> The proper way of calculating a center of mass on a sphere is *not* to combine the weighted average of the latitudes with the weighted average of the longitudes.
This is obvious to me. However, it isn't obvious that the right way to do it would involve calculating the average position in 3-D space. (I'm not saying that isn't the right way; it's just not obvious.)
Is there a good argument for why that way of calculating the center of mass is better than hypothetical alternatives? For example, in the two-point approach, I'd prefer to just take the position halfway along the shortest path (on the surface of the sphere) between the two points. In that case, you get the same result. Extended to many points instead of just two, are those approaches equivalent?
I wonder how many of the "don't work at all" are in that position because they *can't* work, rather than *don't want to* work.... Disability is depressingly common in aggregate, especially if one includes mental illness, and many conditions that are not disabling with sufficient medical care are disabling when that care is unaffordable.
On the same lines as #17, I found an edition of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry & Physics from the 1930s that listed the neutron as chemical element no. 0.
I suppose technically a single neutron is an isotope of element 0? Especially since you can get clusters of two neutrons and probably other weird combinations in neutron stars...
Should an antiproton count as element -1? Antihydrogen?
Well, no, since it has protons in it, too. But a neutron star can't have any protons, in my understanding, since everything is pressed up against each other so tightly. If it weren't, it would be a white dwarf, which may well have lots of free protons in close proximity, but not as compressed as a neutron star, which I thought has neutrons packed as closely together as in an atomic nucleus on Earth.
Though there may be about 10^80 protons in the universe, I don't think they could be considered a single atom, since most of the protons are far away from each other. And not a molecule, either, since most atoms are not chemically bound to each other.
My understanding is that neutron stars are believed to be coated in a thin veneer of ordinary matter - the pressure at a depth of let's say 1mm being insufficient to overcome the electron degeneracy pressure. But I am not a cosmologist.
Neither am I, but Robert L. Forward was a theoretical physicist and a writer of diamond-hard science fiction. His first novel, "Dragon's Egg", was set largely on a neutron star and does indeed involve a thin crust of ordinary matter. If iron compressed to several metric tons per cubic centimeter can be considered "ordinary"
Re 34: Have these people *read* the Bhagavad Gita the model is trained on? It's what the "I [have] become Death, destroyer of worlds" quote is from, but if you've only heard it via Oppenheimer, you might not realize that in context, it's a boast, not a lament.
I thought 34 was funny too. “Should I, Arjuna, greatest warrior alive, like, kill?” Particularly in the context of the Gita where the whole thing is that Krishna is trying to get Arjuna to shake himself off and go kill people.
I always interpreted Oppenheimer's use of the quote to mean something like "We now wield the power of gods, yet remain mere mortals". In that context, a god's boast can well be a mortal's lament.
(of course, this is purely my personal view; I know little of Hindu scripture, and even less of Oppenheimer's knowledge of it.)
"We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, he takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."
Oppenheimer was not only deeply familiar with the original text, he even studied Sanskrit to read it in the original language. Even in the English translations the meaning of that passage isn't particularly hidden.
IIRC, the original context of the Bhagavad Gita was Krishna, avatar of the god Vishnu, persuading prince Arjuna to fight in a war, as was his duty, even though it meant spilling the blood of his own cousins. Krishna's final argument is to take his eldritch divine form -- an infinite number of arms, eyes, mouths, filling the universe -- and declare: "I am death/time, destroyer of all that exists; I have already killed every being that will ever be born; so go and be my instrument in the death of these people, since they have always been already dead". Note that in his famous quote, Oppenheimer does not consider himself the "I" in the Gita's line. Krishna is the Bomb, manifesting itself in history; Oppenheimer is Arjuna, being prodded on to do his duty even if it means monstrous bloodshed.
My own memory of the conversation was more along the lines of the "god's will" excuse. e.g. Your uncle will either die or not, your only duty is to wield the sword, the outcome is beyond your control.
But I like your memory of it as primarily about what you call death/time better as it's more rational.
I mean, to me, yeah, going bezerker and swinging my sword isn't CERTAIN to kill anyone but it's more likely than if I just walk up to him and say, "hey, can I behead you?" or even if I don't go up to him at all. So, yeah, I'd still feel morally culpable.
But "time"?
Time has INDEED already killed all things.
Even your children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
Ecclesiastes' famous first paragraph ends by saying (translating from memory)
"There is no memory of the Early Ones left at all. And there will be no memory of even the Later Ones...among those even after them."
Arjuna's conscience is wise.
The people he was to kill did not indeed matter in the Big Scheme Of Things and therefore to get hung up on moral worries was ridiculous.
Arjuna probably wouldn't benefit very much by capturing his relatives and keeping them as a stock of fresh meat from which to slice a few ounces now and then.
Almost all people at all times enjoy empathetic pleasures of communion with other people.
But to fight as mightily as you could in a one-and-done battle only requires the removal of empathy temporarily.
So while it's true that time has already killed all the people alive today, that bit of information, like the fact that we're actually a gazillion quarks, is only a good idea to call to mind if you are on the battlefield and see people you love in the direct path you will need to go through to survive and have a longer and nicer life during which you can enjoy communion with other relatives and people you find sympatico.
......
I am curious about your word death/time. Does the Sanskrit actually say "Time"? In other words is this certainly the original meaning? That (at least in the extreme case of a battlefield charge) you should live your moment 100% fully without any reservations because nothing matters anyway as all humans are actually just dead men walking?
Deeper still, is there any concern about the karmic outcomes of this battle for either Arjuna or the people he is supposed to slaughter? In other words, if Arjuna gives his uncle his war face in order to paralyze him with fear so as to make him more vulnerable to defeat.... if that uncle shits his pants in terror might that not "matter" in a certain sense as he'd be more likely to reappear as a lower life form?
Though if the ultimate belief of the Gita is that these karmic rebirths ultimately end in nothing at all then I guess it wouldn't matter at all.
There are other intellectual paths towards nihilistic disassociation of course but this one about "the present is always becoming the past and vanishing so don't care about the future because it will vanish too is pretty damn good.
> "I am curious about your word death/time. Does the Sanskrit actually say "Time"? In other words is this certainly the original meaning? That (at least in the extreme case of a battlefield charge) you should live your moment 100% fully without any reservations because nothing matters anyway as all humans are actually just dead men walking?"
Keeping in mind that I can't read Sanskrit and don't know much about Indian literature, I think "time" is the most common translation (Arnold: "Thou seest Me as Time who kills, Time who brings all to doom" *; Besant: "Time am I, laying desolate the world, Made manifest on earth to slay mankind!" **) The original word appears to be काल (kālá), which mostly seems to refer to time or periods of time, though Wiktionary also gives a minor meaning as "death by old age" ***.
As for the karmic outcomes, it's indeed one of Arjuna's arguments against his participation, but according to one treatment****, "Krishna... made a shocking suggestion: even a warrior who was fighting a deadly battle could achieve moksha. To achieve this, he had to dissociate himself from the effect of his action—in this case the battle, and the death of his kinsfolk. Like any yogin, the man of action (karma) must give up desire. He could not permit himself to lust after the fame, wealth, or power that would result from the military campaign. It was not the actions themselves that bound human beings to the endless round of rebirth, but attachment to the fruits of these deeds. The warrior must perform his duty without hope of personal gain, showing the same detachment as a yogin... The warrior must take the “me” and “mine” out of his deeds, so that he acted quite impersonally. Once he had achieved this, he would in fact be “inactive,” because “he” would not be taking part in the war."
Of course, in modern times, "I'm just doing my duty/following orders" has taken a much darker connotation.
I do not believe in text as a means by which the most important of hidden matters can be conveyed but to grant a small amount of context. Among other things I am an Orthodox Rabbi.
My point is not that you can assume a background or belief/practice/etc similar to any other Orthodox Rabbi you may know, or know of.
That would be a Big error.
Simply that my learning and life has been more than elementary on mamy matters that directly or tangentially relate to Judaism/Jews/JewishScript.
I say that not to demand to be heeded as an authority, but simply as a guesstimate regarding my approximate meaning.
Being as my words are simple, it can be useful for a reader who doesn't know me in person to know whether the writer has taught and published on related matters or is approximating what he believes he recalled from a magazine article. 😂
He definitely knew the context, as his interest in sanskrit and hindu philosophy is pretty well-documented. The gita is that kind of text people can meditate over their entire lives for different interpretations and meanings, and I think Oppenheimer quoting it is the same.
The greater context of the boast is that the pandava prince Arjuna doesn't want to fight and kill the enemy army of kauravas, many of which are his relatives or otherwise great men. The war between these two groups is the subject matter of the epic Mahabharata, in which the gita is awkwardly embedded
Krishna, the avatar of boss-god Vishnu who accompanies Arjuna, spends the whole gita discussing philosophy and trying to convince him to fight. A bit after the halfway point, in chapter 11, Krishna pulls the nuclear option and reveals his God form, which includes some freaky imagery.
Highlights:
> "If a thousand suns were to blaze forth together in the sky, they would not match the splendor of that great form. [...] I see Your infinite form in every direction, with countless arms, stomachs, faces, and eyes. O Lord of the universe, whose form is the universe itself, I do not see in You any beginning, middle, or end. [...] I see all the sons of Dhritarashtra, along with their allied kings, including Bheeshma, Dronacharya, Karn, and also the generals from our side, rushing headlong into Your fearsome mouths. I see some with their heads smashed between Your terrible teeth."
And then Khrishna says the part which Oppenheimer quotes, but notice the differences in this more standard translation:
> "The Supreme Lord said: I am mighty Time, the source of destruction that comes forth to annihilate the worlds. Even without your participation, the warriors arrayed in the opposing army shall cease to exist. Therefore, arise and attain honor! Conquer your foes and enjoy prosperous rulership. These warriors stand already slain by Me, and you will only be an instrument of My work, O expert archer. Dronacharya, Bheeshma, Jayadratha, Karn, and other brave warriors have already been killed by Me. Therefore, slay them without being disturbed. Just fight and you will be victorious over your enemies in battle."
In context, the quote is essentially fatalist: It's implying that, to claim responsibility for the deaths in war and thus refuse to carry them out would be arrogant in the face of God, who has already pre-ordained their deaths and to whom you are just one tool of many.
It's easy to see why Oppenheimer would contemplate this part of the gita when testing a terrible weapon which, on one hand will kill a great deal of honourable people, but on the other hand will determine the outcome of a war. A war which, like Arjuna, Oppenheimer considers essentially just. Whether you interpret the quote as Oppenheimer trying to convince himself or something else, he's clearly putting himself in Arjuna's role just as much as Krishna's/Death's.
Interestingly, there were elements of all this on the other side too, as quite a few nazis had similar interest in eastern philosophy (hence the swastika). I remember reading, but not where, about axis soldiers being taught to ignore the moral burden of shooting another human by thinking of it as pre-ordined our outside any causality chain: "You're not shooting someone, a bullet is simply leaving the barrel of your gun as you squeeze this trigger as a coincidental facet of how the universe is structured." Or something like that.
#11. "Has anyone followed some pre-selected group of equal class people (eg the population of some low-income school district) and seen how their own success varies with sequence compliance?"
We can't reasonably expect everyone in a low-income school district to be of exactly equal class, so we might just be picking up on degrees of class within that group.
I am a bit confused about what the distinction between "causal vs class selection" is here anyway, when behaviour and class are the same thing. Being middle-class makes you more likely to follow a middle-class life pattern, but following a middle-class life pattern also makes you fundamentally more middle-class. If you behave like a middle-class person, you become a middle class person and people treat you like a middle-class person.
It's easy to defend the idea that behavior and class are the same thing.
However, _every_ aspect of your behavior goes into determining your social class. Mostly your behavior will all be part of the normal package associated with your background. Sometimes you'll have quirks. Sometimes you might be trying to pass as part of a different class than you actually come from, in which case your behavior will be an unpredictable mixture of the behaviors that are natural to you, behaviors that you've understood and managed to imitate accurately, and behaviors that are not natural to you or to your target class, because you misunderstood what people in your target class do.
It makes perfect conceptual sense to ask whether adopting a few specific very particular upper-class behaviors can cause positive results in someone whose behavior otherwise remains lower-class. Upper-class people will almost all feature those same behaviors, along with an uncountable number of other upper-class behaviors. Imitators will not be able to imitate them all.
I think the problem is that “having the motivation to emulate some behaviour” would have its own, statistically-relevant consequences. You’d need to choose some equally hard-to-imitate behaviour, and show that people who imitate the second have better outcomes than people who imitate the first. Or if you’re lucky, choose some natural experiment where the behaviour varies by something other than class (e.g. if two neighbouring states have different marriage laws so people marry before kids at different rates).
Yeah, my gut reaction to that was exactly the same. Arguably you could investigate in order to pick out which middle-class behaviors give immediate benefit, but the network effects of joining the middle-class mean that porting those behaviors to the lower class only help so much.
In regards to the link about copy-editing and AI, I feel like there is and has been a lot of soulless writing where people aren't really expressing ideas long before AI. That isn't just me being sarcastic and cynical, I am drawing from experience.
I have worked as an online tutor for many years and have had to help students revise essays and short answer questions. It has been shocking to me how many of the students clearly had no understanding of what they were writing, they had just pieced together a bunch of words and phrases that sounded like they went together based on their skimming of the readings. I often asked students what they meant by some phrase they wrote, and they couldn't explain it to me. Sometimes it was clear they had copied someone else's writing and just swapped words using a thesaurus. Goodhart's law in action, in other words.
When I started reading about how GPT worked I was actually struck by how similar it was to what my students were doing. In both cases the writing was being done without any understanding of what ideas the words represented, they just stitched together strings of phrases that seem like they went together. GPT can do a better job than my students because it has access to more texts, but they are both similar in that they don't really understand what the words they are writing say.
In some articles I have read professors being shocked that GPT could pass their exams. Having worked with many college students, I am inclined to wonder if that is because GPT can actually do quality writing, or because professors frequently give passing grades to word salad written by people with no understanding of what they wrote because they'll get in trouble if they flunk too many students.
I don't know how much my experiences generalize to other fields. In terms of copy-writing I've often felt like a lot of organizational copy is just generic pleasantries with a few ideas sprinkled in. I remember once when I worked at a nonprofit I wrote a blurb describing a program and my boss "punched it up" (for example, she changed "our staff" to "our team of dedicated professionals"). That kind of writing, where you encircle ideas in a cloud of generic pleasantries, is something where I don't think the human race would lose much through its automation.
The main point I'm trying to make is that there was an awful lot of soulless writing that didn't mean anything before GPT came along, and that if that kind of writing is replaced by GPT there isn't that much loss. And who knows, maybe GPT will force professors to redesign their curricula so that students will have to show actual understanding of the material, since GPT has automated the process of Goodharting it. I must admit I feel a certain sadistic glee at the thought of my students suddenly being forced to understand and engage with their course material.
Agree with this. I find the existence of ChatGPT produced writing strangely consoling - when I stumble across empty and idea-free articles, I say to myself 'guess AI wrote that one' even though they are indistinguishable from things I could have read a year ago or five or ten...
I agree that I don't think AI is making the problem WORSE. Computers have bid the price of a mediocre sentence down to essentially zero already. But contra AI bulls, I don't think it's making the problem any BETTER either. The AI has just learned how to be a mediocre writer and god help us, we don't need any MORE of that.
As for your point on pedagogy, I agree completely. Insofar as AI changes how students are assessed, it will almost certainly be for the better.
I tried ChatGPT out on some questions from the Eton College scholarship exam General paper (a tough test of logical and verbal reasoning administered to bright 13-year-olds). It did not do well. Samples here made with GPT-3.5, but the outcomes didn't substantially improve when a colleague tried with GPT-4: https://twitter.com/pozorvlak/status/1641836166927220738 Perhaps GPT-5 will do better, of course, but this experience makes me think Gary Marcus is on to something, and that you can't do much better than the (pretty low) average human performance on that kind of question by simply increasing scale and amount of training data.
I looked at your example question. There are aspects of the question itself (as intended) that I don't like; for example, deva' is in only one example sentence and therefore it isn't possible to determine what it means. Despite that, one of the four questions posed to the testee is "give the meaning of deva'". (The best available guess is that it means "here", but to make this guess you need to be in possession of the question, which informs you that you should be able to guess what the word means. Merely being in possession of the glossed examples is not sufficient; compare the example "hucha' tereg urijuku" which is glossed as "the game was played yesterday" despite the fact that we can completely account for every word in that example sentence and none of them carries a meaning related to "yesterday".)
Anyway, you say that the GPT answers to followup questions are consistent with its (completely unjustified) answers to the first set of questions. I would not interpret things that way; if we model the GPT as someone who believes that the infix -ok- "is the third person singular possessive [marker]", we should expect a third person singular possessive or two to appear in the translation of "zuthuz esalacoka aburukoke". There are many problems with the concept that "deva' means "was" or "were"," but if we accept the apparent assumption that Sedna is isomorphic to English, there is a glaring inconsistency when "Here the giants will know his songs about the games" is translated using deva'.
> deva' is in only one example sentence and therefore it isn't possible to determine what it means
I think you can. Most simply, you can observe that "here" only occurs in the gloss of that example, so deva' probably means "here". But you can also check that hucha' occurs exactly when the sentence is in the past tense, so is probably a past-tense marker (same with hulescha' and the future tense), that aboruku or close variants occur exactly when the gloss mentions a boy or boys, and that pathad or variants occur exactly when the gloss mentions knowing. So we can say with high confidence that deva' means "here", hucha' means "past tense", and hulescha' means "future tense". If I were decoding a real unknown language I'd certainly look for more examples to test these deductions, but I haven't used the assumption that the question gives enough information anywhere.
> compare the example "hucha' tereg urijuku" which is glossed as "the game was played yesterday" despite the fact that we can completely account for every word in that example sentence and none of them carries a meaning related to "yesterday".
We can deduce that hucha' is a past-tense marker; it's IMHO completely plausible that "yesterday" could come to mean "at some time in the past" through metonymy.
> Anyway, you say that the GPT answers to followup questions are consistent with its (completely unjustified) answers to the first set of questions.
Not merely completely unjustified, but definitely wrong.
> if we model the GPT as someone who believes that the infix -ok- "is the third person singular possessive [marker]", we should expect a third person singular possessive or two to appear in the translation of "zuthuz esalacoka aburukoke".
Good catch, though there is a *first*-person possessive in "My game is being played".
> if we accept the apparent assumption that Sedna is isomorphic to English
I think "isomorphic" is too strong - the grammar is pretty different. And "It is possible to provide useful translations from common words in language X to common words in language Y" is a weak assumption, even if the nuances of meaning don't quite line up.
> there is a glaring inconsistency when "Here the giants will know his songs about the games" is translated using deva'.
Also a good catch! So ChatGPT is even weaker at logical reasoning than I had thought!
Yes, you can deduce that hucha' is a past tense marker. You can go on to speculate that it derived from a word that meant "yesterday" in an ancestral form of the language. But you know with certainty that it doesn't mean "yesterday" in modern Sedna. There are many examples listed in which hucha' appears and there is no reference to yesterday.
The same argument that you say should give us high confidence that deva' means "here" should give us even higher confidence that some element of "hucha' tereg urijuku" means "yesterday". But we already know that that isn't the case; there is no element that means "yesterday". Similarly, we have no grounds to conclude that any element of "deva' hucha' pathad fi aboruku" means "here" -- unless we're willing to believe the test when one of its questions tells us that this is the case.
> [The GPT answers are n]ot merely completely unjustified, but definitely wrong.
Sadly, this isn't the case. You're given 12 sentences accompanied by English glosses which don't stick particularly close to the Sedna syntax. It's perfectly possible to come up with sets of examples like this in two natural languages that will lead, by the type of reasoning you're supposed to apply to these questions, to grossly erroneous conclusions about one of the languages. That requires some malevolence on the part of the person providing the examples, but it can be done.
>> the apparent assumption that Sedna is isomorphic to English
Like I said, there are many problems with the claim that deva' means "was or were". That claim in this context will always be taken as meaning that deva' is a copula, the verb you see appearing in sentences like "I am a doctor". No such verb exists in any of the example glosses, making it a truly awful guess.
Forms of 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒 do appear in the examples, but without exception they are the very syntactically different passive marker 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒, not the copula 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒. In order for the guess "deva' means "was" or "were"" to make any sense, you have to import the assumption that Sedna is identical to English in how it marks the passive voice, or that the English way of marking passives is not just a coincidence but a fundamental fact about human language that would naturally apply to any other language. This is, obviously, not true. (And not assumed by the test as intended - instead, passive marking is accomplished through the extremely unusual method of devoicing the initial consonant of the verb. This raises all kinds of questions; it requires a phonemic distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants while at the same time preventing transitive verbs from beginning with voiceless consonants -- or vowels. A voicing contrast is also used to distinguish nominative from accusative case in possessive adjectives, even though the same distinction in nouns is made with vowel suffixes.)
To avoid this problem, it would be necessary for the guess about deva' to be phrased "deva' is a passive marker that applies to verbs in the past tense", not "deva' means "was" or "were"."
I'm having trouble keeping track: are we in agreement that GPT's answers suggest it is poor at logical reasoning on unseen problems? Or are you saying that the problem as set is too ill-posed to prove anything?
> unless we're willing to believe the test when one of its questions tells us that this is the case
Well, yeah, you have to assume that the glosses are correct to make progress. But that's not the same as using meta-logical information like "this set of example translations is enough to answer this question because otherwise this exam would be impossible".
> But you know with certainty that it doesn't mean "yesterday" in modern Sedna. There are many examples listed in which hucha' appears and there is no reference to yesterday.
I disagree. The glosses (assuming they're accurate) indicate that it can *sometimes* mean "yesterday". I can completely buy a language in which a word for "yesterday" is sometimes used with its literal meaning and sometimes means "some time in the past" - we do this sort of thing in English all the time! Think about the word "suit", which sometimes means a literal suit of clothes and sometimes means a businessperson, who may not even be wearing a literal suit.
> It's perfectly possible to come up with sets of examples like this in two natural languages that will lead, by the type of reasoning you're supposed to apply to these questions, to grossly erroneous conclusions about one of the languages. That requires some malevolence on the part of the person providing the examples, but it can be done.
I'd love to see an example, if you have time to find or construct one! You've clearly studied more linguistics than me :-)
> In order for the guess "deva' means "was" or "were"" to make any sense, you have to import the assumption that Sedna is identical to English in how it marks the passive voice, or that the English way of marking passives is not just a coincidence but a fundamental fact about human language that would naturally apply to any other language. This is, obviously, not true.
Oh, I see. If I were marking the question I'd treat that as "the candidate answered imprecisely" rather than "the candidate mistakenly thinks that Sedna behaves like English in using the same word for a copula and for the passive past tense". Possibly relevant context: candidates for this exam will have studied at least one non-English language (probably both French and Latin, and possibly also Ancient Greek). But either interpretation is, as you say, inconsistent with using deva' to translate a sentence that uses neither construction. So yes, I was mistaken when I said that ChatGPT's later answers were consistent with its earlier answers - as I said, I didn't check very closely!
"All that comes up on search engines anymore are dozens of identical AI generated articles that only graze the surface of the topic and never answer your question. So you add reddit to the search query because even talking to redditors is refreshing compared to nonsentient machines."
Wasn't this just a few years ago the standard complaint against modern *journalism*? Journalists copying from each other; often coordinating their approaches in private mailing lists. All the buzz, but your factual questions are never answered, because by the time the facts are reliably known, the topic is no longer interesting. People adding "reddit" to their search queries in order to avoid blogspam and clickbait.
Hey, the AI will probably devour us all, but it not an accident that journalists got on the chopping block first.
(Perhaps instead -- or in addition to -- measuring IQ, we should also measure something called "GPT quotient", which would be the version of the GPT that replaces you. The average journalist has a GPT quotient 4, because GPT-4 can do their job.)
Trying to find digestible news on the internet is not something anyone makes money off of. Click-bait low-info articles aside, over 50% of "news" articles are actually ads. I get 90% of my web based news from https://www.boringreport.org/app - a site that uses AI to strip out all extraneous garbage text, all images, and stealth ads. You can still click through to the original ad if you like. The main take away from this site is that day to day very little happens that is actually noteworthy.
> And who knows, maybe GPT will force professors to redesign their curricula so that students will have to show actual understanding of the material, since GPT has automated the process of Goodharting it.
This will not happen. That's how curricula generally start out; the reason they change is, as you note, that a curriculum is judged to be deficient if someone who attends class and turns in assignments is nevertheless capable of failing the class.
> there was an awful lot of soulless writing that didn't mean anything before GPT came along<
Which in turn becomes fodder for GPT to learn on…and…uh…
You know that game where someone picks a word out of the dictionary, and then others have to give a definition; the point of the game being to make up a false definition that sounds convincing. You win by getting the largest number of people to believe your definition is right. GPT will never have a sense of true or false. If something can write a convincing legal brief that is full of case citations that don’t actually exist, and vouch for their veracity when challenged, then we are not dealing with something that lies,
We are dealing with something that has no concept of the underlying issue. Language for human beings is a metaphorical system that allows us to refer to things in the world. It has second and order derivatives, which means we have language that can refer to other language that refers to something in the real world, the AI has only a world of language. It is no longer a metaphor. It is the real thing. That’s a problem.
> In both cases the writing was being done without any understanding of what ideas the words represented, they just stitched together strings of phrases that seem like they went together
This does not match my experience or understanding of how GPT4 works. How does this hypothesis explain the GPT4 Unicorn (Figure 1.3 from the "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4" paper), or Figure 5.8, where GPT4 is able to draw a map of a room after being allowed to ask questions about it?
To me these and other examples from the paper and my own dialogue with GPT4 seem to suggest that GPT has an internal model of the world, albeit a very simplistic and often incorrect one.
My understanding of LLMs is that they basically function through statistical analysis of huge databases of text and are therefore able to write sentences in proper English with no understanding of what they actually mean (hence why they are often referred to as "glorified autocomplete"). AI "art" programs are similar, except they correlate text with blobs of pixels, allowing them to draw human figures without knowing what a human looks like, or even what looking is. It seems like it is trained similarly to write computer code without knowing what the code does.
If I understand the paper you are referencing correctly, it looks like GPT-4 didn't literally draw anything, even to the extent that art programs like Midjourney do. Instead it wrote TikZ and pyplot code that generated drawings of a unicorn and a map. How to write code thsy draws simple images seems like something that would be in its training data. What kind of code is statistically correlated with what verbal descriptions likely is as well.
GPT-4 likely didn't actually have any model of what a unicorn or a room was. It knew that certain text descriptions were associated with certain pyplot and TikZ programing and extrapolated from there. That's quite an incredible achievement, but l don't think it arrived at it using the same process a human did. Instead it likely used an scaled up version of the process I described in my original post.
Actually, the map in question was a real room that was described to GPT through sentences alone and did not correspond to any existing training data. GPT was then able to display It's internal mental model of the room with a sketch (using a tool).
It's worth reading that example in the paper thoroughly, it's fascinating!
Edit: I should add that I've replicated this with my apartment with GPT4.
#25 as an Australian I don’t think it’s done that at all. Sorry day isn’t exactly well-known in most circles - and there exist sus at risk campaign against major public holidays such as Australia Day.
"Australia has a National Sorry Day where they focus on various atrocities perpetrated against the indigenous population. I think this makes more sense than the American solution of having it be a mildly awkward undercurrent across all the other more celebratory holidays (eg July 4, Thanksgiving, Columbus Day)."
We actually do both. In practice National Sorry Day is mostly ignored, while Australia Day* has become an annual 2-3 week national argument over whether we should be celebrating Australia Day (or rather, should we move it to another date).
* (our Columbus Day equivalent, which is mostly treated like Americans treat July 4th)
Right, National Sorry Day exists purely for the sake of culture war arguments (and even then only by particularly dedicated culture warriors). There isn't a day off for it, there's no traditional Sorry Day meal, no one performs any Sorry Day rituals, blah, blah blah.
What is more culturally relevant is:
1) Welcome to Country ceremonies, where before major events professional Aboriginal welcomers will get up and welcome all the rest of us to Australia. Often this includes a gift-giving ceremony, sometimes there's smoke and dancing involved.
2) Acknowledgement of Country - at smaller events typically you will see the MC recite a specific set of words. "I acknowledge the <local tribe> people as the traditional custodians of the land we meet on today and pay respect to their elders, past, present, and emerging". It's become almost like a prayer used to be - done routinely to open formal gatherings. E.g. school assemblies, board meetings, etc. Somewhat amusingly, I've heard Aborigines complain about the phrasing (on the basis that there is no such thing as an "emerging elder"), but that doesn't seem to bother anyone.
3) Indigenous Rounds in our major football codes. We'll have a weekend (now spread over two weekends in the AFL for some reason that escapes me) where all the teams wear special jerseys designed with aboriginal artwork and the contribution of Aborigines to the sport is highlighted. Sport is a big part of Aussie culture so this is a big deal, and also (in the AFL at least, I don't follow NRL) Aboriginal players really do have a disproportionate presence at the top level relative to their small population.
4) Also we are having a referendum this year about whether to establish an Aboriginal advisory body in the constitution (which I personally expect to fail).
I have always wondered about the psychological effects of telling the majority of the population "this is not your land, you are only welcome here if we say so"...
There’s a weird double think thing going on where somehow we keep insisting that this “always was, always will be, Aboriginal land”, reminding each other that “sovereignty was never ceded”, and yet you’re a crazy extremist if you think that means that Aboriginals get to kick the white people out if they want.
I guess most people think of “ownership” and “sovereignty” as kind of abstract, spiritual concepts in this context rather than actually meaning “you have the right to decide who can live on the land you own.”
But hey. The world is built on incoherent, inconsistent ideas. To the logical mind it feels like these contradictions must eventually collapse on themselves. But probably they can just continue on forever until people don’t even care anymore.
This drives me up the wall about land acknowledgements in Canada. If they're meaningful, we need to be giving people some land back. If they're not meaningful, stop fucking having them everywhere and patting yourself on the back for them.
Then there's the bit where we are apparently an illegal settler nation who is committing genocide, but we need to bring in more immigrants (indeed, as many as possible). I feel like both those things can't be true.
Dunno about 'Illegal', but 'settlers nation built on genocide' is quite obviously true. Alas, how would it change the facts about immigration? Is an Indian programmer in Vancouver less productive bc a genocide was perpetrated 300 years ago?
Built on genocide is more debatable than it would be for the US - Canada has far fewer examples of Indigenous groups nearly or actually getting wiped out (and a far friendlier relationship with a lot of groups). Most of the truly awful stuff happens relatively late. It's far less "we killed people for the land" and far more "once people had agreed to give us the land, we treated them abominably in ways that killed or abused a lot of them."
In any case, the Prime Minister has at least passively claimed that genocide of Indigenous people in Canada is ongoing (he has also done basically dick about it).
It doesn't change facts about immigration. But if being "settlers" is a bad thing (and I assure you, it is presented as such) then how the hell is it OK to add more settlers?
And this is without getting into one of the core ideas behind Canada having a quite open immigration policy - multiculturalism. You can't logically combine multiculturalism with the idea that people are entitled to extra rights for being here first.
I suspect you're only considered a crazy extremist if you argue both that Aboriginals get to kick the white people out if they want and that that's a bad thing...
the double think reminds me of the "defund the police" discourse.
Personally, I'm quite right wing on the whole "aboriginal land" issue, being conquered by another country isn't great but it's 250 years in the past now and trying to reverse every similarly old conquest would erase a lot of countries (including most of the USA, and fragmenting Italy and Germany back into city states, among others).
The complaint that Aboriginal people didn't get full citizen rights in Australia until circa 1970 is a much more serious and real one, and maybe warrants compensation to people older than that? But again, as a matter of law if not culture there's been full equality since then, and I don't think in the modern day Aboriginal Australians should have any more special privileges than Australians of any other heritage. (Which is importantly distinct from whether remote regional communities warrant extra support by virtue of being poor and remote, which they definitely do, but that doesn't require encoding racial discrimination in law)
You need to read the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and then realize that a LOT of people consider that just a starting point.
(It shouldn't be, and it's also inherently ludicrous. Note, for example, that the Inuit in Scott's recent post would be having their rights breached, because they couldn't simultaneously participate in Western society AND their traditional one).
Thor, it sounds like you are poorly informed rather than right wing. I don't have any duty to correct you. You could easily do that yourself by thinking critically about what you have written. However, for the benefit of anyone else who is reading these comments I feel obliged to mention that land rights is not about reversing conquest, and that historical disadvantage is not something that you can simply erase by giving full legal equality.
#25, People in Australia still always have the discussion on Australia Day (Jan 26th) on whether it should be renamed or changed since it was the date of first settlement (First Fleet).
National Sorry Day also isn't a national holiday so the conversation remains
This seems like a rude thing to say about a story someone probably put a lot of effort into. Why not just say “it’s stylistically like Scott but not the same content” or whatever you meant, rather than saying someone’s story reads like a sometimes-cogent computer program wrote it?
I wasn't saying it rhetorically. My impression of it is that there are reasonable chances that it is written by ChatGPT, prompted to create a story in Scott's style. It's not even really any kind of commentary on the quality of the piece, I love AI generated art, both stories and images.
Fair enough. It felt too long-range coherent to me to be from GPT, but haven't played around with ChatGPT or GPT4 enough to know if that's still the case.
My response came from the fact that I would be upset if I got that reaction about fiction I had written, that I was hoping for positive feedback about. Like, why should I have bothered pouring my soul into a story if I could have just asked GPT to do it for me. I don't know how coherent a feeling that is in the world we live in to be honest, but I think most would feel the same.
The best norm would be to only post LLM content with clear disclaimers that that's what it is, and then assume anything without a disclaimers is human-made. Obviously that's tough to enforce...
If you click that link you'll see that the relationship between wealth and kids' cognitive and noncognitive skills disappears among lottery winners. This is probably the most powerful design for assessing the effects of exogenous wealth on outcomes.
If you click that link, you'll see that the relationship between SES and IQs in one study was entirely attributable to genes and not at all attributable to environments. In the UK Biobank, the phenotypic correlations fluid intelligence has with degree attainment, pre-tax household income. the Townsend deprivation index, outright home ownership, and working a manual labor job are, respectively, 0.32, 0.25, -0.09, 0.06, and -0.29. The genetic correlations are 0.71, 0.63, -0.26, 0.26, and -0.82. I believe I've covered the gamut with those traits.
There are many designs that suggest confounding plays the dominant role in the relationship between kids' rearing SES and their achievement scores, GPAs, and IQs. You can even look at PGS correlations since we now have them for education, income, and occupation, and they're all positively related to intelligence and each other.
The standardized test stuff mystifies me. How is SES supposed to causally affect one's ability to answer a math question correctly, for instance? It's just silly, but I guess this is one of those areas where we have to do a ton of research to land back on the conclusion that seems obvious to some people from the start.
Leaving aside the issue of whether octopus farming is a good thing or not, I think it's very misleading to imply that octopus factory farming is a thing that actually exists. When I visited Kanaloa Octopus Farm 10 years ago it was a 400 square foot shack with like maybe a couple of dozen octopuses. Trying to figure out how to get octopus to breed in captivity and not eat each other is a big unsolved problem in octopus farming. Given that nobody yet really understands how to farm octopus, it seems entirely valid to me to characterize octopus farms as research facilities. Even the linked post describes UNAM as "conducting research" and indicates that they are selling fewer than 10,000 octopus per year (not clear what the actual number is though). It also feels misleading to imply that UNAM is trying to do something deceptive by characterizing their octopus farming activities as research, when, octopus farming is not prohibited by either international or Mexican law, and, frankly, an incredibly tiny number of people care about it relative to the number who object to whaling (even tinier if you consider the constituency that Mexico would likely care about).
I mean, if their research consists of "how can we factory farm octopus", I think it's fair to say that it's both research and factory farming.
Also, not that I don't like octopus, but I feel like if we're going to cut out one type of meat for ethical reasons, octopus would be a reasonable choice. The deliciousness-to-intelligence ratio is pretty low.
Scallops have all those blue eyes, and can "fly" from place to place underwater. I'd probably vote for mussels or oysters, which remain stationary for most of their lives.
Whoever created that fire dog has a lot to answer for. Same as the sealion comic guy.*
*This is not a comment on the content of any fire dog or sealion comic memes, whether individually or generally. This is a comment on their ubiquity (at one point or another).
I will comment on the content of xkcd 1357 and its children: fuck them. I'm not an xkcd reader, and while I've heard that this comic is some kind of uncharacteristic lapse into authoritarian cant, I still say fuck them.
xkcd guy (Randall Munroe?) is intelligent/quirky/interesting and comics about math/rockets/dinos and other nerd things in a nerd accessable entertaining way. But he mostly has pretty normie viewpoints and doesn't seem to be much of a critical thinker. His big virtues are thoroughness and imagination, taking scenarios to their full conclusion, not careful analysis.
I have always found 1357 and 137 (https://xkcd.com/137/ ) an odd pair to coexist for the same writer.
Given their separation in time, they may just reflect different stages of his thinking. But juxtaposed, they sort of come across like the Hundred Flowers campaign.
?? I don't see a contradiction. In 137, he says he wants to write whatever he wants to. In 1357, he says he also gets to choose not to listen. These are both compatible. You can write in *your own space* whatever you like. Nobody's obliged to listen or give you a platform. Where's the authoritarianism?
Obviously the two are not literally contradictory, but they certainly have different flavors.
Notably, the first was from 2006, the second from 2014. At the time of the first strip, Republicans controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. By less objective measures, they seemed to have been a stronger cultural force.
Free speech, not just as a legal concept, but as a cultural value, would have been more left-coded, pushing back against a dominant conservative cultural force.
At the time of the second strip, Democrats controlled the White House, and the Senate. By less objective measures, they seemed to have become a stronger cultural force. Cancel Culture (while not called that yet) was to a greater extent being wielded by more left-wing forces.
Free speech, not just as a legal concept, but as a cultural value, would nominally have become more right-coded, pushing back against a dominant liberal cultural force.
I say 'nominally,' since even after clearly becoming cultural underdogs and adopting the language of free speech, many Conservatives still advocate silencing their opponents' speech, and punishing them for it.
My comment is about rhetoric not about whether people actually act consistently with it in a coherent way.
I'm always amazed when people spin "people should be forced to listen to [my] asshole opinions, and I should face zero backlash" as an anti-authoritarian position.
The metaphor is the *marketplace* of ideas. If people don't like your ideas, you're going to get crowded out of the marketplace. And real marketplaces have regulations on what transactions are allowed to occur (in public)
Rank strawmanning. The only acceptable responses to speech are: (1) ignore it or (2) more speech. The fact that regulations exist doesn't mean that they should.
>he only acceptable responses to speech are: (1) ignore it or (2) more speech.
Except you can trivially come up with cases where that's untrue. If someone wanted to broadcast their speech by spamming low-information, high temperature content in reply to every thread and every comment, Scott would be in the right to ban them (and all posters here would appreciate it). Likewise, if I posted your CC, SSN, and address here, you'd be justified in getting it removed. These are extremes, but serve as a sort of base case through which we can progress through inductive reasoning to the idea that some speech isn't acceptable, and it's how you arrive at 1357.
Speech is an action and actions have consequences. It's naive to think otherwise. Freedom of speech is therefore has to be an equilibrium, and just because you personally disagree with where that equilibrium has settled does not make you de facto correct.
>The fact that regulations exist doesn't mean that they should.
I, along with most other people, don't want to live in a society where selling blatantly fraudulent or deadly products is legal. Just because you disagree does not make your position the correct one. Or do you mean that "just because a particular regulation exists does not mean it is justified"? Because that doesn't follow from your argument
The normal marketplace response to products you don't like is not to buy them. Organizing a boycott of the sellers is legal but not part of the mechanism that makes markets work.
The normal response in the market for ideas to ideas you find unconvincing is not to believe them, not to repeat them to others. Trying to impose costs on the people putting out those ideas in order to keep other people from hearing them isn't a violation of freedom of speech in the legal sense but it is inconsistent with the market for ideas defense of freedom of speech.
If that's the only xkcd you've seen, I'll recommend Every Major's Terrible, https://xkcd.com/1052/.
I feel like Making Hashbrowns is only funny if you've binged enough of them to get your head into a particular state, but I found it very funny my first binge. https://xkcd.com/421/
Generally speaking, agreed, but I think the charitable interpretation is that the author was thinking of independent small-scale fora and personal blogs, which generally belong to individual people or to tightly-knit communities, and which exist(ed) in such number and variety that being banned from one is not a terrible loss. Rather different is a ban from an all-devouring social medium that assimilates all competition, enjoys government subsidies, postures as the global meeting place for all discussions of importance, and is a de facto requirement for several jobs. Unfortunately I'm not sure 1357 came early enough for this to be plausible.
It's also just factually false. He makes the middle school-level error of confusing the philosophical principle of freedom of speech with the legal standard of the First Amendment. The First Amendment is one implementation of the ideal of freedom of speech, specifically safeguarding against the threat of *government* retaliation, but the principle itself is much broader. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
I'm mostly surprised that the xkcd guy didn't seem to realise that "freedom of speech only means the government can't censor you" applied to things on 'his' side (though since this particular comic comes from back when the polarisation was just heating up, maybe it wasn't so obvious).
I'm running a website and someone comes on with a pro-gay marriage/trans rights/pick your own value comment? Great, I can bounce them out the door and it's not censorship or repression or any such bad thing! My site, my rules, and I'm not obliged to give space to comments that are against my values, and if you complain, then *you're* the asshole!
The problem with that comic is that it is so *clearly* "right-wing values are held by assholes and claiming free speech defence only means you're a loser of top of being an asshole". It doesn't seem to realise that "oh hey, if school libraries don't want to stock books that say 'sex work to pay for your cross-sex hormones is a legit way to get money, teens!' then they're not engaging in censorship, since a school board is not the government!"
Gamergate is one fight I managed to avoid and I've been careful not to look up what it was about, because I really don't need or want to keep a list of "Internet culture war fights".
I've been on the Internet since Usenet, and it was about a week ago that I first heard of "Loss" and was told that it's one of the best-known memes there is.
"For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning."
It was as if a million copium addicts suddenly cried out in terror, then resolved to huff all the harder and STILL never shut the fuck up.
In the very slowed down version I can see the reality. In the normal version it looks like the hand that comes from behind encloses the foremost hand and then pushes back through it.
I think the point here is that a lot of people are like "How did he do that?", even though it is extremely obvious what he's doing. You can deduce it even if your mind still gives you the optical illusion effect.
I think there's probably some part of our brain that doesn't quite know how to fully process fingers. The notorious AI problems with fingers might go deeper than we know.
I saw the illusion the first few times, then I focused hard on the what the middle finger of the front hand was doing, and the illusion went away. I have trouble seeing the illusion again now.
For what it's worth, the second video where the young white girl repeats the trick is much less convincing. I'm not sure whether it's the skin colour, or just the camera angle, or just the fact that she's not as good/smooth at the trick.
It's odd because generally I do have problems with optical illusions, but that one I could straight away see what he was doing.
Perhaps because going in I knew it was an illusion, so I was watching for that. If I didn't, I think there's a chance my brain could have been tricked.
I suspect the low quality of the video is more important than any deficiency in our brains, with the high level of compression blurring the lines between the fingers.
I notice a similar effect with AI generated art. It obviates much of the automatic "seeing" process. So many times there are clearly problems with a generated image, but we don't see them at first - often only with an analytical eye.
Did you read the article? He's not saying AI has automated away his job; he's saying it's changed his job from helping humans express themselves better to helping to pass off AI-generated text as non-AI-generated. He says the copywriters have been automated away but the editors haven't (yet).
I hardly dare unpack that. Are you saying that lubrication is a defence mechanism against the damage that would otherwise be done by rape? Because it seems to follow that women should therefore be turned on by the prospect of rape. Have I misunderstood?
Indeed you didn't, but what, if not rape, are you claiming lubrication is defensive against? You could have explained this already: "read it again" is not a helpful response.
OK I am now completely mystified. Item 19 (the link) says exactly what I was saying it said:
"Researcher Meredith Chivers has proposed that this evolved in order to protect women from rape: women lubricate and become erect when their bodies expect that sex might happen, whether or not they want the sex, in order to protect the delicate tissues of the vagina from damage. I find this a satisfying explanation, although speculative evolutionary biology of human beings is notoriously prone to bad conclusions so I wouldn’t take it too seriously."
Are you saying lubrication is also defensive against something else, and if so what? Siege artillery? Credit card fraud?
“ Item 19 (the link) says exactly what I was saying it said:”
No it says what you accused me of saying , while clutching your pearls and basically accusing me of rape apologetics. I didnt follow the link and was just responding to the main post.
I'm not sure what OP meant, but it is important to note that many women do experience lubrication during rape. This has been frequently reported to cause guilt and confusion (victims wondering if this means they enjoyed the rape, despite feeling no actual enjoyment). This is also part of the general argument that lubrication is separate from subjective attraction/enjoyment and is more a mechanical preparation.
>Are you saying that lubrication is a defence mechanism against the damage that would otherwise be done by rape?
No. He's saying that lubrication is a defense mechanism against the damage that would otherwise be done by penetrative sex.
>Have I misunderstood?
Yes. You're confused. Specifically, you have confused "lubrication as a physical defense mechanism against penetration" with "lubrication as a sign of sexual desire."
I suggest you calm down--a lot--and think about the distinction between those two things. Pretend you had been having the discussion with somebody more socially adept than Nolan Eoghan, if that helps any. I strongly suspect that it will.
Hey you didn't say anywhere that everyone would be able to view everyone else's entries to the name survey (it's currently set up that way), and I don't want people to see what I wrote...
I am not identifiable by my first name, but I chose to make the same comment both on the survey and here under the links post, guaranteeing that it's trivial to identify my survey response.
I stopped taking the SSC reader survey because it was a surreal combination of being intrusive and completely uninteresting [note: you're getting a lot of selection bias in the reader survey], and I can see why people might not want their responses to that shared. But it's hard for me to imagine a survey more anodyne than the name survey. What is it that you don't want shared?
One of the more interesting side-effects of having a unique, or extremely rare, name... is that you think about internet privacy *very* differently from most David Joneses and Alison Smiths. I'm fairly horrified every time somebody proposes we should strip everybody of internet anonymity, because there are *maybe* three other people in the whole friggin world who share my name, and the privacy consequences for me personally would be drastically different from the consequences for your average Josh or Brooke. Lopsided in the extreme.
I want to see Scott do a poll that compares first-name popularity ranking with how people feel about internet anonymity. I'd bet that there's a tight correlation between how common your name is, and how chill you feel about using it on the internet.
My last name is pretty unique and I don't really mind having it associated with my random Internet stuff, but my mom was a doctor (under her maiden name) and was very determined to make sure that none of her patients could ever find out her address. Fortunately her name is common enough to make her completely Google-proof.
One of my parents was a special-ed teacher who for many years taught "emotionally handicapped" kids-- literally would read the police blotter every week to see what their old students were up to. We paid extra to the phone company to NOT be listed in the phone book.
Mine's rare enough that I had some concerns, but left a comment anyway. The year I was born, it didn't even make the SS roster. But I notice in the last couple years it has finally cracked the top 1000... I am not at all sure how I feel about that.
I think what I'm learning from this experience is not to let people leave comments, or to make it clear that any comments will be identifiable. But I've hidden the whole survey for now.
"Australia has a National Sorry Day where they focus on various atrocities perpetrated against the indigenous population. I think this makes more sense than the American solution of having it be a mildly awkward undercurrent across all the other more celebratory holidays (eg July 4, Thanksgiving, Columbus Day)."
If this described the choices available in the USA, that is to say, one day of remorse and full-throated patrotism/appropriate-ism on other days versus low-to-medium-grade preachy shaming on the same theme with every holiday, I'd be into it. But let's not kid ourselves.
Yeah, good idea in theory but there is no way we could reach a reasonable accommodation on this. One of the core impulses of wokeness is ruining holidays (and everything else) that normal people enjoy.
Like the Puritans punishing people for celebrating Christmas, the whole point is to completely replace the traditional civic and religious calendar with an ideologically ‘correct’ one, as dictated by the Elect. On that note, happy Pride month, and don’t forget to take out all of your traditional Juneteenth decorations!
If it became an established, accepted holiday, it would cease to offer opportunities for moral preening or grievance mongering, thus its appeal would be rather limited.
As other commentators have noted, it's also not how it functions in practice in Australia either. ("sorry day" was a political stunt instantly forgotten, the big fight is over Australia day and the date it's celebrated on)
"One of the more obscure sequlae of 9/11 was the effort by Orthodox Jewish rabbis to find technicalities in Jewish law allowing the widows of victims to remarry, even though in some cases it was impossible to find their bodies to confirm death. Here’s one rabbi’s recollections of the process."
I am a philo-Semite by any description (also an atheist; related?). But I do not understand this fixation Jewish clergy (correct term?) have with what seems like trying to trick God.
This seems to be a theme of a lot of Jewish religious/legal writing going back a long way. "This is the statute inscribed in fire by THE LORD, and by which all men are bound, there can be no exceptions. Buuuuut here's why it never applies...[ten billion cases]." As a lawyer, I applaud this dedication to my profession and am grateful that they walked so I could run. But it seems to play into certain stereotypes.
It’s because like (maybe a majority of religious people) they don’t really actually believe with a capital b. It is more cultural. They don’t really think they are tricking god.
Lots of time atheism is really just having the common courtesy to actually take religions seriously, unlike their adherents.
Nah, they take religions literally, not seriously. The cultural is what religions are actually for, and when you abolish them, alternative fully-formed atheist cultures retaining the good parts and free of supernatural bullshit don't suddenly spring into existence. Pol Pot springs into existence. That there wasn't any serious grappling with this by New Atheists amply showed their infantile superficiality, and getting devoured by nascent wokism was a fitting fate for them.
> The cultural is what religions are actually for, and when you abolish them, alternative fully-formed atheist cultures retaining the good parts and free of supernatural bullshit don't suddenly spring into existence. Pol Pot springs into existence.
The prevalence of this problem would seem to imply that there's more to the claims religions make of supernatural aid than the "bullshit" they're often so glibly dismissed as.
Even if they are bullshit, it doesn't mean that they're worthless. Placebo effect is one example of bullshit being tangibly beneficial. However, when bullshit becomes too blatant, it undermines the credibility of the entire operation, which is why traditional religions are on the decline in the first world. Plenty of stuff which seemed plausible thousands of years ago no longer does, which is undeniable to anyone who's intellectually honest. However, it also should be clear by now that glib dismissal is woefully inadequate on its own, and going on pretending otherwise has nothing to do with "rationality" worthy of the name.
I mostly agree with what you're saying there, with one big exception that your definition of "rational" is obviously wrong, as one can verify by checking any dictionary, what you provided is more like a definition of "logical" instead. But this doesn't seem to be load-bearing.
Do you eventually intend to provide a "rational" argument for Christianity in particular? That would be interesting to see, as the only bids in this direction that I've ever seen are essentially "read Aquinas".
I think there is something to the idea that humans are generally pretty superstitious irrational little critters and if you don’t give them one big lie to cling to they will just create another. That POV seems to be winning out in a lot of ways as religions decline.
The crucial difference, I'd say, is that "old lies" had their edges sanded off by cultural evolution, and ended up more-or-less appropriate for the circumstances that those cultures existed in. Whereas now we've been increasingly entering an uncharted free-for-all, where circumstances are already pretty far from those tested environments, and still change ever faster. It's sheer hubris to think that anyone can design the new world order from scratch. Much of the old stuff will inevitably die off, but to the extent that it still on average produces better outcomes than Pol Pot, maybe "rationalists" shouldn't be so gung-ho about dismantling it as quickly as possible.
> Lots of time atheism is really just having the common courtesy to actually take religions seriously, unlike their adherents.
This comment reminds me of the many times I've been accused of "arrogance" for my tendency to reveal an assumption that naturally everyone else in the world knows at least as much as I do about any topic.
Ya no, that's not it. I've been there, a fervent Orthodox Jew. They believe. It's real for them. They pray earnestly for God to help them, including to inspire them to find these loopholes. It is all part of the religious devotion.
Yeah. One loophole is that (parts of) God's law are only binding on Jews, because Jews were the ones that agreed to follow it way back when; God doesn't care if Gentiles work on the Sabbath or whatever, because they're not God's People and God doesn't hold them to the same standard. So if a non-Jew wants to help out on the Sabbath by doing something that Jews aren't supposed to, like light a fire, Jews shouldn't encourage them, but they aren't obligated to stop them, either.
This sounds like a weird edge case but I work at an Israeli hedge fund with a religious CEO and they specifically employ non Jews to do the trading systems monitoring during sabbath.
Yes, there are specific legalisms to allow that. Like having a non-Jew have partial ownership of the company, and declaring that the work done on Shabbat (by workers who are also not Jewish) is for his potion of things and not the Jews'.
I think the point is that you at least have to make an effort to show that you acknowledge that the rule exists and that you're formally obeying it, even if you're actually doing some (religiously approved) workaround. You're not just going around specifically *dis*obeying Yahweh and ignoring his commands, you fully acknowledge through your actions that they - and he - exist! I'm not Jewish, though, so what do I know.
I mean, they have a set of old, sometimes very murdery, laws that often seem completely absurd to modern sensibilitities but that they need to pretend they follow. This is a much better out than actually following them. Fundamentalist Islam would do well to pick up this kind of practice.
Then it wouldn't be fundamentalist. Boilerplate Islam seems to be catching up toh, at least judging from how they actually live as long as they get some amount of economic development
Humans abuse loopholes, too. How many of us go "I'm a good person!" where we mean "Well, I haven't raped or murdered anyone, and beside those sins, is being a son of a bitch to my family and embezzling money from the fund for the blind and deliberately telling lies about my colleague so I'd get promoted instead of him so bad, now really is it?"
Lust in your heart. Bad as adultery. Don't think you can get off on the technical "Well if I go right up to the very line but don't quite step over it, I'm okay!"
The point of loopholes in religion is "oh crap, I didn't know/I couldn't help it", not "I know very well but I'm rules-lawyering".
You absolutely are not supposed to travel on the Sabbath but you really, really have to? Okay, we'll find a loophole so you can keep the law and also your obligation to others.
Because (1) letting the law be broken means that eventually it'll be broken for any old excuse and then not respected at all but (2) if you rigorously enforce it despite any emergencies, that's inhumane and makes people hate God and that's not good
""This is the statute inscribed in fire by THE LORD, and by which all men are bound, there can be no exceptions. Buuuuut here's why it never applies...[ten billion cases]."
It's called (in Christianity) moral theology. The rules are Da Rulez, But. There are always exceptions, because "this is a hard saying, who can accept it?" and we are not to break the bruised reed or quench the smouldering wick, and there are always the weaker brethren.
Intention, as well as the act itself, makes the sin. If you do something out of ignorance or necessity, is it just to impute the full gravity of the sin to you? Hence looking for exceptions and loopholes. Naturally it can be taken to an extreme, and abused, hence why casuistry got a bad name:
"Casuistry dates from Aristotle (384–322 BC), yet the zenith of casuistry was from 1550 to 1650, when the Society of Jesus used case-based reasoning, particularly in administering the Sacrament of Penance (or "confession"). The term became pejorative following Blaise Pascal's attack on the misuse of the method in his Provincial Letters (1656–57). The French mathematician, religious philosopher and Jansenist sympathiser attacked priests who used casuistic reasoning in confession to placate wealthy church donors. Pascal charged that aristocratic penitents could confess a sin one day, re-commit it the next, then generously donate to the church and return to re-confess their sin in the confidence of being assigned only a nominal penance."
Well, Pascal was sympathetic to the Jansenists, but they were extremely rigorous in their views, so it's six of one and half a dozen of the other there between him and the Jesuits 😁
And I was always struck by how in the Scriptures God seems to take delight in being talked out of/bargained down, see Abraham and Sodom, where God intends to destroy it for the wickedness of its people, but Abraham talks him down from fifty to ten righteous men - if in the entire city there are ten righteous men, God will spare it.
That sounds like Abraham has a shrewd estimate of how likely it is to find a righteous man in the city, but also that God only wants an excuse to be merciful, if we will ask for it.
Alternatively you can read it as God knowing full well there are not ten good men to be found. After all he ultimately destroys the two cities and the only people rescued are Lot (who offers up his two daughters to be gang raped) and his two daughters (who get their father drunk and have sex with him). It implies a pretty low bar to not get fire and brimstoned.
"It implies a pretty low bar to not get fire and brimstoned."
God will be merciful if we give Him a chance, it's just that we insist on being assholes. Even if you go with the liberal/progressive Christian interpretation that "The sin of Sodom was lack of hospitality!" it's pretty asshole behaviour to go "Nah, you guys can clear off and die in the desert".
There's also stuff like Ezekiel talking God down from using human dung to cow dung for his prophesy cooking. And Moses does it a few times, with Aaron and with the Israelites at large. And Jacob straight up beats a blessing out of an angel.
I feel like the Catholic approach differs a lot from the Jewish approach on this issue, but I'm neither and merely a curious layperson.
I appreciate you sharing the Catholic perspective on the issue. It's not clear to me if you meant to imply that you expect Orthodox Jews feel similarly, or if you' were merely providing a comparison point?
