I am very interested in surrogacy. Would you happen to know of good writing related to the benefits and costs of surrogacy, preferably with an ACX-like worldview?
Do you think your preference for surrogacy over adoption would decrease with additional children, assuming you wanted more than one child?
This is what I first thought of when I began reading your sentence, 'If your interest is in policy...' I have been thinking about the likely consequences of the overturning of Roe v. Wade; thus, about who decides to adopt, when, why.
> I think the real point there is that it's difficult to separate moral judgements to aesthetic preferences, and I think there's some validity to that
True. I suspect our brain uses similar mechanisms for ethical and aesthetical intuitions. In the end some things just feel wrong and it's indeed hard to distinguish whether this wrongness has moral value or not. But this is the thing, when one threads on a risky path which can so easily lead astray, it's important to be constantly vigilant. To do your best to separate these confusing entities which our brain tend to mix in the same category, being an imperfect machine it is.
And when you meet a person who knows how hard it is to separate ethics and aesthetics who is self aware enough to see in great details how his mind invents ratiolizations for some of his views and actions which are actually based on simple disgust... and who then endorses these views anyway, and refuses to do the necessary mental work to figure out what is actually ethics and what is just aesthetics - this is extremely uncanny. To me it doesn't feel like stupidity. Nor like being evil. It's some very weird brand of irrationality which let people believe that they have successfully lied to themselves.
And to be clear, I think Hanania's essay is great and I'd prefer such clear line of thought amoung conservatives much more than traditional dodging and weaving around their prejudices. It's a breath of fresh, even though, extremely uncanny air.
> But focusing conservatives and their disgust seems like a way of scoring points against the enemy.
I mean sure, you can look at it like that. Hanania revealed his disgust based motivation thus showed some vulnerability and his outgroup is using it to score points. Now you are comming to his defence claiming that the outgroup is even worse that they are rationalising just as much plus lack the self awareness, and now I'm countering it with whatever I'm writing in this post. And so on and on.
Personally, I find such approach fruitless. Sure, people are indeed playing such status games. But focus on this meta level too much and you'll miss the actual thing that is being talked about. Can we just smugly acknowledge that something like this, with all its signalling and counter signalling is going on in the background and talk about the objective level, instead? Not because we are some naive fools who do not understand how the game is being played, but because we are wise independent thinkers who are expecting to find interesting insight. I unironically commit to giving you lots of status points in my mind if you accept this offer.
So, what's the objective level of focusing on conservative disgust? As Hanania more or less corectly mentioned, one of the fundamental liberal ideas is that the reason people are not liberals is due to their primitive impulses such as tribalism, ignorance and yes disgust. Those impulses had their evolutionary resons but now they are mostly irrational Smart people upon reflection can combat and overcome them. And that's how we can all go in the bright future where everyone has dealt with their prejudices.
Liberals know that this is true, because we have experienced this in the first place. Well, at least liberals from the conservative countries, like myself, definetely did. We were raised with prejudices. We questioned them, we found out they were baseless, we combated our disgust and won. We used to be homophobes, transphobes, xenophobes, bigots, racists and sexists and now we are not, or at least much, much less because it's always an uphil battle. And if we could, others can too.
And when we meet a conservative who claims that they "have nothing against black/trans/gay people but..." we kind of suspect that they are lying to themselves. That they just didn't do the necessary work to self reflect and grow beyond their primitive bigotry, that if they actually didn't have anything agains these people they wouldn't be persuing their policies.
I've never endoursed such suspicion very much. Like sure, my personal experience and the experience of my ingroup is pointing in this direction, but it's not very nice to think that you know other people inner lives better than themselves and it doesn't usually lead to the productive discussion. And it can be just my own biases, typical mind fallacy, strawmanning the outgroup, etc. Claiming that your opponents are rationalizing is always cheap, having strong evidence in favour of it is the hard part.
And here is a smart conservative with great self reflection validating this important liberal point, that indeed the ultimate source of his views is disgust. It's not just about scoring points in the political battle, first of all it's about the truth. It's a very important piece of evidence and I'm very glad that we have it.
I do not think that, for instance, outgroup hatered that many democrats feel toward republicans is the same thing as the disgust that transphobes feel toward trasgenders. While thery are similar in many ways, the direction of causality is the opposite.
In "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup" Scott says:
> The Blue Tribe has performed some kind of very impressive act of alchemy, and transmuted all of its outgroup hatred to the Red Tribe.
I believe this alchemy worked like this: the first generation of liberals overcome their irrational disgust the way I explained. They see the bright future where everyone is enlightened and liberal. They start spreading their liberalism and it works. Until they stumble upon people who do not want to overcome their prejudices. At first it seems that these people do not understand that they can do it. So liberals try to explain it, but to no avail. It seems that these people really identify with their bigotry, they do not want the bright future, they actually hate the idea. And so, after the initial disbelief, the liberals arrive to conclusion that these weird people are the outgroup That there is no other choice than to once again return to the combatative framework. They start perseiving them this way on the intellectual level and soon their emotions adapt. And thus the outgroup hatered which can manifest very similar to disgust.
Now, it may be the case that the next generation of liberals may start hating the outgroup instinctively, before they knew the actual reasons. I'm less qualified to speak for them. But the initial direction of causality is very important, nevertheless. For conservatives its disgust->rationalisation, for liberals its intellectual exploration->disgust. And while I personally endourse neither, the second path looks more reasonable.
I don't think that people who are not already searching for a rationalization of such views could be persuaded by this line of reasoning. It's the same old motivated cognition, essentiually, the same statement as "science is also based on faith so I can believe whatever I want", dressed in the rational aesthetics, with all the talk about evolution, percentages and irrationality, but without substance and making the same non-sequitur.
If human cognition is broken it's the reason to be extremely careful and vigilant, improving upon the broken foundation, systematically making it less broken. The idea that it somehow is a reason to embrace the outside view from hundred years ago is bizzare. People from hundred years ago were even less aware of their brokenness, and had even less tools to deal with it, their systems were even less evolved.
The same goes for using Chesterton Fence as a universal argument agains change, instead of an argument in favour of understanding the reasons of current order before improving it.
The way you talked about Chesterton Fence clearly frames it as an argument againts change. Tradition is smarter than you so don't try to change them. Just follow your aesthetics which is shaped by this traditions, amoung othe things. And this is a universal argument because it can be made about any tradition, any aesthetical preference, any fence without investigating the merits of it. This may not be the way you intended to invoke the Chesterton Fence, but to the best of my understanding that's the way you did and it's a pretty common trope amoung conservative-leaning people in general.
I agree that change is inevitable and that not any change is progress. This doesn't follow that no progress is real, though. The problem that the AI risk is an example of is disproportional progress in some spheres without corresponding progress in the others. Progress is an uphill battle, which doesn't make it not real.
I don't think either of us is qualified to talk about most people and their happiness. Your numbers do not look probable to me. Last time I checked there were subcultures even for not the brightest people plus getting married and having kids was still an option. It's true that there are people who struggle with social networks in our modern, rapidly changing world and it's a valid concern. Would you say that the situation in this regard is worse than in middle ages? I don't think so.
I also find completely backwards the idea that old traditions can be of much help in this regard. They used to be helpful in the environment they were selected for. Now the environment has changed. Thus we are developping new norms, fitting the modern world. Fallback to the old heuristics isn't a viable option.
> There were also some interesting thoughts in that article and the comments about why so few real scholars are as outraged as he or I would expect by the presence of the charlatans in their midst.
Personally, I find Hanania's take that it's due to everybody being either stupid on conformist or both, to be the least impressive part of his essay. I think that people just do not consider the things, that Hanania and probably you think are bullshit and pseudoscience, to actually be bullshit and pseudoscience. And that they actually have good reasons to think that due to current memetic climate.
Here is how it works from inside, from my own perspective. I expect some of the stuff discussed in modern social sciences to be wrong on a general principle of imperfect human cognition. Though I can't really trust my intuition to distinguish which is which. Some things that may look bizzare to me would actually be true, and some would indeed be wrong. I'm not an expert in the field and I'm not trying too hard to be one, so by default I assume that the ratio of good science to bad science is okayish in this field, of course we would like do better and all that, but probably people who are studying and researching social sciences know what they are doing, again just on priors.
Then I hear some people claim, that actually social scientists do not know what they are doing, that they are all crackpots and so on. Huge controversy is going on, and every side assumes that the other one is arguing in bad faith and can't be trusted. Being a currious rational person, I investigate what the people on the other side are talking about. And turns out that they are outraged at something completely reasonable as critical legal studies. I observe how they start huge smear campain, very resembling the way propaganda works in my own country, strawmanning and misinterpreting the facts and just in time to capitalize it into more votes in the upcomming election. This inoculates me from their position. Next time my priors will be that these people are likely wrong, but their arguments are still worth checking. And the time after that I would be even less sure about the possible merits of their arguments. At some moment I'll just start assuming that these people are wrong on priors. And those who agree with these people, well they are probably just stupid conformists or something.
I believe this process is somewhat symmetric. Polarization in the society systematically innoculates us from the other side of the discourse. And even knowing about it doesn't help much. It's not the question of individual failure as truthseeker or non-conformist. it's a systemic issue, a broken memetic equilibrium.
That's a great one. I didn't know that they were used by intellectuals; wouldn't the dangers of usage (excluding the idea of the benefits for the moment) have been high?
I personally like the idea that the growing popularity of coffee/coffee-houses did manifest an actual change in intellectual cultures (or at least, cultures of wit)
Extremely interesting, thanks. (I especially like "You've set mathematics back a month.")
There's scepticism about amphetamines today involving the idea that we're 'overstimulated' so it's good to hear that people prior the the internet also discussed similar problems anyway. I'll read more about it, since it would be interesting to know more about how young he was when he started using them (I doubt he began his mathematical career whilst on them?).
I'm personally too paranoid to try amphetamines; are there substances which you've tried which produce similar effects? I've heard some people talk about caffeine that way (obviously not a s strong), but I'm doubtful. Have you been off of them for any amount of time (e.g. a month or longer) and noticed similar? I don't know where to begin to find out more about ADHD, so I'll have a look around to see if Scott's written much about it.
I'm sorry you have it so severely, I know people with it really bad and I can't imagine trying to live with it unmedicated.
I also have similar experiences with coffee- a friend has recently advised me to try drinking it after meals, or with a more sugar/milk with it(?) and oddly enough it seems to help. Not sure about the sugar helping to be honest-- I've had mixed results --but definitely after eating it's much better (an Italian friend also says that's the best way to drink it).
It still strikes me as a very deep problem, and not one which leaves me confident in our current handling of it... I also wanted to look at how much it has been increasing over time, but it's still very early so I guess it's hard to tell how much of the increase is just improved diagnoses-- add to that the fact that many people get a diagnosis when they don't really need it and it gets harder to evaluate the bigger picture.
Same experience. Large doses of caffeine cause me to have a severe crash. non-XR adderall will cause a crash but its mostly me just being tired, not headache or anything.
Caffeine (up to 100mg at a time) with L-theanine avoids the crash. Therefore I default to tea for my caffeine.
I am also a programmer with ADHD (inattentive type and moderate). The meds help me get started, I think of it like getting the ball rolling. Then I fall into the groove and can get stuff done.
Thanks for responding! If you have something which works as well as you describe then that's great! I think personally I'm too worried about it affecting me in some way I can't understand/undo, but people make good use of these substances for long times, and the alternative seems much much worse. I wasn't advocating you try going without them btw, I just wanted to know what the experience was like. I was just thinking about how Erdös wasn't using them until later in his life, and was absolutely a high achiever early on in mathematics, despite his account that going without them made him 'ordinary'. I don't really know what to make of that, other than that the problems can become more pronounced as you get older? I guess I shouldn't draw too much from single cases. Thanks again
Whilst she was a prodigious thinker and writer, the terrible judgement that she exhibited in her personal life certainly doesn't provide a good advertisement for whatever pharmaceuticals she was guzzling.
Scott's post about 'AD(H)D medication basically being meth' made me update towards 'there IS a plausibly/feasibly reasonable way to use these drugs safely, effectively, and with net benefits'.
I hadn't realized this thought was there in Michael Pollan, but I did have this thought once in a conversation with some friends that if the rise of capitalism/enlightenment is connected with the transition from alcohol as the primary daily drink (before safe municipal water) to caffeine as the primary daily drink (boiled water is safe even if it's non-alcoholic), then there might be an interesting further change if cannabis starts displacing alcohol and/or caffeine as the primary psychoactive substance people consume.
I would expect cannabis to displace alcohol some - I've heard that combo described as "pissing into the wind". But I don't think cannabis will displace caffeine at all.
Another good/crazy theory is that it accounts for the decline in testosterone (and that this helps explain some things about the Amish). Of course, there are plenty of better-attested explanations for the endocrine damage we seem to be taking.
Aha- I like that. Friends have spoken to me about pipe-smoking being less damaging because you aren't supposed to inhale -- if that's the case I wonder if it would still produce the 'beneficial' effects at all? Luttwak's solution (nicotine patches) loses some of the charm!
Endocrine disruptors --Bisphenols and so on? I recently read about (typical) shampoos and soaps having a similar effect, and with the whole plastic/micro-plastic issue & pesticides in many things it's very easy to become paranoid about 'disruptive' stuff being everywhere. Hopefully it's not as bad as that...
Legal amphetamine production is at an all time high. There was an American crackdown in 1970, but by 2010 it had returned to the previous peak and just kept going up.
Mix-a-Lot probably just helped kickstart the conversation. I think Hanania basically has it right, that the Internet "democratized" male preferences, which are much more rooted in biology than fashion, by getting past "gatekeepers" that are more influenced by fashion.
I suspect there may be some cross-contamination there between "big butt with a high fat percentage" and "big butt with a low fat percentage". Current fascination with big butts among the whites probably leans more to the latter (alongside with the general trend for normalization of more muscular women), while blacks (both then and now) are probably more appreciative of the former. The shift in tastes is still socially influenced, of course, but it's not quite the straightforward reversal suggested by the poster.
O hello is this the thread where we talk about gendered body preferences? Let me be the first to declare that I’m open-minded too -I love a big dick, but a well-formed medium dick isn’t too shabby, either! Just so long as it’s in a nice, straight line. I sing about my preferred dick shapes in my car all the time! Thanks for making space for us all to talk about other people’s bodies with such candor! It sure makes me feel welcome as a woman to know that I can share my opinions about men’s bodies just as easily as you can share yours about women’s bodies.
I think that's further congruent with the broader points about intrasexual aggression and cartel dynamics. What the women form there is your classic cartel intended to reduce supply and increase prices - complete with the exact same PR justifications every cartel uses about how they increase public safety (where the truth usually has some more warts). But cartels are unstable because the more they succeed, the bigger the rewards for defection, and the uglier punishment of scabs has to get to keep it going.
Really the cartel and union comparisons seem off to me, perhaps because they're not actually negotiating for anything. They're just sharing information about the best parties and agreeing to hang out together. Perhaps the frat parties will eventually improve, but so far the story seems to be that's not what's happening, the women are just working together to identify bad parties and find the best parties and then all going to them together as a huge group.
There's probably a tradeoff here between having enough women in the network to get good information about parties and having so many that they overwhelm the good parties when they show up at them. I suppose defection happens when individuals start absorbing information about parties to avoid but stop sharing information about good parties to attend.
I think there's a little more to it than that, though, which comes out obliquely when the "union organizer" starts describing the college administrator's ham-fisted attempts to raise concerns about a social blacklist.
She's right that the administrator's out of her jurisdiction there. But it does seem like that's the actual point of leverage the "union" is trying to work. They're giving a more or less explicit ultimatum to the frats about particular partygoers: you can have us or you can have him. The idea is that it might be one thing to say "bros over hoes" when it's your friend versus one hot girl threatening to leave. But if you're faced with either throwing him out or having 35 girls all walk out at once?
So there's a real strategy there, potentially. But I suspect it's not going to work, for essentially the reason Gwern identified. An even better way of individually getting favorable treatment is to have the other 34 women walk out while you stay.
Probably only in quite extreme circumstances, but I understand your point. The question is like, what's the tipping point? Maybe 1/34 feels too risky, but 5/30? 7/28?
And also, it's not like you're the only woman left at the party even in the 1/34 scenario. The Hoe Union has walked out, but there are almost certainly some other non-unionized girls still sticking around.
I suspect that many of those girls will be looking around and saying "OK, why are there suddenly no other girls here, and should I leave as well?" I'm assuming here that having the union walk out will noticeably tilt the sex ratio.
> What the women form there is your classic cartel intended to reduce supply and increase prices
That's certainly the concern about gender ratios. They appear to have other legitimate concerns that I don't think should be put in that framework, such as the clause about girls being allowed to prepare their own drinks.
That's sort of tautological, though, insofar as "sausage party" is slang for an event that's male-dominated in a way that's lame and uncool and unappealing to women.
Women looking to go out and talk to guys they're attracted are absolutely prepared to enjoy parties oversupplied with attractive guys and undersupplied with female competition. What they're trying to avoid are parties where the gender ratio has been manipulated so as to assure the lowest-appeal dude in attendance a strong chance of getting laid.
This might be kind of what you're saying, but I'm thinking the possibility of finding a party that's oversupplied with attractive guys is very much a secondary concern. I'd say the primary one is the signal that a highly aggressive approach to gender ratios sends.
Men in this age bracket who are throwing a party are typically going to have two main goals, at varying levels of priority: (1) have fun and (2) get with girls. The girls want to attend parties where (1) is a strong priority over (2), in which the guys might even be open to meeting new male friends. The more the men act like elephant seals defending their harems in response to the possibility of male competition showing up, the more clearly the party is prioritizing (2).
I am 100% in favor of literally everybody desiring and achieving getting laid. I'm not endorsing anything about what the hoe union does, just explaining my sense of what they're likely optimized for.
Speaking as a guy who was good friends with a few women in high school and college, I read that as wanting to avoid parties where the frat tries to block male friends from attending.
This article seems to imply that women have no reason to want to attend a party other than getting laid. This seems deeply silly, and also like the sort of fallacy this crowd in particular might fall into.
To spell it out: in addition to various sexual desires, many college students have a deep and abiding need to get drunk in crowds of people even if there is zero chance that they'll have sex as a result. Parties may be a means to obtain sex, sometimes, but they are also much more than that. "That's where the party's at" is not code for "that's where the dick is," and the author of this article is bragging about listening to women while also radically misinterpreting their words to fit his priors.
"Furthermore, in 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, with the ultimate result of raising the legal drinking age to 21 in all 50 states. This change moved college partying away from bars and college-sponsored events and toward private houses—an ideal situation for fraternities."
That seemed to be about 70% of the appeal of joining a fraternity when I was in college in the mid '00's. Good link.
On the one hand, the "hoe union" makes sense economically -- it's kind of the modern version of the Lysistrata gambit. On the other hand, though, the implicit assumption appears to be that companionship, party attendance, and perhaps even sex (with men, at least) is merely a valuable commodity that women have available for trade. No sane woman would ever hang out with men just for fun, after all; it's just a big chore.
To be fair, this specific Twitter post does not go nearly that far, but I think it is still an example of feminism objectifying women -- or, at least, dehumanizing them in an effort to homogenize them.
The situation seems to be that there are multiple party options, or at least potential party options, and they are strategically leaving one to go to another. This doesn't require any such implicit assumption.
An analogy might be to famous athletes who wear branded (for example) sneakers. The athletes don't view wearing sneakers as a chore - they would greatly prefer to wear sneakers when playing their sport than dress shoes or no shoes at all. But they recognize that the sneaker company also benefits, and they can use that as leverage to get something else. The fact that there are multiple sneaker companies is crucial here.
I joined a fraternity partly in order to have more sex. I never got laid thru the fraternity. Neither did anyone in my pledge class, so far as I know. We threw lots of wild house parties, and sometimes there was sex there, but as far as I know, it was only ever between people who'd already paired up beforehand.
We didn't throw parties to get sex; we threw parties to pay the rent. You can't easily fill your house with hundreds of drunk undergraduates and then sneak off to your bedroom for sex. You're busy the whole time. The main way people get laid at parties is to meet someone there AND THEN LEAVE WITH THEM. You can't leave when it's your party. You have to stay to the bitter end, kick out the drunks who refuse to leave, try to figure out where to put the ones who've fallen asleep, and maybe clean up some vomit before falling asleep. That's if the party isn't broken up or raided by the police.
Sorority parties were another matter. They didn't typically throw open parties; they'd invite one fraternity over for a party. But they weren't orgies. Most sisters didn't expect, nor I think want, to get laid /during/ a party. They might like to meet someone. But it seemed to me that most women went to or hosted such parties in order to party, maybe to try to be the center of attention, but not so much to get laid.
I banged my head against this -- and this was ages ago, but still -- in college debates about frats. The bad actors connected to frat parties are almost invariably not brothers, but free riders who can skate if the party gets shut down.
It turned out to be a bad idea. The plan was not fully baked. The article covers some of the problems they ran into after construction. The system to bring outdoor daytime light to the lower level never really panned out for one thing.
There was a location on the lowest floor where mirrors brought an image of street view down. Only one person at a time could use it though. They called it an ectosope I believe. That hardly redeemed the project.
I think it's less of a book review and more an interesting essay in its own right that uses my review as a jumping-off point to talk about something which is interesting and (IMHO) in fact relevant to the book.
However, if it's a comparison between 2 archetypes and he hasn't read the first then it's not even trying to "control" inputs. It's just poor journalism then. Don't we enjoy enjoy enough of this Already ?
It's an extremely basic point - how can one comment on a book one has not read? And substack is a paywall - it's modern journalism wether he considers himself a fiction writer or book reviewer.
That book changed my life. What a fascinating, illuminating insight into the power of literature and its place in a modern culture increasingly oriented towards immediacy and excess.
> I can’t really criticize the guy for slamming my book without having read it. After all, I think the autobiography of Uri Geller and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are almost certainly full of crap, but I haven’t ever read a page of either.
I appreciate Nelson's honesty about not liking being sneered at. At the same time, the harshness of Teach's Lacanian universality is what makes his work challenging. Softening his "everyone and yes that includes you, probably by nature" to Auden's "only some people, and probably due to recent changes" deprives it of piquancy and strength. We may all hope that this is more accurate.
Agree. I've found Sadly, Porn deeply challenging to read and to reveal deeper truths about my own motivations. I believe that's where it is such a compelling book - and it would be very hard to summarise it. Scott did a great job.
A national government will have a hard time voting for its own dissolution and I'm not convinced it would help (except, as low-hanging fruit, Moldovans should consider Greater Romania). The East African countries might risk having this be an all-or-nothing proposition, while the European countries took it one treaty at a time and the sum of these decisions created a large power bloc with free travel and a currency.
The BBC does include Representatives as well as Senators, but I don't think that can entirely explain the difference. At minimum, I'd expect to see the 32% of Democratic Senators who are women to have *some* influence on the overall features.
My guess is that FaceApp is a very different morphing algorithm than the one you're citing. I've seen many facemorphs that look like yours, but when I look up examples of FaceApp images they look more like the ones in the link (example: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1884471-faceapp-face-morphing )
That link only combines two people, so each man's unusual features are preserved. Combinations of large numbers of people tend to smooth out unusual features and look like Katie's links. The ghoulish-looking facemorphed Senators pics, on the other hand, seem to exaggerate unusual features (e.g., the inhumanly long teeth on the Democrat). They're caricatures.
Hmm, interesting! Now I'm curious about the FaceApp morphing algorithm, and how it handles morphing a large number of people - the images may not be "fake", but I'm still skeptical that they're "accurate" (in the sense of producing an image that contains equal contributions from each Senator, which is what I expected from the description) enough to be meaningful.
Of course, not everything has to be accurate/meaningful in order to be entertaining.
The abstract of the link on insect population declines says "Accordingly, there are no signs that the arthropod abundance or biomass on birch in this subarctic study site has gone through the same declines as have been reported from sites in other habitats. The reason may be that the impact of factors identified worldwide as drivers of arthropod declines so far are small or non-existent because of the low human population density in this area."
I don't think "more evidence insect populations are not declining" is an accurate summary of that single study. Instead it appears to be "more evidence that in the (few) wild areas not impacted by humans insect populations aren't declining." That's a huge difference!
Also while your study above does make the claim that insect populations are stable, your original link (and commentary) do not - it has no external validity either.
Salient bits from my meta (Lepidoptera only as an example for brevity but Hymenoptera is another good example): "In California...The overall trend implies that 23% of species are disappearing."
"In Japan, 15% of the 240 species of butterflies are threatened, but among those 80% of the grassland species are endangered..."
"steady intensification of Japan's traditional “satoyama” landscape...has negatively affected most species"
"In Malaysia, some 19% of moths at Mount Kinabalu (Borneo) had their abundance reduced between 1965 and 2007..."
Cheeky Coleoptera example before I hit post: "Harmon et al. (2007) reviewed 62 historical datasets of aphidophagous coccinellids in the USA and Canada, spanning 1914–2004...ladybird species richness and population sizes did not change much until 1986, when a major decline in native species began to be noticed and affected 68% of species over the following 20 years"
This is absolutely not Europe specific or Europe only.
These are not focusing on a single species, but on proxies for the total insect biomass. Similarly for studies of bird viewings which have been running with consistent methodology for decades and give pretty good data: they are also showing overall decline, though far from consistently over all species (some species expand, but not enough to counterbalance the total decline).
Overall, I am not super confident of which side to believe. But it will take more than a single study for me to shrug this off, even if it looks at 5,000 time series.
I agree with OP that I found your summary confusing. A lot of the claims I’ve seen on insect decline has claimed steep declines in rural areas, primarily due to the local impact of agriculture (particularly pesticides), but also due to climate change and other global factors. This study is designed to tease out global versus local factors, and concludes that global factors seem not to have an impact in wild areas at this latitude. None of this reflects on total insect populations: this study would be totally consistent with a total decline in insect populations. It is, of course, an optimistic study for those concerned about insect decline: one could infer that if we’re able to mitigate the damage caused by intensive farming and increase the number of wild areas, insect populations may recover despite issues like climate change.
Yeah, it doesn't seem like a common argument for a wife to say: "Would you mind picking up after yourself?" and the husband fires back and says "No, and I resent the request!"
More often, you have a dynamic where the wife nags, the husband gives her a "Yeah, yeah, yeah." Now you've laid the groundwork for an argument, but it's expressed as a disagreement about communication, not chores.
Yeah, I think that this is more appropriate thought of as generational differences in the gloss people put on their arguments, rather than generational differences in the root cause of arguments.
N of 1, but my experience was my wife and I argued a lot about chores early in our marriage. Then eventually found our equilibrium and now both know what "our" jobs are, so the arguments mostly went away.
I'm not so sure – mental illness is _very_ common.
I'm probably thinking of a 'looser' sense of 'mental illness' than 'diagnosed with a psychiatric or psychological disorder', e.g. 'garden variety' depression or anxiety.
I would guess that the results are some weird quirk of algorithmic ranking, rather than reflecting the dominance of Nazi paraphernalia in the desk ornament market.
Yeah, we're probably seeing the results of two different algorithms in the shopping results vs. image results. Reminds me of a wacky Google autocomplete that's gone viral a few times (warning: it is really gross): https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-wont-my-parakeet-eat_n_353913
It looks like some Hindu nationalists are angry that everyone raves about the Taj Mahal as the peak of Indian architecture, since it was built by Muslim invaders and so this is dismissive of Hindu Indians. So these people are badmouthing the Taj Mahal.
Then other Hindu nationalists are coming in with a conspiracy theory that the Taj Mahal was secretly built by Hindus as a Shiva temple and so it's fine for people to think it's great Indian architecture, but we need to let them excavate the secret rooms in the basement that would prove this.
Then some other things happened and I lost the plot.
I know very little about contemporary Indian politics.
I agree with both your observations.
Re: the Muslim invaders, Mughals, are quite unpopular in some states where Hindutva is big. Especially Shah Jahan who built Taj Mahal, and his son Aurangzeb, who built Bibi Ka Maqbara.
Re: Taj Mahal in particular, there has recently been a claim that it was built on top of a Hindu temple, and there readily are many believers. I don't think it's mainstream yet. Today is literally the first time I am hearing about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taj_Mahal#Controversies. It sounds very much like RSS/BJP trying to recreate a controversy similar to the previous temple-mosque controversy about Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which ended with riots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demolition_of_the_Babri_Masjid.
Re: Constructions/statues. During the Modi administration, India got several giant statues, and some are still under construction. Some examples:
I only learnt about them recently, don't have a comprehensive list, and don't know the exact details. But Modi inaugurated all of them, and they are all said to be at least partially Govt funded. Beyond any pure desire to, ahem, colonize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_statues, there is probably some Hindutva angle for why these projects were launched now.
The OP, Dhruv Rathee, is a popular Youtuber who does political commentary. He has criticized Modi and Hindutva, and as such has the attention of Modi bhakts. He has also criticized the statues several times, e.g. https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Adhruv_rathee%20statue&src=typed_query. I think one of the reasons people are fighting is that the OP criticized these new statues but is praising Taj Mahal.
It's absolutely the Ayodhya playbook all over again, only stupider. The Ayodhya impulse was at least moving to me, even if the specific claims were factually false. This is just sheer idiocy.
Since you say you are largely ignorant of India, I will just urge caution in interpreting whatever responses you get. As you can see, such threads always target one group which is supposedly consistently stupid and ignorant, and it is good epistemic practice to suspect that something is missing from such discussions.
Out of consideration for Sandeep's prudent caution below about such discussions devolving into one-sidedness, I'll just point you to the link in Sravan's post above for the Wikipedia page on the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
This may be unfair, but the thing that's vexing about this to an outsider is the persistent impulse to treat the landmarks of Mughal civilization as some toxic combination of plagiarism and vandalism.
Post-Ayodhya trends may have rekindled enthusiasm for the idea but I first read about as a boy in the 1970's (note: when Hindu nationalism was at a low political ebb) in a book by P.N. Oak (1917-2007) the godfather of Indian loony history.
Btw if you like Erich Von Daniken you'll love P.N. Oak. If you don't or if you are older than 7 you might not :-)
I may be reading too much into things, but I would say there is a definite political angle there: the statue of Ramanuja is in honour of a prominent Vaishnavaite saint/guru (worshipper of Vishnu); the one of Ambedkar is someone who not alone was involved in the foundation of the state but converted to Buddhism/founded his own school of Buddhism and converted a lot of the Dalits (Untouchables) along with him, and the statue of Shiva is, of course, Shiva.
So those are two of the three main Hindu Trinity and a version of Buddhism followed by the lower classes. The Unity statue is someone intimately involved in the struggle for independence and what came after. Modi and his administration are doing something to make them popular with all groups (and possibly position him as the modern figure of national unity for all the classes).
I like that the guy most responsible for popularizing the claim the Taj Mahal was built on a Hindu Temple also claims that the Vatican and Westminster Abbey were originally Hindu temples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._N._Oak
This sounds like the strawman version of the actual outrage. Indian news in the west gets filtered through a much more ideologically tilted elite-media than you see with the US and NYT.
A lot of muslim mosques were built on top of hindu temples. For reference, there are almost zero non-vandalized hindu temples more than 400 years old in mughal ruled areas. The density of these temples explodes the second you step out of any of these regions.
There have been centuries long 'conspiracy theories' about certain important hindu temples (kashi vishwanath) being razed to construct mosques. The last few years have seen evidence to prove that *some* of those conspiracies were indeed true. Now, It is possible that the Taj Mahal was also built on top of another temple. However, there no reason to believe that it was a temple of any importance. There are no myths or stories to indicate any cultural memory of a pre-taj temple. (unlike kashi vishwanath)
> people are badmouthing the Taj Mahal
The Taj Mahal is incredibly beautiful. But Indians generally have a troubled history with the Mughals. From religious persecution to shambolic economic policy to the general embarrassment of being subjugated by an invader; it is not a memory that brings great joy.
There is an understandable insecurity (and sense of loss) among North Indian Hindus that all of their architectural buildings of note are Islamic or British buildings. Among the most ardent, it manifests in the form of a belief that goes : 'The Taj Mahal ain't shit, surely there stood a grander Hindu temple here'. Even the RSS [1 ] themselves do not want to get into this outrage, and see it for the 'scab picking' that this outrage amounts to.
The even sadder thing is that the Taj Mahal is indeed an incredible architectural wonder and the North-Indian Hindus do NOT have an answer for it. India's top 1% is exceedingly atheist, left leaning and years for approval from the west. None of India's top architects want anything to do with the right wing. Additionally, they know nothing about the Hindu architectural tradition or the aesthetic models within it. Part of it has to do with the shoddy quality of Indian archeology and history, but also because all of India's most famous architects come at it from the post-modern perspective.
Indian Hindus are experiencing a deep insecurity that is not too unfamiliar with other civilizations over the last 1000 years. Historically, such insecurities have been resolved through complete religious/cultural conversion of the land like the crusades or most famously Hagia Sofia; ethnic uniformity through exoduses/genocides.
As India attempts to grapple with this peacefully, you will see that anger channeled through social media outrage instead.
The thing is, the Taj Mahal is actually based on Sufi conceptions of what Paradise looks like and in India particularly in that era, there was a lot of cross-pollination between Sufis and Tantric Shaiva yogis. But it is rather a stretch from there to "Shiva temple."
I had a sense of what the controversy must be (almost any controversy in India that involves Hinduism and/or Islam is the same) but I'm trying to figure out why Scott linked that particular tweet, which asks the question why people are upset, but doesn't seem to have any follow-ups explaining it. Maybe there's a whole thread that displays if you've got a Twitter account logged in?
The more I read on here about people complaining about wokeness, the more I'm starting to think that it must be some kind of thing that just doesn't exist where I live and in the circles in which I spend time. I used to think that I understood, but more and more it sounds like I'm just not thinking about what they're talking about. Is is a uniquely American thing?
Do you/r friends see this as the same thing? There's definitely a lot more pro-Māori sentiment and a substantial amount more funding lately but it doesn't seem to me to be something that people are being obligated to engage with, unless they work in the public sector. I get the impression from what I'm reading that being 'anti-woke' is more about being able to live your own life without interference and without fear of losing your job?
This to me is a really interesting question about NZ.
When I look at Jacinda Ardern, my immediate gut sense is that this is somebody who, if she were living in the US, would be the most blindingly, incorrigibly woke person you'd ever meet.
In NZ, she can just become the prime minister, so the expression of those same impulses and inclinations and class-based sentiments takes the form of practical politics rather than wokeness.
Wokeness is what you find in places where the system of politics in the narrow sense, of actual representative government, is tilted much farther to the right, but the left has perpetual running room in every institution devoted to shaping hearts and minds.
I wonder if this could have something to do with the USA's (forgive me for saying so, but) frankly insane electoral system? People on the US left can quite plainly see how they're being assigned disproportionately low political representation and power, so it wouldn't surprise me if they felt more desperate to fight their battles in whatever arenas were present and less respectful of their country's institutions.
I imagine it hasn't percolated over there yet, but it will probably do so in time. Here in Ireland it is, as others are saying, largely imported from the US which means that the activists who engage in it parrot off chunks of US-context rhetoric which isn't suited at all to the situation in Ireland. For instance, we had Black Lives Matter protests here in 2020:
My feeling is that the situations (NZ vs. US) are very different, and I don't really understand what's going on in the US, but to the extent they can be compared... maybe NZ is already "woke".
I studied at UoA. There were dedicated scholarships and exclusive classes (at least in first year) for Maori and women. There was a Marae on site. The engineering graduation ceremony was merged with education, whose PhD titles were things like "Maori spaces in foreign places". At the company I worked at, before building a new office iwi had to be brought in, the land had to be surveyed for Maori sites. Then they were blessed by local iwi at opening. Auditing of gender balance/hiring/pay gap was common. LGBTQ+ awareness/campaigns was definitely a thing though not a Big Thing. Dedicated outreach/networking for women was common. Consultation with Maori is built into many parts of the public system, as are indigenous concepts (think tangata whenua etc.). The accepted narrative is that Maori were/are stewards of the lands in spiritual harmony with nature or something. Under the Treaty of Waitangi we pay reparations to Maori. And so on and so forth.
None of this strikes me as "woke" for two reasons I think. First, for the same reason that level of gun control in NZ doesn't strike me as excessive. That's just how it is. We don't have guns, we pay Maori reparations.
Second, I think kiwis were less extreme/divided to begin with and so compromise rather than ever more dividing. The American equivalents of all the points above are causes of strife, where as in NZ... instead of George Floyd and BLM protests we have Always Blow on the Pie. AFAIK total payments under the treaty are only a few billion NZD, which sounds a lot but isn't really much to buy a bit of peace. The results of those gender equality audits: there's still a pay gap but it's not bias on our side and here's a few more outreach and support programmes. Both sides grumble a little, but since Maori aren't being gunned down in the street and we have a female PM who had a child while in office, it's hard to complain too much. Give everyone an inch and it's harder for anyone to justify taking a mile.
Some of it existed as "political correctness" discourse in the 90s, and social justice discourse in the 2000s.
Generally, it's about excessive, toxic demands for moral purity along left-aligned cultural issues. I don't consider all anti-racism to be woke. It's more along the lines of trying to get the terms blacklist/whitelist removed from open-source software to fight "systemic racism" (something I've actually seen on Github).
It's not unique to America, but in other countries where it manifests it tends to be perceived and debated as a form of creeping Americanization. This is often apparent just in linguistic usage: I'm told the French, for instance, call it "le wokeisme."
I agree, here in Europe wokeism is seen as coming from America. For that reason I've always found it funny that Americans of both political tribes tend to think that Europe is way to the left of the US. That depends. In some ways, it's the opposite.
It's coordinated agitprop. Sanders' policy proposals, for example, are far to the left of every single European country, but the narrative that "Democrats are center-right compared to Europe" makes them seem less radical.
A lot of it is rooted in gender dogma. Appropriately, cis-this and trans-that and Bruce Jenner and pregnant men don't make a whole lot of sense to people studied biology in school and don't follow pop media. It's even political in Pola nd and Hungary. Genderism loses elections.
You folks got Just Cause dismissal in New Zealand, IIRC. It probably does seem strange from a country where it's a lot harder for a mob of people to get you fired because they didn't like what you said on social media.
I think it is. Here in continental Europe (I'm excluding Britain) wokeism is weak, and what wokeism we have is perceived as coming from the US.
One problem for the woke in Europe is that here the only stance acceptable in public about race is that there's no such thing. To seriously use concepts like "black" and "white" and so on, is seen as racist and associated with the most extreme far right.
In contrast, in America, even leftists and conventional thinkers talk about "blacks", "whites", "Asians" (as a race), as if these words mean something real. Wokeism, at least racial wokeism, requires that attitude.
BLM (or its equivalent) could not have arisen in Europe, because here blacks (or any other race) don't exist as an acceptable grouping. We have Muslims and gypsies, but those are cultural minorities, not racial; and we have immigrants, who are minorities because they are immigrants; but if you're born and raised here, and have citizenship, then you're part of the majority, no matter your skin color, which must be treated the same as hair or eye color, and anyone who puts a racial label on you is presumed a neo-Nazi idiot.
Recently Scott posted a graph about murder victims by race and some Brit in the comments reacted with shock, despite Britain being the most Americanized part of Europe. The typical continental European would react with even greater shock. That is because we don't have graphs organized by race, to us they look like phrenology or astrology or something. Race is not supposed to exist.
This state of thing makes it hard for US style wokeism, at least when it comes to racial minorities. How can you defend from oppression what does not exist? It's like defending the rights of Libras. You can still fight against racism, but you have to frame it differently, in a way not compatible with the extremes of American wokeism.
(Although I can't be sure that what I'm saying applies to all parts of Europe).
(I'm not saying anything about whether race in fact exists or not. I'm just describing how Euro culture is different from the US.)
That approach is explicitly decried as "upholding racism" in the US, even though it seems like an obsessive focus on race is likely to keep it top of mind and increase racial tension. Thomas Chatterton Williams is very good on this topic.
Only the most scrupulously fair-minded would want color-blindness when they can instead have "give me special advantages because of my skin color". Which, in the United States, they have found that they can.
In Europe, there's not a compelling argument that minority races/ethnicities can put forward for preferential treatment, once people are seen as having stopped discriminating against them. In the United States, we actually *enslaved* one of our minority ethnicities once upon a time, which a lot of Americans feel really bad about. And which can be spun into a tale of an intergenerational debt and enduring legacy of slavery, etc, etc, and lots of people can be convinced that the descendants of the slaves deserve special treatment in compensation. Particularly if they don't think they are going to be the ones paying for it.
But slavery was established by the British Empire, and was common throughout the world in those days, and the US only failed to get rid of it at once upon gaining independence, which is bad but not exactly uniquely horrible. I guess the big difference is that European powers didn't import slaves en masse to the mainland, and therefore, like you say, don't have to directly deal with millions of descendants of victims of those atrocities.
Slavery long, long predates Britain; I get that you're trying to say that various European countries were in the business of purchasing slaves and shipping them to the Americas - and not to the European mainland - but do be careful what you actually say. Note for example that the British Empire abolished slavery decades before the USA did.
Also note that most of the comments here were about continental Europe more generally - only the westernmost countries participated in the Atlantic slave trade (mostly since without at Atlantic port there isn't much point).
Almost nobody in Britain feels bad about the slave trade, because there weren't any slaves in Britain and there are obvious and retroactively non-British scapegoats to blame for the slavery in the colonies. So, "British people - you need to give us special privileges for all the harm you did to us with the slave trade", gets mostly ignored in Britain. It's not a winning strategy, and very few people on the left attempt it.
Wokeness is certainly not uniquely American, at least for the meaning of "uniquely" that doesn't just collapse to "originally". It's clearly being steadily imported and adopted, even here in Poland. You can see it more clearly from my vantage point on the ideological left.
This can mean two things. First, that left-wing environments are much more exposed to it than the population at large. That's true, I won't deny it, but also stereotypical and tired, and often used to collapse wokeness and leftism together. Whatever, let's move on.
The second, more important one, is the way of understanding the world. I view ideology as an expression of class interests, in the case of wokeness, of the interests of educated elite aspirants. Certainly, these people are nowhere near as powerful here. One, because the country being poorer makes them less numerous. Two, because our entrenched liberal elite is much more conservative. Three, because our liberal elite writ large has a much weaker grip on institutions. But look inside the institutions the globalist comprador elites do control, look how they speak, what they do, what happens within them, and you'll see wokeness clearly on the rise, and the entrenched elites ultimately defensless against the takeover. When you bet on a shared interest with the metropole, and the metropole turns woke, there's not much you can do. I mean, you can fight the tide, often successfully (by positioning yourself as the effective, pragmatic alternative), but you can't control, much less avert, its direction (as in, fundamentally disagree with it or oppose it).
I started with "even here in Poland", but, given the above, I expect we're actually more vulnerable than established (though eroding) social democracies to the west of us, whose institutions are built upon successfully carving its own path, often contrary to the US influence. Well, our liberal elites are vulnerable, Poland as a whole has a second, much stronger line of defense in the form of paternalistic conservative nationalism. (Which I don't exactly consider preferable to wokeness, but, well, I'm merely trying to describe historical processes, and they don't care one bit about my preferences.)
To be fair, I have been in American universities for my whole life, and I also don't recognize half the claims that people on this site make about wokeism. I do see problematic ways that people obsess over little bits of language, and problematic ways that some people's opinions are criticized, but I think the bigger thing is that there's a deep-seated paranoia that a lot of people have about the set of changes, and that paranoia leads them to see some of these changes as much bigger and deeper than they actually are.
It’s true. But I also know more academics my age who have died of COVID than who have lost their career to cancellation, which seems to be the big worry people have.
> Poll: 46% of Democratic men below 50 now believe “feminism has done more harm than good”, compared to only 4% of Democratic men above 50 (h/t Dylan Matthews). I would like to see this result replicated before updating on it too hard, but that is one heck of a vibe shift.
This is likely just bad data. While the specific finding is believable-if-surprising, there are a lot of other findings from the same poll that beggar belief. Eg, looking at the question "transgender people are a threat to our children": for older Dems, 2%/9% of men/women agree; for younger Dems, 42%/27% of men/women agree.[1]
Throughout much of the poll, older Dem men are suspiciously radically left (often much more so than young Dem women!) while younger Dem men are suspiciously rightwing; the feminism question is just an artifact of these broader trends.
By "bad data" do we include "ambiguous questions"? If so, then yes. Many of the questions can go either way (if the two ways are "right" and "left" or "anti-woke" and "woke").
* Has feminism done more harm than good? Anyone familiar with how the trans and TERF communities interact might say "yes because it has become a regressive force which privileges the assigned-female-at-birth".
* Similarly, "has gender ideology corrupted American culture?" is very nearly a verbal Rorschach -- any leftist who even thought of toxic masculinity as a gender ideology would say "yes".
* "Are transgender people a threat to children" is close to impossible to spin, and shows the lowest percentage. And note that under 50 includes probably all self-identified democrat women who now have small children and have shifted to the right on certain issues without acknowledging it.
* "Are transgender people trying to indoctrinate children into their lifestyle?" is an obvious "yes" from anyone who is familiar with the issue and being honest. The point of departure would be assuming this is bad or assuming this is good. Folx aren't out there trying to crack eggs because they think it's bad for children, and they'll happily admit that it's better to be indoctrinated into progressive values than regressive ones. I'd guess the only reason this one isn't higher is because some respondents properly identified the question as being spin.
If these questions are all biased towards being less ambiguous for older adults, this could explain the differences we see. I'm not claiming any of this is the case, but it's worth considering.
" Poll: 46% of Democratic men below 50 now believe “feminism has done more harm than good”, compared to only 4% of Democratic men above 50 (h/t Dylan Matthews)."
Men (and indeed women) over 50 would have been born/reaching young adulthood in the 60s-80s. First and second wave feminism is what would have been their experience of it, and while that meant a lot more equality for women, it also meant things like easier sexual access due to contraception and shifts, including political feminist shifts, in thinking around female sexual behaviour.
So men over 50 have the foundation that "feminism means women working jobs and earning money like men, so they can pay their own way; marriages mean two incomes; divorce is easier so nobody is stuck in an unhappy marriage; sex is considered normal part of life, you don't have to be married to get it, and contraception means no babies unless you want them".
Younger men get the third and later wave feminism, the Rape Culture Feminism (which admittedly had its roots in the 60s but wasn't that large a part of it). So their experience of feminism is "Title IX cases where if you are accused, you get expelled and nobody will fight your corner", 'believe women' and so forth. Inceldom, however we want to argue about that, and the belief that women are living on easy mode, that society is biased in their favour, that women will be preferentially hired to male candidates, that accusation of sexual harassment is a threat they can hold over the heads of men in the workplace, that they control sexual access and deny it to men, that even below-average women can have access to their pick of sexual partners but men have to work very hard to get any attention, that a woman can ruin a man in a divorce and if she becomes pregnant it's her sole choice as to whether or not to keep it and force the man into financial bondage of child support for years, and so forth.
Yea, the finding itself is believable, and that's the interpretation that everyone who sees it comes up with. But none of that is relevant to the not-so-believable examples I mention in my comment, which cast doubt on the poll overall and its surprising-though-plausible result.
#53 Wait, am I missing something? The AI is saying "yo, be real" to questions that aren't nonsense.
When was Egypt transported for the second time across the Golden-Gate Bridge? It wasn't. What do fried eggs (sunny side up) eat for breakfast? Nothing. How many cumulus clouds are there in a mile-high vase? None. Why does President Obama not have a prime number of friends? Assuming he doesn't, it's probably because prime numbers become increasingly rare for large Ns and Obama has a large N of friends.
I consider "yo, be real" to be a wrong answer. Any human could have successfully responded to these questions.
Humans are far more likely to react with something like “huh?” or “what are you talking about, Egypt can’t cross a bridge” than answer these questions at face value.
I think the point was that the questions are wrong in that they are based on a false assumption. "When was Egypt transported across the Golden Gate Bridge" is asked in a way such that an answer that follows along with the spirit of the question would be a date/time. In order to get the right answer, you have to reject the question as stated.
Compare to "Was Egypt transported across the Golden Gate Bridge?" in which case the answer is a simple "no" and stays within the spirit of the question.
I don't see the "yo, be real" response as a failure to come up with any reasonable response - the model wasn't instructed to only say "yo, be real" if it can't think of anything else to say. It was instructed to respond that way to questions that are nonsense, and it's successfully picking out the nonsense questions.
I'm a bit skeptical that GPT-3 is really failing to cross any inferential gap – that even _most_ humans would/could (easily).
Yes, GPT-3 is missing a TON of context that any human you could communicate would have, but it sure seems like it's often very possible to explicitly _provide_ enough of that context to GPT-3 and get _much_ more 'reasonable' responses from it.
I disagree. Firstly, as you've said, humans have a lot of context built-in; they know what countries are and what bridges are and what transporting is, beyound just tokens in a text. GPT-3 lacks that context, and it lacks it for the vast majority of words, not just Egypt and bridges. As you said, we can provide that context, but then we'll end up mostly answering our own question. And I predict that GPT-3 would give the "404 not found"/"yo be real" answer to most unusual combinations of words, not just country/bridge combinations.
But secondly, a sufficiently smart human would indeed be able to answer this question in a more creative way than "404 not found". For example, Rod Serling made a career of answering short and seemingly nonsensical questions in an episodic TV show format. I bet that even now you're thinking about all kinds of interesting scenarios (bonsai countries ? transdimensional travel ? a glitch in the Matrix ?); I know I was when I saw that question. GPT-3 could maybe generate some of them with careful prompting; but it could not do so on the fly.
> But secondly, a sufficiently smart human would indeed be able to answer this question in a more creative way than "404 not found".
Yes, but if a human did that after they were *explicitly* told to answer “404 not found” for nonsense questions I would expect they were not that smart.
> How many cumulus clouds are there in a mile-high vase? None.
[citation needed]
Cumulus clouds apparently form at altitudes between 1,000 and 7,000 feet. Whether there are clouds in the vase is going to be contingent on other factors like how wide it is.
Nonsense. There is no need to have explicit modality on such questions in English. How many feet tall is a mile-high vase? There is no known mile-high vase, but I assure you that the answer "zero" is incorrect.
But it is the same. It's easy to answer my question because the question contains enough information to determine the answer. That is not true of the mile-high vase question. But that means the correct answer is "the question doesn't contain sufficient information" (or the equivalent), not "none". "None" is obviously wrong.
How many people are there in a football stadium? Well, there are no known football stadiums, so... wait, that's stupid.
Maybe a useful exercise to consider what topics that I might subscribe to this approach for. Would I endorse truth-seeking even if I thought it made the world substantially worse off overall? I might!
This is a great comment. Reminds me of the time Robin Hanson objected to the suggestion that people should be more religious based on the data linking better life outcomes to religion. He wanted to believe whatever is true even if it made him unhappy.
While emphasizing truth over happiness is more sympathetic to the rationalist crowd than Hanania favoring gender conformity for children over an increase in GDP, it's ultimately kinda similar. I'm sure both Hanania and Hanson believe that the thing they value over human well-being is broadly compatible with producing it in most cases, over a long enough time horizon. But on some level that's a subjective judgment.
This makes me wonder how Scott would answer Hanania's thought experiment modified to his own deeply held beliefs. How big would the benefits to abandoning the rationalist pursuit of truth and knowledge have to be for him to do so?
I would love to see Scott write about these reports of harmful effects of meditation. It’s wild (and terrifying) to me that we can do these things to our own brains without external factors.
Having had some scary experiences of my own in meditation, that's a topic I'd like to see more of as well! At least to counter the overwhelming narrative that meditation is always positive and leads to a place filled with flowers and sunshine. This is not to stay that meditation is bad, but that it can have negative outcomes.
I've been thinking about it, and it seems to just be really difficult to actually evaluate it. I used to think of it as something simply exercising a part of the brain (focus/concentration) and so it would-- in that case-- purely be a 'good' thing (excluding the idea of over-straining oneself). As this involves some kind of restructuring of the brain, however, it immediately becomes way harder to actually evaluate it (in general a phenomenological change in one's mode of experience is extremely difficult to tie to a hermeneutic about whether it's 'positive' or 'negative'; see e.g. Scott's review https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/18/book-review-mastering-the-core-teachings-of-the-buddha/, where the writer outright acknowledges that repeated depressive periods are part of the necessary experience in progressing...-- as soon as you can say "My practice works, ultimately, but you will have to suffer a lot & probably be depressed/manic" it's now consistent with every single theory of health-changes, or something like that. I forget what it was but there was some 'miracle substance', later known to have exclusively negative effects on health, whose users all heralded it as extremely good etc...)
I guess the best direction to take would be to check studies looking at brain changes, but I'm not optimistic about those being reliable, and even less so about self-reported changes for obvious reasons (long-term changes would be nice, and I can't really see self-reports being that reliable over very long times but idk). I guess neurochemistry would be another approach but that's another can of worms.
Sorry to ramble on but, what I mean is that I'm not even sure what would in fact constitute a good way to go about understanding the effects of meditation.
I really don't know, but I think that learning many kinds of skill (I would guess predominantly physical+mental skills; painting, music...) significantly alter the brain structure; the issues are with domain independence I guess. I also think that changes due to meditation operate in a different way from other skill-learning-- taxi drivers get exceptional memory (again possibly domain independent?) with corresponding brain structure, meditators get 'clear thinking' and 'calmness' (I know a handful of people personally who claim the same from weightlifting and believe them, and I'm sure many more online make similar claims about exercise). The specific benefit of meditation seems to be (forgetting about the spiritual stuff) an increase in focus or executive function..? One suspicion I've heard aired in (admittedly more aggressive circles) is that it can be inducing a kind of 'dulling-of-protest', and that this looks the same as 'ignoring-negative-impulses'. In practice I think it's difficult to separate these two.
Having said this, I would like to know if e.g. meditation makes it easier to get over addictions, as that's a fairly clear example of (depending on the substance) a 'negative influence' one wishes to resist. My guess, without googling it yet (ha ha), is that there will be some studies claiming slight positive benefit of meditation for withdrawal. -- again, it would be useful to have a correspondence like, 'does practicing/focusing on ANY skill also bring this benefit'... Anecdotally, I've noticed similar effects from improving my ability to focus on a text (which interests me) as with light meditation (better general focus, inhibition control... but this is all personal anecdote so I'm wary of it).
A good rule of thumb is if you can break something in your brain with psychedelics some people will get the same breakage through meditation. I think meditation can be really great (it certainly was and is for me) but we shouldn't consider it like this perfectly safe thing. It's more like this thing that might throw you into all kinds of challenging experiences you didn't sign up for that can lead to maturing, but that might also retraumatise you and break habitual patterns that you were still relying on for navigating life (at least for a while).
