> But, unless you are on medicare or frequent a medical provider with a high percentage of medicare beneficiaries, nothing about your life is likely to change if this bill passes.
A) It's estimated that 11 million people will lose health coverage (or up to 17 million if you include the effects of ending ACA provisions). That's a LOT of people.
B) At that scale, there's lots of knock-on effects. Rural hospitals will close because they've lost a critical mass of paying patients. That means that even non-medicaid recipients will find it harder to get care. Likewise, individual health insurance plans are likely to get a lot more expensive.
Additionally, the bill is likely to make ordinary people's lives worse in other ways too, such as rising interest rates from the ballooning debt and increasing electricity prices, although those will probably be subtle enough that it won't get people on the streets the way that killing Medicaid does.
If 11 million people lose health care I imagine that means a noticeable increase in homelessness, which is certainly annoying for everyone. Especially if it’s preventable
> But, unless you are on medicare or frequent a medical provider with a high percentage of medicare beneficiaries, nothing about your life is likely to change if this bill passes.
You mean Medicaid. No politician would dare touch Medicare.
> I feel like both sides are selling this as a major tax cut, with the republicans hoping that people will like that and the democrats hoping that people won't like that because it includes/favors rich people.
That would be a little weird of the Republicans. On the fundamentals, people are far, far more angry about having their taxes raised - the actual effect of letting the TCJA provisions expire - than they are happy about having their taxes lowered. Why would you characterize an issue that's amazing for you as if it were only moderately good for you?
> It's still important though because, when the original tax cuts were passed, the entire deficit/impact forecast and subsequent conversation at _that_ point was under the assumption that would expire the way that they were meant to.
No, this isn't a new phenomenon. We knew about official budget forecasting at the time.
> So now, we are at the point when the lie of the expiration is finally being made explicit.
We reached that point decades ago.
Though I am curious about one point. Official budget forecasts don't consider anything more than 10 years out. From the forecast's perspective, there is no difference between a program that is enacted with an expiration date 10 years in the future and one that is enacted for all of time. The TCJA has some provisions that expire in 2025, which is inside the budget window.
But it also has some provisions that expire in 2028, which is the end of the budget window. Why?
Well, under current law, the top rate this year will be 39.6 percent, whereas under the bill it will be 37 percent. It seems perfectly reasonable to describe that as a tax cut.
10: The explanation for this that I've always heard is that sometime during Trump's first term, social media algorithms changed to start pushing the manosphere much harder to teenage boys, realizing it was a good way to get them really hooked into the social media systems. I haven't done any research into whether or not this is true, that's just what I've heard.
33: "I guess this is good (the verdict wasn’t dependent on a few ignorant or dishonest people), but maybe also bad (shouldn’t being familiar with the best evidence for one side or the other make you believe that side more?)" Isn't this what you should expect from a healthy scientific field? The experts in a subject matter who don't know the details of a specific topic still know whose opinion they should trust, and thus end up converging on the truth? This sort of shortcut is exactly how science is supposed to work, right?
#20 Wonderful timing. The Roman Catholic lectionary cycles through much of the Old Testament every few years, and today's Old Testament reading features the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah!
#1 - The way that the author identifies the relatively small set of emotive words the AIs consistently alight on (ghost, whisper, echo, buzz, hum, pulse, etc.) reminded me of a common observation about another poorly-trained artificially intelligent storytelling entity, the modern Walt Disney Corporation. It's an in-joke in theme park fandom that Disney only knows about a dozen words (dream, fantasy, wish, enchantment, adventure, magic, etc.) and combines them in various ways to serve every possible purpose.
Other corporate entities surely have their own favored vocabularies (synergy, sustainability, difference, etc.) just as AIs bent toward nonfiction do, but something about narrowing the domain to the production of fiction makes them even easier to surface.
Hey, if Taco Bell can do it with beef, cheese, and tortillas, Disney should get to do it too.
I for one embrace the budget entertainment that is adventure tortillas.
What about beef wish?
It makes me think of the "start to Clench" races for Stephen Donaldson books, where everyone opens a different book to a random page and sees how long it takes until the word "clench" is used.
(In trying to find that article again, I've discovered Google lists no blogs or articles called 'Rickety Fiction', which seems like a fun enough name that SOMEONE would have used it.)
I heard of it from an essay called "The Well Tempered Plot Device" https://news.ansible.uk/plotdev.html
That's the one I was looking for; I completely forgot the name or where I saw it linked.
A shiver ran down my spine as I read your comment!
Re #3: Man, that's really disappointing about Sapolsky. I really respect him and though he was a responsible scientist, but this is pretty irresponsible. Now I will have to take every claim from him under suspicion. I wonder how many of the stories in A Primate's Memoir were embellished or even made up.
I just want to add that one thing I really like about Scott is that he is not a bullshiter. I really dislike bullshiters. I think Scott is about as honest as people come, and I really respect that.
Thanks. I think relatively few people are bullshitters, and it's more of a question of how careful your back-of-the-envelope calculations are. It looks like Sapolsky's issue was that someone said chessmasters breathed three times as fast (at one point), and he seems to have assumed breathing was a perfect correlate for metabolic rate so you could multiply daily metabolic expenditure by 3x. I can imagine making this mistake if I filed this fact away in my head as "something something 3x something metabolism chess" and then remembered it while writing an essay about something else and rolled a critical failure while trying to recall it.
I have probably done things approximately this stupid; when I don't, I'm protected less by careful source tracking, and more by a good enough mental model of how metabolism works that if I felt tempted to say something like this, I would think "no, that's crazy, I know that an active brain doesn't consume that many more calories than an inactive brain" and then check my source.
I don't think Sapolsky deserves too much disapproval for having gotten the calculation wrong. I think he deserves a lot of disapproval for, once it became clear that it was wrong, going around falsely telling people that it was a journalistic misrepresentation of what he said, instead of admitting that he made a mistake. I think that you would not have done that.
Also condemn him for blaming the original source.
I think bullshitting is a spectrum, and I think almost everyone does it to a certain extent. I also think that there is a continuum between genuine mistakes and intentional bullshitting. The question then is, how likely are you to make a mistake about a fact or an inference from given facts, based on your commitment to truth and your love of bullshitting? In this case, and of course this is speculation, but as an intellectual, would it not be seductively attractive that thinking burns as many calories as athletic competition? Someone committed to truth would be wise to stop and take a step back, when such a seductive fact presents itself. But if you are prone to exaggeration, you will dismiss such thoughts.
Perhaps I am being too harsh, and I am sorry about that. But even in the most generous interpretation, this reveals a carelessness that I find off putting in a scientist. I still like Sapolsky and will continue to enjoy his books. I will just approach his writing with more skepticism, which I suppose is not a bad thing.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VzykUGonAyg
17) "I’d always heard modernism was a reaction to the trauma of the World Wars," No, it was a reaction to the glutinous over-reach of late 19C art. The more every new building is ornately Gothic, the more you're likely to dream of clean Bauhaus lines merely as a refresher. The problem is that then the reaction went even more overboard than what it was reacting to.
Useful to remember that Virginia Woolf wrote, "On or about December 1910, human nature changed."
56) I also hated dogs as a child, still do. And not for any psychological displacement reasons. Dogs attack strangers, they bark, they bite, they knock you over. Nothing used on the child in this story would have worked on me at all. Isn't there a reason for signs reading "Beware of dog"? You don't see any signs reading "Beware of cat" or "Beware of goldfish."
Well, on the subject of fish... https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Carp
You don't have a permanent hole in your skull (visible on an MRI) from a cat whose claw got into your (still soft) bones. (That person, on the other hand, likes cats).
36 & 44: the gaza aid distribution failure seems like a great example of POSIWID
You'll have to spell this out so I can see how intensely I disagree with you. If you mean "even though the people who distribute the aid really wanted it to go well, I am going to say the 'purpose' of the aid was to have it go badly, to express my disapproval of the process and my belief that good intentions aren't enough", I continue to think that's just confusing matters. See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of and https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-posiwid
I'm not Big Swan, but I assume they meant to imply that the (radical?) left's support of Palestine is mostly about "decolonization", i.e, that they're fully on board with terrorism against Israel, support 10/7, etc. And that this has nothing to do with the recent occupation of Gaza by Israel.
ETA: to be clear, I'm merely relaying claims I've heard from rightists about the supposed true motives of leftists.
I would interpret it as "the system was not intended to distribute aid effectively, it was intended to create a volatile situation where the IDF can freely attack civilians while claiming that it is simply protecting the aid mission."
And like, I'm not saying I fully endorse that view, but Gaza has had a very long list of "unfortunate accidents" and at some point you're allowed to start asking if they are actually accidental, or if there's some sort of deliberate policy that's making them accident-prone.
I just wrote a reply to Scott - I think the real purpose is to concentrate Gazans in the south of the strip for eventual removal. I am hesitant to say that the intention is to create a situation where civilians can be freely fired upon because it's just too pointlessly evil and I don't think the Israeli government currently has the charisma points to spend on something like that.
The fact that the GHF relies very heavily on armed private security (which is apparently headed by a guy who previously trained Nicaraguan contras, known for their brutality against civilians) did give me pause, but I hope and suspect that this is more of a "when you only have a hammer..." type thing: the Israeli government doesn't like the UN and the UN won't use food distribution to concentrate the Gazans south, so they had to run it themselves, but they don't know how to run a food distribution organization so they handed it off to paramilitary groups because that's what they DO know. You put a bunch of mercenaries who don't know what they're doing in charge of a food distribution system that is not primarily intended to distribute food and as soon as they run into a problem they're going to solve it the way they know how (by shooting), simple as that.
And since the Israeli government doesn't particularly care whether the Gazans get food or get shot, the situation continues and no one cares to fix it.
No, I'm saying the same thing that the author of the twitter thread that you linked to is saying: the main purpose of the GHF is to draw Gazans south, towards the Egyptian border, where the can be better concentrated for eventual removal. (https://x.com/JeremyKonyndyk/status/1927489293280551405)
Smotrich has said much the same thing, that the aid is a figleaf, which (besides drawing Gazans away from the north of the strip for eventual removal while the rest of the area is destroyed completely) was also meant to take international pressure off of the Israeli government after the three month blockade. (https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/1924501462807089208)
Was there anyone involved in this that wanted the distribution to go well? Likely, but I don't think they're in control of the project: the original executive director of the GHF resigned before the distribution started, saying that "it was not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence." He had previously said that he "would participate in no plan in any capacity if it was an extension of an I.D.F. plan or an Israeli government plan to forcibly dislocate people anywhere within Gaza.”
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/05/25/gaza-humanitarian-foundation-aid-jake-wood/)
(https://web.archive.org/web/20250529002219/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/24/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-aid-plan.html)
All right, sorry for over-reacting.
I do think it's a vibe based question (IMO most teenagers are going to answer surveys based on vibes and will probably have a higher lizardman constant), but there are definitely enough people to hit 20% on that question. The replies on that link are completely full of people arguing the premise - IE "if women did the same work they should get paid the same, but women don't do work as well as men" and things like that. The age they're surveying is particularly susceptible as well, I personally remember being pretty shitty at that age and growing out of it in college with exposure to more people and becoming friends with more women.
I think it was always a vibe question for most people. You ask "did humans evolve from apes," and a small number of literal-minded people answer the literal question ("Technically, no, the great apes and we have a common ancestor....") but the normies just give the related "whose side are you on" or "directionally correct" answer.
13. Trump's BBB "lowers taxes (especially on the rich)"
1. Most of the so called lowering consists of making permanent provisions that were enacted in 2017 and were scheduled to expire later this year. I have been a tax professional for 50 years, during that time there have been major revisions to the tax law in almost every administration. Any thing that is in effect for 8 years should be viewed as permanent. Taxes are imposed on a dynamic economy. We do not know what the effect of most changes are until years after they are put in place. A real reform would be leaving things the same for long stretches.
2. It is a tax on income. People who do not have much income do not pay much taxes. The standard deduction for a married couple filing jointly is not $29,200. Any decrease is mostly going to be a decrease for those who are better off.
3. The US has had an income tax system for more than a century now. it has not affected the distribution of wealth or income in any meaningful way. It probably cannot. The distribution is determined by factors that are not related to taxation. The wealthiest people in the country, Musk, Bezos, Gates, Ellison, Page, Brin, all made their money by exploiting a new technology. In the gilded age it was railroads, now its the internet. The real impact of taxes is imposed by the forces of supply and demand. Any tax that on a growing segment will simply be passed along as a consumer cost. Taxes should be designed to collect revenue cheaply and and easily. Getting the most feathers from the goose wit the least amount of hissing.