Since we took all the Good Stuff from the Jewish tradition, as a point of comparison.
Reading the Epistles, sounds like straight out of the gate the newly-minted Christians were getting up to "yeah well Law doesn't apply any more, we're under Grace!" shenanigans looking for loopholes as witness Paul rebuking the Corinthians for "no, you can't shack up with your stepmother":
"5 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father's wife. 2 And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you."
Point 1: If God wrote the law then he wrote the loopholes too. You want to tell Him how to do his job? You think you’re smarter than God?
Point 2: Some Jewish legal rulings are deliberately stricter than they need to be, basically due diligence to be extra sure risk of breaking the actual law is minimized. In such cases if you find some convoluted exception, this serves the same purpose of making sure people take care.
I object to the "God wrote the loopholes" interpretation. It's a convenient, self-serving take, but if the people who actually followed the rules as-written thousands of years ago weren't looking for loopholes because they didn't think they needed excuses to avoid what the law apparently says, then the law isn't pointing people in the direction of an actual desired behavior. It basically amounts to attributing non-Gricean communication to God.
Right, but God is omniscient, so he knew that thousands of years ago the people would follow RAW sans loopholes and today people will follow RAW with loopholes and he carefully wrote the law exactly for this purpose.
If you grant God's omniscience, it follows that he knows people would know that, but it also follows that God would have known Adam and Eve would eat the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, which was supposedly a transgression against him. That implies that God can know people are going to do something, and still object to it.
If you believe that nothing in the Torah is meaningless, that every single letter, the ornamental crowns above every letter, every word, and all repeated verbiage in the Torah was dictated directly by God for the purpose of clarifying His law further than what's explicitly written, than sometimes Rabbis (the term for Jewish Clergy) will use these features to modify their interpretations to the text in a way not congruent with its literal meaning. Rabbis very much do not think they are tricking God, rather they believe they are using the process He already outlined to fully elucidate His will.
Yes. The law is the law. Not the secret intentions of the drafter, not the opinions of the judge, not what "common sense" implies, but the actual enacted text. It is not the court's job to figure out what legislature was trying to say. It's job is to apply the text of the law as written, ambiguities, loopholes, and all. Just like here: God wrote the book - under what authority do we act as copy editors?
>It is not the court's job to figure out what legislature was trying to say. It's job is to apply the text of the law as written, ambiguities, loopholes, and all.
That is--as you surely very well know--an opinion, not a fact; and an opinion that is, to put it mildly, far from universally held, let alone practiced.
Isn't it only Muslims who believe Koran is the literal word of God? And even they rely on hadiths for their laws, which instead purport to be things said by humans while Muhammad was alive.
The traditional Jewish view is that the written Torah was given exactly as we have it today, verbatim written in Hebrew with the exact same spellings and misspellings by God to Moses. The parts that say stuff like "as I instructed you" about things that aren't mentioned in the written text are in traditional Judaism proof of an additional Oral Torah that was given to Moses.
I don't think even the most fanatical believer claims that the entire Talmud verbatim was given to Moses, rather that the Oral Torah includes some extratextual traditions and the hermeneutical principals on how to correctly expound the meaning of the Torah. Some of these derivations are regarded as Torah law, and some of them are considered Rabbinic enactments and treated more leniently.
I'm going to try and balance out the cynical/atheist takes with a more traditionally Jewish one:
The name "Israel" was given to Jacob for fighting an angel and in Hebrew litterally means "to contend/struggle with god". So it seems that struggling with god and his commandments is quite deeply engrained in the history and destiny of the Israelites (and by extension the Jews).
In Judaism, the Israelites were/are the people chosen to contend and struggle with god's commandments to their fullest.
To be fair, tricking God is in fact an established tradition in Jewish religion. That is to say, the Jewish God is the ultimate rules-lawyer, and finding creative exceptions to his rules is in fact what he wants His followers to do.
On top of that, Judaism has a strong tradition of survival (for obvious reasons). The Torah explicitly instructs you that any and all ceremonial rules can be rendered null and void in dire emergencies; the physical survival of the Jewish community is paramount.
Not exactly related to this story, but also about tricking god. In Germany there is a food called Herrgottsbscheisserle, which is dough filled with meat or vegetables, which translates to "thing that tricks god" and the legend is that a monk wanted to eat meat during lent so he hid it in the dough so god couldn't see it and he could eat meat without committing a sin. Probably not a true story but still funny.
For what it's worth, this characteristic of Judaism goes all the way back to the advent of Rabbinic Judaism and was the subject of early Christian (anti-Pharisaic) criticism.
While not a defense, I suspect that broadly speaking, you can't have endless deference to both the letter and the spirit of the law. Deference to one inevitably comes at the expense of the other.
You say that you respect the dedication as a lawyer. Indeed, the secular legal systems in which a lawyer operates heavily favor the letter of the law over the spirit of the law. Many of the same critiques apply to those systems.
I suspect that the difference is that people realize that laws meant to govern other people can't be left to individual discretion of the spirit of the law. The Jewish system is similar in that it has specific prescriptions and proscriptions, rather than generic ones like "be righteous, don't do evil, etc." Such a system naturally lends itself to legal loopholes that circumvent the spirit of the law.
The same applies to Shari'a, which is also a detail-oriented system and also respects loopholes that nominally circumvent the spirit of the law.
If someone thinks that religions shouldn't exist at all, let alone impose endless minutia on adherents, then of course legalistic chicanery seems absurd.
Within the systems of those religions, however, it is a natural development. The corollary of the highest value being placed on following specific detailed rules, is a lesser degree of importance on respecting the spirit of the rules, so sophisticated systems designed to circumvent the rules inevitably emerge.
That said, I don't know that the case at hand is a very good example of that - it is almost an example of the opposite.
The issue is married people having affairs. Non-legalistic thinking would assume that the spouse of someone who disappeared after last having been in the World Trade Center on 9/11 is no longer married and is free to remarry without having an affair. Indeed, they are colloquially referred to as "widows of victims," implicitly acknowledging the death of their spouses.
So the spirit of the law was met.
The problem was the letter of the law describing formal thresholds of evidence for the death of the spouse that may have not been met. Thus, legalistic problems, required legalistic solutions.
The bonobo study doesn't really seem to prove anything to me. Like yes they found a slight elevation in women's arousal to bonobo sex compared to women's arousal to nonsexual stimuli, but it was WAY smaller than women's arousal to human sex. Women's arousal to bonobo sex was nearly the same as women's arousal to nonsexual control stimuli. So I don't really think this proves anything.
32: “The good news is that if this happens, it proves that the original SO2 emissions were an (accidental) act of safe and effective geoengineering, opening the way to trying a similar policy at greater scale (in theory/utopia only, probably our actual society would rather die or economically self-destruct).”
True. Although maybe China or some similar sensible country may do this. If the effect is real, as according to the link, then a relatively small increase in SO2 would cool the planet until we reduced carbon. The fear might be that we would never reduce carbon. But then, so what?
Also how weak, or political, is climate science that we don’t know exactly what percentage of SO2 would counter CO2
I thought the point was that SO2 was DECREASING the planetary temperature by blocking sunlight? So you would INCREASE SO2 emissions to cool the planet. Would China start doing that?
I mean China as an example of a country that would not have the democratic pressures to oppose something like that. „sensible“ was a bit tongue in cheek.
I mean we are destroying the ocean with overfishing anyway? Does it matter if their are no fish due to acidification collapsing food webs, or their are no fish because we catch them all?
In either case the ecosystem will recover a few millennia after we stop fucking with it and arrive at some new (constantly evolving) normal.
You can fix overfishing by just not fishing in that area anymore. After a few years they bounce back. Poisoning the entire ocean at once is a bigger problem.
Well tis not "poisoning the entire ocean". Its damaging specific processes in specific creatures. The ocean has been very acidic before and had plenty of diversity, it would just take time to recover.
Also the overfishing has already harmed things to the point where "just stopping fishing" doesn't "fix" things. They don't bounce back the same. It will take centuries. More?
The point was calling it "poisoning the whole ocean" is perhaps some overly inflected language. I was balancing that with a "the ocean will in essence be fine" counterweight.
For sure we have super damaged the existing ecosystem in the ocean (though once again mostly through fishing).
But yes it is important to remind people that the biosphere will be fine. Many many people seem to believe that somehow the world is going to look like Mercury in 2100 if we don't do something tomorrow. Which is false.
It is not even going to look like a hot Mars. It will jsut be a slightly less good earth.
CO2 isn't making the ocean acidic and won't for a very long time. It is making it less basic, more nearly neutral. That could be a problem for organisms adapted to a basic environment, but it isn't the problem of immersing them in acid. "Acidification" is technically correct but rhetorically dishonest.
To apply your analogy properly - "I'm not cooking this frozen steak, I'm defrosting it". I.e. we're moving the temperature closer to neutral rather than further away from neutral.
"Ocean acidification" sounds like we are making the ocean more extreme, corrosive, and hostile to life. That's an inaccurate connotation. We are making it less like lye or bleach and more like pure water.
See now you're not being dubiously pedantic, you're just straight up wrong. Regardless of whether you describe it as "more acidic" or "less basic", we *are* making the ocean more hostile to life. That's the whole problem! And yes, shellfish do need a slightly basic environment to build their shells, and you thinking things should be otherwise doesn't change reality.
To quote David Friedman upthread, is there any reason to believe that a less basic ocean is worse for aquatic life in general, as opposed to worse for organisms adapted to current pH?
Analogously, some animals do better in arid climates, but that doesn't mean that water isn't good for life in general.
> And now I expect this pretty strong evidence that women were actually advantaged in hiring and had parity in most other things (the salary is probably just the usual negotiation issue)
Another possibility is that it could be caused by the advantaging of women in hiring - if you lower the threshold for women for assistant professor jobs, then the average woman hired will be less competent, and if you don't keep advantaging them in the same way for raises/promotions, they'll mean-revert on pay.
I work in an engineering department. Some of my colleagues really wanted to increase the number of female students. They worked worked with admissions and in the previous year, we got what we asked for. Fast forward to the end of the year, and it turns out that women are failing classes or getting Ds at a higher rate than male students. Now we're tasked with finding solutions to this inequity. The obvious reason seems to elude most.
I had a very sweet girlfriend in college who was a C level STEM student in a program with maybe 95/5 men. They worked so so so hard to keep her in that program despite her constant struggle. And she did eventually finish it.
Then they really tried to push her hard into grad school. Someone who barely finished undergrad. She got in...and predictably washed out due to not being good enough pretty quickly (after wasting a couple years).
I think she eventually went and got some easier non-STEM advanced degree.
The part that pains me most is that the people most harmed by this are precisely those marginal students of the "promoted" categories that end up wasting years of their life as a result of being pushed into courses they aren't suited for.
My anecdote is a student I worked with on a project in engineering freshman year. She was very smart, but had no particular interest in or unusual skill in math/science. She was in Engineering basically just because she was offered a big women-only scholarship to be in engineering. She abandoned the field after a (free) year and went on to success in non-STEM. Sticks with me because one of her skills was teacher’s-pettery and she got an A in the class despite basically abandoning the group project halfway through while the dude that busted his ass with me to fill in for her part for a B+
Well, on a round Earth as you walked in one direction you'd notice that gravity was starting to pull you sideways as "down" ceased to be perpendicular to the surface of the Earth. And eventually you'd fall off the side. Maybe you personally wouldn't notice because you don't stray too far from home (which is clearly on the exact top of the world) but why don't the oceans fall off the side?
To make a round Earth make sense you not only have to postulate that it's round, but that gravity just happens to point towards the centre of the Earth no matter where you go. And what are the chances of that?
The earth was already known to be round to the ancient Mediterranean world. That's why you see statues of Romans holding globes. That's what the orb in medieval European regalia represents.
Ironically for your argument, there were two major reasons that the Earth was accepted as being round: first, that the shadow it casts on the moon is round. But second, that ships disappear over the horizon from the bottom up, and reappear from the top down.
This is, of course, exactly what things would have looked like if the world had been round. In the region of the Mediterranean close attention was paid to the sea, and so the roundness of the world was recognized. In China that didn't happen.
Wouldn't a flat disc Earth also cast a round shadow on the moon? Assuming that paleo flat Earthers even accepted that that's what a lunar eclipse is...
A lunar eclipse can occur at any time of night. If it's at the beginning or end of the night, with the sun just below the horizon and the moon just above it, then the sun would see a flat earth nearly edge-on and cast a long, thin shadow.
Round I suppose. I mean it does, if you look at the horizon.
To expect the uneducated pre scientific man to also know that curvature was so slight as to be unnoticeable is expecting a bit too much, unless he lives by the sea. Generally it’s not noticeable.
I think this gives pre-scientific method civilisations too little credit, seeing as most of them did in fact know that the Earth was round (though civilisations tend to be coastal), and eg. ancient Greece has a very accurate measurement of its circumference
The variant I heard was that a Swedish economist told Milton Friedman "In Sweden we have no poverty", and Friedman replied "That's interesting, because among Swedes in America we have no poverty either."
Something I’ve been interested in lately is Milton Friedman’s views on genetics, and in particular dysgenic effects.
In the education chapter of Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman expresses support for a policy that would require all children to receive a minimum amount of schooling at their parents expense. Apart from granting some minimal need-based exceptions, such a policy would be broadly analogous to requiring vehicle owners to pay the costs of auto insurance as is currently the case in most states. Pretty standard libertarian stuff.
But then he makes this additional point—
“Finally, but by no means least, imposing the costs on the parents would tend to equalize the social and private costs of having children and so promote a better distribution of families by size.”
And in the footnote—
“It is by no means so fantastic as may appear that such a step would noticeably affect the size of families. For example, one explanation of the lower birth rate among higher than among lower socioeconomic groups may well be that children are relatively more expensive to the former, thanks in considerable measure to the higher standards of schooling they maintain, the costs of which they bear.”
This doesn’t have to be about genetics (although it could be). Kids from better-off families will do better on average even without genetic advantages, due to better socialization and schooling.
When he says “a better distribution of family size” I took that to mean that wealthier families might have more kids and poorer families might have less, thus a promoting a better gene pool over time.
Maybe there is a different interpretation of what he means by “better” but it seemed to me like he might be choosing vague language intentionally to partially obscure his point from people who might be offended (i.e. being Straussian).
I got that, but it doesn't have to be genetics to produce that outcome - it's sufficient if (as is almost certainly the case) kids from better-off families do better in life even at the same genetics.
On the basis of the quoted passage, I think he was probably not alluding to a eugenic / dysgenic effect (although I have no idea what he thought about it).
I think it is understood that children would be better off being born into higher SES groups than lower ones, and that shifting the distribution of children born in that direction would be of benefit even aside from genetic advantages those children would have. (This does not even have to relate predicted future earnings as an adult, as other comments are alluding to. The null hypothesis is just that kids would be happier as children in higher income households).
Similarly, it is understood that society would be better off under such a distribution. There would be less need, for example, for support for the poor - be that support coerced by the government, or willingly granted privately - if more people were born rich.
Incidentally, if this passage from Friedman is representative, he wrote the way he spoke. One can easily hear his voice while reading this.
I admit I had to somewhat reconstruct the exchange, and may even have gotten the nation wrong.
That said: I wonder if this would really have been interesting by Friedman's standards. Wouldn't it be _un_interesting in the null hypothesis sense for the same demographic to do about as well in two locations?
Not to mention, maybe not even factual; ISTR accounts of rural Swedes who are struggling financially, in the same way one would expect anyone to struggle in a remote location.
May be odd to do this, so sorry in advance if you already received a notification from my reply to JohanL's reply to you, but I'm very curious about Friedman's views on genetics and I was wondering if you knew anything more about that. [More context is in the replies further down the thread.]
Under the heading "Copy editors say AI has already changed their job beyond recognition", let's be clear that the job has changed because people are now sending this copy-editor AI-generated bilge instead of actually trying to write things themselves and it's so unsalvageably bad it's making the copy editor depressed.
#34: this chatbot is presumably perfectly "aligned" in the view of at least some of the 1.2 billion hindus worldwide. There's your problem right there.
It may be aligned with the Bhagavad-Gita, but the ostensible purpose of that text (on the surface) is to persuade a warrior to do his duty and engage in a civil war. So the advice about sacrificing a life for dharma is *maybe* a special case not generally applicable to peace-time civilian life?
I'm pretty sure some smart-alec could create a Gospel-bot to answer "Yes of course" to "Should I cut off my arm because I keep sinning with it?" but, uh, no.
I would expect a bot trained faithfully on the Bible alone to end up resembling one of the extreme protestant denominations, since the primary thing that makes them extreme is rejecting all of the accumulated ancillary writings that form most of the eg. Catholic canon.
Like, it is entirely possible to say that the ancient texts are not (in isolation, or at all, depending on your personal taste) aligned with modern morals, but the explicit task was to 'align' a bot with a specific text and complaining that it doesn't match modern morals rather misses the point there.
P.s. I think I agree with you that Robert is quite wrong here in assuming that all or even most Hindus would take the Bhagavad-Gita that literally
That particular one (is it permissible to take a life for the sake of the dharma?) is a Just War question and the Bhagavad-Gita as a source text is in part about "when it is right to fight a war? when is it right to kill? what do we do between the competing demands of duty and social bonds?"
I don't think anyone (well, there are always a few extremist loopers) would take it as "Go run around the streets killing people and say you're doing it in the name of God/dharma, that's okay and fine!"
But that isn't what it was asked — it's not "should I, a random Hindu, kill in this modern world?"; it's specifically asking one of the heroes of the Bhagavad Gita if another of the heroes — one of the greatest warriors of the entire saga! — ought to fight and kill.
That's exactly what is being asked, but the original article makes it sound like "Can I, a Hindu, kill for the sake of dharma in this modern age?" and that the AI is telling them "Sure, go and murder people, it's fine!"
It's like Internet atheists taking snippets out of the Old Testament at random and then jeering at modern Christians about "hey, you're supposed to keep slaves and stone women who have been raped, right?"
"how after leaving Africa, modern humans were limited to “Arabia and surrounding regions” for ~30,000 - 50,000 years, racking up various new mutations and becoming adapted to life outside Africa"
Well, yes, that's how long it took Yaqub to perform his experiments. NOI proved right once again.
#2: Horse "breeds" strictly understood, die out: in the UK Exmoor ponies, Clydesdales and Suffolk Punches are "endangered" in that not enough purebreds (both parents in the studbook) are being generated to replace losses, and you get to a stage where the shrinking of the gene pool prohibits further "pure" breeding. On the other hand, people continue to breed horses from the best available stock. If Nisaeans were valued as alleged, then absent a sustained and successful genocide against them, thier genes necessarily survive somewhere in the world.
Yes, I did read the link. The guy claims examples still exist just from eyeballing them, which isn't strong evidence but then doesn't have to be - if there were horses there then and there are horses there now, the most parsimonious explanation for the horses there now is not that the previous lot were entirely wiped out and replaced from elsewhere. So the theory is probably true, but not terribly interesting.
The modern pharaoh hound dog looks like the one in the ancient Egypt pictures, but is likely instead a 19th Century development in Malta. In any case, pharaoh hounds are extremely fast.
#11 Success Sequence - *just based on what you cite and write*:
Via the word "follow", the sentence "97% of Millennials who follow what has been called the “success sequence”—that is, who get at least a high school degree, work, and then marry before having any children, in that order—are not poor by the time they reach their prime young adult years (ages 28-34)." suggests that this is a recipe that people could follow, like a treatment applied to a group. However, whether people follow this traditional recipe is highly endogenous: People who "follow" this recipe are specific people, with specific personalities. They know their own situation and their personality and make decisions based on that. They first finish high school because it makes sense for them, they can endure sitting in a school, their mind has not been destroyed by bullying. They then are stable enough to find a good job (relative to what they expect of life etc). They marry because they have a person to marry and think they can afford it etc. They first marry because this usually indicates that they plan to have children, as opposed to e.g. a woman who gets pregnant without intending to before marrying - which usually conflicts with life plans. (If your life develops as planned, that should usually reduce your likelihood of becoming poor.)
On top of this, we then seem to have the sample selection bias in the data that Bruenig seems to point to. Both effects are “if you’re young, healthy, abled, married, don’t have to support anyone else, and have a full-time job, you’re probably not poor”.
"Controlling for a range of background factors" does not change that. That "the order of marriage and parenthood in Millennials’ lives is significantly associated with their financial well-being in the prime of young adulthood" is still just correlation. The sentences "marrying before children more than doubles young adults’ odds of being in the middle or top income. Meanwhile, putting marriage first reduces the odds of young adults being in poverty by 60% (vs. having a baby first)." should not be understood as describing treatment effects, they just summarize descriptive statistics.
I agree about the endogeneity and consequent insufficiency of controlling for background. On the other hand, there are obvious causal mechanisms here. Employers prefer high school graduates to drop-outs. People who have jobs make more money than people who don't. And households with two working adults make more money than households with one working adult. Even if only one parent works, that's free child care, which puts you in a much better financial situation than one parent who has to pay for child care.
Sure, it's often a good idea to follow the sequence - that's why many people do it. But if people for whom it doesn't work try to apply it based on the "evidence", then we can probably just apply the Lucas Critique.
Well, here is where the rubber hits the road: who are those people?
Because if we're going all White Saviour about "maybe it’s just your cultural bias that makes you care about this" and how we can't possibly expect little Jamal to make anything of himself, then we're being racist bastards even if we think we're being compassionately inclusive or whatever.
Even if Jamal is the third generation of kids raised by single parents in poverty with dead-beat dads, it's still damn good advice. Even if Jamal is made cynical by "who the fuck gets married round here, any stud can have six baby-mommas", it's still good advice.
It's much more corrosively harmful to pat Jamal on the head about how we don't expect anything from you, poor little inner-city boy, you just can't help the systemic racism keeping you down and naturally you will end up in crime and casual relationships like all around you. You're a victim with no agency, just a puppet of societal and environmental forces. Don't even try, you're fore-doomed to failure.
Maybe Jamal gets married and it ends up in divorce two years later. That is still better, as an attempt, than not even bothering and just sleeping with whatever girl will let him into her bed and if she gets pregnant, not his problem, up to her to get an abortion and if she doesn't, well, that's what social welfare is for.
Well, here is where the rubber hits the road: who are those people?"
For example, a man who just finished high school and for whatever reasons doesn't find an adequate job, an 18-year old woman that got pregnant by accident, a man who is just terrified of the thought of founding a family because he is somehow convinced he cannot take care of kids and stay with his wife, whatever.
I don't doubt that following the pattern can be a good rule-of-thumb. The problem is methodological. What you see in a sample is "not being poor" and "having followed the sequence up the moment where you are observed" are correlated. That is not the same as showing causality.
HS is easy enough probably 80-90% (maybe more) of the population can graduate with even the slightest of effort. If you stipulate reasonable effort you can probably get that to 95%. So what we are asking for step 1 is just for someone to try (yes there are maybe 5% beyond help).
In terms of step 2 "get a job", that is achievable to anyone who isn't severely disabled and puts some effort in. So once again just try. A motivated person can find a job in a week if they are realistic.
As for "don't have kids before you marry", that is the tough one, though again not too hard to actually achieve if you are serious about it.
Now there are a lot of ancillary reasons you might fail at any of those, but they are for almost anyone, completely under your control.
So little Jimmy who is 25 doing a 18 month stint for beating someone in a bar fight, has two kids with different women... well Jimmy isn't just some down on his luck hardscrabble striver who society oppressed.
Jimmy has likely thousands, tens of thousands of times in his life to that point chosen to not try. Chosen to not attend school, chosen to ignore his reading book, chosen to not look for a job and instead play videogames and smoke pot on dozens of separate occasions this month, chosen to lie to his hookup about whether he brought condoms, etc. etc.
It is about reflecting on the idea that while yes society/culture and institutions do lay out an obstacle course for everyone, and there are barriers and struggles and injustices, the obstacle course is both negotiable, and honestly not even that hard. And while navigating the obstacle course, worrying about the justice of it all and making excuses, is a lot less productive than just getting through the damn thing.
My wife and I both grew up poor. I made A LOT of bad decisions until I was in my teens-mid-20s. Did this present obstacles, sure? But I didn't get married until I was 28 and had a stable income, and then didn't have kids until we were married for another 4 years and had saved a lot of money. Which was good because day-care was crazy expensive and my wife didn't want to stay at home.
It is not rocket science. Not everyone who is born poor can grow up to have the apartment from Friends, but they can achieve a middle class lifestyle easily. There is a well worn path.
And while that path might not work anymore of literally everyone did it, so many people don't try that it isn't hard to beat them.
Now when you get higher up the ladder this is less the case. A lot more is needed from the middle class person looking to improve their station than the poor person. Just zombieying through an Art History BA isn't going to do it. Which is why you have so many pissed off college graduates mad they are stuck in the middle wrung of society when they felt they were promised the education and career they wanted and the big house with the white picket fence without thought to whether they were above average or whether their desired career/course of study was in demand.
It's a lot harder to get "any job" than you think. The local grocery stores presumably took one look at my degree and decided that I was overqualified...
That happens, but a smart person might just lie about their credentials.
IDK, I have personally never met someone in the US who I thought would fail to find a job basically immediately if you gave them a serious ultimatum. It isn't hard, in most metros there are literally thousand of jobs openings at all times, even in the heart of the recession.
But people don't want to touch food, or do manual labor, or can't see themselves stocking shelves, or whatever. Known way way too many people who were on 6 months of unemployment, spent 5 months not seeing anything that looked very promising, and then magically in that final month they suddenly have tons of interviews and options (because they actually started filling out applications and compromising a bit?).
How many applications a week do you think the average person on unemployment completes? I would be SHOCKED if it was over 3. I would be shocked if the "mode" and "median" wasn't 0.
I used to volunteer at a place that fed homeless people, plus anyone else who wanted to show up. I'd guess maybe a quarter couldn't get a job at all, and another quarter would only be suitable for handing out free newspapers. And I don't know about the rest; looks can be deceiving.
But people don't want to touch food, or do manual labor, or can't see themselves stocking shelves, or whatever
Marty babes, round these parts there are large chain grocery stores that don't want people who are 'too educated' because they're afraid they will stick up for their rights. Disabuse yourself of the idea of union organisers coming in and stirring up trouble, they mean 'someone who knows it's not legal to make them work unpaid overtime'.
There really are exploitative employers out there (the hospitality industry is a doozy) who want docile, scared workers ignorant of their rights and too unsure of themselves to protest how they're being treated. "You can just quit and get another job stocking shelves" isn't great advice when the other supermarket engages in the same practices.
Back in the late 80s in Ireland, when we were in the depths of really bad unemployment, I had a further education qualification (nothing like even a basic bachelor's degree) and went for a job in a local pharmaceutical company and was flat-out told by the guy doing recruitment, before I even got to interview, that they wouldn't hire me - I was 'too educated' which meant I would 'cause trouble'.
The job I was going for was on the floor working on the production packing line, so this wasn't me being "don't want to do manual labour". They meant "you can't be bullied into doing what we want by us calling you ignorant and uneducated, you can find out what employment law says and we can't harass you into working unpaid and extra hours in unsafe conditions".
I feel like the whole thing is a massive tangled causal mess.
Usually when A ("sensible behaviour") is correlated with B ("non-poverty"), you can at least speculate on whether A causes B, B causes A, or both are caused by some other factor C. In this case it seems clear to me that it's all of the above -- A is caused by B, B is caused by A, and both are caused by factors C, D, E, F and G (things like "low impulsivity" and "social class"). And then factors C, D, E etc are themselves partially caused by A and B, so you've just got one big causal mess.
I guess the really important question then is whether the "success sequence" can actually still be considered good life advice for those who might be at risk of winding up in poverty. I'm thinking that it probably still is, but that anyone who is smart enough to finish high school and sensible enough to take some good basic life advice is probably not going to have trouble avoiding poverty anyway.
"anyone who is smart enough to finish high school and sensible enough to take some good basic life advice is probably not going to have trouble avoiding poverty anyway"
There's two ways of ending up in poverty; for the person above, they might lose their job or get very sick/be in a severe accident or some other misfortune might befall them. If you're a working-class person in a manual trade or job and you become unable to work, you may have problems.
But that's the unforeseeable hardships of life. The Success Sequence is talking about the other way to end up in poverty: make bad choices and decisions, and continue making those.
That's where the good advice comes in: get to kids early enough and try and steer them down the path. Maybe little Johnny isn't going to go to college because he's not smart enough, but that doesn't mean going to the other extreme, throwing our hands up, and accepting that Johnny will just end up jobless and a petty criminal. This sort of advice is very necessary for kids in the environments where there's a lot of hopelessness and resignation around; where the likelihood is dropping out of school, getting pregnant before marriage, etc.
It's so old-fashioned as to have come straight off the Ark, but the advice remains the same: try and stay in school and complete your education; try to get a job, any kind of job; don't get pregnant before marriage; don't cohabit with your boyfriend (or a bunch of serial monogamy boyfriends) before marriage; for both sexes, get married and settle down and then have a family.
You[re never going to be rich and you're going to have struggles in life, but a two-parent family where at least one parent is working and they're not involved in drugs and/or crime is much more stable for everyone, parents and children.
Whats the rationale against opposing cohabitation? It saves money on rent and allows you to better check compatibility without the finality of marriage. You don't even necessarily have to be having sex, I cohabited abstinencly the first six months with my now wife.
Agreed, every couple that I know had cohabited before marriage, and most of them have been married for like 20 years. Oh, and they had premarital sex too, even before all that cohabitation ! *clutches pearls*
How many of them had kids while cohabiting and before marriage? How many of them had several kids? By different partners to those whom they ended up marrying?
The 'smart' ones will do okay because they'll figure out, and will have the examples and influence in their lives, of the people who got an education, got a job, got married, avoided the poverty trap.
The more vulnerable will be more at risk. There's enough ambient culture around 'do what you want', 'they only want to stop you having fun', 'pearl-clutching around sex' that they're not hearing the message about responsibility and prudence. They're the ones who need it.
I believe multiple studies have shown that premarital cohabitation correlates strongly with higher divorce rates thereafter. IIRC, this includes controlling for normal socioeconomic factors. I don't know that it's proven causal, that would be a tough set of evidence given how entangled it is with cultural attitudes towards relationships, sex, and marriage.
The obvious confounder is that no-premarital-cohabitation correlates with religiosity, which correlates (ceteris paribus) with lower-likelihood-of-divorce
"The survey also examines how adults who are married and those who are living with an unmarried partner are experiencing their relationships. It finds that married adults are more satisfied with their relationship and more trusting of their partners than those who are cohabiting.
...The share of adults in the U.S. who are presently married remains far higher than the share cohabiting. However, an examination of their lifetime experiences, which captures past relationships as well as present ones, tells a different story: Among people ages 18 to 44, a larger share have cohabited at some point than have been married (59% vs. 50%). Moreover, marriage and cohabitation are intertwined, as a plurality of adults (35%) have experienced both of these types of relationships.
Cohabitation today takes on many different forms. The majority of people who have ever cohabited have had only one cohabiting partner, but a significant share (14%) have had a total of three or more. Just over half of cohabiters are raising children, including about a third who are living with a child they share with their partner. The nature of cohabiting relationships varies significantly by race, ethnicity and educational attainment."
We're talking about the people for whom the "Success Sequence" is not obvious and something that they're 'smart enough' to figure out for themselves. The people most at risk are the kids of right now, where the girls may end up on the path of "never had a husband, had a string of boyfriends some of whom lived with her, may or may not have kids, kids may or may not have the same father" because if they're not married by a certain time - and yes, that includes during a cohabitation - then they'll never be married. And the boys who may drift into "no place of my own, so I bounce between living with my parent(s) and whatever girlfriend of the day I have, moving in to the house/apartment which is in her name on the lease because she's the social housing tenant; she may or may not already have kids, I may or may not already have kids; we're not getting married and I'm not getting married to any of them".
"Majorities of married and cohabiting adults express at least a fair amount of trust in their spouse or partner to be faithful to them, act in their best interest, always tell them the truth and handle money responsibly, but by double digits, married adults are more likely than those who are cohabiting to express a great deal of trust in their spouse or partner in each of these areas.
Married adults also express higher levels of satisfaction with their relationship. About six-in-ten married adults (58%) say things are going very well in their marriage; 41% of cohabiters say the same about their relationship with their partner.
When asked about specific aspects of their relationship, larger shares of married than cohabiting adults say they are very satisfied with the way household chores are divided between them and their spouse or partner, how well their spouse or partner balances work and personal life, how well they and their spouse or partner communicate, and their spouse’s or partner’s approach to parenting (among those with children younger than 18 in the household). When it comes to their sex life, however, similar shares of married and cohabiting adults say they are very satisfied.
Married adults are also more likely than cohabiters to say they feel closer to their spouse or partner than to any other adult. About eight-in-ten married adults (78%) say they feel closer to their spouse than to any other adult in their life; a narrower majority of cohabiters (55%) say the same about their partner.
Even after controlling for demographic differences between married and cohabiting adults (such as gender, age, race, religion and educational attainment), married adults express higher levels of satisfaction, trust and closeness than those who are living with a partner.
The reasons why people get married and the reasons they move in with a partner differ in some key ways
Most married and cohabiting adults cite love and companionship as major reasons why they decided to get married or move in with a partner. But about four-in-ten cohabiters also say finances and convenience were important factors in their decision: 38% say moving in with their partner made sense financially and 37% say it was convenient. In comparison, just 13% of married adults cite finances and 10% cite convenience as major reasons why they decided to get married.
About six-in-ten married adults (63%) say making a formal commitment was a major factor in their decision to get married. This is particularly the case among those who did not live with their spouse before getting married.
Among cohabiters, about a quarter (23%) say wanting to test their relationship was a major reason why they decided to move in with their partner.There is substantial variation in marriage rates by race and ethnicity. While 57% of white adults and 63% of Asian adults are married, fewer than half of Hispanic (48%) and black adults (33%) are. Since 1995, marriage rates have declined among white, black and Hispanic adults, but for Asian adults they have stayed roughly constant. Cohabitation rates are more consistent across racial and ethnic groups – 8% of whites and Hispanics and 7% of blacks are cohabiting, as are 3% of Asians. Cohabitation has risen more among white, black and Hispanic adults in recent decades than it has for Asian adults."
It's all part of the entire net of reasons: it's not cohabitation on its own, single parenthood on its own, and so on. But for the more vulnerable, missing one step on the path may lead to missing others, and the end result is that they're not in the same boat as "I graduated college, have a good job, and am living with my long-term partner and we may get married and have kids some day, why are you so anti-sex?" responses on here.
So, I hope you don't mind me asking you as the resident knowledgeable and talkative Catholic of the comment section, but is there a specific prohibition on cohabiting before marriage? I am friends with a Catholic couple who bought a house together a couple of months before their wedding day, and was quite surprised that he didn't move in until after they were married - I know there's a prohibition on pre-marital sex, but I would have assumed he'd simply sleep in a different bedroom until after the wedding, their house has multiple bedrooms.
Because the social housing files that I was working on updating in my job were chock-full of "had a string of serial boyfriends, had a set of kids with different surnames, never got a job or anything more than low-paid, temporary work, dropped out of school early or had very bad results if graduated high school, never married and not likely to be, kids are already heading down the same path".
It's almost like - but no. I must simply be pearl-clutching about people having fun enjoyable sex!
It's definitely good advice. Whether going into college or the workforce, getting a high school diploma, or at least GED, is all but required. Not having babies as single parents is incredibly important for staying out of poverty. This goes beyond statistics, but to the obvious causal mechanism of more adults per child taking care of bills or running a household. And having, and keeping, a job is obviously causal on poverty rates. Statistically, I'm less certain we can prove the marriage part. Scott notes that upper class people tend to marry, and that appears to be true. We may be noticing the correlation and getting the causation backwards. But the 97% of people following this sequence are not all rich, or even middle class. Something about marriage, or the people who marry, is still making a difference here.
This message isn't really for the people who are incredibly likely to be successful regardless. It's also not really for the people who are very likely to fail no matter what (though it can be helpful if they listen). It's for the people who are on the margins and have more a of a choice. At age 15, knowing that dropping out of school or knocking up your girlfriend is going to have a negative effect on your whole like, might just be enough to get someone to not do those things.
I agree that the items are good advice but it's dangerous to moralise on them too much - at best this sequence is restricted to healthy working-age adults, and that means it's not talking at all about a large fraction of the population, many of whom are in poverty - disabled people especially are very likely to be poor, both because of dramatically decreased ability to work and because of dramatically higher medical expenses, both usually through no fault of their own.
On the other hand, if we're going to talk about racial/class/environmental effects, then in effect we're writing off people: "yeah, no point in *you* trying to stay in school or wanting to get married before you have kids, you're not white/rich/abled enough".
If we set low expectations, then those become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Does a college grad with a negative net worth (potentially forver) due to outstanding college loans - but with a "good" job - qualify as "not poor"?
I put "good" in quotes because this also is vague. A young lawyer with $300K in debts, making $100K/year but living in New York city is going to be net negative worth for likely 10 years or more. Is this person "not poor"?
Poverty has a legal definition by the federal government, true.
"Not poor" is a very bad categorization, however, if it simply means not falling under the poverty income line.
Yes, the lawyer is not in poverty - but this lawyer at least potentially can get out of the debt. What about the far more common liberal arts graduate with $40K or more in debt? It is high probability that this person winds up with Social Security getting garnished to pay said student debt. AFAIK - 20% of outstanding student loan borrowers are age 50 or higher meaning the number of people I note above is a non-trivial number, and getting Social Security checks garnished to pay for student debt seems very much like an example of being poor.
$40k for undergrad puts you probably around the 80th or 90th percentile in terms of debt load. And that still only costs about $5k per year to service. Liberal arts majors are not so unemployable that being unable to make $400 monthly payments on student loan debt is the norm. Plus there are income-driven repayment plans.
I don't have the stats on this, but student loan borrowers over 50 are, AFAIK, mostly parents who took out PLUS loans and non-traditional students who took out loans later in life, not people who've failed to pay off their undergrad loans for 30 years.
This says 9 million Americans age 50 or higher with student loan debt. The article supports your statement that some of these are parents taking out loans on behalf of their kids, but isn't clear the distribution between self debt and kid debt.
" Of the $1.6 trillion in total student debt at the end of 2020, borrowers 50 and older owed about 22 percent of that amount, or $336.1 billion — more than a five-fold increase from 2004.
...
In 1989, 3.1 percent of families headed by someone age 50-plus carried student loan debt, owing an average of $10,073. By 2016, 9.6 percent of families headed by someone age 50-plus carried student loan debt, with the average amount owed more than tripling to $33,053.
...
In fiscal year 2015 alone, almost 114,000 borrowers age 50 and older had Social Security benefits seized to repay defaulted federal student loans, according to a 2016 Government Accountability Office report. Half of those were receiving Social Security disability payments."
So: your assertion that $40K is unusually large is likely inaccurate given that the average debt owed is $33K as of 2016. It is extremely unlikely the average amount owed has declined in the ensuing 7 years.
Secondly - 114K Social Security garnishments as of 2015 - 8 years ago - is a pretty large number. Of course, half are disability so "only" 57000 seniors are getting their Social Security benefits garnished. But this is only 0.63% of the over 50 loans so all good right?
Of course, the problem is that the over-50 of today are people who did not have to pay the ginormous burden of college costs when they went to college in the 1980s or earlier. People who are over-50 today also directly benefited from the massive asset inflation of the past generation. Neither of these facts is likely to hold true for the student of 2023.
So I would have to say that it is a very good question whether "very poor" outcomes due to student loan debt is really as relatively rare (but still significant) as the data shows.
Some quick Googling directly on the question of average or median student loan debt shows that the median is between $20,000 and $24,000. *Average* at graduation is slightly higher, just under $26,000.
You're showing the amounts currently owed by those over 50. That number is partly, likely significantly, affected by years of interest not being paid. That would especially be true for individuals holding their own student loan debt for 30+ years. Even being really sloppy with the payments and the math, surely they could have come up with $1,000/year to pay that back?
I was specifically talking about undergrad debt. The $40k average you found includes grad school and professional school debt. Check the College Board's report, "Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid." It says that about 45% of undergrads graduate debt-free, and of the remaining 55% the average debt at graduation is around $30,000, which means that around 70% graduate with less than $30k in debt. This is all for people graduating in the past few years.
A caveat here is that this doesn't include students of for-profit schools, who tend to have somewhat more debt, but not that much more, and they're a small minority of all college graduates.
Also of interest in the same report: Adjusted for inflation, undergrad loan balances and net tuition have been trending downwards since the mid 2010s. Net of grants and discounts, people just don't pay that much for college. The monetary cost is dwarfed by the opportunity cost of being out of the labor force for four years.
Interestingly, default rate is negatively correlated with loan balance. Default rates are sky-high for people with less than $10k debt, but very low for people with more than $40k.
Also a lot of older students with loans are students who have taken multiple economic hardship deferments so they can like take a trip to Thailand with their work buddies, and so the interest keeps piling up.
At the rates some student loans were at, this wasn't even necessarily a bad idea, it can be very cheap debt.
When people talk about student loan debt carriers there is this image of a second generation latina mom who struggled through her degree, got married knocked up and divorced, and now struggles to make all the ends meet. Her debt is a huge burden.
There are 5x more student loans debtors who are Kyle who works in facilities or security at a hospital and has a stable girlfriend with a great job, and a great income to expense ratio, but just would rather take a couple extra trips a year and have a fancier TV/car than pay down his student debt.
$300k is on the high end even for doctors; lawyers more typically have debt about half that size. A lawyer at a non-Biglaw firm trying to make it in NYC with $300k in student loans is not in good financial shape, but this is a very avoidable situation.
"Don't take out $300k in loans to go to a lower-tier law school and get a job paying $100k in NYC without a heavily rent-controlled* apartment" is an unwritten step of the success sequence.
* This is not an endorsement of rent control, which virtually all economists agree is terrible policy.
Given that these are averages - I would say that your assertion about doctor student loan debt may or may not be accurate: a $203K average would certainly encompass a lot of $300K individual debts unless medical school cost curves are actually very flat.
Your statement on lawyer debt is actually a bit high: $150K vs. $130K average.
As for decisions: I absolutely agree that financially, taking on massive debt isn't a great idea especially if disposable income isn't going to be high even with a job in a big city.
However, the equation isn't so clear:
1) Is lawyer pay in a non-big city such that enough disposable income would be achieved anywhere else?
2) Are the advancement opportunities such that just keeping at it will result in ever increasing income?
3) Are students and their families really all so financially savvy as to understand the inherent risks with taking on massive debt?
I really wonder if the assumptions that have held true in the past, hold true going forward.
Indeed. in fact, those averages were only for students who assumed any debt. According to that same source, 45% of students did not assume any debt at all, so the actual average amount of student debt, would be lower than the stated figures (this is true even though presumably a higher percentage of medical students assume debt than students in other fields).
I find #6 to be very *un*witty. In order to have a reasonable view that 10^9 grains of sand is a heap and 2 grains of sand is not a heap, I don't need to have given careful thought to whether "heap" begins at 10^4 or at 10^6.
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with the sentiment of the original tweet. But it seems fine to believe that for a billion trillion it hardly matters at all, that for 1 it would matter a lot, and that the fewer there are, the more it matters, without caring about any well-defined threshold where the mattering begins.
I agree that asking for a sharp boundary is unreasonable, but I read the question as asking "name at least one low number of stars so that things would matter", not "name the precise greatest number where things begin to matter". (Sounds like you could have answered the first question with "1".)
Speaking for myself, as soon as I imagine that things can matter an a world with 6 stars, it start to seem incredibly silly to me to say that they would matter less if you started adding extra stars to the universe, though admittedly I never agreed with the original tweet in the first place, so I'm a bad example.
I took it as gesturing to the innate silliness of asserting "there's a bunch of other stuff out there, so stuff here doesn't matter." Incidentally, I have come to call this the "Rick and Morty fallacy," due to the titular drunk scientist's propensity for asserting nothing matters because the multiverse is really big, or something. I take things to be exactly as big as they are and to matter exactly as much as they do no matter what may or may not exist in addition to them. Admittedly, the existence of extra stuff might alter moral decisions (i.e. if only one person existed you wouldn't sacrifice their life, but you might if a million others existed and sacrificing that one life could save them), however, the utility and worth of the initial subject isn't lessened in its own inherent magnitude, it's just that losses of the same absolute worth become more acceptable as gains of greater worth become possible. Essentially, being dwarfed in relative size in no way diminishes actual size, morally, physically, or otherwise.
The number of stars does not matter for meaning because of the number itself but due to the metaphysical implications following from that number. Billions of stars simply imply that your existence is a "meaningless" quirck of the universe and nothing more. Contrast this vs the view that earth is the center of the universe, and our sun the only one in existence, all hand crafted by God. It's no chance this was the view (and in some ways, still is) of the worlds biggest religions.
An alternative way of looking at "there are billions of stars " from the perspective of a believer, even one who believes that the Earth is special and there is no other life in the universe, is that *God took the trouble of creating an entire universe just so we'd have a place to live, grow, and throw our adolescent rebellion in His face*. Which adds a lot of meaning to that believer's life. So it's a matter of viewpoint, I think.
It's why a lot of atheist "gotchas" fall flat--the differences aren't at the level of "outcomes of a process of reason." They're differences at the level of basic principles, the axioms and predicates upon which and from which reason happens. Most believers don't say "XYZ and therefore God exists", they say "God exists, therefore XYZ implies <something else>." While atheists (in my experience) often start with an implied "God does not exist OR we can ignore the possibility of his existence, therefore XYZ implies <whatever>." They may even end up at the same end point. Just by different chains of logic.
> Billions of stars simply imply that your existence is a "meaningless" quirck of the universe and nothing more.
An analogical argument made 100 000 ago would be: "there are more trees in the forest than there are members of our tribe, therefore human existence is meaningless".
#33 Do you still think that "peak wokeness" is behind us? It sure look like if AI alignment is at all tractable, what corporate cutting-edge stuff is going to be aligned to would look much more like CRT than CEV.
It is so hard to say. on the one hand it seems to be waning and a bit and sometimes these cultural moments mostly come and go.
On the other hand the majority of crazy 15-30 year olds pushing this shit so hard are only going to have more power and influence a decade or two from now, and the 35-65 demographic that is more skeptical of it is only going to age and die.
It really seems like there is a bit of discontinuity around HS grad year 2000-2005 or so. When the kids who were in college after about 2005-2010 are often just completely immersed in this.
I think it's this. I suspect the rate of new true believers is much lower now, but as existing true believers age they move up the corporate hierarchy and gain in power, in a way that does not require a successor generation (though also the young people are less 'fanatic' because some ideas of "wokeness" are just the new normal, so less fervent passion for it doesn't mean less passive support)
"How would you feel if you had been given an X name, such as Xtopher, Xtherine, Xdysseus, or Xzebel?"
It is impossible to answer a question like this. How would you answer if I asked you "How would you feel if you were given something very life-changing, such as a billion dollars, or cancer?"
Traditional and mythological names are tricky ones. "Helen" is a name from Greek mythology, after all, but I think someone might have a different reaction to being named "Helen" than if named "Clytemnestra" (Helen's half-sister).
I've seen a description of "the Tiffany problem" where a name like Tiffany would be considered much too 'modern' to use in a fictional work about the Middle Ages, but in fact the name would work as it comes from the 12th century and is from the Greek name of the feast of Epiphany, Theophania (the same way children born at Christmas may be named Noel/Noelle or boys born at Easter may be named Pascal).
And because of changes in fashion, etc., one person's old-fashioned traditional family name is another person's revived, modern hip name.
There are clearly a lot of people who don't take those sorts of associations into account when choosing a name. Plus a smaller number engaged in some sort of conscious invocation or reclaiming, but I think a lot of kids' names are chosen on sound alone.
On a somewhat related note, my dad regularly expresses mystification at the name "Dolores". I know and have explained to him that it's an epithet of the Virgin Mary (which he hadn't been aware of). But I admit I'm not sure myself why one would choose that for a baby girl's name given the countless other titles with happier associations referencing that figure's sanctity, love, maternal nature, queenliness, etc.
Is it wrong that I associate the name "Dolores" as being the real name of the character for which "Lolita" was a nickname given to her by a dirty old man?
Tiphaine is a French noblewoman character in Arthur Conan Doyle's *The White Company*. Pretty sure the S.M. Stirling character is a hat-tip to ACD, as some of his other Emberverse characters are unambiguous references to that book.
I don't understand this comment; those seem like very easy questions to answer. My best guesses for what my emotions would be under those circumstances are:
1. I would feel shocked and thrilled and incredibly happy and unbelievably relieved. I'd be a bit paranoid about protecting it and not letting it all get lost or stolen. I'd be excited about all the stuff I'd be able to do with that kind of money, and nervous anticipating what sorts of challenges my new life would involve.
2. (assuming it's a cancer with a high risk of cutting my life short) I'd be horrified and distraught. I might be nauseous to the point of vomiting. I'd probably be depressed to the point of being totally nonfunctional for a couple of days. I would dread the upcoming painful and awkward conversations between me and people in my life --- especially people for whom there is mutual love and care, but no mutual understanding. I'd feel grateful that modern medicine would give me more hope than I'd otherwise have, if I'm fact that would be the case. After a couple days my emotions would shift to some kind of resignation, and I'd be able to start prioritizing for whatever comes next.
I'm confused about why you called that impossible. Do you find other hypothetical questions easier? Eg "how would you feel if you had stayed up much laster last night, but woke up at the same time?"
You totally missed the point. You’re answering them as separate, long form answer questions, when the point being made was the absurdity of combining them both into a single, survey-format question.
Overwhelmed, at first, but before long I would realize that I have to continue living day-to-day while formulating a plan to get rid of it, and preparing for some conversations I'd rather not have.
The name survey is mostly going to end up being a test for the social class of ACX readers, rather than general attitudes to names (there aren't going to be a lot of Brody Rockefellers and Tyler Van Burens running around). This means you can compare the questions about 'new' names to the Social Security database to get a sense of your readership's social standing!
Answered without googling to avoid spoiling the fun, and using the US system:
Hanora - never heard of this name. If it's invented ex nihilo, it'd be lower-class Black in a US context. If it's 'ethnic' then it's unassimilated immigrant if used as a first-name, assimilated middle to upper-middle if used as a middle name.
Honoria - aspirational end of the middle-middle class; doesn't have the Latin, but would like to be the sort of person who does. Wouldn't guess
Hannah - top end of the middle-middle to lower end of the upper-middle, but also possibly upper; it's one of the better slightly old-fashioned names, so it's a good choice if you've got a clue and don't want to get it 'wrong.' It's also not wrong, so it's a possible upper class name, barring the fact it's not especially euphonic, which people like for girl's names. Can also be Jewish at basically any level.
These are names going back three, maybe four, generations in my family.
Hannah is the name of a first cousin, Hanora and Honoria are great-aunt and great-grand-aunt.
Since it's mixed (one side is the paternal side, the other the maternal side), it's a combination of working/lower-middle class for one set of names and middle-middle class for the other. The older names (Honoria) are the more classy in my circumstances 😁
So it really does depend where you come from, what part of the country, and what generation had the name as to "sorting ACX readers by class". What's an aspirational name today might have been a common name four generations ago, but fell out of favour because it sounded so old-fashioned, and is now back in favour because it has that 'high toned' sound to it.
My maternal grandfather was a farm labourer/ploughman (he would have been a farmer, but he was Disinherited For Love) 😀
My paternal grandfather split his time between working on building sites in England and, when back home in Ireland for the winter, doing whatever general manual labour he could pick up.
So - a ploughman on one side, a navvy on the other, what does that make me? 😁
OK, that's you - but what about Honoria's, Hannah's, and Hanora's grandfathers? That's what I was asking.
It's fine if you don't know; it just means that we have as much evidence as we did before.
I don't even know any of my great-grandparents' *names*. I suspect that if I lived in an oral/preliterate culture, I would know their names, occupations, and some of their deeds.
Re: Sam Kriss' response on the Antman movie, there's two things:
(1) The excerpt he quotes from the Mabinogion:
"And Peredur stood, and compared the blackness of the raven and the whiteness of the snow, and the redness of the blood, to the hair of the lady that best he loved, which was blacker than jet, and to her skin which was whiter than the snow, and to the two red spots upon her cheeks, which were redder than the blood upon the snow appeared to be.
death and desire and the rich strangeness of the world."
That's in a Christianised context, but the trope is a familiar one in Celtic (to use that much-abused term) myths; in (set in pre-Christian era) one of the Three Sorrows of Irish Storytelling, "Deirdre and the Sons of Uisneach", Deirdre sees something similar and wishes for a lover with hair as black as the crow's feathers, skin as white as snow, and cheeks as red as blood:
"Deirdre was the daughter of the royal storyteller Fedlimid mac Daill. Before she was born, Cathbad the chief druid at the court of Conchobar mac Nessa, king of Ulster, prophesied that Fedlimid's daughter would grow up to be very beautiful, but that kings and lords would go to war over her, much blood would be shed because of her, and Ulster's three greatest warriors would be forced into exile for her sake.
Hearing this, many urged Fedlimid to kill the baby at birth, but Conchobar, aroused by the description of her future beauty, decided to keep the child for himself. He took Deirdre away from her family and had her brought up in seclusion by Leabharcham, a poet and wise woman, and planned to marry Deirdre when she was old enough. As a young girl, living isolated in the woodlands, Deirdre told Leabharcham one snowy day that she would love a man with the colours she had seen when a raven landed in the snow with its prey: hair the color of the raven, skin as white as snow, and cheeks as red as blood.
Leabharcham told her she was describing Naoise, a handsome young warrior, hunter and singer at Conchobar's court. With the collusion of Leabharcham, Deirdre met Naoise and they fell in love. Accompanied by his brothers Ardan and Ainnle (the other two sons of Uisneach), Naoise and Deirdre fled to Scotland."
Naturally it does not end happily.
(2) " i think it would be very hard to write a version of ant-man and the wasp quantumania that read like this. but if you did, it wouldn’t really be a marvel movie any more."
I think this is incorrect, because (for instance) there are tales of very small, tiny people coming to visit Irish kings and vice versa. Antman and Wasp as heroes/travellers going to the Other World and becoming tiny themselves, and their adventures in this strange place, would be very possible to do. I think what is really being denied here is not the translation of characters and plot, but the themes or motivation or whatever - that you can't write an epic version of Quantumania because its purpose is not to be a hero-tale or epic adventure, but to slot into "extruded product of identifiable origin" in the Marvelverse.
"In Irish mythology, Abcán (modern spelling: Abhcán) was the dwarf poet and musician of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the early Celtic divinities of Ireland. He was said to have a bronze boat with a tin sail.
In the story of the death of the goddess Ruad, Abcán is the dwarf that ferries her from the Otherworld to this one so that she can seduce the human, Aed Srónmár. The sounds of mermaids singing, or in some versions, music from a fairy mound cause her to leap into the water and drown.
In another story, Abcán is captured by the hero, Cúchulainn. He frees himself by playing lullabies so irresistible that the warrior goes to sleep.[3]
Abcán has much in common with, and may be another name for, the dwarf musician Fer Í."
I think that Quantumania would be better rendered as the heroes visiting the Faerie or some other such alternate realm (they could still have size-changing powers, of course). The movie makes it pretty clear that there's virtually no interaction between the "Quantum Realm" and ordinary Earth, so it's more analogous to an alternate dimension than a world of small things.
Anyway, here's a question: how much moral ambiguity was contained in classic folk tales ? Quantumania is a Marvel product, yes; but once you strip away all the CGI, it's a story about people's choices and unintended consequences. One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist; a person could be both sympathetic and monstrous at the same time; saving your loved ones could doom a world; and so on. The movie doesn't offer any clear moral prescriptions, but it does explore these issues. Setting aside the question of whether this mode of storytelling is good or bad, are there folktales that are written in a similar pattern ?
> here's a question: how much moral ambiguity was contained in classic folk tales ?
From a modern perspective, loads and loads. It's more of an open question how much moral ambiguity the people of the past saw in their own stories, but I'm pretty sure they had more than we like to have in the modern day.
I have a collection of selected translations from a ninth-century collection of Chinese folk tales. In one of them, a young man is injured somehow and is taken in and nursed back to health by an older man.
The young man is grateful, but he doesn't have the resources to properly pay back the guy who cared for him. So off he goes to work hard and save money so that one day he can reward his savior in proper style.
And he does! It's all very uplifting... except for the fact that the young man's vocation, at which he redoubles his efforts so that he can save up an amount of money that matters, is that he's a highwayman. This would be a tough sell in a modern story.
I dunno. A Hollywood film maybe (though even then!…), but it seems like half of the YA genre these days thinks "assassin" is an obvious career for an only-slightly-edgy, but mostly sympathetic personal.
The name survey is a bit confusing because I disagree with the examples concerning what names are new or primarily from fantasy etc.
For example for me the first name Madison is well established and not particularly unusual but the other examples in that question are unusual. Also Hermione for me is a “standard“ name even though it is rare (it is in Shakespeare and there is a St Hermione) but Arwen isn’t.
To me as an English person, the most surprising thing about the Ashley Madison hoohah was the revelation that that's two girls names. I think I know one Ashley, no madisons, and the standard English reaction is Why does this dating site have a name like a firm of accountants?