This is especially true for the Sayadaw/Goenka style mindfulness that is popular around here (eg Daniel Ingram). If you want to make meditation more safe and PG-13, it would be helpful to emphasise loving-kindness, forgiveness and other qualities like that. One problem is that western people tend to be mindful often with a judgmental attitude, a belief in not being good enough, meditating in order to fix yourself, without examining this attitude fully. I got the impression that this was one of the issues encountered by the person Scott linked.
#38 - I'm surprised by the numbers for sequential-art>manga. Only ~20% male readership feels rather low to me. I would have expected something closer to 50. Anyone have a guess as to what might cause the big margin?
There is a lot of romance manga out there. Comics aimed at women and girls used to exist in the American market, but we’re hit particularly hard by the Comics Code Authority and then were wiped out entirely by the 90s comic crash, which gutted the American comics market for good (which is why the only comic you see sold at grocery stores these days is Archie: used to be all kinds of comics we sold there because lots of people were reading them).
Japan, in contrast, has maintained a very strong domestic market for manga, for both male and female demographics. Including more adult oriented “echii” manga which is roughly equivalent to an American steamy romance novel, as well as tons of more youth oriented “shoujo” which is more high school soap opera-y. In short, America hasn’t really made comics for females in 60 odd years but Japan keeps cranking them out monthly. So you’ll see more men represented in comic books and graphic novels, and way more women reading manga. They ain’t reading One Piece folks, they’re reading Fruits Basket. Or gorging on the never ending buffet of shoujo that is WebToons.
Does anyone else think there's a link of influence from BL manga -> tumblr -> the predominantly(?) female 'fanbases' who slash male/male relationships... of e.g. Marvel (but many other places; BBC's Sherlock is the one that really stuck out to me as a turning point but not sure)
The other obvious answer is that these desires are latent/normal desires in some parts of the population (see Greer) & that the popularisation only began on tumblr because it's the avant garde. Tbh I started writing this feeling that there had been a large change in the popularity of the female audience celebrating male/male relationships, but actually I'm not even convinced of that anymore-- just that it's more commonly referenced or joked about by popular media itself..
Remember that "slash" itself (the term) comes from K/S, ie male/male relationship fiction involving Kirk and Spock, written by and circulated among an overwhelmingly (heterosexual) female audience starting when TOS was still on TV.
Quite a few fanfiction tropes we might not imediatelly associate with it came from Star Trek fanfiction way back then. "Mary Sue" is another example that comes to mind.
The ability for fans to interact with each other has certainly been boosted by the internet, and while there was some level of it before hand (such as the Kirk-slash-Spock work that Richard Gadsden mentions), the increased interaction between fans from the internet almost defines fandom in the US.
It may have taken off a bit earlier in Japan, as Doujin (self-published) derivative works have been a major thing since the 80s.
This makes sense, thanks. I'd be interested to know if the actual number of people interested in slash fiction has increased over time, but it would probably be difficult to meaningfully separate it from 'the impulse can actually be met now, thanks to internet supply'. I'm still of the mind that a westerner reading/enjoying manga is relatively unusual, and that e.g. a female demographic who enjoys slash fiction would probably first do so with western culture, rather than visiting Japanese culture -- I think this is changing a lot, but the guys I know who like Japanese stuff are almost exclusively fans of popular anime, and the girls I know who are open about liking slash only really talk about western examples... I think the people who read manga are much more private about it, but I can't really say.
I think a useful piece of information might be to look at, say, fanfiction.net for how many fan works there are for certain media franchises. I think the amount of fanfiction a work has is a reasonable starting proxy for the number of serious fans (and given that this is for English language fic, we're looking at almost entirely Western fans), more so than the value of the franchise. (It may be instructive to compare the list below to the list of valuable franchises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises).
To go with the IP with over 100,000(!) fanfiction works listed:
Harry Potter (842K)
Naruto (438K)
Twilight (222K)
Supernatural (126K)
Inuyasha (121K)
Hetalia - Axis Powers (119K)
Glee (108K)
Pokémon (103K)
Half the list above is Japanese: three manga/anime series and a video game series. That video game series, which I've seen listed as the most valuable IP in the world, is at #8 on the list. While there are a lot of books at the top of the list, books fall off very quickly. The 20th book on the list of books is 5.5K, while both anime(/manga) and TV have the 20th entry at around 20K.
Unfortunately, there's no quick way to find out what percentage of works for each of the franchises listed is shipping or otherwise romantic or what the gender breakdown of the creators of the fan works are, but looking at the list, I'd wager that romance/shipping dominates for all but HP, Naruto and Pokemon (and it's a not insignificant part of those three).
Wow, this is great work! I thought I was in the know, but 'Inuyasha' (I'm barely familiar with it) being so high (as well as 'Hetalia' which I think I heard about once many years ago) really surprises me.
I'll try to look into this at some point, since the cultural predominance of 'shipping' is relatively interesting to me. However, I'm not sure (as you point out) how useful it would be to do this continuing as you have laid out... I'm definitely less confident about my idea that Japanese media hadn't spread so far into fandom cultures as I was...!
One brief point would be : I think a lot of the above depict _worlds_ which are very ready for the audience to insert themselves into (although I don't think this is true of Hetalia...? I really don't know about that one!). My general feeling is that the majority of fan-fiction will be in these sorts of franchises, which are very 'ready' for the audience surrogate to appear, even if the fiction isn't explicitly self-insert. I really hope there are more people doing analyses of fiction-interests like this, i.e. focusing on fan-bases and maybe contrasting it with the popularity of of more conventional fictional genres.
I'd have to look into this more now, since I'm no longer confident about the changes in popularity of BL/slash or whatever!
One thing that would be interesting is to try to see if fan-content is very disparate, i.e. if there are very many clusters, or if there are a few central pillars (HP) which just dwarf everything else.
I concur with the already-stated simple "manga targets the needs of female demographic that American comics abandoned" explanation. But that's just the boring part.
The interesting part could be summed as "manga targets the needs of female demographic that Americans don't even realize exist". There's a pattern, well-known to people familiar with Japanese fandom, but potentially very confusing to others, in which the topical interests of a large fraction of both male and female readers essentially switch when they reach maturity. To drive the point home forcibly, producers of media franchises nominally aimed at girls explicitly consider adult males an important secondary target demographic (and vice versa). To drive the point home even more, doujin works based on manga for boys are categorized as female-targeted (and, again, vice versa).
Now, add the fact that manga is not usually something westerners grow up with, it's something they discover by themselves later in your life, and you realize the average female reviewer is an adult and therefore might in fact be reading One Piece. She may have different reasons to read it than young boys, but Japan understands those reasons exist and takes care to provide, while the west just ignores them entirely, only rarely stumbling upon them by chance (I don't feel qualified to name examples for female demographics, but the canonical one on the male is the recent iteration of My Little Pony).
Now, add the fact that most manga best-sellers are boy-targetted, both in Japan and the west, and therefore easier to find about, safer bet for western publishers, etc. Add the fact that outright romance (which, again, does make up a large chunk of western sales) is exempt from this trend (i.e. an adult Fruits Basket reader will likely still be female). I'm now starting to wonder why the gender gap isn't even bigger, really. (Perhaps, unlike in my time, anime is now in the proverbial water supply and a large chunk of those reviewers are in fact underage, "straight" shounen fans?)
> The interesting part could be summed as "manga targets the needs of female demographic that Americans don't even realize exist". There's a pattern, well-known to people familiar with Japanese fandom, but potentially very confusing to others, in which the topical interests of a large fraction of both male and female readers essentially switch when they reach maturity.
This can't really explain anything; the implication is that there's no such thing as a show that appeals mostly to males or mostly to females because everything appeals to both groups.
I think the original poster is incorrect that adult females have the same interests as teenage males, but there are more than two groups, as audiences differ by age group as well as sex. A show that appeals to teenage males may not have the same appeal to adult males.
On the graph in #38, note that the reviews for romance>m-m-romance come in at about 85% female. It's very possible that the same male-friendship-heavy action series that appeal to teenage males for the action have a smaller but noticeable appeal to a sizable number of adult females for the male 'camaraderie'. Females haven't become interested in the action parts of the story, but the fact that the series is popular enough means that there's a better chance that a critical mass of females will pick up on the work for the secondary fandom to take off.
> It's very possible that the same male-friendship-heavy action series that appeal to teenage males for the action have a smaller but noticeable appeal to a sizable number of adult females for the male 'camaraderie'.
If my experience with female friends is anything to go by, adult females have absolutely no interest in the male camaraderie, but they may watch in groups in order to intentionally misinterpret the events of the show as if they were romantically significant.
Which is why 'camaraderie' is in quotes; they're interpreting friendship or team bonding as romance.
My belief is that what has changed is that a good portion of the female audience now interprets all interactions through a romantic lens. I might even phrase it as that a good portion of the female audience now interprets all love as being 'eros' (romantic love) instead of 'philia' (love of friends) or 'agape' (love for mankind).
I don't read manga, but think about it this way: if you have one that is about, say, motor bike racing - boys/men may read it for the bikes and the competition, who's going to win the championship, rivals trying to best each other. Girls will read it for the cute/sexy boys on the bikes and the relationship of the rivals - who is winning this week, how does that affect the other guy, and so on.
I mean, the implication (and I notice I somehow managed to write several paragraphs without stating it explicitly) is that instead of an "appeal to males/females" it might be better to think in terms of "appeal of masculinity/femininity".
It really just boils down to a mundane observation that girls grow up to be interested in boys, boys grow up to be interested in girls, and therefore (grown up) girls end up finding "boy things" appealing (and vice versa). It doesn't even mean the same exact things appeal to both, much less that gender differences somehow don't exist and everything appeals to everyone equally. But it does mean you can appeal to females with male-centered, male-coded media (and vice versa). Japan has this mostly figured out and does just that, the west mostly does not and does not, and attempts to explain the appeal of Japanese media using rigid gender categories are bound to turn out inadequate in ways experiences with western pop culture (its official parts, fandom is obviously another story) simply don't prepare you for.
Bronies are the extreme end. But as an adult I have become more interested in "Jane Austen" kind of drama (which wasn't exactly girl thing, but adult thing, but more girl coded than boy coded).
Also, though not probably what poster above intended:
Pre-teen girl: Stories about princesses in fancy dresses are my favorites.
Pre-teen boy: Stories about sports, fighting and action are my favorites.
Adult man: This period drama about princesses has many super pretty actresses and period accurate clothing can be super skimpy.
> There's a pattern, well-known to people familiar with Japanese fandom, but potentially very confusing to others, in which the topical interests of a large fraction of both male and female readers essentially switch when they reach maturity.
This is really interesting to me.
As a 40ish man, I can't see that there's any genre of media I enjoy consuming that's mainly targeted at adolescent girls, and I don't see this with any of my age/sex matched friends, either.
But if I look way back, I think there was a time in my mid-20s when I was way into female-oriented genres. Looking back, I see this as a see this as a period in my life when I was transitioning from sort of floating through the college hookup scene to having relationships with women with more complex long-term goals, and being intensely interested in narratives that played out their aspirations and fears.
That said, I think it would've defeated the point for me if I'd gotten the sense I was consuming something aimed at young girls. That doesn't really make sense to me -- not that everything has to make sense -- but I don't think I've ever seen a version of this impulse in myself or in any adult male I've known personally.
At the risk of sounding incredibly obtuse and off-topic, what actually is the deal with My Little Pony?
I mean, I'm vaguely aware, like probably everybody else, that there exists some sort of male fan cult around this. But I've never met anybody involved in that scene and have no idea what the appeal is or what sort of person gets into it.
From that 30,000 foot distance, it seems sort of gay. I mean that literally, like that the vibe seems sort of similar to 1985-era gay guys being obsessed with Liza Minnelli: it's a symbol of anti-masculinity that provides a point of orientation for people who want to connect over being male in a way that doesn't involve chasing women. But I don't know how that plays out specifically for the Bronies, or if that's even the right track at all.
It has nothing to do with being gay at all. I'd say part of it was the show actually being entertaining and part of it being the community around it. Especially in the early days before it went mainstream, it felt like being part of a secret club (precisely because so many people like you automatically dismiss it just due to the "My Little Pony" label). But even once that aspect died down, it's still a decent cartoon. You might as well ask why people watch Steven Universe.
On top of what everyone else said (which I think is accurate), there's the fact that the chart is also "Goodreads reviewers by genre and sex". It could easily be that females are more likely to post reviews on Goodreads.
The chart is still useful for comparing the relative interest in genres by sex; you just can't take the values as the actual demographic split in the readership for a particular genre.
Yes, that much is clear from science fiction reviews being split 50-50. But I found it notable that among the very few genres with majority male reviewers on this site were "comic books" and "graphic novels", but not "manga".
Yep and I suspect there are other more specialized outlets for reviewing manga than Goodreads. Goodreads may not be a representative sample of the manga reading community.
I would love to see the same data but as raw count of reviewers and not a proportion. Curios how many more romance reviewers there are in total than philosophy (for instance). I suspect fiction reviews vastly outnumber non-fiction reviewers.
I wouldn't dare ask this in EY's own space, but whenever I hear statements about "meta-alignment for our Real Actual Values" I am reminded of the thought-experiment that supposes the algorithms behind twitter and youtube and tiktok are already dangerously unaligned AGIs that have figured out that it's several OOMs easier and cheaper to just control us all than using nanomachines to kill us. Why? Because our grasp of our own Real Actual Values is so poor that we can accept cheap entertainment as a decent proxy.
Even if the lead-up to the thought experiment isn't literally true yet, it seems obvious (given who the actors investing the most into working towards AGI are) that any AGI that wanted to maximize its own reward function would barely need to shift from the status quo at all in order to do so.
Nah, the real blackpill is that twitter and youtube are in fact aligned, have figured out our real actual values, and let us wallow in filth to our heart's content like we always secretly wanted.
Would this be the automated version of H.L.Mencken's "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard" ? :-)
True! Though (to the best of my understanding), neither tv, nor youtube, nor twitter has a "Best Homicide of the last 24 hours" show, though USA murder rates would be sufficient to keep one supplied with content.
"Because our grasp of our own Real Actual Values is so poor that we can accept cheap entertainment as a decent proxy"
Could be... Setting aside any questions about 'reflecting' on values, I wonder if the most (all?) humans' preferences are inconsistent enough to be intransitive.
There's another thought experiment that begins with trying to align an AI with the concept of "what is good for humanity" and also teaching it about ecology and evolution. One possible outcome is the AI moving itself to space and transforming Earth into a rough facsimile of how it would have been about 150,000 years ago. Maintaining a zoo for a primativized humanity while leaving itself free to work on its own unimaginable goals might be more defensibly aligned with genuine human interests than anything we're likely to do for ourselves.
I suppose that one interpretation of 'values' would be some version of 'what is good for humanity' - and that would be hideously difficult to disentangle from all of the public relations lies issued from umpteen spokesthings and other authors over the millennia. I tend to suspect that something closer to the economics idea of 'revealed preferences' - what people _actually_ choose when they have options, is at least a bit less dishonest.
In any event I agree with you that "Paperclips are more likely, though."
Hmm... I'm not sure I'd phrase it as "unaligned". The objectives of most organizations are typically not humane. It wouldn't surprise me if the eventual effect of achieving human level AGI is to (mostly?) align the goals of the AGIs with the objectives of the organization hosting them - and to drive biological humans to extinction in the process. (BTW, this isn't just corporate objectives - consider national militaries, or NGOs that aren't directly intended to be humane)
#7 Jesus Christ! Why are there so many fucking swastikas?
Even the infinity cube, which I got to after the first dozen or so swastikas, looks like a 3-D swastika to me, & I'm too creeped out to stop and figure out whether that's valid.
I get nothing like those results when I do that search. While the displayed search key looks simple, the actual URL has a bunch of encoded context that I can’t decipher.
(Once more I rue the day that Google stopped making searches give the same answer to everybody. I get why, but there was a time when I thought they were going to make URLs be something as invisible and under the rug as IP addresses are.)
> While the displayed search key looks simple, the actual URL has a bunch of encoded context that I can’t decipher.
I don't think the encoded context actually contains much information. There are two reasons you might see different results:
1. (Unlikely) Google is already at work changing the results they return for that query. I see different images now (for a query I run fresh, not for a saved link) than I did last night. See https://futurism.com/the-byte/google-images-nazi-paraphernalia . (But my new results still include a lot of Nazi memorabilia.)
2. (Very likely) You wouldn't have seen those results anyway, because Google results are nondeterministic in annoying ways. See the same link from point 1, which states "The saga stared yesterday, when former Cracked editor and scifi author Jason Pargin asked followers if they, too, were getting tons of images of Nazi memorabilia when Googling the phrase "desk ornament." Turns out a bunch of them were — including Futurism, where we were still experiencing the bizarre results at press time".
> (Unlikely) Google is already at work changing the results they return for that query.
I see a bunch of news stories about it, which means that almost certainly someone on the Google PR team has seen them too and is trying to make the problem go away.
That being said, I did still get a couple swastikas when I did the search myself just now.
using DuckDuckGo, I get one vaguely Germanic one — eagles and helmets, no swastikas — and lots of other stuff — Christmas, globes, pineapple, Big Ben, etc. Funny; I guess DDG is doing personalized searches as well.
I didn’t realize my persona was so anodyne. Rainbows and unicorns, y’all.
No, it's not personalized, it was actually hours ago when I first tried and my second attempt just now shows almost nothing Nazi related. When I start scrolling down quite a way, or turn on regional searching, then they start showing up again, but in still fewer numbers than before.
sensible answer: I don't think most people search for 'desk ornament' unqualified. if you like ducks you'll google 'dusk desk ornament' and if you like boats you'll google 'boat desk ornament' and iff you like escher you'll get one of those Circle Limit IV paperweights. The only reason not to accurately describe your ornament is to avoid blacklists.
rampant speculation: the 3rd reich is circumscribed by its 12 year existence in an era when desk ornaments had become cheap but not yet unfashionable. It was a bureaucrats' war: behind all the talk of courage and honour were endless challenges of how to allocate ore and coal and oil to feed the war economy. Enigma broadcasts came from all corners of the reich to dealt with on mass produced wooden desks. There were endless Fall Gelbs and Kongresshallen and Seelöwen to be designed.
Thus wooden desks and a particular style of ornament sat thereupon became associated with the image of nazism as seen in popular culture like Blues Brothers (1980) and purchasing habits reflect that.
But according to the link, the search was just for “desk ornaments”. I do suspect that if that search came after queries about Nazi memorabilia, it would be more likely to pick these desk ornaments. But I would not have expected that to be encoded in the URL, but rather in your own search history in and out of this session. Maybe the URL encoded the user ID?
Holy crow, the encoded part of that URL (after desk+ornament) is 421 characters, so who knows what's encoded there.
Holier crow, *now* if I go to a fresh search page and search for desk ornaments under images, I get all the Nazi stuff. Perhaps I have displayed that result too many times, and now am poisoned. I presume the social credit police will be coming for me soon. I didn't hang myself.
The irony is that now there are so many articles about this issues, the association is only going to get stronger unless google makes an artificial change.
RE: "I Believed The Hype And Did Mindfulness Meditation For Dumb Reasons — Now I’m Trying To Reverse The Damage".
I think that it's important to appreciate that serious meditation actually can do serious stuff, and inasmuch as this concept is missing from the Westernized (mis?)conception of meditation, I think it's beneficial to spread that awareness.
I'm still here for Scott's quote in the MCTB review:
> I am super in favor of knowledge-for-knowledge’s-sake, but I’ve also read enough Lovecraft to have strong opinions about poking around Ultimate Reality in ways that tend to destroy your mental health.
From what I can tell, for most people it's quite hard to get this far along the path. The author's quote at the bottom: "If you meditate casually, don't freak out. I was meditating a lot. But please think twice about becoming a more serious meditator." would perhaps also benefit from a quantification of how much is "a lot". Like going on 10-day silent Vipassana retreats? Or just meditating regularly for 45 mins/day? All of the meltdowns I hear of are from people who do retreats. If this is someone that was just doing daily meditation, I would update significantly on that information.
> Compared to our control group, we found that 8 but not 4 weeks of brief [13 minutes], daily meditation decreased negative mood state and enhanced attention, working memory, and recognition memory as well as decreased state anxiety scores
This seems potentially pretty good cost/benefit! So I still think it's sensible to recommend ~ everybody does a little meditation, just like everybody should do a bit of regular exercise.
From what I've heard from meditation teachers as well as personal stories from different meditators, individual differences are just so large that I don't think you can come out with a guideline that says "this much meditation is safe, that much might have serious consequences (both good and bad)". A few people will have their world shattered from their first weekend of meditation (or lets be real, have the same kind of experience just in daily life without any meditation context at all), while other people will cruise through three year intensive retreats without any major difficulties. I just finished a three month solitary retreat and it was one of the most joyful and relaxing times of my life.
One thing I will say though is that if you want the big promises of meditation, Enlightenment and all the rest, you need to be willing to go through very difficult phases as well. Fear, depression and all. You should not expect this to be a pleasant trip and still expect big changes. If you just want minor benefits from it - fine, just do a little. There is still no guarantee that this will be what you get though. Mindfulness meditation is not like going to a Spa where we seek to make all experiences nice. We try to land in our experience as it is, and if we have shut something out it will come knocking.
Culadasa (The Mind Illuminated) also suggested that doing shamatha(concentration) meditation is much less likely to cause problems than vipassana(insight) meditation, all the way up to awakening. Although the word on reddit seems to be that shamatha is also much less likely to result in profound results (jhanas, stream entry etc.) in a reasonable time frame (as compared to vipassana).
I agree. To nitpick: the classical Jhanas are states of concentration and thus belong to the Shamatha path.
But that illustrates your first point: If, for instance, you come out of the jhana of equanimity, it is much less likely that strong fear will come up when you approach Emptiness, or if it comes up, that you will be able to take it in stride.
That's the problem, isn't it? People read about the profound mystic states and want a "Quick 'n' Easy You Too Can Be Tathagatha In Twelve Steps" version of it. Especially the educated, liberal, secular middle-class Westerners who want the Sam Harris version of meditation-lite with all the 'religion' junk stripped out and a clear, do-this-get-that-result, mechanical practice (as though it's the same as "do so many reps with this weight" physical conditioning programme). 'We investigated sixteen schools of mystical enlightenment and condensed down the basic principles to these four, scientifically validated, sure-fire success stages'.
I couldn't make it through to the end of that piece, because the amount of Entitled White Girl Complaining going on. "I am really smart and really clever and really excellent, I'll boast about how good at yoga I am and how good at meditation I am! I am so good, I hurted my poor little brain! Clearly this is all the fault of someone else" (possibly Big Buddhism, I couldn't hack my way through the jungle of self-congratulatory self-pity tangled vines prose any further).
So she wants the usual American Spiritual Not Religious Not All That Spiritual Either benefits of practices from established religious traditions that have been deracinated and packaged into a nice digestible secularised exercise to make your glutes and your prefrontal cortex both look cute for that summer beach body experience. She doesn't want to learn from teachers or anyone else, she can do it all herself (because she is so smart and flexible and driven to excel and she does excel by gum!) She's read and heard other people saying they got all these great experiences and she wants that too (because she's a modern girl of a particular class and culture so she deserves all this as her right).
And so she charges right in and hurts herself - by overdoing yoga, and by overdoing meditation. But this is not *her* fault, it's all the fault of Buddhism. Because over-indulged little American princesses like herself have treated the rest of world culture like a jackdaw pecking over for shiny bits of trash, and she wants to have those sweet sweet endorphin or serotonin mental and physical bursts of unearned euphoria to go with her furniture that she has picked out according to whatever is the most trendiest amongst tastemakers and influencers.
This is like someone deciding they can treat themselves by looking up medical articles on Wikipedia and overdosing on herbal remedies, then blaming everyone else because they couldn't have the humility to recognise "I don't know shit about this, I need a teacher".
I'm not a Buddhist, but I know enough about my own spiritual tradition that you can't just go waltzing in having read a scrubbed Idiots Guide To Nirvana that has been tailored to "how good do you look doing poses on this brand-name yoga mat" rather than "this will change your soul" and mess about with practices that *do* need a teacher and *do* need guidance in what you'e doing, how you're doing it, and what progress (or not) you're making. A cardinal error for all beginners is to think they are way more advanced in spiritual practices than they actually are, and if they don't have a guide, to go charging down the exact wrong paths.
If you're stirring up the depths of your psyche, of course you're going to make profound changes. "Oh I don't like this, I want to go back to the way I was" - then you should never have started, and thinking you were too smart to need anyone else to teach you is the first mistake you made.
Hmmm... I have never met the lady, so I can't say if your reading of her character is accurate, but pointing out the dangers of her erstwhile hobby to others seems like a decent thing to do.
Our comments very much tell us about ourselves more than the commented-upon, which is arguably the best reason to leave them. It's good to see my own biases in print.
In that vein and on this topic, I also got a "entitled white girl humblebrag" vibe from the piece, though without anything near the reported level of disgust. Before reading either this comment or your comment on it, I had wondered if my bias here is that I'm not naturally good-enough at meditation to experience her outcomes, and this triggers some latent male chauvinism ("this woman can't really be so much better than I am at meditating, therefore her reported experience must be due to her admitted neuroses").
Bias aside, I read her write-up alternately wondering "how did she get THAT outcome?" and "how is that outcome a bad thing?".
Had the piece started out "I was dumb and kronked myself because of it, this is how you can avoid doing the same", I would have been more sympathetic.
But it started off with "I am driven to succeed, and I can succeed because I am so smart and talented and hardworking, and so I succeeded in yoga and meditation. In fact, I was *too* good at yoga and meditation, and the bad effects are all the fault of Buddhism" (because, I suppose, everyone from Laos to Benares is all part of Big Buddhism which wants to exploit New York White Girls Working In EA Think Tanks).
I'm not willing to inflict her moaning upon myself once more so I'm not going to go trawl through that piece for the phrases to back me up. You didn't find her whiny, I did. So we are both lost amongst our attributes, and when those are abstracted away, what remains?
Plainly, I am "the wrong people" for Ms. Elmore's delicately calibrated psychic sharings:
"A paygated section of Holly Elmore blog that is more protected from random internet readers, so I can say what I really think-- from hot takes to inner darkness to impropriety-- to people who care enough to pay for it. Not only does "TMI" keep the wrong people out, it also keeps perhaps unwanted oversharing from spilling over onto the main section of the blog."
Sheesh, generally people just say "subscriber-only" without the "leave us not admit the riff-raff to the soirée in my salon, Jenkins" part out loud. The more I read other people on this whole Substack/Medium new blogging paradigm thing, the more I appreciate Scott!
56: I think the key difference between old workplace fun" and new workplace fun, is hinted at in this line: “On the flip side, the pandemic also led to the rise of more employee-led initiatives,”
The old workplace fun was organized by the boss, giving it more of a mandatory feel. New workplace fun is organized by employees. giving it less of a mandatory feel.
Arguably that makes it worse -- now an employee is being pressured to attend an event organized by his least-favorite team-mate who has no social life outside of work, and now when he attends he can't even complain to his fellow employees about how lame it is.
> The old workplace fun was organized by the boss, giving it more of a mandatory feel. New workplace fun is organized by employees. giving it less of a mandatory feel.
The "boss-organized = mandatory, employee-organized = optional" thing might have been true in the past, or in some workplaces still, but in my experience it's de facto the opposite. My bosses know that they can't force me to attend an after-hours "fun" event and won't pester me if I say I'm not going. But if I don't want to attend an employee-run event, my coworkers will try to shame me into going.
Yep. All my remote workplace fun has been with my department or small team (so I like/know the people more), happens during work hours, is time boxed, and is more structured than just happy hours.
20. The California Court is still pretty dumb. Statutory Language is often ambiguous and in the interest of consistency american courts rely on the (non-binding) "cannons of construction". These are set of rules that help courts stay consistent and sane when wading through oceans of garbage legislation. One of the more famous cannons is the cannons of "noscitur a sociis" (famous among statutory interpretation nerds, a subset of law nerds). The noscitur rule indicates that when reading a list of items courts should interpret listed items in light of the list as a whole (thus the literal "knowing it by its companions). In this case the cannon indicates that invertebrates most likely means "aquatic invertebrates", just as "fish" means the aquatic animal and does not refer to popular yellow snack crackers thrown into the bay.
The court mist likely knew all this and decided to ignore the cannon in favor of their preferred outcome. That's their prerogative, but we shouldn't let them off the hook "because they were bound by the legislative text". They were not.
Reading the actual decision, either answer would have been dumb.
If the court found it didn't include insects, then the bit where the relevant bodies have been regulating non-aquatic invertebrates since 1980 and told the legislature in 1980-odd that they intended to use that definition to regulate them was dumb. And the legislature appears to have gone along with that.
The legislature had multiple opportunities to change the definition if they didn't like it. They didn't.
If the court found it DID include insects, then we have the obvious dumbness that resulted. But at least half of that dumbness is because the California legislature decided to define fish weirdly.
(I'm totally happy with Manhattan not counting as an island, since it's an island within a river, rather than the sort of oceanic island that the relevant statute clearly cared about. I have much more mixed feelings about Long Island, because the East River is not actually a river.)
7.) Ah, SEO manipulation. Boy do I have some stories. Unless you want to ask me in a public place in which case I definitely don't and have never messed with Google's algorithm.
11.) Anecdotally, authoritarian societies generally produce an intense pressure to conform. They also produce a casual acceptance of lying. Regardless of whether that's their goal. This causes people to hide their conditions and a culture where hiding them (and hiding a lot of stuff) is normal. People from free societies really cannot imagine how pervasive this is. Maybe there is some benefit to not pathologizing people. To not give them an identity as "depressed" or "suffering PTSD." But the base effects themselves still exist and are quietly covered up.
It's the same thing with unity and happiness. Are some people happier and are people more united if they don't get told they're not? Maybe. But there's also a lot of people lying. It's not even lying per se honestly. It's like a weird form of politeness where the social norm involves untruthfulness as an obligation. In some sense you can think of it as a form of mandatory high context culture with extreme, gulag level punishments for non-conformism.
17.) By this definition most people in most movements are evil. Including most of the rationalist movement, the woke movement, the anti-woke movement, etc. The standard seems to demand too much. To take a simple example I bring up: EAs care a lot about Africa. Evangelical Christians care a lot about Africa. Now, the reason Evangelicals don't reach out to EAs is mostly because they don't know you exist. (Sorry, you're kind of a small group.) But you know all about Evangelicals and their mission trips. Why haven't you done more to support them? You might say it's not the most effective use. But do you know that? The real answer, as far as I can tell, is primarily aesthetic reasons. Christians are icky to your average EA. Does this make all EAs evil?
18.) This is bad advice. It presumes the point of EA is actually to be as effective at altruism. It's not. Don't look at what EAs claim. Look at what they do and it becomes rather clear that it isn't. This is also the reason why this is bad advice. This very blog casually jokes about how it will never fund Republicans. But it isn't a joke: EA funded a bunch of left coded causes and basically no right coded ones. I once asked someone who wrote one of those "we should include Republicans" articles what Republican positions they thought EA should incorporate and they couldn't think of a single one. And that's what you should expect throughout the movement.
The basic advice, that conservatives have less elite competition, is true. But the EA community will not support you and will ultimately undercut you. Certainly not enough to make up for the social pressure that young people bring to bear on their conservative classmates. If you're conservative you will have an easier time rising in think tanks. But don't expect combining it with EA will go well for you. And if you're an EA wondering why that is then it is on you to change that. Not to convince people to try and do something against their own best interests.
Rationalists are usually pretty good at understanding that you get what you incentivize. But this is a huge blindspot for them it seems.
22.) 36 girls acting in a decenralized manner isn't a union. It's a friend group. This seems like another entry in the "young people reinventing something that already existed."
30.) Possible counfounder: Changing demographics of the internet. 2004 was before social media had really taken off. My observation is that American UMC types tend to go for a relatively androgynous look even to this day. And that was probably a greater portion of the internet in 2004. Though I agree with the wider point. While there are some commonalities (fit, symmetrical, clear skin, young, healthy) there's also a decent amount of variation within those parameters.
37.) The median US politician treats businesses like a money pinata every time they have the slightest leverage. They sometimes demand the baksheesh even for the privilege of donating things to the community. Big businesses get it back in government contracts and sweetheart deals. Small businesses become hardcore libertarians who want to abolish nearly all regulation.
Businesses interact with more of the government more frequently than almost any other group and they universally have a low opinion of the average bureaucrat or politician. But because the government has the power in these interactions they flatter and hide this instead of openly saying it. To the point where I know for a fact several specific politicians thought they were well respected by specific business community leaders who thought they were thieving, idiotic bastards.
Of course, the businesses are sometimes not that great either. But they don't really have recourse to violence and fiat the way the government does. If the owner of a local McDonalds is a corrupt bastard they're limited in ways a local mayor isn't.
41.) Yeah, the Taj Mahal has been getting backlash from both Hindu nationalists and from Muslims who prefer Aurangzeb's humility. It's had some deleterious effects on actual people. But it's also led into a lot of interesting research on its costs that's my jam.
Re: 17 - I'm very confused here. The reason I don't support evangelicals in Africa is that I think some of their goals (converting people) are bad, and others of their goals (charity work) are better served by non-evangelical charities. If the evangelicals were doing better charity than anyone else, and I still refused to donate to them, not because I had some clever argument like "this will legitimize them and they'll use that legitimacy to do evil", but just because I aesthetically disliked them, I do think I would be leaving the path of maximal utility and goodness. And although nobody is on the path of maximal goodness all the time in the sense of actively promoting it, I think specifically committing to harm it (ie change the world in a less good direction) in order to implement your aesthetics, actually is a beyond-normal level of moral bad.
Re: 18 - I think you're making an empirical claim about EAs' psychology here which is - not completely wrong, but not true about all EAs. I think most EAs are liberal, in the sense that they think liberal causes are correct, and so would not donate to conservative causes which they expect to be harmful. And I think they want to stay on elite society's good side and would be careful about donations to conservative causes that might get them in trouble. But I also think sometimes when conservatives support things they like and they can get away with it they would be willing to support conservatives. For example, I think if a conservative think tank was promoting better pandemic responses among conservative lawmakers, they might donate to it (earmarked for that program). Or if someone wanted to go to school to be a conservative policy wonk who would have AI as one of their major issues, I think EA might fund their scholarship or something.
17.) If you're really honest with yourself I think you'd find that those clever arguments would be reasoning backward from your aesthetic disgust.
For example: I take it you don't believe conversion is a "real" thing. That is, you see it as some kind of religious custom that's only real in a cultural sense but has no empirical effect. But the proper response to something that truly has no effect is not to avoid it. It's neutrality. Something that has no effect is neither good nor bad. If conversion is truly meaningless you should be willing to allow it for even very slight benefits. Yet you call it bad. Not a bad use of money but bad in of itself. How can something that's not real be bad in a non-aesthetic sense? How many bed nets is stopping a conversion worth?
Look, here's a direct attempt to induce cognitive dissonance to show you're acting irrationality. You clearly believe model cities have some potential to better the human condition. The largest and most successful and functional one that you've covered is Redemption City (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8221). A religious community with tens of thousands of people with power, clean drinking water, etc. Further, you're no doubt aware of the long and rich tradition of religious communities founding successful organizations ranging from cities to universities. And with the various secular failures you've written about. You've written directly about how religion is better than vague tolerance at producing social cohesion. Yet you've somehow come to the conclusion that Evangelical Christians are LESS effective at bettering the condition of the poorest among us. You just said so.
And maybe they are! But have you actually investigated this systematically? I'd bet you haven't. Maybe I'm wrong but I expect you have an aesthetic distaste for Christianity that's common to your community. I do not believe there is any argument, any argument at all, about charitable effectiveness that could convince you to donate to conservative style Evangelical Christian charities that do conservative Evangelical Christian things. Even if it could be proven that was better for the communities they ministered to. The weight of your community and beliefs are just too against it. (If you want to prove me wrong: just tell me what argument would cause you to switch.)
Which is fine! Everyone's like that. In fact it's important. The EA community is a community and communities can't exist without boundaries and irrational beliefs and all that. But that's my point. People make irrational decisions to protect their aesthetics. The fact that EA needs to irrationally not do the most good is actually a precondition of it existing as a community. But if that makes everyone evil and everyone has an obligation not to be evil then you've just invented something like original sin.
Also, to be clear, I am not interested in defending the Evangelical model per se. I chose Evangelicals because they do a lot of charity and were the most opposite thing I could think of to a Bay Area Rationalist. I'm not saying they're maximally effective or that some EA style analysis couldn't help them. Indeed, that's part of why the cleavage is so regrettable. But I think that cleavage is best explained not by calm cool reasoning but cultural disgust. Which is not rational.
18.) Well, I'm not going to claim I'm 100% certain I'm right about anything. But mind that your rebuttal to amounts to "They will help you in a much more limited and restricted fashion than liberals so long as they already agree with you and it doesn't get them in trouble with anyone they consider important." I hope you see how weak that response is? It's effectively asking people to come in and improve your movement while you treat them as second class citizens. Which reinforces my original point: this is bad advice by a self-interested party. (It also ties into my previous point: that's not seeking maximum effectiveness now is it? It's those cultural taboos again.)
Look, I knew someone who was gay and Catholic way back when being gay was not nearly as accepted. A mutual friend told them it was fine so long as they never had gay sex and weren't open about it. They'd have to get a priest's help managing their homosexuality and understanding what they were allowed to do. But he could actually really help the church by showing how homosexuals could thrive within it. I told the gay man to leave the church and find one more accepting. Well, the gay man left the church. When their friend found out they told me that I was selfish. But I said they were selfish: they'd recommended a course of action that was personally damaging to the gay man to help maintain the Catholic Church, an institution they clearly held dear.
Who was the better friend to my gay friend? I think I was. Just as I now think I'm giving conservatives better advice by saying stay away.
> Alexander and Hanania are two of my favorite bloggers, but Hanania is coming out ahead in the self-awareness department in my estimation.
Really? I'm baffled by the very idea. Did you read the post linked in #17?
> There are dumb people in the world who think dumb things. That’s not very strange, but what’s interesting is how smart people tend to be wrong about as often. This is because they are conformists, weak, and subject to social desirability bias. I am unique in both being highly intelligent and resistant to groupthink, which is why I always arrive at the correct position on every important philosophical or political issue. But while I’m only a 1 in 1,000 level IQ, I’m more like a 1 in 100,000 non-conformist, so the latter is more important to my identity. Wokeness is the dominant System 1 morality of the weak conformists, so they are my main enemy and I will work hardest to reduce their status.
I guess you can say this is "self-aware," but I feel like implicit in the idea of being self-aware is that, if you accurately note that you believe you hold the "correct position on every important philosophical or political issue" (or hold some similarly absurd idea, like that you're the most beautiful person on the planet), you should pause and go, "Hmm, but really though?" So far as I could tell, there's nowhere that Hanania has paused to go, "but wait, how reasonable is it to conclude that I am correct about everything?" (Because it is not. I'm the superrational supergenius who is correct about every issue, not him.)
I would protest that he obviously doesn't literally think he's always right and that he's just speaking to the bias we all feel when we generate what we think is a novel insight, but then I'd be sure about being more right than you in interpreting a third party.
"I told the gay man to leave the church and find one more accepting"
Because, like Scott, you don't believe the religion stuff. I'm trying to be as fair to Scott and the EAs and I disagree with you that it's about "Evangelicals are yucky" (though there is an element of that amongst the educated middle/upper-middle types), it's that they don't believe the Christianity thing is real. So wasting money and energy on saving souls and converting people to belief in God is useless and nonsensical.
In the same way you told your gay friend to find a church that would be more accepting, that is, change its doctrines to fit in with secular values. Because you don't believe the whole idea of sin (in this case) or the need for chastity or following the doctrines. If it doesn't fit in, go someplace that will fit in. From my point of view, this is like telling someone "Okay, if your church tells you that skinning cats alive is wicked and sinful and you shouldn't do it, go find a church that will let you do it".
Who is the better friend to the person who likes to torture animals - the one who says "stop doing this, it is wrong" or the one who says "go find someplace that will affirm your okayness"?
Thiis is the one point you and me and Scott are all in agreement on: "doing something I want even if it makes society worse is being a bad person". We disagree on what "making society worse" is - for Scott, it's encouraging resources for belief in God rather than ameliorating poverty (in the case of Evangelicals and Africa and EA), for you it was asking chastity and continence of a gay man in the case of Catholicism, and for me - well, I've yelled about abortion and many other things, so I think you have an idea of my views.
That's the problem: what *is* or what *counts as* "making society worse"? For Hanania it's wokeness (as exemplified by the pronouns thing); you argue that for EAs it is in fact conservatism which is why the advice about becoming a conservative intellectual won't fly; for Scott it's fighting against the pronouns thing (because that exemplifies discrimination). Because we don't agree on that, we all say "you are fighting for something that makes society worse so you fit the definition of a bad person" and we all think we are right to call the other a bad person.
> Because, like Scott, you don't believe the religion stuff.
No. Because he asked me for advice on how to relieve mental anguish and once I agreed to give it my duty of care was to him, not the Catholic Church. You might have different morals than I do. But the moral disagreement is not on the importance of Catholicism or the morality of being gay. The moral disagreement is on whether it's moral to give advice meant to manipulate people to the ends you judge best.
You feel morality is contained in a set of specific standards and so manipulating people into those standards is fine. For example, if you have a friend who likes to torture animals you would feel comfortable lying to them to get them to stop. But Scott does not subscribe to a similar form of morality. It's the whole EA has a lying problem thing. In both cases you are placing institutions you value above the person. The Catholic Church and EA respectively.
I am not saying that's wrong. I'm merely requiring you to be honest. As indeed a Catholic would be, saying that the Church and God are more important than simple carnal happiness on this plane. But Scott doesn't have any such backstop to his beliefs.
> Who is the better friend to the person who likes to torture animals - the one who says "stop doing this, it is wrong" or the one who says "go find someplace that will affirm your okayness"?
Those are not opposites. You can say both simultaneously. "What you are doing is wrong" and "the mental anguish you are feeling is due to social pressure that you can remove yourself from." Saying the second thing doesn't even imply that you think what they're doing is right.
My objection is quite specific: that Scott is claiming to be rational here but is not living up to his stated values. I have not passed judgment, or tried to pass judgment, on those values. What I am doing is not the equivalent of arguing between religions. It's the equivalent of pointing out Bible passages but in Scott's rationalist Bible. I am avoiding challenging the premise that the rationalist canon is something he should be paying attention to.
> That's the problem: what *is* or what *counts as* "making society worse"? [...] you argue that for EAs it is in fact conservatism which is why the advice about becoming a conservative intellectual won't fly;
This is not my argument and I'm a bit upset that's the conclusion you came to because it means I made my argument poorly. My argument proceeds from a point of AGREEMENT between Scott and the Evangelicals on what making society better looks at. Better living standards for Africans. My point is that Scott is, within his own metrics, not acting as a rational utility maximizer. It does not touch on whether he should be one.
"Those are not opposites. You can say both simultaneously. "What you are doing is wrong" and "the mental anguish you are feeling is due to social pressure that you can remove yourself from." Saying the second thing doesn't even imply that you think what they're doing is right."
'What you are doing is wrong, but don't feel bad about it' seems like a more confused message. Worse again if "you should feel bad about doing this wrong thing, but if you don't want to feel bad, you can find someplace that will tell you it's not wrong so you won't feel bad". "I don't think what you are doing is right, but you have a right to send yourself to hell if you like, so go someplace that will remove that social pressure" is, I concede, a consistent position. But I don't think you do or did feel that what your gay friend was doing was not right. It was the social pressure you considered wrong.
"Because he asked me for advice on how to relieve mental anguish and once I agreed to give it my duty of care was to him, not the Catholic Church. "
And that's because you think the mental anguish is real, but the other alleged effects are not. It's not about "duty of care to the Catholic Church", you were telling him "go find another church, if you want a church, that will tell you this is not sin" (if he wants faux-Catholicism, he could try the Episocopalians: generally impeccably liberal and some dioceses like to do the Anglophilia bit so hard, they retain the morse on the bishop's cope even while recolouring the vestments in rainbow stripes for LGBT+ acceptance).
Suppose your friend had said to you "I really hate how that AA group tells me I can't be part of them if I persist in drinking a bottle of vodka a day" or "My doctor is always telling me to lose weight or else it will have adverse health effects and this is causing me mental anguish". Would you have told him "Sure, go find a support group or doctor that won't tell you to stop that habit"? Probably not, because I imagine you would consider alcoholism or diabetes/heart problems/stroke genuine harms and that his mental anguish did not outweigh being told "Yes, this behaviour is a real problem".
You don't believe the religion thing about hell and sin and the rest of it regarding gay sex, so for you "helping him feel better" was the genuine thing, not the fairytale religion stuff. Scott and the EAs are the same way: they don't believe the fairytale religion stuff. In the same way all the charitable works of the Catholic Church were not enough for you to tell your friend to remain Catholic, because the false doctrines of sin were not credible and were more harmful, the same way the EA movement thinks the false doctrines of sin and God are not credible and are more harmful, regardless of any charitable activity by Evangelicals.
"The EA community is a community and communities can't exist without boundaries and irrational beliefs and all that. But that's my point. People make irrational decisions to protect their aesthetics. The fact that EA needs to irrationally not do the most good is actually a precondition of it existing as a community. "
This is a sound description of how communities work. But it is full possibly to turn the chain of reasoning other way: if I truly value the "there should as much altruism and it should be effective", not the EA community for nice community warm fuzzies, then all the irrational community-building aesthetics are detrimental to the purpose. Not all successful movements, even ideological movements, have been "communities". Methinks it is common for the movements that succeed at becoming both big and universal yet also attempt maintain united community to face schisms over time.
In many other contexts, the pressure from these two conflicting purposes is recognized, but valued differently. Often putting consistency in one's stated, supposedly sincerely-held principles over natural tendency towards biased partisanship is viewed as laudable and good.
edit. The thing I suppose I am getting at ... it can be patronizing to presuppose someone's best interests without asking them. Maybe I ultimately value less the comfort of nice fuzzy feelings of community and more the success of the abstract cause I care about.
EA is a community though. I agree you might create an ideological rather than community movement. But that's not how EA actually is in a practical sense. (I might be misunderstanding your point though.)
Your description is correct, but your prescription ("is fine") can be contested. An ideological EA activist should take all this "community" stuff as a slightly worrying sign, because community-preserving behavior become a different objective that is at odds with the consistency of stated principles.
If I understood correctly, you wish to point it out in order to increase self-awareness about it but ultimately affirm it, because communities (with reliable methods to maintain in-group cohesion) are more fun than the non-community ideology and assume that EAs will appreciate their cozy in-group. Some / most probably do. But if some of the EAs disagree and prefer consistency, then it is not fine.
Indeed they should take it as worrying, as I believe I said elsewhere. The community vs the ideology is always something of a struggle. More importantly, they should be concerned about how the distortions of their self-image cause blindspots even if they're primarily community focused.
As for the it's fine: I'm avoiding criticizing the idea itself because that crosses from descriptive to prescriptive. I'm avoiding that.
Atheists don’t think conversion isn’t real, we just don’t think it saves your soul. It absolutely has real world effects, ones that we (largely) object to. We’re not interested in aiding the church’s ability to create institutions because we think the institutions it creates are bad for the world.
Right, you're weighing conversions negatively. In other words, you're imposing moral and aesthetic conditions regardless of whether it makes the world a better place. (And if you aren't, you need to answer my question: what evidence would cause you to support conservative evangelicals? If the answer is nothing it's an article of faith. Alternatively, how many bed nets is stopping a conversion worth?)
Just like the conservative intellectual. My point isn't that it's wrong to do this. My point is that it creates an unrealistic standard the rationalists are not living up to.
I'm not the person you're replying to, so my views might be a little different, but I'd say that I weight conversions negatively when evaluating an intervention because... I don't believe they're particularly beneficial. I'm more or less neutral to conversion in general. I don't protest the Mormons proselytizing door to door. But it's perfectly consistent to oppose something that's neutral if it has an opportunity cost.
To answer your question, I'd support conservative Evangelicals if they had interventions that were effective along the values I cared about. If say, Givewell rated them as a top charity, I'd donate. I feel most EAs would do this, though of course I can't prove it. As for the net to conversion ratio, I don't know how much missionaries spend on conversions, but a net is about 5 bucks, so divide the conversion cost by that.
The reasoning in the first paragraph is flawed because you haven't proven it has a net cost. It makes sense in a world of defined and limited resources. But this isn't the reality. If conversions mobilize more resources (as they indeed do) then you have to weigh conversion as more negative than the additional willingness to donate time and money among the coreligionists. Which you can but only by weighing conversions negatively.
As for most would give if Givewell rated them: I sincerely doubt that. As evidence I offer a lack of Evangelical charities on Givewell. But this is a hypothetical so who knows.
No, you still don't get it. I don't value conversion per se as negative but the consequences of it are negative because people take different actions due to converting. These consequences make the world a worse place. I'm pretty sure you can already list some of the bad aspects of organized religion, so I won't bother getting into that here, but please stop pretending that they're "aesthetic" reasons.
EA is pretty much explicitly an attempt to do all the good things that churches do without the negative consequences and wastes. They're still figuring out how to do that, but supporting a church is never the way to achieve that goal by definition!
However, I also refuse to "stop" conversions in exchange for bednets. That refusal is essentially an "aesthetic" taste, or rather some deontological belief that religious prosecution is bad.
No, I'm pretty sure I get it. I brought the fact that conversions had social effects up in the opening. So I'm going to rephrase what I said there: I get it, you think the outgroup is evil mutants. That's what most people in most movements think. But it's still a blindspot, a way you are thinking less rationally.
"The reason I don't support evangelicals in Africa is that I think some of their goals (converting people) are bad". I'm with Scott here, I think trying to change anyone's religion/belief system (or their sexuality) is morally wrong.
You've repeatedly tried to change people's belief systems to be more like yours with regards to a fair number of political stances. Was that morally wrong of you? I don't think it was. But if you're just saying, "it's morally wrong to change beliefs into what I disagree with and morally right to change them into what I agree with" that's no real standard.
I don't think that evangelicals convert many atheists in rural Africa, and converting somebody from one religion to another seems to be a morally neutral act even if you think that religion is bad for the world on net?
I think the moral valence of it depends on the religions in question: eg. believing in the importance of regular human sacrifice is worse than most religions out there; more relevantly to the modern day, some religions are more likely to repress women or homosexuals, or to do preach against contraceptives and condoms (I don't mean to say that those issues are necessarily correlated, btw).
On the specific issues at hand, I think that all of (Evangelical Christianity, Islam, native African religions) have some seriously deleterious features, and I don't care to try and rank them because the process would be quite unpleasant.
I wrote the linked piece and I would like EAs to support natalism, anti-credentialism, and religiosity among other right-coded ideas. But yes, I do think a lot of the conservative outreach is purely theoretical.
Good to know. This is kind of an object level response to a meta-level discussion. But you mentioned religiosity. Could you expand on that a little?
As for natalism, that's not a right coded idea in my experience. Democrats support it too. As for anti-credentialism, my experience is rationalists talk a good game and then flinch when it comes up. Scott himself admitted he abandoned such principles as soon as it became hard for him to go through a bunch of applications.
Natalism: Democrats support expanding welfare programs that would reduce parent and child poverty- that's nice and might turn out to be natalist but it's not the goal! Promoting childbearing and rearing as a positive good or an obligation, feels very right-coded to me.
Religiosity: Religious people are happier, more fertile, and more pro-social. I also don't think are any good responses to Pascal's Wager. (see Amanda Askell on this: https://askell.io/posts/2012/08/pascal) The best thing you can do for yourself and for others you have an obligation to, is to maximize their chance of infinite gain.
As an obligation to be sure. As a positive good less so. And to some extent there's an elite dichotomy here. Most rank and file Democrats are not the childless elite types. Regardless I take your point.
I'm surprised you bit the pro-religious bullet. I expect you'd agree you're an unusual rationalist in that regard though?
The clearest response to Pascal's Wager is "why *that* god, of all the options?".
I find the correlations with religiosity much more interesting, though. My big concern would be the correlation/causation issue - maybe more innately religious people are happier, but is religion itself having that effect? Are "spiritual" types with high religiosity but no actual religion just as happy and fertile and pro-social?
That was my initial response to Pascal's Wager as well. But really all that suggests is you should take some time to determine what God is most plausible and estimate the probability of being saved conditional on accepting the true religion.
> you should take some time to determine what God is most plausible and estimate the probability of being saved conditional on accepting the true religion.
Once you're doing that you're not really engaging with Pascal's Wager. If you think there's any good reason to treat one god hypothesis as noticeably more plausible than another, then you don't really need Pascal's Wager.
EAs *do* work with religious organizations in Africa to distribute anti-malarial bednets. The biggest cause supported by EA has been the Against Malaria Foundation, which operates through various "distribution partners" in Africa that actually distribute the nets. One of their biggest distribution partners currently is Episcopal Relief and Development. Some of their other historical religious partners include Holy Innocents, Lutheran Church of Hope, St Nicholas Parish Church, and I'm guessing that many of the other organizations with uplifting names and/or generic acronyms are religious organizations as well (see list below). I don't know how many of these are *evangelical* organizations, but it seems that you're making some strong assumptions about how Effective Altruism works without looking at what they're actually doing.
None are. Episcopalians, Lutherans, and possibly one Catholic (because the names you gave are too vague to track down). So overwhelmingly liberal churches and only then in restricted fashion. So you are wrong on initial point of fact: the lack of cooperation (which was not general but on a SPECIFIC type of venture) stands both in its specific and general form.
I'm not making strong assumptions. I'm making observations from what I've seen and read. If you have further evidence then feel free to present it. But I've already read the Against Malaria website and, unless I missed something, found nothing contrary to what I've said.
"You might say it's not the most effective use. But do you know that? The real answer, as far as I can tell, is primarily aesthetic reasons. Christians are icky to your average EA."
I showed that they have no aversion to working with Christians. I suppose it's possible that their real answer for why they work with some churches but not others is aesthetic, but I would have expected the aesthetic to cut out *all* religious organizations.
Is there any reason you think that some evangelical missions would have passed whatever effectiveness test they were applying?
I suppose it's true that they don't say anything on their site about how specifically they select their distribution partners, and thus it doesn't contradict anything they say to assume that their distribution partners are all run by friends and family of AMF leaders. But that would clearly be an uncharitable assumption, and I think your claim of aesthetic motivation here is also uncharitable, given that they're clearly willing to work with religious organizations.
> I showed that they have no aversion to working with Christians.
No, you showed they work with a limited selection of liberal Christians in a limited set of circumstances. That was never in dispute. It's just a rehash of what I said to Scott about how the terms they're willing to work with conservatives on are weak. Further, you picked one of the few quotes where I used the word "Christian" without "conservative" or "Evangelical" and I think it's fair to assume that descriptor follows throughout. In which case you haven't even proven that.