If you're going to say that temporary tax cuts should be treated as permanent, then the Congressional Budget Office should score them that way, so that Congress and the people can be honestly informed about their impact on the deficit over the long term.
If you pass a tax cut and say "it's not going to be too bad for the deficit because it's just temporary," and then a few years later you say "well, they've been in place for so long it's not really changing anything if we make it permanent," then your previous claims about the deficit are now retroactively lies. And if you *know* that you're going to make the cuts permanent if you stay in power for long enough, then they're lies from the very start.
If you are embarrassed by lying, politics is the wrong job for you.
And the world looks exactly like you'd expect as a result....
It is what it is.
>it has not affected the distribution of wealth or income in any meaningful way. It probably cannot.
Perhaps it can't affect the distribution of before-tax income, but it certainly can affect the distribution of after-tax income, which is kind of the whole point of the debate.
Let's think about a corner case to illustrate what I mean. Let's think about LeBron James, NBA Star, who many think is the GoAT of basketball. He is paid around $50 million a year to play basketball. Forget the union contract and the salary cap for a moment. How is his pay determined? Simple, Jeanie Buss, calls him up and says we hope that you want to play for the Lakers in 2025/26, how much are you looking for in your contract. LeBron says $50 million. Ms. Buss says, great, we are so excited that you want to come back. I will shoot you a contract proposal toot suite.
A few days later, LeBron meets with his people to review the proposal. The accountant speaks up and says Congress just changed the tax law. Under the old law, if you made $50 million, you paid $20 million of that in taxes and took home $30 million. Under the new law you will pay $25 million in taxes and take home $25 million. LeBron is upset, even for him $5 million is not couch change. The agent speaks up and says don't worry we will just get the Lakers to increase the contract to $60 million.
The agent calls the Lakers and makes the new demand. They have a staff meeting to discuss it. Marketing says that if LeBron retires our ticket sales and tv advertising will tank. The accountant runs the numbers and tells them the bad news is the team's owners will also be paying higher taxes but the good news is that the increased contract will be deductible. He also reports that a 3% increase in ticket prices and a 2% increase in advertising rates would get the team to net out to the same place they were at under the old tax rates. Marketing says that should not be a problem. The Governor says make it so.
The moral of this story is that people with market power will make sure their after tax net remains the same. Of course this a corner case. For lots of people demanding a pay increase to cover a tax increase is a request to be replaced by ChatGPT. But the economy is composed of hundreds of millions of individual actors who work under different constraints. There is simply no a priory way of knowing where the incidence of the tax will fall.
But, you can take it as a given that the rich are rich because they have market power and poor are poor because they don't. Tax increases actually fall those who do not have market power. Taxes will not affect the distribution of wealth or income over the whole society.
If the team had the ability to raise ticket prices 3% and advertising rates 2%, without losing sales of tickets or advertising, why did they wait until this hypothetical scenario to make these price increases?
Similar to vectro's point, if LeBron could demand $60 million and receive it, why would he not be doing that already? Surely he'd prefer $36 million take-home to $30 million.
This whole argument seems very strange. If it *truly* made no difference to the people paying the highest tax bills, one would hardly expect them to fight so hard to lower their taxes. I'm sharply reminded of all of the "deficit hawks" who screamed that ballooning deficits were *the most important thing* until just a few months ago, when large deficits being a big problem became politically inconvenient. So too do we suddenly learn that changes to tax rates don't *really* matter: and curiously, we learn it just when it's most convenient for them not to matter.
I agree with your main points, I just wanted to pipe in that, as a true deficit hawk(*), I had almost no company a couple of months ago. In fact, in this policy area, I have been lonely for decades.
(*) Even I am not a "true" deficit hawk if the requirement is believing that deficit reduction is always the highest policy priority. There's a lot more nuance and complexity than could fit on a legible bumper sticker.
Vectro: In the real world there are salary caps etc. In game theory world, I can cop out that the IRS changed the rules of the game which changes the outcomes.
In a game theoretic world, players who have frequent low stakes transactions are motivated to not extract the last dollar. Customer good will is a real thing with real value. Sports teams have fan bases. The fans supply all kinds of revenue streams such as merch and broadcast fees.
in markets where there are fewer repeat transactions price negotiations will be tougher. Compare car buying and grocery shopping.
agrajagagain: The players on sports teams have lots of constraints. Their biggest revenue may be from endorsements and advertising. Another one, and i can think of examples of this like Mahomes, is that in team sports even the biggest stars need competent teammates. Its no good to be the highest paid player in the league if all your team can afford after paying you is rookies and washed up veterans.
I think more examples come from the world of auction design. Flower markets with repeat players and daily transactions use designs like the lowest market clearing price Dutch auction. Art markets use a competitive highest bidder system that can produce the winner's curse.
#10: Coincidentally, Matt Yglesias wrote about this today: https://www.slowboring.com/p/progressive-millennials-are-old-now
It's unfortunately paywalled, but here's my summary of his argument: It's a cohort effect. Most millennials came of age in the late 2000s or early 2010s, which was when the coolness of progressivism peaked. The conservative establishment had three huge high-profile political failures in short order (the Global War on Terror, the Great Recession, and same-sex marriage), which created a sense that the right was just bad and wrong about everything. The election of Barack Obama was the most exciting thing in ages and put tons of cultural momentum on the progressive side. And the cultural hegemony of scoldy Christian moralists was in just the right phase of its decline: recent enough that millennials remembered it as the uncool establishment to rebel against, but too advanced to push back effectively against that rebellion.
Now, as Yglesias's title says, those progressive millennials are old and uncool. The new cohort that's now coming of age is doing so in an environment where the left hasn't been doing so hot, and grew up being scolded by *woke* authority figures and so thinks of wokeness as the moralistic establishment that's cool to rebel against.
Someone in the comments linked https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/, which is now on Scott's Mistakes page, and made a point that I hadn't heard before: Maybe Scott wasn't wrong, maybe he was just early.
Also Democrats used to benefit from the decreasing share of the white vote, but that's stopped working as the right has gotten better at appealing to racial minorities. I'm not sure to what extent it makes sense to think of that as the same trend, though.
>Also Democrats used to benefit from the decreasing share of the white vote, but that's stopped working as the right has gotten better at appealing to racial minorities
It is perhaps more accurate to say that it has worked less well. Democrats still get the lion's share of non-white voters, so they will continue to benefit from the demographic shift.
Right now, I don't think that's true, as the Republican share of the nonwhite vote is rising much faster than the nonwhite share of the electorate (see https://catalist.us/whathappened2024/). Of course, it can't keep rising this fast forever, so I suppose the question is what level it plateaus at.
Well, that is an argument about a very hypothetical future. And based on n=1. Note also that Bush II got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004. https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2004
But that didn't last.
N is not just 1, it’s the latest data. So it counts for something.
Your summary of the social media consensus is wrong (to be clear, that's because the reporting and tweeting on this by the authors was misleading). I'm not sure what the plot is from (not the preprint), but the study did a Delphi process and it looks like this is the stage 1, not the final vague statements that they had consensus on (see third link).
I wrote about how the consensus sausage got made:
https://rubenarslan.github.io/posts/2025-05-20-consensus-how-the-sausage-gets-made/
Some SM scholars explained why they didn't engage in this process:
https://www.science.org/content/article/social-media-consensus-paper-causes-social-media-uproar
A representation of the final consensus, although the first author of the preprint (Capraro) says the best representation is the table in the preprint.
https://bsky.app/profile/ruben.the100.ci/post/3lprsihzzn22l
#10: Although the woke movement peaked in 2022, specific lines of woke argument peaked long before then. One of these is the alleged 23% gender-based pay gap. Although it was debunked by mainstream outlets in 2012, the myth persisted among feminists for *years*. I remember seeing new videos and articles decrying the pay gap in 2017, and perhaps as late as 2019.
For some data points about the history of this debate, see section 6 on this page:
https://becauseits2015.wordpress.com/2016/08/06/a-non-feminist-faq/#power2
My first hypothesis was that some boys took the "reversed stupidity" response to the pay gap claim. Feminists claimed "Women should not earn 23% less than men", and although many boys inverted the claim correctly ("Women *do not* earn 23% less than men"), some of them inverted it incorrectly ("Women *should* earn 23% less than men). This explanation seems plausible in principle, but I think the timing is wrong.
My next hypothesis is that it's related to the MeToo movement, which began in 2017. The movement may have contributed to the proliferation of workshops and other programs about sexual consent. (Presumably, these would have began 1-2 years later.) Many of the boys would have felt like they were being blamed, profiled, or punished for bad things that they didn't do.
In addition to stoking a general feeling of resentment in the boys, I suspect that some of the boys also responded with solidarity toward adults who actually did mistreat women. Both of these psychological factors could contribute toward the development of sexist attitudes.
My bet is on MeToo. It peaked in 2018 and I believe exhausted many men's tolerance for modern feminism. For me personally I know that's when I switched from considering it a little nutty to outright adversarial and in bad faith.
13. What I find interesting about this is that it was largely the religious right that drove this over concerns about pornography and child protection. It's also a good reminder that one reason prediction is hard is that success or failure can come from basically exogenous factors to the narrow area you're examining.
16. Decker is not as smart as he thinks he is. No bank would lend on the promise of a political party, in part because the Democrats can neither credibly promise to win the next election nor that they will pass that bill. You could calculate the risk discount rate but it would be huge. You'd need to discount that they'd win the presidency and both houses which, even if they're individually favored in all three, would net out to a lower than half chance. Then you'd need to discount they actually fulfilled the promise.
Giving some fairly favorable assumptions:
P(Presidency win) = 60%
P(House win) = 55%
P(Senate win) = 55%
P(Passing the bill even with control) = 70%
You get about 87% discount rate. That is insanely high. That's 4x the discount rate that VC gets for investing in companies that don't exist yet. That's higher than the discount rate given to Zimbabwe during its crisis.
That math isn't right because it assumes that the three electoral outcomes are uncorrelated, and because it represents the probability of *any given* election resulting in unified Democratic control, without accounting for their getting another chance every two years.
The math is simplified for sure. If you want to assume they're positively correlated and produce a P(Unified Gov) that does increase your chances but it still ends up at like 40%. Which produces a discount rate of like 73%. Which is still gigantic. And that's in a good year, if they have a less than 50% chance of winning it drops.
They get a new chance every four years, not two, because they need the presidency. But you're right that's the biggest simplification: you'd need to calculate the time value. You get an expected wait of 3.7 cycles through that, rounding to 16 years. Multiply them together and you get 89% even with the higher correlated number.
I'm not sure I'm following your discount-rate math. If (we assume for the sake of argument) the banks will have to wait 16 years in expectation to get paid back, then can't you just apply the normal interest rate to figure out how much they have to charge? The concern would be the possibility that they never get paid back at all, and I'm not sure how your back-of-the-envelope calculation purports to calculate that.
No, because the bank is not trying to give the universities the lowest possible interest rate. It needs to take into account default risk, political risk, time horizon uncertainty, etc. This means the cost of capital converges to the risk adjusted rate, not the prime interest rate.
What I think you're kind of feeling is the universities have other, cheaper sources of capital already. Which is true.
Somewhat that, but also I'm literally just trying to understand your math; I don't work with financial math that frequently. When you say "89% discount rate", does that mean that a lender would have to charge 669% APR to break even on expectation? If not, what does it mean? And can you show how that number is derived from the probability of unified government per election?
Also, the scale in question is far too big to fit within the risk budgets of private companies anyway.
That's why Democrats should be threatening banks with EOs titled "Addressing Risks From JPMorgan/Chase"
36. While I'm sympathetic to the idea that experts tend to know things, I'm also sympathetic to the idea that experts have a vested interest in finding whatever replaced them failed. There's no mention of the reason the GHF concentrated in a few checkpoints: because they were under military guard after Hamas supporters attacked those more distributed checkpoints.
He also does not mention the reason the UNRWA and other aid organizations were able to disperse aid checkpoints is because they paid off Hamas. Now, maybe he just doesn't think this is worth mentioning, but I think he knows the optics of "we paid Hamas so they would allow us to feed starving Gazans" would harm already waning support for UNRWA. And so on and so forth. This is a narrow selection of facts that veer into speculation, memetically fit but not a mature discussion of the situation.
48. The Gulf War was fought over land though which meant that the US could sweep in hammer after the degredation including actual, hard fighting. China's hammer would need to go over a rough sea. There's also the problem that the Gulf War, which is widely regarded as rapid, took six months. That's plenty of time for even a relatively unprepared America, Japan, etc to get itself together and intervene. And once they decide to intervene China has no option but a slugging match with no clear diplomatic exist. Of course, "a slugging match with no clear diplomatic exit" is also how I would have described Ukraine.