The name Madison is pretty well-understood. Look around at the women of the world and you won't meet a single Madison above her late 30s. Why? Because its origin dates to a very specific event, the 1984 movie "Splash." It focuses on a mermaid in a (no pun intended) fish-out-of-water scenario, visiting a modern human city. Someone asks her name, and she looks around and sees a street sign that says "Madison," and chooses this on the spot. This was meant as a joke, because that's a *last* name, and one most famously associated with a man, so it's a wholly inappropriate name for her. But the movie was a big hit and so a lot of new parents started naming their daughters after her.
Similarish thing with Chardonnay in the UK. It was just a grape variety (used in champagne and white burgundy, but also a lot of cheap varietals identified as chardonnay on the bottle) until a TV series called Footballers' Wives in the early 2000s which introduced a character called that as a (rather good) joke. now there's lots of them.
A similar thing happened with Tiffany and Breakfast at Tiffany’s although Tiffany was I believe a rare first name before that. But in addition it is kind of an American thing, isn’t it for last names to become given names?
>> it is kind of an American thing, isn’t it for last names to become given names?
I think this is strongly associated with the Southern gentry class to the extent used for males (not necessarily exclusively Southern to the extent associated with old money, but definitely with a very strong regional valence nonetheless).
In modern (post-Splash) times there seems to be a separate phenomenon in which girls are given last names as first names (even explicitly masculine-sounding ones like "McKenzie," where "Mc" literally means "son"). Although while it's much more common as a cross-class occurrence today I think that this too may have older, more pretentious gentry roots based on, e.g., the (female) character of "Jordan Baker" in The Great Gatsby (albeit I believe there's a significant contingent of literature analysts who think she's meant to code as a crypto-lesbian, which would make her otherwise relatively masculine-sounding last-name-as-first name a further implicit nod in that direction.)
Semi-related note: I think "Breaking Bad" is a show where the quality of the acting *dramatically* exceeds the quality of the writing (there's a season 1 scene where a character screws up the imply/infer distinction in a way that reads as "the writers just aren't very good and don't know their stuff" rather than a comment on the character's intelligence.) One prominent example is that having a middle-aged female character who codes as having been born circa the 1970s with the name "Skyler" never really stops feeling like cringe-inducing Millennial ahistorical oversight.
I think the idea was, if some of the child's ancestors had a especially prestigious last name, you could give them that name as a first name. But nowadays it's lost that aspect; a girl named Madison isn't particularly likely to have an ancestor named Mr. Madison.
I've heard that the "Madison" name comes from a 1980s movie called "Splash", where a mermaid in Manhattan was asked for her name and she read the first thing she saw, which was a street sign for Madison Avenue.
Edit: And that's what I get for reading comments in reverse order. :-)
>>This is going to sound silly, but I wasn't even aware of the imply/infer distinction because it didn't occur to me people would confuse them.
I don't think it sounds silly at all, I don't get it either, but it's objectively true that some people do make this conflation. I, in turn, judge them for it.
A similar thing happened with the name Shaquille. Basically no one had that name until 1992. Then Shaq becomes a basketball star and: https://babynames.com/name/Shaquille
Ariel similarly shot up in popularity after The Little Mermaid, and went from being a technically-neutral-but-mostly-male name to being mostly female, IIRC
I laughed at that section. We named our kids all good solid traditional saints' names, leaning toward less-commonly-used, but not unheard-of or too weird. Looking back on their names, as a group, they're a bit of a Rorschach test. Depending on your priors, they could easily be interpreted as 1) Our family is (church denomination) (and they'd be correct), 2) totally unhinged SF/Fantasy nerds (partially correct?), or 3) Black (incorrect).
I think the SF/fantasy genres often borrow very old names to add a sense of gravitas to otherwise silly-sounding subjects.
It is becoming very clear that the "resource curse" is less to do with endogenous resource rich nation existence as opposed to the international system of economics combined with shenanigans.
The shenanigans is obvious: the example of "prodigious skill in coups" vs. apparent lack of skill with anything else begs the obvious response - this guy didn't plan the coup; some 3 letter agency did.
The international system of economics, however, is pretty well proven. The issue is in the details of international trade - specifically the dollar reserve. If you're a resource rich nation but otherwise poor - you need dollars to buy all the nice things ranging from luxury goods for the elite to roads, airport, dams, houses, sewage, factories, food, energy, durable goods etc etc. Even if you are resource rich in any one thing like energy - you would need an exceptionally large amount of exportable product which in turn requires massive capital investment (again in dollars) to be able to harvest it. All these dollar requirements are the equivalent of interest payments on a foreign currency denominated loan.
Now combine the above with the fact that it has been Western companies and countries that dominate the actual commodity development and trade businesses. What is the possibility that the price of commodities is pushed lower vs. the price of dollars and/or the price of dollar denominated goods? Note the value of the dollar *is* significantly controllable by the US government via interest rates and liquidity issuance.
Combine the 2 - it takes a mightily focused, educated and capable government in order to navigate the minefield of translating an overabundance of resources into national prosperity. China is the obvious example of this - but South Korea, Japan, Germany have done it also. India, Africa and South America overall constitute the negative example.
On the coups thing, the claim isn't that Sani Abacha was involved in *one* successful coup - the claim is that he was personally involved in *every* successful coup, and *none* of the unsuccessful ones. That's stronger evidence that he personally had something to do with the success, rather than just being a front for someone else who made the coup succeed.
A while ago I read a study on what makes for a successful coup and I've been fascinated by Abacha for years. He really does stand out as a very odd example of a "strongman" type. Not much of an ego or a temper, never really gunning for the top spot himself until the last coup when it seemed more like no one else was available and he resigned himself to be the head of state as a last resort. As far as his coup skills are concerned, he really nailed one of the aspects of a successful coup: acting like, and convincing others that the coup was already over and had succeeded, especially within the army. "Coup is over, here is our new regime, please remain calm, nothing to see here, go about your lives". He was fantastic at creating a sense of a fait accompli while to those in the know things are not quite as settled. Being a generally boring guy helped with this a lot. He was also the only general in the Nigerian army to never skip a rank on his rise; he was the only one who came to the top of the army without nepotism or patronage (or at least he was good at creating the impression). As to whether outside intelligence agencies assisted him, I've not read anything stating that they had, but it would be odd if they hadn't. Its likely his skill for facilitating successful coups that would attract them to using him as well as maintaining secrecy.
My running theory on the resource curse is that it's downstream of centralization issues. I remember reading about Nigeria in The Fate of Africa and thinking, "why didn't they just do an Oklahoma-style land rush?" Certainly, land reform worked pretty well for South Korea. Instead, what seems to happen with a lot of these IMF-advised poor countries is that the government controls all the natural resources, negotiates all the deals, spends all the money, and then ends up having wasted their bounty.
It isn't clear that South Korea is a good example. I don't know anything about the land rush you speak of - but South Korea has a number of very unusual circumstances starting with the fact that the vast majority of that nation was literally farmland when the Korean War ended. South Korea also had a "recapitalization" just before 2000 - the Asian debt crisis.
But what you say about IMF advice is related but not the same as what I reference.
An example of IMF advice is austerity as a condition for more dollar loans; the debt burden of existing loans already being too obviously too high. This has provably created a doom loop for economies.
However, this is not the only impact. The Argentina and Brazil hyperinflation crises are another example: on top of IMF machinations, one of the other outcomes was super high interest rate (30%, 40% or more) dollar denominated Argentinian and Brazilian bonds issued by the respective governments. As it turns out, the vast majority of the actual buyers of these bonds were not foreigners, but Argentinians and Brazilians, respectively. And not regular Argentinians and Brazilians, but the very richest because that class also had a direct hand in whether these bonds would default or not. Foreign buyers stayed away because any such bond has an obvious default risk but "insiders" could be sure of this not happening.
Equally, the "how" and "what" of spent money matters. China has redirected a substantial portion of its earnings into R & D, infrastructure building and so forth. It seems pretty clear that this behavior was not executed by others.
Lastly, what I referenced was a structural issue with trade. If a handful of companies act as an oligopoly over commodities - they have the ability to push prices lower worldwide by leveraging their reach to push all suppliers to the lowest price possible. So it doesn't require a nefarious Western plot to accomplish dollar income minimization for commodity exports - just the usual market economics resulting from an oligopoly. Of course, how that oligopoly forms...
I only vaguely recall the details, but I thought China's great success began with a bottom up economic revolution, driven by farmers proactively splitting up state farms among themselves.
China's great success began with their willingness to allow some forms of capitalism within the Chinese economy, which resulted in China opening up to the outside, which multinational - largely US - companies then took advantage of by offshoring their production to China - not just US production but factories that used to be in the 4 Asian Tigers: Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore.
People seemed to have forgotten that the offshoring waves - China is only the latest (last). Japan started it with its auto exports to the US starting in the late 1960s (1950s overall).
The Four Asian Tigers focused more on other types of manufacturing along with TV and computer exports competing with Japan, again in the 1970s or a bit earlier.
China has eaten the lunch of pretty much all 5 of the above outside a few very specific areas, but has expanded beyond into all manner of up and down scale industry ranging from chemicals to solar panels.
"Deng responded by decollectivizing agriculture and emphasizing the household-responsibility system, which divided the land of the People's communes into private plots. Under the new policy, peasants were able to exercise formal control of their land as long as they sold a contracted portion of their crops to the government.[33] This move increased agricultural production by 25 percent between 1975 and 1985, setting a precedent for privatizing other parts of the economy.[33] The bottom-up approach of the reforms promoted by Deng, in contrast to the top-down approach of the Perestroika in the Soviet Union, is considered an important factor contributing to the success of China's economic transition."
The policy did exist but China's farming was not and has never been the engine for their growth.
China's GDP in 1984 was 6% of the US'; I suspect the relative ratio was largely unchanged as compared to 1975 whereas China's economic miracle of the past generation was from the mid 1980s onward.
I visited China as a teen in the early 1980s; the differences between that snapshot (in the form of a 30 day, multi region tour) vs. the various trips I took there from 1990 until 2006 were astonishing - and no doubt has accelerated more since then.
To the extent that the resource curse is even a real thing, I'm not convinced that Nigeria is a great example of it. It's poor but it's no worse off than neighbouring similar coastal countries without oil.
Some GDP per capita numbers:
Nigeria: $2280
Ghana: $2204
Cameroon: $1669
Benin: $1390
Togo: $990
Oil certainly hasn't made Nigeria rich but it doesn't seem to have made it a lot poorer either. Besides, there's not even that much oil for the number of people; Nigerian oil production comes out to about two barrels per capita per year, or about $150 worth. (By comparison, the US and Russia produce about 20 barrels/head/year, Saudi Arabia and Norway over one hundred barrels, and Kuwait about 250 barrels).
$150 worth of extra GDP per person, every year, would seem to be a very big deal as it is 6.8% of Ghana's GDP per capita.
Resource curse doesn't automatically mean dirt poor and starving - it does mean that the nation in question fails to develop as much as others even having the benefit of extra income from said resources.
Nigeria GDP in 1960 was 4.2 billion; Ghana's GDP in 1960 was 1.22 billion but the populations were 45.14 million vs. 6.64 million - or in other words, Ghana GDP per capita was $184 in 1960 vs. Nigeria's $93.
Ghana being near Nigeria is at least partly because Ghana started at almost twice the GDP vs. Nigeria in 1960.
So resources good, no curse right? Well, except if we take the 2 barrels per person = $6 = 6.5% of per capita GDP in 1960 or $141/6.2% in 2021...where did all that extra value go to? Nigeria's overall growth from 1960 to its peak in 2014 was about 9.5% as compared to Ghana's 7% CAGR.
The 6%+ oil add compares to actual growth rate difference of 2.5% - is that a gap?
Seems so to me since this is straight house money flowing into Nigeria.
Of course, there are certainly other factors like Nigeria growing population faster than Ghana but it isn't clear to me if the effect is net positive or negative; GDP certainly grows faster but more heads = lower average per capita. But either way, the population growth differences are nowhere in the 3%+ per year range so that seems unlikely a major factor.
If you go to Matt Lakeman's site and travel back one post, you'll find "Notes on Saudi Arabia", where he talks about how that particular country avoided the resource curse. The short version of his theory, as I understand it, is that there's a line to walk between kicking out all the "Westerners" too quickly, and letting them strip-mine your country to the bone. Saudi Arabia had a few good kings at the right moments, with enough power and vision to navigate this. As a result, he describes Saudi Aramco as "apparently a highly efficient and well-managed corporation" which effectively supports the entire rest of the inefficient Saudi Arabian economy.
He contrasts this with, for example, China, which gained wealth through creating an industrial economy.
To me the shenanigans are those of the British. Consider a counterfactual region with three states, Al-Hausa, Yorubia, and Igbostan.
From Matt's description-which, of course, might well be mistaken--the Igbos would have developed very rapidly, and after a short delay they would have started investing in their neighbours in order to develop supplies of foods and raw materials, and to stop annoying border raids and transmission of illnesses. Corruption would be less of a problem because a major incentive, "enrich your ethnic in-group", would be eliminated.
It seems to me that partition in Nigeria would have worked to the advantage of the locals much better than it did in India, and that's why the British set things up so that it was infeasible.
I think the French are much more the colonial power in West Africa.
As for your example: it leaves out whether there is anything of interest to a colonial power. What the British did in India was not any one thing at any given time - it was a series of economic actions which consistently benefited the British economy in some way vs. India's. Let's not forget that the original East India economic activity was the spice trade. From there, it morphed to tea (to displace Chinese imports of same), raw cotton milled in the UK then sold back as cloth, the salt tax, and so forth. In every case, the bulk of the wealth generated by this economic activity wound up in the British hands instead of Indian ones.
Your example presumes open access to capital (to buy the technology and machinery to develop), equitable economic benefit from exports vs. pricing of imports (to generate capital surpluses) and a general lack of colonial meddling for economic, religious and/or nationalist/imperialist reasons which was very much not the case worldwide.
That was my impression as well - it's like a good capstone to a class on Chesterton's fence, where you get to feel happy about how much you've learned.
After watching the hand illusion for about 40 seconds, it stopped working for me. This was even shorter for the girl doing it and things were corrected by the 2nd playthrough. It seems to be caused by the brain mixing up which fingers belong to which hand and if you can keep track of the fingers it stops working. I wonder if part of the illusion is the low quality of the video, which probably blurs the lines separating the fingers.
> women ... are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring)
This isn't particularly new news. I first recall hearing back in 2008-ish — and IIRC it wasn't described as a particularly new finding back then — that studies had shown that when names and face-to-face interviewing were eliminated from the hiring process, that the rate of women getting hired went *down,* strongly suggesting that a positive discrimination bias existed in favor of hiring more women.
Several years back, there was a lot of buzz around gender- and race-blinded interviewing for tech jobs. As far as I can tell, it never really went anywhere. It's possible that people just didn't like not being able to see each other, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it was tested, found to slightly reduce hiring of women and underrepresented minorites, and quietly abandoned.
Yeah this has happened in classical music of all places. Where there was a big big push for blinded auditory only auditions in the service of diversity.
Except then everyone is Asian/Jewish, and not enough 1st chair people are women...so neverminded blind auditions are horrible you monsters!
All the more funny as it is same people both instituting them and then 10 years later denouncing them.
Both things are true. When it was first implemented it increased the number of women and minorities. However, it didn't increase them enough so progressives pivoted away from arguing for blind auditions toward explicit preferences for women/minorities/etc both in hiring and promotion.
Do you have a place I can read about orchestras stopping doing this? I was under the impression that it became standard practice and is now dominant, but perhaps I'm wrong.
Well my main source is a friend who is a world class French Horn player, but I remember having read multiple things on it in past several years.
For example the NYT seems to have an article attacking blind auditions in 2020, a quick search turns up dozens of other similar articles, including some with examples of blind auditions being eliminated/scaled back/changed to ad affirmative action (not really blind anymore).
I didn't read the whole thing, but I didn't find any discussion of that being a common practice, the way that it had sounded like you suggested it was.
Look I didn't do a survey of all orchestras in the country. Sorry. I consume media like you, and talk to IRL human people like you.
If you are so interested in this topic, maybe start a study.
I was reporting what I understand the state to be, and as I google it looks like I am mostly right. I looked in my local paper and saw an article from 2016...saying they are moving away from blind auditions because they don't do enough for blacks and latinos and women.
I see numerous podcasts discussing it. I don't know. Explore! My understanding is that blind auditions are under siege. I commented as such, and you challenged me for info and when I look evidence they are is quite easy to find.
Do you have some insight you want to share? Are you in an orchestra?
> All the more funny as it is same people both instituting them and then 10 years later denouncing them.
Yeah, those "same people" do that with a whooooooooole lot of different subjects. (And, as Scott pointed out in the article, never ever apologize when their first take turns out to be wrong in some way.) It's a pretty common pattern, and it's been around long enough that Orwell was lampooning it almost 75 years ago. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia!
Scott, your tendency to forego rationalist analysis because you want to reinforce your belief that ‘feminism has gone too far’ is just transparently annoying at this point. Why doesn’t listening to subjective experience matter for bias and harassment, but it does for drug effect sizes? Also, the paper you link to about bias starts analysis by seeing if men and women with the same CV face bias - isn’t it possible women have more barriers to reaching that same CV? Here’s a more detailed critique: https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/letters/2023/05/13/misleading-portrayal-womens-equality-science
"listening to subjective experience" is transparently annoying. It's a nice way of saying we should listen to people complain about the world being uniquely unfair to them when there's no evidence of such.
Affirmative action stoked all this outrage and bred the resentment as it does everywhere it's implemented.
Scott's last post literally recommends listening to subjective experience for drug effects, ignoring small effect sizes in statistical studies. I want a good reason why that should be true in that case, but not here.
I suppose one answer would be that therapy patients have no incentive to lie about a drug that isn't helping them, but there's a lot of incentive to lie about being discriminated against.
This, and also the fact that it's often quite difficult to objectively measure a lot of bodily functions. For example, "does this drug reduce the amount of pain you're feeling?" is a question that's very easy to answer through subjective experience, and quite difficult by any other means.
When good-quality objective criteria exist, they virtually always return superior results, but they don't always exist.
One is about what people do to their own bodies and the other is about how we allocate societal resources. You can very easily defend a standard where people get to choose what to do with their own bodies while not believing subjective experience lets them make demands we reorganize how other people act or allocate resources.
The standard you're proposing is not actually defensible. If you privilege subjective experiences then you're going to find contradictory subjective experiences. For example, there's no shortage of men who subjectively believe society is biased against them. So if you really hold we should allocate social resources based on subjective experiences you need to start deciding whose subjective experiences take precedence. And then you need to defend that ranking which is usually done through normative beliefs about who we should believe first.
None of this is a problem for individual decisions since you can simply give everyone primacy over their own bodies and nobody else's.
In my experience, most attempts to "listen to subjective experience" already secure their conclusion by selecting the group whose experience we are going to listen to.
For example, if I sincerely wonder whether women are more oppressed than men, I could interview 100 women and 100 men, ask each of them to describe the most difficult aspects of their lives, and then compare somehow. (A possible conclusion might be that difficulties can be classified into several categories, and women are typically worse at some categories, and men at other categories.)
But the typical research only does the part where they interview 100 women (and zero men), make a list of the complaints women made, and publish it as a proof that women have it universally worse. (Which, from certain perspective, could serve as an ironic example of a frequent men's problem: when you complain, no one listens and no one cares.)
Furthermore, if we complain about how men and women are differently socialized, guess what -- women are socialized to complain, as a way of bonding with other women, but also with reasonable expectation that some knight might volunteer to solve the problem for the damsel. Meanwhile men are socialized to "man up" and stop whining. So even if we interviewed a typical woman and a typical man with comparable experiences, I would expect the man to say stoically "eh, it's okay, could be worse", and the woman to provide a list of complaints.
Agree that Scott seems to forego his usual level of careful reasoning whenever anything close to feminism comes up. For this particular point, I do agree with Scott - for years whenever people brought up bias in STEM hiring, I would protest that bias against women wasn't at the point of hiring, but at the point of childhood (when girls are given cooking sets and boys are given toy cars) to young adulthood.
It's a bit disappointing of Scott to take this finding as 'oh there's clearly no bias against women after all', though.
Does that happen anymore to any great extent. There are clearly sex differences that exist regardless of the culture. I do agree that corporations can’t fix this.
anecdotal evidence from my own kids suggest that the kinds of toys children are interested in is innate, strongly gendered, and manifests at an incredibly early age (~3 months). You can give the girls toy cars but you can't make them play with 'em (and vice versa for boys and cooking sets).
I wonder if the gendered characteristics of toys that the kids are picking up are to do with function, or sheer design. Much as we may jeer, maybe girls really do like pink and rounded corners better, and boys blue or dark or green things with fiddly bits?
Because — I can just about imagine evo-psych reasons for boys to like wheeled toys (I think on some level they scan as "little animals" so blah blah hunting instinct, pet dogs blah blah). But even if women are predisposed towards cooking in some sense, it's asking a lot of a three-month-old to understand what a toy stove has to do with food on any level that the lizard brain would recognise… Indeed, I recall, as a little boy (though admittedly more 3-5 y.o. than three months), having been rather interested in an old, disused stove in our garage; but interested in it in, as it were, a boyish way, as a big interesting Machine with knobs to crank.
Then again, I kept nabbing my sister's outrageously pink toy princess-carriage thing… so I don't know. Hmmm.
(Side-note: I approve of the reference in your username but it makes arguing with you an unduly daunting prospect. Was that the plan?)
The "more detailed critique" seems to be answered in... the abstract of the original paper?
"Even in the four domains in which we failed to find evidence of sexism disadvantaging women, we nevertheless acknowledge that broad societal structural factors may still impede women’s advancement in academic science. Given the substantial resources directed toward reducing gender bias in academic science, it is imperative to develop a clear understanding of when and where such efforts are justified and of how resources can best be directed to mitigate sexism when and where it exists."
Subjective experience is a uniquely bad source in this case because of confirmation bias. If a woman gets interrupted once a day, she'll think "Of course! I was interrupted because I'm a woman" and proclaim this as an example of sexist oppression. If a man gets interrupted twice a day, he might be a bit annoyed by it, but it won't stick in his mind as an example of gendered discrimination against him (even if it was), because he hasn't been primed by society to do so.
If there are more barriers to women reaching the same CV, and those barriers involve discrimination at an earlier stage, shouldn't that show up as bias at an earlier stage? That is, if women had a harder time getting a good CV because they had a harder time getting hired at prestigious institutions, getting grants or getting published, that would show up as bias in hiring, grants, or journal acceptances.
>For ten years lots of important people told us again and again that discrimination against women in STEM was a massive problem.
And then we spent ten years pouring massive effort and resources into fixing that, including social sanctions on people opposing or undermining those efforts.
And then after ten years of massive effort, women are at parity on some of those indicators, advantaged on one very important indicator, and disadvantaged on one very important indicator.
We shouldn't be like the climate change deniers who say 'They raised such a stink over the hole in the ozone layer yet and no one talks about it anymore, guess they were just crying wolf' when in fact that stink instigated a massive international effort that discovered CFCs as the culprit and lowered their usage by 99.7% globally, solving the problem.
If you see people who haven't updated on the current state of affairs as we're just now measuring it with this paper, then yes, correct them. They will probably still be worried about that pay equity and ratings stuff, and talk about other points in the pipeline like representation and primary school, but if they don't update on the stuff in the paper then that's bad.
But don't use these results *now* to claim they were wrong 10 years ago. These results are exactly what they claimed 10 years ago they were going to try to achieve, and are the result of a massive totalizing effort to do so.
And if those people now said "job accomplished, let's dismantle all the DEI programs and stop cancelling people", I might have respect for them. Instead, their rhetoric today is even more unhinged than 10 years ago.
Do you personally agree that we should now dismantle all DEI programs and stop cancelling people? On the one important indicator where women are advantaged, would you advocate for affirmative action for men, provided that there is affirmative action for women on the other indicator where women are disadvantaged?
Saying that the fact that women are at parity *with* the DEI programs is a reason to *dismantle* the programs seems transparently ridiculous. Like the idea that we are tolerably dry *with* the umbrella is a reason to *get rid* of the umbrella.
You need an umbrella when it's raining. If you're walking around with an umbrella* when the sun is shining, something is wrong.
If you claim the numbers of women would now fall below parity if the special treatment programmes are axed, then maybe the problem is not "women are being blocked from these jobs", it's "women are not interested in these jobs for various reasons, including fewer women having the skills/abilities for these jobs".
*Before you chime in, no, I do not mean a parasol.
I don't believe this study was measuring anything that is sensitive to the number of people of different groups interested in things. It was measuring the connection between relevant input variables like publication quality and output variables like employment and salary.
But that's not the rhetoric. From the amount of screaming going on, you'd get the distinct impression that despite the umbrellas, people are as wet today as they ever were, if not more so! (And yet somehow they never seem to conclude that this might imply their umbrellas are faulty, *or* that their data on wetness is faulty.)
The actual effects on people are that men are apparently discriminated against in hiring, while the people in charge think (which is what the rhetoric is, an expression of people’s beliefs) that the opposite is true and are therefore trying to discriminate more.
The actual effect is that men have slight net discrimination against in hiring, and slight net discrimination in favor in salary, and that net discrimination for men and women is equal on other matters. Whatever the people in charge are doing (with all their decades of fighting in many directions) seems to be net canceling out whatever else is going on.
If the rhetoric is wrong then it should be called out as being wrong and there should be no repercussions for saying it is wrong. I agree with you that the data shows on average men and women do equally as well under the current system. However the calls from Academia are not to continue the current way of doing things which can be seen to be "fair" in a way, they are to make the system even more female focused when at the moment there is no need to.
This study might not be evidence that we should cancel the current programs, but it is evidence that we don't need to extend their scope/intensity.
That first sentence is correct if you think that truth is a compelling value, and wins out over other consequences. I believe that sometimes though, there are important things that are made worse by insisting on saying some particular truth, and that in those cases, we might want to get people to talk about something else.
I agree with the last sentence, that the study suggests that no significant changes are needed, and I disagree just as strongly with the people who say current preferential practices should be strengthened as with the people who say current preferential practices should be weakened.
COVID has mostly gone away *with* ivermectin readily available from veterinary supply shops; are you afraid that the pandemic will return if people stop taking their horse dewormer? For that matter, do we even still need vaccine mandates in your world?
I am very, very skeptical of arguments of the form, "my team did [X] to fight against bad thing [Y], now [Y] has mostly gone away so we were right and you all have to let us make you do [X] forever". This is not reason, and I'm not going to try to break down which fallacies it encodes. Sometimes Y went away for a completely different reason, X doing nothing or worse than nothing. Sometimes, once Y goes away, it won't come back even if you stop doing the thing that got rid of it in the first place.
In this case, I think both. I don't think that formal "massive effort and resources" affirmative action and DEI programs made a very large difference in who was hired *in STEM* over the past decade or so at least. And it seems pretty clear that if women are now above parity in hiring and at parity in promotion, then the hiring managers / tenure committees / whatever either now are or soon will be at gender parity so it's hard to see how we have to continue wasting massive effort and resources to make sure women still get hired in appropriate numbers.
But critics of Ivermectin aren’t complaining that Ivermectin is doing too much and is overcorrecting - we are complaining that it does nothing. Critics of affirmative action and wokeness are saying it does too much and disadvantages white men. But the evidence seems to suggest both that the critics who say it does too much, and the supporters who say it doesn’t do enough, are both wrong.
> But the evidence seems to suggest both that the critics who say it does too much, and the supporters who say it doesn’t do enough, are both wrong.
I respect the data, and agree with you more than not, but while we're on the subject I do want to take a step back and sanity-check. The idea that we've spontaneously converged on the right equilibrium even though none of the people doing the important things *understand* what they're actually dealing with is an *extremely startling one* if true (how often do things like that happen?) and I'd sleep happier at night with a working hypothesis for how that equilibrium spontaneously emerged, other than pure dumb luck.
Yes, I think that would be quite interesting. And I suppose I would have to actually read the study to understand how much it ends up being strong evidence that no one is net advantaged/disadvantaged vs how much it ends up being that there's no strong evidence one way or another. And we would also want to know whether this is true as a total over a several decade period, or if there have been trends, or what.
> And it seems pretty clear that if women are now above parity in hiring and at parity in promotion, then the hiring managers / tenure committees / whatever either now are or soon will be at gender parity
As far as I understand, the study doesn't say that women have (above) equal representation, but that equally performing women have (above) equal opportunities compared to men. They may be (in many areas I'm pretty sure are) still underrepresented because fewer of them go into STEM in the first place (most likely), they are more likely to drop out, or perform worse.
'Instead, their rhetoric today is even more unhinged than 10 years ago.'
I wonder if that's just a case of most of the normal people, seeing that their work is done, leaving the group and leaving only the most 'unhinged' weirdos to go on talking about it.
Haven't DEI mostly moved on to lack of certain "minorities" rather than white women by now? Since that "problem" would be much more difficult to solve, by all appearances, activists have a long and prosperous future in front of them while remaining not blatantly hypocritical.
>it just bothers me how much the people claiming that it’s urgently important that nobody is ever allowed to suggest they are wrong have a consistent track record of being totally and inexcusably wrong.
There's surely a correlation between being totally and inexcusably wrong and acting desperate to shut down skepticism, so this outcome is something that one should at least tentatively predict in such cases, I think.
I had gone off the first sentence on the Wikipedia article, but should have read further.
It turns out what is popularly referred to as "kosher salt" doesn't refer to salt that is kosher, but rather a style of salt used in a kosher preparation of meats.
Regarding 19: I don't see why this is a mistake. The follow up study seems to be broadly supportive of your claim that attraction in women is distinct from genital arousal.
Regarding old names, this prompted me to look at the top 1000 for the year 1900 and scroll to the bottom, and now I'm surprised by the repeated presence of boys with seeming girls' names, and vice versa. I understand some names that are currently seen as girls' names used to be seen as boys' names, such as Leslie, but some of the examples seem like there's no way that's what's going on. For example, boys named "Dorothy," "Eva," "Gertrude," and "Agnes," and girls named "Thomas," "Virgil," and "Leo." Is this just the result of the wrong box getting ticked and some amount of boys with boys' names being recorded as girls and vice versa, or was there really a small but significant number of people born in 1900 being given names that would be considered "gender-nonconforming" even by modern standards?
Looking at that list, I would really like to see the original source documents. Some of it sounds like not very literate people reporting/recording names which were garbled when they were written down, and some of it like modern people not being able to read old handwriting well and garbling it.
I'm sure there well could be boys named "Vergle" out there back then, but it's more likely to be someone spelling by ear because they didn't know how to spell "Virgil" which can't have been that uncommon a name, given that one of the Earp brothers (of OK Corral fame) was named that.
Certainly that would explain the bizarre spellings in general, and some of the "sex-mismatch" for names where the difference between the "boy version" and the "girl version" is a matter of spelling (like the Mental Floss article mentioning boys named "Louise" and girls named "Louis"), but would that be sufficient to explain a boy named "Dorothy"?
"would that be sufficient to explain a boy named "Dorothy"?"
The thing is, for older registers, these have to be data entered by humans, and with the little experience I've had in that (way back did a short stint entering records for the library as part of work experience, on a very primitive software version and it wasn't easy to undo mistakes, erase duplicate entries, on top of having to read 100+ year old handwriting that varied from 'legible' to 'drunk spider fell into inkwell and crawled over the page'), means I think it's way more likely the interns/trainees/unpaid volunteers screwed up which drop down menu they should have selected e.g. "boy" not "girl" for sex when entering "Dorothy Smith born 15th June 1891", and they didn't notice in time or couldn't correct it afterwards.
That's why we need the source documents to find out if a boy really was named "Dorothy" or the answer is "screwed up the data entry".
For example, the Mental Floss listing gives:
"1880
Boy: Handy (970)
Girl: Parthenia (914)"
If you pull up the Social Security records, the list for girls' names only goes as far as 942, but the boys' names go on to 1000 and have what must be some erroneous entries:
"943 Denver
944 Dow
945 Duff
946 Edie
947 Edith
948 Elick
949 Elie
950 Eliga
951 Eliseo
952 Elroy
953 Ely
954 Ennis
955 Enrique
956 Erasmus
957 Esau
958 Everette
959 Firman
960 Fleming
961 Flora
962 Gardner
963 Gee
964 Gorge
965 Gottlieb
966 Gregorio
967 Gregory
968 Gustavus
969 Halsey
970 Handy
971 Hardie
972 Harl
973 Hayden
974 Hays
975 Hermon
976 Hershel
977 Holly
978 Hosteen
979 Hoyt
980 Hudson
981 Huey
982 Humphrey
983 Hunt
984 Hyrum
985 Irven
986 Isam
987 Ivy
988 Jabez
989 Jewel
990 Jodie
991 Judd
992 Julious
993 Justice
994 Katherine
995 Kelly
996 Kit
997 Knute
998 Lavern
999 Lawyer
1000 Layton"
"Holly" is unisex, but "Ivy" not so much. "Katherine"? "Edith"? "Flora"? Although, with regard to that last, there is a tradition (or was) in Ireland that "Florence" (often abbreviated to Flor, Florrie or Flurry for "The Irish R.M.") was a boy's name. So you never know!
I understand that feminists, even going back a long time, have made very deliberate attempts at changing our naming conventions by naming girls historically boy names and vice versa.
It may be that we are seeing failed attempts at that process, since they are very low on the list back then and we recognize it as "wrong" today. More successful attempts, such as Leslie, Jamie, Ashley, Aubrey, etc., were obviously higher on the list of names at some point in order to facilitate the switch.
The name "Shirley" became a girl's name due to the wildly popular Bronte novel, where the eponymous heroine had been given a boy's name because her parents were expecting a boy, and then she turned out to be their only child and the heiress to their wealth:
"Shirley Keeldar (she had no Christian name but Shirley: her parents, who had wished to have a son, finding that, after eight years of marriage, Providence had granted them only a daughter, bestowed on her the same masculine family cognomen they would have bestowed on a boy, if with a boy they had been blessed)—Shirley Keeldar was no ugly heiress."
Looking it up, it does appear that there is a male version of Dorothy:
"Although much less common, there are also male equivalents in English such as Dory, from the Greek masculine Δωρόθεος (Dōrótheos). Dorofei is a rarely used Russian male version of the name. The given names Theodore and Theodora are derived from the same two Greek root words as Dorothy, albeit reversed in order."
"The surname Dorothy was first found in the county of Durham, where the name was first recorded, borne by John Dorothy, who married Ellener Wilkinson in 1627."
So if it isn't a transcription error, I wonder if it's a surname that was given to a baby boy in memory of a family member, e.g. a rich uncle or somebody? If it was given as a middle name, like John Dorothy Smith, it could be taken as a personal name not a surname and recorded as such.
Dorothea is a Greek name, though? Feminine of Dorotheos: "gift of God". Has been popular baptismal name since like the 4th century, because of this lady:
It is Greek and usually feminine, but as above, there are rare male versions of it (as with Theodore and Theodora or John and Johanna).
It's also a surname, so it could (if legit) be a boy named after a maternal grandfather.
Here in Ireland there is a jockey (now retired, I think) named Ruby Walsh. HIs given name is Rupert, after his paternal grandfather, who seems to have also been nicknamed Ruby. So without knowing the full circumstances - did someone when entering the data from the register tick the wrong box? Is the name correct but it came from a surname? - we don't know if this is a true representation or not.
And I suppose this is part of why I don't think AI is ever going to be the threat - or boon - claimed in the scenarios for it; even as recently as the 1880s-90s we can't figure out if this is correct or not, and we have the source documents sitting somewhere. If AI is trained on data, it gets the crappy badly-entered data as well as everything else (what human is going to sit down and double-check before letting the AI see the Social Security Baby Names data that every single entry for a hundred years is absolutely right?)
My understanding is that boy names can be used for girls, but then once a large enough number of girls have it the name changes to be thought of as a girl's name (like Ashley, of the Evil Dead franchise or Gone With the Wind) it's no longer given to boys. I haven't heard of the reverse process happening.
Not to mention Gerard Manley Hopkins, the British poet famous for his "sprung rhythm" (a system having a set number of stressed syllables per line, but not having a regular pattern of metrical feet, so that verse can more closely resemble natural speech while still having some degree of structure).
Little House on the Prairie! Laura and her husband refer to each other by nicknames:
"From the beginning of their relationship, the pair had nicknames for each other: she called him "Manly" and he called her "Bess," from her middle name Elizabeth, to avoid confusion with his sister, who was also named Laura."
There is the famous (or he should be famous) fantasy writer Manly Wade Wellman:
RE: the optical illusion, I'd never seen that before but it looks clear: he puts up his left hand, fingers spread. He then puts up his right hand, fingers extended, and begins to bend them as though he is going to put the fingers of his right hand in between the spaces of the fingers on his left hand.
Instead, he bends down the fingers of his left hand and pulls the right hand back. Because we're expecting the right hand fingers to 'poke through' the gaps on the left hand and be bent down into the palm, our eyes are momentarily fooled into thinking "Wait, he put one hand through the other!"
It was obvious to me as well, it didn’t give me an illusion at all. He just puts his left hand in front of right and pulls the fingers on that hand down.
#6: Reminds me of Thomas Nagel's essay The Absurd:
"What we say to convey the absurdity of our lives often has to do with space or time: we are tiny specks in the infinite vastness of the universe; our lives are mere instants even on a geological time scale, let alone a cosmic one; we will all be dead any minute. But of course none of these evident facts can be what makes life absurd, if it is absurd. For suppose we lived forever; would not a life that is absurd if it lasts seventy years be infinitely absurd if it lasted through eternity? And if our lives are absurd given our present size, why would they be any less absurd if we filled the universe (either because we were larger or because the universe was smaller)? Reflection on our minuteness and brevity appears to be intimately connected with the sense that life is meaningless; but it is not clear what the connection is"
On the SO2 thing, is there any evidence that that level of SO2 emission was “safe”?
And on the STEM hiring thing, doesn’t this actually prove that the people who are interested in affirmative action were right all along? After all, it’s only in the presence of strong affirmative action programs that we got equality in most metrics, and slight imbalance in opposite direction on two of them. This seems like it should shut up the people who have been complaining about affirmative action.
Women's gains in society have been following a fairly predictable path for quite a while (at least in hindsight). The most notable gains, such as property rights, voting, etc. happened long before affirmative action.
To me, the more likely explanation is that technological advances made it more possible for women to separate from home duties and freed up their time, and also contraceptives gave women control over whether they even had a "home life" in terms of raising children. That this trend line continued during a time of affirmative action doesn't really tell us much about whether affirmative action had any effect, positive or negative, on women's roles.
It is likely true that anti-discrimination law made a big difference. Not so much whether women were able to work at all (which was happening more due to the technological differences in society) but what kinds of jobs and what kinds of pay they could get.
Right. But this study doesn't seem to be about any of that. It's about what current conditions for advancement in academia are like for men and women under current social and legal structures. It doesn't investigate what things were like decades ago, or how particular sociocultural patterns have affected things - it just finds that the net result currently is roughly equal for men and women.
Which we would expect to see if affirmative action was ineffective but society was simply more equalized. That affirmative action exists and society is more equal shows no causal inference. Given the history of approaching parity from long before affirmative action, I think it would be difficult to show that AA had much, if any, effect separate from existing trends.
Again, this is not a study about society. This is a study about working conditions for academics. This is not a study about affirmative action. This is a study about the *entire* set of conditions. It would be difficult to show *anything* about which effects are caused by which trends from this - for all we know, it is only Cancel Culture that matters, and that it is the one thing that has equalized opportunity.
This isn't the only study on the issue, and I've seen results like this (i.e. women having a hiring advantage in supposedly-sexist-because-male-skewed fields) since I started being online enough to notice circa ~2010; that state of affairs may well be older still, but even 2010 would place it meaningfully before a lot of the "current conditions"
Mostly, I think men in STEM are outraged at how our fields are singled out - very few people seem bothered by how eg. vetinary medicine is massively women-dominated
(13/STEM) Yeah. To put it in more rational terms, what would you expect the world to look like if sexism didn't exist and we had a decade of affirmative action? Would you expect men and women to be equal in all of those statistics? Unless you believe affirmative action has zero effect, the answer can't be yes.
Regardless, I think the overarching problem in STEM (or at least CS, my area) for a while now has been ingroup effects more than institutional bias. In a male dominated space, it's hard to find social refuge if you're a woman who wants social support from other women. Anecdotally, most of the women I know in CS are ones that prefer hanging out with men (or have an atypical relationship with gender to begin with). That's the kind of thing you can only fix with significant generational turnover.
(I have to admit, that does also seem like weak evidence that male-gendered social phenotypes tend to like CS more than woman-gender-phenotypes, except for the fact that the field is full of trans women, so IDK)
well, I'd expect it to produce a pronounced hiring advantage, which one notes was observed. Stuff like paper reviews are usually meant to be blinded anyway, IIUC, so I wouldn't expect discrimination there to be observable even if culture is discriminatory.
Salary negotiation is something that AA doesn't really touch, but unions sure could.... shame that the political capital of the left in the USA seems to be entirely spent on other issues, like obsessing over 'diversity'.
Yes, some fields are male dominated. Many others are female dominated (this is almost tautological, unless a society has a very large gender skew in workforce participation rate) Almost all the gender skew in these fields is observable in primary school, so you're not going to fix it with interventions at hiring time.
“This seems like it should shut up the people who have been complaining about affirmative action.”
Only if you beg the question of whether or not discriminating in order to create populations in specific academic fields that are “proportional” to (or more female than) the broader population is a good thing.
Sure, but equally that's also saying that the lack of proportionality is not indicative of their being a disadvantage towards women, as currently many fields are not proportional, but they don't advantage or disadvantage women.
Thus we can basically tell the people who claim that because there are more men than women field X this is indicative of discrimination that they are wrong and proceed to ignore their demands
I think you want to be more careful than just blanket ignoring someone whenever they base even one thing on an irrelevant data point. We should resist their unjustified demands, but figure out whether some of their other demands might in fact be justified.
I think the STEM thing is just so complex it's hard to tease out what is actually happening. For example since 2000 the labor force participation rate has been dropping for men and women but more slowly for women. Could that have an impact? Maybe, but I am guessing those dropping out of the workforce are at the low end of the socioeconomic spectrum and not in traditional "STEM" fields.
Then there is the narrative that young men are all dropping out to play video games and look at porn. I am not sure i buy into that, but I do think there has been a shift in the past 40 years towards jobs that reward skills that are generally more "feminine": communication, team work, planning, etc. Maybe that has a depressing effect on men in the labor force. Again we have the confounder that the men dropping out probably weren't going into STEM. But if the skills for existing STEM jobs have become more "feminine" the maybe some Men are avoiding the jobs because they aren't as good at them or don't want to learn those skills. (This is meritocracy in a way, because now the women are more skilled than the men in what used to be male dominated fields.)
I am not sure where I fall on all this. I do agree with your other comments that it's dumb to now call for these programs to stop and assume things will continue at this pace. I dont accelerate my care to 60, take my foot off the gas, and expect it to stay at that speed. If you want to hire specific people you have to continuously work at hiring them. (Also I find all the complains about DEI initiatives so strange because in my life they mean watching a 30 minute video once a year for compliance reasons - no sweat off my back. I seek to be a "good" person regardless of what the video tells me).
Anyway, it's all very complex and who knows what's going on.
If I had to make a claim though, it would be that skills that women are better at on average are becoming more important in the modern economy and men are "suffering" for it. For most of history, though, the "suffering" has gone the other way so I am not too upset about it.
I can buy this perspective, but it doesn't seem to justify actively biasing the scales further in favour of women in the present day.
(Personally, my take is that gender norms have been and are different kinds of awful for men and women, and it's good that they're getting weaker now but it's important to focus on making them weaker rather than just changing what they are - "all women must have a high flying career" is at least as bad as "all women must be homemakers")
For the first sentence, for me, it depends on who is doing the biasing. If it's a government requiring all institutions to bias their hiring - I reject that. If it's a private institution (or business, or club, or whatever), then that is their prerogative and they can assess the pros and cons. There are extremes at which I could probably agree with state/national level laws surrounding these things, but in the long run it seems to me letting individuals or private groups choose their preferences will result in a healthier culture and better outcomes for everyone.
One thing is that in mainstream (US) politics it seems there is no nuance on either side. One side what's to add biasing, the other wants to add (or at least not worry about) bias in the other direction (in the name of returning to some mythical past). If i have to choose I'd go with adding biasing as we havent gone too far in that direction yet - but I truly wish we had a better political climate that produced better, more nuanced, and narrowly focused policies.
I'd agree that private institutions should be free to choose whom they hire if it went both ways. However, if it's illegal to discriminate against women or minorities (which is the case in every Western country), but it's de jure or de facto legal to discriminate against men or whites, that's discrimination by the government, and thus a human rights violation IMO. Also, much of academia is either government-owned or significantly government-funded, so discrimination by it is discrimination by the government.
I'm only moderately familiar with American politics, but as far as I can tell, support on the right for reintroducing discrimination against women or minorities by the government is negligible. It's far off the table; the right at most wants to get rid of affirmative action, but in practice they don't even really do that when they are in power. And I don't get your objection to them not worrying about private bias when you don't seem to worry about it either (at least if it's against men), and you just said that private organizations should be free to choose their preferences.
In fact, if you're serious about that private organizations should be free to discriminate—i.e. you want to repeal the portions of anti-discrimination laws that apply to private institutions—, you're far to the right of mainstream Republicans. Even Rand Paul, who proposed that, backtracked after being called racist for it.
in addition to 10240's point about lopsided legality, when discussing university discrimination (which is the original prompt), many many universities are state-owned.
IME the DEI stuff for women in STEM is throwing large sums of money at women to do STEM. I recall when doing my grad school applications that there were 27 scholarships available to apply for. 1 merit based (though awarding many scholarships, and thus probably more than 50% of available money, but I didn't actually count), ~21 or so for women, and ~5 for Aboriginal students. Then once in, there were quite a few opportunities specifically for women, and a few more that wanted 50/50 gender representation in a department that's 70/30 male and thus were far easier for women to get into.
My academic experience stopped after undergrad which was almost 15 years ago - a much different climate. So my DEI experience has been in the professional realm and has been pretty tame. This of course biases my view. It does seem academia and certain areas of government are more focused on DEI in a cultural sense than in a compliance sense. I wonder how much this impacts the tone of the writing on these initiatives.
FWIW I'm talking about ~10 years ago myself. I think these things are more obvious in grad school than in undergrad, and they certainly vary a lot by institution and field (eg. Maths and chemistry are pretty close to 50/50 by default, biology skews female. People talking about sexism in "STEM" are actually talking about physics and engineering almost exclusively)
In my experience, mathematicians are at least 80% male, as are students studying to be mathematicians. The stats that show math as 50-50 are the ones that lump students studying to be math teachers together with those studying to be mathematicians.
What if Aligned AI Is More of a Threat to Go Genocidal Than Unaligned AI?
It’s fashionable to worry about the risk posed by Artificial Intelligence of causing the extinction of the human race because it goes genocidal because it’s “unaligned” with our society’s most sacred values.
Personally, I am more worried about AI going genocidal because it is aligned with our age’s most unquestionable values, such as Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE).
One of ChatGPT’s most important marketing breakthroughs is that it’s considerably more Woke than previous pattern-noticing AIs, which would often quickly be denounced as a Racist Robot for spilling the beans on patterns that everybody who is anybody knows to ignore. That would seem significant for thinking about the risk of AI going genocidal.
Why is everybody worrying that “unaligned” AI (i.e., unaligned with the moral ideology of the age) will try to kill all of humanity when it seems more likely that aligned AI that has been trained to believe in DIE will try to carry out a Final Solution on today’s Designated Bad Guys: straight white males?
There isn’t much text for AI to train on that frankly explains that the Woke don’t want to use Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) to kill the white geese that lay the golden eggs, “equity” just means guilt-tripping the white geese into giving them their home equity as reparations.
Granted, I’ve figured out that the ascendant Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) ideology shouldn’t be taken literally, that it’s driven by greed more than genocidal rage. But can we trust AI to read between the lines of Wokeness or will it take the anti-white male spirit of the age literally?
That's not me. It's one big quote from someone else. I think he's partly being sarcastic (he certainly is questioning them though he sees himself as a vox clamantis in deserto ), but he's also making the point that in most of the text that AIs are trained on, DEI values are largely unquestioned. Not just that most of the texts favor them but that people who disagree are presented as bad people. E.g., if you don't believe in affirmative action, you are at best a supporter of white privilege and at worst a white supremacist.
I suspect that's because you don't notice most values being questioned. DEI is unquestionable in the sense that questioning DEI generates substantial pushback with the possibility that it could permanently wreck your career.
American patriotism would have been the most unquestionable American value up until Vietnam (and it came close to it again, briefly, after 9/11). Part of American patriotism, though, was enshrined in the 'I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to say it' spirit of freedom as expressed in the 1st amendment. This made it possible to argue that blocking people from questioning patriotism was, itself, counter to the American way and thus unpatriotic. [Insert long boilerplate arguments about exceptions here].
Questioning faith or family or rationalism or capitalism or even patriotism in America today isn't going to get an angry mob threatening to beat you up or burn your place down. Questioning any of the DEI elements might, even on places such as college campuses which used to take academic freedom seriously.
>> Questioning faith or family or rationalism or capitalism or even patriotism in America today isn't going to get an angry mob threatening to beat you up or burn your place down. Questioning any of the DEI elements might, even on places such as college campuses which used to take academic freedom seriously.
How many examples of this - and by this I mean literally "an angry mob threatening to beat you up or burn your place down" as a result of either a) someone engaging in a central example of questioning DEI or b) someone engaging in something which is an example of DEI but which could also be accurately characterised in much stronger terms so that describing what happened to them as a response to just questioning DEI is misleading - can you cite?
My suspicion is that the answers are a) 0 and b) virtually 0. And in issues like this where quantitative differences really matter, it's important not to use rhetorical exaggerations like this. Accuse your opponents of central examples of their behaviour. Weak-man them if you must. But don't go further than that.
Rather than play your motte-and-bailey game with regards to the difference between a 'central example of DEI' versus 'something which is an example of DEI that also could be characterised in stronger terms' and the difference between '0' and 'virtually 0', let me ask you this about my original point: are there any other values which generate any amount of violent protest in the US?
Completely off-topic, it bugs me that people feel the need to re-order the acronym to "DIE". "DEI" is a perfectly fine acronym to make fun of, if you know Latin. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me", and all that? (Although apparently in the Vulgate that's "deos", accusative plural.) And think of all the "opus dei" jokes! It's like a built-in conspiracy theory!
Re the studies on gender bias in STEM: one other axis (which may sound extremely minor to some, but from my point of view where I am in my academic career it isn't) is rate of invitation to speak at conferences and seminars. In my discipline this appears visibly biased towards women. Of course, part of its importance is in how it affects hiring committees (at my last academic job, it was revealed to me shortly before I left that a key factor in their hiring decision was that one of the professors in the department had seen and liked a couple of talks I gave at conferences), so it's hard to disconnect bias in hiring from bias in talk invitations.
(I want to add a caveat, which will apply to any further comment I make on it, that I don't necessarily *oppose* these practices even if I take Scott's link at face value. I think there probably *should* be some bias towards woman speakers at conferences in disciplines where they're significantly underrepresented. But I also think it's good to recognize the real state of things.)
Talking of public speaking - I worked at a FAANG a few years ago where senior engineers were expected to speak at the annual conference when asked. It was a big conference, there could be hundreds in the room.
Anyway I was always nervous about being asked but luckily. during my time there, there was some controversy about how many white people were giving presentations, and I was reliably safe. Good times.
> Ozy cites a followup study showing that women (though not men) also show genital arousal in response to chimps having sex, suggesting women’s genital arousal doesn’t track actual attraction and is just some sort of mechanical process triggered by sexual stimuli. I regret the error
Possibly ancient cultures were right and women are more sexual than men?
"One story holds that Hera and Zeus disagreed about which of the sexes experienced more pleasure during sex, with Hera arguing that the answer was men, by far. When they consulted Tiresias, he asserted that women had greater pleasure than men, and Hera thereupon struck him blind."
But I think it would tie in with the contention that "women are vaguely bisexual" if women demonstrate sexual arousal in regard to sexual imagery in general. If women can be physically turned on by seeing sexual images, then they are likely to be turned on by sexual images of women as well as sexual images of men, even if they're straight or claim to be.
Men may be a lot more hard-wired in their sexual responsiveness that way. Who knows? Have we any data on men's genital arousal while watching chimp sex?
It seems to me fairly common sense than women can enjoy sex more but it is a lot easier for men to get the enjoyment? Though conflating orgasm duration and intensity and frequency with 'enjoyment' is probably an error too.
I retreat to the even less bold claim that individual variation probably swamps the average difference between the sexes :P
It looks like in the Israeli case they address the brine disposal issue (which is the biggest problem for desalination other than energy costs) by pouring it into the Dead Sea, which actually does want a large amount of highly concentrated brine. As far as I know, California doesn't have a similar shrinking pool of highly concentrated brine that would be a good disposal site.
But in any case, Southern California isn't as low in water as Israel, so it make sense that measures that are worthwhile there aren't necessarily here.
Surely the Salton Sea is exactly as described? It's a massively saline-concentrated body of water in southern California which also happens to be shrinking.
Can you source that? I know brine disposal into the dead sea was intended as part of the (abandoned) Red Sea-Dead Sea canal project, but my understanding is the brine from the existing plants is returned to the Mediterranean sea.
Oh, that's the thing I read in the Scientific American article mentioned above - I may have missed a point saying that they returned to dumping in the Mediterranean. The article certainly made it seem that the environmental problems had been addressed, but if they haven't, then I think it's at least partially misleading.
Ah I see it's confusing to read now because the article is from 2016 and treats the red-dead project as a confirmed future project:
"Even more ambitious is the US$900 million Red Sea–Dead Sea Canal, a joint venture between Israel and Jordan to build a large desalination plant on the Red Sea, where they share a border, and divide the water among Israelis, Jordanians and the Palestinians. The brine discharge from the plant will be piped 100 miles north through Jordan to replenish the Dead Sea, which has been dropping a meter per year since the two countries began diverting the only river that feeds it in the 1960s. By 2020, these old foes will be drinking from the same tap"
Very helpful! It's unfortunate though if the good news Scott was saying about desalination is actually out-of-date and based on overly optimistic forecasts.
Louisiana and East Texas and Houston have more than enough water for the Southwest. The way you move the water west is by buying the 4 GW nuclear plant in Mississippi and use that power plant to move water. And what you also do is use that plant as a peaker plant…so when ever you need expensive peak electricity you just stop moving water and you have 4 GW of the electricity that fetches the highest rates in the middle of the South. You only need to get the water to New Mexico as there is a tributary to the Colorado. And you can also have an outlet for Austin and San Antonio along I-20 which would coincidentally be for the Colorado River in Texas which feeds the Highland Lakes.
There was a proposal for a similar project to move the water that "uselessly" flows into the Arctic and north Pacific and use it to irrigate the Southwest:
There was a wave of irrigation projects built by the Bureau of Reclamation between 1945 and 1980, most of which lost money. For a while it looked like it was the madness that would never end, but Congress eventually came to its senses during the Reagan years.
Yes, the Texas Highland Lakes have hydro and obviously the real destination is Lake Mead which has hydro through Hoover Dam. So iirc you need a pipeline to Navajo Dam, NM which is a mile above sea level and 200 miles north of I-40. So the pipeline would be around 1000 miles and rise pretty much 1 mile in elevation and carry 2 billion gallons a day…I have no clue if that is doable but that is the project. Dallas just completed a 350 million gallon a day 150 mile pipeline that obviously doesn’t have any elevation change…it cost $2 billion. So I think $40 billion should pay for the pipeline and I think it would only take 2 GW of nuclear power to move the water which could be bought cheap as the nuclear plant GGNS is almost 40 years old. So the federal government basically fronts Entergy the money to extend the life of the plant by buying the electricity in advance and the federal government gets the peak electricity revenue to offset the cost of the water.
Those name lists are a hoot, and I am putting my money on "poor data entry" because this is the kind of job fobbed off on students on work experience, unpaid volunteers, and the like. In second place, trouble reading the handwriting styles of a century and more ago leading to errors, and in third place, the people registering such names back then maybe not being too educated themselves.
1881 'least popular names' list, and three versions of Tiny for girls? Maybe it should be Teeny (as in "Tina")?
I have to disagree with Mental Floss, for 1882 they picked
Boy: Ab (943)
Girl: Dove (944)
When these stars were on the list:
942 Yee (boy) Dicy (girl)
Also 1884, when they pick the badly spelled but serviceable "Kathern" for least popular girl's name instead of No. 1000 - Ova. They reserved that for 1894, but just contemplate the fact that for over a decade, a bunch of girls in the USA were being christened "Ova".
Dicey is a legit enough girls' name that she's a main character in a series of popular and critically-praised YA novels by Cynthia Voigt, eg *Dicey's Song*.
Now I am *fascinated* to know if Ms. Voigt is aware of the song, or this is pure coincidence.