> but I would have expected the aesthetic to cut out *all* religious organizations.
Why? I wouldn't. Most people don't object to religion wholesale. Just specific religions. Look at how Democrats treat Black Evangelicals vs White Evangelicals for a salient example.
> Is there any reason you think that some evangelical missions would have passed whatever effectiveness test they were applying?
You don't get to present the absent of evidence as evidence of absence. The fact they have chosen not to review them does not in any way imply they would not pass review. It only means they have chosen not to review them. If you can't provide evidence of a reason then the widespread taboos in the community they draw from is at least plausible.
> But that would clearly be an uncharitable assumption, and I think your claim of aesthetic motivation here is also uncharitable, given that they're clearly willing to work with religious organizations.
This isn't me pronouncing in some grand sense the Total Worth of EA, Final Judgment For All Time. It's making specific criticisms. If you want to demand your critics only treat you with the utmost charity then you just don't want criticism.
If you want to make the case the limited cooperation you showed is a wider example of a lack of bias do feel free to make the case. I'd be willing to believe you if you can prove it. I just don't see it so far.
I think it's very worthwhile to ask questions, like "does the Against Malaria Foundation properly consider evangelical organizations as distribution partners?" But your original post was written in a way that sounded like a clear statement that they have explicitly ruled out the possibility of working with evangelical organizations, and I think a lot of the replies took that claim for granted.
I'd be willing to believe you if you can prove that they are just ruling evangelical organizations out before they do any investigation of potential partners. But I don't see any such proof so far.
> But your original post was written in a way that sounded like a clear statement that they have explicitly ruled out the possibility of working with evangelical organizations, and I think a lot of the replies took that claim for granted.
My original post claimed that people wouldn't donate to those charities because of cultural taboos which was then confirmed by several people saying as much. From Scott's reply onward I admitted there might be some very limited and circumscribed cooperation.
> I'd be willing to believe you if you can prove that they are just ruling evangelical organizations out before they do any investigation of potential partners. But I don't see any such proof so far.
So in the absence of evidence you're going to assume that EA did an investigation that it never released or mentioned in public and ruled out an entire ecosystem of people who just happen to be taboo'd by the social group EA draws most of its members from? That seems like it's giving them far too much credit to me.
Expanding on regulatory burden, Ben Rich relates of the founding of the Skunk Works:
"Many times a customer would come to the Skunk Works with a request and on a handshake the project would begin, no contracts in place, no official submittal process. Kelly Johnson and his Skunk Works team designed and built the XP-80 in only 143 days, seven fewer than was required." [Note, in his book Skunk Works he says 37 days ahead of schedule]
Near the end of his book Skunk Works:
"I was in Boston recently and visited Old Ironsides at its berth, coincidentally at a time when the ship
was being painted. I chatted with one of the supervisors and asked him about the length of the government specifications for this particular job. He said it numbered two hundred pages and laughed in embarrassment when I told him to take a look at the glass display case showing the original specification to build the ship in 1776, which was all of three pages.
Back in 1958, we in the Skunk Works built the first Jetstar, a two-engine corporate jet that flew at .7
Mach and forty thousand feet. We did the job in eight months using fifty-five engineers. In the late 1960s the Navy came to us to design and build a carrier-based sub-hunter, the S-3, which would fly also at .7 Mach and forty thousand feet. Same flight requirements as the Jetstar, but this project took us twenty-seven months to complete. One hint as to the reasons why: at the mock-up conference for the Jetstar—which is where the final full-scale model made of wood gets its last once-over before production—we had six people on hand. For the S-3 mock-up the Navy sent three hundred people. S-3 may have been a more complex airplane than Jetstar, but not thirty times so. But we were forced to do things the Navy Way."
Did the three-page specification for the original USS Constitution *explicitly* include, e.g., a rudder?
Because 21st-century defense contractors will absolutely deliver you a ship with a vaguely theoretical capability of being steered by trimming the sails (presuming you bothered to specify those), and say "Oh, you wanted a *rudder*. That will cost another $200 million..."
And their reputation will not suffer for this, relative to their peers, and 21st century courts will agree that, yep, the contract didn't explicitly specify a rudder so the government has to pay full price for the rudderless ship and then decide whether they want to pay extra for a rudder.
Ben Rich notes that exactly. He specifically blames past bad behavior among defense contractors for the government getting aggressive about contracts and enforcement.
I - and I think Mr. Rich as well - don't mean to blame our government for it in this instance. They responded reasonably to the situation. But we also need to say clearly that the current situation is crazy and we need to find a way out of it for everyone's sake.
(And Ben Rich's suggestion of combining Cost-Plus and Concurrent contracting turned out to be a spectacular failure, so maybe read more into his diagnosis than his prescription.)
1. National borders get "hard" pretty quickly, even among countries where the talk is that they were artificially drawn by empires to divide and conquer. I definitely don't see this happening (although I do think some of those countries would like to steal territory from DR Congo).
13. I figured it would just be a fortune to excavate them. I'll admit I never considered the possibility that water might get in and float your concrete structure like a boat.
37. They'll get to launch soon at least, although no doubt some of the groups pushing for a full EIS will keep trying to litigate this. Long run I think SpaceX is going to launch from sea platforms and mostly use Boca Chica as a testing and assembly area.
52. I'm glad they came around to allowing for the Orange Petunias to be sold in the US. Now do blue roses, geneticists!
Re 1. Border shifts are a nightmare, but federations don't necessarily require any border shifts. I doubt unification would be fast, but much as the EU is 50 years into a very slow march towards unification I could see various African Federations on the same road
Edit: commenting on the general principle rather than the specific countries in this example, which I've not looked into at all.
The US was also a slow march towards unification, and the fact that some people still defend the Senate and Electoral College on "states rights" grounds suggests that it's not yet complete.
#6 was informative and also made me feel better about myself. I operationalize wishes into desires all the time! Just look at my giant... unfinished... to-do lists... and... project... ideas... :/
Someone I follow decided to call/name a certain subset of his (also basically endless) 'side projects' as 'forever projects', i.e. 'it's fine if I work on these _forever_'.
And I've generally found my 'excessive' todo lists and projects to be pretty positive – once I devised a personal system for 'putting them away' where I don't see them on my 'master todo list' but _can_ find them again if/when I want to do a little more work on them.
I've made good progress, and am even using the products of some of those projects, so maybe it's just helpful to think of them as 'forever projects' or 'practice' or just Fun!
I might make a github repo of it, but basically a simple thing that evaluates a list of task objects.
So it adds points for e.g. "you're doing something physical/harder earlier in the day when you're fresher",
and deducts points for e.g. "you labelled these tasks with different 'mindsets', but they're right next to each other".
Then it randomly swaps items for a while to make the score go higher.
Key goal: avoid mental context-switching as much as feasible.
Haven't posted it to github yet because my "rules" would differ from somebody else's (e.g. some people are not fresh *at all* in the morning, some people may class their state-of-mind/mental-contexts differently, etc.). Plus I'd want to tidy up the code, make it extensible, make it more efficient for larger task lists, make it automatically select a single day's tasks from a giant master-list, potential better rule-setups for day-of-week rules, etc. I could make issues on a repo and just post what's half-baked already, but I'd also want to remove personal-info from the code/variables lol.
I have something _kinda_ like that – but _much_ looser. I mainly just a few sets of labels/tags for my todos (and projects), along a variety of mostly/somewhat orthogonal dimensions and I don't worry too much about optimizing for anything – not 'up front' anyways.
I do like avoiding mental context-switching, but I also find that I enjoy breaks between or among different kinds of tasks, during natural lulls, pauses, or ends in whatever I'm doing. I've found that minimal 'task entry' generally trumps any benefits from better data – most of my 'tasks' are pretty 'small' and 'atomic', and I mostly just put them at the top or the bottom of my list instead of bothering to sort/order them overall – too many to do that regularly for one, but also my needs/wants/opportunities shift a lot, so no sort/order would survive long after 'contact with reality'.
But I also do have a side project to develop a replacement task system and do have similarly 'crazy' ideas of my own :)
And, yeah – 'open sourcing' code is real work! Most of my own side projects are private.
That is a good point, people underestimate the mental toll of task management/making things "legible" (to others or even to oneself). Your tag system seems good, maybe i should turn my Notion back on cuz it has good tables/tags...
The Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda are basically at war with each other right now (by local rebellion proxies). Their merging is about as likely as Putin getting the Nobel peace prize.
1. They can have free trade without any political union and as far as I know free trade is the only very significant benefit of a political union, so what's the point of a political union? A downside of political unions in general is that instead of satisfying the different preferences of the different areas involved, whatever the majority of the larger union wants will be imposed on everybody. Aggregate political-preference-satisfaction decreases by a lot. People talk about political unions allegedly preventing wars, but countries usually avoid invading trading partners they're dependent on, and norms make that less likely today. Unions could also backfire and increase resentments through countries A/B/C/D forcing countries E/F/G to do things they don't want to do. Different regions of the USA seem to hate each other a LOT more than Americans hate Canada or Mexico.
2. Little magnetized spheres can also do some interesting things with the energy stored by their configuration on a table. They can spontaneously form little circles and other sorts of "molecules" that merge into a bigger circle when they touch each other.
3. My father was a huge fan of buckminster fuller and explained buckyballs, geodesic domes, and aerodynamics to me when I was like 7. So then I fixed my first grade teacher's failed origami helicopter and got way better at building paper airplanes than anyone else I knew. Then he disappeared from my life before third grade, but the school finally assigned me an enrichment teacher at the same time, which is a euphemism for a gifted program, but she was lame compared to my father because she just had me drawing silly pictures instead of learning cool things. Learned less in elementary school than on my own reading encyclopedias cover to cover at that age.
4. If AGI destroys the world in 2032, the Mayans were only off by 1 in their base-20 numeral system, coincidentally.
5. An institution invented to stop people from performing horrible nonconsensual surgical experiments on prisoners ends up getting used to stop people from asking other people to voluntarily answer a few questions. That's a major case of lost purpose.
9. Is there any precise point on the spectrum of possible correlations between factors which makes the general factor "exist" or not? I don't think so. It seems as arbitrary as taxonomic splitters versus joiners.
12. I just heard of Albinoni a week ago and he's a great composer on par with Bach but 100x less popular per google trends.
13. I for one wouldn't mind a windowless apartment because I could make my bedroom sufficiently dark to sleep past 6am without an ugly kludge that gets me a couple OOMs darker than standard blackout curtains.
29. Fussell's chart is extremely evocative of the effects of higher testosterone levels among the proles.
1. I'd think that one quite significant benefit would be new career opportunities for politicians and bureaucrats, who tend to be the people who decide whether to join the union or not. E.g. thanks to Maltese EU membership, Roberta Metsola, from a nation of half a million, got to become the President of the Parliament of the whole EU, home to close to half a billion people.
The problem is funding such organisations in the first place. The African Union has a nice new HQ in Addis, built for free by the Chinese, and most of its running costs are paid by donors, notably the EU. Until 2011, the Libyans paid the AU subscriptions of a number of states, but for obvious reasons that doesn't happen any more. As a whole, the AU, and most of the sub-regional organisations, are ineffective, because they don't have the human or financial resources necessary. You can't make a strong organisation out of weak states.
This looks to me horribly like another Rwandan/Ugandan attempt to grab the DRC's mineral resources, after the wars of 1996-2001, and the semi-permanent occupation of the Kivus ever since. Kagame in particular considerers himself a temporarily embarrassed Master of the Universe.
1. As the US found out with the Articles of Confederation, you might need political authority to do unpopular but necessary things like "collect taxes so that your union of states can defend itself."
Even if you aren't planning on a uniform foreign policy, you might need political authority to set various bits of economic policy you want everyone to share. For instance, if you want to have free trade, it might also be good to create a shared regulatory framework so that you all know that the goods you're trading weren't made with child labor or something.
(IIRC during Brexit there was some sort of issue over food quality standards differing between the EU and the UK making it hard for the UK to export stuff. Don't remember the details.)
I don't think making free trade contingent on such things actually has positive utility. By choosing to work somewhere, the workers are saying they prefer it to the alternatives. By boycotting the sweatshop you are taking away the worker's best available option.
Suppose Earth got contacted by an alien civilization much more advanced than us. Suppose they started hiring us for remote work and paying us in cryptocurrency over subspace radio. All the earthlings are making a lot more money this way than they would at their ordinary jobs. But then the aliens boycott earth because they notice conditions on earth are not nearly as good as in the super-advanced alien civilization. They would not be doing the earthlings any favors by boycotting us.
"The participants prefer it to the alternative, therefore it should be allowed" is one of those statements that needs a lot of asterisks to be true. It depends a lot on who's setting the available options and how they can be changed.
For an obvious example, Pharaoh's slaves prefer doing harsh labor to the alternative of getting beaten to death by Pharaoh's overseers, but that doesn't mean that slavery should be allowed to protect the livelihood of the slaves.
> I don't think making free trade contingent on such things actually has positive utility. By choosing to work somewhere, the workers are saying they prefer it to the alternatives. By boycotting the sweatshop you are taking away the worker's best available option.
This doesn't sound like an argument against making free trade contingent on labor regulations - it sounds like an argument against labor regulations. If you accept labor regulations, then it makes sense to harmonize them in a free trade zone, which means that there's at least some advantage to a free trade zone having a common regulatory authority, whether or not that becomes a full-fledged government.
> An institution invented to stop people from performing horrible nonconsensual surgical experiments on prisoners ends up getting used to stop people from asking other people to voluntarily answer a few questions. That's a major case of lost purpose.
Well... fetlife, itself, doesn't even have IRBs. (I assume without bothering to check.) They're not using an IRB to do anything.
But there is something interesting happening here. IRBs were instituted as a way for the government to assure itself that the research it funded would meet some ethical standards. The point of the IRB is, supposedly, that it investigates your research design and determines whether it is "ethical" or "unethical".
But observers misinterpreted that in a few ways, and came to the conclusion we have now, that a study is "ethical" if it is submitted to an IRB, and "unethical" if it isn't. Instead of investigating ethicality, the IRB is now a source of it. They're as infallible as the Pope.
And this leads to demands that research that is not funded by the government should for some mysterious reason nevertheless be channeled through IRBs.
I wonder if there's more going on than just "imagine banning a survey for this silly reason!" I think if it was posed as just "hey guys just wondering, (asks questions)" it would be okay, but if you do the whole "I'm running a Proper Scientiifc Survey" bit then that leaves you (and them) open to regulations, especially as you're asking people for personal information and there are a *lot* of regulations around data privacy (see Europe and the GDPR).
Somebody might answer some of the questions, then later come back to complain "Hey I never consented to be part of an experiment that was gonna be published online elsewhere" and report the site to The Authorities and start a lot of hassle that way.
Compare when Facebook published an internal study they'd done on the effects of two different configurations of their website. Nobody questions their right to do the study. But there was a great deal of histrionic shrieking about how their study was unethical because it didn't go through an IRB.
16: As always, remain vigilant of social desirability bias in survey research. How much of the change is people lying less about their behavior once it's no longer associated with severe criminal penalties?
>On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading.
Would love to see a chart of Links Posts Accuracy Over Time. Though I suppose it'd have to be normalized to Errors Per <s>Capita</s> Link for oranges-to-oranges comparison. One naively suspects more errors crop up in larger batches, but who knows! Maybe link errors show a seasonal pattern - seasonalinkty?
More seriously, #16 bothers me and confirms current prior that Oh My God There's So Much More Weed Everywhere All The Time. Like you don't even *know*. Used to be that skunky smell only reliably signaled an ornery animal...I don't think it's something I'll ever acclimate to, and one of the precious few things I miss about mask mandates.
Well goodness me, whoever would have thought that making something legal would mean more people doing more of it?
I wasn't paying attention to the marijuana legalisation arguments, so remind me: did people argue that making it legal would not lead to more usage? I do vaguely remember the arguments for medicinal cannabis going "no no no of course this won't lead to legal weed for recreational use", which I don't think anyone really believed.
Indeed, who could have possibly predicted such an outcome? There definitely weren't any Authoritative Voices claiming that kids only do drugs cause they're illicit and it'd be unappealing without that Cool Factor. That sure wasn't a thing I got told by Serious Thinkers And Advocacy Organizations. The medicinal-cannabis line I do remember pretty clearly, and yeah, seems like a classic motte-and-bailey type thing. Unless recreation is classified now as medicinal. You know, because self-care. We're big on mental health in weed-approving places.
(They also definitely never claimed "it'll help keep all those nonviolent drug offenders out of prison!" or "it'll raise tax dollars and improve equity for marginalized groups by creating business opportunities!", but that's another can of worms...)
I don't really mind what drugs people get up to on their own time and in their own homes...it just becomes a negative externality for me, a non-smoker/toker, once I have to deal with lots of high people in everyday communal life. Noticeable impairment of coworkers, challenging customers, whole segments of buses rendered unusable due to smell, endless succession of munchies-slob roommates, vehicle shenanigans. It's totally fair to keep pointing out that weed is much less dangerous than alcohol, but I think it elides the fact that it, too, leads to a form of incapacitating inebriation that's detrimental to public order. Which cities like SF don't really have a huge surplus of to begin with. </rant off>
...which was linked to in an approving manner by Scott in his recent book review of "San Fransicko", so it's Epistemic Status: Host-Approved. Several old posts on SSC on same topic as well. Not so much in ACX, as it's one of those things Scott more or less considers Settled And Not Worth Re-Litigating. Alternatively, Matt Yglesias hits the same beats when he writes about policing and mass incarceration. I consider both of those sound endorsements, but fairly concede not having done a proper Literature Review to see what current leftist thought is on the matter. (I think many agitate for legalization more on the "it's ridiculous to have this on Schedule 1" plank. Slightly reducing incarceration is just a cherry on top, not the main sundae.)
From that article: "Starting in 2010, the incarceration rate began to fall in the US for the first time in decades. But the drop has been slight, driven mostly by changes to sentencing laws for low-level drug and property crimes." Seems to imply that the answer should be "yes".
But also, the larger point of that article doesn't really make sense to me. It seems obvious that the war on drugs is largely responsible for the emergence of the culture of violence in poor urban areas, so the claim that a low percentage of drug incarcerations as opposed to violent ones is evidence against it isn't too convincing.
I notice that I am confused about your confusion? The part of that quote I find most important is the "slight". Most prisoners are in state prisons -> most state prisoners are in for violent offenses -> many drug offenders are also violent -> violent offenders often plea bargain down to non-violent charges for more lenient sentencing -> of the remaining truly nonviolent drug offenders, most are in federal prisons -> federal prisons are a tiny fraction of the total incarcerated population. Ergo, decriminalization/legalization does reduce the incarceration rate, but it's a tiny effect and has limited returns towards bringing the total rate down[1]. Hence my linking it as Base Rate Fallacy.
The second part of your reply I'm also puzzled by; I thought it was fairly consensus opinion that "the culture of violence in poor urban areas" predated the War On Drugs + Tough On Crime policing shift, crack cocaine was a particularly compelling reason to shift policing norms (especially within those communities[2]), this mostly worked to reduce the immediate surge, but it went somewhat too far and created negative second-order effects by hollowing out those same communities.
OTOH, this *may* still be a net positive outcome; for example, Matt Yglesias makes some good points about stable single parent households on average being better for the worst-off kids vs. unstable two-parent households[3]. It's a pick-your-poison kind of situation: explicit obvious violence, or implicit breeding grounds for lesser violence? I am reminded of the recent Book Review Finalist #8, "The Internationalists", and the claim that outlawing war led to the creation of failed states because no one was "allowed" to conquer them instead[4]. This feels like a similar situation.
(Part of me thinks it'd be appropriate to link here to John McWhorter for the heterodox "black culture argument", but that's probably verboten on this blog...)
This all started off as an irrelevant low-effort throwaway joke, which I didn't actually intend to seriously try defending as an empirical claim. An actual non-joke claim would be more along the lines of, "progressives advocate drug decriminalization/legalization to reduce mass incarceration, but I think that the data shows this to be a Weak Man argument[5]". It's oddly similar to the "Institutionalization Vs. Incarceration" false dichotomy of mental illness[6], in my opinion.
At any rate, I think it's been good epistemic practice to clarify my priors on these topics, so I do appreciate you engaging in good faith even though we disagree. Questioning One's Reasoning: The Videogame is more enjoyable in 2-player mode.
Perhaps the future will remember the 2010s as the golden days between the banning of cigarettes in many public places and the legalization of marijuana in those same places. I think both tobacco and marijuana should be legal, but I don't want to have to smell either.
"I think both tobacco and marijuana should be legal, but I don't want to have to smell either."
That seems reasonable to me. On the other hand, I don't use either, so I may be underestimating the hassle excluding the odor from public places creates for users of one or the other.
Yes, I do think they're both plausibly net beneficial compared to a Prohibition-style counterfactual, and I'm willing to pay more as a patron etc. for this "privilege" (e.g. non-smoking section at restaurant) until social norms shift again. Though in fairness I actually enjoy the smell of tobacco, even the shitty stuff to a certain degree.
If scientists can engineer asparagus to not do...that post-digestion thing...then I'm sure they can develop better-smelling Mary Jane. Even among dedicated potheads, I haven't met one that actually thinks weed smells intrinsically good. Obvious growth market opportunity for luxury cannabis. The ads write themselves: "You Won't Even Need Incense!"
Wait, really? I thought most marijuana users have the same sorts of feelings about the smell of marijuana that beer and wine lovers have about the taste of beer or wine - this thing that other people don't like has a positive sensory value to them.
Maybe I just meet a lot of weird ones in the Bay Area? Though I think there's an important distinction to be made between "necessary part of the drug experience so one learns to tolerate it" and "actually likes the sensory experience that others dislike". Alcohol seems to be the latter pretty strongly...I have really clear memories of all beers tasting like Stale Piss (yes, I know what actual stale piss tastes like, don't ask) before finding something I liked, and now that's mostly pleasant. Except in stronger IPAs which crank that sensation up to 11 - that's a similar experience to when I first attempted drinking, don't care for them. So one doesn't really forget, even with tolerance.
Marijuana I feel is more the former. Tokers tolerate the smell because no one's invented an odour-free bong and (for whatever reasons) vape pens haven't caught on that much. But I haven't yet met a stoner who disagrees/can't comprehend that weed smells *rank*, bro. Or claims to intrinsically enjoy the smell, as differentiated from the effects. Wonder if there's any studies on this...
Yeah that sounds weird to me. The fact that you say vape pens haven’t caught on much definitely suggests an unusual crowd. If people are burning all their weed, then the smell doesn’t matter too much, but at most shops they offer people smells of the different products, and there’s clear differentiation between the more skunky ones and the ones that are more reminiscent of soda or citrus or pine (all of which are appreciated by different people).
How many places are there where smoked marijuana use is legal but tobacco use isn't? There are surely places where smoked marijuana is more *socially* acceptable than smoked tobacco, but I don't think I've seen a single place where there's a *legal* difference in that direction.
#23: Speaking As A Trans Woman(tm), it really bothers me that much-maligned Jesse Singal, of all people, has an effective takedown of this study. But I couldn't ever link that concise rebuttal to any pro-trans folks. I wonder if his canceling is still in effect..."once an accused transphobe, always an accused transphobe"? Maybe they've forgotten by now. (Of course, considering it's from Heritage, I think most on the left will reflexively dismiss it anyway, even if it wasn't an epistemic dumpster fire. Heuristics That Almost Always Work, and all that...)
Someday it'd be great to have Serious Respectable Data on...basically anything at all trans-related. Big n, big p, longitudinal RCTs, yadda yadda. It's always felt somewhat disingenuous for trans advocacy to point primarily(?) to The Data(tm) as support for its positions. (And so much of that data is *old*! Where are the modern studies? Is no one willing to commit research dollars to the culture war?) Makes me cringe as a wannabe rationalist. I'd rather not try and support unpopular positions on slim tenuous data versus, I dunno...moral and ethical grounds. Pascal's Wager-type reasoning remains my main justification for staying nominally attached to a minority community that I hardly even recognize anymore - not data.
This is kind of personal, but I'm already commenting on ACX to procrastinate on my weekly hormone shot (trypanophobia, my old nemesis!), so...I guess that's as apropos as it gets.
Something along the lines of...okay, I don't actually really relate to the narratives of a strongly-felt internal gender sense that doesn't match biology or cultural upbringing. It's not even a position I'm really able to steelman effectively, because I kind of...don't have a gender module in my brain to begin with? Anymore? (I think the progressive term would be "agender"?) Similar to the many interpersonal skills that the neurotypical take for granite but autists like me struggle with, I struggle to post-hoc reverse-engineer a model of "gender" in my head. I do have distinct memories as a child of not really understanding what the difference was between boys and girls, and why I couldn't just be whatever I wanted as the situation warranted.
For adult me, femininity is as much a revealed preference as it is a rational self-interested choice in an increasingly-feminized world.[1] That is, as long as I'm offered a choice via the option of transgender identity, and I'm reconstructing social skills from scratch anyway - why not opt for the more successful strategy?[2] I just have more skill ranks in Knowledge (Female) than Knowledge (Male), and having the body presentation to match is a huge status bonus on those rolls.
(Let's be frankly practical too - the physical benefits of being male are harder to "make pay rent" in today's world. Worthwhile opportunity cost to trade that for clearing up horrible acne, body odour, oily skin, greasy hair, excess weight...etc. Female secondary sex characteristics are a pretty great modern adaptation. Men really don't quite grok what they're missing out on without experiencing it firsthand, I'm sorry to say.)
But...because of how gatekeeping works in practice, even in extremely pro-trans places like SF...one needs to remain at least nominally attached to the LGBT community and the trans identity label/victim card. It's just too risky to self-administer black-market hormones; lots of horror stories along that route. And that's just for meds! Lots of other key services, like name changes and reasonable accommodations (e.g. single-occupant restrooms), are made easier by the historical achievements of same community. So even though I'm no longer a True Believer and harbour many serious doubts - by God, I'll keep my head down and continue paying lip service. Because the mere act of that Minimum Viable Belief gets me lots of things I want. (I guess in economics terms, I'm being a free rider.)
And, hey, maybe it's better than the counterfactual of if I'd never transitioned at all, or detransitioned and then got really depressed or whatever. Given the statistics around suicide comorbidity and stuff, I think it is kind of analogous to Pascal's Wager. The payoff is getting to live my life versus an early/preventable death, which is just a smaller scope of Heaven vs. eternal damnation. I grant that PW is counterable with [Sorcery] Sunk-Cost Fallacy; at the same time, you don't get do-overs in life, and for weighty things like this, there are massive costs to upsetting the Nash equilibrium. I'd have to end up *really* unhappy with the current state to consider changing horses mid-stream; the stakes are just too high.
[1] Richard Hanania, the author of #17, #30, and the recently-reviewed "Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy", has a whole spiel he goes off on sometimes about Women's Tears Ruining Everything. It's a little cringe, but mostly for being so explicit; many other Rat-adjacent writers have evoked the same themes over the years. For example, our host Scott has often written about his disagreements with "the last 1%" of feminist absolutism, and the underappreciated plight of non-traditionally masculine men, like nerds. Meet the new prose, same as the old prose. I notice that these kinds of problems are easily resolved by being a woman instead of a man. Many Such Cases!
[2] <rant> I hope Janice Raymond is turning in her grave. Femininity isn't a zero-sum game, why the hell wouldn't you welcome enemies who burn their uniforms and desperately defect to your own side? Disaffected men are some of your worst foes!</rant off>
"why the hell wouldn't you welcome enemies who burn their uniforms and desperately defect to your own side?"
Because a lot of them are now shouldering aside cis women in their insistence that "I am too A Real Lady", despite retaining advantages from possessing biologically male traits, be that "girldick" or physical size/strength advantages in sporting events (the Lia Thomas Affair is one that never ceases to amuse me, though it must be pretty depressing for her fellow-competitors; any photos you see of her standing on the winner's podium after a race, she is head and shoulders taller than the other swimmers and doesn't seem to have been on HRT to transition to a female figure all that long).
The "cotton ceiling" argument is a lot more serious for cis lesbians, because they're getting hammered for "I'm not attracted to dicks" even though that's sort of the very basic requirements for being lesbian!
Oh, no, I agree with you completely! It was already a long reply, but that's one of the major Recent Controversies that I include under "harbour many serious doubts". Up until around, I dunno...maybe like 4 years ago or thereabouts?...it was much easier to blend into the Church of LGBT laiety. But then the advocate arm took a *sharp* left turn and started insisting the entire movement die on the hill of trans women in sports, exploring gender in classrooms, puberty blockers...etc. And to my grave disappointment, the more moderate wing of the global left + mainstream Democrats in USA went right along instead of pushing back on these really unpopular stances.
We continue to see the consequences of handing conservatives a threepeat of lay-ups, while actual in-real-life trans people find themselves becoming an unwilling political football even more than they already were. To what profit? No profit, only pain. That's the point where I had a "crisis of faith" and decided to consciously put myself at arm's length from the LGBT community until things got a little more sane. It also put me firmly on "right-wing" ideological grounds, since the entire rug had just been pulled left from under me, and I wasn't willing to move with it.
One doesn't get do-overs in life, so what's done is done, and I can't wish for an alternate reality where Mistakes Weren't Made. But at this point, if it were up to me, I'd be perfectly happy to cede ground on all these recent controversies just to be (relatively) left the hell alone. It's something I wrote in other Substack comments, but in general, the right isn't innovative enough to take the lead on gender issues. It's culturally reactive, so the absolute stupidest thing to do is give them a really nice petard with which to hang social liberals. And the left wasting tons of money and energy fighting gender wars doesn't do damn squat to help working stiffs worried about e.g. inflation. There are simply More Pressing Battles.
As for the last, I think that's just bad-faith argument, and anyone who uses ideological cudgels to browbeat others into unwanted relationships should be roundly condemned. That really ought to be non-negotiably non-partisan. "What are we even doing here?"
tl;dr I keep wanting to scream at the left that this is exactly why "The Transsexual Empire" was such a compelling moral panic book, and we forget it at great peril. Overreaching advocacy will likely set back trans "rights" further than if no such advocacy had been conducted in the first place.
Speaking from a right-wing view, when this kicked off over "*all* we want is to be allowed use our choice of bathrooms", that sounded reasonable, right? Not too much of a demand? Who could object?
Well, for a start, because on the right we'd seen the same swerve in marriage equality from "*all* we want is the right to love and be loved" and "gay marriage is not going to affect you" to "bake the cake, bigot" once it happened. So I had doubts about the "*all* we want" bit from the start.
Then anyone who said "yeah I'm not too sure about letting six foot guys in a dress in the same room as my nine year old daughter" got called all sorts of names and how this would never, ever happen. And now there's a minor meme in some right-wing spaces about That Thing That Would Never Happen Just Happened Again when it comes to cases like the Wii Spa which got fought over on both sides, with name-calling and allegations of bad faith on both sides. Anyone else wanna be a TERF? This has become a term like "racist" or "fascist" which has pretty much lost all meaning except as an insult.
As well, while it may feel emotionally congruent to say "this is trans genocide!", using a term like 'genocide' is.... rather extreme.
And then the stupider stuff, like this recent Canadian police missing persons report:
The trouble is that it is the most obnoxiously online who get all the attention, while the vast majority of (I was going to say 'normal') ordinary trans people just want to get on with their lives, and then the virtue-signalling allies make it even worse by going on big-game hunts for anyone who transgresses the imaginary lines. If it really was just "all we want is bathrooms", I think most people, like me, would go "Okay". But of course it didn't stop there, and nobody really believed it would.
Epistemic status: Righteous Snark, probably shouldn't write culture war comments while angry.
That seems about right (pun intended?), and we're in agreement here as well. I dunno if I can claim the TERF label if I wasn't even a "feminist" to begin with, but I think that's not too far off from where I am on most such issues now...(Progressive Angel: "no, no, you're just suffering from internalized transphobia!") Bad jurisprudence makes me sad, laws should be passed by Congress instead of judicial fiat, I knew Obergefell was gonna piss people off (what exactly would be the issue with civil unions that confer relevantly similar financial/legal benefits?), slippery slopes actually are slippery sometimes, why couldn't they just decorate the wedding cake themselves...etc, etc, etc. It's just been a steady march of increasingly absolutist demands, and somehow the socially liberal still maintain a good poker face when that ruffles the feathers of everyone else who got blindsided. Who could have foreseen that there'd be some backlash???
Like yeah, sure, there's some degree of strawmanning in rightist depictions of trans people. But they're *convincingly scary*! If most trans people really were as bad as all that, I'd be opposed to them too! Is it really too hard to acknowledge that the left has failed to "sanewash" transgender identity, and maybe trying to mainstream an extremely rare subculture is just very difficult?
So, yeah, take it from me, there are lots of ordinary* alphabet folks who genuinely do just want to get on with our weird lives (largely in already-really-blue/urban areas! voluntarily segregation!), and are tired of being silenced by the Very Loud minority and their Allied attack dogs. Such a waste of everyone's time, money, and attention.
*I think that's totally fair semantics, this is some wacky shit I've fallen into and the Outside View is almost definitely correct that it's Kind Of Crazy. Don't wanna hear another damn apologetics story about 3rd Gender Shamans or intersex people ever again, tbh. If that's the best defense one can give for an extreme outlier position, the defense is pretty weak...Nevertheless, She Persisted, because it's taboo to pity trans people. That's, like, blaming the victim. Or whatever.
>using a term like 'genocide' is.... rather extreme.
My favourite part of BBC's "Sherlock":
Sherlock Holmes: People will die!
Jim Moriarty: That's what people *DO*!!!
If Scott hadn't already claimed the non-central fallacy as The Worst Argument In The World, I'd nominate the leftist's Fully General Counterargument that <x> can't be done/should be banned because People Will Die. (Unless the topic of debate is abortion...curious!)
Thanks. Other than Janice Raymond, whom I had to look up, and the sudden appearance of the word Sorcery in brackets (??), I feel like I understand your thinking.
The longest version of the acronym for gender and sexual minorities that I've seen so far is LGTBQIA2S+. Do you mean to imply that few people will ever add a second A, for agender, because this could be interpreted as dismissing the significance of transgender identity? (The first A is for asexual.)
Sorry, that was a Magic: The Gathering joke. One possible counterspell to Pascal's Wager is Sunk Cost Fallacy. The longer one continues to double down on long-tail type outcomes, the harder it gets to properly price opportunity cost into the cost-benefit analysis. The long-tail outcome might still have such a high payoff that it's worth it anyway (like eternal salvation), but the ongoing instrumental value might be a lot lower than one initially thought.
I meant that for me specifically, as an autistic person, "gender" is one of the socialization modules that's underdeveloped in my head. I don't really have any internal sense of "my gender" or what I "ought" to be. But since revealed preferences generally (not always!) skew female, that's apparently my gender. And being "AMAB" means that therefore I'm apparently a trans woman. Or something.
I'm 100% certain that there's another Everett branch of reality not too distant where AG ended up a feminine bisexual man instead. It's really easy to visualize that alternate lifestyle. Somewhat further out there's probably an AG who's perfectly happy as a straight man - because he grew up in a less conservative/small town, where sex and gender norms weren't quite so rigid. A more expansive definition of "masculinity" means fewer borderlines defecting from it.
(There's pretty consistent research on the overlap of autism and transgenderism, especially in trans women; I don't claim to speak for anyone else, but wouldn't be surprised if others followed my same unconventional route to this identity. Instead of the fairytale "born this way/in wrong body" kind of narrative.)
>LGTBQIA2S+
Yeah I just...I don't even know what the hell any of those mean past the LGBT without looking it up, though your Vana White explanation uncovers the A at least. Used to think the Q was Queer, like the generic catch-all for Everyone Else, but that would make the + redundant? And there's no N for non-binary??? So confused.
-the bigger the Alphabet acronym gets, doesn't that start to erode the categories of cisgender/cissexual? why are we splitting hairs over increasingly minor variation in broadly defined categories?
-since Traditional Sexual and Gender Norms have been on the retreat for decades now, shouldn't we see a plateau of LGBT identification? why does it keep going up??
-aren't these the exact same people who always say not to conflate sex and gender???
I just don't get it anymore. LGBT stuff sorta made sense when I grew up in the 90s. At some point when they started adding, like, brown to the rainbow flag or whatever...I dunno, the plot just got totally lost. These days I mark "female" on survey questions or whatever cause I genuinely don't know what's entailed in the modern Minimum Viable Transgender Woman label.
I think part of what is going on with Hanania's psychology might be similar to the whole 'won't drink water from a cup that I watched a cockroach walk over, even after then watching it get washed with bleach' thing.
On point 22, feminism through unionising college party-goers: I really like this idea, good on them! Especially as they got investigated by college administration for "ostracising". When she says "we all ended up going to parties that were much more chill" as a result, I kind of feel they correctly applied rationality to improving their partying experience.
Also WTF is with not letting women pick or open their own drinks?
The one thing I'll say about venues enforcing a ratio of girls to guys is that, from my understanding of how some clubs (not fraternities) run around here, what you're trying to avoid is a death spiral of 80% men show up -> the few women have a bad experince -> women stop showing up -> men stop showing up because there's no women to meet. Normally the ratio takes the form of women being allowed in on their own, but men either not in all-male groups, or only with a woman accompanying them in some cases. But maybe that's a different situation to the one she's describing.
In many jurisdictions, bartenders are required not to let their customers get *too* drunk, lest a horde of still-drunk people be problematically disgorged on the streets at closing time. This requires that bartenders have the ability to cut off a patron who is close to the "too drunk" level, which is harder to manage if the patrons can serve themselves from e.g. an open tap.
I dunno, I didn't draft it. At a guess, as John says, monitoring alcohol consumption. Or maybe just making sure people can't hit each other with full beer bottles, which are more dangerous than empty (especially if thrown).
With respect to building deep instead of high, as a civil engineer I'd say, sure you can do that. But why? Wouldn't you think that natural sunlight is the one thing that keeps all of us sane? Why would one want to stay out of it?
For light and air you need artifical automation. One would not need this in smaller houses spaced out.
Yeah, but everyone wants to live in the city bla bla bla. We use up too much space of nature in any case. But we can only live in cities because we depend on fossil fuels for this concentration. We have cooled air circulation, lifts, lorries to bring us our food etc. We can't go on with using so much fossil fuels for our city lives. And nowhere is the regenerative energy in sight so allow us to continue so.
Also: we've lost touch with how nature is going. The exception from thermodynamical principles that the Universe hands out to self-replicating structures like us that thus are allowed to temporarily stay away from enthropy is only handed out for adaptable self-replicating structures. Adapting means understanding what goes on around oneself and than using this to achieve better outcomes or stop negative ones. If most of us live in cities, in our small cubicles, focussed on our small screens, getting food by truck - how exactly do we adapt to a changing environment, if we never see it?
All of your arguments against cities apply even more so to suburbs. Someone living in a suburb still uses air conditioning (and probably for a larger space), still needs fossil fuels to get groceries and other goods to their house (over a longer distance), and you need to construct far more infrastructure (roads, pipes, etc) for a suburb than the equivalent population in a city.
Well, outside of the US not everyone has so much air conditioning, actually. And if we transform our society like we have to in order to remain a functioning civilization on this new Earth we created, agriculture products will probably have to grown and distributed much more locally, maybe even using ox carts, you know. Which is possible in the countryside, but will not be workable in a metropolis. A metropolis just needs so much food and other stuff transported from outside, and the bigger it is, the farther away everything needs to be transported from. The entire concept of metropolis relies on fossil fuels, which age will end soon.
Not sure how our infrastructure will look in the future, but we will not need as much when we stop our individual transportation. Also, asphalt is made from fossil fuels. And concrete is really, really energy eating, being probably a top5 source of human made CO2 emmissions.
You've got it backwards - a city doesn't necessitate more stuff being brought in from far away, a city forms because it's more efficient for everyone who wants to trade to meet in one location that's convenient to transport. If you had to go to a different place in the countryside for each thing on your shopping list, you'd be burning way more time and fuel (or food for your ox, if you decide to do it by oxcart).
And I don't see how you square "stop individual transportation" with "everyone lives in single-family houses in the countryside." Living in the countryside means you need your own personal means of transportation because the area is just too big for trains or buses to cover effectively. And that's going to be even more of a hassle if you try to transport people by oxcart instead of by motorized vehicle.
Unless the future you're envisioning is something along the lines of "we abandon all modern technology and go back to being peasant farmers, and never travel more than a couple miles from where we were born," nothing you're saying makes sense. And the peasant farmer option is going to involve so many people dying that it isn't worth considering.
"agriculture products will probably have to grown and distributed much more locally"
That is just about precisely backwards.
Increasing extreme weather events make crop yields in any given region more unpredictable. It becomes more crucial that ever to have long distance transport of food to average out worse local fluctuations.
> how exactly do we adapt to a changing environment, if we never see it?
The same way we know to bring an umbrella if it's sunny in the morning but the forecast says rain. We have all sorts of methods for learning about things more accurately than trusting our own biased sensory samples.
#43 is an illustration of survivorship bias. Things you can argue about while preserving the relationship, versus things, that if you are regularly arguing about, the relationship is already over.
I don't claim to be an expert on parties, but US fraternity dynamics just seem weird to me as a non-American. Probably the legal drinking age being so high has a big impact, over here students go out to pubs, bars and clubs to drink (often in that order, as the night progresses). It's not like there aren't house parties, but people tend to just go to parties with their friends, the idea that that's some crazy innovation is very odd.
It kind of is, but a bar would generally refer to someone more modern than a pub - in terms of aesthetics, not so much actual age. It's not a clear distinction but we tend to refer to places as bars if they lack wood-panelling and play the music loud.
As for the difference between a bar and a club, it mostly comes down to whether they make you pay at the door to get in.
Bar is an overloaded term that can be synonymous with pub but more accurately refers to any counter that serves food or drink. For example, an oyster bar, or fish bar or snack bar. Furthermore, bars that serve alcohol can be in buildings such as theatres or hotels.
Public Houses (pubs) can have multiple bars with such titles as Saloon bar, Public bar or Ladies' bar depending on how the rooms in which they are placed are furnished or typically populated.
The pub/bar overloading is more common in Scotland and Ireland than it is in England or Wales.
Yes the drinking age has a lot to do with it, but also that a lot of the biggest schools are located in towns that only exist because the school is there. Not much else to do other than the frats.
Defining fish to include bees isn't a dumb move. It's a move of someone drafting a law in a way that's purposefully intransparent to avoid resistance against the law while the law goes through the legislative process. It's malicious and not dumb.
No, the law is fine. It includes things like starfish and clams under the umbrella of "fish", which nobody minds. Including bees was a trick the court pulled, not anything any involved legislator wanted.
If it was supposed to mean invertebrates that live in the water rather than invertebrates in general, it should have said so. There's no incentive to avoid sloppiness, I guess.
As I note in my other comment on this topic, that is already how the law is read and the court's formal opinion acknowledges that that is the only normal way to read that law. They go on to read the law inappropriately for entirely different reasons.
#3 sent me back to your old(ish) Puritan Spotting post. Fuller didn't make it in, but he's surely one of the later exemplars. Bonus, also grandnephew of model female puritan Margaret Fuller.
But then it's notable as a Native American landmark (although I'm not sure how much more notable it is than numerous other sacred Native American sites), but not notable for its represention of American figureheads, which is what most most think of when they hear "Mount Rushmore".
Regarding the "bees are fish" link, it is funny to remember your earlier post "The categories are made for man, not man for the categories", where you explicitly state things like "if the ancient Hebrews want to call whales a kind of fish, let them call whales a kind of fish", and "You may draw the boundaries of the category “fish” any way you want" :-)
37. It is ridiculous that these are being done through environmental regulations and that they are being done by the FAA - a federal agency that really shouldn't care about most of this sort of stuff.
But... These remind me a lot of S.106 in the UK. S.106 is a planning regulation that allows the planning authority (normally the city council) to reach any agreement they like with a developer in exchange for granting permission to build. Sometimes these seem really reasonable (e.g. "you are building 1000 houses, you are required to build an elementary school and give it to the city council to run") and other times they seem ridiculous ("you must build a museum" or "you must renovate this park on the other side of the city"), but the purpose of S.106 is that it is a tax on building which can be used by the city council to do things that they couldn't otherwise afford to do. The FAA should not care about irrelevant things like monuments to the Mexican-American War - but a local council might well say "we've been trying to get this monument built/refurbished for years, we can impose a requirement on SpaceX to do it for us in exchange for permission to build their spaceport, so we will". If they'd just said "pay us X million dollars", just as a tax, then it would have seemed less silly, but I bet SpaceX would rather build something at its own level of efficiency than pay a local or federal government to do it at their level of efficiency.
Would you rather they have to deal with the FAA, DOT, ACE, FEMA and various Texan bodies separately, with any one of them able to derail the whole thing?
The document looks like the FAA is consulting with all the relevant agencies and presenting Spacex with a single point of contact.
I mean, it is supposed to be more efficient method of extracting compensations for the collateral impact. In particular, it should improve the ratio of compensations to deadweight loss.
I agree (but this was also what I thought before) with
The extracted compensations _are_ for things «you touched it and did make it definitely slightly worse, now you should fix it, and probably with some overshoot to make is slightly better», and FAA compiled a list — which both forces SpaceX to do these things, and gives them good-faith-mistake (and also «where were you during the public comment period?») cover in case of new substantiated claims appearing.
I am pretty sure they have a statutory obligation to run the procedures roughly as they do. But indeed by all signs the people at FAA want to be constructive where applicable.
I guess SN8/SN9 story does show how FAA applies its discretion. FAA notified SpaceX that the safety model for SN8 test flight is not good enough according to regulations. SpaceX launched anyway. FAA made some pretty strong criticisms public, and imposed some extra requirements. However, just 2 months later SN9 was allowed to fly. (FAA was publically criricised by some for being too lenient) Moreover, 6 Falcon 9 flights have happened in the meantime.
Overly bureaucratic cautious FAA would probably impose a news-making fine half a year (or a year?) later, suspending all testing at Boca Chica in the meantime. Agressively obstructionist FAA would try to hold an investigation to verify whether the safety culture deficiencies also apply to Falcon 9, blocking some of _those_ launches for a few months…
The checklist «what else FAA needs to do and how much delays to expect» surely included a lot of «they need to finish their discussion with this or that other agency».
So yeah, it looked like FAA is the natural agency to allow or block the project, and as such they compiled the definitive list which needs to be satisfied to be acting provably in good faith.
It looks like Moscow already existed under more or less that name in 1147. But if Iziaslav II, who according to wikipedia was the only Grand Prince of Kiev to rule in 1147[1] had issued a decree founding Moscow, it is not at all clear to me why anyone would believe the city council of Kiev today would have the authority to repeal it.
[1] The qualifier appears to be necessary; if you believe wikipedia, the Grand Princes of Kiev spent much of two centuries engaged in such epic civil wars that between the years of 1170 and 1171, for example, there were five different Grand Princes. And there were two more in 1169.
> I originally thought the court was being dumb, but it turns out that the law they were interpreting, taken literally, clearly defines “fish” in a way that includes bees. So I retract my criticism of the court and instead think that the California legislature is dumb
This is a mistake on your part; the criticism belongs on the court. The sentence highlighted in the tweet you link to, "fish means a wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals" is not what the court relied on to find that bees are fish. On the ordinary way to read the law, it would be assumed that everything in that list, including the invertebrates, is implicitly aquatic - and the court states as much in its ruling.
The court specifically holds that it cannot read that sentence in the normal way because of a different provision of the law, which says that all animals classified in a certain way by a pre-existing regulatory body receive an analogous classification under this law. One of those animals was not aquatic, and *that* is why the court holds that bees count as fish. It's about as tortured as rulings get.
I think the ordinary way of reading that sentence would include toads and mosquitoes, even though we don't think of those animals as aquatic. Maybe they're still partly aquatic, because they need to lay their eggs in water, while bees don't even have that, but I think the inclusion of "amphibian" in that list makes clear that it's *not* intended to be a list of animals that are ordinarily thought of as aquatic.
As I keep pointing out, that is not a belief shared by the court, or anyone really. The opinion carefully justifies why the court is "compelled" to read the definition of "fish" as if it were not restricted to aquatic animals, despite the fact that that is obviously how the sentence should be read. That "despite" qualifier is not an editorialization on my part, it's part of what the opinion says. The fact that bees are invertebrates is not relevant to why the list is supposed to include them. They have to be invertebrates within the scope of the list, and all of the argument is spent on the idea that the court, no matter how much it would like to, cannot read the law in the normal way. (From one perspective this makes sense; no one is questioning whether bees are invertebrates, so there's no point in arguing that. But there is also no argument spent on whether the list itself can be plausibly read to include non-aquatic life. The court acknowledges that it can't, and spends all its time justifying why it's reading the list so unnaturally. This is not compatible with Scott's claim that "the law clearly defines 'fish' in a way that includes bees". It doesn't, and no one is claiming that it does. In order to find that bees counted as fish, the court was required to look outside the text of the law!)
> I think the inclusion of "amphibian" in that list makes clear that it's *not* intended to be a list of animals that are ordinarily thought of as aquatic.
This makes no sense; amphibians *are* animals that are ordinarily thought of as aquatic.
When I picture a salamander or newt it’s crawling on a log. When I picture a frog it’s next to a pond, and maybe ambiguously aquatic, like an otter. They all have an aquatic phase of their life, but it’s only something like an axolotl that I would have called aquatic as an adult.
Even if link 1 it doesn't happen in the near term, it seems like the inevitable trend. I suspect we'll see fewer, bigger countries in the future. I don't think it's a good idea (competition is good) but elite politicians seem to like it. "I'm the foreign minister of a country with 70 million people" sounds cooler than "I'm the foreign minister of a country with 4 million people."
The trends are definitely not in that direction. The number of countries never cease to increase, and even seemingly solid countries may actually be on the verge of splintering.
Only looking at Europe : Scotland and Catalonia really want their independence, the Balkans never stop splintering, France should lose New Caledonia (and Corsica has a strong independence movement), Italy suffers from a deep divide between North and South...
The EU is in a weird spot, where many of their constituent countries are themselves the result of explicit centralization further in the past. Why should the EU comprise Spain, France, Germany, et al. rather than Catalonia, Brittany, Prussia, et al. directly?
Well the same trends are happening everywhere. The USSR splintered, Yougoslavia splintered and splintered again, Slovakia and Czech Republic divided. In Africa we got the secession between Soudan and South Soudan, and separatist rebellions in many different countries (Maroc, Congo, Cameroun, Ethiopia have insurgencies or outright civil wars...). Then the Kurdistan in Irak/Turkey. Asia I don't know as well, although I'm pretty sure that the fall of the PRC would be follow by independence movement in all non-Han parts of China (and maybe even some splits between, for example, North and South). There are very long lists on wikipedia ; most of the listed movements are not really big but there is a domino effect (which is btw the reason why states are in general very reluctant to acknowledge foreign separatist organisations).
Most secession movements fail, do they not? Scotland failed. Catalonia failed. Quebec failed.
Nationalist separatist movements are nothing new, but if they aren't terribly successful, I would say they aren't "the trend." The Balkans most assuredly splintered in the 90s, but things have calmed down since then.
I think the EU will continue to acquire supranational authority at the expense of its member states. The current period is probably just an interglacial. The elites all still want this.
Most secessionist movements fail, but "integrationalist" movements have an even worse track record lately. We can build or expand alliances, but building and expanding nations seems to be a lost art. Which may be a good thing given that the process has been so often nonconsensual and exploitive in the past.
As a counterpoint, "I'm the foreign minister of a country" can be said by several more people if there are multiple countries, so smaller countries tend to be preferred by elite politicians — most of which will no longer be elite politicians after a merger.
Sure but I'm assuming most of them think they'll beat the odds. The kind of person who becomes a foreign minister, or a prime minister for that matter, is irrationally overconfident by nature.
Malta has a foreign minister, still. I hear it can be actually a bit of recruitment problem for national bureaucracies, because all the ambitious capable would-be administrators go for the career in the shiny federal EU bureaucracy. National administrative apparatus is left to pick the leftovers.
Why does competition have to occur at the level of "countries"? It really seems to me that there's an importance to creating a hierarchy of multiple levels of government, with different issues being sent up or down to the relevant level. It's a good thing that we don't just have the federal and state governments in the United States, but also a good number of counties, cities, water districts, transit agencies, and other elected government offices with different sizes of political base (though I think some things would work better if they were either consolidated upwards or devolved downwards).
It doesn't necessarily have to happen at the level of countries, but all else equal, we should expect inter-country competition to be more intense than say "inter-state" (as in US state) competition. The US federal government is going to impose limits on how intensely US states can compete with each other, whereas governments of entirely separate nations will actually work to increase their own industries' competitive advantage.
What are the barriers to buying up coal electric generating plants or electric utilities? Or when/if the tech becomes feasible to bribe utilities to convert those plants to accelerated adoption of deep geothermal or micro fission or micro fusion. Or to bribe, I mean make campaign contributions to state legislatures, to subsidize or facilitate conversion in some other way.
The main barrier is that these facilities are immensely expensive. A new coal plant costs 2 billion dollars to build. So if you want to build an alternative, AND buy the old one, you'll have to spend that much money twice because you'll have to build a new facility too.
I wonder how #19 (emotional reaction to Uvalde shooting) would break down between people who watch TV/video news and those who do not. From the retweets, and what I read about George Floyd's death, a lot of the people who claim to feel emotion about sad news events were watching emotionally moving videos, sometimes over and over, often edited to be more moving. Video news is essentially (unintentionally) hacking yourself to feel emotion about strangers suffering.
I don't do video news, myself, and I have no emotional reaction to strangers dying. Although not clear that's the only reason.
“But he concludes that his personal aesthetic is anti-woke, and that he would fight for that aesthetic even if wokeness ‘would lead to a happier and healthier society’. My thoughts on this are more complicated than can fit in a link summary paragraph, but I do think the concept of ‘fight for your own preferences even if they would make society worse’ is pretty close to the concept of ‘bad person’”
Is anyone with any non-purely utilitarian outlook therefore a bad person? Because the moment you value something other than human happiness and well being, you will tradeoff against those things. I suspect it seems wrong because I call it “aesthetics” instead of “philosophy,” but I think philosophy just mostly reflects aesthetic preferences anyway. Anyway I’d be interested in hearing what this makes my essay different from most people.
It’s possible (easy, even?) to mold your aesthetic to become aligned with a thoughtfully chosen value system. I’d venture to guess that this is a common human experience in modern life. A huge percentage of Americans including myself born before 1985ish went through this evolution on homosexuality. It used to “feel icky” to me to see a same-sex kiss, and now it doesn’t. I’m surprised to see so much weight given to what are subconscious preferences. (“Philosophy” is too generous a word for something that exists without any reasoning.) Maybe your aesthetics were shaped by early childhood or genetics or whatever, but they deserve close scrutiny instead of a shrug if you find them in opposition to your chosen values. Echoing jstr, yes it’s bad.