Another important fact is that neither Ukraine nor Iraq could retaliate against the home territory of the attacking country. Taiwan absolutely can.
Sure, maybe China can hope for the victory to be so quick, and the Taiwanese military so rational and dispassionate, that they just negotiate a dignified surrender rather than ravaging Xiamen in defiance. But it's an additional risk they're taking compared to Russia and the US.
Can you expand on that first thought? Ukraine has been (with some difficulty) striking targets in Russia for some time, and I'd have thought Chinese air superiority would make similar strikes by Taiwan at least as difficult? Or am I underrating Taiwan's offensive capability?
The ports from which a PLAN invasion fleet can reasonably embark & be supplied are comparatively few, concentrated, and near Taiwan
They needn't hit the rest of mainland China so long as they can sufficiently degrade the capacity of those ports.
55. China has had various institutes for understanding and controlling the effects of AI. It was seen as a natural extension of their control of other forms of technology and information production. I would bet the point of making an AISI that's modeled on the western ones is not to signal a new commitment to AI safety but to provide a Chinese voice in such conversations abroad. They do this a lot, having an internal version that controls domestic affairs and an external version that's meant to push the Chinese point of view in international organizations or create commitments China itself is not bound by.
A key tell: can you get commitments from actual Chinese regulators and are they sending over top party officials? Do they actually make laws and regulations that are enforced internally? Are they allowed to advocate for it openly inside China in Mandarin? Or are they just sending over people who are mostly specialized in dealing with foreigners with little domestic power? So far the CnAISDA style outreach has been the latter.
That said, I stand by my comment China invests more into AI alignment research than anyone else in the world. They just want to align it with the CCP.
Compare the image manipulation retraction of the Sodom & Gomorrah paper to the image manipulation retraction of the Alzheimer's amyloid beta paper. The archaeology paper was published in 2021 and immediately had concerns about repetitive elements. The Alzheimer's paper also had concerns in 2021, but was published in 2006. And my understanding is that no one looked at it merely because it was an influential paper, widely known to be unreplicable garbage, maybe widely believed to be fraud, but only because they were doing general sweeps, having discovered > 1% image fraud rate.
Why didn't the Alzheimer's paper get any attention to its images? Because no one thought it would be easy to prove fraud? Or because no one thought proving fraud was worth the personal career risk of being a whistle-blower? If image manipulation fraud is so common, why aren't there any whistle-blowers testifying to having witnessed it? Do the people doing systematic studies of fraud have a secret origin story of witnessing fraud but don't want to throw their mentors under the bus?
22. So it’s sorta like Cameo, but for dorks like us?
23. I’m surprised it’s only 32 players. I thought the general practice was to take any player of prominence and slap his name on a random athletic shoe design.
#22: Where are you finding the list of paid reviewers on here? I clicked around a little and couldn't.
#12 they already signed a contract with the military...
#1 - Is the quick and easy answer for why AI writes like that simply because the training data for fiction writing is overwhelmingly things like tumblr posts, mediocre mass-market stuff, and, perhaps most significantly, fan fiction? When I was reading the AI output it reminded me most of all of cringe-inducing tumblr posts and that time in high school (I've fruitlessly tried to erase from memory) when I went to see what all the fanfic fuss was about.
Aren't there lots of traditionally published books and journalism and stuff in the training corpus? Also, I don't see why fanfic in particular would be more than a small percentage of it, most user-generated text on the public internet isn't fanfic.
I'm not familiar enough with what's in the AI corpus, nor do I understand how much training on non-fiction (most of the internet, I assume) informs an AI's fiction stylings. But a very quick search indicates that fanfic, specifically, numbers in the lower 8-digits, and the number of traditionally-published fiction books is in the high 5-digits yearly. How many of those are available for AI training? I have no clue.
Self-publishing (mostly e-books), which probably has some overlap with fanfics, as I assume people often publish to both fanfic sites and create e-books of their works, numbers roughly 3-4x traditional publishing. I'd hazard to guess most of that, in terms of quality, is closer to the fanfic average than the traditional average. But, of course, the traditional publishing average is probably closer to the fanfic average than it is to "great" writing.
But it seems obvious to me that it will be extremely hard or impossible to get AI to produce great fiction, given that it's something of an aggregation machine. Nearly all humans can't write great fiction either!
That said, the particular stylistic quirks shown in the article resemble a particular style of internet writing, at least to my eyes. I'm not confident in this argument at all, as you can probably tell.
Nearly all humans can't solve IMO problems either, but LLMs manage that. This seems very much like a prompting issue--the capability to write, maybe not great fiction, but closer to the style of great fiction, is certainly present. Writing anything actually good probably also requires a lot more than just a one-shot attempt. Humans write lots of crap before they come up with something good. The best ones also discard lots of crap ideas without even starting to write them. And I suspect many of the best stories come from a nugget of thought inspired by real-world observations. We don't usually give the LLM any of those, let alone a wide enough variety for it to pick out a combination of interesting ideas.
I don’t think this is sufficient explanation. There’s much more training data that isn’t any sort of attempt at literary fiction. To the extent that the prompt is able to get it to focus on attempted literary fiction, it should be able to focus on the better examples.
I suspect this is more about what sorts of traits are easy to generalize from literary fiction, when imitating the output, without any attempt at going through the design process of planning what you want to achieve with the work, and then how to construct it so that it achieves those goals.
It would be interesting to test this more explicitly by training a model on a dataset that doesn’t include mediocre fiction - just non-fiction and a highly curated fiction dataset. (This seems hard to do though.)
Don't exclude the mediocre stuff outright, just clearly label it as such in some way the machine can recognize. Maybe hire an office block full of literary critics to do RLHF, rating text samples on a zero to 100 scale where, say,
zero is formatting errors (e.g. hexadecimal numbers which contain occasional words by coincidence) and similar unmitigated gibberish,
20 is intelligible text with semantic content but no artistic merit whatsoever,
"Doom: Repercussions of Evil" is somewhere around a 30,
and anything above a 90 is 'couldn't finish reading, broke down in tears, too beautiful.'
Then, don't just ask the resulting AI to spew high-rated content. Set up an adversarial system to hunt for flaws in the model, and to generate tricky problems for it like "a single paragraph which reviewer A will rate at 53 and reviewer B will rate at 27" or "improve this text as much as possible by removing up to two words and adding one."
LLMs only every predict the next word, i.e. they think "one word at a time", and don't really plan ahead that much. When you give them a prompt, you basically give them a todo list, and with every word they output, they try to get closer to clearing some entry of that todo list. I think most quirks in that blogpost can be explained by the LLM only ever thinking about the next couple words, and how they can help with clearing the todolist.
There are ways to counter this behavior to some degree (e.g. reasoning/CoT), but the "one word at a time"-ness will always be there, because that is how they work at the core.
I'm not terribly familiar with Cremieux's take on the lead/crime hypothesis -- I think he has mostly argued that cohort studies are heavily confounded by race and class, so you can't just compare violence rates in high blood lead neighborhoods against low blood lead neighborhoods.
Meta-analysis of such studies and their confounders is difficult, but there are many other reasons why the lead/crime hypothesis fails to be some kind of unified theory for the rise and fall of crime across the western world in the second half of the 20th century:
https://medium.com/p/949e6fc2b0dc
In short, the lead/crime hypothesis fails for many other countries: Japan, Hong Kong, Mexico, Brazil, etc. The lead/crime hypothesis also fails in the US, if you divide the data up by age groups -- the rise in violence in the 1960's was a period effect, not a cohort effect, as you'd expect if this were an issue of subsequent generations getting lead poisoned in youth.
The rough synchronization of crime trends across western countries is fascinating, but may ultimately have simpler explanations. Demographics is one of them -- these countries all had a post war baby boom and then a decline as birth control became more widely available in the 60's/70's. A proper analysis would, at the very least, age adjust the data before just noticing the bump in the murders per capita graph.
There does remain a plausible theory that blood lead levels are one small factor in the bigger picture of crime rates, and that leaded gasoline did raise crime somewhat (10-20%?), all else equal. A sufficiently careful analysis of cohort studies and their confounders might be able to find whether this effect exists, and how large it is. But that's a hard thing to tease apart from the data and separate from other variables that did have an effect on the 80's crime wave and subsequent decline. Other strong factors may include: demographic changes, crack cocaine, mass incarceration, changes in policing, and medical changes that reduced the lethality of gun shots:
https://medium.com/@tgof137/explaining-the-crime-wave-of-the-1980s-d98395133dfc
I take the general lesson here and in many other cases to be that social science is where nice, comprehensible one-parameter models go to die.
Wow, wasn't expecting to see myself here! Thank you ACX, you're all wonderful.
I am confused about the karma point chart, I don't see it anywhere in the linked paper.
"Related: Cube_Flipper on his (?) experience taking estrogen. “What did change was my sense of space. This one’s quite subtle – it was the kind of thing that was more noticeable when I experimented with deliberately spiking my hormones. I’ll do my best to explain. It’s as if I took the entire volumetric representation of the space around me and increased the degree to which every point within that could influence the location of every other point, recursively. This allows everything to elastically settle into a more harmonious equilibrium. This effect is basically identical to what a small dose of psychedelics can do, specifically a tryptamine like psilocybin or DMT.”"
Might be an absolutely wild thing to say but I've been thinking this for a while, a big difference between women and men is that women are basically constantly microdosing on LSD/psychedlics. Thats there experience of the world
17. My pet theory is that the "decline of rhyming poetry" is largely an illusion caused by the rise of sound recording and broadcast media. There is still a ton of rhyming poetry being written, and much of it is extremely popular and commercially successful, but we call it "song lyrics" rather than "poetry" because it comes to us as audio/video recordings of the poem being performed set to music. Even for genres where the lyrics are often spoken rhythmically than sung (certain subgenres of folk, blues, and rap), we still think of it as music rather than poetry.
Before phonographs and radio became widespread, lyrics were commonly composed and published without any particular music being intended, and people could read them as poems or set them to whatever tune they liked that fit the meter of the poem. And poetic forms were standardized enough that you had a large menu of tunes to choose from for any given poem. Especially for "common meter" or "ballad meter", which is both very specific and very widespread, and is why you can sing the lyrics of the Gilligan's Island theme song to the tune of Amazing Grace and vice versa. One major and very popular form of poetry/music in the 19th century was "broadsheet ballads", poems written in ballad meter and published in broadsheet format (basically a single sheet of a full-sized newspaper).
It would be interesting to do statistics on the formal properties of song lyrics! Do they rhyme as often as 19th century poetry? Do they stick to standardized meters as well? Which genres differ from each other in these ways?
Copy pasting my comment about #3 here
"Chess Grandmasters Do Not Burn 6000 Calories Per Day"
There is a reddit post with the exact same title from a deleted account, is it your post? Also, more generally how good is substack for search engine optimization. I dont think its very good, I cant find your post on google, limiting the value of correcting this misninfo. I've had this problem with other substacks as well
17: "the decline of rhyming poetry"
I think it depends on how you define poetry. If you limit yourself to the academic journals, maybe yes. But, I think that is snobbery. I think the great mass of poetry these days comes from in the form of lyrics and rap, both of which are deemed to be musical genres.
Didn't the august body that awards the Nobel Prize for literature concede my point by giving the laurel to Bob Dylan? He characterized himself as a poet when young:
Though you might hear laughing, spinning,
swinging madly across the sun.
It's not aimed at anyone.
it's just escaping on the run.
And before the sky there are no fences facing
And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time
It's just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn't pay it any mind
It's just a shadow you're seeing,
that he's chasing
Rap of course rhymes. I detest it because of its coarseness and vulgarity, but it does often rhyme.
The thing about musical lyrics is that they have an unfair advantage. There's something about hearing words set to a tune you like that changes how you process them. For instance in song, phrases or sentences are often repeated, sometimes over and over with no other phrases intervening, and not only is that not tedious, it is often very powerful. For instance I love hearing the Talking Heads' sing "take me to the river, drop me in the water" over and over. Or there's the end of a hallelujah chorus -- "forever and ever" & "hallelujuh" over and over. But it's not just repetition we experience differently in song. Cliches are much more tolerable -- can sound heartfelt and obviously true -- .and so are phrases that don't make sense. I've often looked up the lyrics of songs I love and felt taken aback by how lame they are with the tune stripped away.
>Or there's the end of a hallelujah chorus -- "forever and ever" & "hallelujuh" over and over.
This one I disagree with; I dislike most church songs because they're this very sort of grating repetition.
As for cliches being more tolerable in music, I'd say that's more about how often we interact with the two; music is so prevalent you have to make an effort to avoid it, while poems are rare things you have to actively seek out, and it's the level of effort investment that makes cliches less tolerable.