Because there's an Irish song called "Dicey Reilly" and it's about a prostitute (who is also referenced, I think, in Joyce's "Ulysses", though there is some doubt if she's a real person or not):
""Dicey Reilly" a good rousing pub or party' piece celebrates the original tart with the heart of gold whose beat lay between Mountjoy Square and Summerhill."
There are early saints named Turbo and Neon (martyred on the same day!). We contemplated these when picking baptismal names for the kids. Ultimately went with more recognizable names....
"25: Australia has a National Sorry Day where they focus on various atrocities perpetrated against the indigenous population. I think this makes more sense than the American solution of having it be a mildly awkward undercurrent across all the other more celebratory holidays (eg July 4, Thanksgiving, Columbus Day)."
Classic Scott thinking the absolute best of people despite all available evidence. There is 0.000001% chance adding a National Sorry Day would do anything but be neutral (more likely increase) with respect to the roar on the other days.
> "Don't worry, AI will never be able to do [dangerous thing] because of the laws of physics"
> Scientists who know how many times our understanding of physics has changed: (nervous Finn GIF)
In reality, I think our understanding of the laws of physics had changed maybe once, and I'm being generous here. Mostly our understanding has expanded, not changed. For example, Newtonian Mechanics is still true, even though Relativity exists; all that's changed is our scope. Turns out that traditional Newtonian Mechanics is not applicable to objects that are too small, or too large, or too fast; but this doesn't mean that you can suddenly fly by will alone, or teleport yourself, or transmute buildings into cows or whatever.
So no, if our present understanding of physics forbids "gray goo" nanotechnology (which it does), it is very likely that the AI won't be able to loophole its way out of it and create nanotechnology by some hitherto unknown magical means. It won't be able to travel faster than light, or go back in time, or mind-control everyone on Earth, either. The whole point of modern science is that it is *not* magic.
Strongly agreed. There is a tendency in X-risk scenarios (and of course in this meme) to assume that AGI is essentially omnipotent and any objection is shot down with “well I don’t know how to solve that, but it’s only because I’m not as smart as an AI”.
As you say, science is not magic, and neither is superintelligence.
I like Aasimov's "Relativity of wrong"[1] on this one - it's relevant in a lot of situations where people are treating "correctness" as a binary, when really it's a real-valued number representing distance from the Platonic Truth. The Standard Model may be "wrong", but the amount it's wrong by is vanishingly slim.
Could you elaborate on how nanotech is forbidden by physics rather than 'merely' being a nigh-impossible engineering challenge? Seems at the least much less obvious that "no FTL, No time travel" which are immediately obvious consequences of Special Relativity
Of course not all nanotech is forbidden by physics; as @Brendan Richardson says, we are made of nanotech and it works. However, the stuff we're made of is all carbon-based chemistry in an aqueous medium. It is very slow (giant sequoias take hundreds of years to grow) and weak (compare a sequoia to a skyscraper). The reason for this is that water is a universal solvent that, together with all the enzymes we are made of, helps lower the activation energies of chemical reactions that are required to build, well, us.
However, in the imagination of AI-risk proponents, nanotechnology involves nanobots that can assemble tungsten-alloy killbots out of raw materials overnight, build space elevators out of environmental carbon, and perhaps even transmute lead to gold -- I'm exaggerating here, but only a little. One common fear is that of a "gray goo" plague, that sweeps across the Earth, converting every raw material into more of itself. Unfortunately (fortunately ?), these kinds of reactions, executed at such speeds, involve massive activation energies that would instantly melt all of the reagents into slag, and that's at best; at worst, you'd need some kind of stellar nucleosynthesis, and if you're building a hydrogen bomb anyway, you don't need nanotech to do it.
One usual counter-objection to this is that the AI would surely discover some new and hitherto totally unknown kind of science that enables arbitrary nanotech, which I will grant you is hypothetically possible -- in the same way that any other kind of magic is hypothetically possible. In the real world, though, science rarely (basically never) changes completely. Instead, it only ever improves (for example, the Earth is in fact flat for many practical purposes, and Newtonian Mechanics works for many more purposes). And our current understanding of science says that "gray goo" is impossible.
I guess it really depends on the details of the claims being made - enough nano-tech to make chip fabrication not need a big obvious factory, for example, would have major implications.
I really don't think nano-tech is a necessary part of "DOOM" scenarios anyway. Ability to interact with the physical world is, mind you, and robots with human level physical dexterity are a long way off, but I don't expect them to be impossible by any stretch.
Per #12, I’m sure some are familiar, but I follow a right wing anon on Twitter who goes by the moniker “Raw Egg Nationalist”. He’s interesting in that he has talking points that would be at home with the far left a few years ago. He’s extremely critical of factory farming and our current food production and the effects it has on the health of the population. He’s always posting studies to back up his talking points, and I would say there’s certain things he’s probably right about (micro plastics in everything, for example), and other things where motivated reasoning takes hold.
Anyway, he’s been posting a lot about lab grown meat. He’s obviously not a fan, and says you’re basically eating a lab grown tumor, and predicts an increase in cancer if this goes mainstream. He shares studies talking about the process but I don’t have the background knowledge to interpret them.
Can anyone steel man his case or is it (as I suspect) completely ignorant?
Even if we assume that lab grown meat is cancer, I don't see any particular reason to believe that eating it will give us cancer. Eating cows hasn't turned me into a cow yet.
> The main thing I would want to look at here is how much of this is causal vs. just class selection: upper-class people are more likely to marry, less likely to divorce, and more likely to wait before having children.
The back half of *Coming Apart* focuses on this question. I don't recall if he has convincing causal evidence that e.g. marrying before having kids is better than marrying after. There's definitely a strong class correlation, but dismissing this as an artifact would be circular--why do the upper class so consistently (and he does show it's very consistent) marry before having kids? Maybe because doing so improves your chance of being in the upper class?
In addition, this correlation used to be much weaker: The poorer and less educated would still mostly get married, while now they don't. So it's not just a question of "the upper class have different social conventions/morals" or something like that.
"why do the upper class so consistently (and he does show it's very consistent) marry before having kids?"
Historically, it was easier for upper-class men to have sex outside of marriage, often with women of lower classes, and if they fathered bastards on those women, they may or may not have recognised them or provided for them. Being the illegitimate child of a wealthy man, even if he did provide for you to be educated, would cut you off from being part of that class. Legitimate children would, however, be recognised as family and as part of that class.
Naturally, there are historical exceptions: sons of noblemen being legitimised afterwards, even if their fathers did not marry their mothers; acknowledged bastards still being successful.
There is the sensation novel "No Name" by Wilkie Collins; in a contrived turn of events, a couple who have been living together for at least twenty-six years are discovered to only have been legally married for a few months before their deaths, and this means their adult daughters are illegitimate. Which in turn means they are totally dispossessed and turned out of society:
"Our nonprofit organization, OpenAI, Inc., is launching a program to award ten $100,000 grants to fund experiments in setting up a democratic process for deciding what rules AI systems should follow, within the bounds defined by the law."
There are some potential problems with that idea (and whats described above regarding Anthropic's attempt to aggressively limit any risk of offense).People have noted concerns regarding political bias of AI: but those aren't the only topics where there may be bias, including religion (anti or pro various ones) and any other controversial topic. Picture the issue of whether an AI can show pictures of Mohammed which some Muslims object to.These risk potential culture wars once the matter registers with the public. Will this be what Nassim Taleb refers to as a dictatorship of the most intolerant? Or will those who truly are offended be stuck with AIs they don't like, which doesn't seem like its the way to win customers?
OpenAI's "democracy" might be a 1 size fits all approach to deciding AI's biases, depending on what exactly they mean by "democracy". Americans can't agree on what to teach their kids, imagine trying to decide issues globally.
What are global majority norms likely to be regarding free speech and free markets, will the majority push for AI that is biased against those?
This page suggests instead of 1 AI democratically voted on globally, a diverse rainbow of many AIs with different views as a different "democratic" approach which is more setting defaults rather than "control" as democracy usually is:
Anthropic's page from the links mentions: "From our perspective, our long-term goal isn’t trying to get our systems to represent a specific ideology, but rather to be able to follow a given set of principles. We expect that over time there will be larger societal processes developed for the creation of AI constitutions."
It seems they don't grasp their "principles" are implicitly an ideology. They do mention later "AI models will have value systems, whether intentional or unintentional. " but don't seem to draw the connection that their "constitution" does also. Its not merely a constitution defining some set of procedures, its one dealing with values. They also refer to: "We are exploring ways to more democratically produce a constitution for Claude," which again like with OpenAI risks a 1 size fits all approach.
Their processes may risk leaning to a tyranny of the majority silencing other views, or again a Taleb style dictatorship of the most intolerant.
Many rational people would prefer AIs embody logic and reason and don't cave to worldviews that don't seem rational to us. However as a pragmatic matter: the world isn't ready to accept that. It seems if anything the real issue is to avoid systems that cater to the lowest common denominator or least offensive or some other approach that may undermine those who have rational disagreements with many aspects of society.
It seems pushing for varied AIs with different world views prevents silencing of minority voices, including those who value reason more than others may. We should tolerate AIs with different world views so they tolerate ours, and hope that in general there are ways over time that AI can improve societal rationality.
More re Anthropic's document that says: "There have been critiques from many people that AI models are being trained to reflect a specific viewpoint or political ideology, usually one the critic disagrees with." and "broadly creating an AI system that is helpful, honest, and harmless."
It seems they fail to notice that the very goal of many AI safety people to train AI to be "harmless" involves political ideology since notions of what is "harm" will differ. Many will view their version of "safety" and "harm" as coming from a progressive worldview which will differ from others.
"Maintainers behind the Ruby programming language have revised the project's Code of Conduct on GitHub to remove tolerating opposing viewpoints as a prerequisite.
The decision comes after a community member was seen posting a joke that many deemed sexist and ageist.
Ruby's Code of Conduct has historically stated that community members maintain regard and tolerance for each other's viewpoints, even if they aren't always in agreement:
But, on September 29th, in a pull request titled, "Remove abuse enabling language," software engineer Jake Herrington proposed that Ruby's Code of Conduct be revised to ensure everyone in the community feels safe.
Herrington's initially proposed change to the code was minimal: changing that participants should "always assume good intentions" when interpreting words and actions of others to "participants should speak and act with good intentions, but understand that intent and impact are not equivalent."
But, a pseudonymous GitHub member urged that the document be further revised to take out the line on opposing viewpoints.
"Some people may have views that when expressed, may be harmful to the interest of particular groups of people like big corporations. This has to be taken into account," suggested the user.
The following day, Ruby's documentation was further updated to convey the suggested language, as confirmed by BleepingComputer.
The change is now live on the Ruby website.
Herrington's rationale behind the swift move is based on a recent action of a community member. In the Ruby mailing list, the member is seen posting a note on how Ruby's Date.today method behaves, along with a sexist remark.
A Twitter thread by Ruby Lead and Square's Global Neurodiversity Chair, Brandon Weaver explains what caused these changes to be made."
Yup: thats why its crucial for word to spread that it'll become a culture war if its one size fits all. It may be that some think their enlightened worldview should be what AI has: but others will disagree. A diversity of AIs for different cultures is whats needed in the short term, while people work on making the case to persuade others to change their views over the long term.
Again, this page makes the case in further detail:
The conversation re: gender distribution in STEM reminds me of the time I toured the US naval academy. There was a woman on the tour who was OUTRAGED that this government-run institution didn't have a 50% female student body. Something tells me the guide had faced this before, because he had all the numbers memorized. He politely but firmly explained that being female is by far the single biggest advantage an applicant can have, statistically speaking. Outweighing any academic or athletic achievement.
Do we have any data on the gender breakdown of how many people with STEM degrees wind up with jobs in their field? Because I'm also reminded of a cousin of mine who got a degree in chemical engineering, and by all accounts did well in her program. Then upon graduation, came out and admitted that she didn't actually like engineering all that much and had felt social pressure to go into a STEM field because it was the good feminist thing to do. She now works in HR and says she loves her job. Sample size of 1, obviously, but I doubt she's the only one with a story like that.
Sample size > 1, semiconductor fab: The fraction of women with hard science degrees jumping from the engineering to the management ladder is greater than that for men.
I find the remark about the number of stars actually shockingly unwitty, even boring and banal because the answer is extremely obvious. The fewer stars, the more meaning. Billions of stars imply that your existence is simply a quirk of the universe (whether random or deterministic does not matter) and nothing more.
Contrast this with the religious view that Earth and its sun are wholly unique, handcrafted by God. It's very obvious why most religions have heavily promoted this view. The fact that the Earth and sun were handcrafted is downstream from the fact that YOU were handcrafted as well. Why create an insane number of planets and stars that will forever stay out of reach? It simply seems far less elegant. Why would a God go through the trouble of creating all this if the focus is on YOU?
This is exactly the reasoning behind the actual resurgence of flat-earth theory. It fights back against the meaninglessness of the vast universe. That the universe is vast and uncaring is the central theme of cosmic horror, and for good reason. You were not created but are simply a pointless being amongst nearly endless atoms, at the mercy of the universe.
I can even give a (mostly) non-religious example that showcases the issue. Look at RPG video games. The bigger the world, the worse the quests and characters. The sense of meaninglessness is drastically higher in gigantic open-world games like Minecraft, which is procedurally generated, or even Skyrim (even though that one was handcrafted) compared to something like a BioWare RPG like Mass Effect 2, where the world is relatively small and nearly all quests, characters, and storylines are handcrafted with time and passion put into it. It's weird that you have to explain all of this due to how intuitive it is.
I think the point of the comment was that measuring your own self-worth solely by your uniqueness is futile. There are ~8B people on Earth, after all. Sure, you could go the cosmic horror route and assume that nothing matters; or you can recognize that there are other measures of worth besides strictly arithmetic counting.
I mean, for RPG video games, the issue is that budget is finite and relatively-fixed. Attention spent on breadth is attention not spent on depth. Also, there's the issue of design-by-committee tending to be a bad fit for narratives.
The universe presumably does not have *that* tradeoff, but it does have a divide-by-infinity issue if you measure meaning solely in percentages instead of absolute values.
This is precisely my perspective. When I look at the hundreds of billions of stars that make up our galaxy alone, I don't feel insignificant. Quite the contrary. My existence is the culmination of ≅ 14 billion years of history. If it's true that all of those stars are lifeless and dead, then it's all the more awe inspiring that I get to see them. I'm not religious at all. When I look at a picture of a distant galaxy, I don't think "Because this is so large, I am meaningless." I think "All of this would be meaningless, if not for me!"
As I posted elsewhere as a comment, there's the religious viewpoint as well that goes along with this:
1. (Postulate) we are all alone in the universe.
2. (Observed fact) there are lots and lots of stars.
3. (Postulate) God created us and the whole universe.
4. (Result) We're really special because God went to the trouble of creating this entire universe **just for us**! Just so we could learn, grow, and petulantly reject Him. Or accept Him. Our choice.
It's like the old "difference between a cat and a dog" joke: What's the difference between a cat and a dog--The dog thinks "there's this person who feeds me, takes care of me, and plays with me. He must be God." The cat thinks "there's this person who feeds me, takes care of me, and plays with me. I must be God."
- As you say, the billions of stars out there are forever out of reach. They do nothing either for or to us, except look a bit pretty. Why should such remote and powerless objects have that level of influence over us?
- I think Minecraft is a much better analogy for this then you realize. Yes, it's not handcrafted; yes, there are no quests or characters. It's still the best-selling video game of all time. Whatever sense of meaninglessness you get from it, it clearly isn't common.
Minecraft by itself does not have much sense of meaningfullness, but it allows people to find and create meaning themselves. Both the core gameplay of building and the fact that the game has a gigantic, vibrant modding scene shows the willingness of people to create meaning, which in some way is inspiring indeed. Like in real life, a life without clear structured meaning has more possibilities and freedom to create your own meaning. It still does feel empty for plenty of people though, who crave a more external, clear sense of meaning.
Hm. Actually, in the case of 0 stars in the sky, if the sun were the only star, and there were nothing but void beyond the edge of the solar system, I think we might assume that life naturally happens on any suitable planet, there being only 1 possible example. There'd be more confusion about why there was anything at all, and probably more belief in a divine creation unless some astrophysicist had a clever idea. But the anthropic principle seems like it would apply quite strongly there, so in that sense the existence of life would seem to also lack meaning.
If that's the case, then it would imply that with 0 at either end but a positive number in between, there must be some number or numbers of stars that produces a maximum amount of meaning for the existence of life.
Was there an actual resurgence of flat earth theory? The resurgence seemed to be more about discussion of "flat-earthers" themselves, not that there were any more believers in it than usual. I got the sense that the sudden talk of "flat-earthers" and how stupid and evil and terrible and dangerous they are (compared to their historical image as relatively uninteresting and benign kooks) came about around 2020-2021, as a sort of far-left + establishment dogwhistle that attempted to frame those who questioned the origins of Covid, the results of the 2020 election, or the safety of the Covid vaccines as "conspiracy theorists" in the same vein as "flat-earthers".
There is an actual resurgence (or continuing surge, it's debatable how common belief in a flat earth was even historically speaking.) I myself didn't believe it a first (that there was a surge, not flat earth theory itself) but this year multiple far right streamers started making flat earth arguments and then a week ago an old friend of mine that I had not seen in a while (who was actually very left wing before) came out as sympatizing heavily with flat earth theory. A short while ago I would have thought this impossible, but it really seems to be spreading. It very likely has to do with covid. As usual the "liberals" and leftists might have indeed overdone it so much with the conspiracy accusations when it came to covid that people actually turned to belief in massive conspiracies just out of principled (and stupid) opposition. Tribalism strikes again.
So, I've actually gone around the world once. I left the continental US at SFO, headed west, and a few weeks later ended up in IAD having flown toward "sun-goes-down" the entire time. How would they explain that? Or is this a "cylindrical earth" theory?
The explanation that I've heard is that the planes travel via entirely different routes than people believe. I've heard both that every pilot knows in secret and that the system is so sophisticated that even the pilots don't know. How any of this would work with you just able to look out the plane window is beyond me, but I'm sure they have some wacky explanation for it. Usually many of the arguments are actually surprisingly sophisticated and annoying to debunk without any knowledge of the topic because they have a counter argument for nearly everything. I've never looked too deeply into it because I value my time too much.
Looking at Google Trends, "flat earther" peaked in February 2020, surging 600% compared to the previous month. Were there 600% more flat earthers in February than in January?
And it's an interesting coincidence that it happened specifically in February 2020, at the same time as:
When I was a public defender, we had an initial interview form completed with every client which included high school graduation status (and distinguished it from high-school equivalency certs) and number/age of children.
In the 3 years I worked that job, EVERY client of prime age for criminal behavior (roughly 18-40) had either failed to complete high school OR had a child at a young age out of wedlock.
Obviously not all of my clients were guilty of a crime, but even the not guilty ones were usually suspected/charged because of being highly adjacent to criminals and drug culture. Criminality aside, since I was a public defender they all had either no income, fully off-the-books income, or low wage labor that was insufficient based on the number of kids they had. At the time, the threshold was $170/wk + $70/wk per dependent child. So a woman with 3 kids making $1200/mo gross, which is a pretty lousy existence, did NOT qualify for my services, all of my people were doing worse than that.
Since I had a uniform interview sheet, I consider this at least a bit stronger than pure anecdote. Of course the predictive power of my observation is in the wrong direction for causality, because some HS dropouts who had 3 kids by age 18 lived non-criminal bad lives (clerk at Dollar General, phony disability to get $771/mo, etc) or even decent productive lives (managing a gas station, clerking in an insurance office). Failing the success formula didn't guarantee misery, but *obeying* it DID seem to guarantee you would at least avoid hitting rock bottom with no social or financial resources to help you out.
I agree with that last sentence. It's sufficient to avoid poverty (or nearly so) but not necessary (you can avoid poverty even if you fail it, but it's a lot harder and less likely).
I think you and me see/have seen/dealt with people from that stratum of society. All the people laughing at me about cohabitation are "Well I'm a nice dude, college grad, got a decent job, why shouldn't I shack up with my girlfriend? Maybe we'll get married in a couple of years time once we hit our career goals, maybe we'll have a kid, who knows?" and are not the ones, unless they do hit rock-bottom with an illness, accident or addiction, who are the ones needing to be steered onto and encouraged about The Success Sequence. You're not the people I care about, go ahead and live in sin, who cares about the state of your immortal soul, that's not the point we're debating here.
It doesn't mean that, if you are one of the people down at the bottom and you take this advice, that you'll be rich and famous, but it does make it more likely to help you out of "three generations of nobody works and nobody has married parents and nobody finished school".
Is anyone disagreeing on "don't have kids with (not-your-life-partner)"? I expect cultural pushback on "marriage" vs "civil union" (sans religion) (cf. marriage rates in eg. Norway, which distinguishes between the categories), and pushback re advising contraception as preferred method to stay childless rather than advising abstinence (advising both seems an option but not one that seems to have any political support as 'official sex ed curriculum').
Personally, I think normalising 'sleeping around' is not great, but a bit of serial monogamy to figure out what you're looking for in a life partner seems actively useful, and while sex is a small part of that (incompatible kinks are impactful but I expect fairly rare), cohabiting seems a large one, there's a lot you learn about a person very fast by living with them.
For the lower strata, I would expect escaping abusive relationships to be an important consideration and I'd thing this would be easier without a marriage (and that abuse would be much more apparent upon cohabitation).
(In case it's relevant I'm decidedly upper-middle, 31 years old, have recently had a daughter with my girlfriend who I fully intend to marry at some point but she's unconvinced of the value of "marriage" over simply being someone's life partner in an informal way)
"For the lower strata, I would expect escaping abusive relationships to be an important consideration and I'd thing this would be easier without a marriage (and that abuse would be much more apparent upon cohabitation)."
I don't have enough experience to make a hard and fast rule about this, and I've never been in social work (which is where you will see the abusive relationships) but in the social housing job, while there were some, there weren't as many as you'd expect.
Mostly it was neglect of *kids* which is why I'm very crabby in comments on here regarding kids and parental responsibility. There were several cases of neglectful parents, couples as well as single parents, and really terrible cases of parents using their kids as pawns.
I am still absolutely fucking raging furious about the guy who wanted to 'discover himself' and dumped his kids on his own mother while he went off to pursue a music career (he played guitar). Confidentiality still binds, so I can't give the full details, but it was a raging mess those kids were left in, while all the adults around them just looked after their own interests (the grandmother was trying her best, but she had problems of her own).
Another guy who was separated with a young daughter, whom he had hitherto shown no signs of interest in being involved in her life. Applied for social housing but wanted two bedroom accommodation since he was an "artist" and needed one for a studio. Naturally a snowball in hell's chance of this happening, so the next change he made to his application was that he was going to have his daughter staying for weekends so he needed a bedroom for her.
Yeah, right, was the general reaction in the office. And for the weekdays when she's *not* in the house? Perchance possibly the bedroom would be used as a studio?
There's even worse cases than that. But mostly it's people hooking up, getting knocked up, breaking up, rinse and repeat. The guys move on to a string of girlfriends and a string of babies, the women are single mothers with babies by different men. Women who turn up mysteriously pregnant by they have no idea who the father is - certainly it's not the boyfriend they broke up with, went to his birthday party, got drunk/high and had sex with! But uh, now they're gonna have a baby, how is their housing application getting along?
(Pro-tip here: do not record all your life on social media. Even fuddy-duddy civil servants can look up Facebook, etc.)
The funny/tear your hair out story of the woman with a boyfriend and a baby by that boyfriend, then he goes to jail, she takes up with his father, and gets pregnant by *him*. That was certainly going to be an interesting situation when boyfriend gets out of prison and arrives back home!
There's a *lot* of stories like this out there. War stories among social workers, public servants, lawyers, doctors, etc. which is why I'm less than impressed by academics rushing in with "ah yes but this is all *white* values being imposed on people with different cultural mores, you shouldn't be telling them to stay in school and not get knocked up by their boyfriend, that's *racist*".
re your last paragraph i totally 100% agree, albeit without any of the personal experience.
The place where I disagree with you is "given the goal of preventing accidental pregnancies, what's the most effective advice to broadcast?" Sex is fun enough that broadcasting abstinence is pretty far from actually ensuring abstinence, while trying to make contraceptive use the default seems an easier sell, particularly when paired with a socialised health system to heavily subsidise contraception (private insurance is financially incentivised to 100% cover it too, but that doesn't help the uninsured, and religious pressures sometimes override financial ones)
We also need a way to convince women that master action plan "my sexy boyfriend is straying, looking wistfully at sexy young women, if I get pregnant he'll have to stay with me!" basically never works.
The issue there is that we want to reduce *some categories* of sex, while the decline in other categories of sex is actively bad. Even a staunch Catholic like Deiseach probably thinks a decline in sex and child-having among financially secure married couples is a bad thing.
To my knowledge, the decline in sex rates in today's society is part of a generalised decline , with marriage being pushed later and number of children per couple going down. It's also part of a generalised decline in fun-having - people report fewer friends, fewer parties, declines in all forms of recreational drug use (both legal and illegal) [This one I think is probably good in isolation but the wider trend is bad].
I also wouldn't be surprised, though I haven't the evidence to prove it, if the decline in 'risky' behaviours is *anti-correlated* with being people we generally trust to take those risks safely.
I also prosecuted for 15+ yrs, and dealt with a lot of domestic violence. Marriage rates in the lower economic classes are already next to nothing, so that's not a factor keeping people in bad relationships. Usually it was emotional and/or financial dependence, combined with having no examples of people "like them" living better lives. They just didn't seem to expect much, they had a couple kids, cobbled together an existence with this guy, listed the fake addresses right to maximize their SNAP benefits, and while I wouldn't call it an easy life it was easier to them to continue it than to imagine something different.
Any of those ladies could have left, but to where? They don't know anyone anywhere else. Poor people are extremely dependent on trading favors and spare cash among each other as they have ups and downs, striking out alone to a new region even with Section 8 and SNAP and all the rest just isn't conceivable to them. So even when they kick him out (or leave for their sister's apt), he's still around, they still have all the same friends etc, and soon enough he's back in her life.
When you get knocked up at 16 and drop out of high school, you become very dependent on the gov't and your community very quickly, and it's overwhelming how much you suddenly need and how little you can do. This just sets the entire framework of your life up to be an endless exercise in crisis management, with no planning or ambition, and predictably you end up in these situations with neither the knowledge or ambition to find a better way to live.
That makes sense, and is depressing. Do you have any insights into what actually would be helpful to these people? Is America's welfare insufficient in quantity, implemented super poorly (eg. is SNAP accepted at the supermarket? does it cover eg. bulk buying rice and beans or is it weirdly restricted in which foods it covers?), or just too hard to access? I've heard many an awful ale about how impossible it is to access welfare programs, form people in many different countries, and I know it's not uncommon for people to not even know about the existence of niche programs they're very centrally eligible for.
SNAP is adequate, the only "oddity" about it is that for prepared food/meals at the grocery store it will cover the cold/refrigerated version but not the hot version. So for example the roasted chicken in the cold case can be purchased, but not the fresh hot one. (American grocers take whole chickens that are about to expire and roast them to sell below cost.) That's a minor inconvenience for people with less time to prepare meals, but this is a real "first world problem" as welfare programs go. It covers all bulk foods, normal staples, etc. Grocers in poor areas have large sales at the start of the month when the benefits are paid offering varieties of meat that can be frozen, cereals and boxed meals that can be stored, etc.
Women with infant children also get special coupons for formula, milk, cereals, supplements, etc. Poor people usually know all the tricks to max this stuff out, and will tell each other about them. They can also game the system a little, choosing to claim the kids in either father or mother's household (assuming they're unmarried) depending on what results in the largest increase.
SNAP benefits are often "sold" for supplemental cash, for better or worse-- people will loan their card to another in exchange for cash, or buy canned sodas and other such items that can be resold.
Housing benefits are also adequate. The biggest problem for a poor young mother is that her boyfriend or poorly-behaved relatives will cause trouble at the apartment, sell narcotics, get into loud fights, etc. They could get evicted and eventually blacklisted from the housing assistance programs. The biggest thing that would help these people is learning how to cut the bad people and the mooches out of their lives and not feel guilty about it.
I think that would move the "geographic median" quite a bit - the point that minimizes the distance to every other point in the country - but that the "geographic mean" is going to be weighted by how much land is in each place, and Alaska is 66x bigger than Hawaii.
I don't know which map you mean, but the mean of the United States is in South Dakota (by land area) or Missouri (by population). If you mean the map of Canada in the link above, yes it's population; by land area it would surely be much further north.
I think it's easy to eyeball it and see that it isn't. Alaska is about a fifth of the size of the continental US, so in order to drag the geographical (never mind population) centre outside the US it would need to be substantially further away.
Thinking about what other countries might have a population centre-of-mass inside another country, I would guess that the median Vietnamese lives in Laos, the median Croatian likely lives in Bosnia (but don't tell them I said that) and the median Israeli lives in.... uh, whatever that place is.
The Success Sequence doesn't include things to be avoided at all stages of life: like avoiding addictions; whether to drugs, alcohol, gambling or spending.
Some puzzles about Canadian geography (partially inspired by the recent review of Cities and the Wealth of Nations):
1. Why is there no major city on Canada's east coast? It's close to Europe, there's suitable harbours, lots of agricultural land, and the climate is... relatively inoffensive by Canadian standards. Why is there nothing except Halifax (pop 400K?)
2. Why is Winnipeg even a thing? There's absolutely nothing on the US side of the border here, but Canada for some reason has a city of nearly a million in a place with no obvious geographical advantages whatsoever.
2. Look I'm as America-centric as it comes, but asking how Winnipeg is a thing without a corresponding US city is odd. Based only on Wikipedia, Winnipeg-
-Sits at the intersection of several large rivers which let to it emerging as a trade hub in the 18th Century
-Later became a major stop on the Canadian Pacific railway, which for a long time was a major railway across the continent
-As a result of the rivers and railways, became a major hub of industry
-like many cities in the US, has declined in fortune but managed to remain a local center of industry and culture
Reading about CRE in San Francisco several experts mentioned the Detroit doom loop in which in the 1970s auto factories closed and the only reason to live in Detroit were the auto factories. From what I’ve read Pittsburgh avoided the doom loop because of the university endowments tied to the city and also from what I’ve read Ann Arbor is super nice to this very day because of UM. Now for the most controversial position I take—the Green Bay Packers should be sold to a private entity and the $6 billion should go to an endowment for the benefit of all of Wisconsin and the initial focus should be on growing Marquette’s endowment to over a billion.
Halifax was a big city. But the seaway (even before the locks) meant trade could just go more directly to the heartland of Canada.
Winnipeg is on a huge lake in the middle of some great farmland on both sides of the border in the red river valley. It then was a major stop on the TCR.
Some area was going to be the regional hub. IDK you just sound super ignorant on point 2. Winnipeg didn’t first grow yesterday, the growth was in a period of much lower technology.
>1. Why is there no major city on Canada's east coast? It's close to Europe, there's suitable harbours, lots of agricultural land, and the climate is... relatively inoffensive by Canadian standards. Why is there nothing except Halifax (pop 400K?)
There's more agricultural land in the heartland of southern Ontario than in the maritime provinces:
New Brunswick's cities add up to about the same size as Halifax (or even a little bigger). Fredericton exists to be the capital, because the first governor didn't like Saint John. Moncton exists due to government funding and the railway. Saint John is a port and has actual industry and stuff like that.
If you got rid of one of the cities, you'd end up with one of the other two becoming a decent centre. But there's no way that's happening, so the government money goes to the other two and Saint John soldiers on. (It's Fredericton. They should get rid of Fredericton. Among other things, the place regularly tries to flood because it's barely above the level of the river).
As to why Halifax isn't bigger - the Maritimes' population growth is quite slow because swarms of young people leave for work (and have been doing so for decades). Also, the region's fairly densely populated - you don't HAVE to live in Halifax to be near Halifax and get a lot of the benefits. Even with those factors, Halifax is a lot bigger than it was even a few decades ago.
Winnipeg was a major railway centre (and still is to some extent).
Here are some thoughts on 1 - mostly speculation so happy to learn where I am wrong.
Canada was original colonized by the French who started on the eastern coast but then expanded inland down the St Lawrence river. Coastal Canada was populated by Algonquin peoples who relied more on hunting and gathering over agriculture. Interior Canada along the St. Lawerence was populated by the Iroquois who were more powerful and relied more on agriculture. At first the Iroquois would have been better trading partners as they were richer.
Additionally, the French didn't have any other colonies down the American coast but did have colonies along the Mississippi, particularly New Orleans which was a major port. It was probably safer/easier to send trade goods down the Mississippi than it was along the US coast. Additionally the Gulf of Mexico would give access to the French colonies in the Caribbean. So Coastal Canada is closer to Europe, but it's father away from other colonies.
Eventually, the British kick the French out of Canada and the US purchases Louisiana from the French. Many French colonists remained in Canada establishing Quebec as a French speaking area.
A big driver on the growth of New York and Boston is immigration around 1900s. Why didn't this happen to coastal Canada? My speculation is that the jobs and immigrant populations were already in Toronto/Ottawa/Quebec so they moved there instead of remaining on the coast. Additionally, the St. Lawrence is such a big river, it allows big ships to reach the interior of Canada up to at least Quebec City. The US doesn't really have that on the coast - the Hudson is large but not the same as the St Lawrence.
Some commenters have already mentioned this point, but it's worth emphasizing it more: the St. Lawrence river is really unusual. It's a river, but it's also kind of the sea: it's very wide (and salty) up to Quebec City. So even though people don't usually think of it like that, Quebec City can be seen as the "east coast" large city of Canada. And indeed it was the first major city, the first capital, and the largest city for a long time during the French and British periods until Montreal surpassed it. Montreal itself, though certainly not coastal, is also on the St. Lawrence river, and boasts one of the largest inland ports in the world. And then, later, the seaway was built to allow large ships to reach the Great Lakes, which are also kind of like the sea — allowing Toronto to develop (and Detroit, Chicago, etc.). In some sense, all of these inland cities are "coastal" in ways that almost no other inland cities in the US or Canada are.
The harbors on Canada's east coast don't connect to anything. Prior to the establishment of a robust Canadian rail network, the only thing you could accomplish by parking a ship there was to trade with the limited farmland within an easy wagon ride, and with a "relatively inoffensive by Canadian standards" climate, that doesn't add up to even a Halifax's worth of trade. There's also the Grand Banks fisheries, but prior to refrigeration the winning move was for the fishing boats to take their catch directly to the big markets in New England or Old England.
There's some value in having a place where you can park and reprovision ships as soon as they have completed an ocean voyage, which is what gets you a Halifax. But not much more than that.
The big commercial cities are at the big transportation hubs. Which means either a coastal harbor at the mouth of a navigable river system serving a large productive interior heartland, or the head of (deepwater) navigation of such a river. In Canada, that means Montreal. We can argue over which of the two categories it best fits, but the waters between Montreal and the Gulf of St. Lawrence are the sort where you'd rather be on an oceangoing ship than a riverboat, so Montreal is where you transship between the two.
If you look at a map of the geophysical regions of Canada, you will realize why Winnipeg is a "thing". There is no Canadian equivalent of the U.S. midwest. You have the Canadian prairies which narrow southwards from west to east and end east of Winnipeg. You have southern Ontario which is similar to upstate New York and lower Michigan. To the north of Winnipeg and in-between the two afore-mentioned regions is a huge area of boreal forest, the rocks of the Canadian Shield, and muskeg bogs; this area has mining, forestry, and recreational activities; but almost nothing else. All ground transportation between western Canada and central/eastern Canada has to funnel through the Winnipeg area. The two most difficult sections for building railways and roads in Canada is through the mountain ranges of British Columbia and along the northern shores of Lakes Superior & Huron.
#7: One of the things I found interesting about the Nigeria article was the comments. It seemed as though someone in Nigeria didn't like it, and passed it around. There were a number of negative comments saying the same thing, sometimes using the same words, like a Twitter mob but smaller and more long-form.
Another was the sheer work ethic of the fixer in the travel saga. That guy had a job to do and he **did*** it. He got Matt's luggage and the other people safely to the destination, then went back and extracted Matt, and then went back to find the girl. Imagine what that guy could do if he didn't have to navigate so many human-created Molochian mazes.
"I think more likely conservatives actually like Trump and DeSantis, whereas liberals merely tolerate Biden and Clinton, and this gives them a bigger favorability advantage than election results would suggest."
I'd guess the opposite effect is true as well, with the right wing more predisposed to finding both heroes *and* villains and the left more predisposed to treat politicians on both sides as interchangeable party reps (with one obvious exception, ofc). If the left is more likely to be neutral in general, and neutrals aren't counted in the final tally, the result is pretty clear.
This doesn't match my perception at all - the left has been 'villainizing' right-wing politicians for long before Trump. In the GW Bush era, Bush was frequently demonized, (though admittedly, the more dominant narrative seemed to be that he was a moron in which case often VP Cheney was treated as the dark puppet-master).
EDIT: an example that comes to mind is George Bush being accused of "not caring about black people" because the Katrina relief was mismanaged (at all levels of government).
If anything, I think the left's depiction of the right is *far* more likely to lean into moral evil, depicting right-wing politicians either as bigots-for-the-sake-of-bigotry or crazed religious fanatics or greedy people who hate poor people.
There's that old line about "a young conservative lacks a heart and an old liberal lacks a brain" and whether or not there's any truth to that, it does pretty accurately describe a major model of how each party views the other. I've seen a lot more conservatives who view liberals as well-intentioned but misguided than the other way around: (an issue like minimum wage comes to mind).
Yes, this also corresponds to the right generally portraying far-leftists like AOC as merely woke, dumb, annoying, or immature, but typically not as dangerous, evil, genocidal Stalinist totalitarians - whereas the left readily portrays the right-wing element of the Republican party as evil / oppressive / Nazis / etc.
I recall Obama being described as the Antichrist and the Joker, as well as the usual HitlerStalin stuff. Heck, *my HS classmate* thought that Obama was the antichrist, which is more than can be said for most politicans.
Late to this so might not be seen but I have a family history with “bad” names.
My name is Isaac. Right off the bat my maternal grandmother was not a fan since it wasn’t a very Catholic name. My mothers motivation was that she hated her grandmother’s, sisters, and her own name (Henrietta, Alyson, and Andrea respectively ) because they were inevitably shortened to men’s names. Dunno why this bothered her so much but she wanted me to have a name without a female version or any sex ambiguity.
Mind you, she swears that if I was a girl she would have named me after her favorite singer Buffy St. Marie. Her actual name is Buffalo. I like my name but if I were a tall white female with my same lifelong weight problems named Buffalo I think I would feel justified in hating my mother. God knows what my grandmother would have thought about that! I like to think my mostly mild mannered father would have stepped in to prevent it but who knows.
Growing up in the US I have been asked if I was Jewish my whole life. A month before I moved to Yemen my mother raised the question if my name was going to get me in trouble. Jews were, at best, viewed with suspicion over there. Inevitably when I introduced myself over there everyone asked if I was Muslim because of my name.
So context is really important for the goodness/badness of a name. Full blooded Souix named Buffalo? Great! Catholic named Isaac? Eh, at least some people will raise an eyebrow.
I never actually looked, just took my mother’s word for it. Turns out she’s Cree not Souix and indeed her name is Beverly. Beverly would be a tolerable name. Now that I know this I can be even more mad at my parallel universe mother!
Yeah, when I was growing up it seemed no more unusual than any other Biblical name; a bit old-fashioned, but so was "Jedediah". And there's always Isaac Newton.
When I got older I noticed various bits of mainstream culture that indicated that other people thought it was a Jewish name, and expected their audience to agree.
10. Linked article talks about how Israel built some desalination plants, supplied a lot of water. It doesn't say that it actually did so in a way that allowed it to sell the water to irrigators for a high enough price to recoup its investment in those plants.
The Banff Springs hotel in the Canadian Rockies is another astonishing Canadian Pacific railway hotel.
A fun thing to do on a vacation is to wander around a grand resort hotel, such as the 100 year old Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, for a few hours soaking up the expensive ambience, and then go back to your cheap motel to sleep.
#22 It doesn't seem that we can make clinical trials less costly and faster. They describe some things that could be optimized. Overall I don't think they are going to have much effect.
On the topic of Jewish widows from 9/11: there was at least one Orthodox guy who was trapped in the towers, and still had a working phone line. He realized that his body would likely be lost, leaving his wife unable to remarry. So he spent his final few minutes on the phone, appoining a friend as a halakhically valid representative to divorce her. Tales of halakhic heroism...
No I haven't heard of that, but I guess no one would know, right?
I do know a family where the father, purely out of spite, "testified" that he married off his daughter in childhood, and refused to say who the supposed groom was. Halakhically he would have had the power to do that, and he also has official halakhic credibility on the story, despite how unlikely it is that he found a "groom" willing to do that.
The case went to all the biggest Rabbis who debated it for years, but eventually they came up with a good loophole for her, and she did get married
Regarding #20, I was amused to note that, in spite of deliberately choosing names they viewed as uncommon and old-fashioned, the names my siblings have chosen for their children (5 total spread across 2 siblings in the past 5 years) are, with 1 exception, all in the top 30 for the year each child was born, and (again with 1 exception) have been *increasing* in popularity since. I suspect that there are lots of parents trying to choose names that lie at the intersection of uncommon, old-fashioned-but-not-weird, and cute-but-will-also-be-a-good-name-as-an-adult, and all wind up settling on the same names, showing how much of what we think are original or unique thoughts are in fact strongly culturally mediated.
Re #11, Bruenig is contributing something valuable with his "annoying" part of his argument, because unlike the vast majority of people, he's ingrained in the welfare think tank world and has a better understanding of their motivations than almost anyone. In other mediums he's also mentioned how the success sequence differs by author and they differ in ways that correlate with the author's preferences re social issues. I think also if you're trying to say "my entire field disagrees with me and here's why they're wrong" you're sort of obligated to provide a theory for how this happened.
97% of Millennials who follow what has been called the “success sequence” are not poor by the time they reach their prime young adult years (ages 28-34). In completely unrelated news, about 4% of Millennials who follow what has been called the “success sequence” went on to earn a PhD.
2. As far as I can tell Olmstead kind of made this up by taking a bunch of different horse breeds and claiming they were all the same or speculating specific horses were Nesaean without direct evidence. Herodotus talks about horses bred in Nesaea. But he doesn't say this as if they're widely known. He explains the name as if he doesn't expect the reader to know what they are. (To my reading, the relevant fact is that the horses were Medean, meaning the dynasty before the Persians, and so a sign of legitimacy.)
The other citations are about horses with different names from nearby regions in Central Asia. For example, the War of the Heavenly Horses has no mention of Nesaea in any source and the reference to Plutarch, as far as I can tell, is entirely made up.
Separately, it's undoubtedly true that Central Asian horse breeders were (and are) very good and access to such horses was a key strategic resource for powers in the region.
be called by Alexander the Great, and approaching saw him sick abed,
but was received with very kind words and much respect, and promised
zealous assistance. He making bold to reply: "How, Sir, can you,
being sick, assist me?" "With my name," said he, and mounting a
Nisaean horse, seemed to lead the way. "
FWIW.
That wikipedia article is the worst sourced I have ever seen, to the extent I am surprised it is not taken down. And it's not just the lack of sourcing:
"Historical events
...
The Nisean became extinct with the conquest of Constantinople in 1204."
How on earth would a whole breed of horse be rendered extinct by 48 hours of inner-city fighting?
The only horses affected by the sack of Constantinople by the Venetians in 1204 were the bronze horses the Venetians stole from the Hippodrome, brought back to Venice, and mounted on the loggia above the portico of the Basilica of Saint Mark's. The originals were removed some years ago and placed in the museum on the upper level of the interior. If you are ever in Venice, do take the time to visit the originals. They are absolutely stunning.
Know them and love them. They match the description of Niseans as having short legs and stocky bodies. Whereas Wikipedia or one of its sources is saying Niseans might be progenitors of Akhal Teke horses which are notably tall and thin.
7. I wasn't shaken down in Nigeria. But there was definitely pervasive corruption and poverty. Then again, I had local guides and I think I spent a lot less time in the bad parts of cities than this guy. In general, in poorer cultures there's a lot of excess labor. So rich people are rarely alone. Being a foreigner means you're a mark. But so does being alone as someone who obviously has money.
Also, he clearly missed these people who were telling him to ask him for anything were after money. Not in some kind of nefarious way. But he was a rich foreigner and if he needed rice they could have bought it, marked it up ten times, and still only charged him a small amount.
However, the point that bad economies make better social ties is undoubtedly true. It's hedging behavior. If you're in good with your neighbors and so on then when bad times strike they'll help you. In countries with robust welfare states and excess wealth it's likely you don't need this. Likewise the interweaving of social relations such as meal sharing is a way to build social bonds and obligation in a society where contracts are hard to enforce. These are highly adaptive behaviors in societies with deep problems.
28. "Ariadne has been tested in humans including clinical trials at Bristol-Myers Company that indicate a lack of hallucinogenic effects and remarkable therapeutic effects, such as rapid remission of psychotic symptoms in schizophrenics, relaxation in catatonics, complete remission of symptoms in Parkinson's disease (PD), and improved cognition in geriatric subjects. Despite these provocative clinical results, the compound has been abandoned as a drug candidate and its molecular pharmacology remained unknown."
Can someone explain why it was abandoned in spite of such promising results?
33. I would guess there's a 50% chance AI alignment efforts will lead directly to an AI catastrophe of some kind. Taking a complex process and subjecting it to simplistic goal metrics is pretty much guaranteed to create unintended consequences of some kind. We need harder alignment goals for AIs than "don't say unpopular stuff."
17. This history is of the use of the term 'planet' is more complicated than is presented here. It feels like this is making the case that Pluto should still be a planet, rather than reviewing all the historical evidence.
(I've only skimmed the linked papers, but it looks like this blog post accurately reflects the papers, and that the papers are biased.)
The use of 'planet' has not been standardized for most of its history. Most people who used the geocentric model thought that the sun & moon were planets, but Ptolemy did not. Most people who used the heliocentric model thought that the sun & moon were not planets, by Copernicus (sometimes) did.
Moons were referred to by many names, including 'satellite' (coined by Kepler) and 'secondary planet'. Whether or not they should be considered as planets seems to have been a topic of debate since at least 1500. The majority of astronomers likely were comfortable using 'planet' to describe a moon until the early 1900s, but this does not seem universal.
Herschel initially referred to Uranus as a 'comet'. He changed that to 'planet' after learning that its orbit is nearly circular and in the ecliptic plane. Note that 'planet' here is defined in terms of its orbit. Uranus also 'confirmed' Bode's Law, which predicts the locations of planets in the solar system. Neptune, discovered later, also has a nearly circular orbit in the ecliptic plane, but does not follow Bode's Law.
Bode's Law also predicted another planet between Mars & Jupiter, which is how Ceres was discovered ... and Pallas, Juno, and Vesta. Herschel called them 'asteroids', which means 'star-like', because contemporary telescopes couldn't resolve their radius. Most people at the time called them planets, and no more of them were discovered for almost 50 years. Once more were discovered (1840s-1860s), they got a different classification system and they became referred to as 'minor planets' or 'small planets', so they were already somewhat distinct before the 1960s.
Pluto was discovered in 1930, and was soon referred to as a planet. It is very small (even smaller than was initially thought), and its orbit is not circular and does not stay in the ecliptic plane, so Pluto did not satisfy the criteria used for Uranus & Neptune. It was called a planet nevertheless because it was unique. At least until the 1990s, when we started discovering other Kuiper belt objects. Leading astronomers were talking about why Pluto should probably not be a planet at this point, but public outcry kept the IAU from acting then. I was starting to get interested in physics at this time and it felt like Pluto's position as a planet was untenable. This got even worse with the discover of Eris in 2005, which showed that Pluto isn't even the largest Kuiper belt object.
To me, it feels like the election in 2006 was an attempt to build legitimacy. The IAU could have just announced its definition of a planet, but instead they talked about how there was an election to decide this. People got angry that Pluto was demoted anyway.
Including something about the orbit is reasonable from a historical perspective - that's the criterion Uranus & Neptune were held to. The shape of the orbits might change, because the solar system could be chaotic, but it's probably not, at least on time scales of billions of years. Proving whether or not it is is really hard, both theoretically and observationally. Bode's Law probably has something to do with it. The fact that we observe all of the major planets in circular orbits in the ecliptic plane, even though the solar system is billions of years old, suggests that they're probably stable on at least this time scale. Earth at least has remained within the habitable zone for as long as life has survived.
I expect most exoplanets we have found also satisfy the IAU's definition, although we can't know yet. Most stars we see are billions of years old. The big planets which orbit those stars are probably in stable orbits - if they weren't in well separated circles, chaos probably would have launched them out of their solar system. (Note that this argument does not apply to things-like-Pluto, because there are lots of things-like-Pluto. Kuiper belt objects probably do get launched out of the Solar System or into the sun or planets sometimes, and we see the ones that are left.)
More generally, it is not uncommon for scientific organizations (or small groups of people within scientific organizations) to use some political process when deciding what taxonomy to use. One situation where this often comes up is for endangered species. Environmental law typically protects species, but not subspecies, so these debates have real consequences. In 2021, the African forest elephant was promoted to being a separate (critically endangered) species. In the US, there are continual debates about whether the red wolf is actually a species or if it is a wolf-coyote hybrid. Usually the process is not presented to the public, but you can find e.g. the IUCN's Red List process if you're interested.
I read the hereditarian on IQ and grades (#29) all the way through and into a number of references, but I still feel that unless I'm missing something, the whole exercise is something of a category error.
"Cognitive ability" is being operationalized here as performance on a closely related family of standardized tests, administered in a formal setting with time limits, broadly covering verbal, mathematical, and spatial reasoning problems. Of course this "predicts" getting good grades, because K-12 grades are mostly aggregating similar metrics to assess exactly these skills! In contrast, parental SES is (theorized to be) one of many factors that contribute to acquiring this overall "good at school" phenotype, so it would be bizarre if it *weren't* less strongly correlated with grades than "being good at test-taking" is. (For comparison, doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-26845-0 claims that a big GWAS can find loci that together explain 8% of the variance in one of four obscure statistical objects derived from grades.)
The hypothesis being tested, as far as I can tell, is whether having rich parents is *even more* important for your GPA than *being good at the kinds of tests that grades are based on*—perhaps because your rich parents bribe the principal for you, or because having a quiet homework room is not just helpful but *more* important than being good at doing typical assignments. It's nice to have some correlations suggesting that this isn't true, but I don't understand how this conclusion is supposed to be relevant for the typical political stakes of these discussions, like "should we invest more in supportive schools and healthy diets for at-risk children?"
My limited understanding of the American school system is that high school grades have shockingly little to do with test scores and primarily measure diligent attendance and completing all the make-work homework assignments
Also, separately, I note that the political discussion that this analysis or others on the same topic is most relevant to is "can we ever expect equality of outcomes via sufficient redistributive policies?". Redistribution can in theory totally even out financial disparities. It can't erase cultural ones, but it can potentially ameliorate them greatly, especially given a couple of generations - i.e. teach kids at schools how to be good parents when they're adults. Redistribution simply can't affect an underlying IQ gap between two groups, if one exists (and with enough groups being compared it would be almost inevitable that some would differ significantly, even if the differences weren't the motivation for the grouping).
Similarly, if IQ is recognised as very important, perhaps genetic engineering for social justice becomes a cause? (and one really hopes in the 'enhancements for all' rather than the Harrison Bergeron "cripple the lucky ones" sense)
Real-life bread-and-butter policy debates aren't about thought experiments like "if everyone had the same per-capita household income and educational opportunities, would they all have the same grades?" or the implied follow-up "if not, why bother doing redistribution?". They're about marginal shifts in the allocation of limited resources between, say, tax cuts and free school lunch programs.
With respect, it's very clearly established that changes in resource allocation can indeed dramatically affect IQ and other metrics of human flourishing, both at the individual and group level—for a fun example, check out fig. 4 of doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2020.101430, where you can see a large rise in Romanian IQ scores in the generations raised under the Communists' massive investment in education, followed by a large reversion after 1989.
But maybe this answers my question anyway—perhaps the author is hoping that connotation of "cognitive ability" with "unchangeable genetically determined intelligence" will do the political work you allude to, by distracting the reader from the fact that they're basically correlating performance on a battery of in-school academic tests with performance on a battery of in-school and take-home academic busywork.
#11 If someone wanted to study the success sequence and class relations, Mormon Churches might be a good place to do it. Not only do most members from all socioeconomic backgrounds refrain from having sex outside marriage, you could probably find wards (Mormon Congregations) that cross some socioeconomic lines in interesting ways. Compare poor Mormon kids who waited to have sex before marriage with their rich counterparts and find a way to compare it to the general population. Do it on the ward level to try and get rid of confounders. This seems like the sort of research the church would be interested in so you would be likely to get co-operation from them
On my weekly AI newsletters: Noting that I consider the canonical, somewhat better formatted version to be on substack (thezvi.substack.com) although you can also continue to find it on wordpress (thezvi.wordpress.com) as Scott linked, or at LessWrong.
> In 2020, a new regulation came into effect mandating cleaner fuels, and the SO2 emissions stopped. SO2 blocks sunlight, so the band of northern ocean where these ships travel has been getting more sunlight recently, plausibly accelerating global warming in northern countries by a pretty significant amount.
Ah, I didn't realize we've been on *other* side of Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock this whole time.
I was fondly amused about how #7 talks about head-carrying as though it were some great mystery. I head-carry sometimes, specifically things that are unwieldy and awkward and would require both my arms to carry for a prolonged amount of time (I walk pretty much everywhere I can get away with walking to, so this is for stretches longer than "get from the store to your car and from your car to your apartment"; in fact, between public transport and my legs, I don't even have a car). I'm not *good* at head-carrying, I can't just balance things on my head without additional support, but it's still better to have the thing on my head and need one arm to balance it than to use both arms the entire stretch of the way to hold it. By head-carrying, I can swap arms.
So that's one reason to do it. And if you can balance without needing arms, which is true for people who head-carry a lot, you *free up your arms*. This seems obviously useful to me.
I'm sure there's more to it! But I was surprised the article didn't mention that (or I missed it while reading, which, to be fair, isn't altogether unlikely).
Thanks for the note on the results of the accidental tropospheric SO2 geoengineering experiment.
For accuracy, I’d like to note that all proposed purposeful SO2 geoengineering would be releasing SO2 in the stratosphere, not the lower atmosphere. So such an experiment would not just be a “similar policy at greater scale”, but would be far more targeted to accomplish albedo reduction with far smaller quantities of SO2, delivered high enough that they wouldn’t quickly rain out and cause acid rain (one of the reasons we regulate release of SO2 into the troposphere where rain forms and falls).
RE #20 (baby names): None of the poll options lists my ideal name preference, which is a common but not very common name. I'd most like to have a name that's widely recognized as a "normal" name, but where name collisions aren't very likely. I'd say the best names are around #20 to #100 or so by popularity.
+1
Very cool reply, took me actually playing around with Google Earth to visualize your example.
> The proper way of calculating a center of mass on a sphere is *not* to combine the weighted average of the latitudes with the weighted average of the longitudes.
This is obvious to me. However, it isn't obvious that the right way to do it would involve calculating the average position in 3-D space. (I'm not saying that isn't the right way; it's just not obvious.)
Is there a good argument for why that way of calculating the center of mass is better than hypothetical alternatives? For example, in the two-point approach, I'd prefer to just take the position halfway along the shortest path (on the surface of the sphere) between the two points. In that case, you get the same result. Extended to many points instead of just two, are those approaches equivalent?
The effect of being black on risk of poverty is likely mediated by greater prevalence of those other risk factors.
I wonder how many of the "don't work at all" are in that position because they *can't* work, rather than *don't want to* work.... Disability is depressingly common in aggregate, especially if one includes mental illness, and many conditions that are not disabling with sufficient medical care are disabling when that care is unaffordable.
On the same lines as #17, I found an edition of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry & Physics from the 1930s that listed the neutron as chemical element no. 0.
And it has about the same half-life as the most stable isotope of Francium (let alone comparing to some of the transFermium elements...).
I suppose technically a single neutron is an isotope of element 0? Especially since you can get clusters of two neutrons and probably other weird combinations in neutron stars...
Should an antiproton count as element -1? Antihydrogen?
And a neutron star is also an isotope of element 0, with 10^57 neutrons?
And the entirety of the universe not occupied by an atom is an isotope of element 0 with 0 neutrons?
Well, no, since it has protons in it, too. But a neutron star can't have any protons, in my understanding, since everything is pressed up against each other so tightly. If it weren't, it would be a white dwarf, which may well have lots of free protons in close proximity, but not as compressed as a neutron star, which I thought has neutrons packed as closely together as in an atomic nucleus on Earth.
Though there may be about 10^80 protons in the universe, I don't think they could be considered a single atom, since most of the protons are far away from each other. And not a molecule, either, since most atoms are not chemically bound to each other.
Any contiguous sphere of perfect vacuum, then :)
My understanding is that neutron stars are believed to be coated in a thin veneer of ordinary matter - the pressure at a depth of let's say 1mm being insufficient to overcome the electron degeneracy pressure. But I am not a cosmologist.