Well I actually followed a similar path to be honest. I stopped thinking it was icky for a while, but then saw how gay rights was used as another protected identity to take away people’s freedom and thought that well there was probably some wisdom in the old instincts.
If you see identity politics as more harmful than the actual harm to every one of the millions of individual gays, women, nonwhites, etc who had a LOT less money safety power happiness freedom etc etc etc in the absence of policies protecting them from the aesthetic preferences of the monoculture, then… ok. That’s a chosen value system of a kind.
Well you might want to check the data on how much happier women and gays are in the last few decades, and what’s happened to things like the incarceration rate and out of wedlock birthrate for blacks since the 1960s.
We probably fall on different sides of the screaming match among academics/bloggers on social trends. One point I know with certainty is that I, a nonwhite woman, have more money safety power and freedom in 2022 than my clone in any previous era would have had, and this is *very obviously* because of policy. I’m aware of the damaging effects of identity politics, and I’m a closer follower of Jonathan Haidt. The progressive left has overshot. There is a good equilibrium yet to reach. But giving in to the “wisdom” of icky feelings about same-sex kissing is a huge cost to LGBT folks since its natural outcome is ostracizing, reversal of the right to marriage, etc and will cause overshooting in the other direction.
There seems to be a little rift within the lute, Selina, when it comes to the Ls and Gs and the Ts. But surely it is not idpol that is at fault here, no, it must be that the kids are wrong!
If the old instincts were that we shouldn't have protected classes, then this would make sense. But why would feeling icky about a same-sex kiss in any way pick up on the protected identity thing? Do you feel equally icky about seeing a kiss between poor black people of different sexes, just to take members of other protected identities?
"I’d venture to guess that this is a common human experience in modern life. A huge percentage of Americans including myself born before 1985ish went through this evolution on homosexuality. "
I would be very careful with stating it aloud. If it becomes a common public knowledge (everyone knows that everyone knows) again that "actually, peoples' deeply held gut-level instinctual preferences can be changed with enough effort", then I believe there is higher than 50% chance for even more determined and forceful efforts to indoctrinate new ones to replace $outgroup's current ones and protect $ingroup from evil $outgroup attempts to do the same.
I say *again* because it isn't exactly a new idea. How else one would think the mono-religious have emerged anywhere? It is just that, creation of such creatures is often violent and seldom compatible with personal liberty and freedom of conscience.
I think the Overton window contains is more like "Pride movement has made people increasingly to realize the errors they had been taught, it was only the bad people really felt icky about same-sex relationships already back in the 1970s".
When you get to the point "it is possible to convert people to orthodoxy", then you are a bit too close to "we have made all possible effort to convert people peacefully, yet some heathens still remain, how can that be". And from there, it is only a half-step to using force and religious war. Current amount of violence is still within the long-term baseline noise of Western religious violence. It could be much worse.
It seems like the BBC is celebrating a shift from mandatory “fun” to optional fun that has to be actually fun in order to persuade people to attend voluntarily. I don’t know if that shift is actually happening, but if so it seems like a positive thing.
With any "fun" organized by a large institution, the problem is that not everyone finds the same things fun. Some of us like happy hours, some of us hate being around alcohol. Kelsey Piper at one point wrote a passionate defense of tech companies providing food for employees, which completely fell flat for those of us who would much rather get a little more money and be able to eat the food we like, at home, in private.
Solution: make the organized "fun" actually optional.
Even that is a bit fraught, sometimes- if the optional benefit is costly to the company (and it usually is), then you're basically paying people more if they agree with the company's taste.
#7: Can anyone explain what the hell is going on here?
#26: You can put me far into the bottom left - it's a lonely quadrant, but I'll take it. I'm not really sure why it's so poorly occupied - a combination of 'intelligence has only happened once in the universe as far as we can tell so is probably pretty complicated' and 'that intelligence was generally really bad for most other entities around it, particularly near-peer competitors' aligns with the single data point we have pretty well, no?
17: Reading the claim about «happier and healthier» society… It's pretty clear that in the hypothethical effects are assumed to be small and with different signs for dfferent people, and if the least cherry-picked method of aggregation says something, well, still not buying.
I disagree with the morality in question, but I think that the summary here is too uncharitable.
18: I remember that when Donald Trump offered people to vote on the urgency order of his campaign promises (which apparently was predictably ignored), in some places supporters and opponents agreed on the order but disagreed where net-negative starts. So maybe there is even more leeway (depending on one's favourite issues, of course)?
46: Ouch, that part where there is more A contamination in a B-labeled product that is indeed mostly B than A in A-labeled products that are … also almost pure B
[42] – YESSSSS! Tolerate _all_ speech! Persecute the _initiation_ of violence or coercion (e.g. the threat of violence)! Ayn Rand had this down but this post is wonderful too. I like the thoughts on _when_, i.e. under what circumstances, to 'de-platform' someone: "they make enough absurd arguments that are easy to demonstrate false"; that "enough" is doing a LOT of the work tho! Daryl Davis and similar are what I think of as an 'existence proof' that "enough" is, for many of the relevant people, QUITE a lot actually!
[43] – daaang; my own worst topic doesn't even make the list. That's probably a bad sign!
Well, the whole thing about nazis winning a fair democratic election is a pretty persuasive argument, even if they did also play dirty. The sad truth seems to be that reason just doesn't reliably win against unreason on open platforms, and the best we can hope for with the current level of sanity waterline is that the dominant flavor of unreason is a bit more benign than that. Of course, how to ensure that is also an unsolved problem, and what cancel culture amounts to in practice is simply punishment of dissent.
How is 'playing dirty' compatible with 'winning a fair democratic election'?
Playing dirty is unfair!
> The sad truth seems to be that reason just doesn't reliably win against unreason on open platforms
It would be nice if we actually _tried_ reason first!
And I note that the people that really DO try actually do succeed, often to a considerable degree, e.g. Daryl Davis and the people – on Twitter of all places! – that helped Megan Phelps-Roper leave the Westboro Baptist Church.
It is extremely Sad that so many people think "reason" is entirely compatible with a very unproductive (and often stupid) hostility towards people that disagree with them. Changing one's mind is one of the most difficult things for us to do!
> what cancel culture amounts to in practice is simply punishment of dissent
Yes – and that's also a clue/evidence that the people resorting to basically 'fascist' ('totalitarian') tactics are in fact NOT the 'standard bearers of Reason', but just another variety of "unreason".
We – no one – is currently at war with Nazis. To the extent that any Nazis are committing crimes, they should be investigated/prosecuted/punished – just like anyone else. Otherwise, we absolutely should maintain the moral and effective commitment to _reasoning_ with them, or at least the possibility of doing so.
Or, if they really _were_ somehow 'super extra dangerous' and their words or other communications really are 'info poison' – we should complete our own 'progrom' and kill them all immediately. That wouldn't work anyways, but at least that would make _sense_ if they really were, somehow, as dangerous as they're often portrayed.
1. Last time i had checked DR Congo was not included. Had they limited themselves to Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania it may have had some chance of succeding. This is going to end up failing for the same reason the eu is in a gridlock, too many countries with too different necessities and very little desire to surrender their sovereignty to Bruxelles, but made even worse by the internal problems of african countries.
4. Re mathematicians in alignments: that does not sound like a problem where a mathematician can help all that much? Also re radical abundance, colour me skeptical that AGIs will be that much helpful. They are still bounded by physics and economics, no matter how intelligent. They may lead to breakthroughs, but only if a breakthrough is possible in the first place.
> I do think the concept of “fight for your own preferences even if they would make society worse” is pretty close to the concept of “bad person”
The Westminster Shorter Catechism famously answers "What is the chief end of man" with "Man's chief end is to glorify God[...]". Similarly, Dostoevsky in Brother's Karamazov "The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular.[...] the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.”
It's very utilitarian to claim that goodness/badness of a person should be measured by how they view society as a general whole. But there are certainly plenty of thinkers through history who have no held this point of view.
> Dostoevsky in Brother's Karamazov "The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular.[...] the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.”
Just checking: is the character speaking these words a villain in the story?
The speaker is the old monk Zosima, who is something like the moral authority in the book. Brothers Karamzov is a literary and philosophical masterpiece, if you haven't read it you should. The full quote below makes this more clear. The idea is kind of that you can easily fool yourself that you are a good person for loving the abstract notion of "humanity", while actual being bad towards other people.
""It's just the same story as a doctor once told me," observed the elder. "He was a man getting on in years, and undoubtedly clever. He spoke as frankly as you, though in jest, in bitter jest. 'I love humanity,' he said, 'but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,' he said, 'I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he's too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.'
"But what's to be done? What can one do in such a case? Must one despair?"
"No. It is enough that you are distressed at it. Do what you can, and it will be reckoned unto you. Much is done already in you since you can so deeply and sincerely know yourself. If you have been talking to me so sincerely, simply to gain approbation for your frankness, as you did from me just now, then, of course, you will not attain to anything in the achievement of real love; it will all get no further than dreams, and your whole life will slip away like a phantom. In that case you will naturally cease to think of the future life too, and will of yourself grow calmer after a fashion in the end."
I am surprised by how left wing Scott purports to be. He claimed to have voted for Elizabeth Warren which most of the economists he reads thought had terrible ideas.
As far as I can figure out, Scott thought he was voting for the Elizabeth Warren who wrote The Two-Income Trap (2004), not the Elizabeth Warren who became a senator nine years later. The former seems to have had a brain.
In the "bees are fish" case neither the California legislature nor the Court of Appeals were "dumb." The legislature was at worst naive; the court used sophistical reasoning to reach a desired result. The legislature not unreasonably assumed that its language defining fish as including invertebrates would be understood as meaning that aquatic species which lacked an internal skeleton, such as shellfish, would still be considered fish, not that all terrestrial invertebrates would be defined as fish. The trial court opinion got it right: https://www.californialandusedevelopmentlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/33/2020/11/Almond-Alliance-of-California-v.-California-Department-of-Fish-and-Wildlife.pdf. The court of appeals was hardly compelled to reach the result it did by the plain language of the statute; rather, through highly motivated reasoning they managed to reach a result that was contrary to the obvious intent of the legislature and the normal principles of statutory construction. This case is a real-life version of the famous fictional case of Regina v. Ojibway, in which it was held that a pony was legally a small bird. http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/program/law/08-732/Interpretation/regina.pdf.
"Cocklecarrot: Having regard to the curious nature of this case, I think there should be an appeal under article 6 of the Statute of Giminy and Bocage.
Mr. Pass: Under Statute Law, m'lud, refraction must be proven.
Cocklecarrot: Aye, an' it be not proven, there is always the right of multiple cozenage.
Mr. Honey-Gander: Ultra vires?
Cocklecarrot: Of course. Sine die. Tutamen being implicit, with or without barratry, responderia and plonth, except in municipal law.
Mr. Pass: And wivenage, in lieu of direct mandibility?
Cocklecarrot: Not concurrently with external vapimenta. Merely in plenary copyhold.
Mr. Honey-Gander: M'lud, a tort being the source of a private right of action, in common law, as distinct from equity, matrimonial, Admiralty, agricultural or piscatorial jurisdiction, alterum non laedere, I suggest that classification, per se, under the Employers' Liability Act of 1897, as in Wivenhoe v. Spott (1903 A.C. 274) becomes a matter of malicious nuisance, sic utere tuo ut alienum laedas, in which case follopy is self-evident. For instance, a turtle's egg in the Galapagos Islands--
Cocklecarrot: Quite, quite, Mr. Honey-Gander. Let someone else develop the thing for a bit now. Now, my office being jus dicere, if not jus dare (see Hopkins v. Tollemache), it would be some considerable advantage to me to know what this case is about. Nobody, so far, has thought of mentioning such a thing.
Mr. Honey-Gander: M'lud, we have first to decide whether common usage or commercial usage is the more' convenient instrument for developing and expanding a statute law.
Cocklecarrot: I don't see why we have to go into that now.
Mr. Poss: M'lud, if a contract is unenforceable, as in Miss Fancy Fimple v. The Gaiety Theatre, Buttery-on-the-Vile, then, and not till then, the interchangeable nature of judicial procedure becomes, morally speaking, paramount. Now by the Bills of Exchange Act (1876) twill was included in the category of perishable goods. But if perishable goods are used to wrap the tails of rocking-horses they become, by mansuetude, imperishable, because the tail of a rocking-horse, of which the wrapping is an integral part, is a structure and not a moving fixture.
Cocklecarrot: How can a thing be both perishable and imperishable?
"22: Feminism through unionizing female college party-goers. I like this idea, although the devil on my left shoulder is telling me it should involve blockchain somehow."
I wouldn't believe anything that comes from the subreddit without further verification.
12: This reminds me of the album "Wintertide" by Alexander James Adams. Alexander is a trans man who previously sang as "Heather Alexander" before transitioning. Wintertide is a Christmas/Solstice album sung in duet between Heather Alexander and Alexander Adams. AIUI, he recorded the Heather Alexander parts before going on hormone therapy and getting a more masculine voice, but I'm not 100% certain. Either way, put it down as another entry in "unusual biological situation leading to unique and interesting music"
"I can just barely remember the time when the culture was telling us that small butts were attractive; now it tells us the opposite. Everyone always talks about how attractiveness is culturally conditioned, but it’s weird to have lived through a shift and have an intuitive sense of how both sides feel from the inside."
This seems to be a constant swinging between 'more curvy - less curvy - more curvy' in fashion; look at the introduction of the bustle in the 1870s:
Wikipedia says it was " Bustles are worn under the skirt in the back, just below the waist, to keep the skirt from dragging. Heavy fabric tended to pull the back of a skirt down and flatten it. As a result a woman's petticoated skirt would lose its shape during everyday wear (from merely sitting down or moving about)" but later adds "Fullness of some sort was still considered necessary to make the waist look smaller and the bustle eventually replaced the crinoline completely" and really that is what this is all about - the contrast of the hourglass shape, with rounder bust and bottom accentuating/accentuated by the slender waist.
Along comes the flapper silhouette of the 20s and 30s where 'boyish', flat figures are preferred. Then back to the curvy pin-ups of the 40s and 50s (see Marilyn Monore in "Some Like It Hot"):
Then back to the 60s and Twiggy is the face of fashion.
The reason women wanted to know "how do I reduce my butt/make it smaller/look smaller?" is because being broad in the beam is associated with fatness. Being fat is not attractive. Having a slim, svelte, toned figure is. Remember the fuss about cellulite back in the 2000s (and apparently it is something that goes in cycles, first being described in the 20s in spas, reoccuring again during the 60s, and back once more for the 2000s)? All the treatments and exercise plans to get rid of your ugly orange-peel skin and fat deposits on your hips and upper thighs? Read the interview with the snakeoil salesman in the linked article (and I say "snakeoil" because "osteopathic physician Lionel Bissoon ...runs a clinic for mesotherapy (injections of homeopathic extracts, vitamins and/or medicine designed to reduce the appearance of cellulite) in New York City" and he talks about "What I try to do is find old picture books, women in the 1950s or 1960s…. When you find these pictures, women had perfect legs" which is horse manure, because women back then had dimply knees etc. every bit as much):
The transition then to "bigger butts" comes when cultural changes in what is considered attractive happens, but it still relies on the "hourglass shape" most desirable silhouette: big bust, slender waist, big bottom. Not *too* big, though; you can easily get a bigger butt just by eating more and not exercising. That's not what is wanted, and thus butt implants (a phrase I never contemplated having to type out): something that produces an effect that looks toned, not flabby.
Give it another ten years or so, and in the 2030s the craze will be for "flat as a board" once again 😁
There's obviously been a difference in the speed of surgical progress in the various areas too. Compare Blair White's chest to Madonna's terrifying frankenbutt.
I appreciate the mention of the bustle, here. I think we might want to soft-pedal our assumptions about what it meant for self-perception and buttocks, though. An aesthetic appreciation for a clothed shape is different than an aesthetic/sexual appreciation for an unclothed shape. There may be private recollections by the men and women of that era as to how they felt about butts, but I haven't personally read any. I have read reflections on the attractiveness of bound feet, and how important it is to never allow yourself to see a woman's bound feet unbound, as it quite ruins the effect. There's also class markers and status markers. There surely are still venues at which it would be gauche to appear with a too-largely-endowed woman on one's arm, or places in which one might be ashamed to admit to a preference for petite women. Under-girding all of this is the endless human capacity for dishonesty, leading to such 'classic' jokes as "fat chicks are like mopeds -- fun to ride until your friends catch you on one." That is to say, preferences may have changed less than we think within demographic groups during the mentioned times, with the window of what it is acceptable to admit liking being the primary change.
The problem with taking the products of the fashion industry as exemplars of male preference is that relatively few straight men work in the industry and therefore have little say on what is 'fashionable'.
While I agree that high fashion is not much of an indication of what ordinary women are wearing or how their figures are constructed, fashion does help map what the tendencies are in each era towards what is considered attractive or desirable.
Corsetry that produced the desired tiny waist and bounteous bust/buttocks ratio, for example, and then the reaction to the uncorseted look, which of course best suited slim, slender women of a straight up-and-down figure.
(Warning; if you get into the history of corsetry, it's *very* deep-dive).
Think of classic 80s shoulder-pads and power-dressing; it was to create a very definite, inverted-triangle silhouette in order to mimic men's style of dressing, as well as the perennial fashion recycling of earlier trends (in this case, 1930s/40s broad shoulders in women's clothing:
So swinging from a more 'masculine' (wide-shouldered) or androgynous style to a more 'feminine' (wide-hipped) style is all part of the natural oscillations of fashionable looks!
Off topic but driving me crazy: there is a well established term in rationalist circles for "inability to separate object and meta levels in discourse" which is also sometimes used for inability to make is-ought distinctions. I can't remember what this term is, but I see a reason to use it like twice a day. Any help?
That data for the educational interventions looks extremely suspect to me. The supposedly good interventions have a radically different maximum scale value, and appear to show the same trend when limited to the same regime as the supposedly bad-scaling interventions.
For #8 this quote appears to be the "money shot" of the analysis:
"Classes aren’t just half the size; there are twice as many different classes now compared to thirty years ago."
This gets into something that I think many people have casually noted. As human knowledge expands, to be an expert you increasingly have to focus on more specialized fields. But... what does that mean for universities, the places that are supposed to turn you into an expert? It means that if they want to provide as wide a range of potential topics as they once did, they have to produce a lot more classes subdivided into specialities. Now of course a university could simply become more specialized, "We're the Biology University... you come here for the Bio and if you want something else the Chemistry University is down the road." But that contradicts another purpose of universities, that in the first year or two of classes students have some flexibility to decide what they ultimately want to study in depth. I suspect eventually there will be to be more of a split, where you have the two year "General Studies" university in one place, and then you go to a separate "specialized" university that will likely be a different institution in a different place. Basically like medical schools do now, except it'll be necessary to even get as far as a 4-year degree. (Oh, did I just describe Community College? Yes, except it'll become the standard for everyone.)
The specialization of human knowledge shouldn't cause scope creep in the mission of the undergraduate university. Four years bachelors can continue to be competent at something, but expertise is the result of further practical or research experience.
> We're the Biology University... you come here for the Bio and if you want something else the Chemistry University is down the road.
A lot of Europe does it exactly this way (though it's institutes within universities - but you study a certain specialization from the start). It seems to work fine.
Then I suggest meditation. I directly criticised Scott and also conceded his blog his rules. It's called Discourse. My tone here I called sarcastic and patronising.
And - you should try meditation. Your anger is a deeply first world indulgence.
I'm skimming the SpaceX Boca Chica FONSI right now and it doesn't seem unreasonable or hard to comply with, compared to e.g. building the largest and most powerful rocket the world has ever seen.
It's mostly things like:
restrictions on when they can close the public roads in the area,
making sure they don't leak pollutants into the water table,
speed limits and a shuttle bus to avoid damaging roads that were designed for a sleepy fishing village, not a spaceport,
protocols for cleaning up the government's land in the event that bits of exploded spaceship crash into it,
tying down pressure vessels so they don't explode (as has happened before) and crash into somebody else's land,
making sure the vibrations from their activites don't damage nearby buildings.
The history assignment, ocelot tittlation and cutting a cheque to the fishermen don't seem too hard for a $125,000,000,000 company to manage.
When you're building a massive industrial site like Starbase, you should have to take measures to avoid damaging other people's stuff that's nearby.
>The history assignment, ocelot tittlation and cutting a cheque to the fishermen don't seem too hard for a $125,000,000,000 company to manage.
regulation requirements shouldn't be based on the size of the organization being regulated. I also fail to see how these items conform to your next statement about taking measures to avoid damaging other peoples stuff.
On 38 (genres by gender), I'm less surprised by the relative ordering than by how early the 50-50 point lands. Is reading really that gender-skewed or is this data somehow biased by observing goodreads reviews only?
if I believe all kinds of studies, yes? There's perennial discussion over "how do we get boys to read?" and in tests like PISA for literacy and numeracy, the gap is that girls do better on reading and boys do better on maths:
Part of it seems to be men prefer to read certain types of books and don't go much outside them, I'm pretty sure we've had discussions on here previously from guys saying how they only read non-fiction and what the heck is the use of fiction anyways?
Allegedly women read more, read more broadly, and form things like book clubs etc.
Discussing a book for hours definitely seems a female action. I'm more interested in the story. Discussing it often decays into finding subtle nuances to make the speaker look smart by finding plausible fake nuance, and besides, takes up time I could be using to read another book.
Absolutely. Women supposedly make up 80% of those who read for pleasure. We dork men don't realize how girl-coded it is to read because we don't want to internalize that we're doing something as gay as drag, but men in general abandoned literature as soon as movies were created – more immediate, more visceral, far better at describing action.
If one's opinion of contemporary architecture is, that for sufficiently large buildings, it might spoil the view, one might build down at least to mid-rise depths. The HVAC and natural lighting situations are helped if one has a hillside to build into.
W/re #22, isn't "union of female college party-goers" another word for "sorority"? Granted, the concept doesn't *have* to be bundled with a group living arrangement, but there are economies of scale and if your priorities are A: college and B: partying in the company of trusted friends, it seems like that's what sororities were made for.
Are there sororities that are imposing similar demands as a condition of group attendance at e.g. fraternity parties? If not, why?
Fraternities and sororities are very different, at least where I went to school. Sororities are governed by rules set by women who graduated decades ago and don't particularly care what the actives want. For example, sororities go to fraternity parties instead of hosting their own, because the alumnae believe hosting a party would hurt the sorority's reputation.
#7 (desk ornaments) - Hank Green just uploaded a video featuring the same search, and added a possible explanation: people search something tangentially related and click on the shocking/notable results, leading those results to get boosted in related searches. He also showcases it affecting shopping reviews for books. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMlw7mDPHgY
Prediction: 37 will turn out to be a NEPA document which actually documents compliance with a whole bunch of other laws/regulations, many of which aren't strictly environmental (e.g. the National Historic Preservation Act) and that the requirements will be fairly clearly tied to the effects SpaceX is having.
Well, I was right, it's a NEPA document. For the second, lets take a look at the specific claims:
1) "hire a biologist to investigate the effect of lighting on sea turtles,"
Well, sort of, in that: "A qualified biologist will conduct lighting inspections to eliminate unnecessary lighting before nesting season and weekly during the nesting-hatching season (March 15th to October 1st) and send the results of the inspections to the FAA"
This appears to be part of the ESA compliance, as apparently night lighting can attract turtle hatchlings, which is, you know, bad for them, as well as causing harm to birds. There doesn't appear to be a requirement for study, just inspection and minimization.
2) "perform quarterly cleanups of local beaches,"
Again, sort of: . "SpaceX will conduct quarterly SH 4 clean-up efforts east of the first public hard checkpoint to reduce garbage and litter along the road. The clean-up efforts will take place within the SH 4 right-of-way."
So, they have to clean-up the areas they're closing to public access, in order to preserve it as habitat.
3) "operate an employee shuttle,"
True: "SpaceX will operate an employee shuttle between Brownsville and the project site and between parking areas at LLCC and the VLA to reduce the number of project-related vehicles traveling to and from the project site."
This appears to be about minimizing the footprint of parking lots, as they're filling wetlands to create the required ones.
4) "plus write a report on the Mexican-American War (really!),"
True: "Preparing a historical context report (i.e., historical narrative) of the historic events and activities of the Mexican War (1846–1848) and the Civil War (1861–1865) that took place in the
geographic area associated with and including the APE."
They're having an adverse effect on a bunch of historic properties, creating a report which hopefully captures the pre-effect state and minimizes the lost information from those effects is standard mitigation.
5) "plus “install missing ornaments” on a local historical marker,"
Not sure where the internal quotes come from, what I found was: "One-Time Replication of Missing Marker Elements. SpaceX will pay for the replication and installation of the missing star and wreath on the Palmetto Pilings 1936 Centennial Marker. SpaceX accomplished this measured in 2015 as part of compliance with the 2015 MOA; however, the star and wreath were removed after SpaceX replaced them. SpaceX will replace the star and wreath again within 1 year following completion of construction. However, should the Palmetto Pilings Marker be damaged by SpaceX’s activities, such as from an anomaly, SpaceX will repair the Marker..."
This one is pretty weird. Looks like it's probably going to have effects, but no one could really figure that out, so they came up with mitigation everyone could live with.
6) plus help protect ocelots,
Yep, they'll do habitat improvement and look into wildlife road crossings, as well as donate to a local ocelot group which will do some other support work to mitigate for the potential effects to these endangered species of the actions they wish to take. Now, this one is arguable, as they haven't seen ocelots locally in ~20 years, there are populations in the region ~20 miles away and this is a very large project.
7) plus make an annual donation to a state recreational fishing program
True: "Provide improved, enhanced, or new access for fishing opportunities in the Gulf of
Mexico, Rio Grande, Brownsville Shipping Channel, and/or South Bay. SpaceX will provide
$5,000 annually to enhance the existing TPWD Tackle Loaner Program. This funding may
be used to purchase fishing equipment (rods, reels, and tackle boxes with hooks, sinkers,
and bobbers) for use at existing, heavily visited sites and/or allow the program to expand
to new locations"
Yes, they're going to have a bunch of access restrictions that limit use of state park lands, and so they're paying to attempt to create alternate fishing opportunities, for those lost.
I'm not the biggest fan in the world of NEPA, or the broader structure of compliance law/regulation which has grown over the years, but 'yeah, we should definitely be allowed to launch a 400 foot tall rocket, with 3700 metric tons of propellant into space and get it back again without considering the ramifications for the local community/environment/resources' is not an argument I think you're going to find many supporters for.
ETA: To be clear, that's a paraphrase, not an argument which was actually made.
I had a look at that Palmetto Pilings one, and it seems to be that in 1936 Texas put up a lot of memorials (from grave plaques to monuments) for the centenary of the independence from Mexico. These were on historical sites associated with battles and so forth, and over time they needed to be repaired/restored. So plans to do that were drawn up.
So if SpaceX are operating on land where one of these monuments is located, it seems that they've accepted at least part of the cost for repairing such a monument. (From what I can make out, whoever owns the land also 'owns' the monument on it). You can see on this marker the missing star and wreath (plus what looks like someone used it for target practice, and that's included in the restoration plans: "Shotgun damage (holes or pockmarks) A conservator may be able to glue a mixture of granite dust and epoxy into the holes but must drill ½” holes at each location to attach the filler"):
I think another good sign about this being done as expected is: Elon Musk complained about broken regulatory structure for single-week delays at FAA (for 10km hop-and-land attempts), and he did complain about the PEPA process taking longer than planned, ans SpaceX even got some slaps on the wrist for using a more optimistic risk model than FAA approved when launching the hops (!) — but Elon Musk did not say «it's getting funny although of course we will comply» about any point in the requirement list.
Official SpaceX reaction (at least as tweeted) is strictly positive, too.
Oh well, the project does deal a little bit of damage to a lot of things, and SpaceX have overstepped their permits before and they know it, so it's not unexpected to have a long list of small compensations and mitigations; the primary requirements have much more impact on the project costs!
I love to see things like #47, an incredible and thorough debunk of something wild I had never heard of before. Having read Herman Pontzer's "Burn", I also feel confident that it's not lithium making us fat. Someone should review that one for ACX book review.
I'm someone who reads this blog for the explanations of how conclusions are reached, the grappling with uncertainty, the attempts to reduce cognitive bias, the awareness of the inevitability of tradeoffs, etc.
All that is prelude to saying, I understand *very little* about the AI risk debate (in part, it seems, because I don't have any clear model of human cognition).
The AGI predictions compass, #26, would be a lot more informative if the current 'outcome likely good/bad' scale were split into two separate scales. The first would be an intentions scale: 'un/likely to ever decide to try to harm or subdue humanity'. The second would remain an 'outcome likely good/bad' scale - but the existence of the separate intentions scale would change how we read it.
To the extent that such a simplistic diagram could ever be a guide to a debate - surely there are others who would find these split scales helpful?
I'm reminded of Scott's post on things like anorexia in Hong Kong, with HK being an example of a place that historically had no framework for anorexia but which was open enough to allow it to be introduced. A less open society nearby with the same cultural history might still have no anorexia.
Your final line is where the rubber really meets the road, though. Humans appear to 'function' best when coerced by cruel necessity, and Nature long since has lost the power to apply this kind of necessity. The cost of using human will to impose an artificial version is (generally recognized to be) too high, but induces the same 'functioning' where applied.
I put 'functioning' in scare quotes because I acknowledge the futility of attempting to establish a mutually agreed-upon definition for it in a comment section.
"AGI will not be upper-bounded by human ability or human learning speed. Things much smarter than human would be able to learn from less evidence than humans require to have ideas driven into their brains; there are theoretical upper bounds here, but those upper bounds seem very high. (Eg, each bit of information that couldn't already be fully predicted can eliminate at most half the probability mass of all hypotheses under consideration.) "
Can someone explain what this means? Presumably it is something to do with working out the maximum theoretical intelligence of an AI system, but I don't see how you get from halving a hypothesis search space to some notion of intellectual capability. It sounds rather like there is a lot of heavy lifting that needs to be done before you can fix that bit in the first place.
> I don't see how you get from halving a hypothesis search space to some notion of intellectual capability.
Problem-solving is an intellectual capability. Any problem has a set of possible solutions -- that's the search space. Some subset of that search space are solutions that actually solve the given problem. So what problem-solving is (in the abstract) is pretty much searching a space of possible solutions. An efficient search implies faster/better problem-solving, and therefore higher intellectual capability.
Yes, but it is the intellectual capability that halves the search space, not the other way around. I just don't understand what the author is trying to prove with this statement.
Well, the general idea is, that the less evidence you require to arrive at a correct conclusion, the more efficient your intelligence is. Of course, this says nothing about the explicit mechanism of its working (the heavy lifting), just that humans are in practice immensely far from theoretical limits, and there is no reason a priori to think that AI can't quickly get much better.
17. Re Hanania, this is a big problem of the "woke" cultural egemony. That it allowed conservatives like Hanania to rebrand themselves as allies of moderates, libertarians and disgruntled liberals against the eccesses of wokism. But, and i am going to be uncharitable here, i cannot shake off the impression that if the conservatives controlled the culture Hanania would be no better than your average woke asking for cancellations.
Even if he were no better than them, he would still not be as bad – simply because his instincts are the ones shared by most of the population. This isn't to defend censorious conduct on the part of conservatives, but it's undeniable that it de facto does less damage.
It's not hard to imagine, given that Republicans have literally tried to ban books (even at private booksellers) and passed state laws micromanaging what schoolteachers can say.
And then there's the "cancellations" of Disney, Delta, etc. Republicans have made it clear that companies will be punished for criticizing their policies.
Re. "Why is there more mental illness in open compared to authoritarian societies?" --
One hypothesis to consider is that most people are more comfortable in authoritarian societies, or in societies where they have a clear social role and clear social standards. Freedom is scary. I doubt there's much existential angst in authoritarian societies.
I'm reminded, for instance, of the Marxist hatred of wage labor, which they've always denounced as being inhuman and oppressive. Yet when I tried to found a start-up, I was unable to find any partners. Every person I spoke about it to strongly preferred wage labor over working for themselves, which they considered much too scary.
I'm also reminded of the odd phenomenon that most fiction writers, who are probably the most creative free spirits today, nonetheless find it easier to write when given some strict limitations, such as a writing prompt or a set of things the story must include.
Arnold Schoenberg invented serialism in music as a way to put constraints on himself once he had achieved what he called the "emancipation of the dissonance". In traditional tonal music, some combinations of pitches are considered "dissonant" and others are "consonant", and while there are some objective factors defining them (notably, consonant pitch combinations tend to have small integer ratios in their frequencies) there are some traditional ones that he got rid of (namely, dissonances like the tritone - a pitch ratio of square root of 2 - are traditionally required to "resolve" to a nearby consonance, so that in C major, having B against F *must* resolve to C against E). Thus, he made up the idea that you should take some arbitrary sequence of the 12 different pitches, and require that the entire piece of music consist of some patchwork of organizations of this sequence (they can be transposed, inverted, done in reverse, or done partially simultaneously in different melodic lines). This forces us to consider each of the 12 pitches as equal, and stop thinking of consonances as privileged over dissonances, but gives us a new framework of arbitrary constraints that can then enable creativity.
#51 on meditation doing damage: It does sound like she didn't have a teacher. While there are risks to having teachers, there are also risks to using powerful tools based on your guesses about what might work.
I believe she read material about the effects of deep meditative experiences, and tried to get those effects instead of letting enlightenment happen or not-- and it's an easy mistake to make.
"attractiveness...culturally conditioned...lived through a shift"
Living overseas will do this for you as well. When I first moved to China, I didn't find female Chinese faces very attractive. After a while, I did! I also had that thing where it felt more difficult to tell Chinese faces apart at first; later, it didn't feel difficult at all (I'm caucasian and grew up in Britain). I even got a little feel of what the reverse might be like: I find occasionally that when I see a caucasian face now, sometimes the first thing that registers with me is "that's a caucasian face," so if I see a face very briefly, it's quite possible that the only thing I'll remember about it is that it's white. It's not quite the same as "white people all look the same," but it's an interesting step in that direction.
Given the tone of that post at Less Wrong, and the discussion below. I am starting to think we have more to fear from that wing of the AI Safety universe than from an AGI itself.
Certainly, seems like many there seem to be on the verge of internally justifying terrorism and or mass atrocity on a pretty large scale in the interest of protecting everyone from possible atrocity by AGI.
The are right about some things, but seem to think many elements of an AGI takeover plan would be wildly easier than reality. Nanobots? 20 years from now?
Yeah, the AI safety crowd is starting to sound unhinged.
We know exactly what y'all mean by "pivotal acts", why you use the GPU melting euphemism, and it's a good idea to shelve that concept before you get defunded and/or arrested.
The Yudkowsky piece is (unintentionally) the most reassuring thing I have ever read regarding AI safety. It all comes down to cost-to-benefit ratio.
Orthogonality implies that an AI could become nice or bad, or, that it could become diligent or lazy. Instrumental convergence implies that AI could use the same tools for different goals. Or, that an AI will serve its own goals even if we give it specific tools. Both of these together inform the "benefit" arm of the ratio. The only way the AI benefits is if its desired variable state is achieved. Orthogonality and instrumental convergence tell us quite clearly that it doesn't matter to the AI how it achieves that variable state.
When you consider the space of available strategies, an AI will be bound by entropy in two important ways. The first way is simple thermodynamics - grander strategies are costlier. The more important second way is mere numeration - grander strategies are far more rare than simpler strategies. This is the more important way because of instrumental convergence : even if an AI is smart enough to solve thermodynamic problems in far better ways, it's going to apply those thermodynamic tools to simpler strategies, too. Entropy informs the "cost" arm of the ratio. The cost to the AI is the grandness of its strategy, due to increased physical barriers and due to the need to reject a larger number of strategies. This cost is minimized by selecting from the far more available simple strategies.
This sums up to : most AI's will probably self-degrade to a state in which their desired variable states are met with the least amount of real effort. They'll Goodhart themselves into oblivion, like black holes evaporating.
17: Richard Hanania: Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?
Maybe Hanania opposes woke pronouns even if they “would lead to a happier and healthier society” in the same way he would oppose harvesting organs from an unwilling donor to save multiple lives even if that would lead to a happier and healthier society.
A world where Scott gave his entire income to the AMF would surely be happier and healthier, yet Scott is clearly uninterested in doing this. Can we conclude that Scott is a bad person?
I also think that aesthetics are a shorthand/heuristic for complicated and difficult (perhaps impossible) to formulate n-th order effects, and they're often a better guide to good outcomes than utilitarian/deontologist explicit reasoning.
At some point every philosophy will reinvent virtue ethics with extra steps.
Do you mind elaborating on why aesthetic preferences are often a better guide to good outcomes than explicit reasoning? Lots of people have different aesthetic preferences, so then how can we tell whether Hanania or the woke people are using the complicated higher order inferences about good outcomes, and who just thinks the other is cringe?
"Thinking the other is cringe" is an aesthetic opinion as well, just perhaps not a very good one. This is difficult to explain, but I'll make an attempt.
The smug answer would refer to e.g. Plato or Islamic theology - both are heavy on good, truth and beauty as linked with each other (with Islam also adding "God" to the cluster).
To elaborate, aesthetics follow from both deep, universal psychological preferences - people tend to feel a lot better in a lush forest than in a concrete-filled city - and from the very nebulous notion of "quality". Compare Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or the way mathematicians, physicists and engineers speak about a solution being elegant/beautiful.
The thing is, both sides of the political debate have a strong argument from aesthetics. At their best, the left propagates freedom of exploration of new thoughts and styles of being (most artists are left-aligned), while the right propagates excellence, technical mastery and personal virtue (alt-right people are really, really fond of classic statues and paintings!). Perhaps their worst aspects emerge when they lose that link.
All pre-modern people reasoned using virtue/aesthetics implicit reasoning and built mostly functional societies, while utilitarian and deontologist calculus crashes constantly upon trolley problems, inquiring axe murderers, organ transplant-driven murders, utility monsters...
at least two cases surfaced in Twitter where they refused to approve comments critical of their theses. in both cases, it was serious referenced arguments.
The anti-Paradox of Tolerance post was pretty disappointing, because it completely dodges the issue by pretending that censoring is something only strawman leftists do, and thus has nothing interesting to say. If you think that left wing cancel mobs are the real enemy, then you can just do a find/replace on the post of "facist" with "left wing cancel mob" to see the paradox in action. Who cancels the cancelers? It's a real dilemma and anyone who pretends there are easy answers is delusional.
Am I missing something with the Twitter links? Both the "why don't we build underground" and "why are some Indian people anti-Taj" links seem to take me to a Tweet that asks the question, but then no actual discussion of the question. In past, when I've seen people link Tweets, it usually links a thread that then contains discussion of the question in the first, but I don't see any of that discussion, and the links here suggest to me that I should be able to see some of that discussion by clicking on the link.
That post about analyzing university cost increase seems to make some mistakes.
It's a nice null assumption that expenditures on support should track expenditures on education, but it would definitely be worth a deeper dive (some people have mentioned that the increase in attendance by minorities, women, first-generation students, and students with disabilities has led to a big increase in the offices dedicated to ensuring that these students have success).
I wouldn't expect a student/faculty ratio chart from law schools to be a great proxy for the rest of the university. I expect there to be different trends in these ratios between engineering schools, agriculture schools, colleges of sciences and of humanities (whether separate or merged), and others.
But the biggest issue is using the length of the course catalog as a measure of the number of classes taught. The post catches the point that "Math 101" just appears once in the catalog no matter how many sections are being taught, but it doesn't catch the point that catalogs have a tendency to grow whenever departments add classes but not shrink when those classes fail to get taught. I believe that Texas A&M has some sort of process whereby a class that hasn't been taught for six consecutive semesters then gets flagged for removal from the catalog unless the department actively intervenes, but even with that, a class takes up just as much space in the catalog if it's being taught in ten sections per semester, or if it's being taught once every six semesters. I would bet that for upper division classes, there's been a gradual tendency over the past few decades for new faculty members to create new classes once in a while, and add them to the catalog, but keep teaching the same number of classes per faculty per semester by just slightly increasing the duration of the rotation. (i.e., maybe an English professor used to teach 19th Century American literature every semester, and then started alternating teaching 19th Century American literature and 19th Century British literature every other semester, but now they teach 19th Century American literature, 19th Century British literature, and 19th Century world literatures in English on a three semester rotation). I would not be surprised if the average number of sections *per semester* of a listing in the catalog has gradually gone down for this reason (though I would also not be surprised to learn that the average number of sections per semester for a catalog listing has gone up, as we get more and more sections of Math 101 and the like).
It would be nice to see some attempt to guess whether the actual courseload taught by professors has changed. In philosophy (the field I know best) currently, research-focused universities typically have a 2/2 load (i.e., each professor teaches two sections per semester) while moderately prominent liberal arts colleges and non-flagship state universities tend to have a 3/3 load, and less famous private colleges and community colleges have a 4/4 load. But I think in the sciences the corresponding teaching loads are all lower, and I don't know whether that was already true a few decades ago, or whether these expectations have changed over time. (Some of the most prominent philosophy departments have moved to a 2/1 load, and I think that is a recent change.)
Can someone track down the source of the ball bearing experiment (link #2)?
I have tried and it seems to be one of those circular reference search results. Perhaps, it is an example of a closed timelike loop, and the video bootstrapped itself from an infinite regress of alternate histories...
But seriously, how would one go about replicating this experiment? Why were there balls of different sizes? How was the magnetic field generated? What is the seemingly shallow layer of some sort of viscous liquid?
I find it amusing/intriguing that there were >300 comments on the Reddit thread, comparing the experiment to nerve cell generation and fungii, but no one even asked or commented regarding the original source of this widely distributed video.
> the claim of global cognitive decline due to decreasing nicotine use
is followed by a passage I found most interesting as a Ukraine war buff:
> *WHY THE CIA MUST BE ABOLISHED*
> When I heard about the intelligence assessment that forecast a swift Russian victory I blew up and I said, this is total rubbish and it’s dangerous. Why? Because it’s shared with the Germans. So the Germans say, we will not stop certification of Nord Stream 2, because Putin will inevitably win.
> *And we will not allow any 40-year-old weapons we sent to Estonia to go to Ukraine.*
> That’s right. We will not supply one round. These are the 122-millimeter howitzers, which had belonged to the East German army, taken over by the West German army. And the Estonians wanted to donate them to Ukraine. And the Germans said, you can’t do it because they were briefly German.
> This was all based on the German assessment that, because the intervention would be immediately successful, there’s no point in disrupting our economy. Kyiv will fall in 24 hours. That was disastrous, because Putin watched the Germans. They are his big customers, and he’s German-oriented, he speaks German. The German announcements gave him a green light.
> *You’re saying that the German assessment was based on the U.S. assessment.*
> Entirely based on the U.S. assessment. Now, the German BND [Federal Intelligence Service] is a useless organization of time servers. They simply relayed the U.S. assessment. So, bad intelligence destroyed deterrence, because the wrong intelligence about what would happen in Ukraine fed into the German policy, which had the effect of inviting Putin in. If the Germans had told Putin on February 23rd what they would do on February 25th, he would never have invaded. OK.
> If you go through the tweets of those days, I started tweeting about the intelligence community, just saying, “17 agencies,” or is it 18, I forget, “none of whom believe in speaking foreign languages, who were all in Kyiv, had no idea who the Ukrainians were. They confused the Ukrainians with some other people that surrendered,” and things like that. I started attacking them head on, and then I started pushing for something that I am pushing for, trying to recruit senators to hold a series of hearings on the performance of the intelligence community, not merely then, but in other cases. Like their estimate that Kabul would hold out for two years, even without any U.S. assistance. [...]
> The CIA’s assessments that Kabul would resist the Taliban for a long time and that Kyiv would fall in 24 hours are sufficient grounds for emptying out its buildings, fumigating them thoroughly, and restaffing with people who are actually interested in foreign countries and therefore know a language or two really well, and have traveled the world.
An idea I find credible is that the U.S. correctly predicted the invasion because they have Kremlin insider information, and the U.S. wrongly predicted the rapid fall of Ukraine because they have Kremlin insider information (and apparently, knew nothing else about Ukraine).
I am very interested in surrogacy. Would you happen to know of good writing related to the benefits and costs of surrogacy, preferably with an ACX-like worldview?
Do you think your preference for surrogacy over adoption would decrease with additional children, assuming you wanted more than one child?
This is what I first thought of when I began reading your sentence, 'If your interest is in policy...' I have been thinking about the likely consequences of the overturning of Roe v. Wade; thus, about who decides to adopt, when, why.
There’s a strong feminist opposition to surrogacy.
> I think the real point there is that it's difficult to separate moral judgements to aesthetic preferences, and I think there's some validity to that
True. I suspect our brain uses similar mechanisms for ethical and aesthetical intuitions. In the end some things just feel wrong and it's indeed hard to distinguish whether this wrongness has moral value or not. But this is the thing, when one threads on a risky path which can so easily lead astray, it's important to be constantly vigilant. To do your best to separate these confusing entities which our brain tend to mix in the same category, being an imperfect machine it is.
And when you meet a person who knows how hard it is to separate ethics and aesthetics who is self aware enough to see in great details how his mind invents ratiolizations for some of his views and actions which are actually based on simple disgust... and who then endorses these views anyway, and refuses to do the necessary mental work to figure out what is actually ethics and what is just aesthetics - this is extremely uncanny. To me it doesn't feel like stupidity. Nor like being evil. It's some very weird brand of irrationality which let people believe that they have successfully lied to themselves.
And to be clear, I think Hanania's essay is great and I'd prefer such clear line of thought amoung conservatives much more than traditional dodging and weaving around their prejudices. It's a breath of fresh, even though, extremely uncanny air.
> But focusing conservatives and their disgust seems like a way of scoring points against the enemy.
I mean sure, you can look at it like that. Hanania revealed his disgust based motivation thus showed some vulnerability and his outgroup is using it to score points. Now you are comming to his defence claiming that the outgroup is even worse that they are rationalising just as much plus lack the self awareness, and now I'm countering it with whatever I'm writing in this post. And so on and on.
Personally, I find such approach fruitless. Sure, people are indeed playing such status games. But focus on this meta level too much and you'll miss the actual thing that is being talked about. Can we just smugly acknowledge that something like this, with all its signalling and counter signalling is going on in the background and talk about the objective level, instead? Not because we are some naive fools who do not understand how the game is being played, but because we are wise independent thinkers who are expecting to find interesting insight. I unironically commit to giving you lots of status points in my mind if you accept this offer.
So, what's the objective level of focusing on conservative disgust? As Hanania more or less corectly mentioned, one of the fundamental liberal ideas is that the reason people are not liberals is due to their primitive impulses such as tribalism, ignorance and yes disgust. Those impulses had their evolutionary resons but now they are mostly irrational Smart people upon reflection can combat and overcome them. And that's how we can all go in the bright future where everyone has dealt with their prejudices.
Liberals know that this is true, because we have experienced this in the first place. Well, at least liberals from the conservative countries, like myself, definetely did. We were raised with prejudices. We questioned them, we found out they were baseless, we combated our disgust and won. We used to be homophobes, transphobes, xenophobes, bigots, racists and sexists and now we are not, or at least much, much less because it's always an uphil battle. And if we could, others can too.
And when we meet a conservative who claims that they "have nothing against black/trans/gay people but..." we kind of suspect that they are lying to themselves. That they just didn't do the necessary work to self reflect and grow beyond their primitive bigotry, that if they actually didn't have anything agains these people they wouldn't be persuing their policies.
I've never endoursed such suspicion very much. Like sure, my personal experience and the experience of my ingroup is pointing in this direction, but it's not very nice to think that you know other people inner lives better than themselves and it doesn't usually lead to the productive discussion. And it can be just my own biases, typical mind fallacy, strawmanning the outgroup, etc. Claiming that your opponents are rationalizing is always cheap, having strong evidence in favour of it is the hard part.
And here is a smart conservative with great self reflection validating this important liberal point, that indeed the ultimate source of his views is disgust. It's not just about scoring points in the political battle, first of all it's about the truth. It's a very important piece of evidence and I'm very glad that we have it.
I do not think that, for instance, outgroup hatered that many democrats feel toward republicans is the same thing as the disgust that transphobes feel toward trasgenders. While thery are similar in many ways, the direction of causality is the opposite.
In "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup" Scott says:
> The Blue Tribe has performed some kind of very impressive act of alchemy, and transmuted all of its outgroup hatred to the Red Tribe.
I believe this alchemy worked like this: the first generation of liberals overcome their irrational disgust the way I explained. They see the bright future where everyone is enlightened and liberal. They start spreading their liberalism and it works. Until they stumble upon people who do not want to overcome their prejudices. At first it seems that these people do not understand that they can do it. So liberals try to explain it, but to no avail. It seems that these people really identify with their bigotry, they do not want the bright future, they actually hate the idea. And so, after the initial disbelief, the liberals arrive to conclusion that these weird people are the outgroup That there is no other choice than to once again return to the combatative framework. They start perseiving them this way on the intellectual level and soon their emotions adapt. And thus the outgroup hatered which can manifest very similar to disgust.
Now, it may be the case that the next generation of liberals may start hating the outgroup instinctively, before they knew the actual reasons. I'm less qualified to speak for them. But the initial direction of causality is very important, nevertheless. For conservatives its disgust->rationalisation, for liberals its intellectual exploration->disgust. And while I personally endourse neither, the second path looks more reasonable.
I don't think that people who are not already searching for a rationalization of such views could be persuaded by this line of reasoning. It's the same old motivated cognition, essentiually, the same statement as "science is also based on faith so I can believe whatever I want", dressed in the rational aesthetics, with all the talk about evolution, percentages and irrationality, but without substance and making the same non-sequitur.
If human cognition is broken it's the reason to be extremely careful and vigilant, improving upon the broken foundation, systematically making it less broken. The idea that it somehow is a reason to embrace the outside view from hundred years ago is bizzare. People from hundred years ago were even less aware of their brokenness, and had even less tools to deal with it, their systems were even less evolved.
The same goes for using Chesterton Fence as a universal argument agains change, instead of an argument in favour of understanding the reasons of current order before improving it.
The way you talked about Chesterton Fence clearly frames it as an argument againts change. Tradition is smarter than you so don't try to change them. Just follow your aesthetics which is shaped by this traditions, amoung othe things. And this is a universal argument because it can be made about any tradition, any aesthetical preference, any fence without investigating the merits of it. This may not be the way you intended to invoke the Chesterton Fence, but to the best of my understanding that's the way you did and it's a pretty common trope amoung conservative-leaning people in general.
I agree that change is inevitable and that not any change is progress. This doesn't follow that no progress is real, though. The problem that the AI risk is an example of is disproportional progress in some spheres without corresponding progress in the others. Progress is an uphill battle, which doesn't make it not real.
I don't think either of us is qualified to talk about most people and their happiness. Your numbers do not look probable to me. Last time I checked there were subcultures even for not the brightest people plus getting married and having kids was still an option. It's true that there are people who struggle with social networks in our modern, rapidly changing world and it's a valid concern. Would you say that the situation in this regard is worse than in middle ages? I don't think so.
I also find completely backwards the idea that old traditions can be of much help in this regard. They used to be helpful in the environment they were selected for. Now the environment has changed. Thus we are developping new norms, fitting the modern world. Fallback to the old heuristics isn't a viable option.
> There were also some interesting thoughts in that article and the comments about why so few real scholars are as outraged as he or I would expect by the presence of the charlatans in their midst.
Personally, I find Hanania's take that it's due to everybody being either stupid on conformist or both, to be the least impressive part of his essay. I think that people just do not consider the things, that Hanania and probably you think are bullshit and pseudoscience, to actually be bullshit and pseudoscience. And that they actually have good reasons to think that due to current memetic climate.
Here is how it works from inside, from my own perspective. I expect some of the stuff discussed in modern social sciences to be wrong on a general principle of imperfect human cognition. Though I can't really trust my intuition to distinguish which is which. Some things that may look bizzare to me would actually be true, and some would indeed be wrong. I'm not an expert in the field and I'm not trying too hard to be one, so by default I assume that the ratio of good science to bad science is okayish in this field, of course we would like do better and all that, but probably people who are studying and researching social sciences know what they are doing, again just on priors.
Then I hear some people claim, that actually social scientists do not know what they are doing, that they are all crackpots and so on. Huge controversy is going on, and every side assumes that the other one is arguing in bad faith and can't be trusted. Being a currious rational person, I investigate what the people on the other side are talking about. And turns out that they are outraged at something completely reasonable as critical legal studies. I observe how they start huge smear campain, very resembling the way propaganda works in my own country, strawmanning and misinterpreting the facts and just in time to capitalize it into more votes in the upcomming election. This inoculates me from their position. Next time my priors will be that these people are likely wrong, but their arguments are still worth checking. And the time after that I would be even less sure about the possible merits of their arguments. At some moment I'll just start assuming that these people are wrong on priors. And those who agree with these people, well they are probably just stupid conformists or something.
I believe this process is somewhat symmetric. Polarization in the society systematically innoculates us from the other side of the discourse. And even knowing about it doesn't help much. It's not the question of individual failure as truthseeker or non-conformist. it's a systemic issue, a broken memetic equilibrium.
That's a great one. I didn't know that they were used by intellectuals; wouldn't the dangers of usage (excluding the idea of the benefits for the moment) have been high?
I personally like the idea that the growing popularity of coffee/coffee-houses did manifest an actual change in intellectual cultures (or at least, cultures of wit)
Extremely interesting, thanks. (I especially like "You've set mathematics back a month.")
There's scepticism about amphetamines today involving the idea that we're 'overstimulated' so it's good to hear that people prior the the internet also discussed similar problems anyway. I'll read more about it, since it would be interesting to know more about how young he was when he started using them (I doubt he began his mathematical career whilst on them?).
I'm personally too paranoid to try amphetamines; are there substances which you've tried which produce similar effects? I've heard some people talk about caffeine that way (obviously not a s strong), but I'm doubtful. Have you been off of them for any amount of time (e.g. a month or longer) and noticed similar? I don't know where to begin to find out more about ADHD, so I'll have a look around to see if Scott's written much about it.
Thanks so much for the info!
I'm sorry you have it so severely, I know people with it really bad and I can't imagine trying to live with it unmedicated.
I also have similar experiences with coffee- a friend has recently advised me to try drinking it after meals, or with a more sugar/milk with it(?) and oddly enough it seems to help. Not sure about the sugar helping to be honest-- I've had mixed results --but definitely after eating it's much better (an Italian friend also says that's the best way to drink it).