Probably why the ancient Greeks played music while reciting or singing their lyric poetry and the priests of the Jerusalem Temple sang the Pslams, as worshipers still do. Nothing changes.
"this post helped me crystallize some thoughts on what “good writing” and “good taste” are in general."
Care to elaborate? Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Allan Shivers did not "beat himself" in the election. His vote share from each party line was pooled together to make his total vote share. It wasn't like there was a competition over whether he gets elected as a Democrat or as a Republican. It's also not unprecedented for candidates to be nominated by both major parties. e.g. Earl Warren won both major party's nominations for CA Governor in 1946. Robert Heinlein wrote a book about his experiences in politics, in which he complained about how he had very narrowly lost an election in which everyone told him they wouldn't bother helping him because he had no chance; I fact-checked this and discovered that he had in fact narrowly lost the Democratic primary to the Republican incumbant. In New York, candidates still can get listed on multiple parties' ballot lines, and it is common for the Democratic and Working Families parties to nominate the same candidates. It's no longer common for both major parties to endorse the same candidate, but Simcha Felder did get both major parties' endorsements for his NY State Senate run in 2024.
Until the Top 2 Primary ballot measure took effect (in 2012, IIRC), California still had a weak back-door ballot fusion system. You could only be a listed candidate on the primary ballot for one party, but you could register as a write-in candidate for other party primaries for the same office. I don't remember if you got separate ballot lines if you won more than one nomination, like in NYC, or if you had to choose one (so the benefit would just be less competition on the general election ballot), or if you got one line with both parties listed on it.
I know about this because in 2010, I was peripherally involved in a Congressional campaign in a safely Democratic district where there was a relatively strong Libertarian candidate and no qualified candidates for the Republican nomination. The Libertarian, Edward Gonzales, tried to use the process to also get the Republican nomination. It didn't work: the local Republican party organization recruited and endorsed a different write-in candidate who won the primary by a large margin, and the Democratic incumbent (Zoe Lofgren) was reelected by an enormous margin (69% to 24% to 7.8%) in the general election.
Did Texas operate with the New York “fusion” system, or did it operate with separate lines? What did the law say would happen if Shivers - D got 33%, Shivers - R got 33%, and someone else got 34%? In New York, that would be a clear win for Shivers, but I don’t think it’s obvious how the Texas system worked in 1952.
My home county's highway superintendent was once nominated by the Republicans, Democrats, Conservatives, and the Independence Party!
#10 (fewer boys believe in gender equality): the explanation seems clear to me, 2018 was the year #MeToo peaked. Weinstein got arrested, the Golden Globes was a public MeToo rally with celebrities wearing black, the phrase "believe women" gained currency, and the Kavanaugh hearings happened. It pushed a certain subset of men to conclude that the 'equality' movement was just rhetorical cover for a zero-sum political gender war. So "gender equality" got (appropriately, in my view) re-coded as "anti-man" by many men and so they stopped supporting it.
Thank you for writing this exact same thing 4 or 5 different times throughout the comments section here. Just once would certainly be insufficient
46. Very interesting. This offers a lesson about prior restraint reverberating through the ages. José Clemente Orozco famously self-sabotaged in the same fashion when painting his tremendous mural "Prometheus" (aka "the hunk without the junk"), located in Pomona College's Frary dining hall.
When I was a student, I heard that Prometheus' penis had been removed or obscured by a third party. It was understood to have been due to puritanical inclinations, but one can't dismiss considerations of appetites might have played a role.
At any rate, I haven't thought of Prometheus in a while, so I looked it up and was surprised to learn that Orozco had actually omitted the titanic genitals himself!
However, seemingly filled with regret, "He attempted to add one when he visited Pomona several months after initially completing the mural, but it did not adhere properly to the wall."
Per the Wikipedia article here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_(Orozco)], based on a lengthier piece in Pomona College today: [https://magazine.pomona.edu/2012/summer/orozco-at-the-border/]
Edit: the original link was almost number 47, which would have mystically tied it back into Pomona College lore. Alas, so close.
#43: So portuguese have been pretty cool about their colonialism? Good catholics who know about humility. At least, by a glance, germans seem to score better than english and french. I wonder what african view on china may look like a century from now.
I think it’s a stretch to read the goodness or badness of colonial practices directly off the reported opinions of current people in these societies - it might be that the French were better at instilling a do-it-yourself anti-colonial attitude in people while the Portuguese instilled a “yes master” attitude! (Probably not actually this, but I would want to try several things to disentangle this.)
>germans seem to score better than english and french.
Germany lost all its colonies in 1920, so that long time gap is likely a major confounder.
Portugal fought rebels seeking independence in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, but of those three, only Angolans were surveyed. For this reason, and for the reason Kenny mentions in another reply to you, I recommend not updating much on Portuguese colonization just from this survey.
Ok, you’re probably right. Ethnic sympathies are strange anyways. Especially when people express friendly feelings for germans enthusiatically because of nazis. Hard to stay polite to them sometimes as a german.
The African view on China right now is positive. I doubt China is going to have a Congo in Africa.
#35 - I'm impressed by the problem solving strategy the LLM is using. It seems like it's either a novel strategy that others aren't using, or it's using one of the most advanced existing strategies. Are there other domains where LLMs are coming up with novel ways to go about solving a problem? Right now it seems like LLMs serve as quickly-responding encyclopedias of known problem-solving strategies. Are there domains where LLMs are producing novel problem-solving strategies without expert prompt engineering? If/when this starts happening, I wonder which domains it will happen in first and how it will spread across domains/topics.
48: "T. Greer on China’s strategy for invading Taiwan."
The Chinese strategy described sounds just like the Russian strategy for invading Ukraine. The Ukrainians are a lot more like Taiwan than the Houthis, who are tribesmen wandering around a desert.
But the all time champions of fighting off invading armies of larger countries are the Israelis. And that is who the Taiwanese should model themselves after, if they are serious about staving off the CCR regime. Of course, it would need to triple its spending, start producing its own armaments, and institute mandatory universal military training and reserve service.
But, if they do something like that, their prospects aren't that bad. The Island is 380 km long and only 130 km wide, but, the eastern two thirds of the country is quite mountainous, The mountains can be a shelter from attack and a defensive redoubt. Given time and money the Taiwanese can defend themselves. they have the money. The questions are whether they have the time and the will.
Israel fights off larger armies by having technological superiority, which Taiwan can't count on (especially if the US won't get off its duff and sell them F-35s).
I think argument-by-analogy is pretty fraught in this area. Taiwan is nothing like Ukraine, nor Israel, nor the Houthis. In any future war the most important factors will be the wide strait separating it from the mainland and the willingness or otherwise of Western allies to get directly involved.
Technological superiority is available to Taiwan. Remember their super power is being the home of the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing in the world. They have the engineering capacity, and the money. And one of Israel's leading exports is high tech weaponry. Taiwan's problems are time and will power.
"the most important factors will be the wide strait separating it from the mainland and the willingness or otherwise of Western allies to get directly involved."
The strait is much to Taiwan's advantage. Defenders love a clear field of fire. Geography is one of their advantages.
As for the willingness of Western allies to get involved is probably a very small consideration. Neither Israel nor Ukraine has had much other than supplies from their western allies. Given the size of the Chinese air force and navy, last minute shipments of weaponry cannot be assumed. they need to stockpile weapons in caves in their eastern mountains. Besides, would you depend on Trump?
Taiwan can defend itself from China, but they have to want to.
Being good at semiconductors doesn't automatically make you good at fighter jets. Things like stealth technology have been developed by the US over a period of decades through a lot of very expensive trial and error.
They're a small country and not that rich, they have the population of Australia and the GDP of Ohio.
And so is Israel. What odds would you give on Israel being able to defend itself against much bigger, much richer nations.
The point is not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.
I’d give Israel no chance at all without western and US subsidies.
You demonstrate your ignorance of Israel and its history by your statement.
When it comes to military technology and the factories that could be converted I’m pretty sure that China is ahead.
Judging from recent developments in Russia/Ukraine, I would expect the Chinese troop transports to be hilariously vulnerable to drone attack.
I object that Bentham got "Eulered" there. If you're going to try to make an argument that is so heavily mathematical in nature, it is entirely correct to point out any issues with the math. Math provides a high level of certainty (or at least, the impression such) *due to the unrelenting demand of rigorous argument.* The issues that Dylan Black raises are pretty core to the use of probability on infinite sets. If you don't understand them, you probably shouldn't be making arguments (especially in favor of something as complex as God!) that rely on the mathematics of probability theory.
#28. Jeez, the Yudkowsky-Soares book needs a catchier title! Anyone have suggestions? Here are a few of mine.
DEATHCODE!
When AI codes Its Own Genius, It's Code Blue for Humanity
------------
THE DIRTNAP IS NIGH
-------------
HUMANITY IS CIRCLING THE DRAIN . . .
and AI Holds the Plunger
43.
The few North African/Muslim countries included are more down on former colonial powers than Black/Non-Muslim countries. That tracks.
Separate from the merits of question being argued over, #41 makes me wonder why to take any of Cremieux's takes seriously.
That seems like a pretty big overreaction. I updated a small amount away from Cremieux, but:
- That chart wasn't the only bit of evidence Cremieux cited.
- I don't even know what Higney could have meant when he wrote "For some reason [Cremiuex] cut off the bottom of that chart" - Higney posted a different chart! (https://x.com/AnthonyHigney/status/1867163809267507628) If there's room for legitimate disagreement about the relative value of PCCs and elasticity, the entire basis for Lexer's (and Higney's) criticism vanishes in a puff of smoke. As an outsider, I asked some LLMs about it and Claude said "If lead exposure leads to small PCCs but high elasticities, it suggests the relationship might be nonlinear, confounded, or noisy, leading to weak correlations." If that's correct, it's not necessarily diabolical to downplay elasticities, particularly if you think they are due to confounders.
- The interpersonal drama Lexer brought up seems completely irrelevant to me. But at best it's a draw, in my book. Higney called Cremieux "a bad faith actor", which is a rather damning thing to say about someone, imo, so even though I don't fully understand Cremieux responding by calling Higney "surly, reactive, and untrustworthy", it seems in-bounds given the level of interaction they were having.
Surliness comment explained here, along with larger issues with the study that I never wrote up because I didn't consider it necessary until now: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2025/comment/131265393
Great point re: the puff of smoke.
#10 is unsurprising; male socialization for teenage boys is even more fucked up than it usually is on the interpersonal level (source: anecdotes and vibes) and there was a big organic push from anti-woke influencers over the past X years which the party and the money put their shoulders behind, from hoi-polloi types like Rogan and Walsh to intelegencia blogs like this one.
This seems like the result one would expect if they knew 12 years ago that the anti-woke side of the culture war would be making gains.
#8 I prototyped a video game with some friends when I was in college where you would earn karma by performing good deeds and lose karma by performing evil deeds, and whenever your character dies she'd reincarnate as a different animal, with different abilities, according to the current karma level. The backstory was that the protagonist was a member of an order of monks grinding good deeds to attain enough karma to ascend to a mythical creature after reincarnation, but was tricked into deicide, the most heinous crime, by a demon king, and lost enough karma to be on the threshold between humans and monkeys. But since she got the power to immediately reincarnate and retain her memories she's the only one who can use the powers of all the creatures to resurrect the godess she had killed and get the karma back to ascend to the higher entity and defeat the demon king.
The gameplay loop was full of contrived trolley-problem-style situations where you'd gain or lose karma and then kill yourself (or allow yourself to get killed) to reincarnate as whatever creature the platforming situation called for.
If I had known at the time about this Ming dynasty guide to karma bounties, I would have used it verbatim, this is hilarious.
> 30: Twitter and Bluesky both seem to be losing users...
On X, I've noticed that lately I'm being swamped with posts from obnoxious rightwing crazies. I block and block, but the X algorithm keeps throwing them at me.
OTOH, everyone on Bluesky is just too fecking nice. I need a little more drama to keep me engaged, but not toooo much drama!
I miss the old Twitter where was a nice balance between interesting people and assholes.
And my Facebook feed is filled with AI-generated groups that swamp the posts from my friends. I'm wondering if there's any future for social media.
Try the substack feed. It's like Twitter-lite. There are way fewer users but they're generally higher quality.
When I check Facebook I only use the feeds option. The key to using social media is to avoid the algorithm whenever possible. I have curated a decent group on twitter and only read the accounts I follow. The Facebook friends feed is also the only way to go.