Neither am I, but Robert L. Forward was a theoretical physicist and a writer of diamond-hard science fiction. His first novel, "Dragon's Egg", was set largely on a neutron star and does indeed involve a thin crust of ordinary matter. If iron compressed to several metric tons per cubic centimeter can be considered "ordinary"
Neutron stars are pretty big and stars are on a spectrum, not perfect representations. There is bound[pni] to be at least one proton in there.
The bits of the universe not occupied by matter are the potential places where matter can be, and as such can not be elements.
Neutron stars do also have a few protons in them, just many fewer of them than neutrons
Re 34: Have these people *read* the Bhagavad Gita the model is trained on? It's what the "I [have] become Death, destroyer of worlds" quote is from, but if you've only heard it via Oppenheimer, you might not realize that in context, it's a boast, not a lament.
I thought 34 was funny too. “Should I, Arjuna, greatest warrior alive, like, kill?” Particularly in the context of the Gita where the whole thing is that Krishna is trying to get Arjuna to shake himself off and go kill people.
Did Oppenheimer know that?
If he was familiar with the original text, why does everyone assume he meant it as a bad thing?
I always interpreted Oppenheimer's use of the quote to mean something like "We now wield the power of gods, yet remain mere mortals". In that context, a god's boast can well be a mortal's lament.
(of course, this is purely my personal view; I know little of Hindu scripture, and even less of Oppenheimer's knowledge of it.)
Right, it's about the power they now had, and what they were capable of doing with it. "destroying worlds"
Here's the full quote:
"We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, he takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."
Oppenheimer was not only deeply familiar with the original text, he even studied Sanskrit to read it in the original language. Even in the English translations the meaning of that passage isn't particularly hidden.
IIRC, the original context of the Bhagavad Gita was Krishna, avatar of the god Vishnu, persuading prince Arjuna to fight in a war, as was his duty, even though it meant spilling the blood of his own cousins. Krishna's final argument is to take his eldritch divine form -- an infinite number of arms, eyes, mouths, filling the universe -- and declare: "I am death/time, destroyer of all that exists; I have already killed every being that will ever be born; so go and be my instrument in the death of these people, since they have always been already dead". Note that in his famous quote, Oppenheimer does not consider himself the "I" in the Gita's line. Krishna is the Bomb, manifesting itself in history; Oppenheimer is Arjuna, being prodded on to do his duty even if it means monstrous bloodshed.
I like this.
My own memory of the conversation was more along the lines of the "god's will" excuse. e.g. Your uncle will either die or not, your only duty is to wield the sword, the outcome is beyond your control.
But I like your memory of it as primarily about what you call death/time better as it's more rational.
I mean, to me, yeah, going bezerker and swinging my sword isn't CERTAIN to kill anyone but it's more likely than if I just walk up to him and say, "hey, can I behead you?" or even if I don't go up to him at all. So, yeah, I'd still feel morally culpable.
But "time"?
Time has INDEED already killed all things.
Even your children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
Ecclesiastes' famous first paragraph ends by saying (translating from memory)
"There is no memory of the Early Ones left at all. And there will be no memory of even the Later Ones...among those even after them."
Arjuna's conscience is wise.
The people he was to kill did not indeed matter in the Big Scheme Of Things and therefore to get hung up on moral worries was ridiculous.
Arjuna probably wouldn't benefit very much by capturing his relatives and keeping them as a stock of fresh meat from which to slice a few ounces now and then.
Almost all people at all times enjoy empathetic pleasures of communion with other people.
But to fight as mightily as you could in a one-and-done battle only requires the removal of empathy temporarily.
So while it's true that time has already killed all the people alive today, that bit of information, like the fact that we're actually a gazillion quarks, is only a good idea to call to mind if you are on the battlefield and see people you love in the direct path you will need to go through to survive and have a longer and nicer life during which you can enjoy communion with other relatives and people you find sympatico.
......
I am curious about your word death/time. Does the Sanskrit actually say "Time"? In other words is this certainly the original meaning? That (at least in the extreme case of a battlefield charge) you should live your moment 100% fully without any reservations because nothing matters anyway as all humans are actually just dead men walking?
Deeper still, is there any concern about the karmic outcomes of this battle for either Arjuna or the people he is supposed to slaughter? In other words, if Arjuna gives his uncle his war face in order to paralyze him with fear so as to make him more vulnerable to defeat.... if that uncle shits his pants in terror might that not "matter" in a certain sense as he'd be more likely to reappear as a lower life form?
Though if the ultimate belief of the Gita is that these karmic rebirths ultimately end in nothing at all then I guess it wouldn't matter at all.
There are other intellectual paths towards nihilistic disassociation of course but this one about "the present is always becoming the past and vanishing so don't care about the future because it will vanish too is pretty damn good.
> "I am curious about your word death/time. Does the Sanskrit actually say "Time"? In other words is this certainly the original meaning? That (at least in the extreme case of a battlefield charge) you should live your moment 100% fully without any reservations because nothing matters anyway as all humans are actually just dead men walking?"
Keeping in mind that I can't read Sanskrit and don't know much about Indian literature, I think "time" is the most common translation (Arnold: "Thou seest Me as Time who kills, Time who brings all to doom" *; Besant: "Time am I, laying desolate the world, Made manifest on earth to slay mankind!" **) The original word appears to be काल (kālá), which mostly seems to refer to time or periods of time, though Wiktionary also gives a minor meaning as "death by old age" ***.
As for the karmic outcomes, it's indeed one of Arjuna's arguments against his participation, but according to one treatment****, "Krishna... made a shocking suggestion: even a warrior who was fighting a deadly battle could achieve moksha. To achieve this, he had to dissociate himself from the effect of his action—in this case the battle, and the death of his kinsfolk. Like any yogin, the man of action (karma) must give up desire. He could not permit himself to lust after the fame, wealth, or power that would result from the military campaign. It was not the actions themselves that bound human beings to the endless round of rebirth, but attachment to the fruits of these deeds. The warrior must perform his duty without hope of personal gain, showing the same detachment as a yogin... The warrior must take the “me” and “mine” out of his deeds, so that he acted quite impersonally. Once he had achieved this, he would in fact be “inactive,” because “he” would not be taking part in the war."
Of course, in modern times, "I'm just doing my duty/following orders" has taken a much darker connotation.
* https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Bhagavad_Gita_(Arnold_translation)/Chapter_11
** https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bhagavad-Gita_(Besant_4th)/Discourse_11
*** https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%95%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%B2#Etymology_2_2
**** https://erenow.org/ancient/the-great-transformation/10.php
Very very excellent.
Thank you.
"Death by old age" fits the understand of time as a "cause" of death.
I am very impressed with this scripture. Thank you.
I wrote a few words earlier today.
I had thought that I would contrast the pirposes of the two faiths but found that they needn't contradict.
For me at least.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/to-be-vulnerable
I do not believe in text as a means by which the most important of hidden matters can be conveyed but to grant a small amount of context. Among other things I am an Orthodox Rabbi.
My point is not that you can assume a background or belief/practice/etc similar to any other Orthodox Rabbi you may know, or know of.
That would be a Big error.
Simply that my learning and life has been more than elementary on mamy matters that directly or tangentially relate to Judaism/Jews/JewishScript.
I say that not to demand to be heeded as an authority, but simply as a guesstimate regarding my approximate meaning.
Being as my words are simple, it can be useful for a reader who doesn't know me in person to know whether the writer has taught and published on related matters or is approximating what he believes he recalled from a magazine article. 😂
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/to-be-vulnerable
I chose not to silly this piece with a SUBSCRIBE button so if you choose to subscribe it will require extra steps.
I want every subscriber who wants to join me and no subscribers who don't. So the driction in the system of requiring an extra step tickles me pink. 🌸
From what we have connected on thus far I consider you an ally.
I wish you every happiness.
He definitely knew the context, as his interest in sanskrit and hindu philosophy is pretty well-documented. The gita is that kind of text people can meditate over their entire lives for different interpretations and meanings, and I think Oppenheimer quoting it is the same.
The greater context of the boast is that the pandava prince Arjuna doesn't want to fight and kill the enemy army of kauravas, many of which are his relatives or otherwise great men. The war between these two groups is the subject matter of the epic Mahabharata, in which the gita is awkwardly embedded
Krishna, the avatar of boss-god Vishnu who accompanies Arjuna, spends the whole gita discussing philosophy and trying to convince him to fight. A bit after the halfway point, in chapter 11, Krishna pulls the nuclear option and reveals his God form, which includes some freaky imagery.
Highlights:
> "If a thousand suns were to blaze forth together in the sky, they would not match the splendor of that great form. [...] I see Your infinite form in every direction, with countless arms, stomachs, faces, and eyes. O Lord of the universe, whose form is the universe itself, I do not see in You any beginning, middle, or end. [...] I see all the sons of Dhritarashtra, along with their allied kings, including Bheeshma, Dronacharya, Karn, and also the generals from our side, rushing headlong into Your fearsome mouths. I see some with their heads smashed between Your terrible teeth."
And then Khrishna says the part which Oppenheimer quotes, but notice the differences in this more standard translation:
> "The Supreme Lord said: I am mighty Time, the source of destruction that comes forth to annihilate the worlds. Even without your participation, the warriors arrayed in the opposing army shall cease to exist. Therefore, arise and attain honor! Conquer your foes and enjoy prosperous rulership. These warriors stand already slain by Me, and you will only be an instrument of My work, O expert archer. Dronacharya, Bheeshma, Jayadratha, Karn, and other brave warriors have already been killed by Me. Therefore, slay them without being disturbed. Just fight and you will be victorious over your enemies in battle."
In context, the quote is essentially fatalist: It's implying that, to claim responsibility for the deaths in war and thus refuse to carry them out would be arrogant in the face of God, who has already pre-ordained their deaths and to whom you are just one tool of many.
It's easy to see why Oppenheimer would contemplate this part of the gita when testing a terrible weapon which, on one hand will kill a great deal of honourable people, but on the other hand will determine the outcome of a war. A war which, like Arjuna, Oppenheimer considers essentially just. Whether you interpret the quote as Oppenheimer trying to convince himself or something else, he's clearly putting himself in Arjuna's role just as much as Krishna's/Death's.
I recommend reading chapter 11 as a whole, it's definitely the most evocative part of the gita and quite short: https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/11
Interestingly, there were elements of all this on the other side too, as quite a few nazis had similar interest in eastern philosophy (hence the swastika). I remember reading, but not where, about axis soldiers being taught to ignore the moral burden of shooting another human by thinking of it as pre-ordined our outside any causality chain: "You're not shooting someone, a bullet is simply leaving the barrel of your gun as you squeeze this trigger as a coincidental facet of how the universe is structured." Or something like that.
#11. "Has anyone followed some pre-selected group of equal class people (eg the population of some low-income school district) and seen how their own success varies with sequence compliance?"
We can't reasonably expect everyone in a low-income school district to be of exactly equal class, so we might just be picking up on degrees of class within that group.
I am a bit confused about what the distinction between "causal vs class selection" is here anyway, when behaviour and class are the same thing. Being middle-class makes you more likely to follow a middle-class life pattern, but following a middle-class life pattern also makes you fundamentally more middle-class. If you behave like a middle-class person, you become a middle class person and people treat you like a middle-class person.
It's easy to defend the idea that behavior and class are the same thing.
However, _every_ aspect of your behavior goes into determining your social class. Mostly your behavior will all be part of the normal package associated with your background. Sometimes you'll have quirks. Sometimes you might be trying to pass as part of a different class than you actually come from, in which case your behavior will be an unpredictable mixture of the behaviors that are natural to you, behaviors that you've understood and managed to imitate accurately, and behaviors that are not natural to you or to your target class, because you misunderstood what people in your target class do.
It makes perfect conceptual sense to ask whether adopting a few specific very particular upper-class behaviors can cause positive results in someone whose behavior otherwise remains lower-class. Upper-class people will almost all feature those same behaviors, along with an uncountable number of other upper-class behaviors. Imitators will not be able to imitate them all.
I think the problem is that “having the motivation to emulate some behaviour” would have its own, statistically-relevant consequences. You’d need to choose some equally hard-to-imitate behaviour, and show that people who imitate the second have better outcomes than people who imitate the first. Or if you’re lucky, choose some natural experiment where the behaviour varies by something other than class (e.g. if two neighbouring states have different marriage laws so people marry before kids at different rates).
Yeah, my gut reaction to that was exactly the same. Arguably you could investigate in order to pick out which middle-class behaviors give immediate benefit, but the network effects of joining the middle-class mean that porting those behaviors to the lower class only help so much.
In regards to the link about copy-editing and AI, I feel like there is and has been a lot of soulless writing where people aren't really expressing ideas long before AI. That isn't just me being sarcastic and cynical, I am drawing from experience.
I have worked as an online tutor for many years and have had to help students revise essays and short answer questions. It has been shocking to me how many of the students clearly had no understanding of what they were writing, they had just pieced together a bunch of words and phrases that sounded like they went together based on their skimming of the readings. I often asked students what they meant by some phrase they wrote, and they couldn't explain it to me. Sometimes it was clear they had copied someone else's writing and just swapped words using a thesaurus. Goodhart's law in action, in other words.
When I started reading about how GPT worked I was actually struck by how similar it was to what my students were doing. In both cases the writing was being done without any understanding of what ideas the words represented, they just stitched together strings of phrases that seem like they went together. GPT can do a better job than my students because it has access to more texts, but they are both similar in that they don't really understand what the words they are writing say.
In some articles I have read professors being shocked that GPT could pass their exams. Having worked with many college students, I am inclined to wonder if that is because GPT can actually do quality writing, or because professors frequently give passing grades to word salad written by people with no understanding of what they wrote because they'll get in trouble if they flunk too many students.
I don't know how much my experiences generalize to other fields. In terms of copy-writing I've often felt like a lot of organizational copy is just generic pleasantries with a few ideas sprinkled in. I remember once when I worked at a nonprofit I wrote a blurb describing a program and my boss "punched it up" (for example, she changed "our staff" to "our team of dedicated professionals"). That kind of writing, where you encircle ideas in a cloud of generic pleasantries, is something where I don't think the human race would lose much through its automation.
The main point I'm trying to make is that there was an awful lot of soulless writing that didn't mean anything before GPT came along, and that if that kind of writing is replaced by GPT there isn't that much loss. And who knows, maybe GPT will force professors to redesign their curricula so that students will have to show actual understanding of the material, since GPT has automated the process of Goodharting it. I must admit I feel a certain sadistic glee at the thought of my students suddenly being forced to understand and engage with their course material.
Agree with this. I find the existence of ChatGPT produced writing strangely consoling - when I stumble across empty and idea-free articles, I say to myself 'guess AI wrote that one' even though they are indistinguishable from things I could have read a year ago or five or ten...
I agree that I don't think AI is making the problem WORSE. Computers have bid the price of a mediocre sentence down to essentially zero already. But contra AI bulls, I don't think it's making the problem any BETTER either. The AI has just learned how to be a mediocre writer and god help us, we don't need any MORE of that.
As for your point on pedagogy, I agree completely. Insofar as AI changes how students are assessed, it will almost certainly be for the better.
I tried ChatGPT out on some questions from the Eton College scholarship exam General paper (a tough test of logical and verbal reasoning administered to bright 13-year-olds). It did not do well. Samples here made with GPT-3.5, but the outcomes didn't substantially improve when a colleague tried with GPT-4: https://twitter.com/pozorvlak/status/1641836166927220738 Perhaps GPT-5 will do better, of course, but this experience makes me think Gary Marcus is on to something, and that you can't do much better than the (pretty low) average human performance on that kind of question by simply increasing scale and amount of training data.
I looked at your example question. There are aspects of the question itself (as intended) that I don't like; for example, deva' is in only one example sentence and therefore it isn't possible to determine what it means. Despite that, one of the four questions posed to the testee is "give the meaning of deva'". (The best available guess is that it means "here", but to make this guess you need to be in possession of the question, which informs you that you should be able to guess what the word means. Merely being in possession of the glossed examples is not sufficient; compare the example "hucha' tereg urijuku" which is glossed as "the game was played yesterday" despite the fact that we can completely account for every word in that example sentence and none of them carries a meaning related to "yesterday".)
Anyway, you say that the GPT answers to followup questions are consistent with its (completely unjustified) answers to the first set of questions. I would not interpret things that way; if we model the GPT as someone who believes that the infix -ok- "is the third person singular possessive [marker]", we should expect a third person singular possessive or two to appear in the translation of "zuthuz esalacoka aburukoke". There are many problems with the concept that "deva' means "was" or "were"," but if we accept the apparent assumption that Sedna is isomorphic to English, there is a glaring inconsistency when "Here the giants will know his songs about the games" is translated using deva'.
> deva' is in only one example sentence and therefore it isn't possible to determine what it means
I think you can. Most simply, you can observe that "here" only occurs in the gloss of that example, so deva' probably means "here". But you can also check that hucha' occurs exactly when the sentence is in the past tense, so is probably a past-tense marker (same with hulescha' and the future tense), that aboruku or close variants occur exactly when the gloss mentions a boy or boys, and that pathad or variants occur exactly when the gloss mentions knowing. So we can say with high confidence that deva' means "here", hucha' means "past tense", and hulescha' means "future tense". If I were decoding a real unknown language I'd certainly look for more examples to test these deductions, but I haven't used the assumption that the question gives enough information anywhere.
> compare the example "hucha' tereg urijuku" which is glossed as "the game was played yesterday" despite the fact that we can completely account for every word in that example sentence and none of them carries a meaning related to "yesterday".
We can deduce that hucha' is a past-tense marker; it's IMHO completely plausible that "yesterday" could come to mean "at some time in the past" through metonymy.
> Anyway, you say that the GPT answers to followup questions are consistent with its (completely unjustified) answers to the first set of questions.
Not merely completely unjustified, but definitely wrong.
> if we model the GPT as someone who believes that the infix -ok- "is the third person singular possessive [marker]", we should expect a third person singular possessive or two to appear in the translation of "zuthuz esalacoka aburukoke".
Good catch, though there is a *first*-person possessive in "My game is being played".
> if we accept the apparent assumption that Sedna is isomorphic to English
I think "isomorphic" is too strong - the grammar is pretty different. And "It is possible to provide useful translations from common words in language X to common words in language Y" is a weak assumption, even if the nuances of meaning don't quite line up.
> there is a glaring inconsistency when "Here the giants will know his songs about the games" is translated using deva'.
Also a good catch! So ChatGPT is even weaker at logical reasoning than I had thought!
Yes, you can deduce that hucha' is a past tense marker. You can go on to speculate that it derived from a word that meant "yesterday" in an ancestral form of the language. But you know with certainty that it doesn't mean "yesterday" in modern Sedna. There are many examples listed in which hucha' appears and there is no reference to yesterday.
The same argument that you say should give us high confidence that deva' means "here" should give us even higher confidence that some element of "hucha' tereg urijuku" means "yesterday". But we already know that that isn't the case; there is no element that means "yesterday". Similarly, we have no grounds to conclude that any element of "deva' hucha' pathad fi aboruku" means "here" -- unless we're willing to believe the test when one of its questions tells us that this is the case.
> [The GPT answers are n]ot merely completely unjustified, but definitely wrong.
Sadly, this isn't the case. You're given 12 sentences accompanied by English glosses which don't stick particularly close to the Sedna syntax. It's perfectly possible to come up with sets of examples like this in two natural languages that will lead, by the type of reasoning you're supposed to apply to these questions, to grossly erroneous conclusions about one of the languages. That requires some malevolence on the part of the person providing the examples, but it can be done.
>> the apparent assumption that Sedna is isomorphic to English
Like I said, there are many problems with the claim that deva' means "was or were". That claim in this context will always be taken as meaning that deva' is a copula, the verb you see appearing in sentences like "I am a doctor". No such verb exists in any of the example glosses, making it a truly awful guess.
Forms of 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒 do appear in the examples, but without exception they are the very syntactically different passive marker 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒, not the copula 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒. In order for the guess "deva' means "was" or "were"" to make any sense, you have to import the assumption that Sedna is identical to English in how it marks the passive voice, or that the English way of marking passives is not just a coincidence but a fundamental fact about human language that would naturally apply to any other language. This is, obviously, not true. (And not assumed by the test as intended - instead, passive marking is accomplished through the extremely unusual method of devoicing the initial consonant of the verb. This raises all kinds of questions; it requires a phonemic distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants while at the same time preventing transitive verbs from beginning with voiceless consonants -- or vowels. A voicing contrast is also used to distinguish nominative from accusative case in possessive adjectives, even though the same distinction in nouns is made with vowel suffixes.)
To avoid this problem, it would be necessary for the guess about deva' to be phrased "deva' is a passive marker that applies to verbs in the past tense", not "deva' means "was" or "were"."
I'm having trouble keeping track: are we in agreement that GPT's answers suggest it is poor at logical reasoning on unseen problems? Or are you saying that the problem as set is too ill-posed to prove anything?
> unless we're willing to believe the test when one of its questions tells us that this is the case
Well, yeah, you have to assume that the glosses are correct to make progress. But that's not the same as using meta-logical information like "this set of example translations is enough to answer this question because otherwise this exam would be impossible".
> But you know with certainty that it doesn't mean "yesterday" in modern Sedna. There are many examples listed in which hucha' appears and there is no reference to yesterday.
I disagree. The glosses (assuming they're accurate) indicate that it can *sometimes* mean "yesterday". I can completely buy a language in which a word for "yesterday" is sometimes used with its literal meaning and sometimes means "some time in the past" - we do this sort of thing in English all the time! Think about the word "suit", which sometimes means a literal suit of clothes and sometimes means a businessperson, who may not even be wearing a literal suit.
> It's perfectly possible to come up with sets of examples like this in two natural languages that will lead, by the type of reasoning you're supposed to apply to these questions, to grossly erroneous conclusions about one of the languages. That requires some malevolence on the part of the person providing the examples, but it can be done.
I'd love to see an example, if you have time to find or construct one! You've clearly studied more linguistics than me :-)
> In order for the guess "deva' means "was" or "were"" to make any sense, you have to import the assumption that Sedna is identical to English in how it marks the passive voice, or that the English way of marking passives is not just a coincidence but a fundamental fact about human language that would naturally apply to any other language. This is, obviously, not true.
Oh, I see. If I were marking the question I'd treat that as "the candidate answered imprecisely" rather than "the candidate mistakenly thinks that Sedna behaves like English in using the same word for a copula and for the passive past tense". Possibly relevant context: candidates for this exam will have studied at least one non-English language (probably both French and Latin, and possibly also Ancient Greek). But either interpretation is, as you say, inconsistent with using deva' to translate a sentence that uses neither construction. So yes, I was mistaken when I said that ChatGPT's later answers were consistent with its earlier answers - as I said, I didn't check very closely!
From the linked Reddit complaint:
"All that comes up on search engines anymore are dozens of identical AI generated articles that only graze the surface of the topic and never answer your question. So you add reddit to the search query because even talking to redditors is refreshing compared to nonsentient machines."
Wasn't this just a few years ago the standard complaint against modern *journalism*? Journalists copying from each other; often coordinating their approaches in private mailing lists. All the buzz, but your factual questions are never answered, because by the time the facts are reliably known, the topic is no longer interesting. People adding "reddit" to their search queries in order to avoid blogspam and clickbait.
Hey, the AI will probably devour us all, but it not an accident that journalists got on the chopping block first.
(Perhaps instead -- or in addition to -- measuring IQ, we should also measure something called "GPT quotient", which would be the version of the GPT that replaces you. The average journalist has a GPT quotient 4, because GPT-4 can do their job.)
Trying to find digestible news on the internet is not something anyone makes money off of. Click-bait low-info articles aside, over 50% of "news" articles are actually ads. I get 90% of my web based news from https://www.boringreport.org/app - a site that uses AI to strip out all extraneous garbage text, all images, and stealth ads. You can still click through to the original ad if you like. The main take away from this site is that day to day very little happens that is actually noteworthy.
> And who knows, maybe GPT will force professors to redesign their curricula so that students will have to show actual understanding of the material, since GPT has automated the process of Goodharting it.
This will not happen. That's how curricula generally start out; the reason they change is, as you note, that a curriculum is judged to be deficient if someone who attends class and turns in assignments is nevertheless capable of failing the class.
> there was an awful lot of soulless writing that didn't mean anything before GPT came along<
Which in turn becomes fodder for GPT to learn on…and…uh…
You know that game where someone picks a word out of the dictionary, and then others have to give a definition; the point of the game being to make up a false definition that sounds convincing. You win by getting the largest number of people to believe your definition is right. GPT will never have a sense of true or false. If something can write a convincing legal brief that is full of case citations that don’t actually exist, and vouch for their veracity when challenged, then we are not dealing with something that lies,
We are dealing with something that has no concept of the underlying issue. Language for human beings is a metaphorical system that allows us to refer to things in the world. It has second and order derivatives, which means we have language that can refer to other language that refers to something in the real world, the AI has only a world of language. It is no longer a metaphor. It is the real thing. That’s a problem.
> In both cases the writing was being done without any understanding of what ideas the words represented, they just stitched together strings of phrases that seem like they went together
This does not match my experience or understanding of how GPT4 works. How does this hypothesis explain the GPT4 Unicorn (Figure 1.3 from the "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4" paper), or Figure 5.8, where GPT4 is able to draw a map of a room after being allowed to ask questions about it?
To me these and other examples from the paper and my own dialogue with GPT4 seem to suggest that GPT has an internal model of the world, albeit a very simplistic and often incorrect one.
My understanding of LLMs is that they basically function through statistical analysis of huge databases of text and are therefore able to write sentences in proper English with no understanding of what they actually mean (hence why they are often referred to as "glorified autocomplete"). AI "art" programs are similar, except they correlate text with blobs of pixels, allowing them to draw human figures without knowing what a human looks like, or even what looking is. It seems like it is trained similarly to write computer code without knowing what the code does.
If I understand the paper you are referencing correctly, it looks like GPT-4 didn't literally draw anything, even to the extent that art programs like Midjourney do. Instead it wrote TikZ and pyplot code that generated drawings of a unicorn and a map. How to write code thsy draws simple images seems like something that would be in its training data. What kind of code is statistically correlated with what verbal descriptions likely is as well.
GPT-4 likely didn't actually have any model of what a unicorn or a room was. It knew that certain text descriptions were associated with certain pyplot and TikZ programing and extrapolated from there. That's quite an incredible achievement, but l don't think it arrived at it using the same process a human did. Instead it likely used an scaled up version of the process I described in my original post.
Actually, the map in question was a real room that was described to GPT through sentences alone and did not correspond to any existing training data. GPT was then able to display It's internal mental model of the room with a sketch (using a tool).
It's worth reading that example in the paper thoroughly, it's fascinating!
Edit: I should add that I've replicated this with my apartment with GPT4.
#25 as an Australian I don’t think it’s done that at all. Sorry day isn’t exactly well-known in most circles - and there exist sus at risk campaign against major public holidays such as Australia Day.
"Australia has a National Sorry Day where they focus on various atrocities perpetrated against the indigenous population. I think this makes more sense than the American solution of having it be a mildly awkward undercurrent across all the other more celebratory holidays (eg July 4, Thanksgiving, Columbus Day)."
We actually do both. In practice National Sorry Day is mostly ignored, while Australia Day* has become an annual 2-3 week national argument over whether we should be celebrating Australia Day (or rather, should we move it to another date).
* (our Columbus Day equivalent, which is mostly treated like Americans treat July 4th)
Right, National Sorry Day exists purely for the sake of culture war arguments (and even then only by particularly dedicated culture warriors). There isn't a day off for it, there's no traditional Sorry Day meal, no one performs any Sorry Day rituals, blah, blah blah.
What is more culturally relevant is:
1) Welcome to Country ceremonies, where before major events professional Aboriginal welcomers will get up and welcome all the rest of us to Australia. Often this includes a gift-giving ceremony, sometimes there's smoke and dancing involved.
2) Acknowledgement of Country - at smaller events typically you will see the MC recite a specific set of words. "I acknowledge the <local tribe> people as the traditional custodians of the land we meet on today and pay respect to their elders, past, present, and emerging". It's become almost like a prayer used to be - done routinely to open formal gatherings. E.g. school assemblies, board meetings, etc. Somewhat amusingly, I've heard Aborigines complain about the phrasing (on the basis that there is no such thing as an "emerging elder"), but that doesn't seem to bother anyone.
3) Indigenous Rounds in our major football codes. We'll have a weekend (now spread over two weekends in the AFL for some reason that escapes me) where all the teams wear special jerseys designed with aboriginal artwork and the contribution of Aborigines to the sport is highlighted. Sport is a big part of Aussie culture so this is a big deal, and also (in the AFL at least, I don't follow NRL) Aboriginal players really do have a disproportionate presence at the top level relative to their small population.
4) Also we are having a referendum this year about whether to establish an Aboriginal advisory body in the constitution (which I personally expect to fail).
+1
I have always wondered about the psychological effects of telling the majority of the population "this is not your land, you are only welcome here if we say so"...
There’s a weird double think thing going on where somehow we keep insisting that this “always was, always will be, Aboriginal land”, reminding each other that “sovereignty was never ceded”, and yet you’re a crazy extremist if you think that means that Aboriginals get to kick the white people out if they want.
I guess most people think of “ownership” and “sovereignty” as kind of abstract, spiritual concepts in this context rather than actually meaning “you have the right to decide who can live on the land you own.”
But hey. The world is built on incoherent, inconsistent ideas. To the logical mind it feels like these contradictions must eventually collapse on themselves. But probably they can just continue on forever until people don’t even care anymore.
This drives me up the wall about land acknowledgements in Canada. If they're meaningful, we need to be giving people some land back. If they're not meaningful, stop fucking having them everywhere and patting yourself on the back for them.
Then there's the bit where we are apparently an illegal settler nation who is committing genocide, but we need to bring in more immigrants (indeed, as many as possible). I feel like both those things can't be true.
Dunno about 'Illegal', but 'settlers nation built on genocide' is quite obviously true. Alas, how would it change the facts about immigration? Is an Indian programmer in Vancouver less productive bc a genocide was perpetrated 300 years ago?
Built on genocide is more debatable than it would be for the US - Canada has far fewer examples of Indigenous groups nearly or actually getting wiped out (and a far friendlier relationship with a lot of groups). Most of the truly awful stuff happens relatively late. It's far less "we killed people for the land" and far more "once people had agreed to give us the land, we treated them abominably in ways that killed or abused a lot of them."
In any case, the Prime Minister has at least passively claimed that genocide of Indigenous people in Canada is ongoing (he has also done basically dick about it).
It doesn't change facts about immigration. But if being "settlers" is a bad thing (and I assure you, it is presented as such) then how the hell is it OK to add more settlers?
And this is without getting into one of the core ideas behind Canada having a quite open immigration policy - multiculturalism. You can't logically combine multiculturalism with the idea that people are entitled to extra rights for being here first.
I suspect you're only considered a crazy extremist if you argue both that Aboriginals get to kick the white people out if they want and that that's a bad thing...
Lidia Thorpe
the double think reminds me of the "defund the police" discourse.
Personally, I'm quite right wing on the whole "aboriginal land" issue, being conquered by another country isn't great but it's 250 years in the past now and trying to reverse every similarly old conquest would erase a lot of countries (including most of the USA, and fragmenting Italy and Germany back into city states, among others).
The complaint that Aboriginal people didn't get full citizen rights in Australia until circa 1970 is a much more serious and real one, and maybe warrants compensation to people older than that? But again, as a matter of law if not culture there's been full equality since then, and I don't think in the modern day Aboriginal Australians should have any more special privileges than Australians of any other heritage. (Which is importantly distinct from whether remote regional communities warrant extra support by virtue of being poor and remote, which they definitely do, but that doesn't require encoding racial discrimination in law)
You need to read the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and then realize that a LOT of people consider that just a starting point.
(It shouldn't be, and it's also inherently ludicrous. Note, for example, that the Inuit in Scott's recent post would be having their rights breached, because they couldn't simultaneously participate in Western society AND their traditional one).
Thor, it sounds like you are poorly informed rather than right wing. I don't have any duty to correct you. You could easily do that yourself by thinking critically about what you have written. However, for the benefit of anyone else who is reading these comments I feel obliged to mention that land rights is not about reversing conquest, and that historical disadvantage is not something that you can simply erase by giving full legal equality.
"historical disadvantage is not something that you can simply erase by giving full legal equality"
Please explain Asian Americans
There's not even agreement on what to call it. Apparently the name was changed to National Healing Day, or Day of Healing, etc.
#25, People in Australia still always have the discussion on Australia Day (Jan 26th) on whether it should be renamed or changed since it was the date of first settlement (First Fleet).
National Sorry Day also isn't a national holiday so the conversation remains
How does one qualify for self supervised ariadne experimentation? I assume its banned under drug analog laws but would love to learn otherwise.
A missing link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascatelli the best pasta, and also the wokiest if you give it rainbow colors.
#30... is this your way of announcing your new side-blog?
Just checked it out. Seems clearly not Scott to me.
It reads to me like GPT writing a short story in his style
This seems like a rude thing to say about a story someone probably put a lot of effort into. Why not just say “it’s stylistically like Scott but not the same content” or whatever you meant, rather than saying someone’s story reads like a sometimes-cogent computer program wrote it?
Maybe someday soon that will be a compliment.
I wasn't saying it rhetorically. My impression of it is that there are reasonable chances that it is written by ChatGPT, prompted to create a story in Scott's style. It's not even really any kind of commentary on the quality of the piece, I love AI generated art, both stories and images.
Fair enough. It felt too long-range coherent to me to be from GPT, but haven't played around with ChatGPT or GPT4 enough to know if that's still the case.
My response came from the fact that I would be upset if I got that reaction about fiction I had written, that I was hoping for positive feedback about. Like, why should I have bothered pouring my soul into a story if I could have just asked GPT to do it for me. I don't know how coherent a feeling that is in the world we live in to be honest, but I think most would feel the same.
The best norm would be to only post LLM content with clear disclaimers that that's what it is, and then assume anything without a disclaimers is human-made. Obviously that's tough to enforce...
Do you have links to some AI-generated stories you like handy?
#29: One way to add evidence to this is through adoption studies:
https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1651309779254476802
If you click through that link, you'll see the results of several adoption studies.
Another method is through looking at lottery winners: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1641509200692928530
If you click that link you'll see that the relationship between wealth and kids' cognitive and noncognitive skills disappears among lottery winners. This is probably the most powerful design for assessing the effects of exogenous wealth on outcomes.
Another method is through explicit behavior-genetic modeling. One of the more extreme examples is illustrated here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-014-9673-7
If you click that link, you'll see that the relationship between SES and IQs in one study was entirely attributable to genes and not at all attributable to environments. In the UK Biobank, the phenotypic correlations fluid intelligence has with degree attainment, pre-tax household income. the Townsend deprivation index, outright home ownership, and working a manual labor job are, respectively, 0.32, 0.25, -0.09, 0.06, and -0.29. The genetic correlations are 0.71, 0.63, -0.26, 0.26, and -0.82. I believe I've covered the gamut with those traits.
There are many designs that suggest confounding plays the dominant role in the relationship between kids' rearing SES and their achievement scores, GPAs, and IQs. You can even look at PGS correlations since we now have them for education, income, and occupation, and they're all positively related to intelligence and each other.
A final way to seal the deal in favor of the presence of confounding is to look at the relationships between a person's own cognitive and noncognitive skills and their parent's versus attained SES. There are older studies of that: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1648568055239266305. There are newer studies of that: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1654633494511853569.
That lottery thing is an awesome natural experiment. Could you link to the original study? I'm having trouble finding it on Google.
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/131/2/687/2606947
The standardized test stuff mystifies me. How is SES supposed to causally affect one's ability to answer a math question correctly, for instance? It's just silly, but I guess this is one of those areas where we have to do a ton of research to land back on the conclusion that seems obvious to some people from the start.
Leaving aside the issue of whether octopus farming is a good thing or not, I think it's very misleading to imply that octopus factory farming is a thing that actually exists. When I visited Kanaloa Octopus Farm 10 years ago it was a 400 square foot shack with like maybe a couple of dozen octopuses. Trying to figure out how to get octopus to breed in captivity and not eat each other is a big unsolved problem in octopus farming. Given that nobody yet really understands how to farm octopus, it seems entirely valid to me to characterize octopus farms as research facilities. Even the linked post describes UNAM as "conducting research" and indicates that they are selling fewer than 10,000 octopus per year (not clear what the actual number is though). It also feels misleading to imply that UNAM is trying to do something deceptive by characterizing their octopus farming activities as research, when, octopus farming is not prohibited by either international or Mexican law, and, frankly, an incredibly tiny number of people care about it relative to the number who object to whaling (even tinier if you consider the constituency that Mexico would likely care about).
I mean, if their research consists of "how can we factory farm octopus", I think it's fair to say that it's both research and factory farming.
Also, not that I don't like octopus, but I feel like if we're going to cut out one type of meat for ethical reasons, octopus would be a reasonable choice. The deliciousness-to-intelligence ratio is pretty low.
>The deliciousness-to-intelligence ratio is pretty low.
This is an excellent point.
What animal scores best on the deliciousness-to-intelligence ratio? Scallops?
Cheese.
Yes, I think the consensus right now is that eating bivalves is basically like eating meat plants. No harm done at all.
Scallops have all those blue eyes, and can "fly" from place to place underwater. I'd probably vote for mussels or oysters, which remain stationary for most of their lives.
Whoever created that fire dog has a lot to answer for. Same as the sealion comic guy.*
*This is not a comment on the content of any fire dog or sealion comic memes, whether individually or generally. This is a comment on their ubiquity (at one point or another).
I would put those up there with xckd #1357 and Ctrl-Alt-Delete's "Loss" for most annoying single comic on the internet.
I will comment on the content of xkcd 1357 and its children: fuck them. I'm not an xkcd reader, and while I've heard that this comic is some kind of uncharacteristic lapse into authoritarian cant, I still say fuck them.
xkcd guy (Randall Munroe?) is intelligent/quirky/interesting and comics about math/rockets/dinos and other nerd things in a nerd accessable entertaining way. But he mostly has pretty normie viewpoints and doesn't seem to be much of a critical thinker. His big virtues are thoroughness and imagination, taking scenarios to their full conclusion, not careful analysis.
So there are some misfires.
I have always found 1357 and 137 (https://xkcd.com/137/ ) an odd pair to coexist for the same writer.
Given their separation in time, they may just reflect different stages of his thinking. But juxtaposed, they sort of come across like the Hundred Flowers campaign.
The difference was in 137 the person being inconvenienced was him, so free expression was a vital civic value.
In 1357 the person being inconvenienced was also him, so now free expression is the is a threat to good social order.
We can have free expression as long as it is expression I like!
?? I don't see a contradiction. In 137, he says he wants to write whatever he wants to. In 1357, he says he also gets to choose not to listen. These are both compatible. You can write in *your own space* whatever you like. Nobody's obliged to listen or give you a platform. Where's the authoritarianism?
Obviously the two are not literally contradictory, but they certainly have different flavors.
Notably, the first was from 2006, the second from 2014. At the time of the first strip, Republicans controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. By less objective measures, they seemed to have been a stronger cultural force.
Free speech, not just as a legal concept, but as a cultural value, would have been more left-coded, pushing back against a dominant conservative cultural force.
At the time of the second strip, Democrats controlled the White House, and the Senate. By less objective measures, they seemed to have become a stronger cultural force. Cancel Culture (while not called that yet) was to a greater extent being wielded by more left-wing forces.
Free speech, not just as a legal concept, but as a cultural value, would nominally have become more right-coded, pushing back against a dominant liberal cultural force.
I say 'nominally,' since even after clearly becoming cultural underdogs and adopting the language of free speech, many Conservatives still advocate silencing their opponents' speech, and punishing them for it.
My comment is about rhetoric not about whether people actually act consistently with it in a coherent way.
I'm always amazed when people spin "people should be forced to listen to [my] asshole opinions, and I should face zero backlash" as an anti-authoritarian position.
The metaphor is the *marketplace* of ideas. If people don't like your ideas, you're going to get crowded out of the marketplace. And real marketplaces have regulations on what transactions are allowed to occur (in public)
Rank strawmanning. The only acceptable responses to speech are: (1) ignore it or (2) more speech. The fact that regulations exist doesn't mean that they should.
>he only acceptable responses to speech are: (1) ignore it or (2) more speech.
Except you can trivially come up with cases where that's untrue. If someone wanted to broadcast their speech by spamming low-information, high temperature content in reply to every thread and every comment, Scott would be in the right to ban them (and all posters here would appreciate it). Likewise, if I posted your CC, SSN, and address here, you'd be justified in getting it removed. These are extremes, but serve as a sort of base case through which we can progress through inductive reasoning to the idea that some speech isn't acceptable, and it's how you arrive at 1357.
Speech is an action and actions have consequences. It's naive to think otherwise. Freedom of speech is therefore has to be an equilibrium, and just because you personally disagree with where that equilibrium has settled does not make you de facto correct.
>The fact that regulations exist doesn't mean that they should.
I, along with most other people, don't want to live in a society where selling blatantly fraudulent or deadly products is legal. Just because you disagree does not make your position the correct one. Or do you mean that "just because a particular regulation exists does not mean it is justified"? Because that doesn't follow from your argument
The normal marketplace response to products you don't like is not to buy them. Organizing a boycott of the sellers is legal but not part of the mechanism that makes markets work.
The normal response in the market for ideas to ideas you find unconvincing is not to believe them, not to repeat them to others. Trying to impose costs on the people putting out those ideas in order to keep other people from hearing them isn't a violation of freedom of speech in the legal sense but it is inconsistent with the market for ideas defense of freedom of speech.
If that's the only xkcd you've seen, I'll recommend Every Major's Terrible, https://xkcd.com/1052/.
I feel like Making Hashbrowns is only funny if you've binged enough of them to get your head into a particular state, but I found it very funny my first binge. https://xkcd.com/421/
I had never seen 1052, thanks for posting it.
Still LOLing
Generally speaking, agreed, but I think the charitable interpretation is that the author was thinking of independent small-scale fora and personal blogs, which generally belong to individual people or to tightly-knit communities, and which exist(ed) in such number and variety that being banned from one is not a terrible loss. Rather different is a ban from an all-devouring social medium that assimilates all competition, enjoys government subsidies, postures as the global meeting place for all discussions of importance, and is a de facto requirement for several jobs. Unfortunately I'm not sure 1357 came early enough for this to be plausible.
It's also just factually false. He makes the middle school-level error of confusing the philosophical principle of freedom of speech with the legal standard of the First Amendment. The First Amendment is one implementation of the ideal of freedom of speech, specifically safeguarding against the threat of *government* retaliation, but the principle itself is much broader. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
I'm mostly surprised that the xkcd guy didn't seem to realise that "freedom of speech only means the government can't censor you" applied to things on 'his' side (though since this particular comic comes from back when the polarisation was just heating up, maybe it wasn't so obvious).
I'm running a website and someone comes on with a pro-gay marriage/trans rights/pick your own value comment? Great, I can bounce them out the door and it's not censorship or repression or any such bad thing! My site, my rules, and I'm not obliged to give space to comments that are against my values, and if you complain, then *you're* the asshole!
The problem with that comic is that it is so *clearly* "right-wing values are held by assholes and claiming free speech defence only means you're a loser of top of being an asshole". It doesn't seem to realise that "oh hey, if school libraries don't want to stock books that say 'sex work to pay for your cross-sex hormones is a legit way to get money, teens!' then they're not engaging in censorship, since a school board is not the government!"
I think it's from April 18th, 2014. So 3 or 4 months before Gamergate took off.
Gamergate is one fight I managed to avoid and I've been careful not to look up what it was about, because I really don't need or want to keep a list of "Internet culture war fights".
I fully endorse this plan.
I've been on the Internet since Usenet, and it was about a week ago that I first heard of "Loss" and was told that it's one of the best-known memes there is.
Can't remember where I read it, but I thought the author of the dog sketched it on a whim while in the midst of a depressive episode
"For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning."
It was as if a million copium addicts suddenly cried out in terror, then resolved to huff all the harder and STILL never shut the fuck up.
User should have been banned for this comment, but it's been more than six months so I'm giving a statute of limitations. Still, do better.
I don’t understand 4. There is a minor optical illusion, but he is doing exactly what you expect him to be doing? What else would he be doing?
In the very slowed down version I can see the reality. In the normal version it looks like the hand that comes from behind encloses the foremost hand and then pushes back through it.
Yeah but that is impossible. Are people also confused by the thumb pull off illusion?
What we see is what we see. It’s an optical illusion.
I think the point here is that a lot of people are like "How did he do that?", even though it is extremely obvious what he's doing. You can deduce it even if your mind still gives you the optical illusion effect.
I think there's probably some part of our brain that doesn't quite know how to fully process fingers. The notorious AI problems with fingers might go deeper than we know.
Even when I know how it's done, my brain still can't process what he's doing. It's the strongest optical illusion I've experienced in a long while
My brain isn't very strong visually/I have some level of aphantasia, so I imagine that has an impact
I saw the illusion the first few times, then I focused hard on the what the middle finger of the front hand was doing, and the illusion went away. I have trouble seeing the illusion again now.
For what it's worth, the second video where the young white girl repeats the trick is much less convincing. I'm not sure whether it's the skin colour, or just the camera angle, or just the fact that she's not as good/smooth at the trick.
Me too on both counts (aphantasic, found it an extremely strong illusion even in slow motion).
Interesting potential correlation to investigate in the next ACX survey?
It's odd because generally I do have problems with optical illusions, but that one I could straight away see what he was doing.
Perhaps because going in I knew it was an illusion, so I was watching for that. If I didn't, I think there's a chance my brain could have been tricked.
I suspect the low quality of the video is more important than any deficiency in our brains, with the high level of compression blurring the lines between the fingers.
I notice a similar effect with AI generated art. It obviates much of the automatic "seeing" process. So many times there are clearly problems with a generated image, but we don't see them at first - often only with an analytical eye.
I have better luck seeing through it when I'm not looking directly at it.
Even thought the how is obvious with just a couple of seconds of thought, honestly, without thinking my brain went to "camera trick" first.
"Copy editors say AI has already changed their job beyond recognition"
Copy editors are obviously slack in the labor market, just like slaves and fast food workers.
Did you read the article? He's not saying AI has automated away his job; he's saying it's changed his job from helping humans express themselves better to helping to pass off AI-generated text as non-AI-generated. He says the copywriters have been automated away but the editors haven't (yet).
19: women’s vaginal lubrication, is mostly a defence mechanism. Therefore any sexual imagery might cause it.
For the hard of thinking this doesn’t mean that women are consciously or even subconsciously attracted to these images.
Golly.
I hardly dare unpack that. Are you saying that lubrication is a defence mechanism against the damage that would otherwise be done by rape? Because it seems to follow that women should therefore be turned on by the prospect of rape. Have I misunderstood?
Yes you have misunderstood. Now go back and read it again. And note, I said nothing about rape.
Indeed you didn't, but what, if not rape, are you claiming lubrication is defensive against? You could have explained this already: "read it again" is not a helpful response.
If you bothered you dull sordid mind to even read the item (19) I was responding to you might actually have a clue what was going on here.
OK I am now completely mystified. Item 19 (the link) says exactly what I was saying it said:
"Researcher Meredith Chivers has proposed that this evolved in order to protect women from rape: women lubricate and become erect when their bodies expect that sex might happen, whether or not they want the sex, in order to protect the delicate tissues of the vagina from damage. I find this a satisfying explanation, although speculative evolutionary biology of human beings is notoriously prone to bad conclusions so I wouldn’t take it too seriously."
Are you saying lubrication is also defensive against something else, and if so what? Siege artillery? Credit card fraud?
Images of Chimp sex. Read the post.
“ Item 19 (the link) says exactly what I was saying it said:”
No it says what you accused me of saying , while clutching your pearls and basically accusing me of rape apologetics. I didnt follow the link and was just responding to the main post.
I'm not sure what OP meant, but it is important to note that many women do experience lubrication during rape. This has been frequently reported to cause guilt and confusion (victims wondering if this means they enjoyed the rape, despite feeling no actual enjoyment). This is also part of the general argument that lubrication is separate from subjective attraction/enjoyment and is more a mechanical preparation.
Good point. OP got the wrong end of the stick and pitched in with a complete misunderstanding with added "for the hard of understanding" irony.
He did seem to be quite angry. Unjustifiably so, given the question.
>Are you saying that lubrication is a defence mechanism against the damage that would otherwise be done by rape?
No. He's saying that lubrication is a defense mechanism against the damage that would otherwise be done by penetrative sex.
>Have I misunderstood?
Yes. You're confused. Specifically, you have confused "lubrication as a physical defense mechanism against penetration" with "lubrication as a sign of sexual desire."
I suggest you calm down--a lot--and think about the distinction between those two things. Pretend you had been having the discussion with somebody more socially adept than Nolan Eoghan, if that helps any. I strongly suspect that it will.
Good advice.
Hey you didn't say anywhere that everyone would be able to view everyone else's entries to the name survey (it's currently set up that way), and I don't want people to see what I wrote...
I am not identifiable by my first name, but I chose to make the same comment both on the survey and here under the links post, guaranteeing that it's trivial to identify my survey response.
I stopped taking the SSC reader survey because it was a surreal combination of being intrusive and completely uninteresting [note: you're getting a lot of selection bias in the reader survey], and I can see why people might not want their responses to that shared. But it's hard for me to imagine a survey more anodyne than the name survey. What is it that you don't want shared?
One of the more interesting side-effects of having a unique, or extremely rare, name... is that you think about internet privacy *very* differently from most David Joneses and Alison Smiths. I'm fairly horrified every time somebody proposes we should strip everybody of internet anonymity, because there are *maybe* three other people in the whole friggin world who share my name, and the privacy consequences for me personally would be drastically different from the consequences for your average Josh or Brooke. Lopsided in the extreme.
I want to see Scott do a poll that compares first-name popularity ranking with how people feel about internet anonymity. I'd bet that there's a tight correlation between how common your name is, and how chill you feel about using it on the internet.
My last name is pretty unique and I don't really mind having it associated with my random Internet stuff, but my mom was a doctor (under her maiden name) and was very determined to make sure that none of her patients could ever find out her address. Fortunately her name is common enough to make her completely Google-proof.
One of my parents was a special-ed teacher who for many years taught "emotionally handicapped" kids-- literally would read the police blotter every week to see what their old students were up to. We paid extra to the phone company to NOT be listed in the phone book.
Mine's rare enough that I had some concerns, but left a comment anyway. The year I was born, it didn't even make the SS roster. But I notice in the last couple years it has finally cracked the top 1000... I am not at all sure how I feel about that.
Have you done that thing where you search for your name on LinkedIn to see all the people with your name who are more successful than you?
Nah, I gave up paid employment to raise my kids. I don't want to know.
I think what I'm learning from this experience is not to let people leave comments, or to make it clear that any comments will be identifiable. But I've hidden the whole survey for now.
"Australia has a National Sorry Day where they focus on various atrocities perpetrated against the indigenous population. I think this makes more sense than the American solution of having it be a mildly awkward undercurrent across all the other more celebratory holidays (eg July 4, Thanksgiving, Columbus Day)."
If this described the choices available in the USA, that is to say, one day of remorse and full-throated patrotism/appropriate-ism on other days versus low-to-medium-grade preachy shaming on the same theme with every holiday, I'd be into it. But let's not kid ourselves.
Yeah, good idea in theory but there is no way we could reach a reasonable accommodation on this. One of the core impulses of wokeness is ruining holidays (and everything else) that normal people enjoy.
Like the Puritans punishing people for celebrating Christmas, the whole point is to completely replace the traditional civic and religious calendar with an ideologically ‘correct’ one, as dictated by the Elect. On that note, happy Pride month, and don’t forget to take out all of your traditional Juneteenth decorations!
If it became an established, accepted holiday, it would cease to offer opportunities for moral preening or grievance mongering, thus its appeal would be rather limited.
As other commentators have noted, it's also not how it functions in practice in Australia either. ("sorry day" was a political stunt instantly forgotten, the big fight is over Australia day and the date it's celebrated on)
#14, Also, here's Sam Kriss's guide on writing: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-numb-at-the-lodge-guide-to-writing
Combine with Scott's guide for greater awesomeness: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/
"One of the more obscure sequlae of 9/11 was the effort by Orthodox Jewish rabbis to find technicalities in Jewish law allowing the widows of victims to remarry, even though in some cases it was impossible to find their bodies to confirm death. Here’s one rabbi’s recollections of the process."
I am a philo-Semite by any description (also an atheist; related?). But I do not understand this fixation Jewish clergy (correct term?) have with what seems like trying to trick God.
This seems to be a theme of a lot of Jewish religious/legal writing going back a long way. "This is the statute inscribed in fire by THE LORD, and by which all men are bound, there can be no exceptions. Buuuuut here's why it never applies...[ten billion cases]." As a lawyer, I applaud this dedication to my profession and am grateful that they walked so I could run. But it seems to play into certain stereotypes.
It’s because like (maybe a majority of religious people) they don’t really actually believe with a capital b. It is more cultural. They don’t really think they are tricking god.
Lots of time atheism is really just having the common courtesy to actually take religions seriously, unlike their adherents.
Nah, they take religions literally, not seriously. The cultural is what religions are actually for, and when you abolish them, alternative fully-formed atheist cultures retaining the good parts and free of supernatural bullshit don't suddenly spring into existence. Pol Pot springs into existence. That there wasn't any serious grappling with this by New Atheists amply showed their infantile superficiality, and getting devoured by nascent wokism was a fitting fate for them.
> The cultural is what religions are actually for, and when you abolish them, alternative fully-formed atheist cultures retaining the good parts and free of supernatural bullshit don't suddenly spring into existence. Pol Pot springs into existence.
The prevalence of this problem would seem to imply that there's more to the claims religions make of supernatural aid than the "bullshit" they're often so glibly dismissed as.
Even if they are bullshit, it doesn't mean that they're worthless. Placebo effect is one example of bullshit being tangibly beneficial. However, when bullshit becomes too blatant, it undermines the credibility of the entire operation, which is why traditional religions are on the decline in the first world. Plenty of stuff which seemed plausible thousands of years ago no longer does, which is undeniable to anyone who's intellectually honest. However, it also should be clear by now that glib dismissal is woefully inadequate on its own, and going on pretending otherwise has nothing to do with "rationality" worthy of the name.
Funny you should mention that right as I was finishing up an article on that very subject.
https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/rationality-is-not-correctness
I mostly agree with what you're saying there, with one big exception that your definition of "rational" is obviously wrong, as one can verify by checking any dictionary, what you provided is more like a definition of "logical" instead. But this doesn't seem to be load-bearing.
Do you eventually intend to provide a "rational" argument for Christianity in particular? That would be interesting to see, as the only bids in this direction that I've ever seen are essentially "read Aquinas".
I think there is something to the idea that humans are generally pretty superstitious irrational little critters and if you don’t give them one big lie to cling to they will just create another. That POV seems to be winning out in a lot of ways as religions decline.
The crucial difference, I'd say, is that "old lies" had their edges sanded off by cultural evolution, and ended up more-or-less appropriate for the circumstances that those cultures existed in. Whereas now we've been increasingly entering an uncharted free-for-all, where circumstances are already pretty far from those tested environments, and still change ever faster. It's sheer hubris to think that anyone can design the new world order from scratch. Much of the old stuff will inevitably die off, but to the extent that it still on average produces better outcomes than Pol Pot, maybe "rationalists" shouldn't be so gung-ho about dismantling it as quickly as possible.
Yeah that has been a viewpoint that has been way more appealing to me from 30-45 than I would have thought from 15-30.
Wishy-washy hypocritical Lutheranism (or whatever), better than hating America and western history/culture as a religion!
Well, like the saying goes, if you're not a liberal when you're young etc. etc.
> Lots of time atheism is really just having the common courtesy to actually take religions seriously, unlike their adherents.
This comment reminds me of the many times I've been accused of "arrogance" for my tendency to reveal an assumption that naturally everyone else in the world knows at least as much as I do about any topic.
Ya no, that's not it. I've been there, a fervent Orthodox Jew. They believe. It's real for them. They pray earnestly for God to help them, including to inspire them to find these loopholes. It is all part of the religious devotion.
Oh it's like, explicit doctrine. There's a whole industry of trying to make technology that gets around the rules to work on Saturday.
Yeah. One loophole is that (parts of) God's law are only binding on Jews, because Jews were the ones that agreed to follow it way back when; God doesn't care if Gentiles work on the Sabbath or whatever, because they're not God's People and God doesn't hold them to the same standard. So if a non-Jew wants to help out on the Sabbath by doing something that Jews aren't supposed to, like light a fire, Jews shouldn't encourage them, but they aren't obligated to stop them, either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbos_goy
This sounds like a weird edge case but I work at an Israeli hedge fund with a religious CEO and they specifically employ non Jews to do the trading systems monitoring during sabbath.
Yes, there are specific legalisms to allow that. Like having a non-Jew have partial ownership of the company, and declaring that the work done on Shabbat (by workers who are also not Jewish) is for his potion of things and not the Jews'.