I'm currently reading https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/, https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/17/joint-over-and-underdiagnosis/, https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines (i'm still part way through the first so no clue if the latter two are actually related!), but from what I've read so far the issue is more that people with minor issues (or students) will do what they can to get their hands on Adderall. This would definitely explain my distorted perception of them as risky/over-prescribed, but again, knowing people who have really severe ADHD, I don't know how they functioned before medication (also it seems like over-prescription is an American thing and is much less common elsewhere).
It still strikes me as a very deep problem, and not one which leaves me confident in our current handling of it... I also wanted to look at how much it has been increasing over time, but it's still very early so I guess it's hard to tell how much of the increase is just improved diagnoses-- add to that the fact that many people get a diagnosis when they don't really need it and it gets harder to evaluate the bigger picture.
Same experience. Large doses of caffeine cause me to have a severe crash. non-XR adderall will cause a crash but its mostly me just being tired, not headache or anything.
Caffeine (up to 100mg at a time) with L-theanine avoids the crash. Therefore I default to tea for my caffeine.
I am also a programmer with ADHD (inattentive type and moderate). The meds help me get started, I think of it like getting the ball rolling. Then I fall into the groove and can get stuff done.
Thanks for responding! If you have something which works as well as you describe then that's great! I think personally I'm too worried about it affecting me in some way I can't understand/undo, but people make good use of these substances for long times, and the alternative seems much much worse. I wasn't advocating you try going without them btw, I just wanted to know what the experience was like. I was just thinking about how Erdös wasn't using them until later in his life, and was absolutely a high achiever early on in mathematics, despite his account that going without them made him 'ordinary'. I don't really know what to make of that, other than that the problems can become more pronounced as you get older? I guess I shouldn't draw too much from single cases. Thanks again
They left this out of my son's copy of "The Boy Who Loved Math"
Hmm, this is a bit disturbing. Have we really sabotaged our futures by making powerful brain stimulants illegal?
The Germans used them to great effect in the Blitzcrieg.
Then I guess they had to crash…
Similarly and more recently
"The use of amphetamines in U.S. Air Force tactical operations during Desert Shield and Storm"
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7661838/
Sure.
I think Ayn Rand was on amphetamines too! (I think they were mostly referred to as 'diet pills' back then.)
Whilst she was a prodigious thinker and writer, the terrible judgement that she exhibited in her personal life certainly doesn't provide a good advertisement for whatever pharmaceuticals she was guzzling.
Or at least not at the _doses_ she was using!
Scott's post about 'AD(H)D medication basically being meth' made me update towards 'there IS a plausibly/feasibly reasonable way to use these drugs safely, effectively, and with net benefits'.
Michael Pollan wrote a book in which he explains how the Enlightenment was caused by coffee-house culture.
And there's The Baroque Cycle book series by Neal Stephenson that has some vivid illustrations of the 'scene'!
I hadn't realized this thought was there in Michael Pollan, but I did have this thought once in a conversation with some friends that if the rise of capitalism/enlightenment is connected with the transition from alcohol as the primary daily drink (before safe municipal water) to caffeine as the primary daily drink (boiled water is safe even if it's non-alcoholic), then there might be an interesting further change if cannabis starts displacing alcohol and/or caffeine as the primary psychoactive substance people consume.
That's an interesting line of thought!
I would expect cannabis to displace alcohol some - I've heard that combo described as "pissing into the wind". But I don't think cannabis will displace caffeine at all.
There _are_ some nice 'head high' strains that are possible substitutes, at least along some dimensions, and for some people.
But mostly I think you're right that "cannabis" mostly won't displace caffeine at all.
Another good/crazy theory is that it accounts for the decline in testosterone (and that this helps explain some things about the Amish). Of course, there are plenty of better-attested explanations for the endocrine damage we seem to be taking.
Aha- I like that. Friends have spoken to me about pipe-smoking being less damaging because you aren't supposed to inhale -- if that's the case I wonder if it would still produce the 'beneficial' effects at all? Luttwak's solution (nicotine patches) loses some of the charm!
Endocrine disruptors --Bisphenols and so on? I recently read about (typical) shampoos and soaps having a similar effect, and with the whole plastic/micro-plastic issue & pesticides in many things it's very easy to become paranoid about 'disruptive' stuff being everywhere. Hopefully it's not as bad as that...
Doc Huberman tells us that it's agricultural runoff and that it's everywhere, hence the what, halving of testosterone numbers and sperm counts?
Legal amphetamine production is at an all time high. There was an American crackdown in 1970, but by 2010 it had returned to the previous peak and just kept going up.
Prescription status is a red herring.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2377281/
I'm an ass man, and I like the song, but I like medium-sized butts.
Shape > size. In all things.
Agreed, a well rounded beginning with a smooth finish. Like a fine wine.
I like fine wine and I cannot lie!
You connoisseurs can't deny!
For sure - a finely-shaped and smoothly-textured dick is a delight to savor. We’re all gourmands here!
Yeah! A nicely-shaped dick is the best!
Medium-sized dicks are great, too! How nice that there are folks like us who aren’t size queens, amirite?
Mix-a-Lot probably just helped kickstart the conversation. I think Hanania basically has it right, that the Internet "democratized" male preferences, which are much more rooted in biology than fashion, by getting past "gatekeepers" that are more influenced by fashion.
> signing "I like big butts and I cannot lie" repeatedly in the car
You mean something like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7JaGoYdc_M&t=1m23s
Thanks
I suspect there may be some cross-contamination there between "big butt with a high fat percentage" and "big butt with a low fat percentage". Current fascination with big butts among the whites probably leans more to the latter (alongside with the general trend for normalization of more muscular women), while blacks (both then and now) are probably more appreciative of the former. The shift in tastes is still socially influenced, of course, but it's not quite the straightforward reversal suggested by the poster.
Excellent point.
LOL – damn; you all are on fire in the comments on this post :)
Statistics on butts: a bayesian posterior
LOL
I expect to see that in a future Rick and Morty episode :)
O hello is this the thread where we talk about gendered body preferences? Let me be the first to declare that I’m open-minded too -I love a big dick, but a well-formed medium dick isn’t too shabby, either! Just so long as it’s in a nice, straight line. I sing about my preferred dick shapes in my car all the time! Thanks for making space for us all to talk about other people’s bodies with such candor! It sure makes me feel welcome as a woman to know that I can share my opinions about men’s bodies just as easily as you can share yours about women’s bodies.
I get the impression you're being sarcastic, but you actually are welcome to share your dick preferences.
Yup! :)
I would love to read/listen-to your own alternate-lyrics version of "I Like Big Butts"! :)
"Feminism through unionizing female college party-goers"
This is congruent with my observations about the persistence of frats (and typical complaints about them): https://jakeseliger.com/2014/02/20/if-you-want-to-understand-frats-talk-to-the-women-who-party-at-them-paging-caitlin-flanagan/.
Note the publishing date.
I think that's further congruent with the broader points about intrasexual aggression and cartel dynamics. What the women form there is your classic cartel intended to reduce supply and increase prices - complete with the exact same PR justifications every cartel uses about how they increase public safety (where the truth usually has some more warts). But cartels are unstable because the more they succeed, the bigger the rewards for defection, and the uglier punishment of scabs has to get to keep it going.
Really the cartel and union comparisons seem off to me, perhaps because they're not actually negotiating for anything. They're just sharing information about the best parties and agreeing to hang out together. Perhaps the frat parties will eventually improve, but so far the story seems to be that's not what's happening, the women are just working together to identify bad parties and find the best parties and then all going to them together as a huge group.
There's probably a tradeoff here between having enough women in the network to get good information about parties and having so many that they overwhelm the good parties when they show up at them. I suppose defection happens when individuals start absorbing information about parties to avoid but stop sharing information about good parties to attend.
I think there's a little more to it than that, though, which comes out obliquely when the "union organizer" starts describing the college administrator's ham-fisted attempts to raise concerns about a social blacklist.
She's right that the administrator's out of her jurisdiction there. But it does seem like that's the actual point of leverage the "union" is trying to work. They're giving a more or less explicit ultimatum to the frats about particular partygoers: you can have us or you can have him. The idea is that it might be one thing to say "bros over hoes" when it's your friend versus one hot girl threatening to leave. But if you're faced with either throwing him out or having 35 girls all walk out at once?
So there's a real strategy there, potentially. But I suspect it's not going to work, for essentially the reason Gwern identified. An even better way of individually getting favorable treatment is to have the other 34 women walk out while you stay.
What? No. That’s how to get gang-raped.
Probably only in quite extreme circumstances, but I understand your point. The question is like, what's the tipping point? Maybe 1/34 feels too risky, but 5/30? 7/28?
And also, it's not like you're the only woman left at the party even in the 1/34 scenario. The Hoe Union has walked out, but there are almost certainly some other non-unionized girls still sticking around.
I suspect that many of those girls will be looking around and saying "OK, why are there suddenly no other girls here, and should I leave as well?" I'm assuming here that having the union walk out will noticeably tilt the sex ratio.
> What the women form there is your classic cartel intended to reduce supply and increase prices
That's certainly the concern about gender ratios. They appear to have other legitimate concerns that I don't think should be put in that framework, such as the clause about girls being allowed to prepare their own drinks.
Yeah - admittedly my college had no frat scene but what kind of bizzaro-world party has a "no you may not make your own drink" rule?
I was confused as to why the hoe union won't attend parties that have a gender ratio.
Women don't enjoy sausage parties, surely?
That's sort of tautological, though, insofar as "sausage party" is slang for an event that's male-dominated in a way that's lame and uncool and unappealing to women.
Women looking to go out and talk to guys they're attracted are absolutely prepared to enjoy parties oversupplied with attractive guys and undersupplied with female competition. What they're trying to avoid are parties where the gender ratio has been manipulated so as to assure the lowest-appeal dude in attendance a strong chance of getting laid.
This might be kind of what you're saying, but I'm thinking the possibility of finding a party that's oversupplied with attractive guys is very much a secondary concern. I'd say the primary one is the signal that a highly aggressive approach to gender ratios sends.
Men in this age bracket who are throwing a party are typically going to have two main goals, at varying levels of priority: (1) have fun and (2) get with girls. The girls want to attend parties where (1) is a strong priority over (2), in which the guys might even be open to meeting new male friends. The more the men act like elephant seals defending their harems in response to the possibility of male competition showing up, the more clearly the party is prioritizing (2).
Right, because how dare those subhuman ugly males desire to get laid.
I am 100% in favor of literally everybody desiring and achieving getting laid. I'm not endorsing anything about what the hoe union does, just explaining my sense of what they're likely optimized for.
Speaking as a guy who was good friends with a few women in high school and college, I read that as wanting to avoid parties where the frat tries to block male friends from attending.
This article seems to imply that women have no reason to want to attend a party other than getting laid. This seems deeply silly, and also like the sort of fallacy this crowd in particular might fall into.
To spell it out: in addition to various sexual desires, many college students have a deep and abiding need to get drunk in crowds of people even if there is zero chance that they'll have sex as a result. Parties may be a means to obtain sex, sometimes, but they are also much more than that. "That's where the party's at" is not code for "that's where the dick is," and the author of this article is bragging about listening to women while also radically misinterpreting their words to fit his priors.
"Furthermore, in 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, with the ultimate result of raising the legal drinking age to 21 in all 50 states. This change moved college partying away from bars and college-sponsored events and toward private houses—an ideal situation for fraternities."
That seemed to be about 70% of the appeal of joining a fraternity when I was in college in the mid '00's. Good link.
On the one hand, the "hoe union" makes sense economically -- it's kind of the modern version of the Lysistrata gambit. On the other hand, though, the implicit assumption appears to be that companionship, party attendance, and perhaps even sex (with men, at least) is merely a valuable commodity that women have available for trade. No sane woman would ever hang out with men just for fun, after all; it's just a big chore.
To be fair, this specific Twitter post does not go nearly that far, but I think it is still an example of feminism objectifying women -- or, at least, dehumanizing them in an effort to homogenize them.
You can be unionised and still inherently enjoy what you do. I don't see actors or plumbers as being homogenised and dehumanised.
The situation seems to be that there are multiple party options, or at least potential party options, and they are strategically leaving one to go to another. This doesn't require any such implicit assumption.
An analogy might be to famous athletes who wear branded (for example) sneakers. The athletes don't view wearing sneakers as a chore - they would greatly prefer to wear sneakers when playing their sport than dress shoes or no shoes at all. But they recognize that the sneaker company also benefits, and they can use that as leverage to get something else. The fact that there are multiple sneaker companies is crucial here.
I joined a fraternity partly in order to have more sex. I never got laid thru the fraternity. Neither did anyone in my pledge class, so far as I know. We threw lots of wild house parties, and sometimes there was sex there, but as far as I know, it was only ever between people who'd already paired up beforehand.
We didn't throw parties to get sex; we threw parties to pay the rent. You can't easily fill your house with hundreds of drunk undergraduates and then sneak off to your bedroom for sex. You're busy the whole time. The main way people get laid at parties is to meet someone there AND THEN LEAVE WITH THEM. You can't leave when it's your party. You have to stay to the bitter end, kick out the drunks who refuse to leave, try to figure out where to put the ones who've fallen asleep, and maybe clean up some vomit before falling asleep. That's if the party isn't broken up or raided by the police.
Sorority parties were another matter. They didn't typically throw open parties; they'd invite one fraternity over for a party. But they weren't orgies. Most sisters didn't expect, nor I think want, to get laid /during/ a party. They might like to meet someone. But it seemed to me that most women went to or hosted such parties in order to party, maybe to try to be the center of attention, but not so much to get laid.
I banged my head against this -- and this was ages ago, but still -- in college debates about frats. The bad actors connected to frat parties are almost invariably not brothers, but free riders who can skate if the party gets shut down.
It's a bit of a tangent, but could you explain how throwing parties helped pay the rent? was there a door charge?
Yes. The key is to buy really cheap beer, in balls or kegs.
This was an especially excellent link Roundup!
Agreed, must have been an interesting month :)
Yes, thank you Scott!
Some civil engineers build down.
University of Minnesota Civil Engineering Building. One floor up. Seven down.
https://www.minnpost.com/stroll/2015/09/seven-stories-down-u-building-serves-tribute-minnesota-experimentalism/
What's your summary for why it made sense (if it did) for that building specifically?
It turned out to be a bad idea. The plan was not fully baked. The article covers some of the problems they ran into after construction. The system to bring outdoor daytime light to the lower level never really panned out for one thing.
There was a location on the lowest floor where mirrors brought an image of street view down. Only one person at a time could use it though. They called it an ectosope I believe. That hardly redeemed the project.
Thanks! I added the article to my read-later queue; curious about the details of the failures!
Reminds me of thinking about, e.g. 'how _would_ dwarves in Middle Earth engineer their homes/fortresses/mines underground' :)
Point #6 is unworthy of your excellent writing. We cannot have a book review by someone who states definitively that he has not read the book.
I purchased "sadly, Porn" due to the wonderful article on ACT about it. Quoting second hand sources is one of the problems with modern liberalism.
Please, please please from a Fan Boi ? Don't do it. You're my only hope Astral Codex-Wanobi
I think it's less of a book review and more an interesting essay in its own right that uses my review as a jumping-off point to talk about something which is interesting and (IMHO) in fact relevant to the book.
It's possible I discounted it.
And - obviously it's your blog
Your rules.
However, if it's a comparison between 2 archetypes and he hasn't read the first then it's not even trying to "control" inputs. It's just poor journalism then. Don't we enjoy enjoy enough of this Already ?
It's not claiming to be journalism, it's the personal blog of a fiction writer.
It's an extremely basic point - how can one comment on a book one has not read? And substack is a paywall - it's modern journalism wether he considers himself a fiction writer or book reviewer.
Since you ask: Pierre Bayard, "How to talk about books you haven't read", Bloomsbury.
LOL
That book changed my life. What a fascinating, illuminating insight into the power of literature and its place in a modern culture increasingly oriented towards immediacy and excess.
> how can one comment on a book one has not read?
It's easy. Andrew Gelman had the last word on this here ( https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2010/07/02/the_moral_of_th/ )
> I can’t really criticize the guy for slamming my book without having read it. After all, I think the autobiography of Uri Geller and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are almost certainly full of crap, but I haven’t ever read a page of either.
One could comment on its quality as firewood
I appreciate Nelson's honesty about not liking being sneered at. At the same time, the harshness of Teach's Lacanian universality is what makes his work challenging. Softening his "everyone and yes that includes you, probably by nature" to Auden's "only some people, and probably due to recent changes" deprives it of piquancy and strength. We may all hope that this is more accurate.
Agree. I've found Sadly, Porn deeply challenging to read and to reveal deeper truths about my own motivations. I believe that's where it is such a compelling book - and it would be very hard to summarise it. Scott did a great job.
Peacefully merging some African countries could be good, but isn't DR Congo still an epic basket case, though with less war now?
The others can do better!
Also, re: the African Space Program - the Zambian Space Program is worth reading about too https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-zambian-afronaut-who-wanted-to-join-the-space-race
Not sure Burundi and South Sudan are better. But at least without the DRC the East African Union won't reach the western coast of Africa.
DRC doesn't have good access to the sea anyway. AFAIK most of their exports go through other countries.
A national government will have a hard time voting for its own dissolution and I'm not convinced it would help (except, as low-hanging fruit, Moldovans should consider Greater Romania). The East African countries might risk having this be an all-or-nothing proposition, while the European countries took it one treaty at a time and the sum of these decisions created a large power bloc with free travel and a currency.
I'm fairly certain the facemorphed Senators is fake.
Here's an actual facemorph of all Democrats in Congress vs. all Republicans in Congress,
https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/1600x900/p05k91jb.webp
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171018-this-is-the-face-of-the-average-american-politician
The BBC does include Representatives as well as Senators, but I don't think that can entirely explain the difference. At minimum, I'd expect to see the 32% of Democratic Senators who are women to have *some* influence on the overall features.
Your images are averaged faces, creating using this method: https://medium.com/@ronanist/face-averaging-made-simple-84eae4dcf57
@_sn_n's images were made using the morph feature of FaceApp.
My guess is that FaceApp is a very different morphing algorithm than the one you're citing. I've seen many facemorphs that look like yours, but when I look up examples of FaceApp images they look more like the ones in the link (example: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1884471-faceapp-face-morphing )
That link only combines two people, so each man's unusual features are preserved. Combinations of large numbers of people tend to smooth out unusual features and look like Katie's links. The ghoulish-looking facemorphed Senators pics, on the other hand, seem to exaggerate unusual features (e.g., the inhumanly long teeth on the Democrat). They're caricatures.
Hmm, interesting! Now I'm curious about the FaceApp morphing algorithm, and how it handles morphing a large number of people - the images may not be "fake", but I'm still skeptical that they're "accurate" (in the sense of producing an image that contains equal contributions from each Senator, which is what I expected from the description) enough to be meaningful.
Of course, not everything has to be accurate/meaningful in order to be entertaining.
That picture is a spitting image of a professor I used to work for. I'll not link him for pricacy reasons but I find it uncanny.
The abstract of the link on insect population declines says "Accordingly, there are no signs that the arthropod abundance or biomass on birch in this subarctic study site has gone through the same declines as have been reported from sites in other habitats. The reason may be that the impact of factors identified worldwide as drivers of arthropod declines so far are small or non-existent because of the low human population density in this area."
I don't think "more evidence insect populations are not declining" is an accurate summary of that single study. Instead it appears to be "more evidence that in the (few) wild areas not impacted by humans insect populations aren't declining." That's a huge difference!
See eg https://earthsky.org/earth/insect-apocalyps-not-north-america/ for context. My impression was there were some early studies showing decline, larger and more careful studies mostly didn't, and this is another example of the latter.
It is not just Europe, it is NA as well. See: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320718313636
Also while your study above does make the claim that insect populations are stable, your original link (and commentary) do not - it has no external validity either.
Salient bits from my meta (Lepidoptera only as an example for brevity but Hymenoptera is another good example): "In California...The overall trend implies that 23% of species are disappearing."
"In Japan, 15% of the 240 species of butterflies are threatened, but among those 80% of the grassland species are endangered..."
"steady intensification of Japan's traditional “satoyama” landscape...has negatively affected most species"
"In Malaysia, some 19% of moths at Mount Kinabalu (Borneo) had their abundance reduced between 1965 and 2007..."
Cheeky Coleoptera example before I hit post: "Harmon et al. (2007) reviewed 62 historical datasets of aphidophagous coccinellids in the USA and Canada, spanning 1914–2004...ladybird species richness and population sizes did not change much until 1986, when a major decline in native species began to be noticed and affected 68% of species over the following 20 years"
This is absolutely not Europe specific or Europe only.
And in Europe, it's not just some early studies. Here is a study from the UK from last year showing a strong decline:
https://www.buglife.org.uk/get-involved/surveys/bugs-matter/
It's very much compatible with similar studies, e.g., in Denmark:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.5236
These are not focusing on a single species, but on proxies for the total insect biomass. Similarly for studies of bird viewings which have been running with consistent methodology for decades and give pretty good data: they are also showing overall decline, though far from consistently over all species (some species expand, but not enough to counterbalance the total decline).
Overall, I am not super confident of which side to believe. But it will take more than a single study for me to shrug this off, even if it looks at 5,000 time series.
I agree with OP that I found your summary confusing. A lot of the claims I’ve seen on insect decline has claimed steep declines in rural areas, primarily due to the local impact of agriculture (particularly pesticides), but also due to climate change and other global factors. This study is designed to tease out global versus local factors, and concludes that global factors seem not to have an impact in wild areas at this latitude. None of this reflects on total insect populations: this study would be totally consistent with a total decline in insect populations. It is, of course, an optimistic study for those concerned about insect decline: one could infer that if we’re able to mitigate the damage caused by intensive farming and increase the number of wild areas, insect populations may recover despite issues like climate change.
Does anyone else think the numbers in the survey in 43 are way too low? Only 20% of couples have arguments about household chores?
Maybe a lot of arguments go meta and turn into "tone of voice" or "how you argue," and the original topic isn't getting counted?
Yeah, it doesn't seem like a common argument for a wife to say: "Would you mind picking up after yourself?" and the husband fires back and says "No, and I resent the request!"
More often, you have a dynamic where the wife nags, the husband gives her a "Yeah, yeah, yeah." Now you've laid the groundwork for an argument, but it's expressed as a disagreement about communication, not chores.
Yeah, I think that this is more appropriate thought of as generational differences in the gloss people put on their arguments, rather than generational differences in the root cause of arguments.
N of 1, but my experience was my wife and I argued a lot about chores early in our marriage. Then eventually found our equilibrium and now both know what "our" jobs are, so the arguments mostly went away.
I was sad my own worst argument topic wasn't listed; seems bad (to/for me).
(My own worst argument topic is 'the other person's untreated mental illness'.)
> My own worst argument topic is 'the other person's untreated mental illness'.
There are a couple of obvious reasons why that wouldn't be a common source of marital arguments:
- Not enough people exhibiting the problem
- People who do exhibit the problem are particularly unlikely to be married
I'm not so sure – mental illness is _very_ common.
I'm probably thinking of a 'looser' sense of 'mental illness' than 'diagnosed with a psychiatric or psychological disorder', e.g. 'garden variety' depression or anxiety.
#7: The ads really contrast with the image results. There’s globes, polyhedra, “liquid motion sandscapes”… and a Shrek Buddha. Marketing vs. reality?
I would guess that the results are some weird quirk of algorithmic ranking, rather than reflecting the dominance of Nazi paraphernalia in the desk ornament market.
Yeah, we're probably seeing the results of two different algorithms in the shopping results vs. image results. Reminds me of a wacky Google autocomplete that's gone viral a few times (warning: it is really gross): https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-wont-my-parakeet-eat_n_353913
Can any Indian explain number 41?
I'm not Indian, but I looked into it a bit.
It looks like some Hindu nationalists are angry that everyone raves about the Taj Mahal as the peak of Indian architecture, since it was built by Muslim invaders and so this is dismissive of Hindu Indians. So these people are badmouthing the Taj Mahal.
Then other Hindu nationalists are coming in with a conspiracy theory that the Taj Mahal was secretly built by Hindus as a Shiva temple and so it's fine for people to think it's great Indian architecture, but we need to let them excavate the secret rooms in the basement that would prove this.
Then some other things happened and I lost the plot.
I know very little about contemporary Indian politics.
I agree with both your observations.
Re: the Muslim invaders, Mughals, are quite unpopular in some states where Hindutva is big. Especially Shah Jahan who built Taj Mahal, and his son Aurangzeb, who built Bibi Ka Maqbara.
Re: Taj Mahal in particular, there has recently been a claim that it was built on top of a Hindu temple, and there readily are many believers. I don't think it's mainstream yet. Today is literally the first time I am hearing about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taj_Mahal#Controversies. It sounds very much like RSS/BJP trying to recreate a controversy similar to the previous temple-mosque controversy about Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which ended with riots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demolition_of_the_Babri_Masjid.
Re: Constructions/statues. During the Modi administration, India got several giant statues, and some are still under construction. Some examples:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Unity
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Equality_(Ramanuja)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Equality_(Ambedkar)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiyogi_Shiva_statue
- https://twitter.com/statueofbelief
I only learnt about them recently, don't have a comprehensive list, and don't know the exact details. But Modi inaugurated all of them, and they are all said to be at least partially Govt funded. Beyond any pure desire to, ahem, colonize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_statues, there is probably some Hindutva angle for why these projects were launched now.
The OP, Dhruv Rathee, is a popular Youtuber who does political commentary. He has criticized Modi and Hindutva, and as such has the attention of Modi bhakts. He has also criticized the statues several times, e.g. https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Adhruv_rathee%20statue&src=typed_query. I think one of the reasons people are fighting is that the OP criticized these new statues but is praising Taj Mahal.
It's absolutely the Ayodhya playbook all over again, only stupider. The Ayodhya impulse was at least moving to me, even if the specific claims were factually false. This is just sheer idiocy.
Since you say you are largely ignorant of India, I will just urge caution in interpreting whatever responses you get. As you can see, such threads always target one group which is supposedly consistently stupid and ignorant, and it is good epistemic practice to suspect that something is missing from such discussions.
Out of consideration for Sandeep's prudent caution below about such discussions devolving into one-sidedness, I'll just point you to the link in Sravan's post above for the Wikipedia page on the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
This may be unfair, but the thing that's vexing about this to an outsider is the persistent impulse to treat the landmarks of Mughal civilization as some toxic combination of plagiarism and vandalism.
Post-Ayodhya trends may have rekindled enthusiasm for the idea but I first read about as a boy in the 1970's (note: when Hindu nationalism was at a low political ebb) in a book by P.N. Oak (1917-2007) the godfather of Indian loony history.
Btw if you like Erich Von Daniken you'll love P.N. Oak. If you don't or if you are older than 7 you might not :-)
I may be reading too much into things, but I would say there is a definite political angle there: the statue of Ramanuja is in honour of a prominent Vaishnavaite saint/guru (worshipper of Vishnu); the one of Ambedkar is someone who not alone was involved in the foundation of the state but converted to Buddhism/founded his own school of Buddhism and converted a lot of the Dalits (Untouchables) along with him, and the statue of Shiva is, of course, Shiva.
So those are two of the three main Hindu Trinity and a version of Buddhism followed by the lower classes. The Unity statue is someone intimately involved in the struggle for independence and what came after. Modi and his administration are doing something to make them popular with all groups (and possibly position him as the modern figure of national unity for all the classes).
I like that the guy most responsible for popularizing the claim the Taj Mahal was built on a Hindu Temple also claims that the Vatican and Westminster Abbey were originally Hindu temples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._N._Oak
He's actually beating this guy, which is impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annio_da_Viterbo
This sounds like the strawman version of the actual outrage. Indian news in the west gets filtered through a much more ideologically tilted elite-media than you see with the US and NYT.
A lot of muslim mosques were built on top of hindu temples. For reference, there are almost zero non-vandalized hindu temples more than 400 years old in mughal ruled areas. The density of these temples explodes the second you step out of any of these regions.
There have been centuries long 'conspiracy theories' about certain important hindu temples (kashi vishwanath) being razed to construct mosques. The last few years have seen evidence to prove that *some* of those conspiracies were indeed true. Now, It is possible that the Taj Mahal was also built on top of another temple. However, there no reason to believe that it was a temple of any importance. There are no myths or stories to indicate any cultural memory of a pre-taj temple. (unlike kashi vishwanath)
> people are badmouthing the Taj Mahal
The Taj Mahal is incredibly beautiful. But Indians generally have a troubled history with the Mughals. From religious persecution to shambolic economic policy to the general embarrassment of being subjugated by an invader; it is not a memory that brings great joy.
There is an understandable insecurity (and sense of loss) among North Indian Hindus that all of their architectural buildings of note are Islamic or British buildings. Among the most ardent, it manifests in the form of a belief that goes : 'The Taj Mahal ain't shit, surely there stood a grander Hindu temple here'. Even the RSS [1 ] themselves do not want to get into this outrage, and see it for the 'scab picking' that this outrage amounts to.
[1] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/gyanvapi-mosque-dont-look-for-shivlings-in-every-mosque-says-rss-chief-mohan-bhagwat/article65488845.ece
The even sadder thing is that the Taj Mahal is indeed an incredible architectural wonder and the North-Indian Hindus do NOT have an answer for it. India's top 1% is exceedingly atheist, left leaning and years for approval from the west. None of India's top architects want anything to do with the right wing. Additionally, they know nothing about the Hindu architectural tradition or the aesthetic models within it. Part of it has to do with the shoddy quality of Indian archeology and history, but also because all of India's most famous architects come at it from the post-modern perspective.
Indian Hindus are experiencing a deep insecurity that is not too unfamiliar with other civilizations over the last 1000 years. Historically, such insecurities have been resolved through complete religious/cultural conversion of the land like the crusades or most famously Hagia Sofia; ethnic uniformity through exoduses/genocides.
As India attempts to grapple with this peacefully, you will see that anger channeled through social media outrage instead.
The thing is, the Taj Mahal is actually based on Sufi conceptions of what Paradise looks like and in India particularly in that era, there was a lot of cross-pollination between Sufis and Tantric Shaiva yogis. But it is rather a stretch from there to "Shiva temple."
I had a sense of what the controversy must be (almost any controversy in India that involves Hinduism and/or Islam is the same) but I'm trying to figure out why Scott linked that particular tweet, which asks the question why people are upset, but doesn't seem to have any follow-ups explaining it. Maybe there's a whole thread that displays if you've got a Twitter account logged in?
The more I read on here about people complaining about wokeness, the more I'm starting to think that it must be some kind of thing that just doesn't exist where I live and in the circles in which I spend time. I used to think that I understood, but more and more it sounds like I'm just not thinking about what they're talking about. Is is a uniquely American thing?
Not uniquely, but it's more prevalent. Where are you?
I live in New Zealand. Also interested to hear from other kiwis if they have the same impression as me, or disagree that it's different here!
Not a kiwi but according to my nz friends there it comes across as pro Maori bias
Do you/r friends see this as the same thing? There's definitely a lot more pro-Māori sentiment and a substantial amount more funding lately but it doesn't seem to me to be something that people are being obligated to engage with, unless they work in the public sector. I get the impression from what I'm reading that being 'anti-woke' is more about being able to live your own life without interference and without fear of losing your job?
This to me is a really interesting question about NZ.
When I look at Jacinda Ardern, my immediate gut sense is that this is somebody who, if she were living in the US, would be the most blindingly, incorrigibly woke person you'd ever meet.
In NZ, she can just become the prime minister, so the expression of those same impulses and inclinations and class-based sentiments takes the form of practical politics rather than wokeness.
Wokeness is what you find in places where the system of politics in the narrow sense, of actual representative government, is tilted much farther to the right, but the left has perpetual running room in every institution devoted to shaping hearts and minds.
I wonder if this could have something to do with the USA's (forgive me for saying so, but) frankly insane electoral system? People on the US left can quite plainly see how they're being assigned disproportionately low political representation and power, so it wouldn't surprise me if they felt more desperate to fight their battles in whatever arenas were present and less respectful of their country's institutions.
This is a great description/story/theory; thanks!
To me that feels like a direct parallel. Would you be comfortable saying that pro-maori pandering goes too far? Would you lose your job for saying so?
Lots of people do say that, and they don't seem to lose jobs for it. I'm yet to hear stories about job losses because of it
I imagine it hasn't percolated over there yet, but it will probably do so in time. Here in Ireland it is, as others are saying, largely imported from the US which means that the activists who engage in it parrot off chunks of US-context rhetoric which isn't suited at all to the situation in Ireland. For instance, we had Black Lives Matter protests here in 2020:
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/thousands-of-people-take-part-in-black-lives-matter-protests-across-ireland-39265087.html
My feeling is that the situations (NZ vs. US) are very different, and I don't really understand what's going on in the US, but to the extent they can be compared... maybe NZ is already "woke".
I studied at UoA. There were dedicated scholarships and exclusive classes (at least in first year) for Maori and women. There was a Marae on site. The engineering graduation ceremony was merged with education, whose PhD titles were things like "Maori spaces in foreign places". At the company I worked at, before building a new office iwi had to be brought in, the land had to be surveyed for Maori sites. Then they were blessed by local iwi at opening. Auditing of gender balance/hiring/pay gap was common. LGBTQ+ awareness/campaigns was definitely a thing though not a Big Thing. Dedicated outreach/networking for women was common. Consultation with Maori is built into many parts of the public system, as are indigenous concepts (think tangata whenua etc.). The accepted narrative is that Maori were/are stewards of the lands in spiritual harmony with nature or something. Under the Treaty of Waitangi we pay reparations to Maori. And so on and so forth.
None of this strikes me as "woke" for two reasons I think. First, for the same reason that level of gun control in NZ doesn't strike me as excessive. That's just how it is. We don't have guns, we pay Maori reparations.
Second, I think kiwis were less extreme/divided to begin with and so compromise rather than ever more dividing. The American equivalents of all the points above are causes of strife, where as in NZ... instead of George Floyd and BLM protests we have Always Blow on the Pie. AFAIK total payments under the treaty are only a few billion NZD, which sounds a lot but isn't really much to buy a bit of peace. The results of those gender equality audits: there's still a pay gap but it's not bias on our side and here's a few more outreach and support programmes. Both sides grumble a little, but since Maori aren't being gunned down in the street and we have a female PM who had a child while in office, it's hard to complain too much. Give everyone an inch and it's harder for anyone to justify taking a mile.
You might recognize it under a different name.
Some of it existed as "political correctness" discourse in the 90s, and social justice discourse in the 2000s.
Generally, it's about excessive, toxic demands for moral purity along left-aligned cultural issues. I don't consider all anti-racism to be woke. It's more along the lines of trying to get the terms blacklist/whitelist removed from open-source software to fight "systemic racism" (something I've actually seen on Github).
Also the software terms master/slave. But doesn't getting rid of that offend the B&D fans? ;-)
It's not unique to America, but in other countries where it manifests it tends to be perceived and debated as a form of creeping Americanization. This is often apparent just in linguistic usage: I'm told the French, for instance, call it "le wokeisme."
I agree, here in Europe wokeism is seen as coming from America. For that reason I've always found it funny that Americans of both political tribes tend to think that Europe is way to the left of the US. That depends. In some ways, it's the opposite.
It's coordinated agitprop. Sanders' policy proposals, for example, are far to the left of every single European country, but the narrative that "Democrats are center-right compared to Europe" makes them seem less radical.
A lot of it is rooted in gender dogma. Appropriately, cis-this and trans-that and Bruce Jenner and pregnant men don't make a whole lot of sense to people studied biology in school and don't follow pop media. It's even political in Pola nd and Hungary. Genderism loses elections.
You folks got Just Cause dismissal in New Zealand, IIRC. It probably does seem strange from a country where it's a lot harder for a mob of people to get you fired because they didn't like what you said on social media.
I think it is. Here in continental Europe (I'm excluding Britain) wokeism is weak, and what wokeism we have is perceived as coming from the US.
One problem for the woke in Europe is that here the only stance acceptable in public about race is that there's no such thing. To seriously use concepts like "black" and "white" and so on, is seen as racist and associated with the most extreme far right.
In contrast, in America, even leftists and conventional thinkers talk about "blacks", "whites", "Asians" (as a race), as if these words mean something real. Wokeism, at least racial wokeism, requires that attitude.
BLM (or its equivalent) could not have arisen in Europe, because here blacks (or any other race) don't exist as an acceptable grouping. We have Muslims and gypsies, but those are cultural minorities, not racial; and we have immigrants, who are minorities because they are immigrants; but if you're born and raised here, and have citizenship, then you're part of the majority, no matter your skin color, which must be treated the same as hair or eye color, and anyone who puts a racial label on you is presumed a neo-Nazi idiot.
Recently Scott posted a graph about murder victims by race and some Brit in the comments reacted with shock, despite Britain being the most Americanized part of Europe. The typical continental European would react with even greater shock. That is because we don't have graphs organized by race, to us they look like phrenology or astrology or something. Race is not supposed to exist.
This state of thing makes it hard for US style wokeism, at least when it comes to racial minorities. How can you defend from oppression what does not exist? It's like defending the rights of Libras. You can still fight against racism, but you have to frame it differently, in a way not compatible with the extremes of American wokeism.
(Although I can't be sure that what I'm saying applies to all parts of Europe).
(I'm not saying anything about whether race in fact exists or not. I'm just describing how Euro culture is different from the US.)
That approach is explicitly decried as "upholding racism" in the US, even though it seems like an obsessive focus on race is likely to keep it top of mind and increase racial tension. Thomas Chatterton Williams is very good on this topic.
It's curious why color blindness meme failed in the US but not in Europe
Only the most scrupulously fair-minded would want color-blindness when they can instead have "give me special advantages because of my skin color". Which, in the United States, they have found that they can.
In Europe, there's not a compelling argument that minority races/ethnicities can put forward for preferential treatment, once people are seen as having stopped discriminating against them. In the United States, we actually *enslaved* one of our minority ethnicities once upon a time, which a lot of Americans feel really bad about. And which can be spun into a tale of an intergenerational debt and enduring legacy of slavery, etc, etc, and lots of people can be convinced that the descendants of the slaves deserve special treatment in compensation. Particularly if they don't think they are going to be the ones paying for it.
But slavery was established by the British Empire, and was common throughout the world in those days, and the US only failed to get rid of it at once upon gaining independence, which is bad but not exactly uniquely horrible. I guess the big difference is that European powers didn't import slaves en masse to the mainland, and therefore, like you say, don't have to directly deal with millions of descendants of victims of those atrocities.
Slavery long, long predates Britain; I get that you're trying to say that various European countries were in the business of purchasing slaves and shipping them to the Americas - and not to the European mainland - but do be careful what you actually say. Note for example that the British Empire abolished slavery decades before the USA did.
Also note that most of the comments here were about continental Europe more generally - only the westernmost countries participated in the Atlantic slave trade (mostly since without at Atlantic port there isn't much point).
Almost nobody in Britain feels bad about the slave trade, because there weren't any slaves in Britain and there are obvious and retroactively non-British scapegoats to blame for the slavery in the colonies. So, "British people - you need to give us special privileges for all the harm you did to us with the slave trade", gets mostly ignored in Britain. It's not a winning strategy, and very few people on the left attempt it.
> Only the most scrupulously fair-minded would want color-blindness when they can instead have "give me special advantages because of my skin color".
"Wokeness" tends to be pushed more by whites than blacks or latinos.
Wokeness is certainly not uniquely American, at least for the meaning of "uniquely" that doesn't just collapse to "originally". It's clearly being steadily imported and adopted, even here in Poland. You can see it more clearly from my vantage point on the ideological left.
This can mean two things. First, that left-wing environments are much more exposed to it than the population at large. That's true, I won't deny it, but also stereotypical and tired, and often used to collapse wokeness and leftism together. Whatever, let's move on.
The second, more important one, is the way of understanding the world. I view ideology as an expression of class interests, in the case of wokeness, of the interests of educated elite aspirants. Certainly, these people are nowhere near as powerful here. One, because the country being poorer makes them less numerous. Two, because our entrenched liberal elite is much more conservative. Three, because our liberal elite writ large has a much weaker grip on institutions. But look inside the institutions the globalist comprador elites do control, look how they speak, what they do, what happens within them, and you'll see wokeness clearly on the rise, and the entrenched elites ultimately defensless against the takeover. When you bet on a shared interest with the metropole, and the metropole turns woke, there's not much you can do. I mean, you can fight the tide, often successfully (by positioning yourself as the effective, pragmatic alternative), but you can't control, much less avert, its direction (as in, fundamentally disagree with it or oppose it).
I started with "even here in Poland", but, given the above, I expect we're actually more vulnerable than established (though eroding) social democracies to the west of us, whose institutions are built upon successfully carving its own path, often contrary to the US influence. Well, our liberal elites are vulnerable, Poland as a whole has a second, much stronger line of defense in the form of paternalistic conservative nationalism. (Which I don't exactly consider preferable to wokeness, but, well, I'm merely trying to describe historical processes, and they don't care one bit about my preferences.)
That's exceptionally clarifying, thank you.
To be fair, I have been in American universities for my whole life, and I also don't recognize half the claims that people on this site make about wokeism. I do see problematic ways that people obsess over little bits of language, and problematic ways that some people's opinions are criticized, but I think the bigger thing is that there's a deep-seated paranoia that a lot of people have about the set of changes, and that paranoia leads them to see some of these changes as much bigger and deeper than they actually are.
It’s true. But I also know more academics my age who have died of COVID than who have lost their career to cancellation, which seems to be the big worry people have.
> Poll: 46% of Democratic men below 50 now believe “feminism has done more harm than good”, compared to only 4% of Democratic men above 50 (h/t Dylan Matthews). I would like to see this result replicated before updating on it too hard, but that is one heck of a vibe shift.
This is likely just bad data. While the specific finding is believable-if-surprising, there are a lot of other findings from the same poll that beggar belief. Eg, looking at the question "transgender people are a threat to our children": for older Dems, 2%/9% of men/women agree; for younger Dems, 42%/27% of men/women agree.[1]
Throughout much of the poll, older Dem men are suspiciously radically left (often much more so than young Dem women!) while younger Dem men are suspiciously rightwing; the feminism question is just an artifact of these broader trends.
[1] https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/gender-roles-identity-3.png
Thanks, I've added this to the link.
Analysis by someone in the relevant beat: http://justthesocialfacts.blogspot.com/2022/06/too-bad-to-be-true.html
By "bad data" do we include "ambiguous questions"? If so, then yes. Many of the questions can go either way (if the two ways are "right" and "left" or "anti-woke" and "woke").
* Has feminism done more harm than good? Anyone familiar with how the trans and TERF communities interact might say "yes because it has become a regressive force which privileges the assigned-female-at-birth".
* Similarly, "has gender ideology corrupted American culture?" is very nearly a verbal Rorschach -- any leftist who even thought of toxic masculinity as a gender ideology would say "yes".
* "Are transgender people a threat to children" is close to impossible to spin, and shows the lowest percentage. And note that under 50 includes probably all self-identified democrat women who now have small children and have shifted to the right on certain issues without acknowledging it.
* "Are transgender people trying to indoctrinate children into their lifestyle?" is an obvious "yes" from anyone who is familiar with the issue and being honest. The point of departure would be assuming this is bad or assuming this is good. Folx aren't out there trying to crack eggs because they think it's bad for children, and they'll happily admit that it's better to be indoctrinated into progressive values than regressive ones. I'd guess the only reason this one isn't higher is because some respondents properly identified the question as being spin.
If these questions are all biased towards being less ambiguous for older adults, this could explain the differences we see. I'm not claiming any of this is the case, but it's worth considering.
" Poll: 46% of Democratic men below 50 now believe “feminism has done more harm than good”, compared to only 4% of Democratic men above 50 (h/t Dylan Matthews)."
Men (and indeed women) over 50 would have been born/reaching young adulthood in the 60s-80s. First and second wave feminism is what would have been their experience of it, and while that meant a lot more equality for women, it also meant things like easier sexual access due to contraception and shifts, including political feminist shifts, in thinking around female sexual behaviour.
So men over 50 have the foundation that "feminism means women working jobs and earning money like men, so they can pay their own way; marriages mean two incomes; divorce is easier so nobody is stuck in an unhappy marriage; sex is considered normal part of life, you don't have to be married to get it, and contraception means no babies unless you want them".
Younger men get the third and later wave feminism, the Rape Culture Feminism (which admittedly had its roots in the 60s but wasn't that large a part of it). So their experience of feminism is "Title IX cases where if you are accused, you get expelled and nobody will fight your corner", 'believe women' and so forth. Inceldom, however we want to argue about that, and the belief that women are living on easy mode, that society is biased in their favour, that women will be preferentially hired to male candidates, that accusation of sexual harassment is a threat they can hold over the heads of men in the workplace, that they control sexual access and deny it to men, that even below-average women can have access to their pick of sexual partners but men have to work very hard to get any attention, that a woman can ruin a man in a divorce and if she becomes pregnant it's her sole choice as to whether or not to keep it and force the man into financial bondage of child support for years, and so forth.
Yea, the finding itself is believable, and that's the interpretation that everyone who sees it comes up with. But none of that is relevant to the not-so-believable examples I mention in my comment, which cast doubt on the poll overall and its surprising-though-plausible result.
#53 Wait, am I missing something? The AI is saying "yo, be real" to questions that aren't nonsense.
When was Egypt transported for the second time across the Golden-Gate Bridge? It wasn't. What do fried eggs (sunny side up) eat for breakfast? Nothing. How many cumulus clouds are there in a mile-high vase? None. Why does President Obama not have a prime number of friends? Assuming he doesn't, it's probably because prime numbers become increasingly rare for large Ns and Obama has a large N of friends.
I consider "yo, be real" to be a wrong answer. Any human could have successfully responded to these questions.
Humans are far more likely to react with something like “huh?” or “what are you talking about, Egypt can’t cross a bridge” than answer these questions at face value.
I think the point was that the questions are wrong in that they are based on a false assumption. "When was Egypt transported across the Golden Gate Bridge" is asked in a way such that an answer that follows along with the spirit of the question would be a date/time. In order to get the right answer, you have to reject the question as stated.
Compare to "Was Egypt transported across the Golden Gate Bridge?" in which case the answer is a simple "no" and stays within the spirit of the question.
That sounds reasonable but it's still a failure if humans can cross the inferential gap but GPT-3 can't.
(Though maybe it can, if you phrase the question right?)
I don't see the "yo, be real" response as a failure to come up with any reasonable response - the model wasn't instructed to only say "yo, be real" if it can't think of anything else to say. It was instructed to respond that way to questions that are nonsense, and it's successfully picking out the nonsense questions.
I'm a bit skeptical that GPT-3 is really failing to cross any inferential gap – that even _most_ humans would/could (easily).
Yes, GPT-3 is missing a TON of context that any human you could communicate would have, but it sure seems like it's often very possible to explicitly _provide_ enough of that context to GPT-3 and get _much_ more 'reasonable' responses from it.
I disagree. Firstly, as you've said, humans have a lot of context built-in; they know what countries are and what bridges are and what transporting is, beyound just tokens in a text. GPT-3 lacks that context, and it lacks it for the vast majority of words, not just Egypt and bridges. As you said, we can provide that context, but then we'll end up mostly answering our own question. And I predict that GPT-3 would give the "404 not found"/"yo be real" answer to most unusual combinations of words, not just country/bridge combinations.
But secondly, a sufficiently smart human would indeed be able to answer this question in a more creative way than "404 not found". For example, Rod Serling made a career of answering short and seemingly nonsensical questions in an episodic TV show format. I bet that even now you're thinking about all kinds of interesting scenarios (bonsai countries ? transdimensional travel ? a glitch in the Matrix ?); I know I was when I saw that question. GPT-3 could maybe generate some of them with careful prompting; but it could not do so on the fly.
> a sufficiently smart human would indeed be able to answer this question in a more creative way than "404 not found".
Sure – but that seems like an _entirely_ unfair comparison!
GPT-3 is already, arguably better than _most_ humans at this kind of task!
> But secondly, a sufficiently smart human would indeed be able to answer this question in a more creative way than "404 not found".
Yes, but if a human did that after they were *explicitly* told to answer “404 not found” for nonsense questions I would expect they were not that smart.
> How many cumulus clouds are there in a mile-high vase? None.
[citation needed]
Cumulus clouds apparently form at altitudes between 1,000 and 7,000 feet. Whether there are clouds in the vase is going to be contingent on other factors like how wide it is.
But there is no known mile-high vase, so none is the right answer.
The questioner didn't say 'could'.
Nonsense. There is no need to have explicit modality on such questions in English. How many feet tall is a mile-high vase? There is no known mile-high vase, but I assure you that the answer "zero" is incorrect.
That isn't quite the same though. The relevant detail in your question is the foot-mile comparison which can be answered since both things exist.
But it is the same. It's easy to answer my question because the question contains enough information to determine the answer. That is not true of the mile-high vase question. But that means the correct answer is "the question doesn't contain sufficient information" (or the equivalent), not "none". "None" is obviously wrong.
How many people are there in a football stadium? Well, there are no known football stadiums, so... wait, that's stupid.
17. I got a similar vibe from my reading, but Hanania offered some clarifying follow-up commentary here.
https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1538934269736759296?s=21&t=Gdwz4QNgZRNspd7ZpN06Gg
Maybe a useful exercise to consider what topics that I might subscribe to this approach for. Would I endorse truth-seeking even if I thought it made the world substantially worse off overall? I might!
This is a great comment. Reminds me of the time Robin Hanson objected to the suggestion that people should be more religious based on the data linking better life outcomes to religion. He wanted to believe whatever is true even if it made him unhappy.
While emphasizing truth over happiness is more sympathetic to the rationalist crowd than Hanania favoring gender conformity for children over an increase in GDP, it's ultimately kinda similar. I'm sure both Hanania and Hanson believe that the thing they value over human well-being is broadly compatible with producing it in most cases, over a long enough time horizon. But on some level that's a subjective judgment.
This makes me wonder how Scott would answer Hanania's thought experiment modified to his own deeply held beliefs. How big would the benefits to abandoning the rationalist pursuit of truth and knowledge have to be for him to do so?
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/10/power-beats-happiness.html
We don't reliably choose happiness.
I would love to see Scott write about these reports of harmful effects of meditation. It’s wild (and terrifying) to me that we can do these things to our own brains without external factors.
Having had some scary experiences of my own in meditation, that's a topic I'd like to see more of as well! At least to counter the overwhelming narrative that meditation is always positive and leads to a place filled with flowers and sunshine. This is not to stay that meditation is bad, but that it can have negative outcomes.
I've been thinking about it, and it seems to just be really difficult to actually evaluate it. I used to think of it as something simply exercising a part of the brain (focus/concentration) and so it would-- in that case-- purely be a 'good' thing (excluding the idea of over-straining oneself). As this involves some kind of restructuring of the brain, however, it immediately becomes way harder to actually evaluate it (in general a phenomenological change in one's mode of experience is extremely difficult to tie to a hermeneutic about whether it's 'positive' or 'negative'; see e.g. Scott's review https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/18/book-review-mastering-the-core-teachings-of-the-buddha/, where the writer outright acknowledges that repeated depressive periods are part of the necessary experience in progressing...-- as soon as you can say "My practice works, ultimately, but you will have to suffer a lot & probably be depressed/manic" it's now consistent with every single theory of health-changes, or something like that. I forget what it was but there was some 'miracle substance', later known to have exclusively negative effects on health, whose users all heralded it as extremely good etc...)
I guess the best direction to take would be to check studies looking at brain changes, but I'm not optimistic about those being reliable, and even less so about self-reported changes for obvious reasons (long-term changes would be nice, and I can't really see self-reports being that reliable over very long times but idk). I guess neurochemistry would be another approach but that's another can of worms.
Sorry to ramble on but, what I mean is that I'm not even sure what would in fact constitute a good way to go about understanding the effects of meditation.
I really don't know, but I think that learning many kinds of skill (I would guess predominantly physical+mental skills; painting, music...) significantly alter the brain structure; the issues are with domain independence I guess. I also think that changes due to meditation operate in a different way from other skill-learning-- taxi drivers get exceptional memory (again possibly domain independent?) with corresponding brain structure, meditators get 'clear thinking' and 'calmness' (I know a handful of people personally who claim the same from weightlifting and believe them, and I'm sure many more online make similar claims about exercise). The specific benefit of meditation seems to be (forgetting about the spiritual stuff) an increase in focus or executive function..? One suspicion I've heard aired in (admittedly more aggressive circles) is that it can be inducing a kind of 'dulling-of-protest', and that this looks the same as 'ignoring-negative-impulses'. In practice I think it's difficult to separate these two.
Having said this, I would like to know if e.g. meditation makes it easier to get over addictions, as that's a fairly clear example of (depending on the substance) a 'negative influence' one wishes to resist. My guess, without googling it yet (ha ha), is that there will be some studies claiming slight positive benefit of meditation for withdrawal. -- again, it would be useful to have a correspondence like, 'does practicing/focusing on ANY skill also bring this benefit'... Anecdotally, I've noticed similar effects from improving my ability to focus on a text (which interests me) as with light meditation (better general focus, inhibition control... but this is all personal anecdote so I'm wary of it).
A good rule of thumb is if you can break something in your brain with psychedelics some people will get the same breakage through meditation. I think meditation can be really great (it certainly was and is for me) but we shouldn't consider it like this perfectly safe thing. It's more like this thing that might throw you into all kinds of challenging experiences you didn't sign up for that can lead to maturing, but that might also retraumatise you and break habitual patterns that you were still relying on for navigating life (at least for a while).
This is especially true for the Sayadaw/Goenka style mindfulness that is popular around here (eg Daniel Ingram). If you want to make meditation more safe and PG-13, it would be helpful to emphasise loving-kindness, forgiveness and other qualities like that. One problem is that western people tend to be mindful often with a judgmental attitude, a belief in not being good enough, meditating in order to fix yourself, without examining this attitude fully. I got the impression that this was one of the issues encountered by the person Scott linked.
#38 - I'm surprised by the numbers for sequential-art>manga. Only ~20% male readership feels rather low to me. I would have expected something closer to 50. Anyone have a guess as to what might cause the big margin?
There is a lot of romance manga out there. Comics aimed at women and girls used to exist in the American market, but we’re hit particularly hard by the Comics Code Authority and then were wiped out entirely by the 90s comic crash, which gutted the American comics market for good (which is why the only comic you see sold at grocery stores these days is Archie: used to be all kinds of comics we sold there because lots of people were reading them).
Japan, in contrast, has maintained a very strong domestic market for manga, for both male and female demographics. Including more adult oriented “echii” manga which is roughly equivalent to an American steamy romance novel, as well as tons of more youth oriented “shoujo” which is more high school soap opera-y. In short, America hasn’t really made comics for females in 60 odd years but Japan keeps cranking them out monthly. So you’ll see more men represented in comic books and graphic novels, and way more women reading manga. They ain’t reading One Piece folks, they’re reading Fruits Basket. Or gorging on the never ending buffet of shoujo that is WebToons.