Yes, I know about the feeds, but my feeds is full of ads, events, and groups. Granted, many of them seem to be things that my friends liked or clicked on. Almost none of what I see in my feeds is content that I would call "primary" posts from my friends. And strangely, it's only a small subset of friends whose posts end up in my feeds. There are a bunch of friends who are posting away, but I would never see their posts except that I make a point to search for them on Facebook.
I haven’t seen an ad on Facebook in years, same on twitter. The key is to use the web sites instead of the apps and use an ad blocker. My friends feed only has posts from my friends. I haven’t checked to see if I am missing posts though. I check Facebook about once or twice a month so it’s quite possible that I’m being cheated in my friends feed.
After posting this, I haven't seen any ads on my main Facebook feed in the past three days. And Facebook has stopped shoving groups at me that it thinks I'll want to join. On one hand, I'm happy the storm is over. OTOH, I can't help but wonder if there's no coincidence here. I'm now concerned about MetaAI's ability to observe my non-Facebook activities.
But every Reel it's offering me is now of AI-generated women in swimsuits with unnaturally large breasts. Oh, well.
#6 Cate Hall's conclusion strikes me as very strange. She were deficient in testosterone for her own sex. Once the levels were brought up to what was typical for her sex, she did much better.
Men don't automatically feel 10 times sharper and more energetic because they have 10 times the testosterone. They feel similarly sluggish if their T is low for their biology (which would still be a very high number for a woman in most cases).
I think the conclusion here is "having a hormonal profile that's out of whack as compared to what's normal for your sex will have negative effects", not "men run life on easy mode".
Have you ever taken testosterone? It's a magical nectar. Men automatically do feel sharper and more energetic with more T, yes.
Men obviously don't play life on easy mode, that's a preposterous perspective you can only achieve with a woman's privilege or an extremely lucky man's.
A person might feel better on T supplements but that's not what I'm arguing. I'm saying a man with average male T levels is not going to be 10 times more energetic than a woman with the average female T levels. So what matters is where your T is as related to the base line for you sex, not the absolute levels. So to conclude somehow that men feel sharper and more energetic than women because they have so much more T in absolute terms is not valid.
I will not engaging with your second paragraph.
I've taken clomid to raise my endogenous testosterone production from 351 ng/dL (low-normal male levels) to 724 ng/dL (high-normal male levels). It had some marginal beneficial effects to energy levels and took a little edge off my migraines, but absolutely was not magical nectar for me. It made my actual mood somewhat worse in terms of anxiety and depression, symptoms although I was a bit better able to power through the symptoms and get things done. I gave up on it after a couple years.
My testosterone is currently 14 ng/dL and I have never felt better. It's estrogen that's "magical nectar" for me, and mine was 312 pg/dL last I checked, up from 37.5 back when I was on clomid. I have been on feminizing HRT for about 2.5 years now, first oral estrodiol and later injections plus spiro as an anti-androgen. My energy and focus are way better than "natural" or on clomid, my mood has gotten enough better that I have discontinued antidepressant use (Lexapro and Wellbutrin) and not missed them, my emotions overall are much "brighter" (position emotions more intense and frequent, sadness more cathartic and less distressing, and anger and frustration easier to cope with calmly and constructively). And I have been very much enjoying all the features my body has had locked behind a paywall all this time.
OTOH, a friend of my who is trans in the other direction has expressed sentiments that pretty much accord with yours about testosterone. He doesn't show any signs of missing being estrogen-dominant.
Overall, my experience and the anecdotes I've heard from many quarters seems to add up consistently to the subjective effects of sex hormones being dependent on your internal gender, not uniform across all humans or dependant on your physical sex at birth except to the extent that the latter correlates strongly with internal gender (i.e. 95-99% of the population is comfortably and unambiguously cisgender). Testosterone feels great for men, both cis and trans. And estrogen feels great for women, both cis and trans. Most adults regardless of gender seem to feel like crap if they're low on both (although young children seem to do fine without much of either hormone), and may report feeling somewhat better with either one supplemented. #6 is the only enthusiastically positive endorsement of testosterone I have ever heard from a cis woman.
Actually, quite a few cis women enthusiastically endorse testosterone supplementation, if they were significantly deficient in testosterone to begin with. That's what happened in #6, and somehow the author conflated treating major deficiency with "more testosterone is always better".
Interesting, I'll dig into that more. Come to think of it, I also haven't heard anything about cis woman trying T and disliking it or finding it indifferent, nor have I heard anything at all about cis men trying E regardless of reaction. So 6 being the only positive anecdote doesn't tell me much besides a demonstration that it's possible.
Even better would be if I could find accounts that specify dosage and blood levels.
Cis men trying E isn't a thing because they need to be advertized to try it. So, I mean, you'll hear dozens and dozens of cis men voluntarily drinking pseudo estrogens. They just don't know they're on E, and have moobs because of it.
Are you talking about phytoestrogens in beer?
My understanding is that there were some studies in the 80s and 90s that suggested that high doses of concentrated phytoestrogens might have feminizing effects on lab rats, and one in 1998 that found some possible but weaker effects in an n=24 trial on postmenopausal women. But more recent research has generally found weak or no effects in humans, except maybe for a minor endocrine disruption effect where the body reduces endogenous sex hormone production somewhat in response to phytoestrogens.
Phytoestrogen supplements do get marketed to both cis and trans women, but they're generally regarded as scams. I'm inclined to agree with this, since actual human estrogen compound (or even other mammalian estrogen products, such as premarin) have such dramatic effects that there would be no missing it if phytoestrogens had a similar effect.
This is interesting to read, since trans people have a brain that mismatched the body, a transwomen is essentially a female brain in a male body. It makes sense it would respond to the female sex hormone profile much better.
I wonder if this could be used as a diagnostic issue, would transmen see a boost from extra T that cis women don't? Or transwomen from extra E that cis men don't?
That's the conventional wisdom I've seen in online trans communities. Unfortunately (as I went into in some detail in my response to Cjw below), it's understudied. We have a fair amount of published evidence that suggests the conventional wisdom, but nowhere near enough to be a rigorously validated diagnostic test.
"my experience and the anecdotes I've heard from many quarters seems to add up consistently to the subjective effects of sex hormones being dependent on your internal gender"
This seems rather dubious. The effects of exogenous estrogen on (adult) genetic-males have been known fairly well since Benjamin's studies in the 60s: it causes gynecomastia, a reduced libido, and a moderate calming effect. The other commonly reported effects are typically vague, variable, and unverifiable. In fact, comparing this to the visual and reported effects of testosterone on genetic-females, one can't help but feel a little sorry for the MtF transexuals that their treatments are so less effective and dramatic than the other way round. Regardless, I haven't seen anything suggesting there is an "internal gender" which doesn't match your genetic sex that governs which hormones to which you'd respond better. (I'm not making the broader claim that there isn't such a thing at all, only that it isn't in play here.) The limited physical changes caused by exogenous estrogen would happen to any genetic male who took it, whether transwoman or cis-male, so the only place we might hunt for this "internal gender" reaction would be in variable magnitudes of the calming effect produced. But for obvious reasons, if you did try to ascertain this, the data would be unreliable and placebo effects would abound in the transwoman sample. On top of which, there would be chemical evidence of the hormones interacting differently with the body across the two groups.
>The effects of exogenous estrogen on (adult) genetic-males have been known fairly well since Benjamin's studies in the 60s: it causes gynecomastia, a reduced libido, and a moderate calming effect.
Do you happen to have a citation for that? I just spent some time looking for Benjamin's research on the subject and came up almost completely dry. The closest things I could find were the title of an article he published about 1946 about using combinations of steroid hormones to treat aging symptoms in men (couldn't find the full text or even an abstract or someone else quoting from or summarizing it) and mention in his book "The Transsexual Phenomenon" that estrogen acts as a "biological tranquilizer" in transgender women (or "transsexual men" as he calls us, since he followed the then-standard practice of referring to trans people according to physical sex at birth).
There are at least two fairly recent studies showing that elevated endogenous levels of estrogen are correlated with increased depression and anxiety scores in men. Of course, the causal link could be in either direction (depression/anxiety somehow affecting hormone levels) or from a common cause (maybe stress or diet causing both mood disturbance and abnormal hormone profiles).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29107881/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34375211/
There are a number of studies on exogenous estrogen on trans women and exogenous testosterone on trans men, and they generally show positive results for mental health and quality of life metrics, although the individual studies tend to be pretty small and low-powered. Of course, these are also not blinded or randomized, and they don't necessarily distinguish between direct effects of hormones on mood, indirect mental benefits from physical changes, and placebo effects. Here are two survey papers:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01605-w
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7894249/
Neither survey found significant differences between findings for trans men and trans women in terms of reducing depression and psychological distress or improving quality of life scores. Baker et. al. (the second link) also found no significant difference in findings about anxiety, while Doyle et. al. found stronger evidence for reduced anxiety in trans men.
Standard feminizing HRT aims to (and usually mostly succeeds at) lowering testosterone to normal female levels as well as increasing estrogen, through combinations of separate anti-androgen medications and estrogen itself suppressing endogenous testosterone production. My understanding is that it's pretty well established by both observational studies and controlled and blinded clinical trials (for both treatment of low testosterone and intentionally inducing it to treat hormone-sensitive prostate cancer) that low testosterone in cis men tends to trigger depression, anxiety, fatigue, etc, and it doesn't sound like you're disputing that. But given that, unless estrogen has substantial positive effects on mood in trans women, one would expect suppressed testosterone levels to lead to significantly worse mood symptoms. Available evidence suggests the opposite.
That leaves the hypothesis that maybe estrogen also improves mood in androgen-deprived cis men as well as in trans women. There is research on using either estradiol or esterol (another form of human estrogen, which has much less of a feminizing effect than estradiol) as an adjunct to androgen deprivation therapy to try to mitigate side effects. It seems to be moderately successful at mitigating bone loss and cardiovascular side effects, but I can't find anything suggesting that it mitigates the negative mood effects of androgen deprivation. I suppose this might be dose dependent, though: cis men are unlikely to tolerate the physical effects of the levels of estradiol typically taken by trans women.
I did find one tiny (n=16) double-blind controlled study of giving cis men transdermal estradiol for a 24-48 hour period and then measuring physiological stress responses. The doses were in the range used for feminization by trans women, and the time period was (barely) long enough for the blood levels of estrogen to reach female levels. The study found statistically significant increased stress reactions in the treatment group relative to the control group.
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article-abstract/81/10/3639/2650007
> Re 45: Conception beliefs among Australian aborigines. Did you know that pre-contact aborigines didn’t know that sex caused conception?
It wasn't until the 1920s that Western medicine had a complete and testable hypothesis about the role of ovulation and the necessity of fertilization with sperm at the correct time in the menstrual cycle for conception to occur. And that hypothesis wasn't tested and confirmed until a decade later.
Although 19th-century scientists had come to the conclusion that sperm was somehow necessary for conception, in the 18th century, there were angry debates between the Spermists and Ovists. Neither side would concede that both were necessary for conception. So, it's no surprise that pre-Enlightenment societies didn't understand conception.
From the chapter you mentioned...
> By contrast Arnold van Gennep, the eminent French folklorist, considered it to be little different from the ignorance of procreative mechanisms still prevailing among the masses of Europe.
> Although 19th-century scientists had come to the conclusion that sperm was somehow necessary for conception, in the 18th century, there were angry debates between the Spermists and Ovists. Neither side would concede that both were necessary for conception
I don't think that's a fair summary of spermism or ovism or the general state of understanding of conception in the 18th century.
There were two schools of thought: "Preformism", where the body develops from (what we may unfairly call) a little homunculus which exists either in the sperm (spermism) or the egg (ovism), and "Epigenesis" which is closer to what actually happens. But all parties were well aware of the necessity of both side for conception.
The exact mechanism of conception, with the two cells meeting, would have to wait until 19th century microscopes, but the connection between sex and conception was well understood by the ancients and also by all primitive societies we've encountered... with the possible exception of the Australian Aborigines. Actually we probably shouldn't generalise about the Aborigines as if they're one society, there were hundreds of different language groups with very limited contact, and it's entirely likely that certain things were known to some groups and not others.
Yes, I oversimplified 18th-century conceptions about conception. Thanks for keeping me honest!
Upon further thought, I would suspect that all human cultures knew that penile-vaginal intercourse was necessary for conception. They may not have understood that sperm was necessary for conception. I no longer have a copy of Malinowski's _Sexual Life of Savages_ but a little Googling turned up this quote...
> The natives are quite ignorant of the physiological process of conception. They have no idea of the fertilizing virtue of the male sperm, nor of the existence of the female ovum. They believe that in order to make a woman pregnant, a spirit child, a baloma or koi (ghost), must enter her body, or rather, must be placed in her womb by another baloma. But they also believe that a woman must be opened up by sexual intercourse before the spirit child can enter.