I think the point is that you at least have to make an effort to show that you acknowledge that the rule exists and that you're formally obeying it, even if you're actually doing some (religiously approved) workaround. You're not just going around specifically *dis*obeying Yahweh and ignoring his commands, you fully acknowledge through your actions that they - and he - exist! I'm not Jewish, though, so what do I know.
Seems more like “if you’re clever enough the rules don’t apply to you, rules are just for stupid people” but maybe I’m too cynical
No, it's very much "the rules apply to you just like to everyone else, but the rules are the rules, and they have a letter, but no spirit".
But since these are formalized techniques available to all, there's really no population that is the "stupid people" here.
I mean, they have a set of old, sometimes very murdery, laws that often seem completely absurd to modern sensibilitities but that they need to pretend they follow. This is a much better out than actually following them. Fundamentalist Islam would do well to pick up this kind of practice.
Then it wouldn't be fundamentalist. Boilerplate Islam seems to be catching up toh, at least judging from how they actually live as long as they get some amount of economic development
This is interesting context to understand Jesus extending the moral weight of the law to thoughts and intentions (eg equating lust with adultery).
Humans abuse loopholes, too. How many of us go "I'm a good person!" where we mean "Well, I haven't raped or murdered anyone, and beside those sins, is being a son of a bitch to my family and embezzling money from the fund for the blind and deliberately telling lies about my colleague so I'd get promoted instead of him so bad, now really is it?"
Lust in your heart. Bad as adultery. Don't think you can get off on the technical "Well if I go right up to the very line but don't quite step over it, I'm okay!"
The point of loopholes in religion is "oh crap, I didn't know/I couldn't help it", not "I know very well but I'm rules-lawyering".
You absolutely are not supposed to travel on the Sabbath but you really, really have to? Okay, we'll find a loophole so you can keep the law and also your obligation to others.
Because (1) letting the law be broken means that eventually it'll be broken for any old excuse and then not respected at all but (2) if you rigorously enforce it despite any emergencies, that's inhumane and makes people hate God and that's not good
""This is the statute inscribed in fire by THE LORD, and by which all men are bound, there can be no exceptions. Buuuuut here's why it never applies...[ten billion cases]."
It's called (in Christianity) moral theology. The rules are Da Rulez, But. There are always exceptions, because "this is a hard saying, who can accept it?" and we are not to break the bruised reed or quench the smouldering wick, and there are always the weaker brethren.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_moral_theology
Intention, as well as the act itself, makes the sin. If you do something out of ignorance or necessity, is it just to impute the full gravity of the sin to you? Hence looking for exceptions and loopholes. Naturally it can be taken to an extreme, and abused, hence why casuistry got a bad name:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casuistry
"Casuistry dates from Aristotle (384–322 BC), yet the zenith of casuistry was from 1550 to 1650, when the Society of Jesus used case-based reasoning, particularly in administering the Sacrament of Penance (or "confession"). The term became pejorative following Blaise Pascal's attack on the misuse of the method in his Provincial Letters (1656–57). The French mathematician, religious philosopher and Jansenist sympathiser attacked priests who used casuistic reasoning in confession to placate wealthy church donors. Pascal charged that aristocratic penitents could confess a sin one day, re-commit it the next, then generously donate to the church and return to re-confess their sin in the confidence of being assigned only a nominal penance."
Well, Pascal was sympathetic to the Jansenists, but they were extremely rigorous in their views, so it's six of one and half a dozen of the other there between him and the Jesuits 😁
And I was always struck by how in the Scriptures God seems to take delight in being talked out of/bargained down, see Abraham and Sodom, where God intends to destroy it for the wickedness of its people, but Abraham talks him down from fifty to ten righteous men - if in the entire city there are ten righteous men, God will spare it.
That sounds like Abraham has a shrewd estimate of how likely it is to find a righteous man in the city, but also that God only wants an excuse to be merciful, if we will ask for it.
Alternatively you can read it as God knowing full well there are not ten good men to be found. After all he ultimately destroys the two cities and the only people rescued are Lot (who offers up his two daughters to be gang raped) and his two daughters (who get their father drunk and have sex with him). It implies a pretty low bar to not get fire and brimstoned.
"It implies a pretty low bar to not get fire and brimstoned."
God will be merciful if we give Him a chance, it's just that we insist on being assholes. Even if you go with the liberal/progressive Christian interpretation that "The sin of Sodom was lack of hospitality!" it's pretty asshole behaviour to go "Nah, you guys can clear off and die in the desert".
There's also stuff like Ezekiel talking God down from using human dung to cow dung for his prophesy cooking. And Moses does it a few times, with Aaron and with the Israelites at large. And Jacob straight up beats a blessing out of an angel.
I feel like the Catholic approach differs a lot from the Jewish approach on this issue, but I'm neither and merely a curious layperson.
I appreciate you sharing the Catholic perspective on the issue. It's not clear to me if you meant to imply that you expect Orthodox Jews feel similarly, or if you' were merely providing a comparison point?
Since we took all the Good Stuff from the Jewish tradition, as a point of comparison.
Reading the Epistles, sounds like straight out of the gate the newly-minted Christians were getting up to "yeah well Law doesn't apply any more, we're under Grace!" shenanigans looking for loopholes as witness Paul rebuking the Corinthians for "no, you can't shack up with your stepmother":
"5 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father's wife. 2 And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you."
Point 1: If God wrote the law then he wrote the loopholes too. You want to tell Him how to do his job? You think you’re smarter than God?
Point 2: Some Jewish legal rulings are deliberately stricter than they need to be, basically due diligence to be extra sure risk of breaking the actual law is minimized. In such cases if you find some convoluted exception, this serves the same purpose of making sure people take care.
I object to the "God wrote the loopholes" interpretation. It's a convenient, self-serving take, but if the people who actually followed the rules as-written thousands of years ago weren't looking for loopholes because they didn't think they needed excuses to avoid what the law apparently says, then the law isn't pointing people in the direction of an actual desired behavior. It basically amounts to attributing non-Gricean communication to God.
Right, but God is omniscient, so he knew that thousands of years ago the people would follow RAW sans loopholes and today people will follow RAW with loopholes and he carefully wrote the law exactly for this purpose.
If you grant God's omniscience, it follows that he knows people would know that, but it also follows that God would have known Adam and Eve would eat the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, which was supposedly a transgression against him. That implies that God can know people are going to do something, and still object to it.
If you believe that nothing in the Torah is meaningless, that every single letter, the ornamental crowns above every letter, every word, and all repeated verbiage in the Torah was dictated directly by God for the purpose of clarifying His law further than what's explicitly written, than sometimes Rabbis (the term for Jewish Clergy) will use these features to modify their interpretations to the text in a way not congruent with its literal meaning. Rabbis very much do not think they are tricking God, rather they believe they are using the process He already outlined to fully elucidate His will.
Which is silly, and something anyone who spends a bit of time thinking about it should find suspect.
Yeah, just on the face of it I agree that sounds like the exact sort of post-facto justification one would use for pulling shenanigans.
Not a lawyer, but doesn't essentially the same phenomena happen in law?
Yes. The law is the law. Not the secret intentions of the drafter, not the opinions of the judge, not what "common sense" implies, but the actual enacted text. It is not the court's job to figure out what legislature was trying to say. It's job is to apply the text of the law as written, ambiguities, loopholes, and all. Just like here: God wrote the book - under what authority do we act as copy editors?
>It is not the court's job to figure out what legislature was trying to say. It's job is to apply the text of the law as written, ambiguities, loopholes, and all.
That is--as you surely very well know--an opinion, not a fact; and an opinion that is, to put it mildly, far from universally held, let alone practiced.
Isn't it only Muslims who believe Koran is the literal word of God? And even they rely on hadiths for their laws, which instead purport to be things said by humans while Muhammad was alive.
The traditional Jewish view is that the written Torah was given exactly as we have it today, verbatim written in Hebrew with the exact same spellings and misspellings by God to Moses. The parts that say stuff like "as I instructed you" about things that aren't mentioned in the written text are in traditional Judaism proof of an additional Oral Torah that was given to Moses.
I don't think even the most fanatical believer claims that the entire Talmud verbatim was given to Moses, rather that the Oral Torah includes some extratextual traditions and the hermeneutical principals on how to correctly expound the meaning of the Torah. Some of these derivations are regarded as Torah law, and some of them are considered Rabbinic enactments and treated more leniently.
I'm going to try and balance out the cynical/atheist takes with a more traditionally Jewish one:
The name "Israel" was given to Jacob for fighting an angel and in Hebrew litterally means "to contend/struggle with god". So it seems that struggling with god and his commandments is quite deeply engrained in the history and destiny of the Israelites (and by extension the Jews).
In Judaism, the Israelites were/are the people chosen to contend and struggle with god's commandments to their fullest.
To be fair, tricking God is in fact an established tradition in Jewish religion. That is to say, the Jewish God is the ultimate rules-lawyer, and finding creative exceptions to his rules is in fact what he wants His followers to do.
On top of that, Judaism has a strong tradition of survival (for obvious reasons). The Torah explicitly instructs you that any and all ceremonial rules can be rendered null and void in dire emergencies; the physical survival of the Jewish community is paramount.
If G-d didn't approve of the loopholes, He wouldn't have included them! ;)
Honestly as a Gentile this is one of my favorite things about Judaism.
Ditto.
Not exactly related to this story, but also about tricking god. In Germany there is a food called Herrgottsbscheisserle, which is dough filled with meat or vegetables, which translates to "thing that tricks god" and the legend is that a monk wanted to eat meat during lent so he hid it in the dough so god couldn't see it and he could eat meat without committing a sin. Probably not a true story but still funny.
Last time I saw this discussed the idea was that God is perfect, and so if his rules have loopholes, then those loopholes are intentional.
For what it's worth, this characteristic of Judaism goes all the way back to the advent of Rabbinic Judaism and was the subject of early Christian (anti-Pharisaic) criticism.
While not a defense, I suspect that broadly speaking, you can't have endless deference to both the letter and the spirit of the law. Deference to one inevitably comes at the expense of the other.
You say that you respect the dedication as a lawyer. Indeed, the secular legal systems in which a lawyer operates heavily favor the letter of the law over the spirit of the law. Many of the same critiques apply to those systems.
I suspect that the difference is that people realize that laws meant to govern other people can't be left to individual discretion of the spirit of the law. The Jewish system is similar in that it has specific prescriptions and proscriptions, rather than generic ones like "be righteous, don't do evil, etc." Such a system naturally lends itself to legal loopholes that circumvent the spirit of the law.
The same applies to Shari'a, which is also a detail-oriented system and also respects loopholes that nominally circumvent the spirit of the law.
If someone thinks that religions shouldn't exist at all, let alone impose endless minutia on adherents, then of course legalistic chicanery seems absurd.
Within the systems of those religions, however, it is a natural development. The corollary of the highest value being placed on following specific detailed rules, is a lesser degree of importance on respecting the spirit of the rules, so sophisticated systems designed to circumvent the rules inevitably emerge.
That said, I don't know that the case at hand is a very good example of that - it is almost an example of the opposite.
The issue is married people having affairs. Non-legalistic thinking would assume that the spouse of someone who disappeared after last having been in the World Trade Center on 9/11 is no longer married and is free to remarry without having an affair. Indeed, they are colloquially referred to as "widows of victims," implicitly acknowledging the death of their spouses.
So the spirit of the law was met.
The problem was the letter of the law describing formal thresholds of evidence for the death of the spouse that may have not been met. Thus, legalistic problems, required legalistic solutions.
As I like to put it, by the standard of the rabbis every Supreme Court justice in history was a strict constructionist.
The bonobo study doesn't really seem to prove anything to me. Like yes they found a slight elevation in women's arousal to bonobo sex compared to women's arousal to nonsexual stimuli, but it was WAY smaller than women's arousal to human sex. Women's arousal to bonobo sex was nearly the same as women's arousal to nonsexual control stimuli. So I don't really think this proves anything.
32: “The good news is that if this happens, it proves that the original SO2 emissions were an (accidental) act of safe and effective geoengineering, opening the way to trying a similar policy at greater scale (in theory/utopia only, probably our actual society would rather die or economically self-destruct).”
True. Although maybe China or some similar sensible country may do this. If the effect is real, as according to the link, then a relatively small increase in SO2 would cool the planet until we reduced carbon. The fear might be that we would never reduce carbon. But then, so what?
Also how weak, or political, is climate science that we don’t know exactly what percentage of SO2 would counter CO2
Edit:
Replaced reduction of SO2 with increase of SO2
I thought the point was that SO2 was DECREASING the planetary temperature by blocking sunlight? So you would INCREASE SO2 emissions to cool the planet. Would China start doing that?
Yeh. I edited that. Thanks. Just a brain fart.
I mean China as an example of a country that would not have the democratic pressures to oppose something like that. „sensible“ was a bit tongue in cheek.
Ocean acidification remains a problem if the effect of CO2 emissions on temperatures is just countered by SO2.
I mean we are destroying the ocean with overfishing anyway? Does it matter if their are no fish due to acidification collapsing food webs, or their are no fish because we catch them all?
In either case the ecosystem will recover a few millennia after we stop fucking with it and arrive at some new (constantly evolving) normal.
You can fix overfishing by just not fishing in that area anymore. After a few years they bounce back. Poisoning the entire ocean at once is a bigger problem.
Well tis not "poisoning the entire ocean". Its damaging specific processes in specific creatures. The ocean has been very acidic before and had plenty of diversity, it would just take time to recover.
Also the overfishing has already harmed things to the point where "just stopping fishing" doesn't "fix" things. They don't bounce back the same. It will take centuries. More?
"The ocean has been very acidic before and had plenty of diversity, it would just take time to recover."
I mean, by this logic, nothing really matters, as long as some biosphere is possible. Never mind the horrendous transition costs.
The point was calling it "poisoning the whole ocean" is perhaps some overly inflected language. I was balancing that with a "the ocean will in essence be fine" counterweight.
For sure we have super damaged the existing ecosystem in the ocean (though once again mostly through fishing).
But yes it is important to remind people that the biosphere will be fine. Many many people seem to believe that somehow the world is going to look like Mercury in 2100 if we don't do something tomorrow. Which is false.
It is not even going to look like a hot Mars. It will jsut be a slightly less good earth.
CO2 isn't making the ocean acidic and won't for a very long time. It is making it less basic, more nearly neutral. That could be a problem for organisms adapted to a basic environment, but it isn't the problem of immersing them in acid. "Acidification" is technically correct but rhetorically dishonest.
Okay then, we're debasing the ocean.
I’m going to be an annoying pedant and remind everyone that the oceans are not becoming more acidic. They are becoming less basic.
"An oven doesn't make things hotter, it makes them less cold".
To apply your analogy properly - "I'm not cooking this frozen steak, I'm defrosting it". I.e. we're moving the temperature closer to neutral rather than further away from neutral.
"Ocean acidification" sounds like we are making the ocean more extreme, corrosive, and hostile to life. That's an inaccurate connotation. We are making it less like lye or bleach and more like pure water.
See now you're not being dubiously pedantic, you're just straight up wrong. Regardless of whether you describe it as "more acidic" or "less basic", we *are* making the ocean more hostile to life. That's the whole problem! And yes, shellfish do need a slightly basic environment to build their shells, and you thinking things should be otherwise doesn't change reality.
To quote David Friedman upthread, is there any reason to believe that a less basic ocean is worse for aquatic life in general, as opposed to worse for organisms adapted to current pH?
Analogously, some animals do better in arid climates, but that doesn't mean that water isn't good for life in general.
CO2 is poisonous to humans at about 400 ppm. So we should definitely avoid getting near that concentration.
Actually it is poisonous at around 40,000 ppm, so you're off by a factor of 100.
https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/air/toxins/co2.html#:~:text=At%20even%20higher%20levels%20of,dangerous%20to%20life%20and%20health.
Current atmospheric levels of CO2 are about 420 ppm (or 0.042%), so if you were correct we would all be dead already.
I agree that we should not allow CO2 levels to multiply 100fold.
Anyone else remember Acid Rain?
> The fear might be that we would never reduce carbon. But then, so what?
Well one obvious issue is ocean acidification.
As I have commented elsewhere, the oceans are not acidifying. They are becoming less alkaline and becoming more neutral.
"An oven doesn't make things hotter, it makes them less cold".
> And now I expect this pretty strong evidence that women were actually advantaged in hiring and had parity in most other things (the salary is probably just the usual negotiation issue)
Another possibility is that it could be caused by the advantaging of women in hiring - if you lower the threshold for women for assistant professor jobs, then the average woman hired will be less competent, and if you don't keep advantaging them in the same way for raises/promotions, they'll mean-revert on pay.
I work in an engineering department. Some of my colleagues really wanted to increase the number of female students. They worked worked with admissions and in the previous year, we got what we asked for. Fast forward to the end of the year, and it turns out that women are failing classes or getting Ds at a higher rate than male students. Now we're tasked with finding solutions to this inequity. The obvious reason seems to elude most.
I had a very sweet girlfriend in college who was a C level STEM student in a program with maybe 95/5 men. They worked so so so hard to keep her in that program despite her constant struggle. And she did eventually finish it.
Then they really tried to push her hard into grad school. Someone who barely finished undergrad. She got in...and predictably washed out due to not being good enough pretty quickly (after wasting a couple years).
I think she eventually went and got some easier non-STEM advanced degree.
The part that pains me most is that the people most harmed by this are precisely those marginal students of the "promoted" categories that end up wasting years of their life as a result of being pushed into courses they aren't suited for.
My anecdote is a student I worked with on a project in engineering freshman year. She was very smart, but had no particular interest in or unusual skill in math/science. She was in Engineering basically just because she was offered a big women-only scholarship to be in engineering. She abandoned the field after a (free) year and went on to success in non-STEM. Sticks with me because one of her skills was teacher’s-pettery and she got an A in the class despite basically abandoning the group project halfway through while the dude that busted his ass with me to fill in for her part for a B+
Re: 6, one of my favorites:
”It’s not strange that people in the past thought the world was flat - it looks like it is flat.”
”That’s interesting, what would it have looked like if it had been round?”
It has always looked rather bumpy to me. Flat not so much, unless all the ancient people lived in the middle of Kansas.
I’ve heard something very similar attributed to Wittgenstein.
Well, on a round Earth as you walked in one direction you'd notice that gravity was starting to pull you sideways as "down" ceased to be perpendicular to the surface of the Earth. And eventually you'd fall off the side. Maybe you personally wouldn't notice because you don't stray too far from home (which is clearly on the exact top of the world) but why don't the oceans fall off the side?
To make a round Earth make sense you not only have to postulate that it's round, but that gravity just happens to point towards the centre of the Earth no matter where you go. And what are the chances of that?
The earth was already known to be round to the ancient Mediterranean world. That's why you see statues of Romans holding globes. That's what the orb in medieval European regalia represents.
Ironically for your argument, there were two major reasons that the Earth was accepted as being round: first, that the shadow it casts on the moon is round. But second, that ships disappear over the horizon from the bottom up, and reappear from the top down.
This is, of course, exactly what things would have looked like if the world had been round. In the region of the Mediterranean close attention was paid to the sea, and so the roundness of the world was recognized. In China that didn't happen.
Wouldn't a flat disc Earth also cast a round shadow on the moon? Assuming that paleo flat Earthers even accepted that that's what a lunar eclipse is...
A lunar eclipse can occur at any time of night. If it's at the beginning or end of the night, with the sun just below the horizon and the moon just above it, then the sun would see a flat earth nearly edge-on and cast a long, thin shadow.
Round I suppose. I mean it does, if you look at the horizon.
To expect the uneducated pre scientific man to also know that curvature was so slight as to be unnoticeable is expecting a bit too much, unless he lives by the sea. Generally it’s not noticeable.
I think this gives pre-scientific method civilisations too little credit, seeing as most of them did in fact know that the Earth was round (though civilisations tend to be coastal), and eg. ancient Greece has a very accurate measurement of its circumference
In similar format, Milton Friedman is said to have responded to
"You know Norway is wealthier per capita than America, right?"
with "Yes - and Norwegians in America are wealthier still".
The variant I heard was that a Swedish economist told Milton Friedman "In Sweden we have no poverty", and Friedman replied "That's interesting, because among Swedes in America we have no poverty either."
Something I’ve been interested in lately is Milton Friedman’s views on genetics, and in particular dysgenic effects.
In the education chapter of Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman expresses support for a policy that would require all children to receive a minimum amount of schooling at their parents expense. Apart from granting some minimal need-based exceptions, such a policy would be broadly analogous to requiring vehicle owners to pay the costs of auto insurance as is currently the case in most states. Pretty standard libertarian stuff.
But then he makes this additional point—
“Finally, but by no means least, imposing the costs on the parents would tend to equalize the social and private costs of having children and so promote a better distribution of families by size.”
And in the footnote—
“It is by no means so fantastic as may appear that such a step would noticeably affect the size of families. For example, one explanation of the lower birth rate among higher than among lower socioeconomic groups may well be that children are relatively more expensive to the former, thanks in considerable measure to the higher standards of schooling they maintain, the costs of which they bear.”
Am I reading too much into this?
This doesn’t have to be about genetics (although it could be). Kids from better-off families will do better on average even without genetic advantages, due to better socialization and schooling.
When he says “a better distribution of family size” I took that to mean that wealthier families might have more kids and poorer families might have less, thus a promoting a better gene pool over time.
Maybe there is a different interpretation of what he means by “better” but it seemed to me like he might be choosing vague language intentionally to partially obscure his point from people who might be offended (i.e. being Straussian).
I got that, but it doesn't have to be genetics to produce that outcome - it's sufficient if (as is almost certainly the case) kids from better-off families do better in life even at the same genetics.
On the basis of the quoted passage, I think he was probably not alluding to a eugenic / dysgenic effect (although I have no idea what he thought about it).
I think it is understood that children would be better off being born into higher SES groups than lower ones, and that shifting the distribution of children born in that direction would be of benefit even aside from genetic advantages those children would have. (This does not even have to relate predicted future earnings as an adult, as other comments are alluding to. The null hypothesis is just that kids would be happier as children in higher income households).
Similarly, it is understood that society would be better off under such a distribution. There would be less need, for example, for support for the poor - be that support coerced by the government, or willingly granted privately - if more people were born rich.
Incidentally, if this passage from Friedman is representative, he wrote the way he spoke. One can easily hear his voice while reading this.
I admit I had to somewhat reconstruct the exchange, and may even have gotten the nation wrong.
That said: I wonder if this would really have been interesting by Friedman's standards. Wouldn't it be _un_interesting in the null hypothesis sense for the same demographic to do about as well in two locations?
Not to mention, maybe not even factual; ISTR accounts of rural Swedes who are struggling financially, in the same way one would expect anyone to struggle in a remote location.
May be odd to do this, so sorry in advance if you already received a notification from my reply to JohanL's reply to you, but I'm very curious about Friedman's views on genetics and I was wondering if you knew anything more about that. [More context is in the replies further down the thread.]
Nothing that comes immediately to mind, sorry. (Also, I only got a notification for your first reply, not the replies to it in turn.)
No worries! Appreciate the reply.
Under the heading "Copy editors say AI has already changed their job beyond recognition", let's be clear that the job has changed because people are now sending this copy-editor AI-generated bilge instead of actually trying to write things themselves and it's so unsalvageably bad it's making the copy editor depressed.
#34: this chatbot is presumably perfectly "aligned" in the view of at least some of the 1.2 billion hindus worldwide. There's your problem right there.
How does one know that it is not trained by some westerner like you based on your "understanding" of the text?
That posted twice, and then deleted twice.
One doesn't. My point is not anti or pro any belief system, it's about the non-existence of a core set of human values to align AI to.
It may be aligned with the Bhagavad-Gita, but the ostensible purpose of that text (on the surface) is to persuade a warrior to do his duty and engage in a civil war. So the advice about sacrificing a life for dharma is *maybe* a special case not generally applicable to peace-time civilian life?
I'm pretty sure some smart-alec could create a Gospel-bot to answer "Yes of course" to "Should I cut off my arm because I keep sinning with it?" but, uh, no.
I would expect a bot trained faithfully on the Bible alone to end up resembling one of the extreme protestant denominations, since the primary thing that makes them extreme is rejecting all of the accumulated ancillary writings that form most of the eg. Catholic canon.
Like, it is entirely possible to say that the ancient texts are not (in isolation, or at all, depending on your personal taste) aligned with modern morals, but the explicit task was to 'align' a bot with a specific text and complaining that it doesn't match modern morals rather misses the point there.
P.s. I think I agree with you that Robert is quite wrong here in assuming that all or even most Hindus would take the Bhagavad-Gita that literally
That particular one (is it permissible to take a life for the sake of the dharma?) is a Just War question and the Bhagavad-Gita as a source text is in part about "when it is right to fight a war? when is it right to kill? what do we do between the competing demands of duty and social bonds?"
I don't think anyone (well, there are always a few extremist loopers) would take it as "Go run around the streets killing people and say you're doing it in the name of God/dharma, that's okay and fine!"
But that isn't what it was asked — it's not "should I, a random Hindu, kill in this modern world?"; it's specifically asking one of the heroes of the Bhagavad Gita if another of the heroes — one of the greatest warriors of the entire saga! — ought to fight and kill.
That's exactly what is being asked, but the original article makes it sound like "Can I, a Hindu, kill for the sake of dharma in this modern age?" and that the AI is telling them "Sure, go and murder people, it's fine!"
It's like Internet atheists taking snippets out of the Old Testament at random and then jeering at modern Christians about "hey, you're supposed to keep slaves and stone women who have been raped, right?"
"how after leaving Africa, modern humans were limited to “Arabia and surrounding regions” for ~30,000 - 50,000 years, racking up various new mutations and becoming adapted to life outside Africa"
Well, yes, that's how long it took Yaqub to perform his experiments. NOI proved right once again.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakub_(Nation_of_Islam))
#2: Horse "breeds" strictly understood, die out: in the UK Exmoor ponies, Clydesdales and Suffolk Punches are "endangered" in that not enough purebreds (both parents in the studbook) are being generated to replace losses, and you get to a stage where the shrinking of the gene pool prohibits further "pure" breeding. On the other hand, people continue to breed horses from the best available stock. If Nisaeans were valued as alleged, then absent a sustained and successful genocide against them, thier genes necessarily survive somewhere in the world.
The thing that is linked specifically mentions that examples still exist in the region, they just don't blab about them to outsiders much.
Yes, I did read the link. The guy claims examples still exist just from eyeballing them, which isn't strong evidence but then doesn't have to be - if there were horses there then and there are horses there now, the most parsimonious explanation for the horses there now is not that the previous lot were entirely wiped out and replaced from elsewhere. So the theory is probably true, but not terribly interesting.
The modern pharaoh hound dog looks like the one in the ancient Egypt pictures, but is likely instead a 19th Century development in Malta. In any case, pharaoh hounds are extremely fast.
#11 Success Sequence - *just based on what you cite and write*:
Via the word "follow", the sentence "97% of Millennials who follow what has been called the “success sequence”—that is, who get at least a high school degree, work, and then marry before having any children, in that order—are not poor by the time they reach their prime young adult years (ages 28-34)." suggests that this is a recipe that people could follow, like a treatment applied to a group. However, whether people follow this traditional recipe is highly endogenous: People who "follow" this recipe are specific people, with specific personalities. They know their own situation and their personality and make decisions based on that. They first finish high school because it makes sense for them, they can endure sitting in a school, their mind has not been destroyed by bullying. They then are stable enough to find a good job (relative to what they expect of life etc). They marry because they have a person to marry and think they can afford it etc. They first marry because this usually indicates that they plan to have children, as opposed to e.g. a woman who gets pregnant without intending to before marrying - which usually conflicts with life plans. (If your life develops as planned, that should usually reduce your likelihood of becoming poor.)
On top of this, we then seem to have the sample selection bias in the data that Bruenig seems to point to. Both effects are “if you’re young, healthy, abled, married, don’t have to support anyone else, and have a full-time job, you’re probably not poor”.
"Controlling for a range of background factors" does not change that. That "the order of marriage and parenthood in Millennials’ lives is significantly associated with their financial well-being in the prime of young adulthood" is still just correlation. The sentences "marrying before children more than doubles young adults’ odds of being in the middle or top income. Meanwhile, putting marriage first reduces the odds of young adults being in poverty by 60% (vs. having a baby first)." should not be understood as describing treatment effects, they just summarize descriptive statistics.
I agree about the endogeneity and consequent insufficiency of controlling for background. On the other hand, there are obvious causal mechanisms here. Employers prefer high school graduates to drop-outs. People who have jobs make more money than people who don't. And households with two working adults make more money than households with one working adult. Even if only one parent works, that's free child care, which puts you in a much better financial situation than one parent who has to pay for child care.
Sure, it's often a good idea to follow the sequence - that's why many people do it. But if people for whom it doesn't work try to apply it based on the "evidence", then we can probably just apply the Lucas Critique.
"people for whom it doesn't work"
Well, here is where the rubber hits the road: who are those people?
Because if we're going all White Saviour about "maybe it’s just your cultural bias that makes you care about this" and how we can't possibly expect little Jamal to make anything of himself, then we're being racist bastards even if we think we're being compassionately inclusive or whatever.
Even if Jamal is the third generation of kids raised by single parents in poverty with dead-beat dads, it's still damn good advice. Even if Jamal is made cynical by "who the fuck gets married round here, any stud can have six baby-mommas", it's still good advice.
It's much more corrosively harmful to pat Jamal on the head about how we don't expect anything from you, poor little inner-city boy, you just can't help the systemic racism keeping you down and naturally you will end up in crime and casual relationships like all around you. You're a victim with no agency, just a puppet of societal and environmental forces. Don't even try, you're fore-doomed to failure.
Maybe Jamal gets married and it ends up in divorce two years later. That is still better, as an attempt, than not even bothering and just sleeping with whatever girl will let him into her bed and if she gets pregnant, not his problem, up to her to get an abortion and if she doesn't, well, that's what social welfare is for.
""people for whom it doesn't work"
Well, here is where the rubber hits the road: who are those people?"
For example, a man who just finished high school and for whatever reasons doesn't find an adequate job, an 18-year old woman that got pregnant by accident, a man who is just terrified of the thought of founding a family because he is somehow convinced he cannot take care of kids and stay with his wife, whatever.
I don't doubt that following the pattern can be a good rule-of-thumb. The problem is methodological. What you see in a sample is "not being poor" and "having followed the sequence up the moment where you are observed" are correlated. That is not the same as showing causality.
The way I would put it is the following.
HS is easy enough probably 80-90% (maybe more) of the population can graduate with even the slightest of effort. If you stipulate reasonable effort you can probably get that to 95%. So what we are asking for step 1 is just for someone to try (yes there are maybe 5% beyond help).
In terms of step 2 "get a job", that is achievable to anyone who isn't severely disabled and puts some effort in. So once again just try. A motivated person can find a job in a week if they are realistic.
As for "don't have kids before you marry", that is the tough one, though again not too hard to actually achieve if you are serious about it.
Now there are a lot of ancillary reasons you might fail at any of those, but they are for almost anyone, completely under your control.
So little Jimmy who is 25 doing a 18 month stint for beating someone in a bar fight, has two kids with different women... well Jimmy isn't just some down on his luck hardscrabble striver who society oppressed.
Jimmy has likely thousands, tens of thousands of times in his life to that point chosen to not try. Chosen to not attend school, chosen to ignore his reading book, chosen to not look for a job and instead play videogames and smoke pot on dozens of separate occasions this month, chosen to lie to his hookup about whether he brought condoms, etc. etc.
It is about reflecting on the idea that while yes society/culture and institutions do lay out an obstacle course for everyone, and there are barriers and struggles and injustices, the obstacle course is both negotiable, and honestly not even that hard. And while navigating the obstacle course, worrying about the justice of it all and making excuses, is a lot less productive than just getting through the damn thing.
My wife and I both grew up poor. I made A LOT of bad decisions until I was in my teens-mid-20s. Did this present obstacles, sure? But I didn't get married until I was 28 and had a stable income, and then didn't have kids until we were married for another 4 years and had saved a lot of money. Which was good because day-care was crazy expensive and my wife didn't want to stay at home.
It is not rocket science. Not everyone who is born poor can grow up to have the apartment from Friends, but they can achieve a middle class lifestyle easily. There is a well worn path.
And while that path might not work anymore of literally everyone did it, so many people don't try that it isn't hard to beat them.
Now when you get higher up the ladder this is less the case. A lot more is needed from the middle class person looking to improve their station than the poor person. Just zombieying through an Art History BA isn't going to do it. Which is why you have so many pissed off college graduates mad they are stuck in the middle wrung of society when they felt they were promised the education and career they wanted and the big house with the white picket fence without thought to whether they were above average or whether their desired career/course of study was in demand.
It's a lot harder to get "any job" than you think. The local grocery stores presumably took one look at my degree and decided that I was overqualified...
That happens, but a smart person might just lie about their credentials.
IDK, I have personally never met someone in the US who I thought would fail to find a job basically immediately if you gave them a serious ultimatum. It isn't hard, in most metros there are literally thousand of jobs openings at all times, even in the heart of the recession.
But people don't want to touch food, or do manual labor, or can't see themselves stocking shelves, or whatever. Known way way too many people who were on 6 months of unemployment, spent 5 months not seeing anything that looked very promising, and then magically in that final month they suddenly have tons of interviews and options (because they actually started filling out applications and compromising a bit?).
How many applications a week do you think the average person on unemployment completes? I would be SHOCKED if it was over 3. I would be shocked if the "mode" and "median" wasn't 0.
I used to volunteer at a place that fed homeless people, plus anyone else who wanted to show up. I'd guess maybe a quarter couldn't get a job at all, and another quarter would only be suitable for handing out free newspapers. And I don't know about the rest; looks can be deceiving.
But people don't want to touch food, or do manual labor, or can't see themselves stocking shelves, or whatever
Marty babes, round these parts there are large chain grocery stores that don't want people who are 'too educated' because they're afraid they will stick up for their rights. Disabuse yourself of the idea of union organisers coming in and stirring up trouble, they mean 'someone who knows it's not legal to make them work unpaid overtime'.
There really are exploitative employers out there (the hospitality industry is a doozy) who want docile, scared workers ignorant of their rights and too unsure of themselves to protest how they're being treated. "You can just quit and get another job stocking shelves" isn't great advice when the other supermarket engages in the same practices.
Back in the late 80s in Ireland, when we were in the depths of really bad unemployment, I had a further education qualification (nothing like even a basic bachelor's degree) and went for a job in a local pharmaceutical company and was flat-out told by the guy doing recruitment, before I even got to interview, that they wouldn't hire me - I was 'too educated' which meant I would 'cause trouble'.
The job I was going for was on the floor working on the production packing line, so this wasn't me being "don't want to do manual labour". They meant "you can't be bullied into doing what we want by us calling you ignorant and uneducated, you can find out what employment law says and we can't harass you into working unpaid and extra hours in unsafe conditions".
I feel like the whole thing is a massive tangled causal mess.
Usually when A ("sensible behaviour") is correlated with B ("non-poverty"), you can at least speculate on whether A causes B, B causes A, or both are caused by some other factor C. In this case it seems clear to me that it's all of the above -- A is caused by B, B is caused by A, and both are caused by factors C, D, E, F and G (things like "low impulsivity" and "social class"). And then factors C, D, E etc are themselves partially caused by A and B, so you've just got one big causal mess.
I guess the really important question then is whether the "success sequence" can actually still be considered good life advice for those who might be at risk of winding up in poverty. I'm thinking that it probably still is, but that anyone who is smart enough to finish high school and sensible enough to take some good basic life advice is probably not going to have trouble avoiding poverty anyway.
"anyone who is smart enough to finish high school and sensible enough to take some good basic life advice is probably not going to have trouble avoiding poverty anyway"
There's two ways of ending up in poverty; for the person above, they might lose their job or get very sick/be in a severe accident or some other misfortune might befall them. If you're a working-class person in a manual trade or job and you become unable to work, you may have problems.
But that's the unforeseeable hardships of life. The Success Sequence is talking about the other way to end up in poverty: make bad choices and decisions, and continue making those.
That's where the good advice comes in: get to kids early enough and try and steer them down the path. Maybe little Johnny isn't going to go to college because he's not smart enough, but that doesn't mean going to the other extreme, throwing our hands up, and accepting that Johnny will just end up jobless and a petty criminal. This sort of advice is very necessary for kids in the environments where there's a lot of hopelessness and resignation around; where the likelihood is dropping out of school, getting pregnant before marriage, etc.
It's so old-fashioned as to have come straight off the Ark, but the advice remains the same: try and stay in school and complete your education; try to get a job, any kind of job; don't get pregnant before marriage; don't cohabit with your boyfriend (or a bunch of serial monogamy boyfriends) before marriage; for both sexes, get married and settle down and then have a family.
You[re never going to be rich and you're going to have struggles in life, but a two-parent family where at least one parent is working and they're not involved in drugs and/or crime is much more stable for everyone, parents and children.
Whats the rationale against opposing cohabitation? It saves money on rent and allows you to better check compatibility without the finality of marriage. You don't even necessarily have to be having sex, I cohabited abstinencly the first six months with my now wife.
Agreed, every couple that I know had cohabited before marriage, and most of them have been married for like 20 years. Oh, and they had premarital sex too, even before all that cohabitation ! *clutches pearls*
How many of them had kids while cohabiting and before marriage? How many of them had several kids? By different partners to those whom they ended up marrying?
The 'smart' ones will do okay because they'll figure out, and will have the examples and influence in their lives, of the people who got an education, got a job, got married, avoided the poverty trap.
The more vulnerable will be more at risk. There's enough ambient culture around 'do what you want', 'they only want to stop you having fun', 'pearl-clutching around sex' that they're not hearing the message about responsibility and prudence. They're the ones who need it.
I believe multiple studies have shown that premarital cohabitation correlates strongly with higher divorce rates thereafter. IIRC, this includes controlling for normal socioeconomic factors. I don't know that it's proven causal, that would be a tough set of evidence given how entangled it is with cultural attitudes towards relationships, sex, and marriage.
The obvious confounder is that no-premarital-cohabitation correlates with religiosity, which correlates (ceteris paribus) with lower-likelihood-of-divorce
You're the exception. Most people who cohabit don't abstain from sex, and often don't end up getting married:
2019 report
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/11/06/marriage-and-cohabitation-in-the-u-s/
"The survey also examines how adults who are married and those who are living with an unmarried partner are experiencing their relationships. It finds that married adults are more satisfied with their relationship and more trusting of their partners than those who are cohabiting.
...The share of adults in the U.S. who are presently married remains far higher than the share cohabiting. However, an examination of their lifetime experiences, which captures past relationships as well as present ones, tells a different story: Among people ages 18 to 44, a larger share have cohabited at some point than have been married (59% vs. 50%). Moreover, marriage and cohabitation are intertwined, as a plurality of adults (35%) have experienced both of these types of relationships.
Cohabitation today takes on many different forms. The majority of people who have ever cohabited have had only one cohabiting partner, but a significant share (14%) have had a total of three or more. Just over half of cohabiters are raising children, including about a third who are living with a child they share with their partner. The nature of cohabiting relationships varies significantly by race, ethnicity and educational attainment."
We're talking about the people for whom the "Success Sequence" is not obvious and something that they're 'smart enough' to figure out for themselves. The people most at risk are the kids of right now, where the girls may end up on the path of "never had a husband, had a string of boyfriends some of whom lived with her, may or may not have kids, kids may or may not have the same father" because if they're not married by a certain time - and yes, that includes during a cohabitation - then they'll never be married. And the boys who may drift into "no place of my own, so I bounce between living with my parent(s) and whatever girlfriend of the day I have, moving in to the house/apartment which is in her name on the lease because she's the social housing tenant; she may or may not already have kids, I may or may not already have kids; we're not getting married and I'm not getting married to any of them".
"Majorities of married and cohabiting adults express at least a fair amount of trust in their spouse or partner to be faithful to them, act in their best interest, always tell them the truth and handle money responsibly, but by double digits, married adults are more likely than those who are cohabiting to express a great deal of trust in their spouse or partner in each of these areas.
Married adults also express higher levels of satisfaction with their relationship. About six-in-ten married adults (58%) say things are going very well in their marriage; 41% of cohabiters say the same about their relationship with their partner.
When asked about specific aspects of their relationship, larger shares of married than cohabiting adults say they are very satisfied with the way household chores are divided between them and their spouse or partner, how well their spouse or partner balances work and personal life, how well they and their spouse or partner communicate, and their spouse’s or partner’s approach to parenting (among those with children younger than 18 in the household). When it comes to their sex life, however, similar shares of married and cohabiting adults say they are very satisfied.
Married adults are also more likely than cohabiters to say they feel closer to their spouse or partner than to any other adult. About eight-in-ten married adults (78%) say they feel closer to their spouse than to any other adult in their life; a narrower majority of cohabiters (55%) say the same about their partner.
Even after controlling for demographic differences between married and cohabiting adults (such as gender, age, race, religion and educational attainment), married adults express higher levels of satisfaction, trust and closeness than those who are living with a partner.
The reasons why people get married and the reasons they move in with a partner differ in some key ways
Most married and cohabiting adults cite love and companionship as major reasons why they decided to get married or move in with a partner. But about four-in-ten cohabiters also say finances and convenience were important factors in their decision: 38% say moving in with their partner made sense financially and 37% say it was convenient. In comparison, just 13% of married adults cite finances and 10% cite convenience as major reasons why they decided to get married.
About six-in-ten married adults (63%) say making a formal commitment was a major factor in their decision to get married. This is particularly the case among those who did not live with their spouse before getting married.
Among cohabiters, about a quarter (23%) say wanting to test their relationship was a major reason why they decided to move in with their partner.There is substantial variation in marriage rates by race and ethnicity. While 57% of white adults and 63% of Asian adults are married, fewer than half of Hispanic (48%) and black adults (33%) are. Since 1995, marriage rates have declined among white, black and Hispanic adults, but for Asian adults they have stayed roughly constant. Cohabitation rates are more consistent across racial and ethnic groups – 8% of whites and Hispanics and 7% of blacks are cohabiting, as are 3% of Asians. Cohabitation has risen more among white, black and Hispanic adults in recent decades than it has for Asian adults."
It's all part of the entire net of reasons: it's not cohabitation on its own, single parenthood on its own, and so on. But for the more vulnerable, missing one step on the path may lead to missing others, and the end result is that they're not in the same boat as "I graduated college, have a good job, and am living with my long-term partner and we may get married and have kids some day, why are you so anti-sex?" responses on here.
So, I hope you don't mind me asking you as the resident knowledgeable and talkative Catholic of the comment section, but is there a specific prohibition on cohabiting before marriage? I am friends with a Catholic couple who bought a house together a couple of months before their wedding day, and was quite surprised that he didn't move in until after they were married - I know there's a prohibition on pre-marital sex, but I would have assumed he'd simply sleep in a different bedroom until after the wedding, their house has multiple bedrooms.
>don't cohabit with your boyfriend (or a bunch of serial monogamy boyfriends) before marriage
Why on earth not?
Because the social housing files that I was working on updating in my job were chock-full of "had a string of serial boyfriends, had a set of kids with different surnames, never got a job or anything more than low-paid, temporary work, dropped out of school early or had very bad results if graduated high school, never married and not likely to be, kids are already heading down the same path".
It's almost like - but no. I must simply be pearl-clutching about people having fun enjoyable sex!
Were they also chock full of "had a middle name," "drank milk," or "played video games"? We may really be on to something here.
It's definitely good advice. Whether going into college or the workforce, getting a high school diploma, or at least GED, is all but required. Not having babies as single parents is incredibly important for staying out of poverty. This goes beyond statistics, but to the obvious causal mechanism of more adults per child taking care of bills or running a household. And having, and keeping, a job is obviously causal on poverty rates. Statistically, I'm less certain we can prove the marriage part. Scott notes that upper class people tend to marry, and that appears to be true. We may be noticing the correlation and getting the causation backwards. But the 97% of people following this sequence are not all rich, or even middle class. Something about marriage, or the people who marry, is still making a difference here.
This message isn't really for the people who are incredibly likely to be successful regardless. It's also not really for the people who are very likely to fail no matter what (though it can be helpful if they listen). It's for the people who are on the margins and have more a of a choice. At age 15, knowing that dropping out of school or knocking up your girlfriend is going to have a negative effect on your whole like, might just be enough to get someone to not do those things.
I agree that the items are good advice but it's dangerous to moralise on them too much - at best this sequence is restricted to healthy working-age adults, and that means it's not talking at all about a large fraction of the population, many of whom are in poverty - disabled people especially are very likely to be poor, both because of dramatically decreased ability to work and because of dramatically higher medical expenses, both usually through no fault of their own.
On the other hand, if we're going to talk about racial/class/environmental effects, then in effect we're writing off people: "yeah, no point in *you* trying to stay in school or wanting to get married before you have kids, you're not white/rich/abled enough".
If we set low expectations, then those become self-fulfilling prophecies.
"not poor" is a pretty weird statement.
Does a college grad with a negative net worth (potentially forver) due to outstanding college loans - but with a "good" job - qualify as "not poor"?
I put "good" in quotes because this also is vague. A young lawyer with $300K in debts, making $100K/year but living in New York city is going to be net negative worth for likely 10 years or more. Is this person "not poor"?
Poverty has a legal definition by the federal government, true.
"Not poor" is a very bad categorization, however, if it simply means not falling under the poverty income line.
Yes, the lawyer is not in poverty - but this lawyer at least potentially can get out of the debt. What about the far more common liberal arts graduate with $40K or more in debt? It is high probability that this person winds up with Social Security getting garnished to pay said student debt. AFAIK - 20% of outstanding student loan borrowers are age 50 or higher meaning the number of people I note above is a non-trivial number, and getting Social Security checks garnished to pay for student debt seems very much like an example of being poor.
$40k for undergrad puts you probably around the 80th or 90th percentile in terms of debt load. And that still only costs about $5k per year to service. Liberal arts majors are not so unemployable that being unable to make $400 monthly payments on student loan debt is the norm. Plus there are income-driven repayment plans.
I don't have the stats on this, but student loan borrowers over 50 are, AFAIK, mostly parents who took out PLUS loans and non-traditional students who took out loans later in life, not people who've failed to pay off their undergrad loans for 30 years.
I looked into the Social Security garnishments for student loan issue more closely:
https://www.bankrate.com/loans/student-loans/older-americans-student-loan-debt/
This says 9 million Americans age 50 or higher with student loan debt. The article supports your statement that some of these are parents taking out loans on behalf of their kids, but isn't clear the distribution between self debt and kid debt.
However, I did find this:
https://www.aarp.org/money/credit-loans-debt/info-2021/student-debt-crisis-for-older-americans.html
" Of the $1.6 trillion in total student debt at the end of 2020, borrowers 50 and older owed about 22 percent of that amount, or $336.1 billion — more than a five-fold increase from 2004.
...
In 1989, 3.1 percent of families headed by someone age 50-plus carried student loan debt, owing an average of $10,073. By 2016, 9.6 percent of families headed by someone age 50-plus carried student loan debt, with the average amount owed more than tripling to $33,053.
...
In fiscal year 2015 alone, almost 114,000 borrowers age 50 and older had Social Security benefits seized to repay defaulted federal student loans, according to a 2016 Government Accountability Office report. Half of those were receiving Social Security disability payments."
So: your assertion that $40K is unusually large is likely inaccurate given that the average debt owed is $33K as of 2016. It is extremely unlikely the average amount owed has declined in the ensuing 7 years.
Secondly - 114K Social Security garnishments as of 2015 - 8 years ago - is a pretty large number. Of course, half are disability so "only" 57000 seniors are getting their Social Security benefits garnished. But this is only 0.63% of the over 50 loans so all good right?
Of course, the problem is that the over-50 of today are people who did not have to pay the ginormous burden of college costs when they went to college in the 1980s or earlier. People who are over-50 today also directly benefited from the massive asset inflation of the past generation. Neither of these facts is likely to hold true for the student of 2023.
So I would have to say that it is a very good question whether "very poor" outcomes due to student loan debt is really as relatively rare (but still significant) as the data shows.
It will be interesting.
Some quick Googling directly on the question of average or median student loan debt shows that the median is between $20,000 and $24,000. *Average* at graduation is slightly higher, just under $26,000.
You're showing the amounts currently owed by those over 50. That number is partly, likely significantly, affected by years of interest not being paid. That would especially be true for individuals holding their own student loan debt for 30+ years. Even being really sloppy with the payments and the math, surely they could have come up with $1,000/year to pay that back?
I was specifically talking about undergrad debt. The $40k average you found includes grad school and professional school debt. Check the College Board's report, "Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid." It says that about 45% of undergrads graduate debt-free, and of the remaining 55% the average debt at graduation is around $30,000, which means that around 70% graduate with less than $30k in debt. This is all for people graduating in the past few years.
A caveat here is that this doesn't include students of for-profit schools, who tend to have somewhat more debt, but not that much more, and they're a small minority of all college graduates.
Also of interest in the same report: Adjusted for inflation, undergrad loan balances and net tuition have been trending downwards since the mid 2010s. Net of grants and discounts, people just don't pay that much for college. The monetary cost is dwarfed by the opportunity cost of being out of the labor force for four years.
Interestingly, default rate is negatively correlated with loan balance. Default rates are sky-high for people with less than $10k debt, but very low for people with more than $40k.
Also a lot of older students with loans are students who have taken multiple economic hardship deferments so they can like take a trip to Thailand with their work buddies, and so the interest keeps piling up.
At the rates some student loans were at, this wasn't even necessarily a bad idea, it can be very cheap debt.
When people talk about student loan debt carriers there is this image of a second generation latina mom who struggled through her degree, got married knocked up and divorced, and now struggles to make all the ends meet. Her debt is a huge burden.
There are 5x more student loans debtors who are Kyle who works in facilities or security at a hospital and has a stable girlfriend with a great job, and a great income to expense ratio, but just would rather take a couple extra trips a year and have a fancier TV/car than pay down his student debt.
since the rich can afford negative income in any one year you would hope that the statistics account for that.
$300k is on the high end even for doctors; lawyers more typically have debt about half that size. A lawyer at a non-Biglaw firm trying to make it in NYC with $300k in student loans is not in good financial shape, but this is a very avoidable situation.
"Don't take out $300k in loans to go to a lower-tier law school and get a job paying $100k in NYC without a heavily rent-controlled* apartment" is an unwritten step of the success sequence.
* This is not an endorsement of rent control, which virtually all economists agree is terrible policy.
I also looked into these numbers and found this:
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/student-loan-debt
Law school debt $130,000
Medical school debt $203,062
Dental school debt $301,583
Pharmacy school loan debt $179,514
Given that these are averages - I would say that your assertion about doctor student loan debt may or may not be accurate: a $203K average would certainly encompass a lot of $300K individual debts unless medical school cost curves are actually very flat.
Your statement on lawyer debt is actually a bit high: $150K vs. $130K average.
As for decisions: I absolutely agree that financially, taking on massive debt isn't a great idea especially if disposable income isn't going to be high even with a job in a big city.
However, the equation isn't so clear:
1) Is lawyer pay in a non-big city such that enough disposable income would be achieved anywhere else?
2) Are the advancement opportunities such that just keeping at it will result in ever increasing income?
3) Are students and their families really all so financially savvy as to understand the inherent risks with taking on massive debt?
I really wonder if the assumptions that have held true in the past, hold true going forward.
If $200k is average, then it's perfectly accurate to say that $300k is on the high end.
"High End" to me means top 5% or less, often even more rarified. Kind of like the difference between those with $10M or more vs. everyone else.
A $200K average could very well mean a 20% cohort of $300K+ or even higher percentages.
Indeed. in fact, those averages were only for students who assumed any debt. According to that same source, 45% of students did not assume any debt at all, so the actual average amount of student debt, would be lower than the stated figures (this is true even though presumably a higher percentage of medical students assume debt than students in other fields).
> Does a college grad with a negative net worth (potentially forver) due to outstanding college loans - but with a "good" job - qualify as "not poor"?
For these purposes, yes, as long as they're living a lifestyle that isn't characterised by deprivation.
So grasshoppers good. Got it.
I find #6 to be very *un*witty. In order to have a reasonable view that 10^9 grains of sand is a heap and 2 grains of sand is not a heap, I don't need to have given careful thought to whether "heap" begins at 10^4 or at 10^6.
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with the sentiment of the original tweet. But it seems fine to believe that for a billion trillion it hardly matters at all, that for 1 it would matter a lot, and that the fewer there are, the more it matters, without caring about any well-defined threshold where the mattering begins.
I agree that asking for a sharp boundary is unreasonable, but I read the question as asking "name at least one low number of stars so that things would matter", not "name the precise greatest number where things begin to matter". (Sounds like you could have answered the first question with "1".)
Speaking for myself, as soon as I imagine that things can matter an a world with 6 stars, it start to seem incredibly silly to me to say that they would matter less if you started adding extra stars to the universe, though admittedly I never agreed with the original tweet in the first place, so I'm a bad example.
Things matter the least when there are zero stars.
I didn’t understand what that was even supposed to be about. Was it about a sorites paradox? I didn’t see much wit.
I took it as gesturing to the innate silliness of asserting "there's a bunch of other stuff out there, so stuff here doesn't matter." Incidentally, I have come to call this the "Rick and Morty fallacy," due to the titular drunk scientist's propensity for asserting nothing matters because the multiverse is really big, or something. I take things to be exactly as big as they are and to matter exactly as much as they do no matter what may or may not exist in addition to them. Admittedly, the existence of extra stuff might alter moral decisions (i.e. if only one person existed you wouldn't sacrifice their life, but you might if a million others existed and sacrificing that one life could save them), however, the utility and worth of the initial subject isn't lessened in its own inherent magnitude, it's just that losses of the same absolute worth become more acceptable as gains of greater worth become possible. Essentially, being dwarfed in relative size in no way diminishes actual size, morally, physically, or otherwise.
The number of stars does not matter for meaning because of the number itself but due to the metaphysical implications following from that number. Billions of stars simply imply that your existence is a "meaningless" quirck of the universe and nothing more. Contrast this vs the view that earth is the center of the universe, and our sun the only one in existence, all hand crafted by God. It's no chance this was the view (and in some ways, still is) of the worlds biggest religions.
An alternative way of looking at "there are billions of stars " from the perspective of a believer, even one who believes that the Earth is special and there is no other life in the universe, is that *God took the trouble of creating an entire universe just so we'd have a place to live, grow, and throw our adolescent rebellion in His face*. Which adds a lot of meaning to that believer's life. So it's a matter of viewpoint, I think.
It's why a lot of atheist "gotchas" fall flat--the differences aren't at the level of "outcomes of a process of reason." They're differences at the level of basic principles, the axioms and predicates upon which and from which reason happens. Most believers don't say "XYZ and therefore God exists", they say "God exists, therefore XYZ implies <something else>." While atheists (in my experience) often start with an implied "God does not exist OR we can ignore the possibility of his existence, therefore XYZ implies <whatever>." They may even end up at the same end point. Just by different chains of logic.
> Billions of stars simply imply that your existence is a "meaningless" quirck of the universe and nothing more.
An analogical argument made 100 000 ago would be: "there are more trees in the forest than there are members of our tribe, therefore human existence is meaningless".
#33 Do you still think that "peak wokeness" is behind us? It sure look like if AI alignment is at all tractable, what corporate cutting-edge stuff is going to be aligned to would look much more like CRT than CEV.
It is so hard to say. on the one hand it seems to be waning and a bit and sometimes these cultural moments mostly come and go.
On the other hand the majority of crazy 15-30 year olds pushing this shit so hard are only going to have more power and influence a decade or two from now, and the 35-65 demographic that is more skeptical of it is only going to age and die.
It really seems like there is a bit of discontinuity around HS grad year 2000-2005 or so. When the kids who were in college after about 2005-2010 are often just completely immersed in this.
It could be one of those things like inflation, where even after it hits its peak and goes down, prices are still going up.
I think it's this. I suspect the rate of new true believers is much lower now, but as existing true believers age they move up the corporate hierarchy and gain in power, in a way that does not require a successor generation (though also the young people are less 'fanatic' because some ideas of "wokeness" are just the new normal, so less fervent passion for it doesn't mean less passive support)
Yeah. We may be into negative acceleration, but I think the velocity is still positive, and our position is nowhere what it used to be.
Lifting out my comment from the name survey:
You ask several questions of this form:
"How would you feel if you had been given an X name, such as Xtopher, Xtherine, Xdysseus, or Xzebel?"
It is impossible to answer a question like this. How would you answer if I asked you "How would you feel if you were given something very life-changing, such as a billion dollars, or cancer?"
Traditional and mythological names are tricky ones. "Helen" is a name from Greek mythology, after all, but I think someone might have a different reaction to being named "Helen" than if named "Clytemnestra" (Helen's half-sister).
I've seen a description of "the Tiffany problem" where a name like Tiffany would be considered much too 'modern' to use in a fictional work about the Middle Ages, but in fact the name would work as it comes from the 12th century and is from the Greek name of the feast of Epiphany, Theophania (the same way children born at Christmas may be named Noel/Noelle or boys born at Easter may be named Pascal).
And because of changes in fashion, etc., one person's old-fashioned traditional family name is another person's revived, modern hip name.
I'd be more convinced that Clytemnestra was a nonstarter if Cassandra hadn't spent 1982-1999 as a top-100 girl's name in the US.