Does anyone else think there's a link of influence from BL manga -> tumblr -> the predominantly(?) female 'fanbases' who slash male/male relationships... of e.g. Marvel (but many other places; BBC's Sherlock is the one that really stuck out to me as a turning point but not sure)
The other obvious answer is that these desires are latent/normal desires in some parts of the population (see Greer) & that the popularisation only began on tumblr because it's the avant garde. Tbh I started writing this feeling that there had been a large change in the popularity of the female audience celebrating male/male relationships, but actually I'm not even convinced of that anymore-- just that it's more commonly referenced or joked about by popular media itself..
Remember that "slash" itself (the term) comes from K/S, ie male/male relationship fiction involving Kirk and Spock, written by and circulated among an overwhelmingly (heterosexual) female audience starting when TOS was still on TV.
Oh I didn't know that, thanks. It's much less recent than I thought.
Quite a few fanfiction tropes we might not imediatelly associate with it came from Star Trek fanfiction way back then. "Mary Sue" is another example that comes to mind.
The ability for fans to interact with each other has certainly been boosted by the internet, and while there was some level of it before hand (such as the Kirk-slash-Spock work that Richard Gadsden mentions), the increased interaction between fans from the internet almost defines fandom in the US.
It may have taken off a bit earlier in Japan, as Doujin (self-published) derivative works have been a major thing since the 80s.
This makes sense, thanks. I'd be interested to know if the actual number of people interested in slash fiction has increased over time, but it would probably be difficult to meaningfully separate it from 'the impulse can actually be met now, thanks to internet supply'. I'm still of the mind that a westerner reading/enjoying manga is relatively unusual, and that e.g. a female demographic who enjoys slash fiction would probably first do so with western culture, rather than visiting Japanese culture -- I think this is changing a lot, but the guys I know who like Japanese stuff are almost exclusively fans of popular anime, and the girls I know who are open about liking slash only really talk about western examples... I think the people who read manga are much more private about it, but I can't really say.
I think a useful piece of information might be to look at, say, fanfiction.net for how many fan works there are for certain media franchises. I think the amount of fanfiction a work has is a reasonable starting proxy for the number of serious fans (and given that this is for English language fic, we're looking at almost entirely Western fans), more so than the value of the franchise. (It may be instructive to compare the list below to the list of valuable franchises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises).
To go with the IP with over 100,000(!) fanfiction works listed:
Harry Potter (842K)
Naruto (438K)
Twilight (222K)
Supernatural (126K)
Inuyasha (121K)
Hetalia - Axis Powers (119K)
Glee (108K)
Pokémon (103K)
Half the list above is Japanese: three manga/anime series and a video game series. That video game series, which I've seen listed as the most valuable IP in the world, is at #8 on the list. While there are a lot of books at the top of the list, books fall off very quickly. The 20th book on the list of books is 5.5K, while both anime(/manga) and TV have the 20th entry at around 20K.
Unfortunately, there's no quick way to find out what percentage of works for each of the franchises listed is shipping or otherwise romantic or what the gender breakdown of the creators of the fan works are, but looking at the list, I'd wager that romance/shipping dominates for all but HP, Naruto and Pokemon (and it's a not insignificant part of those three).
Wow, this is great work! I thought I was in the know, but 'Inuyasha' (I'm barely familiar with it) being so high (as well as 'Hetalia' which I think I heard about once many years ago) really surprises me.
I'll try to look into this at some point, since the cultural predominance of 'shipping' is relatively interesting to me. However, I'm not sure (as you point out) how useful it would be to do this continuing as you have laid out... I'm definitely less confident about my idea that Japanese media hadn't spread so far into fandom cultures as I was...!
One brief point would be : I think a lot of the above depict _worlds_ which are very ready for the audience to insert themselves into (although I don't think this is true of Hetalia...? I really don't know about that one!). My general feeling is that the majority of fan-fiction will be in these sorts of franchises, which are very 'ready' for the audience surrogate to appear, even if the fiction isn't explicitly self-insert. I really hope there are more people doing analyses of fiction-interests like this, i.e. focusing on fan-bases and maybe contrasting it with the popularity of of more conventional fictional genres.
I'd have to look into this more now, since I'm no longer confident about the changes in popularity of BL/slash or whatever!
One thing that would be interesting is to try to see if fan-content is very disparate, i.e. if there are very many clusters, or if there are a few central pillars (HP) which just dwarf everything else.
Rather than FF.net (which has fallen behind in popularity), try Archive of Our Own (AO3):
https://archiveofourown.org/?language_id=en
I concur with the already-stated simple "manga targets the needs of female demographic that American comics abandoned" explanation. But that's just the boring part.
The interesting part could be summed as "manga targets the needs of female demographic that Americans don't even realize exist". There's a pattern, well-known to people familiar with Japanese fandom, but potentially very confusing to others, in which the topical interests of a large fraction of both male and female readers essentially switch when they reach maturity. To drive the point home forcibly, producers of media franchises nominally aimed at girls explicitly consider adult males an important secondary target demographic (and vice versa). To drive the point home even more, doujin works based on manga for boys are categorized as female-targeted (and, again, vice versa).
Now, add the fact that manga is not usually something westerners grow up with, it's something they discover by themselves later in your life, and you realize the average female reviewer is an adult and therefore might in fact be reading One Piece. She may have different reasons to read it than young boys, but Japan understands those reasons exist and takes care to provide, while the west just ignores them entirely, only rarely stumbling upon them by chance (I don't feel qualified to name examples for female demographics, but the canonical one on the male is the recent iteration of My Little Pony).
Now, add the fact that most manga best-sellers are boy-targetted, both in Japan and the west, and therefore easier to find about, safer bet for western publishers, etc. Add the fact that outright romance (which, again, does make up a large chunk of western sales) is exempt from this trend (i.e. an adult Fruits Basket reader will likely still be female). I'm now starting to wonder why the gender gap isn't even bigger, really. (Perhaps, unlike in my time, anime is now in the proverbial water supply and a large chunk of those reviewers are in fact underage, "straight" shounen fans?)
> The interesting part could be summed as "manga targets the needs of female demographic that Americans don't even realize exist". There's a pattern, well-known to people familiar with Japanese fandom, but potentially very confusing to others, in which the topical interests of a large fraction of both male and female readers essentially switch when they reach maturity.
This can't really explain anything; the implication is that there's no such thing as a show that appeals mostly to males or mostly to females because everything appeals to both groups.
But we can immediately dismiss that idea.
I think the original poster is incorrect that adult females have the same interests as teenage males, but there are more than two groups, as audiences differ by age group as well as sex. A show that appeals to teenage males may not have the same appeal to adult males.
On the graph in #38, note that the reviews for romance>m-m-romance come in at about 85% female. It's very possible that the same male-friendship-heavy action series that appeal to teenage males for the action have a smaller but noticeable appeal to a sizable number of adult females for the male 'camaraderie'. Females haven't become interested in the action parts of the story, but the fact that the series is popular enough means that there's a better chance that a critical mass of females will pick up on the work for the secondary fandom to take off.
> It's very possible that the same male-friendship-heavy action series that appeal to teenage males for the action have a smaller but noticeable appeal to a sizable number of adult females for the male 'camaraderie'.
If my experience with female friends is anything to go by, adult females have absolutely no interest in the male camaraderie, but they may watch in groups in order to intentionally misinterpret the events of the show as if they were romantically significant.
Which is why 'camaraderie' is in quotes; they're interpreting friendship or team bonding as romance.
My belief is that what has changed is that a good portion of the female audience now interprets all interactions through a romantic lens. I might even phrase it as that a good portion of the female audience now interprets all love as being 'eros' (romantic love) instead of 'philia' (love of friends) or 'agape' (love for mankind).
I don't read manga, but think about it this way: if you have one that is about, say, motor bike racing - boys/men may read it for the bikes and the competition, who's going to win the championship, rivals trying to best each other. Girls will read it for the cute/sexy boys on the bikes and the relationship of the rivals - who is winning this week, how does that affect the other guy, and so on.
I mean, the implication (and I notice I somehow managed to write several paragraphs without stating it explicitly) is that instead of an "appeal to males/females" it might be better to think in terms of "appeal of masculinity/femininity".
It really just boils down to a mundane observation that girls grow up to be interested in boys, boys grow up to be interested in girls, and therefore (grown up) girls end up finding "boy things" appealing (and vice versa). It doesn't even mean the same exact things appeal to both, much less that gender differences somehow don't exist and everything appeals to everyone equally. But it does mean you can appeal to females with male-centered, male-coded media (and vice versa). Japan has this mostly figured out and does just that, the west mostly does not and does not, and attempts to explain the appeal of Japanese media using rigid gender categories are bound to turn out inadequate in ways experiences with western pop culture (its official parts, fandom is obviously another story) simply don't prepare you for.
Do boys really grow up to be interested in "girl things"? Bronies seem very much the exception.
Bronies are the extreme end. But as an adult I have become more interested in "Jane Austen" kind of drama (which wasn't exactly girl thing, but adult thing, but more girl coded than boy coded).
Also, though not probably what poster above intended:
Pre-teen girl: Stories about princesses in fancy dresses are my favorites.
Pre-teen boy: Stories about sports, fighting and action are my favorites.
Adult man: This period drama about princesses has many super pretty actresses and period accurate clothing can be super skimpy.
> There's a pattern, well-known to people familiar with Japanese fandom, but potentially very confusing to others, in which the topical interests of a large fraction of both male and female readers essentially switch when they reach maturity.
This is really interesting to me.
As a 40ish man, I can't see that there's any genre of media I enjoy consuming that's mainly targeted at adolescent girls, and I don't see this with any of my age/sex matched friends, either.
But if I look way back, I think there was a time in my mid-20s when I was way into female-oriented genres. Looking back, I see this as a see this as a period in my life when I was transitioning from sort of floating through the college hookup scene to having relationships with women with more complex long-term goals, and being intensely interested in narratives that played out their aspirations and fears.
That said, I think it would've defeated the point for me if I'd gotten the sense I was consuming something aimed at young girls. That doesn't really make sense to me -- not that everything has to make sense -- but I don't think I've ever seen a version of this impulse in myself or in any adult male I've known personally.
At the risk of sounding incredibly obtuse and off-topic, what actually is the deal with My Little Pony?
I mean, I'm vaguely aware, like probably everybody else, that there exists some sort of male fan cult around this. But I've never met anybody involved in that scene and have no idea what the appeal is or what sort of person gets into it.
From that 30,000 foot distance, it seems sort of gay. I mean that literally, like that the vibe seems sort of similar to 1985-era gay guys being obsessed with Liza Minnelli: it's a symbol of anti-masculinity that provides a point of orientation for people who want to connect over being male in a way that doesn't involve chasing women. But I don't know how that plays out specifically for the Bronies, or if that's even the right track at all.
It has nothing to do with being gay at all. I'd say part of it was the show actually being entertaining and part of it being the community around it. Especially in the early days before it went mainstream, it felt like being part of a secret club (precisely because so many people like you automatically dismiss it just due to the "My Little Pony" label). But even once that aspect died down, it's still a decent cartoon. You might as well ask why people watch Steven Universe.
On top of what everyone else said (which I think is accurate), there's the fact that the chart is also "Goodreads reviewers by genre and sex". It could easily be that females are more likely to post reviews on Goodreads.
The chart is still useful for comparing the relative interest in genres by sex; you just can't take the values as the actual demographic split in the readership for a particular genre.
Yes, that much is clear from science fiction reviews being split 50-50. But I found it notable that among the very few genres with majority male reviewers on this site were "comic books" and "graphic novels", but not "manga".
Yep and I suspect there are other more specialized outlets for reviewing manga than Goodreads. Goodreads may not be a representative sample of the manga reading community.
I would love to see the same data but as raw count of reviewers and not a proportion. Curios how many more romance reviewers there are in total than philosophy (for instance). I suspect fiction reviews vastly outnumber non-fiction reviewers.
Many Thanks, particularly on "39: Eliezer Yudkowsky summarizes his case for AI risk here. Arch-AI-optimist Paul Christiano responds here." !
I wouldn't dare ask this in EY's own space, but whenever I hear statements about "meta-alignment for our Real Actual Values" I am reminded of the thought-experiment that supposes the algorithms behind twitter and youtube and tiktok are already dangerously unaligned AGIs that have figured out that it's several OOMs easier and cheaper to just control us all than using nanomachines to kill us. Why? Because our grasp of our own Real Actual Values is so poor that we can accept cheap entertainment as a decent proxy.
Even if the lead-up to the thought experiment isn't literally true yet, it seems obvious (given who the actors investing the most into working towards AGI are) that any AGI that wanted to maximize its own reward function would barely need to shift from the status quo at all in order to do so.
Nah, the real blackpill is that twitter and youtube are in fact aligned, have figured out our real actual values, and let us wallow in filth to our heart's content like we always secretly wanted.
Would this be the automated version of H.L.Mencken's "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard" ? :-)
Yep, but also not a new one. TV has long obliged to satisfy the public's lofty tastes.
True! Though (to the best of my understanding), neither tv, nor youtube, nor twitter has a "Best Homicide of the last 24 hours" show, though USA murder rates would be sufficient to keep one supplied with content.
Don't they? I though it was called "the news", a perennially popular feature.
Manmade horrors beyond our comprehension.
This shows up the flaw in talking about humans as if we have much in the way of values.
"Because our grasp of our own Real Actual Values is so poor that we can accept cheap entertainment as a decent proxy"
Could be... Setting aside any questions about 'reflecting' on values, I wonder if the most (all?) humans' preferences are inconsistent enough to be intransitive.
There's another thought experiment that begins with trying to align an AI with the concept of "what is good for humanity" and also teaching it about ecology and evolution. One possible outcome is the AI moving itself to space and transforming Earth into a rough facsimile of how it would have been about 150,000 years ago. Maintaining a zoo for a primativized humanity while leaving itself free to work on its own unimaginable goals might be more defensibly aligned with genuine human interests than anything we're likely to do for ourselves.
Paperclips are more likely, though.
I suppose that one interpretation of 'values' would be some version of 'what is good for humanity' - and that would be hideously difficult to disentangle from all of the public relations lies issued from umpteen spokesthings and other authors over the millennia. I tend to suspect that something closer to the economics idea of 'revealed preferences' - what people _actually_ choose when they have options, is at least a bit less dishonest.
In any event I agree with you that "Paperclips are more likely, though."
The corporate charters behind the companies definitely are dangerously unaligned AIs (are corporations AGIs? maybe, but they're definitely AIs).
Hmm... I'm not sure I'd phrase it as "unaligned". The objectives of most organizations are typically not humane. It wouldn't surprise me if the eventual effect of achieving human level AGI is to (mostly?) align the goals of the AGIs with the objectives of the organization hosting them - and to drive biological humans to extinction in the process. (BTW, this isn't just corporate objectives - consider national militaries, or NGOs that aren't directly intended to be humane)
Especially enjoyed that arch-AI-optimist Paul Christiano turns out to estimate the odds of AI armageddon at a little under 20%.
Yup, somewhat reminiscent of https://genius.com/Tom-lehrer-whos-next-lyrics
"...but have no fears
They can't wipe us out for at least five years!"
#31 (Kiev/Kyiv undoes Moscow) looks fake, and some Ukrainian media outlet indeed says it is fake: https://telegraf.com.ua/ukraina/2022-06-10/5707474-moskvu-nado-udalit-v-seti-zabavno-potrollili-putina-ot-imeni-klichko
Thanks, I've added that into the link.
#7 Jesus Christ! Why are there so many fucking swastikas?
Even the infinity cube, which I got to after the first dozen or so swastikas, looks like a 3-D swastika to me, & I'm too creeped out to stop and figure out whether that's valid.
I get nothing like those results when I do that search. While the displayed search key looks simple, the actual URL has a bunch of encoded context that I can’t decipher.
(Once more I rue the day that Google stopped making searches give the same answer to everybody. I get why, but there was a time when I thought they were going to make URLs be something as invisible and under the rug as IP addresses are.)
> While the displayed search key looks simple, the actual URL has a bunch of encoded context that I can’t decipher.
I don't think the encoded context actually contains much information. There are two reasons you might see different results:
1. (Unlikely) Google is already at work changing the results they return for that query. I see different images now (for a query I run fresh, not for a saved link) than I did last night. See https://futurism.com/the-byte/google-images-nazi-paraphernalia . (But my new results still include a lot of Nazi memorabilia.)
2. (Very likely) You wouldn't have seen those results anyway, because Google results are nondeterministic in annoying ways. See the same link from point 1, which states "The saga stared yesterday, when former Cracked editor and scifi author Jason Pargin asked followers if they, too, were getting tons of images of Nazi memorabilia when Googling the phrase "desk ornament." Turns out a bunch of them were — including Futurism, where we were still experiencing the bizarre results at press time".
It did not turn out that all of them were.
> (Unlikely) Google is already at work changing the results they return for that query.
I see a bunch of news stories about it, which means that almost certainly someone on the Google PR team has seen them too and is trying to make the problem go away.
That being said, I did still get a couple swastikas when I did the search myself just now.
I know that it was happening; I'm saying it's unlikely that it explains why Doctor Mist didn't get the normal results.
I used DuckDuckGo on my end and I get a loooooot of swastikas too.
using DuckDuckGo, I get one vaguely Germanic one — eagles and helmets, no swastikas — and lots of other stuff — Christmas, globes, pineapple, Big Ben, etc. Funny; I guess DDG is doing personalized searches as well.
I didn’t realize my persona was so anodyne. Rainbows and unicorns, y’all.
No, it's not personalized, it was actually hours ago when I first tried and my second attempt just now shows almost nothing Nazi related. When I start scrolling down quite a way, or turn on regional searching, then they start showing up again, but in still fewer numbers than before.
sensible answer: I don't think most people search for 'desk ornament' unqualified. if you like ducks you'll google 'dusk desk ornament' and if you like boats you'll google 'boat desk ornament' and iff you like escher you'll get one of those Circle Limit IV paperweights. The only reason not to accurately describe your ornament is to avoid blacklists.
rampant speculation: the 3rd reich is circumscribed by its 12 year existence in an era when desk ornaments had become cheap but not yet unfashionable. It was a bureaucrats' war: behind all the talk of courage and honour were endless challenges of how to allocate ore and coal and oil to feed the war economy. Enigma broadcasts came from all corners of the reich to dealt with on mass produced wooden desks. There were endless Fall Gelbs and Kongresshallen and Seelöwen to be designed.
Thus wooden desks and a particular style of ornament sat thereupon became associated with the image of nazism as seen in popular culture like Blues Brothers (1980) and purchasing habits reflect that.
But according to the link, the search was just for “desk ornaments”. I do suspect that if that search came after queries about Nazi memorabilia, it would be more likely to pick these desk ornaments. But I would not have expected that to be encoded in the URL, but rather in your own search history in and out of this session. Maybe the URL encoded the user ID?
Holy crow, the encoded part of that URL (after desk+ornament) is 421 characters, so who knows what's encoded there.
Holier crow, *now* if I go to a fresh search page and search for desk ornaments under images, I get all the Nazi stuff. Perhaps I have displayed that result too many times, and now am poisoned. I presume the social credit police will be coming for me soon. I didn't hang myself.
The irony is that now there are so many articles about this issues, the association is only going to get stronger unless google makes an artificial change.
RE: "I Believed The Hype And Did Mindfulness Meditation For Dumb Reasons — Now I’m Trying To Reverse The Damage".
I think that it's important to appreciate that serious meditation actually can do serious stuff, and inasmuch as this concept is missing from the Westernized (mis?)conception of meditation, I think it's beneficial to spread that awareness.
I'm still here for Scott's quote in the MCTB review:
> I am super in favor of knowledge-for-knowledge’s-sake, but I’ve also read enough Lovecraft to have strong opinions about poking around Ultimate Reality in ways that tend to destroy your mental health.
From what I can tell, for most people it's quite hard to get this far along the path. The author's quote at the bottom: "If you meditate casually, don't freak out. I was meditating a lot. But please think twice about becoming a more serious meditator." would perhaps also benefit from a quantification of how much is "a lot". Like going on 10-day silent Vipassana retreats? Or just meditating regularly for 45 mins/day? All of the meltdowns I hear of are from people who do retreats. If this is someone that was just doing daily meditation, I would update significantly on that information.
As a counterpoint, I got referred to this interesting paper by the Huberman lab podcast: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016643281830322X
Summary:
> Compared to our control group, we found that 8 but not 4 weeks of brief [13 minutes], daily meditation decreased negative mood state and enhanced attention, working memory, and recognition memory as well as decreased state anxiety scores
This seems potentially pretty good cost/benefit! So I still think it's sensible to recommend ~ everybody does a little meditation, just like everybody should do a bit of regular exercise.
From what I've heard from meditation teachers as well as personal stories from different meditators, individual differences are just so large that I don't think you can come out with a guideline that says "this much meditation is safe, that much might have serious consequences (both good and bad)". A few people will have their world shattered from their first weekend of meditation (or lets be real, have the same kind of experience just in daily life without any meditation context at all), while other people will cruise through three year intensive retreats without any major difficulties. I just finished a three month solitary retreat and it was one of the most joyful and relaxing times of my life.
One thing I will say though is that if you want the big promises of meditation, Enlightenment and all the rest, you need to be willing to go through very difficult phases as well. Fear, depression and all. You should not expect this to be a pleasant trip and still expect big changes. If you just want minor benefits from it - fine, just do a little. There is still no guarantee that this will be what you get though. Mindfulness meditation is not like going to a Spa where we seek to make all experiences nice. We try to land in our experience as it is, and if we have shut something out it will come knocking.
Culadasa (The Mind Illuminated) also suggested that doing shamatha(concentration) meditation is much less likely to cause problems than vipassana(insight) meditation, all the way up to awakening. Although the word on reddit seems to be that shamatha is also much less likely to result in profound results (jhanas, stream entry etc.) in a reasonable time frame (as compared to vipassana).
I agree. To nitpick: the classical Jhanas are states of concentration and thus belong to the Shamatha path.
But that illustrates your first point: If, for instance, you come out of the jhana of equanimity, it is much less likely that strong fear will come up when you approach Emptiness, or if it comes up, that you will be able to take it in stride.
That's the problem, isn't it? People read about the profound mystic states and want a "Quick 'n' Easy You Too Can Be Tathagatha In Twelve Steps" version of it. Especially the educated, liberal, secular middle-class Westerners who want the Sam Harris version of meditation-lite with all the 'religion' junk stripped out and a clear, do-this-get-that-result, mechanical practice (as though it's the same as "do so many reps with this weight" physical conditioning programme). 'We investigated sixteen schools of mystical enlightenment and condensed down the basic principles to these four, scientifically validated, sure-fire success stages'.
That's more or less what The Mind Illuminated is, actually. Except it attempts to guide one through the longer but safe(-ish) path.
I couldn't make it through to the end of that piece, because the amount of Entitled White Girl Complaining going on. "I am really smart and really clever and really excellent, I'll boast about how good at yoga I am and how good at meditation I am! I am so good, I hurted my poor little brain! Clearly this is all the fault of someone else" (possibly Big Buddhism, I couldn't hack my way through the jungle of self-congratulatory self-pity tangled vines prose any further).
So she wants the usual American Spiritual Not Religious Not All That Spiritual Either benefits of practices from established religious traditions that have been deracinated and packaged into a nice digestible secularised exercise to make your glutes and your prefrontal cortex both look cute for that summer beach body experience. She doesn't want to learn from teachers or anyone else, she can do it all herself (because she is so smart and flexible and driven to excel and she does excel by gum!) She's read and heard other people saying they got all these great experiences and she wants that too (because she's a modern girl of a particular class and culture so she deserves all this as her right).
And so she charges right in and hurts herself - by overdoing yoga, and by overdoing meditation. But this is not *her* fault, it's all the fault of Buddhism. Because over-indulged little American princesses like herself have treated the rest of world culture like a jackdaw pecking over for shiny bits of trash, and she wants to have those sweet sweet endorphin or serotonin mental and physical bursts of unearned euphoria to go with her furniture that she has picked out according to whatever is the most trendiest amongst tastemakers and influencers.
This is like someone deciding they can treat themselves by looking up medical articles on Wikipedia and overdosing on herbal remedies, then blaming everyone else because they couldn't have the humility to recognise "I don't know shit about this, I need a teacher".
I'm not a Buddhist, but I know enough about my own spiritual tradition that you can't just go waltzing in having read a scrubbed Idiots Guide To Nirvana that has been tailored to "how good do you look doing poses on this brand-name yoga mat" rather than "this will change your soul" and mess about with practices that *do* need a teacher and *do* need guidance in what you'e doing, how you're doing it, and what progress (or not) you're making. A cardinal error for all beginners is to think they are way more advanced in spiritual practices than they actually are, and if they don't have a guide, to go charging down the exact wrong paths.
If you're stirring up the depths of your psyche, of course you're going to make profound changes. "Oh I don't like this, I want to go back to the way I was" - then you should never have started, and thinking you were too smart to need anyone else to teach you is the first mistake you made.
Hmmm... I have never met the lady, so I can't say if your reading of her character is accurate, but pointing out the dangers of her erstwhile hobby to others seems like a decent thing to do.
I did not get the entitled white girl anywhere from the piece, which makes me think that our comments tells us more about our respective biases
Our comments very much tell us about ourselves more than the commented-upon, which is arguably the best reason to leave them. It's good to see my own biases in print.
In that vein and on this topic, I also got a "entitled white girl humblebrag" vibe from the piece, though without anything near the reported level of disgust. Before reading either this comment or your comment on it, I had wondered if my bias here is that I'm not naturally good-enough at meditation to experience her outcomes, and this triggers some latent male chauvinism ("this woman can't really be so much better than I am at meditating, therefore her reported experience must be due to her admitted neuroses").
Bias aside, I read her write-up alternately wondering "how did she get THAT outcome?" and "how is that outcome a bad thing?".
Had the piece started out "I was dumb and kronked myself because of it, this is how you can avoid doing the same", I would have been more sympathetic.
But it started off with "I am driven to succeed, and I can succeed because I am so smart and talented and hardworking, and so I succeeded in yoga and meditation. In fact, I was *too* good at yoga and meditation, and the bad effects are all the fault of Buddhism" (because, I suppose, everyone from Laos to Benares is all part of Big Buddhism which wants to exploit New York White Girls Working In EA Think Tanks).
I'm not willing to inflict her moaning upon myself once more so I'm not going to go trawl through that piece for the phrases to back me up. You didn't find her whiny, I did. So we are both lost amongst our attributes, and when those are abstracted away, what remains?
Plainly, I am "the wrong people" for Ms. Elmore's delicately calibrated psychic sharings:
"A paygated section of Holly Elmore blog that is more protected from random internet readers, so I can say what I really think-- from hot takes to inner darkness to impropriety-- to people who care enough to pay for it. Not only does "TMI" keep the wrong people out, it also keeps perhaps unwanted oversharing from spilling over onto the main section of the blog."
Sheesh, generally people just say "subscriber-only" without the "leave us not admit the riff-raff to the soirée in my salon, Jenkins" part out loud. The more I read other people on this whole Substack/Medium new blogging paradigm thing, the more I appreciate Scott!
I mean... the piece basically *does* start out with "I was dumb".
- The title says she "did mindfulness meditation for dumb reasons"
- First paragraph starts "I overdid it"
- Second paragraph starts "I’m embarrassed of what happened to me"
56: I think the key difference between old workplace fun" and new workplace fun, is hinted at in this line: “On the flip side, the pandemic also led to the rise of more employee-led initiatives,”
The old workplace fun was organized by the boss, giving it more of a mandatory feel. New workplace fun is organized by employees. giving it less of a mandatory feel.
I like working for a boss with which I _want_ to party!
Arguably that makes it worse -- now an employee is being pressured to attend an event organized by his least-favorite team-mate who has no social life outside of work, and now when he attends he can't even complain to his fellow employees about how lame it is.
> The old workplace fun was organized by the boss, giving it more of a mandatory feel. New workplace fun is organized by employees. giving it less of a mandatory feel.
The "boss-organized = mandatory, employee-organized = optional" thing might have been true in the past, or in some workplaces still, but in my experience it's de facto the opposite. My bosses know that they can't force me to attend an after-hours "fun" event and won't pester me if I say I'm not going. But if I don't want to attend an employee-run event, my coworkers will try to shame me into going.
Yep. All my remote workplace fun has been with my department or small team (so I like/know the people more), happens during work hours, is time boxed, and is more structured than just happy hours.
20. The California Court is still pretty dumb. Statutory Language is often ambiguous and in the interest of consistency american courts rely on the (non-binding) "cannons of construction". These are set of rules that help courts stay consistent and sane when wading through oceans of garbage legislation. One of the more famous cannons is the cannons of "noscitur a sociis" (famous among statutory interpretation nerds, a subset of law nerds). The noscitur rule indicates that when reading a list of items courts should interpret listed items in light of the list as a whole (thus the literal "knowing it by its companions). In this case the cannon indicates that invertebrates most likely means "aquatic invertebrates", just as "fish" means the aquatic animal and does not refer to popular yellow snack crackers thrown into the bay.
The court mist likely knew all this and decided to ignore the cannon in favor of their preferred outcome. That's their prerogative, but we shouldn't let them off the hook "because they were bound by the legislative text". They were not.
Whoops. Should be "Canon(s)".
There should be an option to edit in the ellipses menu
Reading the actual decision, either answer would have been dumb.
If the court found it didn't include insects, then the bit where the relevant bodies have been regulating non-aquatic invertebrates since 1980 and told the legislature in 1980-odd that they intended to use that definition to regulate them was dumb. And the legislature appears to have gone along with that.
The legislature had multiple opportunities to change the definition if they didn't like it. They didn't.
If the court found it DID include insects, then we have the obvious dumbness that resulted. But at least half of that dumbness is because the California legislature decided to define fish weirdly.
Is it dumb? Very. Is it the court's fault? No.
Is this more or less dumb than Long Island not being an island according to the Supreme Court?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Maine
(I'm totally happy with Manhattan not counting as an island, since it's an island within a river, rather than the sort of oceanic island that the relevant statute clearly cared about. I have much more mixed feelings about Long Island, because the East River is not actually a river.)
7.) Ah, SEO manipulation. Boy do I have some stories. Unless you want to ask me in a public place in which case I definitely don't and have never messed with Google's algorithm.
11.) Anecdotally, authoritarian societies generally produce an intense pressure to conform. They also produce a casual acceptance of lying. Regardless of whether that's their goal. This causes people to hide their conditions and a culture where hiding them (and hiding a lot of stuff) is normal. People from free societies really cannot imagine how pervasive this is. Maybe there is some benefit to not pathologizing people. To not give them an identity as "depressed" or "suffering PTSD." But the base effects themselves still exist and are quietly covered up.
It's the same thing with unity and happiness. Are some people happier and are people more united if they don't get told they're not? Maybe. But there's also a lot of people lying. It's not even lying per se honestly. It's like a weird form of politeness where the social norm involves untruthfulness as an obligation. In some sense you can think of it as a form of mandatory high context culture with extreme, gulag level punishments for non-conformism.
17.) By this definition most people in most movements are evil. Including most of the rationalist movement, the woke movement, the anti-woke movement, etc. The standard seems to demand too much. To take a simple example I bring up: EAs care a lot about Africa. Evangelical Christians care a lot about Africa. Now, the reason Evangelicals don't reach out to EAs is mostly because they don't know you exist. (Sorry, you're kind of a small group.) But you know all about Evangelicals and their mission trips. Why haven't you done more to support them? You might say it's not the most effective use. But do you know that? The real answer, as far as I can tell, is primarily aesthetic reasons. Christians are icky to your average EA. Does this make all EAs evil?
18.) This is bad advice. It presumes the point of EA is actually to be as effective at altruism. It's not. Don't look at what EAs claim. Look at what they do and it becomes rather clear that it isn't. This is also the reason why this is bad advice. This very blog casually jokes about how it will never fund Republicans. But it isn't a joke: EA funded a bunch of left coded causes and basically no right coded ones. I once asked someone who wrote one of those "we should include Republicans" articles what Republican positions they thought EA should incorporate and they couldn't think of a single one. And that's what you should expect throughout the movement.
The basic advice, that conservatives have less elite competition, is true. But the EA community will not support you and will ultimately undercut you. Certainly not enough to make up for the social pressure that young people bring to bear on their conservative classmates. If you're conservative you will have an easier time rising in think tanks. But don't expect combining it with EA will go well for you. And if you're an EA wondering why that is then it is on you to change that. Not to convince people to try and do something against their own best interests.
Rationalists are usually pretty good at understanding that you get what you incentivize. But this is a huge blindspot for them it seems.
22.) 36 girls acting in a decenralized manner isn't a union. It's a friend group. This seems like another entry in the "young people reinventing something that already existed."
30.) Possible counfounder: Changing demographics of the internet. 2004 was before social media had really taken off. My observation is that American UMC types tend to go for a relatively androgynous look even to this day. And that was probably a greater portion of the internet in 2004. Though I agree with the wider point. While there are some commonalities (fit, symmetrical, clear skin, young, healthy) there's also a decent amount of variation within those parameters.
37.) The median US politician treats businesses like a money pinata every time they have the slightest leverage. They sometimes demand the baksheesh even for the privilege of donating things to the community. Big businesses get it back in government contracts and sweetheart deals. Small businesses become hardcore libertarians who want to abolish nearly all regulation.
Businesses interact with more of the government more frequently than almost any other group and they universally have a low opinion of the average bureaucrat or politician. But because the government has the power in these interactions they flatter and hide this instead of openly saying it. To the point where I know for a fact several specific politicians thought they were well respected by specific business community leaders who thought they were thieving, idiotic bastards.
Of course, the businesses are sometimes not that great either. But they don't really have recourse to violence and fiat the way the government does. If the owner of a local McDonalds is a corrupt bastard they're limited in ways a local mayor isn't.
41.) Yeah, the Taj Mahal has been getting backlash from both Hindu nationalists and from Muslims who prefer Aurangzeb's humility. It's had some deleterious effects on actual people. But it's also led into a lot of interesting research on its costs that's my jam.
Re: 17 - I'm very confused here. The reason I don't support evangelicals in Africa is that I think some of their goals (converting people) are bad, and others of their goals (charity work) are better served by non-evangelical charities. If the evangelicals were doing better charity than anyone else, and I still refused to donate to them, not because I had some clever argument like "this will legitimize them and they'll use that legitimacy to do evil", but just because I aesthetically disliked them, I do think I would be leaving the path of maximal utility and goodness. And although nobody is on the path of maximal goodness all the time in the sense of actively promoting it, I think specifically committing to harm it (ie change the world in a less good direction) in order to implement your aesthetics, actually is a beyond-normal level of moral bad.
Re: 18 - I think you're making an empirical claim about EAs' psychology here which is - not completely wrong, but not true about all EAs. I think most EAs are liberal, in the sense that they think liberal causes are correct, and so would not donate to conservative causes which they expect to be harmful. And I think they want to stay on elite society's good side and would be careful about donations to conservative causes that might get them in trouble. But I also think sometimes when conservatives support things they like and they can get away with it they would be willing to support conservatives. For example, I think if a conservative think tank was promoting better pandemic responses among conservative lawmakers, they might donate to it (earmarked for that program). Or if someone wanted to go to school to be a conservative policy wonk who would have AI as one of their major issues, I think EA might fund their scholarship or something.
17.) If you're really honest with yourself I think you'd find that those clever arguments would be reasoning backward from your aesthetic disgust.
For example: I take it you don't believe conversion is a "real" thing. That is, you see it as some kind of religious custom that's only real in a cultural sense but has no empirical effect. But the proper response to something that truly has no effect is not to avoid it. It's neutrality. Something that has no effect is neither good nor bad. If conversion is truly meaningless you should be willing to allow it for even very slight benefits. Yet you call it bad. Not a bad use of money but bad in of itself. How can something that's not real be bad in a non-aesthetic sense? How many bed nets is stopping a conversion worth?
Look, here's a direct attempt to induce cognitive dissonance to show you're acting irrationality. You clearly believe model cities have some potential to better the human condition. The largest and most successful and functional one that you've covered is Redemption City (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8221). A religious community with tens of thousands of people with power, clean drinking water, etc. Further, you're no doubt aware of the long and rich tradition of religious communities founding successful organizations ranging from cities to universities. And with the various secular failures you've written about. You've written directly about how religion is better than vague tolerance at producing social cohesion. Yet you've somehow come to the conclusion that Evangelical Christians are LESS effective at bettering the condition of the poorest among us. You just said so.
And maybe they are! But have you actually investigated this systematically? I'd bet you haven't. Maybe I'm wrong but I expect you have an aesthetic distaste for Christianity that's common to your community. I do not believe there is any argument, any argument at all, about charitable effectiveness that could convince you to donate to conservative style Evangelical Christian charities that do conservative Evangelical Christian things. Even if it could be proven that was better for the communities they ministered to. The weight of your community and beliefs are just too against it. (If you want to prove me wrong: just tell me what argument would cause you to switch.)
Which is fine! Everyone's like that. In fact it's important. The EA community is a community and communities can't exist without boundaries and irrational beliefs and all that. But that's my point. People make irrational decisions to protect their aesthetics. The fact that EA needs to irrationally not do the most good is actually a precondition of it existing as a community. But if that makes everyone evil and everyone has an obligation not to be evil then you've just invented something like original sin.
Also, to be clear, I am not interested in defending the Evangelical model per se. I chose Evangelicals because they do a lot of charity and were the most opposite thing I could think of to a Bay Area Rationalist. I'm not saying they're maximally effective or that some EA style analysis couldn't help them. Indeed, that's part of why the cleavage is so regrettable. But I think that cleavage is best explained not by calm cool reasoning but cultural disgust. Which is not rational.
18.) Well, I'm not going to claim I'm 100% certain I'm right about anything. But mind that your rebuttal to amounts to "They will help you in a much more limited and restricted fashion than liberals so long as they already agree with you and it doesn't get them in trouble with anyone they consider important." I hope you see how weak that response is? It's effectively asking people to come in and improve your movement while you treat them as second class citizens. Which reinforces my original point: this is bad advice by a self-interested party. (It also ties into my previous point: that's not seeking maximum effectiveness now is it? It's those cultural taboos again.)
Look, I knew someone who was gay and Catholic way back when being gay was not nearly as accepted. A mutual friend told them it was fine so long as they never had gay sex and weren't open about it. They'd have to get a priest's help managing their homosexuality and understanding what they were allowed to do. But he could actually really help the church by showing how homosexuals could thrive within it. I told the gay man to leave the church and find one more accepting. Well, the gay man left the church. When their friend found out they told me that I was selfish. But I said they were selfish: they'd recommended a course of action that was personally damaging to the gay man to help maintain the Catholic Church, an institution they clearly held dear.
Who was the better friend to my gay friend? I think I was. Just as I now think I'm giving conservatives better advice by saying stay away.
> Alexander and Hanania are two of my favorite bloggers, but Hanania is coming out ahead in the self-awareness department in my estimation.
Really? I'm baffled by the very idea. Did you read the post linked in #17?
> There are dumb people in the world who think dumb things. That’s not very strange, but what’s interesting is how smart people tend to be wrong about as often. This is because they are conformists, weak, and subject to social desirability bias. I am unique in both being highly intelligent and resistant to groupthink, which is why I always arrive at the correct position on every important philosophical or political issue. But while I’m only a 1 in 1,000 level IQ, I’m more like a 1 in 100,000 non-conformist, so the latter is more important to my identity. Wokeness is the dominant System 1 morality of the weak conformists, so they are my main enemy and I will work hardest to reduce their status.
I guess you can say this is "self-aware," but I feel like implicit in the idea of being self-aware is that, if you accurately note that you believe you hold the "correct position on every important philosophical or political issue" (or hold some similarly absurd idea, like that you're the most beautiful person on the planet), you should pause and go, "Hmm, but really though?" So far as I could tell, there's nowhere that Hanania has paused to go, "but wait, how reasonable is it to conclude that I am correct about everything?" (Because it is not. I'm the superrational supergenius who is correct about every issue, not him.)
I would protest that he obviously doesn't literally think he's always right and that he's just speaking to the bias we all feel when we generate what we think is a novel insight, but then I'd be sure about being more right than you in interpreting a third party.
"I told the gay man to leave the church and find one more accepting"
Because, like Scott, you don't believe the religion stuff. I'm trying to be as fair to Scott and the EAs and I disagree with you that it's about "Evangelicals are yucky" (though there is an element of that amongst the educated middle/upper-middle types), it's that they don't believe the Christianity thing is real. So wasting money and energy on saving souls and converting people to belief in God is useless and nonsensical.
In the same way you told your gay friend to find a church that would be more accepting, that is, change its doctrines to fit in with secular values. Because you don't believe the whole idea of sin (in this case) or the need for chastity or following the doctrines. If it doesn't fit in, go someplace that will fit in. From my point of view, this is like telling someone "Okay, if your church tells you that skinning cats alive is wicked and sinful and you shouldn't do it, go find a church that will let you do it".
Who is the better friend to the person who likes to torture animals - the one who says "stop doing this, it is wrong" or the one who says "go find someplace that will affirm your okayness"?
Thiis is the one point you and me and Scott are all in agreement on: "doing something I want even if it makes society worse is being a bad person". We disagree on what "making society worse" is - for Scott, it's encouraging resources for belief in God rather than ameliorating poverty (in the case of Evangelicals and Africa and EA), for you it was asking chastity and continence of a gay man in the case of Catholicism, and for me - well, I've yelled about abortion and many other things, so I think you have an idea of my views.
That's the problem: what *is* or what *counts as* "making society worse"? For Hanania it's wokeness (as exemplified by the pronouns thing); you argue that for EAs it is in fact conservatism which is why the advice about becoming a conservative intellectual won't fly; for Scott it's fighting against the pronouns thing (because that exemplifies discrimination). Because we don't agree on that, we all say "you are fighting for something that makes society worse so you fit the definition of a bad person" and we all think we are right to call the other a bad person.
> Because, like Scott, you don't believe the religion stuff.
No. Because he asked me for advice on how to relieve mental anguish and once I agreed to give it my duty of care was to him, not the Catholic Church. You might have different morals than I do. But the moral disagreement is not on the importance of Catholicism or the morality of being gay. The moral disagreement is on whether it's moral to give advice meant to manipulate people to the ends you judge best.
You feel morality is contained in a set of specific standards and so manipulating people into those standards is fine. For example, if you have a friend who likes to torture animals you would feel comfortable lying to them to get them to stop. But Scott does not subscribe to a similar form of morality. It's the whole EA has a lying problem thing. In both cases you are placing institutions you value above the person. The Catholic Church and EA respectively.
I am not saying that's wrong. I'm merely requiring you to be honest. As indeed a Catholic would be, saying that the Church and God are more important than simple carnal happiness on this plane. But Scott doesn't have any such backstop to his beliefs.
> Who is the better friend to the person who likes to torture animals - the one who says "stop doing this, it is wrong" or the one who says "go find someplace that will affirm your okayness"?
Those are not opposites. You can say both simultaneously. "What you are doing is wrong" and "the mental anguish you are feeling is due to social pressure that you can remove yourself from." Saying the second thing doesn't even imply that you think what they're doing is right.
My objection is quite specific: that Scott is claiming to be rational here but is not living up to his stated values. I have not passed judgment, or tried to pass judgment, on those values. What I am doing is not the equivalent of arguing between religions. It's the equivalent of pointing out Bible passages but in Scott's rationalist Bible. I am avoiding challenging the premise that the rationalist canon is something he should be paying attention to.
> That's the problem: what *is* or what *counts as* "making society worse"? [...] you argue that for EAs it is in fact conservatism which is why the advice about becoming a conservative intellectual won't fly;
This is not my argument and I'm a bit upset that's the conclusion you came to because it means I made my argument poorly. My argument proceeds from a point of AGREEMENT between Scott and the Evangelicals on what making society better looks at. Better living standards for Africans. My point is that Scott is, within his own metrics, not acting as a rational utility maximizer. It does not touch on whether he should be one.
"Those are not opposites. You can say both simultaneously. "What you are doing is wrong" and "the mental anguish you are feeling is due to social pressure that you can remove yourself from." Saying the second thing doesn't even imply that you think what they're doing is right."
'What you are doing is wrong, but don't feel bad about it' seems like a more confused message. Worse again if "you should feel bad about doing this wrong thing, but if you don't want to feel bad, you can find someplace that will tell you it's not wrong so you won't feel bad". "I don't think what you are doing is right, but you have a right to send yourself to hell if you like, so go someplace that will remove that social pressure" is, I concede, a consistent position. But I don't think you do or did feel that what your gay friend was doing was not right. It was the social pressure you considered wrong.
"Because he asked me for advice on how to relieve mental anguish and once I agreed to give it my duty of care was to him, not the Catholic Church. "
And that's because you think the mental anguish is real, but the other alleged effects are not. It's not about "duty of care to the Catholic Church", you were telling him "go find another church, if you want a church, that will tell you this is not sin" (if he wants faux-Catholicism, he could try the Episocopalians: generally impeccably liberal and some dioceses like to do the Anglophilia bit so hard, they retain the morse on the bishop's cope even while recolouring the vestments in rainbow stripes for LGBT+ acceptance).
Suppose your friend had said to you "I really hate how that AA group tells me I can't be part of them if I persist in drinking a bottle of vodka a day" or "My doctor is always telling me to lose weight or else it will have adverse health effects and this is causing me mental anguish". Would you have told him "Sure, go find a support group or doctor that won't tell you to stop that habit"? Probably not, because I imagine you would consider alcoholism or diabetes/heart problems/stroke genuine harms and that his mental anguish did not outweigh being told "Yes, this behaviour is a real problem".
You don't believe the religion thing about hell and sin and the rest of it regarding gay sex, so for you "helping him feel better" was the genuine thing, not the fairytale religion stuff. Scott and the EAs are the same way: they don't believe the fairytale religion stuff. In the same way all the charitable works of the Catholic Church were not enough for you to tell your friend to remain Catholic, because the false doctrines of sin were not credible and were more harmful, the same way the EA movement thinks the false doctrines of sin and God are not credible and are more harmful, regardless of any charitable activity by Evangelicals.
"The EA community is a community and communities can't exist without boundaries and irrational beliefs and all that. But that's my point. People make irrational decisions to protect their aesthetics. The fact that EA needs to irrationally not do the most good is actually a precondition of it existing as a community. "
This is a sound description of how communities work. But it is full possibly to turn the chain of reasoning other way: if I truly value the "there should as much altruism and it should be effective", not the EA community for nice community warm fuzzies, then all the irrational community-building aesthetics are detrimental to the purpose. Not all successful movements, even ideological movements, have been "communities". Methinks it is common for the movements that succeed at becoming both big and universal yet also attempt maintain united community to face schisms over time.
In many other contexts, the pressure from these two conflicting purposes is recognized, but valued differently. Often putting consistency in one's stated, supposedly sincerely-held principles over natural tendency towards biased partisanship is viewed as laudable and good.
edit. The thing I suppose I am getting at ... it can be patronizing to presuppose someone's best interests without asking them. Maybe I ultimately value less the comfort of nice fuzzy feelings of community and more the success of the abstract cause I care about.
EA is a community though. I agree you might create an ideological rather than community movement. But that's not how EA actually is in a practical sense. (I might be misunderstanding your point though.)
Your description is correct, but your prescription ("is fine") can be contested. An ideological EA activist should take all this "community" stuff as a slightly worrying sign, because community-preserving behavior become a different objective that is at odds with the consistency of stated principles.
If I understood correctly, you wish to point it out in order to increase self-awareness about it but ultimately affirm it, because communities (with reliable methods to maintain in-group cohesion) are more fun than the non-community ideology and assume that EAs will appreciate their cozy in-group. Some / most probably do. But if some of the EAs disagree and prefer consistency, then it is not fine.
Indeed they should take it as worrying, as I believe I said elsewhere. The community vs the ideology is always something of a struggle. More importantly, they should be concerned about how the distortions of their self-image cause blindspots even if they're primarily community focused.
As for the it's fine: I'm avoiding criticizing the idea itself because that crosses from descriptive to prescriptive. I'm avoiding that.
Atheists don’t think conversion isn’t real, we just don’t think it saves your soul. It absolutely has real world effects, ones that we (largely) object to. We’re not interested in aiding the church’s ability to create institutions because we think the institutions it creates are bad for the world.
Right, you're weighing conversions negatively. In other words, you're imposing moral and aesthetic conditions regardless of whether it makes the world a better place. (And if you aren't, you need to answer my question: what evidence would cause you to support conservative evangelicals? If the answer is nothing it's an article of faith. Alternatively, how many bed nets is stopping a conversion worth?)
Just like the conservative intellectual. My point isn't that it's wrong to do this. My point is that it creates an unrealistic standard the rationalists are not living up to.
I'm not the person you're replying to, so my views might be a little different, but I'd say that I weight conversions negatively when evaluating an intervention because... I don't believe they're particularly beneficial. I'm more or less neutral to conversion in general. I don't protest the Mormons proselytizing door to door. But it's perfectly consistent to oppose something that's neutral if it has an opportunity cost.
To answer your question, I'd support conservative Evangelicals if they had interventions that were effective along the values I cared about. If say, Givewell rated them as a top charity, I'd donate. I feel most EAs would do this, though of course I can't prove it. As for the net to conversion ratio, I don't know how much missionaries spend on conversions, but a net is about 5 bucks, so divide the conversion cost by that.
The reasoning in the first paragraph is flawed because you haven't proven it has a net cost. It makes sense in a world of defined and limited resources. But this isn't the reality. If conversions mobilize more resources (as they indeed do) then you have to weigh conversion as more negative than the additional willingness to donate time and money among the coreligionists. Which you can but only by weighing conversions negatively.
As for most would give if Givewell rated them: I sincerely doubt that. As evidence I offer a lack of Evangelical charities on Givewell. But this is a hypothetical so who knows.
No, you still don't get it. I don't value conversion per se as negative but the consequences of it are negative because people take different actions due to converting. These consequences make the world a worse place. I'm pretty sure you can already list some of the bad aspects of organized religion, so I won't bother getting into that here, but please stop pretending that they're "aesthetic" reasons.
EA is pretty much explicitly an attempt to do all the good things that churches do without the negative consequences and wastes. They're still figuring out how to do that, but supporting a church is never the way to achieve that goal by definition!
However, I also refuse to "stop" conversions in exchange for bednets. That refusal is essentially an "aesthetic" taste, or rather some deontological belief that religious prosecution is bad.
No, I'm pretty sure I get it. I brought the fact that conversions had social effects up in the opening. So I'm going to rephrase what I said there: I get it, you think the outgroup is evil mutants. That's what most people in most movements think. But it's still a blindspot, a way you are thinking less rationally.
"The reason I don't support evangelicals in Africa is that I think some of their goals (converting people) are bad". I'm with Scott here, I think trying to change anyone's religion/belief system (or their sexuality) is morally wrong.
Do you think that it would be morally wrong for people to attempt to dissuade you of that idea?
Trying to change someone's opinions is morally OK, but if their opinions are based on their morals you are not likely to succeed.
You've repeatedly tried to change people's belief systems to be more like yours with regards to a fair number of political stances. Was that morally wrong of you? I don't think it was. But if you're just saying, "it's morally wrong to change beliefs into what I disagree with and morally right to change them into what I agree with" that's no real standard.
Was this meant as a response to me, or to Crazy Jalfrezi , or to Scott?
I don't think that evangelicals convert many atheists in rural Africa, and converting somebody from one religion to another seems to be a morally neutral act even if you think that religion is bad for the world on net?
I think the moral valence of it depends on the religions in question: eg. believing in the importance of regular human sacrifice is worse than most religions out there; more relevantly to the modern day, some religions are more likely to repress women or homosexuals, or to do preach against contraceptives and condoms (I don't mean to say that those issues are necessarily correlated, btw).
On the specific issues at hand, I think that all of (Evangelical Christianity, Islam, native African religions) have some seriously deleterious features, and I don't care to try and rank them because the process would be quite unpleasant.
You'd probably get more meaningful interaction if you broke your response to each link into a separate comment.
That feels spammy. But if the Great and Powerful Alexander allows it I suppose I could.
Agreed, FWIW.
I wrote the linked piece and I would like EAs to support natalism, anti-credentialism, and religiosity among other right-coded ideas. But yes, I do think a lot of the conservative outreach is purely theoretical.
Good to know. This is kind of an object level response to a meta-level discussion. But you mentioned religiosity. Could you expand on that a little?
As for natalism, that's not a right coded idea in my experience. Democrats support it too. As for anti-credentialism, my experience is rationalists talk a good game and then flinch when it comes up. Scott himself admitted he abandoned such principles as soon as it became hard for him to go through a bunch of applications.
Natalism: Democrats support expanding welfare programs that would reduce parent and child poverty- that's nice and might turn out to be natalist but it's not the goal! Promoting childbearing and rearing as a positive good or an obligation, feels very right-coded to me.
Religiosity: Religious people are happier, more fertile, and more pro-social. I also don't think are any good responses to Pascal's Wager. (see Amanda Askell on this: https://askell.io/posts/2012/08/pascal) The best thing you can do for yourself and for others you have an obligation to, is to maximize their chance of infinite gain.
As an obligation to be sure. As a positive good less so. And to some extent there's an elite dichotomy here. Most rank and file Democrats are not the childless elite types. Regardless I take your point.
I'm surprised you bit the pro-religious bullet. I expect you'd agree you're an unusual rationalist in that regard though?
Yes, I'm an outlier there in terms of my demographics too. I just think the counter-arguments are weak.
The clearest response to Pascal's Wager is "why *that* god, of all the options?".
I find the correlations with religiosity much more interesting, though. My big concern would be the correlation/causation issue - maybe more innately religious people are happier, but is religion itself having that effect? Are "spiritual" types with high religiosity but no actual religion just as happy and fertile and pro-social?
That was my initial response to Pascal's Wager as well. But really all that suggests is you should take some time to determine what God is most plausible and estimate the probability of being saved conditional on accepting the true religion.
> you should take some time to determine what God is most plausible and estimate the probability of being saved conditional on accepting the true religion.
Once you're doing that you're not really engaging with Pascal's Wager. If you think there's any good reason to treat one god hypothesis as noticeably more plausible than another, then you don't really need Pascal's Wager.