Seems like they understood that there was a cause and effect, even if they didn't understand the necessity of sperm. (NB: my undergrad Anthro department chair was Malinowski's student, and this book was on our reading list.)
And come to think of it, I suspect van Gennep crack about the "masses of Europe" being ignorant about the procreative function was likely wrong. According to Partridge's _Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English_ "to stitch" was 17th-century slang for male penile penetration of the vagina. Thus, we get the saying: "A stitch in time saves nine" (i.e., a "stitch" at the right point in the menstrual cycle saves nine months of pregnancy). The common folk of England must have had at least some knowledge of the menstrual cycle and the likelihood of pregnancy.
Furthermore, there's a long history of arguments among Anthropologists about whether other Anthropologists understood the indigenous language of a culture accurately enough to convey what was going on their subjects' minds. And there are suspected cases where their native informants were unreliable.
> Thus, we get the saying: "A stitch in time saves nine"
I've only ever heard that used to refer to routine maintenance and minor repairs avoiding eventual need for a more elaborate and costly emergency. One stitch, in the literal textile-tailoring sense, to close up a small tear in fabric, can prevent ongoing wear from making the damage worse (as tensile forces concentrate at the edges of any hole, thus tending toward cascading failure), to a point where at least ten times as much effort - nine additional stitches - would then be required.
There are a bunch of common sayings whose original, somewhat risqué meaning has been lost over the centuries.
"What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander." Sauce used to be slang for gonorrhea.
"In a pickle." Salt baths used to be one of the treatments for syphilis.
Got citations for either of those? I'm pretty sure there are also quite a few old sayings which someone relatively recently decided to invent a risqué or "secret" alternate meaning for, and pretend it had been there all along.
ChatGPT confirms that "Pickle" was used for the saline baths used to treat VD.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang lists an early usage (1741, U.K.): “Her new Lover being in a pickled Condition, communicated the Infection to her.”
As for "sauce"...
Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) and later editions of slang dictionaries list “sauce” or being “sauced” as meaning infected with VD.
ChatGPT says that I wrong, and there's no historical evidence that the nine in a stitch in time refers to pregnancy, but it admits that, in British slang, especially during the 18th and 19th centuries, "to get a stitch" or "to have a stitch" was sometimes used as a euphemism for having sex.
However, according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang, there’s a citation from a bawdy poem called _Cambridg Libell_ (1573)
“A cleark doth thread her needle often, / For she doth daylye stiche.”
Where “stiche” was clearly used as a euphemism for sex. Certainly, it seems like the nine could very well refer to nine months.
Another interesting sexual-belief tidbit...
It was commonly believed that children would be born on the same day of the week as the day they were conceived. A Puritan minister, Israel Loring of Sudbury, Massachusetts, refused to baptize children born on Sundays, citing that theory. He maintained this policy for years, going so far as to banish parents of children born on Sundays from his congregation—until his own wife gave birth to Sunday twins on the Sabbath.
>So, it's no surprise that pre-Enlightenment societies didn't understand conception.
no, they didn’t just not understand the mechanics -
They straight up didn’t know sex created pregnancy. Almost all societies knew this, if for no other reason than they observed it in the animals they farmed and used it for breeding purposes for thousands of years.
Support your thesis with references to *contemporary* ethnographic research, please.
Why contemporary?
There are numerous questions and issues with the ethnographies conducted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Whether or not these criticisms are valid, post-1970s anthropologists recognized the need to be more cautious in their claims. I was an Anthro undergrad in the late 1970s, and many of my professors were concerned that the cultural and intellectual prejudices of previous generations of ethnographers colored how they viewed "savage" cultures. That's not to say all that was published back then is crap, but AFAIK we no longer have any cultures that have been "uncontaminated" by modern civilization—except for the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Islands—and they've killed any visitors who've circumvented the Indian government's ban on contacting them.
> Nuno Sempere (maybe with the rest of the Samotsvety team?) has launched askaforecaster.com
Nice! Yes, confirming that some Samotsvety people will help me answer if there is too much demand. In the meantime someone is asking good questions for $150:
> Change in non-engineering product-related roles in tech by 2030?
>
> Current AI tools are augmenting work for engineers at many technology companies. The same thing is happening for non-engineering product-related roles as well -- for instance, Product Designers are having AI included in design tools to create interface mock-ups faster; Product Managers are using LLMs to write drafts of briefs and memos; etc. Presumably, as these tools improve employee efficiency, companies will need to hire fewer and fewer employees to get the same amount of output.
>
> Specifically for these non-engineering product-related roles (which, you may have guessed, I fall into), I wanted a quick forecasting take on how employer demand for these roles may fall in the next 5 years. Is it more likely to expect a modest 10% fewer positions? Is a 30-50% re
duction possible? An industry-shattering 80-90%? And what factors might make a position more or less resilient?
>
> 2025-07-01 15:40:56.188382,PRICE150
9: Meta has spent $50 - 70 billion on the metaverse over the past five years.
How do you spend that much money on, essentially, a Second Life clone?
The 50 billion figure is for *all of Reality labs*, including over a decade of cutting edge technology research, a long line of VR headsets, smartglasses, the failed Portal line, etc. Horizon Worlds is just a small part of that.
Fair enough. Still seems like a lot, but more reasonable.
#10 - If a poll question is seen as linked to a major culture-war issue, a lot of people will answer based on their tribal affiliation rather than their pedantically literal interpretation of the question. E.g., there are a lot of Christians who believe God took His own sweet time making the earth, with room for continental drift and dinosaurs and all that before Adam and Eve - if you ask them "Did dinosaurs walk the Earth 65 million years ago" they can take that as a science question and say "yeah, that sounds about right" but if you instead (or even later in the same survey) ask "Did God create the Earth sometime in the past ten thousand years?", a lot of them will also answer "yes" because now they're interpreting the question as "Are you seriously for real a Christian?" and yes they are.
The sort of feminism that says women should mostly have the same opportunities as men and not be penalized for exercising those options, was pretty much baked in to American culture by 1990, and the more exotic and controversial sorts of feminism weren't a really big deal for a while afterwards.
But 2018 (really late 2017) is when the prime focus of Wokeness shifted dramatically from #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo. It seems very likely to me that this lead to a significant number of people shifting into a defensive "this question seems like it's asking whether I'm on Team Woke" stance on any feminism-related question, and giving the Obviously Not Woke answer regardless of their object-level beliefs on the literal question.
> a lot of people will answer based on their tribal affiliation rather than their pedantically literal interpretation of the question
Or alternatively, they will shape their pedantically literal interpretation of the question to produce their desired answer.
For example: "A woman should have the same job opportunities as a man? ... well no, I can think of at least one job that women shouldn't have, like playing Henry VIII in a movie, therefore no".
"well no, I can think of at least one job that women shouldn't have, like playing Henry VIII in a movie, therefore no"
Sarah Bernhardt would like a word:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Bernhardt
"She played female and male roles, including Shakespeare's Hamlet.
...In June 1867, she played two roles in Athalie by Jean Racine; the part of a young woman and a young boy, Zacharie, the first of many male parts she played in her career.
...Her next success was her performance in François Coppée's Le Passant, which premiered at the Odéon on 14 January 1868 playing the part of the boy troubadour, Zanetto, in a romantic renaissance tale. Critic Théophile Gautier described the "delicate and tender charm" of her performance. It played for 150 performances, plus a command performance at the Tuileries Palace for Napoleon III and his court. Afterwards, the emperor sent her a brooch with his initials written in diamonds.
...She formally returned to the Comédie-Francaise on 1 October 1872, and quickly took on some of the more famous and demanding roles in French theatre. She played ... the male role of Cherubin in The Marriage of Figaro by Pierre Beaumarchais
...In 1898, she had another success, in the play Lorenzaccio, playing the male lead role in a Renaissance revenge drama written in 1834 by Alfred de Musset, but never before actually staged. As her biographer Cornelia Otis Skinner wrote, she did not try to be overly masculine when she performed male roles: "Her male impersonations had the sexless grace of the voices of choirboys, or the not quite real pathos of Pierrot." Anatole France wrote of her performance in Lorenzaccio: "She formed out of her own self a young man melancholic, full of poetry and of truth."
...On 20 May [1899], she premiered one of her more famous roles, playing the titular character of Hamlet in a prose adaptation which she had commissioned from Eugène Morand and Marcel Schwob. She played Hamlet in a manner which was direct, natural, and very feminine. Her performance received largely positive reviews in Paris, but mixed reviews in London. The British critic Max Beerbohm wrote "the only compliment one can conscientiously pay her is that her Hamlet was, from first to last, a truly grand dame."
In 1900, Bernhardt presented L'Aiglon, a new play by Rostand. She played the Duc de Reichstadt, the son of Napoleon Bonaparte, imprisoned by his unloving mother and family until his melancholy death in the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. L'Aiglon was a verse drama, six acts long. The 56-year-old actress studied the walk and posture of young cavalry officers and had her hair cut short to impersonate the young Duke. The Duke's stage mother, Marie-Louise of Austria, was played by Maria Legault, an actress 14 years younger than Bernhardt. The play ended with a memorable death scene; according to one critic, she died "as dying angels would die if they were allowed to." The play was extremely successful; it was especially popular with visitors to the 1900 Paris International Exposition, and ran for nearly a year, with standing-room places selling for as much as 600 gold francs. The play inspired the creation of Bernhardt souvenirs, including statuettes, medallions, fans, perfumes, postcards of her in the role, uniforms and cardboard swords for children, and pastries and cakes; the famed chef Escoffier added Peach Aiglon with Chantilly cream to his repertoire of desserts.
...In 1903, she had another unsuccessful role playing another masculine character in Werther, a gloomy adaptation of the story by German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
...From 1904 to 1906, she appeared in a wide range of parts, including ...the part of the prince-poet Landry in a version of Sleeping Beauty by Richepin and Henri Cain, and a new version of the play Pelléas and Mélisande by symbolist poet Maurice Maeterlinck, in which she played the male role of Pelléas with the British actress Mrs Patrick Campbell as Melissande.
...followed on 27 January 1907 by Les Bouffons, by Miguel Zamocois, in which she played a young and amorous medieval lord.
...In New York, she created yet another scandal when she appeared in the role of Judas Iscariot in Judas by the American playwright John Wesley De Kay. It was performed in New York's Globe Theater for only one night in December 1910 before it was banned by local authorities."
You will admit that playing Henry the eighth is a pretty specific problem though.
#10- The thing that changed was probably that it became funny to say you didn't believe in women's rights. A similar thing happens with self identified transgenderism- a lot of the same age demographic will tell you that they are trans, but also that they eat no fruits in a week or have never seen a dentist. Relevant link: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1926128833947738321
Most trend breaks aren't real!
Yes: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/most-trend-breaks-arent-real
Also, I think the COVID timing suggests it's something like the thing that affected many major surveys, except with a ~typically-sized blip for 2019. As an example of the general phenomenon of COVID-related survey worsening, David Shor noted that either people became much less authoritarian about punishment when COVID kicked off, or survey quality changed: https://x.com/davidshor/status/1669785205983289344
Or maybe people just became a little nuttier than usual for a couple years thanks to lockdowns and such.
"Survey Quality" -- people who used to not pick up the phone suddenly were bored, and home. Maybe?
#41 is complete nonsense, but I can't comment there since the comments are locked to only paid subscribers, so I'll comment here instead. The blog author's strategy seems to be to launder their own misconceptions and misunderstandings into an argument that I am in the wrong. This is a common genre of post, but I wish it wasn't.
---
"Crémieux says that after correcting for publication bias, the correlation between blood lead levels and crime is zero"
This is correct, and it is what the study shows. The correlational estimates go down to zero using trim-and-fill, FAT-PET, and FAT-PEESE. You can say some significant effect remains using FAT-PEESE, but this is a two-tailed p-value of 0.012—hardly convincing, especially given the minuscule magnitude of the effect. The other methods are not common, and are, indeed, far more contentious, helping to explain why they're relatively non-standard. For example, the AP in WAAP is personally selected, and there's no common 'go-to' step-function model.
This is the result that is relevant to my comment, which is for (1) correlations (i.e., Partial Correlation Coefficients, or PCCs, which I showed) in (2) the full sample of estimates. I see no reason to highlight results that come from subsets of the data, which is what the author wanted. Generally, the reason people want to look at subsets is because they're upset that they got a certain result in their full data when they wanted another one. That seems to be what happened here with the author of the article, as there is quite literally no good reason to prefer elasticities over correlations.