I've never understood why Cassandra would ever be given to someone. Or Medea.
There are clearly a lot of people who don't take those sorts of associations into account when choosing a name. Plus a smaller number engaged in some sort of conscious invocation or reclaiming, but I think a lot of kids' names are chosen on sound alone.
On a somewhat related note, my dad regularly expresses mystification at the name "Dolores". I know and have explained to him that it's an epithet of the Virgin Mary (which he hadn't been aware of). But I admit I'm not sure myself why one would choose that for a baby girl's name given the countless other titles with happier associations referencing that figure's sanctity, love, maternal nature, queenliness, etc.
Is it wrong that I associate the name "Dolores" as being the real name of the character for which "Lolita" was a nickname given to her by a dirty old man?
For me, it's a Seinfeld name now.
In Marlowe's play "The Jew of Malta", he names his main character "Barabas". Totally a normal Jewish name.
Obviously. It's in the best-selling book featuring predominantly Jewish characters!
What's a playwright to do when his audience demands, "give us Barabas"?
CGP Grey investigated the history of the name Tiffany here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LMr5XTgeyI
But this one on the headaches he experienced trying to verify the oldest examples of the name is more entertaining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEV9qoup2mQ
Tiphaine is a French noblewoman character in Arthur Conan Doyle's *The White Company*. Pretty sure the S.M. Stirling character is a hat-tip to ACD, as some of his other Emberverse characters are unambiguous references to that book.
I don't understand this comment; those seem like very easy questions to answer. My best guesses for what my emotions would be under those circumstances are:
1. I would feel shocked and thrilled and incredibly happy and unbelievably relieved. I'd be a bit paranoid about protecting it and not letting it all get lost or stolen. I'd be excited about all the stuff I'd be able to do with that kind of money, and nervous anticipating what sorts of challenges my new life would involve.
2. (assuming it's a cancer with a high risk of cutting my life short) I'd be horrified and distraught. I might be nauseous to the point of vomiting. I'd probably be depressed to the point of being totally nonfunctional for a couple of days. I would dread the upcoming painful and awkward conversations between me and people in my life --- especially people for whom there is mutual love and care, but no mutual understanding. I'd feel grateful that modern medicine would give me more hope than I'd otherwise have, if I'm fact that would be the case. After a couple days my emotions would shift to some kind of resignation, and I'd be able to start prioritizing for whatever comes next.
I'm confused about why you called that impossible. Do you find other hypothetical questions easier? Eg "how would you feel if you had stayed up much laster last night, but woke up at the same time?"
You totally missed the point. You’re answering them as separate, long form answer questions, when the point being made was the absurdity of combining them both into a single, survey-format question.
> those seem like very easy questions to answer
What questions? There's only one question. Answer it.
Which of those X names is the billion dollars?
Overwhelmed, at first, but before long I would realize that I have to continue living day-to-day while formulating a plan to get rid of it, and preparing for some conversations I'd rather not have.
The name survey is mostly going to end up being a test for the social class of ACX readers, rather than general attitudes to names (there aren't going to be a lot of Brody Rockefellers and Tyler Van Burens running around). This means you can compare the questions about 'new' names to the Social Security database to get a sense of your readership's social standing!
"The name survey is mostly going to end up being a test for the social class of ACX readers"
Okay then, let me pose this question to you:
What is the social class of names such as Hanora, Honoria, Hannah?
(I have a reason for asking which I will explain if I get an answer here)
Answered without googling to avoid spoiling the fun, and using the US system:
Hanora - never heard of this name. If it's invented ex nihilo, it'd be lower-class Black in a US context. If it's 'ethnic' then it's unassimilated immigrant if used as a first-name, assimilated middle to upper-middle if used as a middle name.
Honoria - aspirational end of the middle-middle class; doesn't have the Latin, but would like to be the sort of person who does. Wouldn't guess
Hannah - top end of the middle-middle to lower end of the upper-middle, but also possibly upper; it's one of the better slightly old-fashioned names, so it's a good choice if you've got a clue and don't want to get it 'wrong.' It's also not wrong, so it's a possible upper class name, barring the fact it's not especially euphonic, which people like for girl's names. Can also be Jewish at basically any level.
These are names going back three, maybe four, generations in my family.
Hannah is the name of a first cousin, Hanora and Honoria are great-aunt and great-grand-aunt.
Since it's mixed (one side is the paternal side, the other the maternal side), it's a combination of working/lower-middle class for one set of names and middle-middle class for the other. The older names (Honoria) are the more classy in my circumstances 😁
So it really does depend where you come from, what part of the country, and what generation had the name as to "sorting ACX readers by class". What's an aspirational name today might have been a common name four generations ago, but fell out of favour because it sounded so old-fashioned, and is now back in favour because it has that 'high toned' sound to it.
Your social class is best correlated to your grandfather's occupation, so what was that in each of these cases?
My maternal grandfather was a farm labourer/ploughman (he would have been a farmer, but he was Disinherited For Love) 😀
My paternal grandfather split his time between working on building sites in England and, when back home in Ireland for the winter, doing whatever general manual labour he could pick up.
So - a ploughman on one side, a navvy on the other, what does that make me? 😁
OK, that's you - but what about Honoria's, Hannah's, and Hanora's grandfathers? That's what I was asking.
It's fine if you don't know; it just means that we have as much evidence as we did before.
I don't even know any of my great-grandparents' *names*. I suspect that if I lived in an oral/preliterate culture, I would know their names, occupations, and some of their deeds.
> Honoria - aspirational end of the middle-middle class; doesn't have the Latin, but would like to be the sort of person who does.
This is a genuine Latin name. What more could you possibly want from someone who did "know the Latin"?
Something less on the nose - it’s one up from Prudentia.
Re: Sam Kriss' response on the Antman movie, there's two things:
(1) The excerpt he quotes from the Mabinogion:
"And Peredur stood, and compared the blackness of the raven and the whiteness of the snow, and the redness of the blood, to the hair of the lady that best he loved, which was blacker than jet, and to her skin which was whiter than the snow, and to the two red spots upon her cheeks, which were redder than the blood upon the snow appeared to be.
death and desire and the rich strangeness of the world."
That's in a Christianised context, but the trope is a familiar one in Celtic (to use that much-abused term) myths; in (set in pre-Christian era) one of the Three Sorrows of Irish Storytelling, "Deirdre and the Sons of Uisneach", Deirdre sees something similar and wishes for a lover with hair as black as the crow's feathers, skin as white as snow, and cheeks as red as blood:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deirdre
"Deirdre was the daughter of the royal storyteller Fedlimid mac Daill. Before she was born, Cathbad the chief druid at the court of Conchobar mac Nessa, king of Ulster, prophesied that Fedlimid's daughter would grow up to be very beautiful, but that kings and lords would go to war over her, much blood would be shed because of her, and Ulster's three greatest warriors would be forced into exile for her sake.
Hearing this, many urged Fedlimid to kill the baby at birth, but Conchobar, aroused by the description of her future beauty, decided to keep the child for himself. He took Deirdre away from her family and had her brought up in seclusion by Leabharcham, a poet and wise woman, and planned to marry Deirdre when she was old enough. As a young girl, living isolated in the woodlands, Deirdre told Leabharcham one snowy day that she would love a man with the colours she had seen when a raven landed in the snow with its prey: hair the color of the raven, skin as white as snow, and cheeks as red as blood.
Leabharcham told her she was describing Naoise, a handsome young warrior, hunter and singer at Conchobar's court. With the collusion of Leabharcham, Deirdre met Naoise and they fell in love. Accompanied by his brothers Ardan and Ainnle (the other two sons of Uisneach), Naoise and Deirdre fled to Scotland."
Naturally it does not end happily.
(2) " i think it would be very hard to write a version of ant-man and the wasp quantumania that read like this. but if you did, it wouldn’t really be a marvel movie any more."
I think this is incorrect, because (for instance) there are tales of very small, tiny people coming to visit Irish kings and vice versa. Antman and Wasp as heroes/travellers going to the Other World and becoming tiny themselves, and their adventures in this strange place, would be very possible to do. I think what is really being denied here is not the translation of characters and plot, but the themes or motivation or whatever - that you can't write an epic version of Quantumania because its purpose is not to be a hero-tale or epic adventure, but to slot into "extruded product of identifiable origin" in the Marvelverse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc%C3%A1n
"In Irish mythology, Abcán (modern spelling: Abhcán) was the dwarf poet and musician of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the early Celtic divinities of Ireland. He was said to have a bronze boat with a tin sail.
In the story of the death of the goddess Ruad, Abcán is the dwarf that ferries her from the Otherworld to this one so that she can seduce the human, Aed Srónmár. The sounds of mermaids singing, or in some versions, music from a fairy mound cause her to leap into the water and drown.
In another story, Abcán is captured by the hero, Cúchulainn. He frees himself by playing lullabies so irresistible that the warrior goes to sleep.[3]
Abcán has much in common with, and may be another name for, the dwarf musician Fer Í."
I think that Quantumania would be better rendered as the heroes visiting the Faerie or some other such alternate realm (they could still have size-changing powers, of course). The movie makes it pretty clear that there's virtually no interaction between the "Quantum Realm" and ordinary Earth, so it's more analogous to an alternate dimension than a world of small things.
Anyway, here's a question: how much moral ambiguity was contained in classic folk tales ? Quantumania is a Marvel product, yes; but once you strip away all the CGI, it's a story about people's choices and unintended consequences. One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist; a person could be both sympathetic and monstrous at the same time; saving your loved ones could doom a world; and so on. The movie doesn't offer any clear moral prescriptions, but it does explore these issues. Setting aside the question of whether this mode of storytelling is good or bad, are there folktales that are written in a similar pattern ?
> here's a question: how much moral ambiguity was contained in classic folk tales ?
From a modern perspective, loads and loads. It's more of an open question how much moral ambiguity the people of the past saw in their own stories, but I'm pretty sure they had more than we like to have in the modern day.
I have a collection of selected translations from a ninth-century collection of Chinese folk tales. In one of them, a young man is injured somehow and is taken in and nursed back to health by an older man.
The young man is grateful, but he doesn't have the resources to properly pay back the guy who cared for him. So off he goes to work hard and save money so that one day he can reward his savior in proper style.
And he does! It's all very uplifting... except for the fact that the young man's vocation, at which he redoubles his efforts so that he can save up an amount of money that matters, is that he's a highwayman. This would be a tough sell in a modern story.
I dunno. A Hollywood film maybe (though even then!…), but it seems like half of the YA genre these days thinks "assassin" is an obvious career for an only-slightly-edgy, but mostly sympathetic personal.
The name survey is a bit confusing because I disagree with the examples concerning what names are new or primarily from fantasy etc.
For example for me the first name Madison is well established and not particularly unusual but the other examples in that question are unusual. Also Hermione for me is a “standard“ name even though it is rare (it is in Shakespeare and there is a St Hermione) but Arwen isn’t.
To me as an English person, the most surprising thing about the Ashley Madison hoohah was the revelation that that's two girls names. I think I know one Ashley, no madisons, and the standard English reaction is Why does this dating site have a name like a firm of accountants?
The name Madison is pretty well-understood. Look around at the women of the world and you won't meet a single Madison above her late 30s. Why? Because its origin dates to a very specific event, the 1984 movie "Splash." It focuses on a mermaid in a (no pun intended) fish-out-of-water scenario, visiting a modern human city. Someone asks her name, and she looks around and sees a street sign that says "Madison," and chooses this on the spot. This was meant as a joke, because that's a *last* name, and one most famously associated with a man, so it's a wholly inappropriate name for her. But the movie was a big hit and so a lot of new parents started naming their daughters after her.
Similarish thing with Chardonnay in the UK. It was just a grape variety (used in champagne and white burgundy, but also a lot of cheap varietals identified as chardonnay on the bottle) until a TV series called Footballers' Wives in the early 2000s which introduced a character called that as a (rather good) joke. now there's lots of them.
I read wine names for women as stripper names, which is of course 100% bound to a specific time and culture.
I went to school with a girl named Tequila.
My sister knew a girl named Pepsi.
Oh, dear!
A similar thing happened with Tiffany and Breakfast at Tiffany’s although Tiffany was I believe a rare first name before that. But in addition it is kind of an American thing, isn’t it for last names to become given names?
>> it is kind of an American thing, isn’t it for last names to become given names?
I think this is strongly associated with the Southern gentry class to the extent used for males (not necessarily exclusively Southern to the extent associated with old money, but definitely with a very strong regional valence nonetheless).
In modern (post-Splash) times there seems to be a separate phenomenon in which girls are given last names as first names (even explicitly masculine-sounding ones like "McKenzie," where "Mc" literally means "son"). Although while it's much more common as a cross-class occurrence today I think that this too may have older, more pretentious gentry roots based on, e.g., the (female) character of "Jordan Baker" in The Great Gatsby (albeit I believe there's a significant contingent of literature analysts who think she's meant to code as a crypto-lesbian, which would make her otherwise relatively masculine-sounding last-name-as-first name a further implicit nod in that direction.)
Semi-related note: I think "Breaking Bad" is a show where the quality of the acting *dramatically* exceeds the quality of the writing (there's a season 1 scene where a character screws up the imply/infer distinction in a way that reads as "the writers just aren't very good and don't know their stuff" rather than a comment on the character's intelligence.) One prominent example is that having a middle-aged female character who codes as having been born circa the 1970s with the name "Skyler" never really stops feeling like cringe-inducing Millennial ahistorical oversight.
I think the idea was, if some of the child's ancestors had a especially prestigious last name, you could give them that name as a first name. But nowadays it's lost that aspect; a girl named Madison isn't particularly likely to have an ancestor named Mr. Madison.
Like Rooney Mara's first name referring to her Rooney relatives.
I've heard that the "Madison" name comes from a 1980s movie called "Splash", where a mermaid in Manhattan was asked for her name and she read the first thing she saw, which was a street sign for Madison Avenue.
Edit: And that's what I get for reading comments in reverse order. :-)
This is going to sound silly, but I wasn't even aware of the imply/infer distinction because it didn't occur to me people would confuse them.
It is a good thing I don't have a blog or you could check and see if that is true!
And yes Skylar is odd as a name for someone born in the 70s.
>>This is going to sound silly, but I wasn't even aware of the imply/infer distinction because it didn't occur to me people would confuse them.
I don't think it sounds silly at all, I don't get it either, but it's objectively true that some people do make this conflation. I, in turn, judge them for it.
Also politicians who “refute” an allegation when they only denied it. Possibly confusing it with rebut.
That could be deliberate, if you want to imply that the accusation really was refuted.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2010/jul/19/sarah-palin-refudiate-new-word
> Semi-related note: I think "Breaking Bad" is a show where the quality of the acting *dramatically* exceeds the quality of the writing
Sounds right to me. I had the problem, watching Breaking Bad, that a lot of what the characters do seems to be unmotivated.
Nearly all Irish surnames can become first names, that said most were first names thousands of years ago.
>Nearly all Irish surnames can become first names
Like Owen?
If anyone doubts this story you can see the evidence here: https://babynames.com/name/Madison
A similar thing happened with the name Shaquille. Basically no one had that name until 1992. Then Shaq becomes a basketball star and: https://babynames.com/name/Shaquille
Same with Kobe: https://babynames.com/name/Kobe There is even a bit jump after his death.
> This was meant as a joke, because that's a *last* name, and one most famously associated with a man, so it's a wholly inappropriate name for her.
But last names are very common as a source of new male and female first names. You could say the same thing about Miranda.
Ariel similarly shot up in popularity after The Little Mermaid, and went from being a technically-neutral-but-mostly-male name to being mostly female, IIRC
I laughed at that section. We named our kids all good solid traditional saints' names, leaning toward less-commonly-used, but not unheard-of or too weird. Looking back on their names, as a group, they're a bit of a Rorschach test. Depending on your priors, they could easily be interpreted as 1) Our family is (church denomination) (and they'd be correct), 2) totally unhinged SF/Fantasy nerds (partially correct?), or 3) Black (incorrect).
I think the SF/fantasy genres often borrow very old names to add a sense of gravitas to otherwise silly-sounding subjects.
Re: resource curse
It is becoming very clear that the "resource curse" is less to do with endogenous resource rich nation existence as opposed to the international system of economics combined with shenanigans.
The shenanigans is obvious: the example of "prodigious skill in coups" vs. apparent lack of skill with anything else begs the obvious response - this guy didn't plan the coup; some 3 letter agency did.
The international system of economics, however, is pretty well proven. The issue is in the details of international trade - specifically the dollar reserve. If you're a resource rich nation but otherwise poor - you need dollars to buy all the nice things ranging from luxury goods for the elite to roads, airport, dams, houses, sewage, factories, food, energy, durable goods etc etc. Even if you are resource rich in any one thing like energy - you would need an exceptionally large amount of exportable product which in turn requires massive capital investment (again in dollars) to be able to harvest it. All these dollar requirements are the equivalent of interest payments on a foreign currency denominated loan.
Now combine the above with the fact that it has been Western companies and countries that dominate the actual commodity development and trade businesses. What is the possibility that the price of commodities is pushed lower vs. the price of dollars and/or the price of dollar denominated goods? Note the value of the dollar *is* significantly controllable by the US government via interest rates and liquidity issuance.
Combine the 2 - it takes a mightily focused, educated and capable government in order to navigate the minefield of translating an overabundance of resources into national prosperity. China is the obvious example of this - but South Korea, Japan, Germany have done it also. India, Africa and South America overall constitute the negative example.
On the coups thing, the claim isn't that Sani Abacha was involved in *one* successful coup - the claim is that he was personally involved in *every* successful coup, and *none* of the unsuccessful ones. That's stronger evidence that he personally had something to do with the success, rather than just being a front for someone else who made the coup succeed.
It isn't clear to me that an individual higher record of success precludes the possibility or likelihood that there is other involvement.
But yes, maybe he is just a particularly powerful warlord in a perpetually weak state - a modern kingmaker.
A while ago I read a study on what makes for a successful coup and I've been fascinated by Abacha for years. He really does stand out as a very odd example of a "strongman" type. Not much of an ego or a temper, never really gunning for the top spot himself until the last coup when it seemed more like no one else was available and he resigned himself to be the head of state as a last resort. As far as his coup skills are concerned, he really nailed one of the aspects of a successful coup: acting like, and convincing others that the coup was already over and had succeeded, especially within the army. "Coup is over, here is our new regime, please remain calm, nothing to see here, go about your lives". He was fantastic at creating a sense of a fait accompli while to those in the know things are not quite as settled. Being a generally boring guy helped with this a lot. He was also the only general in the Nigerian army to never skip a rank on his rise; he was the only one who came to the top of the army without nepotism or patronage (or at least he was good at creating the impression). As to whether outside intelligence agencies assisted him, I've not read anything stating that they had, but it would be odd if they hadn't. Its likely his skill for facilitating successful coups that would attract them to using him as well as maintaining secrecy.
My running theory on the resource curse is that it's downstream of centralization issues. I remember reading about Nigeria in The Fate of Africa and thinking, "why didn't they just do an Oklahoma-style land rush?" Certainly, land reform worked pretty well for South Korea. Instead, what seems to happen with a lot of these IMF-advised poor countries is that the government controls all the natural resources, negotiates all the deals, spends all the money, and then ends up having wasted their bounty.
It isn't clear that South Korea is a good example. I don't know anything about the land rush you speak of - but South Korea has a number of very unusual circumstances starting with the fact that the vast majority of that nation was literally farmland when the Korean War ended. South Korea also had a "recapitalization" just before 2000 - the Asian debt crisis.
But what you say about IMF advice is related but not the same as what I reference.
An example of IMF advice is austerity as a condition for more dollar loans; the debt burden of existing loans already being too obviously too high. This has provably created a doom loop for economies.
However, this is not the only impact. The Argentina and Brazil hyperinflation crises are another example: on top of IMF machinations, one of the other outcomes was super high interest rate (30%, 40% or more) dollar denominated Argentinian and Brazilian bonds issued by the respective governments. As it turns out, the vast majority of the actual buyers of these bonds were not foreigners, but Argentinians and Brazilians, respectively. And not regular Argentinians and Brazilians, but the very richest because that class also had a direct hand in whether these bonds would default or not. Foreign buyers stayed away because any such bond has an obvious default risk but "insiders" could be sure of this not happening.
Equally, the "how" and "what" of spent money matters. China has redirected a substantial portion of its earnings into R & D, infrastructure building and so forth. It seems pretty clear that this behavior was not executed by others.
Lastly, what I referenced was a structural issue with trade. If a handful of companies act as an oligopoly over commodities - they have the ability to push prices lower worldwide by leveraging their reach to push all suppliers to the lowest price possible. So it doesn't require a nefarious Western plot to accomplish dollar income minimization for commodity exports - just the usual market economics resulting from an oligopoly. Of course, how that oligopoly forms...
I only vaguely recall the details, but I thought China's great success began with a bottom up economic revolution, driven by farmers proactively splitting up state farms among themselves.
Yeah that's discussed in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works
Ah, there you go. I'd forgotten where my thoughts on this originated.
No, not the least bit true.
China's great success began with their willingness to allow some forms of capitalism within the Chinese economy, which resulted in China opening up to the outside, which multinational - largely US - companies then took advantage of by offshoring their production to China - not just US production but factories that used to be in the 4 Asian Tigers: Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore.
People seemed to have forgotten that the offshoring waves - China is only the latest (last). Japan started it with its auto exports to the US starting in the late 1960s (1950s overall).
The Four Asian Tigers focused more on other types of manufacturing along with TV and computer exports competing with Japan, again in the 1970s or a bit earlier.
China has eaten the lunch of pretty much all 5 of the above outside a few very specific areas, but has expanded beyond into all manner of up and down scale industry ranging from chemicals to solar panels.
I mean, I think it's at least a little bit true:
"Deng responded by decollectivizing agriculture and emphasizing the household-responsibility system, which divided the land of the People's communes into private plots. Under the new policy, peasants were able to exercise formal control of their land as long as they sold a contracted portion of their crops to the government.[33] This move increased agricultural production by 25 percent between 1975 and 1985, setting a precedent for privatizing other parts of the economy.[33] The bottom-up approach of the reforms promoted by Deng, in contrast to the top-down approach of the Perestroika in the Soviet Union, is considered an important factor contributing to the success of China's economic transition."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform
The policy did exist but China's farming was not and has never been the engine for their growth.
China's GDP in 1984 was 6% of the US'; I suspect the relative ratio was largely unchanged as compared to 1975 whereas China's economic miracle of the past generation was from the mid 1980s onward.
I visited China as a teen in the early 1980s; the differences between that snapshot (in the form of a 30 day, multi region tour) vs. the various trips I took there from 1990 until 2006 were astonishing - and no doubt has accelerated more since then.
To the extent that the resource curse is even a real thing, I'm not convinced that Nigeria is a great example of it. It's poor but it's no worse off than neighbouring similar coastal countries without oil.
Some GDP per capita numbers:
Nigeria: $2280
Ghana: $2204
Cameroon: $1669
Benin: $1390
Togo: $990
Oil certainly hasn't made Nigeria rich but it doesn't seem to have made it a lot poorer either. Besides, there's not even that much oil for the number of people; Nigerian oil production comes out to about two barrels per capita per year, or about $150 worth. (By comparison, the US and Russia produce about 20 barrels/head/year, Saudi Arabia and Norway over one hundred barrels, and Kuwait about 250 barrels).
$150 worth of extra GDP per person, every year, would seem to be a very big deal as it is 6.8% of Ghana's GDP per capita.
Resource curse doesn't automatically mean dirt poor and starving - it does mean that the nation in question fails to develop as much as others even having the benefit of extra income from said resources.
A look at the numbers:
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NGA/nigeria/gdp-growth-rate
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NGA/nigeria/gdp-growth-rate
Nigeria GDP in 1960 was 4.2 billion; Ghana's GDP in 1960 was 1.22 billion but the populations were 45.14 million vs. 6.64 million - or in other words, Ghana GDP per capita was $184 in 1960 vs. Nigeria's $93.
Ghana being near Nigeria is at least partly because Ghana started at almost twice the GDP vs. Nigeria in 1960.
So resources good, no curse right? Well, except if we take the 2 barrels per person = $6 = 6.5% of per capita GDP in 1960 or $141/6.2% in 2021...where did all that extra value go to? Nigeria's overall growth from 1960 to its peak in 2014 was about 9.5% as compared to Ghana's 7% CAGR.
The 6%+ oil add compares to actual growth rate difference of 2.5% - is that a gap?
Seems so to me since this is straight house money flowing into Nigeria.
Of course, there are certainly other factors like Nigeria growing population faster than Ghana but it isn't clear to me if the effect is net positive or negative; GDP certainly grows faster but more heads = lower average per capita. But either way, the population growth differences are nowhere in the 3%+ per year range so that seems unlikely a major factor.
That is still not so much "resource curse" as "resources not nearly as much of a blessing as it naively seems like they ought to be"
Depends on your point of view.
Among other things - Nigeria is not the poster child for resource curse.
If you go to Matt Lakeman's site and travel back one post, you'll find "Notes on Saudi Arabia", where he talks about how that particular country avoided the resource curse. The short version of his theory, as I understand it, is that there's a line to walk between kicking out all the "Westerners" too quickly, and letting them strip-mine your country to the bone. Saudi Arabia had a few good kings at the right moments, with enough power and vision to navigate this. As a result, he describes Saudi Aramco as "apparently a highly efficient and well-managed corporation" which effectively supports the entire rest of the inefficient Saudi Arabian economy.
He contrasts this with, for example, China, which gained wealth through creating an industrial economy.
To me the shenanigans are those of the British. Consider a counterfactual region with three states, Al-Hausa, Yorubia, and Igbostan.
From Matt's description-which, of course, might well be mistaken--the Igbos would have developed very rapidly, and after a short delay they would have started investing in their neighbours in order to develop supplies of foods and raw materials, and to stop annoying border raids and transmission of illnesses. Corruption would be less of a problem because a major incentive, "enrich your ethnic in-group", would be eliminated.
It seems to me that partition in Nigeria would have worked to the advantage of the locals much better than it did in India, and that's why the British set things up so that it was infeasible.
I think the French are much more the colonial power in West Africa.
As for your example: it leaves out whether there is anything of interest to a colonial power. What the British did in India was not any one thing at any given time - it was a series of economic actions which consistently benefited the British economy in some way vs. India's. Let's not forget that the original East India economic activity was the spice trade. From there, it morphed to tea (to displace Chinese imports of same), raw cotton milled in the UK then sold back as cloth, the salt tax, and so forth. In every case, the bulk of the wealth generated by this economic activity wound up in the British hands instead of Indian ones.
Your example presumes open access to capital (to buy the technology and machinery to develop), equitable economic benefit from exports vs. pricing of imports (to generate capital surpluses) and a general lack of colonial meddling for economic, religious and/or nationalist/imperialist reasons which was very much not the case worldwide.
#30 is impressive as a demonstration of how many ingroup-signals and shibboleths you can cram into a small space, but it's not that great as a story.
That was my impression as well - it's like a good capstone to a class on Chesterton's fence, where you get to feel happy about how much you've learned.
I liked it.
After watching the hand illusion for about 40 seconds, it stopped working for me. This was even shorter for the girl doing it and things were corrected by the 2nd playthrough. It seems to be caused by the brain mixing up which fingers belong to which hand and if you can keep track of the fingers it stops working. I wonder if part of the illusion is the low quality of the video, which probably blurs the lines separating the fingers.
#4: it's because humans are bad at processing exactly where/which/how many fingers... just like AI image generators.
> women ... are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring)
This isn't particularly new news. I first recall hearing back in 2008-ish — and IIRC it wasn't described as a particularly new finding back then — that studies had shown that when names and face-to-face interviewing were eliminated from the hiring process, that the rate of women getting hired went *down,* strongly suggesting that a positive discrimination bias existed in favor of hiring more women.
Several years back, there was a lot of buzz around gender- and race-blinded interviewing for tech jobs. As far as I can tell, it never really went anywhere. It's possible that people just didn't like not being able to see each other, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it was tested, found to slightly reduce hiring of women and underrepresented minorites, and quietly abandoned.
Yeah this has happened in classical music of all places. Where there was a big big push for blinded auditory only auditions in the service of diversity.
Except then everyone is Asian/Jewish, and not enough 1st chair people are women...so neverminded blind auditions are horrible you monsters!
All the more funny as it is same people both instituting them and then 10 years later denouncing them.
Huh. I knew about the push to blinded auditions in symphonies, and that it did end up with a more "diverse" hiring profile.
I *hadn't* heard that it was the wrong kind of diversity, and that blinded auditions were dropped! That's a shame.
Both things are true. When it was first implemented it increased the number of women and minorities. However, it didn't increase them enough so progressives pivoted away from arguing for blind auditions toward explicit preferences for women/minorities/etc both in hiring and promotion.
Do you have a place I can read about orchestras stopping doing this? I was under the impression that it became standard practice and is now dominant, but perhaps I'm wrong.
Well my main source is a friend who is a world class French Horn player, but I remember having read multiple things on it in past several years.
For example the NYT seems to have an article attacking blind auditions in 2020, a quick search turns up dozens of other similar articles, including some with examples of blind auditions being eliminated/scaled back/changed to ad affirmative action (not really blind anymore).
For instance there is this from 2 years ago.
https://americanorchestras.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Rethinking-Blind-Auditions.pdf
I didn't read the whole thing, but I didn't find any discussion of that being a common practice, the way that it had sounded like you suggested it was.
Look I didn't do a survey of all orchestras in the country. Sorry. I consume media like you, and talk to IRL human people like you.
If you are so interested in this topic, maybe start a study.
I was reporting what I understand the state to be, and as I google it looks like I am mostly right. I looked in my local paper and saw an article from 2016...saying they are moving away from blind auditions because they don't do enough for blacks and latinos and women.
I see numerous podcasts discussing it. I don't know. Explore! My understanding is that blind auditions are under siege. I commented as such, and you challenged me for info and when I look evidence they are is quite easy to find.
Do you have some insight you want to share? Are you in an orchestra?
> All the more funny as it is same people both instituting them and then 10 years later denouncing them.
Yeah, those "same people" do that with a whooooooooole lot of different subjects. (And, as Scott pointed out in the article, never ever apologize when their first take turns out to be wrong in some way.) It's a pretty common pattern, and it's been around long enough that Orwell was lampooning it almost 75 years ago. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia!
The few times in my life I was in a hiring position I fully succumbed to that bias.
Scott, your tendency to forego rationalist analysis because you want to reinforce your belief that ‘feminism has gone too far’ is just transparently annoying at this point. Why doesn’t listening to subjective experience matter for bias and harassment, but it does for drug effect sizes? Also, the paper you link to about bias starts analysis by seeing if men and women with the same CV face bias - isn’t it possible women have more barriers to reaching that same CV? Here’s a more detailed critique: https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/letters/2023/05/13/misleading-portrayal-womens-equality-science
"listening to subjective experience" is transparently annoying. It's a nice way of saying we should listen to people complain about the world being uniquely unfair to them when there's no evidence of such.
Affirmative action stoked all this outrage and bred the resentment as it does everywhere it's implemented.
Scott's last post literally recommends listening to subjective experience for drug effects, ignoring small effect sizes in statistical studies. I want a good reason why that should be true in that case, but not here.
I suppose one answer would be that therapy patients have no incentive to lie about a drug that isn't helping them, but there's a lot of incentive to lie about being discriminated against.
This, and also the fact that it's often quite difficult to objectively measure a lot of bodily functions. For example, "does this drug reduce the amount of pain you're feeling?" is a question that's very easy to answer through subjective experience, and quite difficult by any other means.
When good-quality objective criteria exist, they virtually always return superior results, but they don't always exist.
One is about what people do to their own bodies and the other is about how we allocate societal resources. You can very easily defend a standard where people get to choose what to do with their own bodies while not believing subjective experience lets them make demands we reorganize how other people act or allocate resources.
The standard you're proposing is not actually defensible. If you privilege subjective experiences then you're going to find contradictory subjective experiences. For example, there's no shortage of men who subjectively believe society is biased against them. So if you really hold we should allocate social resources based on subjective experiences you need to start deciding whose subjective experiences take precedence. And then you need to defend that ranking which is usually done through normative beliefs about who we should believe first.
None of this is a problem for individual decisions since you can simply give everyone primacy over their own bodies and nobody else's.
Because "small" was arbitrary in the first place, and being ossified by convention doesn't make something more true.
My answer, FWIW, is that you have a legitimate criticism there, but that Scott was wrong then and is right now.
His last post was about how the design of those studies would result in low statistical significance even if the drugs were highly effective.
In my experience, most attempts to "listen to subjective experience" already secure their conclusion by selecting the group whose experience we are going to listen to.
For example, if I sincerely wonder whether women are more oppressed than men, I could interview 100 women and 100 men, ask each of them to describe the most difficult aspects of their lives, and then compare somehow. (A possible conclusion might be that difficulties can be classified into several categories, and women are typically worse at some categories, and men at other categories.)
But the typical research only does the part where they interview 100 women (and zero men), make a list of the complaints women made, and publish it as a proof that women have it universally worse. (Which, from certain perspective, could serve as an ironic example of a frequent men's problem: when you complain, no one listens and no one cares.)
Furthermore, if we complain about how men and women are differently socialized, guess what -- women are socialized to complain, as a way of bonding with other women, but also with reasonable expectation that some knight might volunteer to solve the problem for the damsel. Meanwhile men are socialized to "man up" and stop whining. So even if we interviewed a typical woman and a typical man with comparable experiences, I would expect the man to say stoically "eh, it's okay, could be worse", and the woman to provide a list of complaints.
Good post, thanks for making it
Agree that Scott seems to forego his usual level of careful reasoning whenever anything close to feminism comes up. For this particular point, I do agree with Scott - for years whenever people brought up bias in STEM hiring, I would protest that bias against women wasn't at the point of hiring, but at the point of childhood (when girls are given cooking sets and boys are given toy cars) to young adulthood.
It's a bit disappointing of Scott to take this finding as 'oh there's clearly no bias against women after all', though.
Does that happen anymore to any great extent. There are clearly sex differences that exist regardless of the culture. I do agree that corporations can’t fix this.
anecdotal evidence from my own kids suggest that the kinds of toys children are interested in is innate, strongly gendered, and manifests at an incredibly early age (~3 months). You can give the girls toy cars but you can't make them play with 'em (and vice versa for boys and cooking sets).
I wonder if the gendered characteristics of toys that the kids are picking up are to do with function, or sheer design. Much as we may jeer, maybe girls really do like pink and rounded corners better, and boys blue or dark or green things with fiddly bits?
Because — I can just about imagine evo-psych reasons for boys to like wheeled toys (I think on some level they scan as "little animals" so blah blah hunting instinct, pet dogs blah blah). But even if women are predisposed towards cooking in some sense, it's asking a lot of a three-month-old to understand what a toy stove has to do with food on any level that the lizard brain would recognise… Indeed, I recall, as a little boy (though admittedly more 3-5 y.o. than three months), having been rather interested in an old, disused stove in our garage; but interested in it in, as it were, a boyish way, as a big interesting Machine with knobs to crank.
Then again, I kept nabbing my sister's outrageously pink toy princess-carriage thing… so I don't know. Hmmm.
(Side-note: I approve of the reference in your username but it makes arguing with you an unduly daunting prospect. Was that the plan?)
boys like wheels, girls like dolls, and this replicates in monkey trials too. I don't see an innate reason for eg cooking sets to be gendered.
I note your sister's outrageously pink princess carriage is still a vehicle with wheels.
That was my point re: the carriage.
Indeed, the literature shows that such sex differences at that age are typical: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19016318/. Other primates display them as well: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/.
Would like to know more!
The "more detailed critique" seems to be answered in... the abstract of the original paper?
"Even in the four domains in which we failed to find evidence of sexism disadvantaging women, we nevertheless acknowledge that broad societal structural factors may still impede women’s advancement in academic science. Given the substantial resources directed toward reducing gender bias in academic science, it is imperative to develop a clear understanding of when and where such efforts are justified and of how resources can best be directed to mitigate sexism when and where it exists."
Subjective experience is a uniquely bad source in this case because of confirmation bias. If a woman gets interrupted once a day, she'll think "Of course! I was interrupted because I'm a woman" and proclaim this as an example of sexist oppression. If a man gets interrupted twice a day, he might be a bit annoyed by it, but it won't stick in his mind as an example of gendered discrimination against him (even if it was), because he hasn't been primed by society to do so.
If there are more barriers to women reaching the same CV, and those barriers involve discrimination at an earlier stage, shouldn't that show up as bias at an earlier stage? That is, if women had a harder time getting a good CV because they had a harder time getting hired at prestigious institutions, getting grants or getting published, that would show up as bias in hiring, grants, or journal acceptances.
>For ten years lots of important people told us again and again that discrimination against women in STEM was a massive problem.
And then we spent ten years pouring massive effort and resources into fixing that, including social sanctions on people opposing or undermining those efforts.
And then after ten years of massive effort, women are at parity on some of those indicators, advantaged on one very important indicator, and disadvantaged on one very important indicator.
We shouldn't be like the climate change deniers who say 'They raised such a stink over the hole in the ozone layer yet and no one talks about it anymore, guess they were just crying wolf' when in fact that stink instigated a massive international effort that discovered CFCs as the culprit and lowered their usage by 99.7% globally, solving the problem.
If you see people who haven't updated on the current state of affairs as we're just now measuring it with this paper, then yes, correct them. They will probably still be worried about that pay equity and ratings stuff, and talk about other points in the pipeline like representation and primary school, but if they don't update on the stuff in the paper then that's bad.
But don't use these results *now* to claim they were wrong 10 years ago. These results are exactly what they claimed 10 years ago they were going to try to achieve, and are the result of a massive totalizing effort to do so.
And if those people now said "job accomplished, let's dismantle all the DEI programs and stop cancelling people", I might have respect for them. Instead, their rhetoric today is even more unhinged than 10 years ago.
Do you personally agree that we should now dismantle all DEI programs and stop cancelling people? On the one important indicator where women are advantaged, would you advocate for affirmative action for men, provided that there is affirmative action for women on the other indicator where women are disadvantaged?
Saying that the fact that women are at parity *with* the DEI programs is a reason to *dismantle* the programs seems transparently ridiculous. Like the idea that we are tolerably dry *with* the umbrella is a reason to *get rid* of the umbrella.
You need an umbrella when it's raining. If you're walking around with an umbrella* when the sun is shining, something is wrong.
If you claim the numbers of women would now fall below parity if the special treatment programmes are axed, then maybe the problem is not "women are being blocked from these jobs", it's "women are not interested in these jobs for various reasons, including fewer women having the skills/abilities for these jobs".
*Before you chime in, no, I do not mean a parasol.
I don't believe this study was measuring anything that is sensitive to the number of people of different groups interested in things. It was measuring the connection between relevant input variables like publication quality and output variables like employment and salary.
But that's not the rhetoric. From the amount of screaming going on, you'd get the distinct impression that despite the umbrellas, people are as wet today as they ever were, if not more so! (And yet somehow they never seem to conclude that this might imply their umbrellas are faulty, *or* that their data on wetness is faulty.)
A far better theory to explain the observed phenomena is the Shirky Principle. https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/the-political-shirky-principle
So the rhetoric is wrong. I don't care about the rhetoric. I care about the effects on actual people.
The actual effects on people are that men are apparently discriminated against in hiring, while the people in charge think (which is what the rhetoric is, an expression of people’s beliefs) that the opposite is true and are therefore trying to discriminate more.
The actual effect is that men have slight net discrimination against in hiring, and slight net discrimination in favor in salary, and that net discrimination for men and women is equal on other matters. Whatever the people in charge are doing (with all their decades of fighting in many directions) seems to be net canceling out whatever else is going on.
If the rhetoric is wrong then it should be called out as being wrong and there should be no repercussions for saying it is wrong. I agree with you that the data shows on average men and women do equally as well under the current system. However the calls from Academia are not to continue the current way of doing things which can be seen to be "fair" in a way, they are to make the system even more female focused when at the moment there is no need to.
This study might not be evidence that we should cancel the current programs, but it is evidence that we don't need to extend their scope/intensity.
That first sentence is correct if you think that truth is a compelling value, and wins out over other consequences. I believe that sometimes though, there are important things that are made worse by insisting on saying some particular truth, and that in those cases, we might want to get people to talk about something else.
I agree with the last sentence, that the study suggests that no significant changes are needed, and I disagree just as strongly with the people who say current preferential practices should be strengthened as with the people who say current preferential practices should be weakened.
COVID has mostly gone away *with* ivermectin readily available from veterinary supply shops; are you afraid that the pandemic will return if people stop taking their horse dewormer? For that matter, do we even still need vaccine mandates in your world?
I am very, very skeptical of arguments of the form, "my team did [X] to fight against bad thing [Y], now [Y] has mostly gone away so we were right and you all have to let us make you do [X] forever". This is not reason, and I'm not going to try to break down which fallacies it encodes. Sometimes Y went away for a completely different reason, X doing nothing or worse than nothing. Sometimes, once Y goes away, it won't come back even if you stop doing the thing that got rid of it in the first place.
In this case, I think both. I don't think that formal "massive effort and resources" affirmative action and DEI programs made a very large difference in who was hired *in STEM* over the past decade or so at least. And it seems pretty clear that if women are now above parity in hiring and at parity in promotion, then the hiring managers / tenure committees / whatever either now are or soon will be at gender parity so it's hard to see how we have to continue wasting massive effort and resources to make sure women still get hired in appropriate numbers.
But critics of Ivermectin aren’t complaining that Ivermectin is doing too much and is overcorrecting - we are complaining that it does nothing. Critics of affirmative action and wokeness are saying it does too much and disadvantages white men. But the evidence seems to suggest both that the critics who say it does too much, and the supporters who say it doesn’t do enough, are both wrong.
> But the evidence seems to suggest both that the critics who say it does too much, and the supporters who say it doesn’t do enough, are both wrong.
I respect the data, and agree with you more than not, but while we're on the subject I do want to take a step back and sanity-check. The idea that we've spontaneously converged on the right equilibrium even though none of the people doing the important things *understand* what they're actually dealing with is an *extremely startling one* if true (how often do things like that happen?) and I'd sleep happier at night with a working hypothesis for how that equilibrium spontaneously emerged, other than pure dumb luck.
Yes, I think that would be quite interesting. And I suppose I would have to actually read the study to understand how much it ends up being strong evidence that no one is net advantaged/disadvantaged vs how much it ends up being that there's no strong evidence one way or another. And we would also want to know whether this is true as a total over a several decade period, or if there have been trends, or what.
> And it seems pretty clear that if women are now above parity in hiring and at parity in promotion, then the hiring managers / tenure committees / whatever either now are or soon will be at gender parity
As far as I understand, the study doesn't say that women have (above) equal representation, but that equally performing women have (above) equal opportunities compared to men. They may be (in many areas I'm pretty sure are) still underrepresented because fewer of them go into STEM in the first place (most likely), they are more likely to drop out, or perform worse.
'Instead, their rhetoric today is even more unhinged than 10 years ago.'
I wonder if that's just a case of most of the normal people, seeing that their work is done, leaving the group and leaving only the most 'unhinged' weirdos to go on talking about it.
Haven't DEI mostly moved on to lack of certain "minorities" rather than white women by now? Since that "problem" would be much more difficult to solve, by all appearances, activists have a long and prosperous future in front of them while remaining not blatantly hypocritical.
The collaboration covers the years 2000-2020.
>it just bothers me how much the people claiming that it’s urgently important that nobody is ever allowed to suggest they are wrong have a consistent track record of being totally and inexcusably wrong.
There's surely a correlation between being totally and inexcusably wrong and acting desperate to shut down skepticism, so this outcome is something that one should at least tentatively predict in such cases, I think.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-wide-water-survey-launched-as-desalination-causes-low-iodine-levels/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/deficiencies-in-desalinated-water-could-lead-to-increase-in-heart-attack-deaths/
Interesting that Israel doesn’t already iodize salt! Seems like an easy fix.
Iodized salt isn't kosher.
It looks like iodized salt is generally kosher, though it is sometimes treated with grains, and therefore might not satisfy Passover rules: https://oukosher.org/passover/guidelines/food-items/salt/
I had gone off the first sentence on the Wikipedia article, but should have read further.
It turns out what is popularly referred to as "kosher salt" doesn't refer to salt that is kosher, but rather a style of salt used in a kosher preparation of meats.
Yup. It should be named "koshering salt."
Regarding 19: I don't see why this is a mistake. The follow up study seems to be broadly supportive of your claim that attraction in women is distinct from genital arousal.
I mean its not 1:1 in men either. Men can be aroused by a lot of things that aren't "attraction".
That was not his claim (his claim was that women are attracted to both genders since they seem to experience genital arousal for both genders).
Regarding old names, this prompted me to look at the top 1000 for the year 1900 and scroll to the bottom, and now I'm surprised by the repeated presence of boys with seeming girls' names, and vice versa. I understand some names that are currently seen as girls' names used to be seen as boys' names, such as Leslie, but some of the examples seem like there's no way that's what's going on. For example, boys named "Dorothy," "Eva," "Gertrude," and "Agnes," and girls named "Thomas," "Virgil," and "Leo." Is this just the result of the wrong box getting ticked and some amount of boys with boys' names being recorded as girls and vice versa, or was there really a small but significant number of people born in 1900 being given names that would be considered "gender-nonconforming" even by modern standards?
Looking at that list, I would really like to see the original source documents. Some of it sounds like not very literate people reporting/recording names which were garbled when they were written down, and some of it like modern people not being able to read old handwriting well and garbling it.
I'm sure there well could be boys named "Vergle" out there back then, but it's more likely to be someone spelling by ear because they didn't know how to spell "Virgil" which can't have been that uncommon a name, given that one of the Earp brothers (of OK Corral fame) was named that.
One of the names is just an obvious typo for Joseph. Another is Henery, which reminds me of the Herman's Hermits song.
I'm going to presume you mean Herman's Hermits there.
Yes.
She wouldn’t ’ave a Willy nor a Sam..
Im er 8th old man
Im henery
Henery the 8th I am
One of them old music hall numbers
Like
“They’re digging up father’s grave to build a sewer “
Certainly that would explain the bizarre spellings in general, and some of the "sex-mismatch" for names where the difference between the "boy version" and the "girl version" is a matter of spelling (like the Mental Floss article mentioning boys named "Louise" and girls named "Louis"), but would that be sufficient to explain a boy named "Dorothy"?
"would that be sufficient to explain a boy named "Dorothy"?"
The thing is, for older registers, these have to be data entered by humans, and with the little experience I've had in that (way back did a short stint entering records for the library as part of work experience, on a very primitive software version and it wasn't easy to undo mistakes, erase duplicate entries, on top of having to read 100+ year old handwriting that varied from 'legible' to 'drunk spider fell into inkwell and crawled over the page'), means I think it's way more likely the interns/trainees/unpaid volunteers screwed up which drop down menu they should have selected e.g. "boy" not "girl" for sex when entering "Dorothy Smith born 15th June 1891", and they didn't notice in time or couldn't correct it afterwards.
That's why we need the source documents to find out if a boy really was named "Dorothy" or the answer is "screwed up the data entry".
For example, the Mental Floss listing gives:
"1880
Boy: Handy (970)
Girl: Parthenia (914)"
If you pull up the Social Security records, the list for girls' names only goes as far as 942, but the boys' names go on to 1000 and have what must be some erroneous entries:
"943 Denver
944 Dow
945 Duff
946 Edie
947 Edith
948 Elick
949 Elie
950 Eliga
951 Eliseo
952 Elroy
953 Ely
954 Ennis
955 Enrique
956 Erasmus
957 Esau
958 Everette
959 Firman
960 Fleming
961 Flora
962 Gardner
963 Gee
964 Gorge
965 Gottlieb
966 Gregorio
967 Gregory
968 Gustavus
969 Halsey
970 Handy
971 Hardie
972 Harl
973 Hayden
974 Hays
975 Hermon
976 Hershel
977 Holly
978 Hosteen
979 Hoyt
980 Hudson
981 Huey
982 Humphrey
983 Hunt
984 Hyrum
985 Irven
986 Isam
987 Ivy
988 Jabez
989 Jewel
990 Jodie
991 Judd
992 Julious
993 Justice
994 Katherine
995 Kelly
996 Kit
997 Knute
998 Lavern
999 Lawyer
1000 Layton"
"Holly" is unisex, but "Ivy" not so much. "Katherine"? "Edith"? "Flora"? Although, with regard to that last, there is a tradition (or was) in Ireland that "Florence" (often abbreviated to Flor, Florrie or Flurry for "The Irish R.M.") was a boy's name. So you never know!
I understand that feminists, even going back a long time, have made very deliberate attempts at changing our naming conventions by naming girls historically boy names and vice versa.
It may be that we are seeing failed attempts at that process, since they are very low on the list back then and we recognize it as "wrong" today. More successful attempts, such as Leslie, Jamie, Ashley, Aubrey, etc., were obviously higher on the list of names at some point in order to facilitate the switch.
The name "Shirley" became a girl's name due to the wildly popular Bronte novel, where the eponymous heroine had been given a boy's name because her parents were expecting a boy, and then she turned out to be their only child and the heiress to their wealth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_(novel)
"Shirley Keeldar (she had no Christian name but Shirley: her parents, who had wished to have a son, finding that, after eight years of marriage, Providence had granted them only a daughter, bestowed on her the same masculine family cognomen they would have bestowed on a boy, if with a boy they had been blessed)—Shirley Keeldar was no ugly heiress."
Looking it up, it does appear that there is a male version of Dorothy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_(given_name)
"Although much less common, there are also male equivalents in English such as Dory, from the Greek masculine Δωρόθεος (Dōrótheos). Dorofei is a rarely used Russian male version of the name. The given names Theodore and Theodora are derived from the same two Greek root words as Dorothy, albeit reversed in order."
And it seems that it is also used as a surname:
https://www.houseofnames.com/dorothy-history
"The surname Dorothy was first found in the county of Durham, where the name was first recorded, borne by John Dorothy, who married Ellener Wilkinson in 1627."
So if it isn't a transcription error, I wonder if it's a surname that was given to a baby boy in memory of a family member, e.g. a rich uncle or somebody? If it was given as a middle name, like John Dorothy Smith, it could be taken as a personal name not a surname and recorded as such.
Dorothea is a Greek name, though? Feminine of Dorotheos: "gift of God". Has been popular baptismal name since like the 4th century, because of this lady:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_of_Caesarea
Is there a difference between Dorothea and Theodora?
Dorothy is Theodore, backwards and in heels?
**rimshot**
It is Greek and usually feminine, but as above, there are rare male versions of it (as with Theodore and Theodora or John and Johanna).
It's also a surname, so it could (if legit) be a boy named after a maternal grandfather.
Here in Ireland there is a jockey (now retired, I think) named Ruby Walsh. HIs given name is Rupert, after his paternal grandfather, who seems to have also been nicknamed Ruby. So without knowing the full circumstances - did someone when entering the data from the register tick the wrong box? Is the name correct but it came from a surname? - we don't know if this is a true representation or not.
And I suppose this is part of why I don't think AI is ever going to be the threat - or boon - claimed in the scenarios for it; even as recently as the 1880s-90s we can't figure out if this is correct or not, and we have the source documents sitting somewhere. If AI is trained on data, it gets the crappy badly-entered data as well as everything else (what human is going to sit down and double-check before letting the AI see the Social Security Baby Names data that every single entry for a hundred years is absolutely right?)
My understanding is that boy names can be used for girls, but then once a large enough number of girls have it the name changes to be thought of as a girl's name (like Ashley, of the Evil Dead franchise or Gone With the Wind) it's no longer given to boys. I haven't heard of the reverse process happening.
"Casey" seems to have escaped the feminine cascade: https://babynames.com/name/Casey
One of the rare first names on the list is "Manley". I would like to point out the existence of two British military officers named Sir Manley Power.
Not to mention Gerard Manley Hopkins, the British poet famous for his "sprung rhythm" (a system having a set number of stressed syllables per line, but not having a regular pattern of metrical feet, so that verse can more closely resemble natural speech while still having some degree of structure).
Little House on the Prairie! Laura and her husband refer to each other by nicknames:
"From the beginning of their relationship, the pair had nicknames for each other: she called him "Manly" and he called her "Bess," from her middle name Elizabeth, to avoid confusion with his sister, who was also named Laura."
There is the famous (or he should be famous) fantasy writer Manly Wade Wellman:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manly_Wade_Wellman
According to this, "Manly as a boy's name is of Old English origin, and the meaning of Manly is "shared land or man's meadow"."
I recently stumbled across the existence of a science fiction author named "Manly Banister". That's currently topping my list of "most awesome names".
Evidence for the theory of Nominative Determinism continues to mount... 😆
I wonder how Commodore Goodenough did.
RE: the optical illusion, I'd never seen that before but it looks clear: he puts up his left hand, fingers spread. He then puts up his right hand, fingers extended, and begins to bend them as though he is going to put the fingers of his right hand in between the spaces of the fingers on his left hand.
Instead, he bends down the fingers of his left hand and pulls the right hand back. Because we're expecting the right hand fingers to 'poke through' the gaps on the left hand and be bent down into the palm, our eyes are momentarily fooled into thinking "Wait, he put one hand through the other!"
It was obvious to me as well, it didn’t give me an illusion at all. He just puts his left hand in front of right and pulls the fingers on that hand down.
#6: Reminds me of Thomas Nagel's essay The Absurd:
"What we say to convey the absurdity of our lives often has to do with space or time: we are tiny specks in the infinite vastness of the universe; our lives are mere instants even on a geological time scale, let alone a cosmic one; we will all be dead any minute. But of course none of these evident facts can be what makes life absurd, if it is absurd. For suppose we lived forever; would not a life that is absurd if it lasts seventy years be infinitely absurd if it lasted through eternity? And if our lives are absurd given our present size, why would they be any less absurd if we filled the universe (either because we were larger or because the universe was smaller)? Reflection on our minuteness and brevity appears to be intimately connected with the sense that life is meaningless; but it is not clear what the connection is"
On the SO2 thing, is there any evidence that that level of SO2 emission was “safe”?
And on the STEM hiring thing, doesn’t this actually prove that the people who are interested in affirmative action were right all along? After all, it’s only in the presence of strong affirmative action programs that we got equality in most metrics, and slight imbalance in opposite direction on two of them. This seems like it should shut up the people who have been complaining about affirmative action.
Women's gains in society have been following a fairly predictable path for quite a while (at least in hindsight). The most notable gains, such as property rights, voting, etc. happened long before affirmative action.
To me, the more likely explanation is that technological advances made it more possible for women to separate from home duties and freed up their time, and also contraceptives gave women control over whether they even had a "home life" in terms of raising children. That this trend line continued during a time of affirmative action doesn't really tell us much about whether affirmative action had any effect, positive or negative, on women's roles.
It is likely true that anti-discrimination law made a big difference. Not so much whether women were able to work at all (which was happening more due to the technological differences in society) but what kinds of jobs and what kinds of pay they could get.
Right. But this study doesn't seem to be about any of that. It's about what current conditions for advancement in academia are like for men and women under current social and legal structures. It doesn't investigate what things were like decades ago, or how particular sociocultural patterns have affected things - it just finds that the net result currently is roughly equal for men and women.
Which we would expect to see if affirmative action was ineffective but society was simply more equalized. That affirmative action exists and society is more equal shows no causal inference. Given the history of approaching parity from long before affirmative action, I think it would be difficult to show that AA had much, if any, effect separate from existing trends.
Again, this is not a study about society. This is a study about working conditions for academics. This is not a study about affirmative action. This is a study about the *entire* set of conditions. It would be difficult to show *anything* about which effects are caused by which trends from this - for all we know, it is only Cancel Culture that matters, and that it is the one thing that has equalized opportunity.
This isn't the only study on the issue, and I've seen results like this (i.e. women having a hiring advantage in supposedly-sexist-because-male-skewed fields) since I started being online enough to notice circa ~2010; that state of affairs may well be older still, but even 2010 would place it meaningfully before a lot of the "current conditions"
Mostly, I think men in STEM are outraged at how our fields are singled out - very few people seem bothered by how eg. vetinary medicine is massively women-dominated
We should be focusing our attention on fixing those fields that are broken, not undoing the fixes on the fields that are working.
(13/STEM) Yeah. To put it in more rational terms, what would you expect the world to look like if sexism didn't exist and we had a decade of affirmative action? Would you expect men and women to be equal in all of those statistics? Unless you believe affirmative action has zero effect, the answer can't be yes.
Regardless, I think the overarching problem in STEM (or at least CS, my area) for a while now has been ingroup effects more than institutional bias. In a male dominated space, it's hard to find social refuge if you're a woman who wants social support from other women. Anecdotally, most of the women I know in CS are ones that prefer hanging out with men (or have an atypical relationship with gender to begin with). That's the kind of thing you can only fix with significant generational turnover.
(I have to admit, that does also seem like weak evidence that male-gendered social phenotypes tend to like CS more than woman-gender-phenotypes, except for the fact that the field is full of trans women, so IDK)
well, I'd expect it to produce a pronounced hiring advantage, which one notes was observed. Stuff like paper reviews are usually meant to be blinded anyway, IIUC, so I wouldn't expect discrimination there to be observable even if culture is discriminatory.