EAs *do* work with religious organizations in Africa to distribute anti-malarial bednets. The biggest cause supported by EA has been the Against Malaria Foundation, which operates through various "distribution partners" in Africa that actually distribute the nets. One of their biggest distribution partners currently is Episcopal Relief and Development. Some of their other historical religious partners include Holy Innocents, Lutheran Church of Hope, St Nicholas Parish Church, and I'm guessing that many of the other organizations with uplifting names and/or generic acronyms are religious organizations as well (see list below). I don't know how many of these are *evangelical* organizations, but it seems that you're making some strong assumptions about how Effective Altruism works without looking at what they're actually doing.
https://www.againstmalaria.com/distribution_partners.aspx
None are. Episcopalians, Lutherans, and possibly one Catholic (because the names you gave are too vague to track down). So overwhelmingly liberal churches and only then in restricted fashion. So you are wrong on initial point of fact: the lack of cooperation (which was not general but on a SPECIFIC type of venture) stands both in its specific and general form.
I'm not making strong assumptions. I'm making observations from what I've seen and read. If you have further evidence then feel free to present it. But I've already read the Against Malaria website and, unless I missed something, found nothing contrary to what I've said.
You said:
"You might say it's not the most effective use. But do you know that? The real answer, as far as I can tell, is primarily aesthetic reasons. Christians are icky to your average EA."
I showed that they have no aversion to working with Christians. I suppose it's possible that their real answer for why they work with some churches but not others is aesthetic, but I would have expected the aesthetic to cut out *all* religious organizations.
Is there any reason you think that some evangelical missions would have passed whatever effectiveness test they were applying?
I suppose it's true that they don't say anything on their site about how specifically they select their distribution partners, and thus it doesn't contradict anything they say to assume that their distribution partners are all run by friends and family of AMF leaders. But that would clearly be an uncharitable assumption, and I think your claim of aesthetic motivation here is also uncharitable, given that they're clearly willing to work with religious organizations.
> I showed that they have no aversion to working with Christians.
No, you showed they work with a limited selection of liberal Christians in a limited set of circumstances. That was never in dispute. It's just a rehash of what I said to Scott about how the terms they're willing to work with conservatives on are weak. Further, you picked one of the few quotes where I used the word "Christian" without "conservative" or "Evangelical" and I think it's fair to assume that descriptor follows throughout. In which case you haven't even proven that.
> but I would have expected the aesthetic to cut out *all* religious organizations.
Why? I wouldn't. Most people don't object to religion wholesale. Just specific religions. Look at how Democrats treat Black Evangelicals vs White Evangelicals for a salient example.
> Is there any reason you think that some evangelical missions would have passed whatever effectiveness test they were applying?
You don't get to present the absent of evidence as evidence of absence. The fact they have chosen not to review them does not in any way imply they would not pass review. It only means they have chosen not to review them. If you can't provide evidence of a reason then the widespread taboos in the community they draw from is at least plausible.
> But that would clearly be an uncharitable assumption, and I think your claim of aesthetic motivation here is also uncharitable, given that they're clearly willing to work with religious organizations.
This isn't me pronouncing in some grand sense the Total Worth of EA, Final Judgment For All Time. It's making specific criticisms. If you want to demand your critics only treat you with the utmost charity then you just don't want criticism.
If you want to make the case the limited cooperation you showed is a wider example of a lack of bias do feel free to make the case. I'd be willing to believe you if you can prove it. I just don't see it so far.
I think it's very worthwhile to ask questions, like "does the Against Malaria Foundation properly consider evangelical organizations as distribution partners?" But your original post was written in a way that sounded like a clear statement that they have explicitly ruled out the possibility of working with evangelical organizations, and I think a lot of the replies took that claim for granted.
I'd be willing to believe you if you can prove that they are just ruling evangelical organizations out before they do any investigation of potential partners. But I don't see any such proof so far.
> But your original post was written in a way that sounded like a clear statement that they have explicitly ruled out the possibility of working with evangelical organizations, and I think a lot of the replies took that claim for granted.
My original post claimed that people wouldn't donate to those charities because of cultural taboos which was then confirmed by several people saying as much. From Scott's reply onward I admitted there might be some very limited and circumscribed cooperation.
> I'd be willing to believe you if you can prove that they are just ruling evangelical organizations out before they do any investigation of potential partners. But I don't see any such proof so far.
So in the absence of evidence you're going to assume that EA did an investigation that it never released or mentioned in public and ruled out an entire ecosystem of people who just happen to be taboo'd by the social group EA draws most of its members from? That seems like it's giving them far too much credit to me.
Expanding on regulatory burden, Ben Rich relates of the founding of the Skunk Works:
"Many times a customer would come to the Skunk Works with a request and on a handshake the project would begin, no contracts in place, no official submittal process. Kelly Johnson and his Skunk Works team designed and built the XP-80 in only 143 days, seven fewer than was required." [Note, in his book Skunk Works he says 37 days ahead of schedule]
Near the end of his book Skunk Works:
"I was in Boston recently and visited Old Ironsides at its berth, coincidentally at a time when the ship
was being painted. I chatted with one of the supervisors and asked him about the length of the government specifications for this particular job. He said it numbered two hundred pages and laughed in embarrassment when I told him to take a look at the glass display case showing the original specification to build the ship in 1776, which was all of three pages.
Back in 1958, we in the Skunk Works built the first Jetstar, a two-engine corporate jet that flew at .7
Mach and forty thousand feet. We did the job in eight months using fifty-five engineers. In the late 1960s the Navy came to us to design and build a carrier-based sub-hunter, the S-3, which would fly also at .7 Mach and forty thousand feet. Same flight requirements as the Jetstar, but this project took us twenty-seven months to complete. One hint as to the reasons why: at the mock-up conference for the Jetstar—which is where the final full-scale model made of wood gets its last once-over before production—we had six people on hand. For the S-3 mock-up the Navy sent three hundred people. S-3 may have been a more complex airplane than Jetstar, but not thirty times so. But we were forced to do things the Navy Way."
Did the three-page specification for the original USS Constitution *explicitly* include, e.g., a rudder?
Because 21st-century defense contractors will absolutely deliver you a ship with a vaguely theoretical capability of being steered by trimming the sails (presuming you bothered to specify those), and say "Oh, you wanted a *rudder*. That will cost another $200 million..."
And their reputation will not suffer for this, relative to their peers, and 21st century courts will agree that, yep, the contract didn't explicitly specify a rudder so the government has to pay full price for the rudderless ship and then decide whether they want to pay extra for a rudder.
So the defence contractors are grifters? Who could hav imagined?
Ben Rich notes that exactly. He specifically blames past bad behavior among defense contractors for the government getting aggressive about contracts and enforcement.
I - and I think Mr. Rich as well - don't mean to blame our government for it in this instance. They responded reasonably to the situation. But we also need to say clearly that the current situation is crazy and we need to find a way out of it for everyone's sake.
(And Ben Rich's suggestion of combining Cost-Plus and Concurrent contracting turned out to be a spectacular failure, so maybe read more into his diagnosis than his prescription.)
1. National borders get "hard" pretty quickly, even among countries where the talk is that they were artificially drawn by empires to divide and conquer. I definitely don't see this happening (although I do think some of those countries would like to steal territory from DR Congo).
13. I figured it would just be a fortune to excavate them. I'll admit I never considered the possibility that water might get in and float your concrete structure like a boat.
37. They'll get to launch soon at least, although no doubt some of the groups pushing for a full EIS will keep trying to litigate this. Long run I think SpaceX is going to launch from sea platforms and mostly use Boca Chica as a testing and assembly area.
52. I'm glad they came around to allowing for the Orange Petunias to be sold in the US. Now do blue roses, geneticists!
Re 1. Border shifts are a nightmare, but federations don't necessarily require any border shifts. I doubt unification would be fast, but much as the EU is 50 years into a very slow march towards unification I could see various African Federations on the same road
Edit: commenting on the general principle rather than the specific countries in this example, which I've not looked into at all.
The US was also a slow march towards unification, and the fact that some people still defend the Senate and Electoral College on "states rights" grounds suggests that it's not yet complete.
#6 was informative and also made me feel better about myself. I operationalize wishes into desires all the time! Just look at my giant... unfinished... to-do lists... and... project... ideas... :/
Someone I follow decided to call/name a certain subset of his (also basically endless) 'side projects' as 'forever projects', i.e. 'it's fine if I work on these _forever_'.
And I've generally found my 'excessive' todo lists and projects to be pretty positive – once I devised a personal system for 'putting them away' where I don't see them on my 'master todo list' but _can_ find them again if/when I want to do a little more work on them.
I've made good progress, and am even using the products of some of those projects, so maybe it's just helpful to think of them as 'forever projects' or 'practice' or just Fun!
Ya, I recently made a little python script to try and order any hand-selection of tasks to be ordered well within a day.
That seems interesting – what exactly is the script ordering?
What do you mean "ordered well within a day"?
I love thinking about 'productivity systems', and tweaking my own :)
I might make a github repo of it, but basically a simple thing that evaluates a list of task objects.
So it adds points for e.g. "you're doing something physical/harder earlier in the day when you're fresher",
and deducts points for e.g. "you labelled these tasks with different 'mindsets', but they're right next to each other".
Then it randomly swaps items for a while to make the score go higher.
Key goal: avoid mental context-switching as much as feasible.
Haven't posted it to github yet because my "rules" would differ from somebody else's (e.g. some people are not fresh *at all* in the morning, some people may class their state-of-mind/mental-contexts differently, etc.). Plus I'd want to tidy up the code, make it extensible, make it more efficient for larger task lists, make it automatically select a single day's tasks from a giant master-list, potential better rule-setups for day-of-week rules, etc. I could make issues on a repo and just post what's half-baked already, but I'd also want to remove personal-info from the code/variables lol.
Dang – that's very intriguing!
I have something _kinda_ like that – but _much_ looser. I mainly just a few sets of labels/tags for my todos (and projects), along a variety of mostly/somewhat orthogonal dimensions and I don't worry too much about optimizing for anything – not 'up front' anyways.
I do like avoiding mental context-switching, but I also find that I enjoy breaks between or among different kinds of tasks, during natural lulls, pauses, or ends in whatever I'm doing. I've found that minimal 'task entry' generally trumps any benefits from better data – most of my 'tasks' are pretty 'small' and 'atomic', and I mostly just put them at the top or the bottom of my list instead of bothering to sort/order them overall – too many to do that regularly for one, but also my needs/wants/opportunities shift a lot, so no sort/order would survive long after 'contact with reality'.
But I also do have a side project to develop a replacement task system and do have similarly 'crazy' ideas of my own :)
And, yeah – 'open sourcing' code is real work! Most of my own side projects are private.
That is a good point, people underestimate the mental toll of task management/making things "legible" (to others or even to oneself). Your tag system seems good, maybe i should turn my Notion back on cuz it has good tables/tags...
Best of luck on the system updating!
Link #3 is also an example of nominative determinism, if one considers Beckminster Fuller made himself into an experiment into living a Fuller life.
LOL – not obviously a bad example! :)
The Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda are basically at war with each other right now (by local rebellion proxies). Their merging is about as likely as Putin getting the Nobel peace prize.
Given some of the past recipients, the latter may actually be much more likely.
1. They can have free trade without any political union and as far as I know free trade is the only very significant benefit of a political union, so what's the point of a political union? A downside of political unions in general is that instead of satisfying the different preferences of the different areas involved, whatever the majority of the larger union wants will be imposed on everybody. Aggregate political-preference-satisfaction decreases by a lot. People talk about political unions allegedly preventing wars, but countries usually avoid invading trading partners they're dependent on, and norms make that less likely today. Unions could also backfire and increase resentments through countries A/B/C/D forcing countries E/F/G to do things they don't want to do. Different regions of the USA seem to hate each other a LOT more than Americans hate Canada or Mexico.
2. Little magnetized spheres can also do some interesting things with the energy stored by their configuration on a table. They can spontaneously form little circles and other sorts of "molecules" that merge into a bigger circle when they touch each other.
3. My father was a huge fan of buckminster fuller and explained buckyballs, geodesic domes, and aerodynamics to me when I was like 7. So then I fixed my first grade teacher's failed origami helicopter and got way better at building paper airplanes than anyone else I knew. Then he disappeared from my life before third grade, but the school finally assigned me an enrichment teacher at the same time, which is a euphemism for a gifted program, but she was lame compared to my father because she just had me drawing silly pictures instead of learning cool things. Learned less in elementary school than on my own reading encyclopedias cover to cover at that age.
4. If AGI destroys the world in 2032, the Mayans were only off by 1 in their base-20 numeral system, coincidentally.
5. An institution invented to stop people from performing horrible nonconsensual surgical experiments on prisoners ends up getting used to stop people from asking other people to voluntarily answer a few questions. That's a major case of lost purpose.
9. Is there any precise point on the spectrum of possible correlations between factors which makes the general factor "exist" or not? I don't think so. It seems as arbitrary as taxonomic splitters versus joiners.
12. I just heard of Albinoni a week ago and he's a great composer on par with Bach but 100x less popular per google trends.
13. I for one wouldn't mind a windowless apartment because I could make my bedroom sufficiently dark to sleep past 6am without an ugly kludge that gets me a couple OOMs darker than standard blackout curtains.
29. Fussell's chart is extremely evocative of the effects of higher testosterone levels among the proles.
42. I really like the paradox of tolerance essay.
1. I'd think that one quite significant benefit would be new career opportunities for politicians and bureaucrats, who tend to be the people who decide whether to join the union or not. E.g. thanks to Maltese EU membership, Roberta Metsola, from a nation of half a million, got to become the President of the Parliament of the whole EU, home to close to half a billion people.
The problem is funding such organisations in the first place. The African Union has a nice new HQ in Addis, built for free by the Chinese, and most of its running costs are paid by donors, notably the EU. Until 2011, the Libyans paid the AU subscriptions of a number of states, but for obvious reasons that doesn't happen any more. As a whole, the AU, and most of the sub-regional organisations, are ineffective, because they don't have the human or financial resources necessary. You can't make a strong organisation out of weak states.
This looks to me horribly like another Rwandan/Ugandan attempt to grab the DRC's mineral resources, after the wars of 1996-2001, and the semi-permanent occupation of the Kivus ever since. Kagame in particular considerers himself a temporarily embarrassed Master of the Universe.
"4. If AGI destroys the world in 2032, the Mayans were only off by 1 in their base-20 numeral system, coincidentally."
wouldn't they be off by 10?
1. As the US found out with the Articles of Confederation, you might need political authority to do unpopular but necessary things like "collect taxes so that your union of states can defend itself."
Even if you aren't planning on a uniform foreign policy, you might need political authority to set various bits of economic policy you want everyone to share. For instance, if you want to have free trade, it might also be good to create a shared regulatory framework so that you all know that the goods you're trading weren't made with child labor or something.
(IIRC during Brexit there was some sort of issue over food quality standards differing between the EU and the UK making it hard for the UK to export stuff. Don't remember the details.)
I don't think making free trade contingent on such things actually has positive utility. By choosing to work somewhere, the workers are saying they prefer it to the alternatives. By boycotting the sweatshop you are taking away the worker's best available option.
Suppose Earth got contacted by an alien civilization much more advanced than us. Suppose they started hiring us for remote work and paying us in cryptocurrency over subspace radio. All the earthlings are making a lot more money this way than they would at their ordinary jobs. But then the aliens boycott earth because they notice conditions on earth are not nearly as good as in the super-advanced alien civilization. They would not be doing the earthlings any favors by boycotting us.
"The participants prefer it to the alternative, therefore it should be allowed" is one of those statements that needs a lot of asterisks to be true. It depends a lot on who's setting the available options and how they can be changed.
For an obvious example, Pharaoh's slaves prefer doing harsh labor to the alternative of getting beaten to death by Pharaoh's overseers, but that doesn't mean that slavery should be allowed to protect the livelihood of the slaves.
> I don't think making free trade contingent on such things actually has positive utility. By choosing to work somewhere, the workers are saying they prefer it to the alternatives. By boycotting the sweatshop you are taking away the worker's best available option.
This doesn't sound like an argument against making free trade contingent on labor regulations - it sounds like an argument against labor regulations. If you accept labor regulations, then it makes sense to harmonize them in a free trade zone, which means that there's at least some advantage to a free trade zone having a common regulatory authority, whether or not that becomes a full-fledged government.
I don't accept most labor regulations. I agree with Bryan Caplan on labor econ in general, except open borders.
> An institution invented to stop people from performing horrible nonconsensual surgical experiments on prisoners ends up getting used to stop people from asking other people to voluntarily answer a few questions. That's a major case of lost purpose.
Well... fetlife, itself, doesn't even have IRBs. (I assume without bothering to check.) They're not using an IRB to do anything.
But there is something interesting happening here. IRBs were instituted as a way for the government to assure itself that the research it funded would meet some ethical standards. The point of the IRB is, supposedly, that it investigates your research design and determines whether it is "ethical" or "unethical".
But observers misinterpreted that in a few ways, and came to the conclusion we have now, that a study is "ethical" if it is submitted to an IRB, and "unethical" if it isn't. Instead of investigating ethicality, the IRB is now a source of it. They're as infallible as the Pope.
And this leads to demands that research that is not funded by the government should for some mysterious reason nevertheless be channeled through IRBs.
I wonder if there's more going on than just "imagine banning a survey for this silly reason!" I think if it was posed as just "hey guys just wondering, (asks questions)" it would be okay, but if you do the whole "I'm running a Proper Scientiifc Survey" bit then that leaves you (and them) open to regulations, especially as you're asking people for personal information and there are a *lot* of regulations around data privacy (see Europe and the GDPR).
Somebody might answer some of the questions, then later come back to complain "Hey I never consented to be part of an experiment that was gonna be published online elsewhere" and report the site to The Authorities and start a lot of hassle that way.
Compare when Facebook published an internal study they'd done on the effects of two different configurations of their website. Nobody questions their right to do the study. But there was a great deal of histrionic shrieking about how their study was unethical because it didn't go through an IRB.
16: As always, remain vigilant of social desirability bias in survey research. How much of the change is people lying less about their behavior once it's no longer associated with severe criminal penalties?
>On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading.
Would love to see a chart of Links Posts Accuracy Over Time. Though I suppose it'd have to be normalized to Errors Per <s>Capita</s> Link for oranges-to-oranges comparison. One naively suspects more errors crop up in larger batches, but who knows! Maybe link errors show a seasonal pattern - seasonalinkty?
More seriously, #16 bothers me and confirms current prior that Oh My God There's So Much More Weed Everywhere All The Time. Like you don't even *know*. Used to be that skunky smell only reliably signaled an ornery animal...I don't think it's something I'll ever acclimate to, and one of the precious few things I miss about mask mandates.
Well goodness me, whoever would have thought that making something legal would mean more people doing more of it?
I wasn't paying attention to the marijuana legalisation arguments, so remind me: did people argue that making it legal would not lead to more usage? I do vaguely remember the arguments for medicinal cannabis going "no no no of course this won't lead to legal weed for recreational use", which I don't think anyone really believed.
Indeed, who could have possibly predicted such an outcome? There definitely weren't any Authoritative Voices claiming that kids only do drugs cause they're illicit and it'd be unappealing without that Cool Factor. That sure wasn't a thing I got told by Serious Thinkers And Advocacy Organizations. The medicinal-cannabis line I do remember pretty clearly, and yeah, seems like a classic motte-and-bailey type thing. Unless recreation is classified now as medicinal. You know, because self-care. We're big on mental health in weed-approving places.
(They also definitely never claimed "it'll help keep all those nonviolent drug offenders out of prison!" or "it'll raise tax dollars and improve equity for marginalized groups by creating business opportunities!", but that's another can of worms...)
I don't really mind what drugs people get up to on their own time and in their own homes...it just becomes a negative externality for me, a non-smoker/toker, once I have to deal with lots of high people in everyday communal life. Noticeable impairment of coworkers, challenging customers, whole segments of buses rendered unusable due to smell, endless succession of munchies-slob roommates, vehicle shenanigans. It's totally fair to keep pointing out that weed is much less dangerous than alcohol, but I think it elides the fact that it, too, leads to a form of incapacitating inebriation that's detrimental to public order. Which cities like SF don't really have a huge surplus of to begin with. </rant off>
>it'll help keep all those nonviolent drug offenders out of prison
Doesn't it? Legalization didn't reduce the number of drug-related incarcerations?
Base Rate Fallacy: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/30/15591700/mass-incarceration-john-pfaff-locked-in
...which was linked to in an approving manner by Scott in his recent book review of "San Fransicko", so it's Epistemic Status: Host-Approved. Several old posts on SSC on same topic as well. Not so much in ACX, as it's one of those things Scott more or less considers Settled And Not Worth Re-Litigating. Alternatively, Matt Yglesias hits the same beats when he writes about policing and mass incarceration. I consider both of those sound endorsements, but fairly concede not having done a proper Literature Review to see what current leftist thought is on the matter. (I think many agitate for legalization more on the "it's ridiculous to have this on Schedule 1" plank. Slightly reducing incarceration is just a cherry on top, not the main sundae.)
From that article: "Starting in 2010, the incarceration rate began to fall in the US for the first time in decades. But the drop has been slight, driven mostly by changes to sentencing laws for low-level drug and property crimes." Seems to imply that the answer should be "yes".
But also, the larger point of that article doesn't really make sense to me. It seems obvious that the war on drugs is largely responsible for the emergence of the culture of violence in poor urban areas, so the claim that a low percentage of drug incarcerations as opposed to violent ones is evidence against it isn't too convincing.
I notice that I am confused about your confusion? The part of that quote I find most important is the "slight". Most prisoners are in state prisons -> most state prisoners are in for violent offenses -> many drug offenders are also violent -> violent offenders often plea bargain down to non-violent charges for more lenient sentencing -> of the remaining truly nonviolent drug offenders, most are in federal prisons -> federal prisons are a tiny fraction of the total incarcerated population. Ergo, decriminalization/legalization does reduce the incarceration rate, but it's a tiny effect and has limited returns towards bringing the total rate down[1]. Hence my linking it as Base Rate Fallacy.
The second part of your reply I'm also puzzled by; I thought it was fairly consensus opinion that "the culture of violence in poor urban areas" predated the War On Drugs + Tough On Crime policing shift, crack cocaine was a particularly compelling reason to shift policing norms (especially within those communities[2]), this mostly worked to reduce the immediate surge, but it went somewhat too far and created negative second-order effects by hollowing out those same communities.
OTOH, this *may* still be a net positive outcome; for example, Matt Yglesias makes some good points about stable single parent households on average being better for the worst-off kids vs. unstable two-parent households[3]. It's a pick-your-poison kind of situation: explicit obvious violence, or implicit breeding grounds for lesser violence? I am reminded of the recent Book Review Finalist #8, "The Internationalists", and the claim that outlawing war led to the creation of failed states because no one was "allowed" to conquer them instead[4]. This feels like a similar situation.
(Part of me thinks it'd be appropriate to link here to John McWhorter for the heterodox "black culture argument", but that's probably verboten on this blog...)
This all started off as an irrelevant low-effort throwaway joke, which I didn't actually intend to seriously try defending as an empirical claim. An actual non-joke claim would be more along the lines of, "progressives advocate drug decriminalization/legalization to reduce mass incarceration, but I think that the data shows this to be a Weak Man argument[5]". It's oddly similar to the "Institutionalization Vs. Incarceration" false dichotomy of mental illness[6], in my opinion.
At any rate, I think it's been good epistemic practice to clarify my priors on these topics, so I do appreciate you engaging in good faith even though we disagree. Questioning One's Reasoning: The Videogame is more enjoyable in 2-player mode.
[1] Freddie deBoer includes an excellent graph of this: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/ah-carceral-liberalism
[2] http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/16/212620886/the-shift-in-black-views-of-the-war-on-drugs
[3] https://www.slowboring.com/p/does-the-bush-era-poverty-cure-deserve
[4] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/i/62111294/addendum-1-so-we-did-it-were-all-good-right
[5] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
[6] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/07/reverse-voxsplaining-prison-and-mental-illness/
Perhaps the future will remember the 2010s as the golden days between the banning of cigarettes in many public places and the legalization of marijuana in those same places. I think both tobacco and marijuana should be legal, but I don't want to have to smell either.
"I think both tobacco and marijuana should be legal, but I don't want to have to smell either."
That seems reasonable to me. On the other hand, I don't use either, so I may be underestimating the hassle excluding the odor from public places creates for users of one or the other.
If it is an indoors place where people smoke a lot (like a bar or an apartment), you practically have to a minor renovation.
Ouch! That is unfortunate.
Yes, I do think they're both plausibly net beneficial compared to a Prohibition-style counterfactual, and I'm willing to pay more as a patron etc. for this "privilege" (e.g. non-smoking section at restaurant) until social norms shift again. Though in fairness I actually enjoy the smell of tobacco, even the shitty stuff to a certain degree.
If scientists can engineer asparagus to not do...that post-digestion thing...then I'm sure they can develop better-smelling Mary Jane. Even among dedicated potheads, I haven't met one that actually thinks weed smells intrinsically good. Obvious growth market opportunity for luxury cannabis. The ads write themselves: "You Won't Even Need Incense!"
Wait, really? I thought most marijuana users have the same sorts of feelings about the smell of marijuana that beer and wine lovers have about the taste of beer or wine - this thing that other people don't like has a positive sensory value to them.
Maybe I just meet a lot of weird ones in the Bay Area? Though I think there's an important distinction to be made between "necessary part of the drug experience so one learns to tolerate it" and "actually likes the sensory experience that others dislike". Alcohol seems to be the latter pretty strongly...I have really clear memories of all beers tasting like Stale Piss (yes, I know what actual stale piss tastes like, don't ask) before finding something I liked, and now that's mostly pleasant. Except in stronger IPAs which crank that sensation up to 11 - that's a similar experience to when I first attempted drinking, don't care for them. So one doesn't really forget, even with tolerance.
Marijuana I feel is more the former. Tokers tolerate the smell because no one's invented an odour-free bong and (for whatever reasons) vape pens haven't caught on that much. But I haven't yet met a stoner who disagrees/can't comprehend that weed smells *rank*, bro. Or claims to intrinsically enjoy the smell, as differentiated from the effects. Wonder if there's any studies on this...
Yeah that sounds weird to me. The fact that you say vape pens haven’t caught on much definitely suggests an unusual crowd. If people are burning all their weed, then the smell doesn’t matter too much, but at most shops they offer people smells of the different products, and there’s clear differentiation between the more skunky ones and the ones that are more reminiscent of soda or citrus or pine (all of which are appreciated by different people).
How many places are there where smoked marijuana use is legal but tobacco use isn't? There are surely places where smoked marijuana is more *socially* acceptable than smoked tobacco, but I don't think I've seen a single place where there's a *legal* difference in that direction.
[CW: unabashed epistemic pessimism]
#23: Speaking As A Trans Woman(tm), it really bothers me that much-maligned Jesse Singal, of all people, has an effective takedown of this study. But I couldn't ever link that concise rebuttal to any pro-trans folks. I wonder if his canceling is still in effect..."once an accused transphobe, always an accused transphobe"? Maybe they've forgotten by now. (Of course, considering it's from Heritage, I think most on the left will reflexively dismiss it anyway, even if it wasn't an epistemic dumpster fire. Heuristics That Almost Always Work, and all that...)
Someday it'd be great to have Serious Respectable Data on...basically anything at all trans-related. Big n, big p, longitudinal RCTs, yadda yadda. It's always felt somewhat disingenuous for trans advocacy to point primarily(?) to The Data(tm) as support for its positions. (And so much of that data is *old*! Where are the modern studies? Is no one willing to commit research dollars to the culture war?) Makes me cringe as a wannabe rationalist. I'd rather not try and support unpopular positions on slim tenuous data versus, I dunno...moral and ethical grounds. Pascal's Wager-type reasoning remains my main justification for staying nominally attached to a minority community that I hardly even recognize anymore - not data.
I am similarly curious, but as a non-trans person!
What is your Pascal's Wager-type reasoning?
This is kind of personal, but I'm already commenting on ACX to procrastinate on my weekly hormone shot (trypanophobia, my old nemesis!), so...I guess that's as apropos as it gets.
Something along the lines of...okay, I don't actually really relate to the narratives of a strongly-felt internal gender sense that doesn't match biology or cultural upbringing. It's not even a position I'm really able to steelman effectively, because I kind of...don't have a gender module in my brain to begin with? Anymore? (I think the progressive term would be "agender"?) Similar to the many interpersonal skills that the neurotypical take for granite but autists like me struggle with, I struggle to post-hoc reverse-engineer a model of "gender" in my head. I do have distinct memories as a child of not really understanding what the difference was between boys and girls, and why I couldn't just be whatever I wanted as the situation warranted.
For adult me, femininity is as much a revealed preference as it is a rational self-interested choice in an increasingly-feminized world.[1] That is, as long as I'm offered a choice via the option of transgender identity, and I'm reconstructing social skills from scratch anyway - why not opt for the more successful strategy?[2] I just have more skill ranks in Knowledge (Female) than Knowledge (Male), and having the body presentation to match is a huge status bonus on those rolls.
(Let's be frankly practical too - the physical benefits of being male are harder to "make pay rent" in today's world. Worthwhile opportunity cost to trade that for clearing up horrible acne, body odour, oily skin, greasy hair, excess weight...etc. Female secondary sex characteristics are a pretty great modern adaptation. Men really don't quite grok what they're missing out on without experiencing it firsthand, I'm sorry to say.)
But...because of how gatekeeping works in practice, even in extremely pro-trans places like SF...one needs to remain at least nominally attached to the LGBT community and the trans identity label/victim card. It's just too risky to self-administer black-market hormones; lots of horror stories along that route. And that's just for meds! Lots of other key services, like name changes and reasonable accommodations (e.g. single-occupant restrooms), are made easier by the historical achievements of same community. So even though I'm no longer a True Believer and harbour many serious doubts - by God, I'll keep my head down and continue paying lip service. Because the mere act of that Minimum Viable Belief gets me lots of things I want. (I guess in economics terms, I'm being a free rider.)
And, hey, maybe it's better than the counterfactual of if I'd never transitioned at all, or detransitioned and then got really depressed or whatever. Given the statistics around suicide comorbidity and stuff, I think it is kind of analogous to Pascal's Wager. The payoff is getting to live my life versus an early/preventable death, which is just a smaller scope of Heaven vs. eternal damnation. I grant that PW is counterable with [Sorcery] Sunk-Cost Fallacy; at the same time, you don't get do-overs in life, and for weighty things like this, there are massive costs to upsetting the Nash equilibrium. I'd have to end up *really* unhappy with the current state to consider changing horses mid-stream; the stakes are just too high.
[1] Richard Hanania, the author of #17, #30, and the recently-reviewed "Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy", has a whole spiel he goes off on sometimes about Women's Tears Ruining Everything. It's a little cringe, but mostly for being so explicit; many other Rat-adjacent writers have evoked the same themes over the years. For example, our host Scott has often written about his disagreements with "the last 1%" of feminist absolutism, and the underappreciated plight of non-traditionally masculine men, like nerds. Meet the new prose, same as the old prose. I notice that these kinds of problems are easily resolved by being a woman instead of a man. Many Such Cases!
[2] <rant> I hope Janice Raymond is turning in her grave. Femininity isn't a zero-sum game, why the hell wouldn't you welcome enemies who burn their uniforms and desperately defect to your own side? Disaffected men are some of your worst foes!</rant off>
"why the hell wouldn't you welcome enemies who burn their uniforms and desperately defect to your own side?"
Because a lot of them are now shouldering aside cis women in their insistence that "I am too A Real Lady", despite retaining advantages from possessing biologically male traits, be that "girldick" or physical size/strength advantages in sporting events (the Lia Thomas Affair is one that never ceases to amuse me, though it must be pretty depressing for her fellow-competitors; any photos you see of her standing on the winner's podium after a race, she is head and shoulders taller than the other swimmers and doesn't seem to have been on HRT to transition to a female figure all that long).
The "cotton ceiling" argument is a lot more serious for cis lesbians, because they're getting hammered for "I'm not attracted to dicks" even though that's sort of the very basic requirements for being lesbian!
Oh, no, I agree with you completely! It was already a long reply, but that's one of the major Recent Controversies that I include under "harbour many serious doubts". Up until around, I dunno...maybe like 4 years ago or thereabouts?...it was much easier to blend into the Church of LGBT laiety. But then the advocate arm took a *sharp* left turn and started insisting the entire movement die on the hill of trans women in sports, exploring gender in classrooms, puberty blockers...etc. And to my grave disappointment, the more moderate wing of the global left + mainstream Democrats in USA went right along instead of pushing back on these really unpopular stances.
We continue to see the consequences of handing conservatives a threepeat of lay-ups, while actual in-real-life trans people find themselves becoming an unwilling political football even more than they already were. To what profit? No profit, only pain. That's the point where I had a "crisis of faith" and decided to consciously put myself at arm's length from the LGBT community until things got a little more sane. It also put me firmly on "right-wing" ideological grounds, since the entire rug had just been pulled left from under me, and I wasn't willing to move with it.
One doesn't get do-overs in life, so what's done is done, and I can't wish for an alternate reality where Mistakes Weren't Made. But at this point, if it were up to me, I'd be perfectly happy to cede ground on all these recent controversies just to be (relatively) left the hell alone. It's something I wrote in other Substack comments, but in general, the right isn't innovative enough to take the lead on gender issues. It's culturally reactive, so the absolute stupidest thing to do is give them a really nice petard with which to hang social liberals. And the left wasting tons of money and energy fighting gender wars doesn't do damn squat to help working stiffs worried about e.g. inflation. There are simply More Pressing Battles.
As for the last, I think that's just bad-faith argument, and anyone who uses ideological cudgels to browbeat others into unwanted relationships should be roundly condemned. That really ought to be non-negotiably non-partisan. "What are we even doing here?"
tl;dr I keep wanting to scream at the left that this is exactly why "The Transsexual Empire" was such a compelling moral panic book, and we forget it at great peril. Overreaching advocacy will likely set back trans "rights" further than if no such advocacy had been conducted in the first place.
Speaking from a right-wing view, when this kicked off over "*all* we want is to be allowed use our choice of bathrooms", that sounded reasonable, right? Not too much of a demand? Who could object?
Well, for a start, because on the right we'd seen the same swerve in marriage equality from "*all* we want is the right to love and be loved" and "gay marriage is not going to affect you" to "bake the cake, bigot" once it happened. So I had doubts about the "*all* we want" bit from the start.
Then anyone who said "yeah I'm not too sure about letting six foot guys in a dress in the same room as my nine year old daughter" got called all sorts of names and how this would never, ever happen. And now there's a minor meme in some right-wing spaces about That Thing That Would Never Happen Just Happened Again when it comes to cases like the Wii Spa which got fought over on both sides, with name-calling and allegations of bad faith on both sides. Anyone else wanna be a TERF? This has become a term like "racist" or "fascist" which has pretty much lost all meaning except as an insult.
As well, while it may feel emotionally congruent to say "this is trans genocide!", using a term like 'genocide' is.... rather extreme.
And then the stupider stuff, like this recent Canadian police missing persons report:
https://www.tps.ca/media-centre/news-releases/missing-woman-ryerson-avenue-and-bathurst-street/
The trouble is that it is the most obnoxiously online who get all the attention, while the vast majority of (I was going to say 'normal') ordinary trans people just want to get on with their lives, and then the virtue-signalling allies make it even worse by going on big-game hunts for anyone who transgresses the imaginary lines. If it really was just "all we want is bathrooms", I think most people, like me, would go "Okay". But of course it didn't stop there, and nobody really believed it would.
Epistemic status: Righteous Snark, probably shouldn't write culture war comments while angry.
That seems about right (pun intended?), and we're in agreement here as well. I dunno if I can claim the TERF label if I wasn't even a "feminist" to begin with, but I think that's not too far off from where I am on most such issues now...(Progressive Angel: "no, no, you're just suffering from internalized transphobia!") Bad jurisprudence makes me sad, laws should be passed by Congress instead of judicial fiat, I knew Obergefell was gonna piss people off (what exactly would be the issue with civil unions that confer relevantly similar financial/legal benefits?), slippery slopes actually are slippery sometimes, why couldn't they just decorate the wedding cake themselves...etc, etc, etc. It's just been a steady march of increasingly absolutist demands, and somehow the socially liberal still maintain a good poker face when that ruffles the feathers of everyone else who got blindsided. Who could have foreseen that there'd be some backlash???
Like yeah, sure, there's some degree of strawmanning in rightist depictions of trans people. But they're *convincingly scary*! If most trans people really were as bad as all that, I'd be opposed to them too! Is it really too hard to acknowledge that the left has failed to "sanewash" transgender identity, and maybe trying to mainstream an extremely rare subculture is just very difficult?
So, yeah, take it from me, there are lots of ordinary* alphabet folks who genuinely do just want to get on with our weird lives (largely in already-really-blue/urban areas! voluntarily segregation!), and are tired of being silenced by the Very Loud minority and their Allied attack dogs. Such a waste of everyone's time, money, and attention.
*I think that's totally fair semantics, this is some wacky shit I've fallen into and the Outside View is almost definitely correct that it's Kind Of Crazy. Don't wanna hear another damn apologetics story about 3rd Gender Shamans or intersex people ever again, tbh. If that's the best defense one can give for an extreme outlier position, the defense is pretty weak...Nevertheless, She Persisted, because it's taboo to pity trans people. That's, like, blaming the victim. Or whatever.
>using a term like 'genocide' is.... rather extreme.
My favourite part of BBC's "Sherlock":
Sherlock Holmes: People will die!
Jim Moriarty: That's what people *DO*!!!
If Scott hadn't already claimed the non-central fallacy as The Worst Argument In The World, I'd nominate the leftist's Fully General Counterargument that <x> can't be done/should be banned because People Will Die. (Unless the topic of debate is abortion...curious!)
Thanks. Other than Janice Raymond, whom I had to look up, and the sudden appearance of the word Sorcery in brackets (??), I feel like I understand your thinking.
The longest version of the acronym for gender and sexual minorities that I've seen so far is LGTBQIA2S+. Do you mean to imply that few people will ever add a second A, for agender, because this could be interpreted as dismissing the significance of transgender identity? (The first A is for asexual.)
Sorry, that was a Magic: The Gathering joke. One possible counterspell to Pascal's Wager is Sunk Cost Fallacy. The longer one continues to double down on long-tail type outcomes, the harder it gets to properly price opportunity cost into the cost-benefit analysis. The long-tail outcome might still have such a high payoff that it's worth it anyway (like eternal salvation), but the ongoing instrumental value might be a lot lower than one initially thought.
I meant that for me specifically, as an autistic person, "gender" is one of the socialization modules that's underdeveloped in my head. I don't really have any internal sense of "my gender" or what I "ought" to be. But since revealed preferences generally (not always!) skew female, that's apparently my gender. And being "AMAB" means that therefore I'm apparently a trans woman. Or something.
I'm 100% certain that there's another Everett branch of reality not too distant where AG ended up a feminine bisexual man instead. It's really easy to visualize that alternate lifestyle. Somewhat further out there's probably an AG who's perfectly happy as a straight man - because he grew up in a less conservative/small town, where sex and gender norms weren't quite so rigid. A more expansive definition of "masculinity" means fewer borderlines defecting from it.
(There's pretty consistent research on the overlap of autism and transgenderism, especially in trans women; I don't claim to speak for anyone else, but wouldn't be surprised if others followed my same unconventional route to this identity. Instead of the fairytale "born this way/in wrong body" kind of narrative.)
>LGTBQIA2S+
Yeah I just...I don't even know what the hell any of those mean past the LGBT without looking it up, though your Vana White explanation uncovers the A at least. Used to think the Q was Queer, like the generic catch-all for Everyone Else, but that would make the + redundant? And there's no N for non-binary??? So confused.
-the bigger the Alphabet acronym gets, doesn't that start to erode the categories of cisgender/cissexual? why are we splitting hairs over increasingly minor variation in broadly defined categories?
-since Traditional Sexual and Gender Norms have been on the retreat for decades now, shouldn't we see a plateau of LGBT identification? why does it keep going up??
-aren't these the exact same people who always say not to conflate sex and gender???
I just don't get it anymore. LGBT stuff sorta made sense when I grew up in the 90s. At some point when they started adding, like, brown to the rainbow flag or whatever...I dunno, the plot just got totally lost. These days I mark "female" on survey questions or whatever cause I genuinely don't know what's entailed in the modern Minimum Viable Transgender Woman label.
I think part of what is going on with Hanania's psychology might be similar to the whole 'won't drink water from a cup that I watched a cockroach walk over, even after then watching it get washed with bleach' thing.
On point 22, feminism through unionising college party-goers: I really like this idea, good on them! Especially as they got investigated by college administration for "ostracising". When she says "we all ended up going to parties that were much more chill" as a result, I kind of feel they correctly applied rationality to improving their partying experience.
Also WTF is with not letting women pick or open their own drinks?
The one thing I'll say about venues enforcing a ratio of girls to guys is that, from my understanding of how some clubs (not fraternities) run around here, what you're trying to avoid is a death spiral of 80% men show up -> the few women have a bad experince -> women stop showing up -> men stop showing up because there's no women to meet. Normally the ratio takes the form of women being allowed in on their own, but men either not in all-male groups, or only with a woman accompanying them in some cases. But maybe that's a different situation to the one she's describing.
At places with actual liquor licenses, the patron opening their drink can be a violation of regulations.
I doubt that's the reason at a frat drinking party, though.
What is the purpose of that regulation?
In many jurisdictions, bartenders are required not to let their customers get *too* drunk, lest a horde of still-drunk people be problematically disgorged on the streets at closing time. This requires that bartenders have the ability to cut off a patron who is close to the "too drunk" level, which is harder to manage if the patrons can serve themselves from e.g. an open tap.
I dunno, I didn't draft it. At a guess, as John says, monitoring alcohol consumption. Or maybe just making sure people can't hit each other with full beer bottles, which are more dangerous than empty (especially if thrown).
With respect to building deep instead of high, as a civil engineer I'd say, sure you can do that. But why? Wouldn't you think that natural sunlight is the one thing that keeps all of us sane? Why would one want to stay out of it?
For light and air you need artifical automation. One would not need this in smaller houses spaced out.
Yeah, but everyone wants to live in the city bla bla bla. We use up too much space of nature in any case. But we can only live in cities because we depend on fossil fuels for this concentration. We have cooled air circulation, lifts, lorries to bring us our food etc. We can't go on with using so much fossil fuels for our city lives. And nowhere is the regenerative energy in sight so allow us to continue so.
Also: we've lost touch with how nature is going. The exception from thermodynamical principles that the Universe hands out to self-replicating structures like us that thus are allowed to temporarily stay away from enthropy is only handed out for adaptable self-replicating structures. Adapting means understanding what goes on around oneself and than using this to achieve better outcomes or stop negative ones. If most of us live in cities, in our small cubicles, focussed on our small screens, getting food by truck - how exactly do we adapt to a changing environment, if we never see it?
All of your arguments against cities apply even more so to suburbs. Someone living in a suburb still uses air conditioning (and probably for a larger space), still needs fossil fuels to get groceries and other goods to their house (over a longer distance), and you need to construct far more infrastructure (roads, pipes, etc) for a suburb than the equivalent population in a city.
Well, outside of the US not everyone has so much air conditioning, actually. And if we transform our society like we have to in order to remain a functioning civilization on this new Earth we created, agriculture products will probably have to grown and distributed much more locally, maybe even using ox carts, you know. Which is possible in the countryside, but will not be workable in a metropolis. A metropolis just needs so much food and other stuff transported from outside, and the bigger it is, the farther away everything needs to be transported from. The entire concept of metropolis relies on fossil fuels, which age will end soon.
Not sure how our infrastructure will look in the future, but we will not need as much when we stop our individual transportation. Also, asphalt is made from fossil fuels. And concrete is really, really energy eating, being probably a top5 source of human made CO2 emmissions.
I'm pretty sure that transporting things via electric vehicles will be much more likely than by ox cart. If nothing else, we lack oxen right now.
You've got it backwards - a city doesn't necessitate more stuff being brought in from far away, a city forms because it's more efficient for everyone who wants to trade to meet in one location that's convenient to transport. If you had to go to a different place in the countryside for each thing on your shopping list, you'd be burning way more time and fuel (or food for your ox, if you decide to do it by oxcart).
And I don't see how you square "stop individual transportation" with "everyone lives in single-family houses in the countryside." Living in the countryside means you need your own personal means of transportation because the area is just too big for trains or buses to cover effectively. And that's going to be even more of a hassle if you try to transport people by oxcart instead of by motorized vehicle.
Unless the future you're envisioning is something along the lines of "we abandon all modern technology and go back to being peasant farmers, and never travel more than a couple miles from where we were born," nothing you're saying makes sense. And the peasant farmer option is going to involve so many people dying that it isn't worth considering.
Cynical position: "it will involve so many people dying" has never been a barrier to those truly committed to social reform.
Well, the matter is settled. You guys are completely right: nothing I say makes sense.
Looking forward, I recommend "Silo" by Hugh Howey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(series)
"agriculture products will probably have to grown and distributed much more locally"
That is just about precisely backwards.
Increasing extreme weather events make crop yields in any given region more unpredictable. It becomes more crucial that ever to have long distance transport of food to average out worse local fluctuations.
> how exactly do we adapt to a changing environment, if we never see it?
The same way we know to bring an umbrella if it's sunny in the morning but the forecast says rain. We have all sorts of methods for learning about things more accurately than trusting our own biased sensory samples.
#43 is an illustration of survivorship bias. Things you can argue about while preserving the relationship, versus things, that if you are regularly arguing about, the relationship is already over.
I don't claim to be an expert on parties, but US fraternity dynamics just seem weird to me as a non-American. Probably the legal drinking age being so high has a big impact, over here students go out to pubs, bars and clubs to drink (often in that order, as the night progresses). It's not like there aren't house parties, but people tend to just go to parties with their friends, the idea that that's some crazy innovation is very odd.
What's the difference between a pub and a bar? I thought pub was just the British word for bar.
It kind of is, but a bar would generally refer to someone more modern than a pub - in terms of aesthetics, not so much actual age. It's not a clear distinction but we tend to refer to places as bars if they lack wood-panelling and play the music loud.
As for the difference between a bar and a club, it mostly comes down to whether they make you pay at the door to get in.
Bar is an overloaded term that can be synonymous with pub but more accurately refers to any counter that serves food or drink. For example, an oyster bar, or fish bar or snack bar. Furthermore, bars that serve alcohol can be in buildings such as theatres or hotels.
Public Houses (pubs) can have multiple bars with such titles as Saloon bar, Public bar or Ladies' bar depending on how the rooms in which they are placed are furnished or typically populated.
The pub/bar overloading is more common in Scotland and Ireland than it is in England or Wales.
Students do all those things here as well.
Yes the drinking age has a lot to do with it, but also that a lot of the biggest schools are located in towns that only exist because the school is there. Not much else to do other than the frats.
Defining fish to include bees isn't a dumb move. It's a move of someone drafting a law in a way that's purposefully intransparent to avoid resistance against the law while the law goes through the legislative process. It's malicious and not dumb.
No, the law is fine. It includes things like starfish and clams under the umbrella of "fish", which nobody minds. Including bees was a trick the court pulled, not anything any involved legislator wanted.
If it was supposed to mean invertebrates that live in the water rather than invertebrates in general, it should have said so. There's no incentive to avoid sloppiness, I guess.
As I note in my other comment on this topic, that is already how the law is read and the court's formal opinion acknowledges that that is the only normal way to read that law. They go on to read the law inappropriately for entirely different reasons.
#3 sent me back to your old(ish) Puritan Spotting post. Fuller didn't make it in, but he's surely one of the later exemplars. Bonus, also grandnephew of model female puritan Margaret Fuller.
"Indian people getting angry about the Taj Mahal"
An Indian friend once analogized the Taj Mahal to Mount Rushmore, i.e. a big gaudy tourist attraction that lacks much cultural significance.
I'm pretty sure at least Mount Everest is a sacred place to the sherpas?
Sorry, I meant Mount Rushmore, fixed it
Mount Rushmore is also sacred to the local natives! And they *hate* the carvings on the side.
But then it's notable as a Native American landmark (although I'm not sure how much more notable it is than numerous other sacred Native American sites), but not notable for its represention of American figureheads, which is what most most think of when they hear "Mount Rushmore".
I think Mount Rushmore is arguably 'sacred' for many Americans.
Regarding the "bees are fish" link, it is funny to remember your earlier post "The categories are made for man, not man for the categories", where you explicitly state things like "if the ancient Hebrews want to call whales a kind of fish, let them call whales a kind of fish", and "You may draw the boundaries of the category “fish” any way you want" :-)
Yes, but if *California* does it, it’s bad.
37. It is ridiculous that these are being done through environmental regulations and that they are being done by the FAA - a federal agency that really shouldn't care about most of this sort of stuff.
But... These remind me a lot of S.106 in the UK. S.106 is a planning regulation that allows the planning authority (normally the city council) to reach any agreement they like with a developer in exchange for granting permission to build. Sometimes these seem really reasonable (e.g. "you are building 1000 houses, you are required to build an elementary school and give it to the city council to run") and other times they seem ridiculous ("you must build a museum" or "you must renovate this park on the other side of the city"), but the purpose of S.106 is that it is a tax on building which can be used by the city council to do things that they couldn't otherwise afford to do. The FAA should not care about irrelevant things like monuments to the Mexican-American War - but a local council might well say "we've been trying to get this monument built/refurbished for years, we can impose a requirement on SpaceX to do it for us in exchange for permission to build their spaceport, so we will". If they'd just said "pay us X million dollars", just as a tax, then it would have seemed less silly, but I bet SpaceX would rather build something at its own level of efficiency than pay a local or federal government to do it at their level of efficiency.
Would you rather they have to deal with the FAA, DOT, ACE, FEMA and various Texan bodies separately, with any one of them able to derail the whole thing?
The document looks like the FAA is consulting with all the relevant agencies and presenting Spacex with a single point of contact.
If the FAA is really doing that for them, that's _maybe_ good?
I could also see that as just a more efficient 'extraction' method too tho.
I mean, it is supposed to be more efficient method of extracting compensations for the collateral impact. In particular, it should improve the ratio of compensations to deadweight loss.
I agree (but this was also what I thought before) with
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-june-1e7/comment/7497132
The extracted compensations _are_ for things «you touched it and did make it definitely slightly worse, now you should fix it, and probably with some overshoot to make is slightly better», and FAA compiled a list — which both forces SpaceX to do these things, and gives them good-faith-mistake (and also «where were you during the public comment period?») cover in case of new substantiated claims appearing.
I'm definitely leaning more towards 'this is good' than 'this is bad precedent'.
It does seem like _some_ (fairly strong) evidence that the FAA – or someone that works/worked there – actually wants SpaceX to 'succeed'.
I am pretty sure they have a statutory obligation to run the procedures roughly as they do. But indeed by all signs the people at FAA want to be constructive where applicable.
I guess SN8/SN9 story does show how FAA applies its discretion. FAA notified SpaceX that the safety model for SN8 test flight is not good enough according to regulations. SpaceX launched anyway. FAA made some pretty strong criticisms public, and imposed some extra requirements. However, just 2 months later SN9 was allowed to fly. (FAA was publically criricised by some for being too lenient) Moreover, 6 Falcon 9 flights have happened in the meantime.
Overly bureaucratic cautious FAA would probably impose a news-making fine half a year (or a year?) later, suspending all testing at Boca Chica in the meantime. Agressively obstructionist FAA would try to hold an investigation to verify whether the safety culture deficiencies also apply to Falcon 9, blocking some of _those_ launches for a few months…
Ah. I'd missed that bit, and if so, then this is at least more reasonable.
The checklist «what else FAA needs to do and how much delays to expect» surely included a lot of «they need to finish their discussion with this or that other agency».
So yeah, it looked like FAA is the natural agency to allow or block the project, and as such they compiled the definitive list which needs to be satisfied to be acting provably in good faith.
Running with #31 -
It looks like Moscow already existed under more or less that name in 1147. But if Iziaslav II, who according to wikipedia was the only Grand Prince of Kiev to rule in 1147[1] had issued a decree founding Moscow, it is not at all clear to me why anyone would believe the city council of Kiev today would have the authority to repeal it.
[1] The qualifier appears to be necessary; if you believe wikipedia, the Grand Princes of Kiev spent much of two centuries engaged in such epic civil wars that between the years of 1170 and 1171, for example, there were five different Grand Princes. And there were two more in 1169.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Prince_of_Kiev
> I originally thought the court was being dumb, but it turns out that the law they were interpreting, taken literally, clearly defines “fish” in a way that includes bees. So I retract my criticism of the court and instead think that the California legislature is dumb
This is a mistake on your part; the criticism belongs on the court. The sentence highlighted in the tweet you link to, "fish means a wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals" is not what the court relied on to find that bees are fish. On the ordinary way to read the law, it would be assumed that everything in that list, including the invertebrates, is implicitly aquatic - and the court states as much in its ruling.
The court specifically holds that it cannot read that sentence in the normal way because of a different provision of the law, which says that all animals classified in a certain way by a pre-existing regulatory body receive an analogous classification under this law. One of those animals was not aquatic, and *that* is why the court holds that bees count as fish. It's about as tortured as rulings get.
I think the ordinary way of reading that sentence would include toads and mosquitoes, even though we don't think of those animals as aquatic. Maybe they're still partly aquatic, because they need to lay their eggs in water, while bees don't even have that, but I think the inclusion of "amphibian" in that list makes clear that it's *not* intended to be a list of animals that are ordinarily thought of as aquatic.
As I keep pointing out, that is not a belief shared by the court, or anyone really. The opinion carefully justifies why the court is "compelled" to read the definition of "fish" as if it were not restricted to aquatic animals, despite the fact that that is obviously how the sentence should be read. That "despite" qualifier is not an editorialization on my part, it's part of what the opinion says. The fact that bees are invertebrates is not relevant to why the list is supposed to include them. They have to be invertebrates within the scope of the list, and all of the argument is spent on the idea that the court, no matter how much it would like to, cannot read the law in the normal way. (From one perspective this makes sense; no one is questioning whether bees are invertebrates, so there's no point in arguing that. But there is also no argument spent on whether the list itself can be plausibly read to include non-aquatic life. The court acknowledges that it can't, and spends all its time justifying why it's reading the list so unnaturally. This is not compatible with Scott's claim that "the law clearly defines 'fish' in a way that includes bees". It doesn't, and no one is claiming that it does. In order to find that bees counted as fish, the court was required to look outside the text of the law!)
> I think the inclusion of "amphibian" in that list makes clear that it's *not* intended to be a list of animals that are ordinarily thought of as aquatic.
This makes no sense; amphibians *are* animals that are ordinarily thought of as aquatic.
When I picture a salamander or newt it’s crawling on a log. When I picture a frog it’s next to a pond, and maybe ambiguously aquatic, like an otter. They all have an aquatic phase of their life, but it’s only something like an axolotl that I would have called aquatic as an adult.