You get a similar result looking at Panel B, which is a select subsample that addresses endogeneity, for which the effect sizes are uniformly smaller than in Panel A. Why did I not highlight this result? Because it wasn't needed, as it achieved the same result as in Panel A. This is the only panel for which there is an overriding theoretical concern that can justify looking at a subset of the data, because its difference from Panel A is substantive: it's about estimates from studies that deal with endogeneity, and that's actually important.
The article quotes the lead (hehe) author seemingly accusing me intentionally removing the bottom of the chart to obscure something. This is curious. It makes it sound like there was malfeasance, but that is not really possible. The real reason I did not show the bottom of the chart was because I was posting a result to Twitter, and posting two stacked charts is not ergonomic, nor was it necessary. The study is open access and I linked it, so obviously nothing was hidden and anyone suggesting as much is in the wrong. The suggestion of error on my part here, from both the study author and the post author, is totally unwarranted and an insult not just to me, but to the readers of the post.
The next part where the lead author of the study and the author of that post go wrong is in assuming that there's any reason to pick the elasticities over the correlation coefficients. In fact, there's only good reason not to.
Firstly, why *might* we want the elasticities? For interpretability. That is pretty much it. If you apply any deterministic one-to-one transformation to an estimate—whether transforming z to r or r to an elasticity as you would change Celcius to Fahrenheit—this does not switch the estimand. This merely puts the estimate on a different reporting scale. There can be no justification for subsetting to the elasticity subsample unless these studies systematically differ in a way that informs us about something that differs in that subset. These studies would need to be different in a way that matters for us to justify preferring their results to the full-sample ones.
The lead author *never* justified that decision, nor did the authors of that study preregister anything that justified focusing in on the elasticity subsample. The convenience of interpreting and using elasticities is not a reason to prefer them for estimating an overall effect size, it is, instead, a convenient excuse to trick people into thinking there's a result when there isn't actually, by getting them to look at a rather arbitrary subset of the data.
Secondly, I said "pretty much it." To convert a PCC to an elasticity depends on the means and standard deviations from particular studies. The PCC and the elasticity will share the same sign, but the magnitudes can be inflated or deflated according to the relative size of the standard deviations in the studies.
In this case, there was likely inflation relative to the full sample, as the composition of the respective samples differed in ways that seem to be related to the scale of effect size changes. For example, individual-level studies have a different shift in effect sizes relative to area-level studies, and studies that address endogeneity are similar. The mean ratios will tend to deflate effect sizes, the SD ratio will tend to inflate effect sizes, and the residual SD ratio will tend to blow up effect size and be very fragile in the face of small errors (which will blow up effect sizes).
But does this even matter? The elasticities from the different studies are not comparable to one another. The meta-regressions don't fix this issue, as there's obviously not enough power or enough or even the right variables to control away all the relevant between-study heterogeneity, even assuming all the estimates are precise enough. Moreover, a meta-regression with converted elasticites is almost nonsense, as estimates are sensitive to controls first via the PCC, and again through the residual SD ratio. There's a lot more to this, but, basically, PCCs are preferable because they are unit-free, standardized, location-invariant, dispersion-invariant, insensitive to the control set except through the residual covariance, and they measure a linear association where the form is implicit and uniform. This means the PCCs deliver estimates of between-study heterogeneity that reflect genuine variation in association, whereas the functional form of elasticities is log-log and with level conversion, estimates are doubly incomparable. The extra heterogeneity from sample means and dispersions leads to prediction intervals that are wider and weights that are more uneven.
It's almost funny how badly the lead author of the paper eschewed thinking here. They said that "when we use elasticities rather than PCCs there is a clear effect". Is there?! It looks basically the same as the estimates with the PCCs for me, and the publication bias estimates mostly become useless with the elasticities! Why useless? Because the scale factor co-moves with study size, creating a mechanical association between effect magnitude and standard errors, that almost all bias tests interpret as publication bias. You can no longer cleanly interpret FAT-PET, FAT-PEESE, trim-and-fill, IV-Egger/SSc, WAAP, etc. Selection models are potentially still fine, but no one is selecting on your transformed quantity, so they're basically not applicable here when the goal there is to leverage conscious selection, so it's pretty much pointless.
I feel like this is already clear, but *why would we not prefer elasticities?* Because to compute them, we're needlessly subsetting to a non-preregistered sample that we know does differ from the rest, and for which the relevant controls to even attempt making this subset comparable are unavailable. You cannot even safely use controls for this without high precision, which this study does not have! The joke of a meta-regression (which includes a FAT estimate you now know is biased if you didn't already) ends up being like asking us to believe a subset PSM result with just a few common, minimally informative covariates for the matching. Or, perhaps closer to home for people who read a lot of the stuff I post, it's like adjusting for a handful of variables and leaving behind a bunch of residual confounding that won't disappear until you have a design that can take it out, like a twin-control (analogous design), but nevertheless thinking you're A-OK.
I'm not going to belabor this point: practically no thinking went into Higney's response, and absolutely no thinking went into the article this person wrote where they just catalogued Higney's nonsense response as if it was some sort of debunking of anything I said, instead of what it really was, which was thoughtless yammering.
The irony of this is that I was accused of cherrypicking, when I merely showed the full-sample result, which was given in the most readily interpretable metric available. This is ironic because, on the other side, there's no argument supplied for looking at a pretty random subset of the data, with results given in a metric for which we're not supplied sufficient information by the authors, and for which we know there's incomparability between studies. If you want to cherrypick, preregister and do a real, severe test; if you want to be honest, just quote the top-line results like I did.
"Crémieux has semi-retracted his tweet on lead and crime" is an odd statement. It's true that I do not trust the lead author because of their ineptitude and surliness and that I think a large portion of the study should be retracted because the methods are nonsense that never got properly justified. That I'm holding out judgment more strongly because of distrust is not much of a revision though—to get at that, they would need to have asked me how much it was. They could've likely understood this or even just been prompted to ask me if they clicked into the very next comment in my thread, where I said "Maybe it's fine. But I'll have to sit down with it and reassemble the data to make sure of that."
The lead author's ineptitude is visible from the use of inappropriate models, the unjustified preferencing of transformed estimates without an appropriate justification, and so on. The surliness was demonstrated by the defensiveness and the fact that they blocked me immediately upon seeing my initial tweet. They never actually interacted with me at all, never questioned anything I said to me, never asked me to revise anything, and they never even made an argument for using their preferred sets of estimates—ever! They just jumped to blocking me and then going 'No, if you use my likely cherrypicked estimates, then everything is good and they are wrong :)'.
Lexer wrongly assumed the surliness comment had to do with some additional discussion between Higney and I. I cannot, for the life of me, get how they came to that conclusion, or how they thought it was acceptable to publish their nonsense explanation given that they never asked me about this subject at all. I would've immediately told them about Higney senselessly getting combative when he's in the wrong, why he was wrong, and about his blocking me. *If they asked.*
The blogpost author summarizes:
- That they have reading comprehension problems. I posted the full-sample result corrected for publication bias, which is all I ever claimed to post. They claimed that I cited a study claiming the opposite of what I claimed it did, but they are obviously wrong. Go read the study. It's linked. Their first summary claim is impossible to support without acting in bad faith or being ignorant. Given all of the above, you can probably safely pick two.
- That they cannot imagine why someone would post an image to be clearer on Twitter, and that they are not willing to ask that someone their motivations for things they do before making poor assumptions that turn out to be incorrect and unwarranted.
- That they don't understand the meaning of cherrypicking and they live in an ironic world where the person who cherrypicks is in the right and the person who cites the full-sample estimate is actually doing the cherrypicking.
- Again, that they make a bunch of unwarranted assumptions. They could have tried asking me why I said what I did instead of making these silly assumptions.
This paper should have its cherrypicking sections retracted, and its main results kept, but only if the author also supplies the underlying data. If I had been a reviewer, I would have forced the authors to provide much stronger reasoning and far greater detail to justify the cherrypicking they seem to have engaged in, and I also would have requested they post the data to a public repository so people could re-analyze their work and the likely fragility of the elasticity transformations and their use, in particular.
As to my own errors, I have a public, continually updated errors page. If I make an error, people can always point it out to me and I'll update there if I actually did make an error. I did not make an error in this case, but the author of that post and the article did.
#6 - The Cate Hall post on testosterone really elides the distinction between "correcting a hormonal deficiency" (which she had, her T levels were low for a woman) and "hormonal sex differences". If you're anemic, taking an iron supplement will also improve your cognition and energy levels, but that doesn't mean that you can megadose iron to get superpowers. I like the pinned top comment on Cate's post:
>The difference in testosterone concentration between men and women is *enormous*. Even when women's testosterone peaks in their 20s, the concentration for women at the 90th percentile is only one-fifth of the concentration for men at the 10th percentile. The medians differ by a factor of ~15. For most intents and purposes, these distributions do not overlap...
> Despite this, the distributions of traits that are associated with testosterone--libido, aggression, and more--overlap considerably between men and women. This implies that men are less sensitive to testosterone.
> The proper lesson isn't "men play life on easy"; it's "healthy people play life on easy".
Testosterone is overrated 😎
Testosterone is brain poison.
Easy Is good 😊
I really enjoyed 18, it's always nice to see when others share your perspective, aptly summarized in the first Black article: "Bentham’s Bulldog makes invalid arguments."
Re #9: That 50 billion figure is probably for *all* of Reality Labs, including stuff like smartglasses which are just starting to really take off. It's not like it all went to Horizon Worlds as lots of commenters tend to imply.
Not to say there weren't some failures along the way too of course, like the now-canceled Portal line or the Quest Pro.
> 16: Related from Decker: suppose that Democrats promise that, once they regain control of the government, they’ll pay universities all the counterfactual funding they would have gotten if Trump hadn’t cut their budget. Then universities borrow money now against that future windfall. What goes wrong?
One obvious issue is that there aren't any private companies able (and willing) to fund such a massive risky bet. The scale is way too big and it is very risky as well.
Another problem is that even if there were, the political economy of it sucks. Imagine how that looks. If it actually happened, it would look like "the government taxing you to give massive amounts of money to hedge funds for no reason" (to reward them for a risky bet in the past), which is one of the least popular things you could do.
Far from convincing me I had missed something, I came away from the post on POSIWID "only more sure of all I thought was true" -- namely, that POSIWID is a vague slogan which people who aren't predisposed to rigorous analysis seize on for basically aesthetic reasons. The worst thing about this particular defense of POSIWID is that it is, as Feynman liked to say, "not even wrong." "You can disagree with Beer’s argument," writes the author, and then summarizes that argument in Beer's words: "[The observer's] perception of purpose in any one system is ... a function of the relationships that he maintains across the complicated webs of interactive systems, one with another." Sorry, but did I miss something? I don't think there actually *is* an argument to disagree with here. This is such a vaguely stated hypothesis that there is no conceivable evidence that could invalidate it. But by another token, it is unlikely to offer anyone productive insights.
Beer challenges us to redefine the word "purpose" -- and then what? Where does this model take us? About five feet to the left, I claim, and no further. The problem with POSIWID is that, if taken as a concrete claim, it is obviously untrue, and if taken as a vague suggestion (a "lens"), it is banal.
Basically, POSIWID is exactly the sort of brainworm which invades the brains of smart people and makes them spout nonsense. It's exactly the sort of brainworm which Rationalism was right to try to destroy.
#19 links an article from 2006. I asked o3 and after a couple of back and forth this is his conclusion: back in 2006 researchers suggested that blocking the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) might offer a new way to treat depression. Nearly two decades later that insight still holds water, yet the path forward has proved narrow. So far the antidepressant signal we see from GR antagonists is only modest, and it seems to appear mainly in biologically distinct sub-groups—patients whose illness is clearly driven by an overactive stress-hormone system.
Link to full chat (Italian except the last message, sorry): https://chatgpt.com/share/6864f0eb-4900-800b-a3a9-eae767eed3f5
The Republican Allan Shivers tactic: did it work???
Go short on any company that makes money on selling shrimp 🦐 Bentham is coming for your bucks ! 😆
#39: I think this misunderstands the labor force participation link to fertility in two ways.
First, to say that female labor force participation is a primary driver of TFR is not to say it’s the only or predominant one. Definitely my favorite example is Iran’s successful decrease of fertility rates from over 6 to under 2 within about 20 years of the Islamic Revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Iran#Islamic_Republic_of_Iran), which was mostly due to a concerted governmental program, especially after Khomeini died in 1989 (https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2017/12/iran-in-transition-the-implications-of-the-islamic-republics-changing-demographics?lang=en). I actually hadn’t realized that because of the Iran-Iraq war, in the first years after the revolution women had a heightened role in the domestic labor force (as well as serving as soldiers). But I think most agree that the free contraception etc. was more responsible, and the revolution included a lot of restrictions on female labor force participation, though I had trouble finding exact numbers. In both Iran and India it’s hard to ignore the huge decrease in child mortality (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN?locations=IN-IR); in India between 1993 and 2021 under-5 mortality went from 116 per 1,000 live births to 31 (!), and there’s the classic explanation that you have fewer kids when you are less worried that they’ll all just die.
The second thing I think is missed here is the intensive margin— women who are already working having fewer kids. As wages grow, opportunity cost of having children increases even for working mothers, given the time (and reductions in advancement opportunities) childcare requires even if you stay in your job. GDP per capita in India rose almost fourfold between 1993 and 2021 (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locations=IN) so this seems like an important factor even outside the labor force participation rate channel.
I don't see the opportunity cost argument. At higher wages, you lose more money by having children and working less in a formal job, but also, money is worth less at the margin. A, say, 30% reduction in income (or a, say, 60% reduction in per-family-member income) hurts about as much if you're poor as if you're richer, perhaps more if you're poor. That is, well-being is roughly logarithmic in income, except it's near vertical at the bottom where you starve to death if you have less money, and it flattens out at the top.
Keep in mind that each kid you have "stretches" your utility from money. Because it now needs to cover more people. So more kids has a push and pull on labor market participation. Robust support for working families (paid leave, child care solutions, health care) could help. The US is at 1.6 without any of those things. Of course it would mean higher taxes so unlikely to happen here anytime soon
It's true that the marginal utility of money increases if there are more family members (when considering per-family income rather than per-family-member income); to put it in another way, the per-family-member income decreases if there are more children even beyond the decrease caused by working less in a formal job.
As for the rest of your comment: If you want to incentivize more children, why give money (or services costing money) to *working* families, rather than to families with (many) children in general? If a family finds that they prefer to work less in formal jobs and do the childcare work themselves, as opposed to both parents working a lot in formal jobs and having others do childcare for them, that's fine too and shouldn't be disincentivized compared to the latter.
most traits are considerably hereditary (see ACX for IQ) - "giving mostly to mothers with more kids" will proportionally more increase kids from mothers who can not hold a job worth keeping. While tax breaks for kids will increase kids for parents who can and do. If you ONLY want more kids - idk to send them to the trenches or organ-harvesting or what? - paying those poor+without job-prospects+revealed fertility inclination is the obvious way to go. Or source internationally. Wherever women offer their bodies for the surrogacy - or just go bag-ladies/"gypsies" of div. ethnics/women from Mali/Niger/Somalia. On the other hand, you can just let the babies grow up there and let them get into your country when they are 18. Heard that is somehow unpopular even among MAGAs.
There's a point in incentivizing families with more earning ability to have more children, but specifically subsidizing working mothers with children (i.e. deciding based on actual choice to earn in the formal economy, rather than ability to earn) also incentivizes mothers with fixed abilities to keep working in the formal economy rather than do childcare themselves, even if otherwise the latter would be more preferable. In other words, it can make them keep a job even if it would otherwise not be worth keeping. If you want to subsidize families with high abilities with children, decide based on something like their income before they had children (some countries do that in some form), the income of the parent that keeps working full time, or some other way that's closer to measuring ability to earn (and willingness to work) rather than whether they choose to do the childcare work themselves, or do more formal work and pay others to do care for their children.
Measuring average incomes is not easy, measuring hypothetical ones … invites fraud and lots of other 2nd order effects. Real tax exemptions on actually earned(+declared) income - much better. We get around 10k $ a year for our kids, if I’d get 10k less tax instead: hey, I might even start to work full-time. Instead I get considerable additional savings (free kindergarten) for keeping my salary low. I react to incentives, sue me. - In real life, aka politics, not paying the basic bills of single woman who could neither keep a partner nor a job while taking care of her kid(s) - will never happen. With the known results.
Wow: "'giving mostly to mothers with more kids' will proportionally more increase kids from mothers who can not hold a job worth keeping."
I think a more accurate framing is that "giving mostly to mothers with more kids" will proportionally more increase kids from mothers who like mothering, which is linked to better mothering and better outcomes for kids.
Most families prefer to have a stay-at-home parent for their young children. Very few jobs seem "worth keeping" to a mother of a new baby. It's mostly financial hardship that forces mothers of babies to go back to work early.
Daycare also causes worse outcomes for kids, even controlling for income etc. So why would we want to subsidize an option that most people hate and that's worse for most people? Let's just subsidize kids in general instead.
I agree, it will lead to (relatively) more mothers who prefer getting paid say 1k/month for having kids (idk about their mothering) than for paid work. Which will be relatively more true for women who do not expect to ever get a 6-digit-income. Those who actually dislike being mothers will probably still choose not to become one, one hopes. I like to quote Nick Hornby’s review:
The book "Random Family" by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is partly about overpopulation – in the Bronx. Coco and Jessica have so many babies, by so many fathers, and their children have so many half-siblings, that at times it’s impossible to keep the names straight. By the time the two women are in their early thirties, they have given birth to Mercedes, Nikki, Nautica, Pearl, LaMonte, Serena, Brittany, Stephany, Michael, Matthew, Torres, Puma, Willy, Kodak, Wishman and Frankie. … (I) was remembering my first pregnancy scare that helped me to fully understand the stupidity and purposelessness of rants about fecklessness .... It was the summer before I went to college, and my girlfriend’s period was late, and I spent two utterly miserable weeks convinced that my life was over. (W)e were terrified: I would just as soon have gone to prison as started a family. What 'Random Family' explains, movingly and convincingly and at necessary length, is that the future as Coco and Jessica and the fathers of their children see it really isn’t worth the price of a condom, and they’re right. I eventually became a father for the first time around the same age that Jessica became a grandmother. - (Nick Hornby ‚Stuff I’ve Been Reading‘ Sept. 2003)
I'm always a fan of taking changing marginal utilities at different levels of income into account, but this just implies a certain "drag" on the effect, where the increased wages provide a higher opportunity cost (in dollar terms) for having children but maybe the marginal utility of each dollar is decreased because you're richer. It doesn't tell you what the net effect is. Enough of a wage increase will still be worth more in utility terms than a lower wage at lower income levels. Either way it's enough to push back on the idea that a flat labor participation rate with a declining fertility rate *necessarily* means that there's no causal relation between labor market conditions and fertility.
Also, given that India's GDP per capita is still $10,000/year, they're definitely nowhere near the truly flat part of that utility curve-- more money has a very high utility here. Less than at $2,000, sure, but these are still some very poor people.
(Apologies for the different profiles, for some reason my original comment was with an outdated profile)
I'm pretty sure that having your income decrease by x%, while having to support y times more family members, always hurts at least as much at a lower starting income as at a higher one.
In a bit more detail: Simply considering the reduction in total family income, or in per-family-member income, doesn't tell the whole story, because having more family members increases living costs, but less than linearly. We can define something like an "equivalent family size", where a two-adult household has, say, 1.7 times the living costs of an adult living alone at a given standard of living, 2 adults and 2 children have 2.9 times the cost, 2 adults and 4 children 3.7 times the cost etc. My point isn't the exact numbers, but that I think the "equivalent family size" of a given number of adults and children stays roughly the same at different income levels, and a family's standard of living is a function of its income divided by the equivalent family size (with money spent on external childcare providers like daycare or babysitters subtracted from the income to make things comparable between families doing their own childcare vs. paying external providers).
So if having 4 children instead of 2 increases the equivalent family size by 28% (as in my example numbers), and reduces family income by, say, 20% because the parents have to do more housework/childcare, then it reduces the per-equivalent-family-member income by 37%, and that hurts at least as much if they start with a lower income as with a higher one.
The most Rationalist sentence ever: "Michael J Sandel and I are mortal ideological enemies, except for the part where we reluctantly agree on most facts."
from: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-meritocracy
>murder declined because of a law-and-order backlash to Defund The Police
1. The police were never defunded
2. The police do not, on aggregate, Stop Murders.
The claim wasn’t that the police was defunded.
If the police weren't defunded, which they were not, how did Defund the Police affect the murder rate? Were a bunch of people going to commit murder until they remembered that they like the police now?
I think the theory is something like what this article (from 2020) points to:
Even though it’s early to speculate about the extent to which police are disengaging or being less proactive, it seems clear that people are becoming more distrustful of police. Not all people, by any means, but the daily drumbeat of protests and social media complaints about police violence is bound to have an effect. “The community, or certain communities, are drawing further from the police as a result of anger, frustration and fear,” Rosenfeld says. “They’re less likely to call police and more likely to take disputes into their own hands.”
Gang members don’t call police to settle disputes, but people around them might. Communities have now adopted an ethos of “no snitching,” Ture says, citing the still-raw emotions surrounding the killing of George Floyd
https://www.governing.com/now/are-police-protests-leading-to-an-increase-in-crime.html
Another way to phrase this argument is that the police quit doing their jobs because they got their feelings hurt she thousands of people died as a result
This is not what the quoted part of the article says. It says that people trust the police less as a result of George Floyd, call them less, and crime ensues.
Also, you seem to be angry at me, when I am just trying to answer your questions. I didn't express an opinion on this theory at all (and don't have one)
That's the "retreat to the donut shop" hypothesis. It seems plausible--incentives matter a lot--but I don't know if it is true or not.
Have you seen "Seattle is dying"? Police quit doing their jobs is MUCH less likely than a selection of "the police who like beating up on anyone who bothers them" are the only ones who stay in cities that actively hostile to cops doing their actual jobs.
When your DA keeps on letting the people wielding violent skateboards and setting themselves on fire via molotovs off the hook, and you're on the hook if the "antifa pets" get hurt, at all, while you're "nicely" throwing them in the pokey....
Here, have some protest coffee! (contains meth.)
Free "get out of jail" cards for distributing meth and raping women sound like a reason to figure you'd get off scot free for murder. (Aka soros' DAs).
So I don't think this second one is true. As I understand it, there's good evidence that more police lead to fewer crimes overall, and it would seem surprising if that didn't include murder.
I found a survey of experts in criminology and related subjects that bears on this question here: https://cjexpertpanel.org/surveys/policing-and-public-safety/
The TLDR is that the expert consensus (though not at all universal) seems to be that increasing police funding decreases crime. Interestingly ,if you look at individual responses, many of the experts (both those who agreed and disagreed that raising funding for police decreased crime) qualified their answers--yes if that means increasing number of police, no if that means raising salaries or something like that.
It's plausible that having more police around would decrease the rates of property crime, but murder is comparatively very rare, impulsive and often committed in private. The average murder is not "gangbanger shoots gangbanger" but "man shoots wife, girlfriend, or wife's boyfriend"
I'd expect more police to lead to fewer gang shootouts, fewer personal beefs turning into knife/gun fights, and fewer 7/11 clerks shot secondary to fewer armed robberies. This doesn't do anything for domestic violence murders, but it can still lower the total murder rate by a reasonable amount.
How many police would you need to have, in order to have a sub-2 minute response time to get to all 7/11s in your jurisdiction? (Armed robberies work because the guy gets away, and hides for a while -- if you aren't arresting them on the spot, you aren't really having "police" help the issue.)
Police side jobs wind up stopping "personal beefs from turning into gun fights", by creating neutral zones. Police themselves rarely create neutral zones as part of their job. Patrols do not do this.
I was under the impression that the average murder in the US, and definitely in large cities, really is gangbamger shoots gangbanger. And if not, the marginal murder that might be prevented or not is.
Source?
That doesn't seem right, unless there are just lots and lots of wife's boyfriends getting killed: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6.xls
#10: Perhaps, some of these young men simply started realising what implementation of "gender equality" means for them in practice. A good recent illustration is this tweet from a pretty moderate and non-woke Economist: https://x.com/TheEconomist/status/1933297786562265189 "For decades a big story in education has been the ascent of girls. They now outperform boys in most subjects. But one subject remains a problem" . So the moderate take on "equality" is that boys must lose all positional goods and keeping even one is a problem that needs to be solved. Of course, calling this "equality" is a cheap orwellian rip-off, hence my use of quotation marks. More radical woke and feminist takes are, not suprisingly, even less appealing to young men. So why would one expect them to continue supporting this?
https://blog.waldrn.com/p/american-boys-have-become-less-supportive
The original post that the graph is from shows that religious belief is a good predictor of the decrease, but it doesn’t have a lot of details.
It’s not a “predictor” please don’t use causal language for correlates
Sorry, I’ve never taken a stats class. That’s my mistake. Can you explain the difference so I’m better in the future?
A better term to use is “association”, predictor is sometimes used in papers but it can easily confuse a lay audience since we don’t know the nature of the association