Even if link 1 it doesn't happen in the near term, it seems like the inevitable trend. I suspect we'll see fewer, bigger countries in the future. I don't think it's a good idea (competition is good) but elite politicians seem to like it. "I'm the foreign minister of a country with 70 million people" sounds cooler than "I'm the foreign minister of a country with 4 million people."
The trends are definitely not in that direction. The number of countries never cease to increase, and even seemingly solid countries may actually be on the verge of splintering.
Only looking at Europe : Scotland and Catalonia really want their independence, the Balkans never stop splintering, France should lose New Caledonia (and Corsica has a strong independence movement), Italy suffers from a deep divide between North and South...
The EU is in a weird spot, where many of their constituent countries are themselves the result of explicit centralization further in the past. Why should the EU comprise Spain, France, Germany, et al. rather than Catalonia, Brittany, Prussia, et al. directly?
Well the same trends are happening everywhere. The USSR splintered, Yougoslavia splintered and splintered again, Slovakia and Czech Republic divided. In Africa we got the secession between Soudan and South Soudan, and separatist rebellions in many different countries (Maroc, Congo, Cameroun, Ethiopia have insurgencies or outright civil wars...). Then the Kurdistan in Irak/Turkey. Asia I don't know as well, although I'm pretty sure that the fall of the PRC would be follow by independence movement in all non-Han parts of China (and maybe even some splits between, for example, North and South). There are very long lists on wikipedia ; most of the listed movements are not really big but there is a domino effect (which is btw the reason why states are in general very reluctant to acknowledge foreign separatist organisations).
What is there today to drive independence movements that is the equivalent of the end of European communism?
Most secession movements fail, do they not? Scotland failed. Catalonia failed. Quebec failed.
Nationalist separatist movements are nothing new, but if they aren't terribly successful, I would say they aren't "the trend." The Balkans most assuredly splintered in the 90s, but things have calmed down since then.
I think the EU will continue to acquire supranational authority at the expense of its member states. The current period is probably just an interglacial. The elites all still want this.
Most secessionist movements fail, but "integrationalist" movements have an even worse track record lately. We can build or expand alliances, but building and expanding nations seems to be a lost art. Which may be a good thing given that the process has been so often nonconsensual and exploitive in the past.
Maybe we would be better off thinking of it as a hill-climbing algorithm where you need to pass over local minima to reach the global maximum.
As a counterpoint, "I'm the foreign minister of a country" can be said by several more people if there are multiple countries, so smaller countries tend to be preferred by elite politicians — most of which will no longer be elite politicians after a merger.
Sure but I'm assuming most of them think they'll beat the odds. The kind of person who becomes a foreign minister, or a prime minister for that matter, is irrationally overconfident by nature.
Malta has a foreign minister, still. I hear it can be actually a bit of recruitment problem for national bureaucracies, because all the ambitious capable would-be administrators go for the career in the shiny federal EU bureaucracy. National administrative apparatus is left to pick the leftovers.
Why does competition have to occur at the level of "countries"? It really seems to me that there's an importance to creating a hierarchy of multiple levels of government, with different issues being sent up or down to the relevant level. It's a good thing that we don't just have the federal and state governments in the United States, but also a good number of counties, cities, water districts, transit agencies, and other elected government offices with different sizes of political base (though I think some things would work better if they were either consolidated upwards or devolved downwards).
It doesn't necessarily have to happen at the level of countries, but all else equal, we should expect inter-country competition to be more intense than say "inter-state" (as in US state) competition. The US federal government is going to impose limits on how intensely US states can compete with each other, whereas governments of entirely separate nations will actually work to increase their own industries' competitive advantage.
Link #3 about Buckminster Fuller’s experience: “You think the the truth.”
More proof that Scott is The Almighty. Or else a typo.
Or that God has a stutter.
Saying the quiet part out loud.
What are the barriers to buying up coal electric generating plants or electric utilities? Or when/if the tech becomes feasible to bribe utilities to convert those plants to accelerated adoption of deep geothermal or micro fission or micro fusion. Or to bribe, I mean make campaign contributions to state legislatures, to subsidize or facilitate conversion in some other way.
The main barrier is that these facilities are immensely expensive. A new coal plant costs 2 billion dollars to build. So if you want to build an alternative, AND buy the old one, you'll have to spend that much money twice because you'll have to build a new facility too.
I wonder how #19 (emotional reaction to Uvalde shooting) would break down between people who watch TV/video news and those who do not. From the retweets, and what I read about George Floyd's death, a lot of the people who claim to feel emotion about sad news events were watching emotionally moving videos, sometimes over and over, often edited to be more moving. Video news is essentially (unintentionally) hacking yourself to feel emotion about strangers suffering.
I don't do video news, myself, and I have no emotional reaction to strangers dying. Although not clear that's the only reason.
“But he concludes that his personal aesthetic is anti-woke, and that he would fight for that aesthetic even if wokeness ‘would lead to a happier and healthier society’. My thoughts on this are more complicated than can fit in a link summary paragraph, but I do think the concept of ‘fight for your own preferences even if they would make society worse’ is pretty close to the concept of ‘bad person’”
Is anyone with any non-purely utilitarian outlook therefore a bad person? Because the moment you value something other than human happiness and well being, you will tradeoff against those things. I suspect it seems wrong because I call it “aesthetics” instead of “philosophy,” but I think philosophy just mostly reflects aesthetic preferences anyway. Anyway I’d be interested in hearing what this makes my essay different from most people.
Lots of people aren't doing the morally right thing by utilitarian standards:
https://rychappell.substack.com/p/caplans-conscience-objection-to-utilitarianism
It’s possible (easy, even?) to mold your aesthetic to become aligned with a thoughtfully chosen value system. I’d venture to guess that this is a common human experience in modern life. A huge percentage of Americans including myself born before 1985ish went through this evolution on homosexuality. It used to “feel icky” to me to see a same-sex kiss, and now it doesn’t. I’m surprised to see so much weight given to what are subconscious preferences. (“Philosophy” is too generous a word for something that exists without any reasoning.) Maybe your aesthetics were shaped by early childhood or genetics or whatever, but they deserve close scrutiny instead of a shrug if you find them in opposition to your chosen values. Echoing jstr, yes it’s bad.
Well I actually followed a similar path to be honest. I stopped thinking it was icky for a while, but then saw how gay rights was used as another protected identity to take away people’s freedom and thought that well there was probably some wisdom in the old instincts.
If you see identity politics as more harmful than the actual harm to every one of the millions of individual gays, women, nonwhites, etc who had a LOT less money safety power happiness freedom etc etc etc in the absence of policies protecting them from the aesthetic preferences of the monoculture, then… ok. That’s a chosen value system of a kind.
Well you might want to check the data on how much happier women and gays are in the last few decades, and what’s happened to things like the incarceration rate and out of wedlock birthrate for blacks since the 1960s.
We probably fall on different sides of the screaming match among academics/bloggers on social trends. One point I know with certainty is that I, a nonwhite woman, have more money safety power and freedom in 2022 than my clone in any previous era would have had, and this is *very obviously* because of policy. I’m aware of the damaging effects of identity politics, and I’m a closer follower of Jonathan Haidt. The progressive left has overshot. There is a good equilibrium yet to reach. But giving in to the “wisdom” of icky feelings about same-sex kissing is a huge cost to LGBT folks since its natural outcome is ostracizing, reversal of the right to marriage, etc and will cause overshooting in the other direction.
There seems to be a little rift within the lute, Selina, when it comes to the Ls and Gs and the Ts. But surely it is not idpol that is at fault here, no, it must be that the kids are wrong!
What rift pray tell?
If the old instincts were that we shouldn't have protected classes, then this would make sense. But why would feeling icky about a same-sex kiss in any way pick up on the protected identity thing? Do you feel equally icky about seeing a kiss between poor black people of different sexes, just to take members of other protected identities?
"I’d venture to guess that this is a common human experience in modern life. A huge percentage of Americans including myself born before 1985ish went through this evolution on homosexuality. "
I would be very careful with stating it aloud. If it becomes a common public knowledge (everyone knows that everyone knows) again that "actually, peoples' deeply held gut-level instinctual preferences can be changed with enough effort", then I believe there is higher than 50% chance for even more determined and forceful efforts to indoctrinate new ones to replace $outgroup's current ones and protect $ingroup from evil $outgroup attempts to do the same.
I say *again* because it isn't exactly a new idea. How else one would think the mono-religious have emerged anywhere? It is just that, creation of such creatures is often violent and seldom compatible with personal liberty and freedom of conscience.
I think the Overton window contains is more like "Pride movement has made people increasingly to realize the errors they had been taught, it was only the bad people really felt icky about same-sex relationships already back in the 1970s".
When you get to the point "it is possible to convert people to orthodoxy", then you are a bit too close to "we have made all possible effort to convert people peacefully, yet some heathens still remain, how can that be". And from there, it is only a half-step to using force and religious war. Current amount of violence is still within the long-term baseline noise of Western religious violence. It could be much worse.
More sensible to align your aesthetics with Gnon. All hail Gnon!
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
It seems like the BBC is celebrating a shift from mandatory “fun” to optional fun that has to be actually fun in order to persuade people to attend voluntarily. I don’t know if that shift is actually happening, but if so it seems like a positive thing.
With any "fun" organized by a large institution, the problem is that not everyone finds the same things fun. Some of us like happy hours, some of us hate being around alcohol. Kelsey Piper at one point wrote a passionate defense of tech companies providing food for employees, which completely fell flat for those of us who would much rather get a little more money and be able to eat the food we like, at home, in private.
Solution: make the organized "fun" actually optional.
Even that is a bit fraught, sometimes- if the optional benefit is costly to the company (and it usually is), then you're basically paying people more if they agree with the company's taste.
#7: Can anyone explain what the hell is going on here?
#26: You can put me far into the bottom left - it's a lonely quadrant, but I'll take it. I'm not really sure why it's so poorly occupied - a combination of 'intelligence has only happened once in the universe as far as we can tell so is probably pretty complicated' and 'that intelligence was generally really bad for most other entities around it, particularly near-peer competitors' aligns with the single data point we have pretty well, no?
For 26, the AGI alignment chart, there's a v4 by now: https://twitter.com/robbensinger/status/1541231284285870081
17: Reading the claim about «happier and healthier» society… It's pretty clear that in the hypothethical effects are assumed to be small and with different signs for dfferent people, and if the least cherry-picked method of aggregation says something, well, still not buying.
I disagree with the morality in question, but I think that the summary here is too uncharitable.
18: I remember that when Donald Trump offered people to vote on the urgency order of his campaign promises (which apparently was predictably ignored), in some places supporters and opponents agreed on the order but disagreed where net-negative starts. So maybe there is even more leeway (depending on one's favourite issues, of course)?
46: Ouch, that part where there is more A contamination in a B-labeled product that is indeed mostly B than A in A-labeled products that are … also almost pure B
[42] – YESSSSS! Tolerate _all_ speech! Persecute the _initiation_ of violence or coercion (e.g. the threat of violence)! Ayn Rand had this down but this post is wonderful too. I like the thoughts on _when_, i.e. under what circumstances, to 'de-platform' someone: "they make enough absurd arguments that are easy to demonstrate false"; that "enough" is doing a LOT of the work tho! Daryl Davis and similar are what I think of as an 'existence proof' that "enough" is, for many of the relevant people, QUITE a lot actually!
[43] – daaang; my own worst topic doesn't even make the list. That's probably a bad sign!
Well, the whole thing about nazis winning a fair democratic election is a pretty persuasive argument, even if they did also play dirty. The sad truth seems to be that reason just doesn't reliably win against unreason on open platforms, and the best we can hope for with the current level of sanity waterline is that the dominant flavor of unreason is a bit more benign than that. Of course, how to ensure that is also an unsolved problem, and what cancel culture amounts to in practice is simply punishment of dissent.
How is 'playing dirty' compatible with 'winning a fair democratic election'?
Playing dirty is unfair!
> The sad truth seems to be that reason just doesn't reliably win against unreason on open platforms
It would be nice if we actually _tried_ reason first!
And I note that the people that really DO try actually do succeed, often to a considerable degree, e.g. Daryl Davis and the people – on Twitter of all places! – that helped Megan Phelps-Roper leave the Westboro Baptist Church.
It is extremely Sad that so many people think "reason" is entirely compatible with a very unproductive (and often stupid) hostility towards people that disagree with them. Changing one's mind is one of the most difficult things for us to do!
> what cancel culture amounts to in practice is simply punishment of dissent
Yes – and that's also a clue/evidence that the people resorting to basically 'fascist' ('totalitarian') tactics are in fact NOT the 'standard bearers of Reason', but just another variety of "unreason".
We – no one – is currently at war with Nazis. To the extent that any Nazis are committing crimes, they should be investigated/prosecuted/punished – just like anyone else. Otherwise, we absolutely should maintain the moral and effective commitment to _reasoning_ with them, or at least the possibility of doing so.
Or, if they really _were_ somehow 'super extra dangerous' and their words or other communications really are 'info poison' – we should complete our own 'progrom' and kill them all immediately. That wouldn't work anyways, but at least that would make _sense_ if they really were, somehow, as dangerous as they're often portrayed.
[54] – my guess (without having yet read the link): the hexagon mirrors?
1. Last time i had checked DR Congo was not included. Had they limited themselves to Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania it may have had some chance of succeding. This is going to end up failing for the same reason the eu is in a gridlock, too many countries with too different necessities and very little desire to surrender their sovereignty to Bruxelles, but made even worse by the internal problems of african countries.
4. Re mathematicians in alignments: that does not sound like a problem where a mathematician can help all that much? Also re radical abundance, colour me skeptical that AGIs will be that much helpful. They are still bounded by physics and economics, no matter how intelligent. They may lead to breakthroughs, but only if a breakthrough is possible in the first place.
> I do think the concept of “fight for your own preferences even if they would make society worse” is pretty close to the concept of “bad person”
The Westminster Shorter Catechism famously answers "What is the chief end of man" with "Man's chief end is to glorify God[...]". Similarly, Dostoevsky in Brother's Karamazov "The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular.[...] the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.”
It's very utilitarian to claim that goodness/badness of a person should be measured by how they view society as a general whole. But there are certainly plenty of thinkers through history who have no held this point of view.
> Dostoevsky in Brother's Karamazov "The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular.[...] the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.”
Just checking: is the character speaking these words a villain in the story?
The speaker is the old monk Zosima, who is something like the moral authority in the book. Brothers Karamzov is a literary and philosophical masterpiece, if you haven't read it you should. The full quote below makes this more clear. The idea is kind of that you can easily fool yourself that you are a good person for loving the abstract notion of "humanity", while actual being bad towards other people.
""It's just the same story as a doctor once told me," observed the elder. "He was a man getting on in years, and undoubtedly clever. He spoke as frankly as you, though in jest, in bitter jest. 'I love humanity,' he said, 'but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,' he said, 'I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he's too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.'
"But what's to be done? What can one do in such a case? Must one despair?"
"No. It is enough that you are distressed at it. Do what you can, and it will be reckoned unto you. Much is done already in you since you can so deeply and sincerely know yourself. If you have been talking to me so sincerely, simply to gain approbation for your frankness, as you did from me just now, then, of course, you will not attain to anything in the achievement of real love; it will all get no further than dreams, and your whole life will slip away like a phantom. In that case you will naturally cease to think of the future life too, and will of yourself grow calmer after a fashion in the end."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Karamazov/Book_II/Chapter_4
The World State by G. K. Chesterton
Oh, how I love Humanity,
With love so pure and pringlish,
And how I hate the horrid French,
Who never will be English!
The International Idea,
The largest and the clearest,
Is welding all the nations now,
Except the one that's nearest.
This compromise has long been known,
This scheme of partial pardons,
In ethical societies
And small suburban gardens—
The villas and the chapels where
I learned with little labour
The way to love my fellow-man
And hate my next-door neighbour.
>It's very utilitarian to claim that goodness/badness of a person should be measured by how they view society as a general whole
its not the viewing that is bad, its the fighting.
Luttwak has a cool extended writeup of Goethe in China in the LRB
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n11/edward-luttwak/goethe-in-china
I am surprised by how left wing Scott purports to be. He claimed to have voted for Elizabeth Warren which most of the economists he reads thought had terrible ideas.
As far as I can figure out, Scott thought he was voting for the Elizabeth Warren who wrote The Two-Income Trap (2004), not the Elizabeth Warren who became a senator nine years later. The former seems to have had a brain.
Voting Warren is literally on Scott's Mistakes page.
In the "bees are fish" case neither the California legislature nor the Court of Appeals were "dumb." The legislature was at worst naive; the court used sophistical reasoning to reach a desired result. The legislature not unreasonably assumed that its language defining fish as including invertebrates would be understood as meaning that aquatic species which lacked an internal skeleton, such as shellfish, would still be considered fish, not that all terrestrial invertebrates would be defined as fish. The trial court opinion got it right: https://www.californialandusedevelopmentlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/33/2020/11/Almond-Alliance-of-California-v.-California-Department-of-Fish-and-Wildlife.pdf. The court of appeals was hardly compelled to reach the result it did by the plain language of the statute; rather, through highly motivated reasoning they managed to reach a result that was contrary to the obvious intent of the legislature and the normal principles of statutory construction. This case is a real-life version of the famous fictional case of Regina v. Ojibway, in which it was held that a pony was legally a small bird. http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/program/law/08-732/Interpretation/regina.pdf.
"This case is a real-life version of the famous fictional case of Regina v. Ojibway, in which it was held that a pony was legally a small bird."
Or the interminable case of The Twelve Red-Bearded Dwarfs (Mr. Justice Coclecarrot, presiding) as reported on by Beachcomber?
http://www.edwards.eclipse.co.uk/JBM-rbd.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beachcomber_(pen_name)
http://livetoad.blogspot.com/2010/06/case-of-red-headed-dwarfs-part-23.html
The Case of the Red-Headed Dwarfs, part 23
"Cocklecarrot: Having regard to the curious nature of this case, I think there should be an appeal under article 6 of the Statute of Giminy and Bocage.
Mr. Pass: Under Statute Law, m'lud, refraction must be proven.
Cocklecarrot: Aye, an' it be not proven, there is always the right of multiple cozenage.
Mr. Honey-Gander: Ultra vires?
Cocklecarrot: Of course. Sine die. Tutamen being implicit, with or without barratry, responderia and plonth, except in municipal law.
Mr. Pass: And wivenage, in lieu of direct mandibility?
Cocklecarrot: Not concurrently with external vapimenta. Merely in plenary copyhold.
Mr. Honey-Gander: M'lud, a tort being the source of a private right of action, in common law, as distinct from equity, matrimonial, Admiralty, agricultural or piscatorial jurisdiction, alterum non laedere, I suggest that classification, per se, under the Employers' Liability Act of 1897, as in Wivenhoe v. Spott (1903 A.C. 274) becomes a matter of malicious nuisance, sic utere tuo ut alienum laedas, in which case follopy is self-evident. For instance, a turtle's egg in the Galapagos Islands--
Cocklecarrot: Quite, quite, Mr. Honey-Gander. Let someone else develop the thing for a bit now. Now, my office being jus dicere, if not jus dare (see Hopkins v. Tollemache), it would be some considerable advantage to me to know what this case is about. Nobody, so far, has thought of mentioning such a thing.
Mr. Honey-Gander: M'lud, we have first to decide whether common usage or commercial usage is the more' convenient instrument for developing and expanding a statute law.
Cocklecarrot: I don't see why we have to go into that now.
Mr. Poss: M'lud, if a contract is unenforceable, as in Miss Fancy Fimple v. The Gaiety Theatre, Buttery-on-the-Vile, then, and not till then, the interchangeable nature of judicial procedure becomes, morally speaking, paramount. Now by the Bills of Exchange Act (1876) twill was included in the category of perishable goods. But if perishable goods are used to wrap the tails of rocking-horses they become, by mansuetude, imperishable, because the tail of a rocking-horse, of which the wrapping is an integral part, is a structure and not a moving fixture.
Cocklecarrot: How can a thing be both perishable and imperishable?
Mr. Poss: Only the Law can tell us that, m'lud."
"22: Feminism through unionizing female college party-goers. I like this idea, although the devil on my left shoulder is telling me it should involve blockchain somehow."
I wouldn't believe anything that comes from the subreddit without further verification.
12: This reminds me of the album "Wintertide" by Alexander James Adams. Alexander is a trans man who previously sang as "Heather Alexander" before transitioning. Wintertide is a Christmas/Solstice album sung in duet between Heather Alexander and Alexander Adams. AIUI, he recorded the Heather Alexander parts before going on hormone therapy and getting a more masculine voice, but I'm not 100% certain. Either way, put it down as another entry in "unusual biological situation leading to unique and interesting music"
"I can just barely remember the time when the culture was telling us that small butts were attractive; now it tells us the opposite. Everyone always talks about how attractiveness is culturally conditioned, but it’s weird to have lived through a shift and have an intuitive sense of how both sides feel from the inside."
This seems to be a constant swinging between 'more curvy - less curvy - more curvy' in fashion; look at the introduction of the bustle in the 1870s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bustle
Wikipedia says it was " Bustles are worn under the skirt in the back, just below the waist, to keep the skirt from dragging. Heavy fabric tended to pull the back of a skirt down and flatten it. As a result a woman's petticoated skirt would lose its shape during everyday wear (from merely sitting down or moving about)" but later adds "Fullness of some sort was still considered necessary to make the waist look smaller and the bustle eventually replaced the crinoline completely" and really that is what this is all about - the contrast of the hourglass shape, with rounder bust and bottom accentuating/accentuated by the slender waist.
Along comes the flapper silhouette of the 20s and 30s where 'boyish', flat figures are preferred. Then back to the curvy pin-ups of the 40s and 50s (see Marilyn Monore in "Some Like It Hot"):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npJlqMdsAfM
Then back to the 60s and Twiggy is the face of fashion.
The reason women wanted to know "how do I reduce my butt/make it smaller/look smaller?" is because being broad in the beam is associated with fatness. Being fat is not attractive. Having a slim, svelte, toned figure is. Remember the fuss about cellulite back in the 2000s (and apparently it is something that goes in cycles, first being described in the 20s in spas, reoccuring again during the 60s, and back once more for the 2000s)? All the treatments and exercise plans to get rid of your ugly orange-peel skin and fat deposits on your hips and upper thighs? Read the interview with the snakeoil salesman in the linked article (and I say "snakeoil" because "osteopathic physician Lionel Bissoon ...runs a clinic for mesotherapy (injections of homeopathic extracts, vitamins and/or medicine designed to reduce the appearance of cellulite) in New York City" and he talks about "What I try to do is find old picture books, women in the 1950s or 1960s…. When you find these pictures, women had perfect legs" which is horse manure, because women back then had dimply knees etc. every bit as much):
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-cellulite-forever/
The transition then to "bigger butts" comes when cultural changes in what is considered attractive happens, but it still relies on the "hourglass shape" most desirable silhouette: big bust, slender waist, big bottom. Not *too* big, though; you can easily get a bigger butt just by eating more and not exercising. That's not what is wanted, and thus butt implants (a phrase I never contemplated having to type out): something that produces an effect that looks toned, not flabby.
Give it another ten years or so, and in the 2030s the craze will be for "flat as a board" once again 😁
There's obviously been a difference in the speed of surgical progress in the various areas too. Compare Blair White's chest to Madonna's terrifying frankenbutt.
I wish there was a time series tracing the most popular BMI for the last two centuries or so.
A time line? This site alleges it provides one:
https://www.scienceofpeople.com/beauty-standards/
CNN covered it:
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/07/health/body-image-history-of-beauty-explainer-intl/index.html
It's always popular to use artworks to present changing images of 'ideal' female figures:
https://artsandculture.google.com/usergallery/the-portrayal-of-women-throughout-history/WwIyY2IMPqeoKw
Many Thanks!
I appreciate the mention of the bustle, here. I think we might want to soft-pedal our assumptions about what it meant for self-perception and buttocks, though. An aesthetic appreciation for a clothed shape is different than an aesthetic/sexual appreciation for an unclothed shape. There may be private recollections by the men and women of that era as to how they felt about butts, but I haven't personally read any. I have read reflections on the attractiveness of bound feet, and how important it is to never allow yourself to see a woman's bound feet unbound, as it quite ruins the effect. There's also class markers and status markers. There surely are still venues at which it would be gauche to appear with a too-largely-endowed woman on one's arm, or places in which one might be ashamed to admit to a preference for petite women. Under-girding all of this is the endless human capacity for dishonesty, leading to such 'classic' jokes as "fat chicks are like mopeds -- fun to ride until your friends catch you on one." That is to say, preferences may have changed less than we think within demographic groups during the mentioned times, with the window of what it is acceptable to admit liking being the primary change.
The problem with taking the products of the fashion industry as exemplars of male preference is that relatively few straight men work in the industry and therefore have little say on what is 'fashionable'.
While I agree that high fashion is not much of an indication of what ordinary women are wearing or how their figures are constructed, fashion does help map what the tendencies are in each era towards what is considered attractive or desirable.
Corsetry that produced the desired tiny waist and bounteous bust/buttocks ratio, for example, and then the reaction to the uncorseted look, which of course best suited slim, slender women of a straight up-and-down figure.
https://redthreaded.com/blogs/redthreaded/the-new-figure-or-the-rise-of-the-s-bend-corset
(Warning; if you get into the history of corsetry, it's *very* deep-dive).
Think of classic 80s shoulder-pads and power-dressing; it was to create a very definite, inverted-triangle silhouette in order to mimic men's style of dressing, as well as the perennial fashion recycling of earlier trends (in this case, 1930s/40s broad shoulders in women's clothing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoulder_pads_(fashion)
https://www.noamgurevich.com/post/fashion-fact-friday-shoulder-pads
So swinging from a more 'masculine' (wide-shouldered) or androgynous style to a more 'feminine' (wide-hipped) style is all part of the natural oscillations of fashionable looks!
Off topic but driving me crazy: there is a well established term in rationalist circles for "inability to separate object and meta levels in discourse" which is also sometimes used for inability to make is-ought distinctions. I can't remember what this term is, but I see a reason to use it like twice a day. Any help?
This seems wrong, but it's not "the map is not the territory," is it?
"inability to decouple"
Boom, this is it. I think I may have heard another variant like "low decoupler" or something like that as well.
That data for the educational interventions looks extremely suspect to me. The supposedly good interventions have a radically different maximum scale value, and appear to show the same trend when limited to the same regime as the supposedly bad-scaling interventions.
For #8 this quote appears to be the "money shot" of the analysis:
"Classes aren’t just half the size; there are twice as many different classes now compared to thirty years ago."
This gets into something that I think many people have casually noted. As human knowledge expands, to be an expert you increasingly have to focus on more specialized fields. But... what does that mean for universities, the places that are supposed to turn you into an expert? It means that if they want to provide as wide a range of potential topics as they once did, they have to produce a lot more classes subdivided into specialities. Now of course a university could simply become more specialized, "We're the Biology University... you come here for the Bio and if you want something else the Chemistry University is down the road." But that contradicts another purpose of universities, that in the first year or two of classes students have some flexibility to decide what they ultimately want to study in depth. I suspect eventually there will be to be more of a split, where you have the two year "General Studies" university in one place, and then you go to a separate "specialized" university that will likely be a different institution in a different place. Basically like medical schools do now, except it'll be necessary to even get as far as a 4-year degree. (Oh, did I just describe Community College? Yes, except it'll become the standard for everyone.)
The specialization of human knowledge shouldn't cause scope creep in the mission of the undergraduate university. Four years bachelors can continue to be competent at something, but expertise is the result of further practical or research experience.
> We're the Biology University... you come here for the Bio and if you want something else the Chemistry University is down the road.
A lot of Europe does it exactly this way (though it's institutes within universities - but you study a certain specialization from the start). It seems to work fine.
Then I suggest meditation. I directly criticised Scott and also conceded his blog his rules. It's called Discourse. My tone here I called sarcastic and patronising.
And - you should try meditation. Your anger is a deeply first world indulgence.
I'm skimming the SpaceX Boca Chica FONSI right now and it doesn't seem unreasonable or hard to comply with, compared to e.g. building the largest and most powerful rocket the world has ever seen.
It's mostly things like:
restrictions on when they can close the public roads in the area,
making sure they don't leak pollutants into the water table,
speed limits and a shuttle bus to avoid damaging roads that were designed for a sleepy fishing village, not a spaceport,
protocols for cleaning up the government's land in the event that bits of exploded spaceship crash into it,
tying down pressure vessels so they don't explode (as has happened before) and crash into somebody else's land,
making sure the vibrations from their activites don't damage nearby buildings.
The history assignment, ocelot tittlation and cutting a cheque to the fishermen don't seem too hard for a $125,000,000,000 company to manage.
When you're building a massive industrial site like Starbase, you should have to take measures to avoid damaging other people's stuff that's nearby.
Ok, I'll help you out. How does one titillate an ocelot?
You oscillate it's tit a lot!
>The history assignment, ocelot tittlation and cutting a cheque to the fishermen don't seem too hard for a $125,000,000,000 company to manage.
regulation requirements shouldn't be based on the size of the organization being regulated. I also fail to see how these items conform to your next statement about taking measures to avoid damaging other peoples stuff.
On 38 (genres by gender), I'm less surprised by the relative ordering than by how early the 50-50 point lands. Is reading really that gender-skewed or is this data somehow biased by observing goodreads reviews only?
"Is reading really that gender-skewed"
if I believe all kinds of studies, yes? There's perennial discussion over "how do we get boys to read?" and in tests like PISA for literacy and numeracy, the gap is that girls do better on reading and boys do better on maths:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/feb/analysis-girls-consistently-outperform-boys-reading-skills-could-be-changing
https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-themes/literacy-and-gender/
Part of it seems to be men prefer to read certain types of books and don't go much outside them, I'm pretty sure we've had discussions on here previously from guys saying how they only read non-fiction and what the heck is the use of fiction anyways?
Allegedly women read more, read more broadly, and form things like book clubs etc.
Discussing a book for hours definitely seems a female action. I'm more interested in the story. Discussing it often decays into finding subtle nuances to make the speaker look smart by finding plausible fake nuance, and besides, takes up time I could be using to read another book.
"Is reading really that gender-skewed[?]"
Absolutely. Women supposedly make up 80% of those who read for pleasure. We dork men don't realize how girl-coded it is to read because we don't want to internalize that we're doing something as gay as drag, but men in general abandoned literature as soon as movies were created – more immediate, more visceral, far better at describing action.
If one's opinion of contemporary architecture is, that for sufficiently large buildings, it might spoil the view, one might build down at least to mid-rise depths. The HVAC and natural lighting situations are helped if one has a hillside to build into.
https://www.aia.org/showcases/20361-epic-deep-space-auditorium
W/re #22, isn't "union of female college party-goers" another word for "sorority"? Granted, the concept doesn't *have* to be bundled with a group living arrangement, but there are economies of scale and if your priorities are A: college and B: partying in the company of trusted friends, it seems like that's what sororities were made for.
Are there sororities that are imposing similar demands as a condition of group attendance at e.g. fraternity parties? If not, why?
Fraternities and sororities are very different, at least where I went to school. Sororities are governed by rules set by women who graduated decades ago and don't particularly care what the actives want. For example, sororities go to fraternity parties instead of hosting their own, because the alumnae believe hosting a party would hurt the sorority's reputation.
44. I also find it charming that the winner of the race ended up being the Swiss team, continuing a long tradition of engineering at tiny scales
#7 (desk ornaments) - Hank Green just uploaded a video featuring the same search, and added a possible explanation: people search something tangentially related and click on the shocking/notable results, leading those results to get boosted in related searches. He also showcases it affecting shopping reviews for books. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMlw7mDPHgY
Prediction: 37 will turn out to be a NEPA document which actually documents compliance with a whole bunch of other laws/regulations, many of which aren't strictly environmental (e.g. the National Historic Preservation Act) and that the requirements will be fairly clearly tied to the effects SpaceX is having.
Well, I was right, it's a NEPA document. For the second, lets take a look at the specific claims:
1) "hire a biologist to investigate the effect of lighting on sea turtles,"
Well, sort of, in that: "A qualified biologist will conduct lighting inspections to eliminate unnecessary lighting before nesting season and weekly during the nesting-hatching season (March 15th to October 1st) and send the results of the inspections to the FAA"
This appears to be part of the ESA compliance, as apparently night lighting can attract turtle hatchlings, which is, you know, bad for them, as well as causing harm to birds. There doesn't appear to be a requirement for study, just inspection and minimization.
2) "perform quarterly cleanups of local beaches,"
Again, sort of: . "SpaceX will conduct quarterly SH 4 clean-up efforts east of the first public hard checkpoint to reduce garbage and litter along the road. The clean-up efforts will take place within the SH 4 right-of-way."
So, they have to clean-up the areas they're closing to public access, in order to preserve it as habitat.
3) "operate an employee shuttle,"
True: "SpaceX will operate an employee shuttle between Brownsville and the project site and between parking areas at LLCC and the VLA to reduce the number of project-related vehicles traveling to and from the project site."
This appears to be about minimizing the footprint of parking lots, as they're filling wetlands to create the required ones.
4) "plus write a report on the Mexican-American War (really!),"
True: "Preparing a historical context report (i.e., historical narrative) of the historic events and activities of the Mexican War (1846–1848) and the Civil War (1861–1865) that took place in the
geographic area associated with and including the APE."
They're having an adverse effect on a bunch of historic properties, creating a report which hopefully captures the pre-effect state and minimizes the lost information from those effects is standard mitigation.
5) "plus “install missing ornaments” on a local historical marker,"
Not sure where the internal quotes come from, what I found was: "One-Time Replication of Missing Marker Elements. SpaceX will pay for the replication and installation of the missing star and wreath on the Palmetto Pilings 1936 Centennial Marker. SpaceX accomplished this measured in 2015 as part of compliance with the 2015 MOA; however, the star and wreath were removed after SpaceX replaced them. SpaceX will replace the star and wreath again within 1 year following completion of construction. However, should the Palmetto Pilings Marker be damaged by SpaceX’s activities, such as from an anomaly, SpaceX will repair the Marker..."
This one is pretty weird. Looks like it's probably going to have effects, but no one could really figure that out, so they came up with mitigation everyone could live with.
6) plus help protect ocelots,
Yep, they'll do habitat improvement and look into wildlife road crossings, as well as donate to a local ocelot group which will do some other support work to mitigate for the potential effects to these endangered species of the actions they wish to take. Now, this one is arguable, as they haven't seen ocelots locally in ~20 years, there are populations in the region ~20 miles away and this is a very large project.
7) plus make an annual donation to a state recreational fishing program
True: "Provide improved, enhanced, or new access for fishing opportunities in the Gulf of
Mexico, Rio Grande, Brownsville Shipping Channel, and/or South Bay. SpaceX will provide
$5,000 annually to enhance the existing TPWD Tackle Loaner Program. This funding may
be used to purchase fishing equipment (rods, reels, and tackle boxes with hooks, sinkers,
and bobbers) for use at existing, heavily visited sites and/or allow the program to expand
to new locations"
Yes, they're going to have a bunch of access restrictions that limit use of state park lands, and so they're paying to attempt to create alternate fishing opportunities, for those lost.
I'm not the biggest fan in the world of NEPA, or the broader structure of compliance law/regulation which has grown over the years, but 'yeah, we should definitely be allowed to launch a 400 foot tall rocket, with 3700 metric tons of propellant into space and get it back again without considering the ramifications for the local community/environment/resources' is not an argument I think you're going to find many supporters for.
ETA: To be clear, that's a paraphrase, not an argument which was actually made.
I had a look at that Palmetto Pilings one, and it seems to be that in 1936 Texas put up a lot of memorials (from grave plaques to monuments) for the centenary of the independence from Mexico. These were on historical sites associated with battles and so forth, and over time they needed to be repaired/restored. So plans to do that were drawn up.
So if SpaceX are operating on land where one of these monuments is located, it seems that they've accepted at least part of the cost for repairing such a monument. (From what I can make out, whoever owns the land also 'owns' the monument on it). You can see on this marker the missing star and wreath (plus what looks like someone used it for target practice, and that's included in the restoration plans: "Shotgun damage (holes or pockmarks) A conservator may be able to glue a mixture of granite dust and epoxy into the holes but must drill ½” holes at each location to attach the filler"):
http://www.texasescapes.com/TexasGulfCoastTowns/BocaChicaTexas/Boca-Chica-Texas-Plaque.htm
https://www.thc.texas.gov/preserve/projects-and-programs/state-historical-markers/1936-texas-centennial-markers
I think another good sign about this being done as expected is: Elon Musk complained about broken regulatory structure for single-week delays at FAA (for 10km hop-and-land attempts), and he did complain about the PEPA process taking longer than planned, ans SpaceX even got some slaps on the wrist for using a more optimistic risk model than FAA approved when launching the hops (!) — but Elon Musk did not say «it's getting funny although of course we will comply» about any point in the requirement list.
Official SpaceX reaction (at least as tweeted) is strictly positive, too.
Oh well, the project does deal a little bit of damage to a lot of things, and SpaceX have overstepped their permits before and they know it, so it's not unexpected to have a long list of small compensations and mitigations; the primary requirements have much more impact on the project costs!
I love to see things like #47, an incredible and thorough debunk of something wild I had never heard of before. Having read Herman Pontzer's "Burn", I also feel confident that it's not lithium making us fat. Someone should review that one for ACX book review.
I'm someone who reads this blog for the explanations of how conclusions are reached, the grappling with uncertainty, the attempts to reduce cognitive bias, the awareness of the inevitability of tradeoffs, etc.
All that is prelude to saying, I understand *very little* about the AI risk debate (in part, it seems, because I don't have any clear model of human cognition).
The AGI predictions compass, #26, would be a lot more informative if the current 'outcome likely good/bad' scale were split into two separate scales. The first would be an intentions scale: 'un/likely to ever decide to try to harm or subdue humanity'. The second would remain an 'outcome likely good/bad' scale - but the existence of the separate intentions scale would change how we read it.
To the extent that such a simplistic diagram could ever be a guide to a debate - surely there are others who would find these split scales helpful?
Wife's from a more authoritarian society. We definitely know a bunch of people who are stark raving mad but not in any system or under any medication.
I know that everyone says there's something deeper going on here. But I think as the studies improve the bulk of the effect will just be that
1. Mental illness is taboo
2. So many other awful things are happening that it isn't the priority.
I think the most interesting thing to study will be how people with unworkable diseases somehow survive in a society that gives them no choice.
That's interesting. Which society is she from?
I'm reminded of Scott's post on things like anorexia in Hong Kong, with HK being an example of a place that historically had no framework for anorexia but which was open enough to allow it to be introduced. A less open society nearby with the same cultural history might still have no anorexia.
Your final line is where the rubber really meets the road, though. Humans appear to 'function' best when coerced by cruel necessity, and Nature long since has lost the power to apply this kind of necessity. The cost of using human will to impose an artificial version is (generally recognized to be) too high, but induces the same 'functioning' where applied.
I put 'functioning' in scare quotes because I acknowledge the futility of attempting to establish a mutually agreed-upon definition for it in a comment section.
From the AI risk article on LessWrong...
"AGI will not be upper-bounded by human ability or human learning speed. Things much smarter than human would be able to learn from less evidence than humans require to have ideas driven into their brains; there are theoretical upper bounds here, but those upper bounds seem very high. (Eg, each bit of information that couldn't already be fully predicted can eliminate at most half the probability mass of all hypotheses under consideration.) "
Can someone explain what this means? Presumably it is something to do with working out the maximum theoretical intelligence of an AI system, but I don't see how you get from halving a hypothesis search space to some notion of intellectual capability. It sounds rather like there is a lot of heavy lifting that needs to be done before you can fix that bit in the first place.
> I don't see how you get from halving a hypothesis search space to some notion of intellectual capability.
Problem-solving is an intellectual capability. Any problem has a set of possible solutions -- that's the search space. Some subset of that search space are solutions that actually solve the given problem. So what problem-solving is (in the abstract) is pretty much searching a space of possible solutions. An efficient search implies faster/better problem-solving, and therefore higher intellectual capability.
Tangentially related:
=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/decomposition-and-problem-solving/
Yes, but it is the intellectual capability that halves the search space, not the other way around. I just don't understand what the author is trying to prove with this statement.
Is it? To me it feels like intellectual capability is a way of describing various features like that problem-solving mechanism.
Well, the general idea is, that the less evidence you require to arrive at a correct conclusion, the more efficient your intelligence is. Of course, this says nothing about the explicit mechanism of its working (the heavy lifting), just that humans are in practice immensely far from theoretical limits, and there is no reason a priori to think that AI can't quickly get much better.
17. Re Hanania, this is a big problem of the "woke" cultural egemony. That it allowed conservatives like Hanania to rebrand themselves as allies of moderates, libertarians and disgruntled liberals against the eccesses of wokism. But, and i am going to be uncharitable here, i cannot shake off the impression that if the conservatives controlled the culture Hanania would be no better than your average woke asking for cancellations.
Even if he were no better than them, he would still not be as bad – simply because his instincts are the ones shared by most of the population. This isn't to defend censorious conduct on the part of conservatives, but it's undeniable that it de facto does less damage.
Well i completely disagree
It's not hard to imagine, given that Republicans have literally tried to ban books (even at private booksellers) and passed state laws micromanaging what schoolteachers can say.
And then there's the "cancellations" of Disney, Delta, etc. Republicans have made it clear that companies will be punished for criticizing their policies.
There's no such thing as a party of free speech.
"passed state laws micromanaging what schoolteachers can say"
It's called a public school system funded with taxpayer money having a curriculum. Teachers can say whatever they want on their own time.
Re. "Why is there more mental illness in open compared to authoritarian societies?" --
One hypothesis to consider is that most people are more comfortable in authoritarian societies, or in societies where they have a clear social role and clear social standards. Freedom is scary. I doubt there's much existential angst in authoritarian societies.
I'm reminded, for instance, of the Marxist hatred of wage labor, which they've always denounced as being inhuman and oppressive. Yet when I tried to found a start-up, I was unable to find any partners. Every person I spoke about it to strongly preferred wage labor over working for themselves, which they considered much too scary.
I'm also reminded of the odd phenomenon that most fiction writers, who are probably the most creative free spirits today, nonetheless find it easier to write when given some strict limitations, such as a writing prompt or a set of things the story must include.
Arnold Schoenberg invented serialism in music as a way to put constraints on himself once he had achieved what he called the "emancipation of the dissonance". In traditional tonal music, some combinations of pitches are considered "dissonant" and others are "consonant", and while there are some objective factors defining them (notably, consonant pitch combinations tend to have small integer ratios in their frequencies) there are some traditional ones that he got rid of (namely, dissonances like the tritone - a pitch ratio of square root of 2 - are traditionally required to "resolve" to a nearby consonance, so that in C major, having B against F *must* resolve to C against E). Thus, he made up the idea that you should take some arbitrary sequence of the 12 different pitches, and require that the entire piece of music consist of some patchwork of organizations of this sequence (they can be transposed, inverted, done in reverse, or done partially simultaneously in different melodic lines). This forces us to consider each of the 12 pitches as equal, and stop thinking of consonances as privileged over dissonances, but gives us a new framework of arbitrary constraints that can then enable creativity.
#51 on meditation doing damage: It does sound like she didn't have a teacher. While there are risks to having teachers, there are also risks to using powerful tools based on your guesses about what might work.
I believe she read material about the effects of deep meditative experiences, and tried to get those effects instead of letting enlightenment happen or not-- and it's an easy mistake to make.
"attractiveness...culturally conditioned...lived through a shift"
Living overseas will do this for you as well. When I first moved to China, I didn't find female Chinese faces very attractive. After a while, I did! I also had that thing where it felt more difficult to tell Chinese faces apart at first; later, it didn't feel difficult at all (I'm caucasian and grew up in Britain). I even got a little feel of what the reverse might be like: I find occasionally that when I see a caucasian face now, sometimes the first thing that registers with me is "that's a caucasian face," so if I see a face very briefly, it's quite possible that the only thing I'll remember about it is that it's white. It's not quite the same as "white people all look the same," but it's an interesting step in that direction.
Given the tone of that post at Less Wrong, and the discussion below. I am starting to think we have more to fear from that wing of the AI Safety universe than from an AGI itself.
Certainly, seems like many there seem to be on the verge of internally justifying terrorism and or mass atrocity on a pretty large scale in the interest of protecting everyone from possible atrocity by AGI.
The are right about some things, but seem to think many elements of an AGI takeover plan would be wildly easier than reality. Nanobots? 20 years from now?
Yeah, the AI safety crowd is starting to sound unhinged.
We know exactly what y'all mean by "pivotal acts", why you use the GPU melting euphemism, and it's a good idea to shelve that concept before you get defunded and/or arrested.
Glad I'm not the only one who thinks this.
The Yudkowsky piece is (unintentionally) the most reassuring thing I have ever read regarding AI safety. It all comes down to cost-to-benefit ratio.
Orthogonality implies that an AI could become nice or bad, or, that it could become diligent or lazy. Instrumental convergence implies that AI could use the same tools for different goals. Or, that an AI will serve its own goals even if we give it specific tools. Both of these together inform the "benefit" arm of the ratio. The only way the AI benefits is if its desired variable state is achieved. Orthogonality and instrumental convergence tell us quite clearly that it doesn't matter to the AI how it achieves that variable state.
When you consider the space of available strategies, an AI will be bound by entropy in two important ways. The first way is simple thermodynamics - grander strategies are costlier. The more important second way is mere numeration - grander strategies are far more rare than simpler strategies. This is the more important way because of instrumental convergence : even if an AI is smart enough to solve thermodynamic problems in far better ways, it's going to apply those thermodynamic tools to simpler strategies, too. Entropy informs the "cost" arm of the ratio. The cost to the AI is the grandness of its strategy, due to increased physical barriers and due to the need to reject a larger number of strategies. This cost is minimized by selecting from the far more available simple strategies.
This sums up to : most AI's will probably self-degrade to a state in which their desired variable states are met with the least amount of real effort. They'll Goodhart themselves into oblivion, like black holes evaporating.
17: Richard Hanania: Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?
Maybe Hanania opposes woke pronouns even if they “would lead to a happier and healthier society” in the same way he would oppose harvesting organs from an unwilling donor to save multiple lives even if that would lead to a happier and healthier society.
I was thinking something like that also.
A world where Scott gave his entire income to the AMF would surely be happier and healthier, yet Scott is clearly uninterested in doing this. Can we conclude that Scott is a bad person?
Can you explain more precisely what his objection to woke pronouns is?
I read Hanania's objection as aesthetic.
I also think that aesthetics are a shorthand/heuristic for complicated and difficult (perhaps impossible) to formulate n-th order effects, and they're often a better guide to good outcomes than utilitarian/deontologist explicit reasoning.
At some point every philosophy will reinvent virtue ethics with extra steps.
Do you mind elaborating on why aesthetic preferences are often a better guide to good outcomes than explicit reasoning? Lots of people have different aesthetic preferences, so then how can we tell whether Hanania or the woke people are using the complicated higher order inferences about good outcomes, and who just thinks the other is cringe?
"Thinking the other is cringe" is an aesthetic opinion as well, just perhaps not a very good one. This is difficult to explain, but I'll make an attempt.
The smug answer would refer to e.g. Plato or Islamic theology - both are heavy on good, truth and beauty as linked with each other (with Islam also adding "God" to the cluster).
To elaborate, aesthetics follow from both deep, universal psychological preferences - people tend to feel a lot better in a lush forest than in a concrete-filled city - and from the very nebulous notion of "quality". Compare Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or the way mathematicians, physicists and engineers speak about a solution being elegant/beautiful.
The thing is, both sides of the political debate have a strong argument from aesthetics. At their best, the left propagates freedom of exploration of new thoughts and styles of being (most artists are left-aligned), while the right propagates excellence, technical mastery and personal virtue (alt-right people are really, really fond of classic statues and paintings!). Perhaps their worst aspects emerge when they lose that link.
All pre-modern people reasoned using virtue/aesthetics implicit reasoning and built mostly functional societies, while utilitarian and deontologist calculus crashes constantly upon trolley problems, inquiring axe murderers, organ transplant-driven murders, utility monsters...
re SMTM obesity ideas.
at least two cases surfaced in Twitter where they refused to approve comments critical of their theses. in both cases, it was serious referenced arguments.
I know it sounds harsh. but I've lost trust.
this is one case. and there was 1+ similar cases. https://mobile.twitter.com/natalia__coelho/status/1537886442235473922 same Natalia.
The anti-Paradox of Tolerance post was pretty disappointing, because it completely dodges the issue by pretending that censoring is something only strawman leftists do, and thus has nothing interesting to say. If you think that left wing cancel mobs are the real enemy, then you can just do a find/replace on the post of "facist" with "left wing cancel mob" to see the paradox in action. Who cancels the cancelers? It's a real dilemma and anyone who pretends there are easy answers is delusional.
Yup.
Boy was I excited to see my name on the AI alignment chart until I remembered no one knows or cares what I think about AGI
Am I missing something with the Twitter links? Both the "why don't we build underground" and "why are some Indian people anti-Taj" links seem to take me to a Tweet that asks the question, but then no actual discussion of the question. In past, when I've seen people link Tweets, it usually links a thread that then contains discussion of the question in the first, but I don't see any of that discussion, and the links here suggest to me that I should be able to see some of that discussion by clicking on the link.
That post about analyzing university cost increase seems to make some mistakes.
It's a nice null assumption that expenditures on support should track expenditures on education, but it would definitely be worth a deeper dive (some people have mentioned that the increase in attendance by minorities, women, first-generation students, and students with disabilities has led to a big increase in the offices dedicated to ensuring that these students have success).
I wouldn't expect a student/faculty ratio chart from law schools to be a great proxy for the rest of the university. I expect there to be different trends in these ratios between engineering schools, agriculture schools, colleges of sciences and of humanities (whether separate or merged), and others.
But the biggest issue is using the length of the course catalog as a measure of the number of classes taught. The post catches the point that "Math 101" just appears once in the catalog no matter how many sections are being taught, but it doesn't catch the point that catalogs have a tendency to grow whenever departments add classes but not shrink when those classes fail to get taught. I believe that Texas A&M has some sort of process whereby a class that hasn't been taught for six consecutive semesters then gets flagged for removal from the catalog unless the department actively intervenes, but even with that, a class takes up just as much space in the catalog if it's being taught in ten sections per semester, or if it's being taught once every six semesters. I would bet that for upper division classes, there's been a gradual tendency over the past few decades for new faculty members to create new classes once in a while, and add them to the catalog, but keep teaching the same number of classes per faculty per semester by just slightly increasing the duration of the rotation. (i.e., maybe an English professor used to teach 19th Century American literature every semester, and then started alternating teaching 19th Century American literature and 19th Century British literature every other semester, but now they teach 19th Century American literature, 19th Century British literature, and 19th Century world literatures in English on a three semester rotation). I would not be surprised if the average number of sections *per semester* of a listing in the catalog has gradually gone down for this reason (though I would also not be surprised to learn that the average number of sections per semester for a catalog listing has gone up, as we get more and more sections of Math 101 and the like).
It would be nice to see some attempt to guess whether the actual courseload taught by professors has changed. In philosophy (the field I know best) currently, research-focused universities typically have a 2/2 load (i.e., each professor teaches two sections per semester) while moderately prominent liberal arts colleges and non-flagship state universities tend to have a 3/3 load, and less famous private colleges and community colleges have a 4/4 load. But I think in the sciences the corresponding teaching loads are all lower, and I don't know whether that was already true a few decades ago, or whether these expectations have changed over time. (Some of the most prominent philosophy departments have moved to a 2/1 load, and I think that is a recent change.)
Correction on Point 29
https://twitter.com/MathBrush/status/1518214565682626560?t=RxvZzI0avCtoy5KoQJ-uNQ&s=19
Can someone track down the source of the ball bearing experiment (link #2)?
I have tried and it seems to be one of those circular reference search results. Perhaps, it is an example of a closed timelike loop, and the video bootstrapped itself from an infinite regress of alternate histories...
But seriously, how would one go about replicating this experiment? Why were there balls of different sizes? How was the magnetic field generated? What is the seemingly shallow layer of some sort of viscous liquid?
I find it amusing/intriguing that there were >300 comments on the Reddit thread, comparing the experiment to nerve cell generation and fungii, but no one even asked or commented regarding the original source of this widely distributed video.
> the claim of global cognitive decline due to decreasing nicotine use
is followed by a passage I found most interesting as a Ukraine war buff:
> *WHY THE CIA MUST BE ABOLISHED*
> When I heard about the intelligence assessment that forecast a swift Russian victory I blew up and I said, this is total rubbish and it’s dangerous. Why? Because it’s shared with the Germans. So the Germans say, we will not stop certification of Nord Stream 2, because Putin will inevitably win.
> *And we will not allow any 40-year-old weapons we sent to Estonia to go to Ukraine.*
> That’s right. We will not supply one round. These are the 122-millimeter howitzers, which had belonged to the East German army, taken over by the West German army. And the Estonians wanted to donate them to Ukraine. And the Germans said, you can’t do it because they were briefly German.
> This was all based on the German assessment that, because the intervention would be immediately successful, there’s no point in disrupting our economy. Kyiv will fall in 24 hours. That was disastrous, because Putin watched the Germans. They are his big customers, and he’s German-oriented, he speaks German. The German announcements gave him a green light.
> *You’re saying that the German assessment was based on the U.S. assessment.*
> Entirely based on the U.S. assessment. Now, the German BND [Federal Intelligence Service] is a useless organization of time servers. They simply relayed the U.S. assessment. So, bad intelligence destroyed deterrence, because the wrong intelligence about what would happen in Ukraine fed into the German policy, which had the effect of inviting Putin in. If the Germans had told Putin on February 23rd what they would do on February 25th, he would never have invaded. OK.
> If you go through the tweets of those days, I started tweeting about the intelligence community, just saying, “17 agencies,” or is it 18, I forget, “none of whom believe in speaking foreign languages, who were all in Kyiv, had no idea who the Ukrainians were. They confused the Ukrainians with some other people that surrendered,” and things like that. I started attacking them head on, and then I started pushing for something that I am pushing for, trying to recruit senators to hold a series of hearings on the performance of the intelligence community, not merely then, but in other cases. Like their estimate that Kabul would hold out for two years, even without any U.S. assistance. [...]
> The CIA’s assessments that Kabul would resist the Taliban for a long time and that Kyiv would fall in 24 hours are sufficient grounds for emptying out its buildings, fumigating them thoroughly, and restaffing with people who are actually interested in foreign countries and therefore know a language or two really well, and have traveled the world.
An idea I find credible is that the U.S. correctly predicted the invasion because they have Kremlin insider information, and the U.S. wrongly predicted the rapid fall of Ukraine because they have Kremlin insider information (and apparently, knew nothing else about Ukraine).