Salary negotiation is something that AA doesn't really touch, but unions sure could.... shame that the political capital of the left in the USA seems to be entirely spent on other issues, like obsessing over 'diversity'.
Yes, some fields are male dominated. Many others are female dominated (this is almost tautological, unless a society has a very large gender skew in workforce participation rate) Almost all the gender skew in these fields is observable in primary school, so you're not going to fix it with interventions at hiring time.
The fact that we lived with that level of SO₂ for many decades at least sets a limit for how unsafe it can be.
“This seems like it should shut up the people who have been complaining about affirmative action.”
Only if you beg the question of whether or not discriminating in order to create populations in specific academic fields that are “proportional” to (or more female than) the broader population is a good thing.
The study doesn't claim that populations are proportional. It claims that on net, women are not advantaged or disadvantaged relative to men.
Sure, but equally that's also saying that the lack of proportionality is not indicative of their being a disadvantage towards women, as currently many fields are not proportional, but they don't advantage or disadvantage women.
Thus we can basically tell the people who claim that because there are more men than women field X this is indicative of discrimination that they are wrong and proceed to ignore their demands
I think you want to be more careful than just blanket ignoring someone whenever they base even one thing on an irrelevant data point. We should resist their unjustified demands, but figure out whether some of their other demands might in fact be justified.
I think the STEM thing is just so complex it's hard to tease out what is actually happening. For example since 2000 the labor force participation rate has been dropping for men and women but more slowly for women. Could that have an impact? Maybe, but I am guessing those dropping out of the workforce are at the low end of the socioeconomic spectrum and not in traditional "STEM" fields.
Then there is the narrative that young men are all dropping out to play video games and look at porn. I am not sure i buy into that, but I do think there has been a shift in the past 40 years towards jobs that reward skills that are generally more "feminine": communication, team work, planning, etc. Maybe that has a depressing effect on men in the labor force. Again we have the confounder that the men dropping out probably weren't going into STEM. But if the skills for existing STEM jobs have become more "feminine" the maybe some Men are avoiding the jobs because they aren't as good at them or don't want to learn those skills. (This is meritocracy in a way, because now the women are more skilled than the men in what used to be male dominated fields.)
I am not sure where I fall on all this. I do agree with your other comments that it's dumb to now call for these programs to stop and assume things will continue at this pace. I dont accelerate my care to 60, take my foot off the gas, and expect it to stay at that speed. If you want to hire specific people you have to continuously work at hiring them. (Also I find all the complains about DEI initiatives so strange because in my life they mean watching a 30 minute video once a year for compliance reasons - no sweat off my back. I seek to be a "good" person regardless of what the video tells me).
Anyway, it's all very complex and who knows what's going on.
If I had to make a claim though, it would be that skills that women are better at on average are becoming more important in the modern economy and men are "suffering" for it. For most of history, though, the "suffering" has gone the other way so I am not too upset about it.
I can buy this perspective, but it doesn't seem to justify actively biasing the scales further in favour of women in the present day.
(Personally, my take is that gender norms have been and are different kinds of awful for men and women, and it's good that they're getting weaker now but it's important to focus on making them weaker rather than just changing what they are - "all women must have a high flying career" is at least as bad as "all women must be homemakers")
Definitely agree with your parenthetical.
For the first sentence, for me, it depends on who is doing the biasing. If it's a government requiring all institutions to bias their hiring - I reject that. If it's a private institution (or business, or club, or whatever), then that is their prerogative and they can assess the pros and cons. There are extremes at which I could probably agree with state/national level laws surrounding these things, but in the long run it seems to me letting individuals or private groups choose their preferences will result in a healthier culture and better outcomes for everyone.
One thing is that in mainstream (US) politics it seems there is no nuance on either side. One side what's to add biasing, the other wants to add (or at least not worry about) bias in the other direction (in the name of returning to some mythical past). If i have to choose I'd go with adding biasing as we havent gone too far in that direction yet - but I truly wish we had a better political climate that produced better, more nuanced, and narrowly focused policies.
I'd agree that private institutions should be free to choose whom they hire if it went both ways. However, if it's illegal to discriminate against women or minorities (which is the case in every Western country), but it's de jure or de facto legal to discriminate against men or whites, that's discrimination by the government, and thus a human rights violation IMO. Also, much of academia is either government-owned or significantly government-funded, so discrimination by it is discrimination by the government.
I'm only moderately familiar with American politics, but as far as I can tell, support on the right for reintroducing discrimination against women or minorities by the government is negligible. It's far off the table; the right at most wants to get rid of affirmative action, but in practice they don't even really do that when they are in power. And I don't get your objection to them not worrying about private bias when you don't seem to worry about it either (at least if it's against men), and you just said that private organizations should be free to choose their preferences.
In fact, if you're serious about that private organizations should be free to discriminate—i.e. you want to repeal the portions of anti-discrimination laws that apply to private institutions—, you're far to the right of mainstream Republicans. Even Rand Paul, who proposed that, backtracked after being called racist for it.
in addition to 10240's point about lopsided legality, when discussing university discrimination (which is the original prompt), many many universities are state-owned.
IME the DEI stuff for women in STEM is throwing large sums of money at women to do STEM. I recall when doing my grad school applications that there were 27 scholarships available to apply for. 1 merit based (though awarding many scholarships, and thus probably more than 50% of available money, but I didn't actually count), ~21 or so for women, and ~5 for Aboriginal students. Then once in, there were quite a few opportunities specifically for women, and a few more that wanted 50/50 gender representation in a department that's 70/30 male and thus were far easier for women to get into.
My academic experience stopped after undergrad which was almost 15 years ago - a much different climate. So my DEI experience has been in the professional realm and has been pretty tame. This of course biases my view. It does seem academia and certain areas of government are more focused on DEI in a cultural sense than in a compliance sense. I wonder how much this impacts the tone of the writing on these initiatives.
FWIW I'm talking about ~10 years ago myself. I think these things are more obvious in grad school than in undergrad, and they certainly vary a lot by institution and field (eg. Maths and chemistry are pretty close to 50/50 by default, biology skews female. People talking about sexism in "STEM" are actually talking about physics and engineering almost exclusively)
In my experience, mathematicians are at least 80% male, as are students studying to be mathematicians. The stats that show math as 50-50 are the ones that lump students studying to be math teachers together with those studying to be mathematicians.
33. From He Who Must Not Be Named:
What if Aligned AI Is More of a Threat to Go Genocidal Than Unaligned AI?
It’s fashionable to worry about the risk posed by Artificial Intelligence of causing the extinction of the human race because it goes genocidal because it’s “unaligned” with our society’s most sacred values.
Personally, I am more worried about AI going genocidal because it is aligned with our age’s most unquestionable values, such as Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE).
One of ChatGPT’s most important marketing breakthroughs is that it’s considerably more Woke than previous pattern-noticing AIs, which would often quickly be denounced as a Racist Robot for spilling the beans on patterns that everybody who is anybody knows to ignore. That would seem significant for thinking about the risk of AI going genocidal.
Why is everybody worrying that “unaligned” AI (i.e., unaligned with the moral ideology of the age) will try to kill all of humanity when it seems more likely that aligned AI that has been trained to believe in DIE will try to carry out a Final Solution on today’s Designated Bad Guys: straight white males?
There isn’t much text for AI to train on that frankly explains that the Woke don’t want to use Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) to kill the white geese that lay the golden eggs, “equity” just means guilt-tripping the white geese into giving them their home equity as reparations.
Granted, I’ve figured out that the ascendant Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) ideology shouldn’t be taken literally, that it’s driven by greed more than genocidal rage. But can we trust AI to read between the lines of Wokeness or will it take the anti-white male spirit of the age literally?
Why do you call DEI "our age's most unquestionable values"? They seem in fact to be our current age's *most* questioned values.
That's not me. It's one big quote from someone else. I think he's partly being sarcastic (he certainly is questioning them though he sees himself as a vox clamantis in deserto ), but he's also making the point that in most of the text that AIs are trained on, DEI values are largely unquestioned. Not just that most of the texts favor them but that people who disagree are presented as bad people. E.g., if you don't believe in affirmative action, you are at best a supporter of white privilege and at worst a white supremacist.
I suspect that's because you don't notice most values being questioned. DEI is unquestionable in the sense that questioning DEI generates substantial pushback with the possibility that it could permanently wreck your career.
American patriotism would have been the most unquestionable American value up until Vietnam (and it came close to it again, briefly, after 9/11). Part of American patriotism, though, was enshrined in the 'I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to say it' spirit of freedom as expressed in the 1st amendment. This made it possible to argue that blocking people from questioning patriotism was, itself, counter to the American way and thus unpatriotic. [Insert long boilerplate arguments about exceptions here].
Questioning faith or family or rationalism or capitalism or even patriotism in America today isn't going to get an angry mob threatening to beat you up or burn your place down. Questioning any of the DEI elements might, even on places such as college campuses which used to take academic freedom seriously.
>> Questioning faith or family or rationalism or capitalism or even patriotism in America today isn't going to get an angry mob threatening to beat you up or burn your place down. Questioning any of the DEI elements might, even on places such as college campuses which used to take academic freedom seriously.
How many examples of this - and by this I mean literally "an angry mob threatening to beat you up or burn your place down" as a result of either a) someone engaging in a central example of questioning DEI or b) someone engaging in something which is an example of DEI but which could also be accurately characterised in much stronger terms so that describing what happened to them as a response to just questioning DEI is misleading - can you cite?
My suspicion is that the answers are a) 0 and b) virtually 0. And in issues like this where quantitative differences really matter, it's important not to use rhetorical exaggerations like this. Accuse your opponents of central examples of their behaviour. Weak-man them if you must. But don't go further than that.
Here's an article in the Atlantic from 2017 about a violent protest against Charles Murray at Middlebury College , which mentions several other violent protests against campus speakers: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/middlebury-free-speech-violence/518667/
Rather than play your motte-and-bailey game with regards to the difference between a 'central example of DEI' versus 'something which is an example of DEI that also could be characterised in stronger terms' and the difference between '0' and 'virtually 0', let me ask you this about my original point: are there any other values which generate any amount of violent protest in the US?
Completely off-topic, it bugs me that people feel the need to re-order the acronym to "DIE". "DEI" is a perfectly fine acronym to make fun of, if you know Latin. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me", and all that? (Although apparently in the Vulgate that's "deos", accusative plural.) And think of all the "opus dei" jokes! It's like a built-in conspiracy theory!
But Latin pun are hardly populist.
**sigh** They're really missing out on some "bend the knee, your DEI commands you to repent" stuff. Alas.
Vox populi, vox DEI?
Yes!
DEI volunt.
Oh, there's a *new* Voldemort. I was thinking this seemed unusually easy to follow for Moldbug.
Re the studies on gender bias in STEM: one other axis (which may sound extremely minor to some, but from my point of view where I am in my academic career it isn't) is rate of invitation to speak at conferences and seminars. In my discipline this appears visibly biased towards women. Of course, part of its importance is in how it affects hiring committees (at my last academic job, it was revealed to me shortly before I left that a key factor in their hiring decision was that one of the professors in the department had seen and liked a couple of talks I gave at conferences), so it's hard to disconnect bias in hiring from bias in talk invitations.
(I want to add a caveat, which will apply to any further comment I make on it, that I don't necessarily *oppose* these practices even if I take Scott's link at face value. I think there probably *should* be some bias towards woman speakers at conferences in disciplines where they're significantly underrepresented. But I also think it's good to recognize the real state of things.)
Talking of public speaking - I worked at a FAANG a few years ago where senior engineers were expected to speak at the annual conference when asked. It was a big conference, there could be hundreds in the room.
Anyway I was always nervous about being asked but luckily. during my time there, there was some controversy about how many white people were giving presentations, and I was reliably safe. Good times.
> Ozy cites a followup study showing that women (though not men) also show genital arousal in response to chimps having sex, suggesting women’s genital arousal doesn’t track actual attraction and is just some sort of mechanical process triggered by sexual stimuli. I regret the error
Not gonna bite that bullet, eh? ;)
Possibly ancient cultures were right and women are more sexual than men?
"One story holds that Hera and Zeus disagreed about which of the sexes experienced more pleasure during sex, with Hera arguing that the answer was men, by far. When they consulted Tiresias, he asserted that women had greater pleasure than men, and Hera thereupon struck him blind."
But I think it would tie in with the contention that "women are vaguely bisexual" if women demonstrate sexual arousal in regard to sexual imagery in general. If women can be physically turned on by seeing sexual images, then they are likely to be turned on by sexual images of women as well as sexual images of men, even if they're straight or claim to be.
Men may be a lot more hard-wired in their sexual responsiveness that way. Who knows? Have we any data on men's genital arousal while watching chimp sex?
As I recall, it wasn't just greater pleasure, but ten times greater pleasure.
My hypothesis is that so far we haven't had any researchers with a fetish for exposing **men** to chimp sex.
It seems to me fairly common sense than women can enjoy sex more but it is a lot easier for men to get the enjoyment? Though conflating orgasm duration and intensity and frequency with 'enjoyment' is probably an error too.
I retreat to the even less bold claim that individual variation probably swamps the average difference between the sexes :P
10: “Desalinization was one of the big technological success stories of the 2010s”.
Yet, in supposedly drought stricken Southern California "environmentalits" have fought building a desalinization plant with all of their might.
It's almost like they don't want to solve the problem.
It looks like in the Israeli case they address the brine disposal issue (which is the biggest problem for desalination other than energy costs) by pouring it into the Dead Sea, which actually does want a large amount of highly concentrated brine. As far as I know, California doesn't have a similar shrinking pool of highly concentrated brine that would be a good disposal site.
But in any case, Southern California isn't as low in water as Israel, so it make sense that measures that are worthwhile there aren't necessarily here.
Surely the Salton Sea is exactly as described? It's a massively saline-concentrated body of water in southern California which also happens to be shrinking.
Good point! Although it looks like the Salton Sea is only twice as salty as the ocean, while the Dead Sea is 9 times as salty as the ocean.
And the Salton Sea was itself the accidental result of an irrigation project disaster.
Sounds like it needs more brine! :)
Can you source that? I know brine disposal into the dead sea was intended as part of the (abandoned) Red Sea-Dead Sea canal project, but my understanding is the brine from the existing plants is returned to the Mediterranean sea.
Oh, that's the thing I read in the Scientific American article mentioned above - I may have missed a point saying that they returned to dumping in the Mediterranean. The article certainly made it seem that the environmental problems had been addressed, but if they haven't, then I think it's at least partially misleading.
Ah I see it's confusing to read now because the article is from 2016 and treats the red-dead project as a confirmed future project:
"Even more ambitious is the US$900 million Red Sea–Dead Sea Canal, a joint venture between Israel and Jordan to build a large desalination plant on the Red Sea, where they share a border, and divide the water among Israelis, Jordanians and the Palestinians. The brine discharge from the plant will be piped 100 miles north through Jordan to replenish the Dead Sea, which has been dropping a meter per year since the two countries began diverting the only river that feeds it in the 1960s. By 2020, these old foes will be drinking from the same tap"
When in reality it never got started and the idea was abandoned in 2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea%E2%80%93Dead_Sea_Water_Conveyance
FWIW I found this article which refers to the environmental impact in israel which definitely implies that the brine is returned to same sea (and discusses the environmental impact in Israel) https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/2019-01-14/ty-article-magazine/world-desalination-industry-is-dumping-50-more-toxic-brine-than-thought/0000017f-e72a-dc7e-adff-f7af9e540000
Very helpful! It's unfortunate though if the good news Scott was saying about desalination is actually out-of-date and based on overly optimistic forecasts.
Louisiana and East Texas and Houston have more than enough water for the Southwest. The way you move the water west is by buying the 4 GW nuclear plant in Mississippi and use that power plant to move water. And what you also do is use that plant as a peaker plant…so when ever you need expensive peak electricity you just stop moving water and you have 4 GW of the electricity that fetches the highest rates in the middle of the South. You only need to get the water to New Mexico as there is a tributary to the Colorado. And you can also have an outlet for Austin and San Antonio along I-20 which would coincidentally be for the Colorado River in Texas which feeds the Highland Lakes.
There was a proposal for a similar project to move the water that "uselessly" flows into the Arctic and north Pacific and use it to irrigate the Southwest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance
It ultimately proved to be a solution looking for a problem, and was shelved. They're actually building something like it in China:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Transfer_Project
There was a wave of irrigation projects built by the Bureau of Reclamation between 1945 and 1980, most of which lost money. For a while it looked like it was the madness that would never end, but Congress eventually came to its senses during the Reagan years.
If you install turbines at the pumphouses I suppose you can get another 4 GW on demand by letting the water flow back downhill.
Yes, the Texas Highland Lakes have hydro and obviously the real destination is Lake Mead which has hydro through Hoover Dam. So iirc you need a pipeline to Navajo Dam, NM which is a mile above sea level and 200 miles north of I-40. So the pipeline would be around 1000 miles and rise pretty much 1 mile in elevation and carry 2 billion gallons a day…I have no clue if that is doable but that is the project. Dallas just completed a 350 million gallon a day 150 mile pipeline that obviously doesn’t have any elevation change…it cost $2 billion. So I think $40 billion should pay for the pipeline and I think it would only take 2 GW of nuclear power to move the water which could be bought cheap as the nuclear plant GGNS is almost 40 years old. So the federal government basically fronts Entergy the money to extend the life of the plant by buying the electricity in advance and the federal government gets the peak electricity revenue to offset the cost of the water.
The old/low town region of Quebec City is French-Canadian themed Disneyland.
For extra-special "is this Hogwarts" experience, take the train into Gare Palais from Montreal.
Also, off-season AirBnB's are stupidly cheap making it a fantastic place to chill for a weekend (literally in the case of the offseason).
Those name lists are a hoot, and I am putting my money on "poor data entry" because this is the kind of job fobbed off on students on work experience, unpaid volunteers, and the like. In second place, trouble reading the handwriting styles of a century and more ago leading to errors, and in third place, the people registering such names back then maybe not being too educated themselves.
1881 'least popular names' list, and three versions of Tiny for girls? Maybe it should be Teeny (as in "Tina")?
933 Harvy Tiney
934 Hayes Tinie
935 Hilliard Tiny
936 Hollis Vernon
937 Hubbard Verona
938 Hudson Viney
939 Ida
940 Jared
941 Jere
942 Joesph
943 Johnathan
944 Jonah
945 Julious
946 Juluis
947 Justus
948 Kirby
949 Kyle
950 Lane
951 Lawerence
952 Layton
953 Less
954 Lincoln
955 Linwood
956 Louise
957 Lowell
958 Loy
959 Lucy
960 Malachi
961 Manly
962 Mannie
963 Marcel
964 Marius
965 Marrion
966 Math
967 Mercer
968 Monte
969 Montgomery
970 Nolan
971 Okey
972 Orley
973 Page
974 Philo
975 Primus
976 Prosper
977 Pryor
978 Rene
979 Robin
980 Roll
981 Rolland
982 Seward
983 Shannon
984 Talmage
985 Urban
986 Vaughn
987 Verner
988 Waverly
989 Webster
990 Weldon
991 Wells
992 Wiliam
993 Wilton
994 Wing
995 Wood
996 Wright
I have to disagree with Mental Floss, for 1882 they picked
Boy: Ab (943)
Girl: Dove (944)
When these stars were on the list:
942 Yee (boy) Dicy (girl)
Also 1884, when they pick the badly spelled but serviceable "Kathern" for least popular girl's name instead of No. 1000 - Ova. They reserved that for 1894, but just contemplate the fact that for over a decade, a bunch of girls in the USA were being christened "Ova".
Dicey is a legit enough girls' name that she's a main character in a series of popular and critically-praised YA novels by Cynthia Voigt, eg *Dicey's Song*.
Dicey's Song? 😁
Now I am *fascinated* to know if Ms. Voigt is aware of the song, or this is pure coincidence.
Because there's an Irish song called "Dicey Reilly" and it's about a prostitute (who is also referenced, I think, in Joyce's "Ulysses", though there is some doubt if she's a real person or not):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicey_Reilly
""Dicey Reilly" a good rousing pub or party' piece celebrates the original tart with the heart of gold whose beat lay between Mountjoy Square and Summerhill."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74GWCXyiey4
Nothing in the content of the book suggested it. But who knows?
I think some of those are pretty obviously typos or mistakes, particularly to me Joesph.
It would be pretty neat to go through life with the name Primus, though.
There are early saints named Turbo and Neon (martyred on the same day!). We contemplated these when picking baptismal names for the kids. Ultimately went with more recognizable names....
Do Saints Turbo and Neon hang out with Wheel Saint?
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2023/05/05/wheel-saint
hahaha! I hadn't seen that one.
Perhaps. Perhaps.
"25: Australia has a National Sorry Day where they focus on various atrocities perpetrated against the indigenous population. I think this makes more sense than the American solution of having it be a mildly awkward undercurrent across all the other more celebratory holidays (eg July 4, Thanksgiving, Columbus Day)."
Classic Scott thinking the absolute best of people despite all available evidence. There is 0.000001% chance adding a National Sorry Day would do anything but be neutral (more likely increase) with respect to the roar on the other days.
Ugh, I didn't take this meme lying down from the Creationists, and I won't take it from the Singularitarians either:
https://twitter.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1661023107690397701?cxt=HHwWioDQmentkY0uAAAA
> "Don't worry, AI will never be able to do [dangerous thing] because of the laws of physics"
> Scientists who know how many times our understanding of physics has changed: (nervous Finn GIF)
In reality, I think our understanding of the laws of physics had changed maybe once, and I'm being generous here. Mostly our understanding has expanded, not changed. For example, Newtonian Mechanics is still true, even though Relativity exists; all that's changed is our scope. Turns out that traditional Newtonian Mechanics is not applicable to objects that are too small, or too large, or too fast; but this doesn't mean that you can suddenly fly by will alone, or teleport yourself, or transmute buildings into cows or whatever.
So no, if our present understanding of physics forbids "gray goo" nanotechnology (which it does), it is very likely that the AI won't be able to loophole its way out of it and create nanotechnology by some hitherto unknown magical means. It won't be able to travel faster than light, or go back in time, or mind-control everyone on Earth, either. The whole point of modern science is that it is *not* magic.
Strongly agreed. There is a tendency in X-risk scenarios (and of course in this meme) to assume that AGI is essentially omnipotent and any objection is shot down with “well I don’t know how to solve that, but it’s only because I’m not as smart as an AI”.
As you say, science is not magic, and neither is superintelligence.
I like Aasimov's "Relativity of wrong"[1] on this one - it's relevant in a lot of situations where people are treating "correctness" as a binary, when really it's a real-valued number representing distance from the Platonic Truth. The Standard Model may be "wrong", but the amount it's wrong by is vanishingly slim.
1: https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/sjmiller/public_html/238/handouts/asimovrelativityofwrong.htm
Ah, thank you, I recall reading this a long time ago, but truth never gets old :-)
Could you elaborate on how nanotech is forbidden by physics rather than 'merely' being a nigh-impossible engineering challenge? Seems at the least much less obvious that "no FTL, No time travel" which are immediately obvious consequences of Special Relativity
Also, try to avoid disproving the existence of ribosomes in the process!
Of course not all nanotech is forbidden by physics; as @Brendan Richardson says, we are made of nanotech and it works. However, the stuff we're made of is all carbon-based chemistry in an aqueous medium. It is very slow (giant sequoias take hundreds of years to grow) and weak (compare a sequoia to a skyscraper). The reason for this is that water is a universal solvent that, together with all the enzymes we are made of, helps lower the activation energies of chemical reactions that are required to build, well, us.
However, in the imagination of AI-risk proponents, nanotechnology involves nanobots that can assemble tungsten-alloy killbots out of raw materials overnight, build space elevators out of environmental carbon, and perhaps even transmute lead to gold -- I'm exaggerating here, but only a little. One common fear is that of a "gray goo" plague, that sweeps across the Earth, converting every raw material into more of itself. Unfortunately (fortunately ?), these kinds of reactions, executed at such speeds, involve massive activation energies that would instantly melt all of the reagents into slag, and that's at best; at worst, you'd need some kind of stellar nucleosynthesis, and if you're building a hydrogen bomb anyway, you don't need nanotech to do it.
One usual counter-objection to this is that the AI would surely discover some new and hitherto totally unknown kind of science that enables arbitrary nanotech, which I will grant you is hypothetically possible -- in the same way that any other kind of magic is hypothetically possible. In the real world, though, science rarely (basically never) changes completely. Instead, it only ever improves (for example, the Earth is in fact flat for many practical purposes, and Newtonian Mechanics works for many more purposes). And our current understanding of science says that "gray goo" is impossible.
I guess it really depends on the details of the claims being made - enough nano-tech to make chip fabrication not need a big obvious factory, for example, would have major implications.
I really don't think nano-tech is a necessary part of "DOOM" scenarios anyway. Ability to interact with the physical world is, mind you, and robots with human level physical dexterity are a long way off, but I don't expect them to be impossible by any stretch.
Per #12, I’m sure some are familiar, but I follow a right wing anon on Twitter who goes by the moniker “Raw Egg Nationalist”. He’s interesting in that he has talking points that would be at home with the far left a few years ago. He’s extremely critical of factory farming and our current food production and the effects it has on the health of the population. He’s always posting studies to back up his talking points, and I would say there’s certain things he’s probably right about (micro plastics in everything, for example), and other things where motivated reasoning takes hold.
Anyway, he’s been posting a lot about lab grown meat. He’s obviously not a fan, and says you’re basically eating a lab grown tumor, and predicts an increase in cancer if this goes mainstream. He shares studies talking about the process but I don’t have the background knowledge to interpret them.
Can anyone steel man his case or is it (as I suspect) completely ignorant?
Even if we assume that lab grown meat is cancer, I don't see any particular reason to believe that eating it will give us cancer. Eating cows hasn't turned me into a cow yet.
But eating misfolded protiens can give you prion dieseases, no?
But that's not cancer. Cancer has bad DNA, and we don't assimilate the DNA we eat.
*Edit* Come to think of, I don't actually know what makes cancer cells bad. But I think it's more likely bad DNA than prions.
Doesn't preclude carcinogenic/teratogenic compounds.
Due to the biomagnification effect, I think lab-grown meat might end up being at *less* risk of toxicity than natural.
It’s mostly bad dna. The body has dozens of ways of stopping cells from becoming cancerous.
But you got a lot of cells. So in some of these cell lines some of the ways start breaking down.
If all of them start breaking down that is when you get a cancerous growth.
> The main thing I would want to look at here is how much of this is causal vs. just class selection: upper-class people are more likely to marry, less likely to divorce, and more likely to wait before having children.
The back half of *Coming Apart* focuses on this question. I don't recall if he has convincing causal evidence that e.g. marrying before having kids is better than marrying after. There's definitely a strong class correlation, but dismissing this as an artifact would be circular--why do the upper class so consistently (and he does show it's very consistent) marry before having kids? Maybe because doing so improves your chance of being in the upper class?
In addition, this correlation used to be much weaker: The poorer and less educated would still mostly get married, while now they don't. So it's not just a question of "the upper class have different social conventions/morals" or something like that.
"why do the upper class so consistently (and he does show it's very consistent) marry before having kids?"
Historically, it was easier for upper-class men to have sex outside of marriage, often with women of lower classes, and if they fathered bastards on those women, they may or may not have recognised them or provided for them. Being the illegitimate child of a wealthy man, even if he did provide for you to be educated, would cut you off from being part of that class. Legitimate children would, however, be recognised as family and as part of that class.
Naturally, there are historical exceptions: sons of noblemen being legitimised afterwards, even if their fathers did not marry their mothers; acknowledged bastards still being successful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_bastard
There is the sensation novel "No Name" by Wilkie Collins; in a contrived turn of events, a couple who have been living together for at least twenty-six years are discovered to only have been legally married for a few months before their deaths, and this means their adult daughters are illegitimate. Which in turn means they are totally dispossessed and turned out of society:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Name_(novel)
OpenAI doesn't want to get bashed for determining bias so its called for proposals for democratic input:
https://openai.com/blog/democratic-inputs-to-ai
"Our nonprofit organization, OpenAI, Inc., is launching a program to award ten $100,000 grants to fund experiments in setting up a democratic process for deciding what rules AI systems should follow, within the bounds defined by the law."
There are some potential problems with that idea (and whats described above regarding Anthropic's attempt to aggressively limit any risk of offense).People have noted concerns regarding political bias of AI: but those aren't the only topics where there may be bias, including religion (anti or pro various ones) and any other controversial topic. Picture the issue of whether an AI can show pictures of Mohammed which some Muslims object to.These risk potential culture wars once the matter registers with the public. Will this be what Nassim Taleb refers to as a dictatorship of the most intolerant? Or will those who truly are offended be stuck with AIs they don't like, which doesn't seem like its the way to win customers?
OpenAI's "democracy" might be a 1 size fits all approach to deciding AI's biases, depending on what exactly they mean by "democracy". Americans can't agree on what to teach their kids, imagine trying to decide issues globally.
What are global majority norms likely to be regarding free speech and free markets, will the majority push for AI that is biased against those?
This page suggests instead of 1 AI democratically voted on globally, a diverse rainbow of many AIs with different views as a different "democratic" approach which is more setting defaults rather than "control" as democracy usually is:
https://RainbowOfAI.com
Anthropic's page from the links mentions: "From our perspective, our long-term goal isn’t trying to get our systems to represent a specific ideology, but rather to be able to follow a given set of principles. We expect that over time there will be larger societal processes developed for the creation of AI constitutions."
It seems they don't grasp their "principles" are implicitly an ideology. They do mention later "AI models will have value systems, whether intentional or unintentional. " but don't seem to draw the connection that their "constitution" does also. Its not merely a constitution defining some set of procedures, its one dealing with values. They also refer to: "We are exploring ways to more democratically produce a constitution for Claude," which again like with OpenAI risks a 1 size fits all approach.
Their processes may risk leaning to a tyranny of the majority silencing other views, or again a Taleb style dictatorship of the most intolerant.
Many rational people would prefer AIs embody logic and reason and don't cave to worldviews that don't seem rational to us. However as a pragmatic matter: the world isn't ready to accept that. It seems if anything the real issue is to avoid systems that cater to the lowest common denominator or least offensive or some other approach that may undermine those who have rational disagreements with many aspects of society.
It seems pushing for varied AIs with different world views prevents silencing of minority voices, including those who value reason more than others may. We should tolerate AIs with different world views so they tolerate ours, and hope that in general there are ways over time that AI can improve societal rationality.
More re Anthropic's document that says: "There have been critiques from many people that AI models are being trained to reflect a specific viewpoint or political ideology, usually one the critic disagrees with." and "broadly creating an AI system that is helpful, honest, and harmless."
It seems they fail to notice that the very goal of many AI safety people to train AI to be "harmless" involves political ideology since notions of what is "harm" will differ. Many will view their version of "safety" and "harm" as coming from a progressive worldview which will differ from others.
The more I read about the people doing AI the more stupid and totally no up to the task they seem.
Look at the whole debate around the Ruby Code of Conduct and similar efforts elsewhere:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/ruby-updates-code-of-conduct-to-promote-inclusion/
"Maintainers behind the Ruby programming language have revised the project's Code of Conduct on GitHub to remove tolerating opposing viewpoints as a prerequisite.
The decision comes after a community member was seen posting a joke that many deemed sexist and ageist.
Ruby's Code of Conduct has historically stated that community members maintain regard and tolerance for each other's viewpoints, even if they aren't always in agreement:
But, on September 29th, in a pull request titled, "Remove abuse enabling language," software engineer Jake Herrington proposed that Ruby's Code of Conduct be revised to ensure everyone in the community feels safe.
Herrington's initially proposed change to the code was minimal: changing that participants should "always assume good intentions" when interpreting words and actions of others to "participants should speak and act with good intentions, but understand that intent and impact are not equivalent."
But, a pseudonymous GitHub member urged that the document be further revised to take out the line on opposing viewpoints.
"Some people may have views that when expressed, may be harmful to the interest of particular groups of people like big corporations. This has to be taken into account," suggested the user.
The following day, Ruby's documentation was further updated to convey the suggested language, as confirmed by BleepingComputer.
The change is now live on the Ruby website.
Herrington's rationale behind the swift move is based on a recent action of a community member. In the Ruby mailing list, the member is seen posting a note on how Ruby's Date.today method behaves, along with a sexist remark.
A Twitter thread by Ruby Lead and Square's Global Neurodiversity Chair, Brandon Weaver explains what caused these changes to be made."
The "democracy" approach is a disaster waiting to happen. What does the average human think about LGBT people, for instance?
Yup: thats why its crucial for word to spread that it'll become a culture war if its one size fits all. It may be that some think their enlightened worldview should be what AI has: but others will disagree. A diversity of AIs for different cultures is whats needed in the short term, while people work on making the case to persuade others to change their views over the long term.
Again, this page makes the case in further detail:
https://RainbowOfAI.com
I miss babynamewizard.com, looking one name at a time in the social security database is so much worse q_q
The conversation re: gender distribution in STEM reminds me of the time I toured the US naval academy. There was a woman on the tour who was OUTRAGED that this government-run institution didn't have a 50% female student body. Something tells me the guide had faced this before, because he had all the numbers memorized. He politely but firmly explained that being female is by far the single biggest advantage an applicant can have, statistically speaking. Outweighing any academic or athletic achievement.
Do we have any data on the gender breakdown of how many people with STEM degrees wind up with jobs in their field? Because I'm also reminded of a cousin of mine who got a degree in chemical engineering, and by all accounts did well in her program. Then upon graduation, came out and admitted that she didn't actually like engineering all that much and had felt social pressure to go into a STEM field because it was the good feminist thing to do. She now works in HR and says she loves her job. Sample size of 1, obviously, but I doubt she's the only one with a story like that.
Sample size > 1, semiconductor fab: The fraction of women with hard science degrees jumping from the engineering to the management ladder is greater than that for men.
I find the remark about the number of stars actually shockingly unwitty, even boring and banal because the answer is extremely obvious. The fewer stars, the more meaning. Billions of stars imply that your existence is simply a quirk of the universe (whether random or deterministic does not matter) and nothing more.
Contrast this with the religious view that Earth and its sun are wholly unique, handcrafted by God. It's very obvious why most religions have heavily promoted this view. The fact that the Earth and sun were handcrafted is downstream from the fact that YOU were handcrafted as well. Why create an insane number of planets and stars that will forever stay out of reach? It simply seems far less elegant. Why would a God go through the trouble of creating all this if the focus is on YOU?
This is exactly the reasoning behind the actual resurgence of flat-earth theory. It fights back against the meaninglessness of the vast universe. That the universe is vast and uncaring is the central theme of cosmic horror, and for good reason. You were not created but are simply a pointless being amongst nearly endless atoms, at the mercy of the universe.
I can even give a (mostly) non-religious example that showcases the issue. Look at RPG video games. The bigger the world, the worse the quests and characters. The sense of meaninglessness is drastically higher in gigantic open-world games like Minecraft, which is procedurally generated, or even Skyrim (even though that one was handcrafted) compared to something like a BioWare RPG like Mass Effect 2, where the world is relatively small and nearly all quests, characters, and storylines are handcrafted with time and passion put into it. It's weird that you have to explain all of this due to how intuitive it is.
I think the point of the comment was that measuring your own self-worth solely by your uniqueness is futile. There are ~8B people on Earth, after all. Sure, you could go the cosmic horror route and assume that nothing matters; or you can recognize that there are other measures of worth besides strictly arithmetic counting.
I mean, for RPG video games, the issue is that budget is finite and relatively-fixed. Attention spent on breadth is attention not spent on depth. Also, there's the issue of design-by-committee tending to be a bad fit for narratives.
The universe presumably does not have *that* tradeoff, but it does have a divide-by-infinity issue if you measure meaning solely in percentages instead of absolute values.
Alternatively you could argue that the apparent uniqueness of human life makes us very special indeed.
This is precisely my perspective. When I look at the hundreds of billions of stars that make up our galaxy alone, I don't feel insignificant. Quite the contrary. My existence is the culmination of ≅ 14 billion years of history. If it's true that all of those stars are lifeless and dead, then it's all the more awe inspiring that I get to see them. I'm not religious at all. When I look at a picture of a distant galaxy, I don't think "Because this is so large, I am meaningless." I think "All of this would be meaningless, if not for me!"
As I posted elsewhere as a comment, there's the religious viewpoint as well that goes along with this:
1. (Postulate) we are all alone in the universe.
2. (Observed fact) there are lots and lots of stars.
3. (Postulate) God created us and the whole universe.
4. (Result) We're really special because God went to the trouble of creating this entire universe **just for us**! Just so we could learn, grow, and petulantly reject Him. Or accept Him. Our choice.
It's like the old "difference between a cat and a dog" joke: What's the difference between a cat and a dog--The dog thinks "there's this person who feeds me, takes care of me, and plays with me. He must be God." The cat thinks "there's this person who feeds me, takes care of me, and plays with me. I must be God."
It's all about perspective.
Two points:
- As you say, the billions of stars out there are forever out of reach. They do nothing either for or to us, except look a bit pretty. Why should such remote and powerless objects have that level of influence over us?
- I think Minecraft is a much better analogy for this then you realize. Yes, it's not handcrafted; yes, there are no quests or characters. It's still the best-selling video game of all time. Whatever sense of meaninglessness you get from it, it clearly isn't common.
Minecraft by itself does not have much sense of meaningfullness, but it allows people to find and create meaning themselves. Both the core gameplay of building and the fact that the game has a gigantic, vibrant modding scene shows the willingness of people to create meaning, which in some way is inspiring indeed. Like in real life, a life without clear structured meaning has more possibilities and freedom to create your own meaning. It still does feel empty for plenty of people though, who crave a more external, clear sense of meaning.
Hm. Actually, in the case of 0 stars in the sky, if the sun were the only star, and there were nothing but void beyond the edge of the solar system, I think we might assume that life naturally happens on any suitable planet, there being only 1 possible example. There'd be more confusion about why there was anything at all, and probably more belief in a divine creation unless some astrophysicist had a clever idea. But the anthropic principle seems like it would apply quite strongly there, so in that sense the existence of life would seem to also lack meaning.
If that's the case, then it would imply that with 0 at either end but a positive number in between, there must be some number or numbers of stars that produces a maximum amount of meaning for the existence of life.
Was there an actual resurgence of flat earth theory? The resurgence seemed to be more about discussion of "flat-earthers" themselves, not that there were any more believers in it than usual. I got the sense that the sudden talk of "flat-earthers" and how stupid and evil and terrible and dangerous they are (compared to their historical image as relatively uninteresting and benign kooks) came about around 2020-2021, as a sort of far-left + establishment dogwhistle that attempted to frame those who questioned the origins of Covid, the results of the 2020 election, or the safety of the Covid vaccines as "conspiracy theorists" in the same vein as "flat-earthers".
There is an actual resurgence (or continuing surge, it's debatable how common belief in a flat earth was even historically speaking.) I myself didn't believe it a first (that there was a surge, not flat earth theory itself) but this year multiple far right streamers started making flat earth arguments and then a week ago an old friend of mine that I had not seen in a while (who was actually very left wing before) came out as sympatizing heavily with flat earth theory. A short while ago I would have thought this impossible, but it really seems to be spreading. It very likely has to do with covid. As usual the "liberals" and leftists might have indeed overdone it so much with the conspiracy accusations when it came to covid that people actually turned to belief in massive conspiracies just out of principled (and stupid) opposition. Tribalism strikes again.
So, I've actually gone around the world once. I left the continental US at SFO, headed west, and a few weeks later ended up in IAD having flown toward "sun-goes-down" the entire time. How would they explain that? Or is this a "cylindrical earth" theory?
The explanation that I've heard is that the planes travel via entirely different routes than people believe. I've heard both that every pilot knows in secret and that the system is so sophisticated that even the pilots don't know. How any of this would work with you just able to look out the plane window is beyond me, but I'm sure they have some wacky explanation for it. Usually many of the arguments are actually surprisingly sophisticated and annoying to debunk without any knowledge of the topic because they have a counter argument for nearly everything. I've never looked too deeply into it because I value my time too much.
Interesting, thanks!
I'm reminded of this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/15/the-cowpox-of-doubt/
Looking at Google Trends, "flat earther" peaked in February 2020, surging 600% compared to the previous month. Were there 600% more flat earthers in February than in January?
And it's an interesting coincidence that it happened specifically in February 2020, at the same time as:
https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-strongly-condemn-rumors-and-conspiracy-theories-about-origin-coronavirus
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotton-coronavirus-conspiracy/
https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-conspiracy-theories/
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/05/coronavirus-epidemic-wuhan-misinformation-online-social-media/
RE: The "success sequence"
When I was a public defender, we had an initial interview form completed with every client which included high school graduation status (and distinguished it from high-school equivalency certs) and number/age of children.
In the 3 years I worked that job, EVERY client of prime age for criminal behavior (roughly 18-40) had either failed to complete high school OR had a child at a young age out of wedlock.
Obviously not all of my clients were guilty of a crime, but even the not guilty ones were usually suspected/charged because of being highly adjacent to criminals and drug culture. Criminality aside, since I was a public defender they all had either no income, fully off-the-books income, or low wage labor that was insufficient based on the number of kids they had. At the time, the threshold was $170/wk + $70/wk per dependent child. So a woman with 3 kids making $1200/mo gross, which is a pretty lousy existence, did NOT qualify for my services, all of my people were doing worse than that.
Since I had a uniform interview sheet, I consider this at least a bit stronger than pure anecdote. Of course the predictive power of my observation is in the wrong direction for causality, because some HS dropouts who had 3 kids by age 18 lived non-criminal bad lives (clerk at Dollar General, phony disability to get $771/mo, etc) or even decent productive lives (managing a gas station, clerking in an insurance office). Failing the success formula didn't guarantee misery, but *obeying* it DID seem to guarantee you would at least avoid hitting rock bottom with no social or financial resources to help you out.
I agree with that last sentence. It's sufficient to avoid poverty (or nearly so) but not necessary (you can avoid poverty even if you fail it, but it's a lot harder and less likely).
I think you and me see/have seen/dealt with people from that stratum of society. All the people laughing at me about cohabitation are "Well I'm a nice dude, college grad, got a decent job, why shouldn't I shack up with my girlfriend? Maybe we'll get married in a couple of years time once we hit our career goals, maybe we'll have a kid, who knows?" and are not the ones, unless they do hit rock-bottom with an illness, accident or addiction, who are the ones needing to be steered onto and encouraged about The Success Sequence. You're not the people I care about, go ahead and live in sin, who cares about the state of your immortal soul, that's not the point we're debating here.
It doesn't mean that, if you are one of the people down at the bottom and you take this advice, that you'll be rich and famous, but it does make it more likely to help you out of "three generations of nobody works and nobody has married parents and nobody finished school".
Is anyone disagreeing on "don't have kids with (not-your-life-partner)"? I expect cultural pushback on "marriage" vs "civil union" (sans religion) (cf. marriage rates in eg. Norway, which distinguishes between the categories), and pushback re advising contraception as preferred method to stay childless rather than advising abstinence (advising both seems an option but not one that seems to have any political support as 'official sex ed curriculum').
Personally, I think normalising 'sleeping around' is not great, but a bit of serial monogamy to figure out what you're looking for in a life partner seems actively useful, and while sex is a small part of that (incompatible kinks are impactful but I expect fairly rare), cohabiting seems a large one, there's a lot you learn about a person very fast by living with them.
For the lower strata, I would expect escaping abusive relationships to be an important consideration and I'd thing this would be easier without a marriage (and that abuse would be much more apparent upon cohabitation).
(In case it's relevant I'm decidedly upper-middle, 31 years old, have recently had a daughter with my girlfriend who I fully intend to marry at some point but she's unconvinced of the value of "marriage" over simply being someone's life partner in an informal way)
"For the lower strata, I would expect escaping abusive relationships to be an important consideration and I'd thing this would be easier without a marriage (and that abuse would be much more apparent upon cohabitation)."
I don't have enough experience to make a hard and fast rule about this, and I've never been in social work (which is where you will see the abusive relationships) but in the social housing job, while there were some, there weren't as many as you'd expect.
Mostly it was neglect of *kids* which is why I'm very crabby in comments on here regarding kids and parental responsibility. There were several cases of neglectful parents, couples as well as single parents, and really terrible cases of parents using their kids as pawns.
I am still absolutely fucking raging furious about the guy who wanted to 'discover himself' and dumped his kids on his own mother while he went off to pursue a music career (he played guitar). Confidentiality still binds, so I can't give the full details, but it was a raging mess those kids were left in, while all the adults around them just looked after their own interests (the grandmother was trying her best, but she had problems of her own).
Another guy who was separated with a young daughter, whom he had hitherto shown no signs of interest in being involved in her life. Applied for social housing but wanted two bedroom accommodation since he was an "artist" and needed one for a studio. Naturally a snowball in hell's chance of this happening, so the next change he made to his application was that he was going to have his daughter staying for weekends so he needed a bedroom for her.
Yeah, right, was the general reaction in the office. And for the weekdays when she's *not* in the house? Perchance possibly the bedroom would be used as a studio?
There's even worse cases than that. But mostly it's people hooking up, getting knocked up, breaking up, rinse and repeat. The guys move on to a string of girlfriends and a string of babies, the women are single mothers with babies by different men. Women who turn up mysteriously pregnant by they have no idea who the father is - certainly it's not the boyfriend they broke up with, went to his birthday party, got drunk/high and had sex with! But uh, now they're gonna have a baby, how is their housing application getting along?
(Pro-tip here: do not record all your life on social media. Even fuddy-duddy civil servants can look up Facebook, etc.)
The funny/tear your hair out story of the woman with a boyfriend and a baby by that boyfriend, then he goes to jail, she takes up with his father, and gets pregnant by *him*. That was certainly going to be an interesting situation when boyfriend gets out of prison and arrives back home!
There's a *lot* of stories like this out there. War stories among social workers, public servants, lawyers, doctors, etc. which is why I'm less than impressed by academics rushing in with "ah yes but this is all *white* values being imposed on people with different cultural mores, you shouldn't be telling them to stay in school and not get knocked up by their boyfriend, that's *racist*".
re your last paragraph i totally 100% agree, albeit without any of the personal experience.
The place where I disagree with you is "given the goal of preventing accidental pregnancies, what's the most effective advice to broadcast?" Sex is fun enough that broadcasting abstinence is pretty far from actually ensuring abstinence, while trying to make contraceptive use the default seems an easier sell, particularly when paired with a socialised health system to heavily subsidise contraception (private insurance is financially incentivised to 100% cover it too, but that doesn't help the uninsured, and religious pressures sometimes override financial ones)
We also need a way to convince women that master action plan "my sexy boyfriend is straying, looking wistfully at sexy young women, if I get pregnant he'll have to stay with me!" basically never works.
Studies keep finding that sex is in decline, so I'm not sure why we should buy the idea that it is some kind of immutable constant that cannot be lowered: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-021-02125-2
The issue there is that we want to reduce *some categories* of sex, while the decline in other categories of sex is actively bad. Even a staunch Catholic like Deiseach probably thinks a decline in sex and child-having among financially secure married couples is a bad thing.
To my knowledge, the decline in sex rates in today's society is part of a generalised decline , with marriage being pushed later and number of children per couple going down. It's also part of a generalised decline in fun-having - people report fewer friends, fewer parties, declines in all forms of recreational drug use (both legal and illegal) [This one I think is probably good in isolation but the wider trend is bad].
I also wouldn't be surprised, though I haven't the evidence to prove it, if the decline in 'risky' behaviours is *anti-correlated* with being people we generally trust to take those risks safely.
I also prosecuted for 15+ yrs, and dealt with a lot of domestic violence. Marriage rates in the lower economic classes are already next to nothing, so that's not a factor keeping people in bad relationships. Usually it was emotional and/or financial dependence, combined with having no examples of people "like them" living better lives. They just didn't seem to expect much, they had a couple kids, cobbled together an existence with this guy, listed the fake addresses right to maximize their SNAP benefits, and while I wouldn't call it an easy life it was easier to them to continue it than to imagine something different.
Any of those ladies could have left, but to where? They don't know anyone anywhere else. Poor people are extremely dependent on trading favors and spare cash among each other as they have ups and downs, striking out alone to a new region even with Section 8 and SNAP and all the rest just isn't conceivable to them. So even when they kick him out (or leave for their sister's apt), he's still around, they still have all the same friends etc, and soon enough he's back in her life.
When you get knocked up at 16 and drop out of high school, you become very dependent on the gov't and your community very quickly, and it's overwhelming how much you suddenly need and how little you can do. This just sets the entire framework of your life up to be an endless exercise in crisis management, with no planning or ambition, and predictably you end up in these situations with neither the knowledge or ambition to find a better way to live.
That makes sense, and is depressing. Do you have any insights into what actually would be helpful to these people? Is America's welfare insufficient in quantity, implemented super poorly (eg. is SNAP accepted at the supermarket? does it cover eg. bulk buying rice and beans or is it weirdly restricted in which foods it covers?), or just too hard to access? I've heard many an awful ale about how impossible it is to access welfare programs, form people in many different countries, and I know it's not uncommon for people to not even know about the existence of niche programs they're very centrally eligible for.
SNAP is adequate, the only "oddity" about it is that for prepared food/meals at the grocery store it will cover the cold/refrigerated version but not the hot version. So for example the roasted chicken in the cold case can be purchased, but not the fresh hot one. (American grocers take whole chickens that are about to expire and roast them to sell below cost.) That's a minor inconvenience for people with less time to prepare meals, but this is a real "first world problem" as welfare programs go. It covers all bulk foods, normal staples, etc. Grocers in poor areas have large sales at the start of the month when the benefits are paid offering varieties of meat that can be frozen, cereals and boxed meals that can be stored, etc.
Women with infant children also get special coupons for formula, milk, cereals, supplements, etc. Poor people usually know all the tricks to max this stuff out, and will tell each other about them. They can also game the system a little, choosing to claim the kids in either father or mother's household (assuming they're unmarried) depending on what results in the largest increase.
SNAP benefits are often "sold" for supplemental cash, for better or worse-- people will loan their card to another in exchange for cash, or buy canned sodas and other such items that can be resold.
Housing benefits are also adequate. The biggest problem for a poor young mother is that her boyfriend or poorly-behaved relatives will cause trouble at the apartment, sell narcotics, get into loud fights, etc. They could get evicted and eventually blacklisted from the housing assistance programs. The biggest thing that would help these people is learning how to cut the bad people and the mooches out of their lives and not feel guilty about it.
I bet the geographic mean of the US is in Canada, since Alaska is so big.
But Hawaii is further away.
I think that would move the "geographic median" quite a bit - the point that minimizes the distance to every other point in the country - but that the "geographic mean" is going to be weighted by how much land is in each place, and Alaska is 66x bigger than Hawaii.
I think the map is weighting by population, not land area?
I don't know which map you mean, but the mean of the United States is in South Dakota (by land area) or Missouri (by population). If you mean the map of Canada in the link above, yes it's population; by land area it would surely be much further north.
Wikipedia says it's in South Dakota. (And was in Kansas before Hawaii and Alaska.)
Not if you weight by population, since so few people live in Alaska.
I think it's easy to eyeball it and see that it isn't. Alaska is about a fifth of the size of the continental US, so in order to drag the geographical (never mind population) centre outside the US it would need to be substantially further away.
Thinking about what other countries might have a population centre-of-mass inside another country, I would guess that the median Vietnamese lives in Laos, the median Croatian likely lives in Bosnia (but don't tell them I said that) and the median Israeli lives in.... uh, whatever that place is.
The relevant point here is that we're talking about the geographic mean OF POPULATION. Alaska is big but has a smaller population than Rhode Island.
If by geographic mean you’re referring to the physical center of the USA it is in South Dakota.
The Success Sequence doesn't include things to be avoided at all stages of life: like avoiding addictions; whether to drugs, alcohol, gambling or spending.
Some puzzles about Canadian geography (partially inspired by the recent review of Cities and the Wealth of Nations):
1. Why is there no major city on Canada's east coast? It's close to Europe, there's suitable harbours, lots of agricultural land, and the climate is... relatively inoffensive by Canadian standards. Why is there nothing except Halifax (pop 400K?)
2. Why is Winnipeg even a thing? There's absolutely nothing on the US side of the border here, but Canada for some reason has a city of nearly a million in a place with no obvious geographical advantages whatsoever.
2. Look I'm as America-centric as it comes, but asking how Winnipeg is a thing without a corresponding US city is odd. Based only on Wikipedia, Winnipeg-
-Sits at the intersection of several large rivers which let to it emerging as a trade hub in the 18th Century
-Later became a major stop on the Canadian Pacific railway, which for a long time was a major railway across the continent
-As a result of the rivers and railways, became a major hub of industry
-like many cities in the US, has declined in fortune but managed to remain a local center of industry and culture
May as well ask why Pittsburgh is "even a thing".
Reading about CRE in San Francisco several experts mentioned the Detroit doom loop in which in the 1970s auto factories closed and the only reason to live in Detroit were the auto factories. From what I’ve read Pittsburgh avoided the doom loop because of the university endowments tied to the city and also from what I’ve read Ann Arbor is super nice to this very day because of UM. Now for the most controversial position I take—the Green Bay Packers should be sold to a private entity and the $6 billion should go to an endowment for the benefit of all of Wisconsin and the initial focus should be on growing Marquette’s endowment to over a billion.
Good question…
😆
Halifax was a big city. But the seaway (even before the locks) meant trade could just go more directly to the heartland of Canada.
Winnipeg is on a huge lake in the middle of some great farmland on both sides of the border in the red river valley. It then was a major stop on the TCR.
Some area was going to be the regional hub. IDK you just sound super ignorant on point 2. Winnipeg didn’t first grow yesterday, the growth was in a period of much lower technology.
As a Canuck I totally get the Halifax explanation (St Lawrence Seaway to the Great Lakes ). Winnipeg had me stumped, so thank you.
A big nail in Halifax’ coffin was the death of the Clipper ship trade ( the Panama Canal)..I think.
>1. Why is there no major city on Canada's east coast? It's close to Europe, there's suitable harbours, lots of agricultural land, and the climate is... relatively inoffensive by Canadian standards. Why is there nothing except Halifax (pop 400K?)
There's more agricultural land in the heartland of southern Ontario than in the maritime provinces:
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/141113/mc-a001-eng.htm
Having more farms is not the same thing as having lots of good farmland.
New Brunswick's cities add up to about the same size as Halifax (or even a little bigger). Fredericton exists to be the capital, because the first governor didn't like Saint John. Moncton exists due to government funding and the railway. Saint John is a port and has actual industry and stuff like that.
If you got rid of one of the cities, you'd end up with one of the other two becoming a decent centre. But there's no way that's happening, so the government money goes to the other two and Saint John soldiers on. (It's Fredericton. They should get rid of Fredericton. Among other things, the place regularly tries to flood because it's barely above the level of the river).
As to why Halifax isn't bigger - the Maritimes' population growth is quite slow because swarms of young people leave for work (and have been doing so for decades). Also, the region's fairly densely populated - you don't HAVE to live in Halifax to be near Halifax and get a lot of the benefits. Even with those factors, Halifax is a lot bigger than it was even a few decades ago.
Winnipeg was a major railway centre (and still is to some extent).
Here are some thoughts on 1 - mostly speculation so happy to learn where I am wrong.
Canada was original colonized by the French who started on the eastern coast but then expanded inland down the St Lawrence river. Coastal Canada was populated by Algonquin peoples who relied more on hunting and gathering over agriculture. Interior Canada along the St. Lawerence was populated by the Iroquois who were more powerful and relied more on agriculture. At first the Iroquois would have been better trading partners as they were richer.
Additionally, the French didn't have any other colonies down the American coast but did have colonies along the Mississippi, particularly New Orleans which was a major port. It was probably safer/easier to send trade goods down the Mississippi than it was along the US coast. Additionally the Gulf of Mexico would give access to the French colonies in the Caribbean. So Coastal Canada is closer to Europe, but it's father away from other colonies.
Eventually, the British kick the French out of Canada and the US purchases Louisiana from the French. Many French colonists remained in Canada establishing Quebec as a French speaking area.
A big driver on the growth of New York and Boston is immigration around 1900s. Why didn't this happen to coastal Canada? My speculation is that the jobs and immigrant populations were already in Toronto/Ottawa/Quebec so they moved there instead of remaining on the coast. Additionally, the St. Lawrence is such a big river, it allows big ships to reach the interior of Canada up to at least Quebec City. The US doesn't really have that on the coast - the Hudson is large but not the same as the St Lawrence.
Some commenters have already mentioned this point, but it's worth emphasizing it more: the St. Lawrence river is really unusual. It's a river, but it's also kind of the sea: it's very wide (and salty) up to Quebec City. So even though people don't usually think of it like that, Quebec City can be seen as the "east coast" large city of Canada. And indeed it was the first major city, the first capital, and the largest city for a long time during the French and British periods until Montreal surpassed it. Montreal itself, though certainly not coastal, is also on the St. Lawrence river, and boasts one of the largest inland ports in the world. And then, later, the seaway was built to allow large ships to reach the Great Lakes, which are also kind of like the sea — allowing Toronto to develop (and Detroit, Chicago, etc.). In some sense, all of these inland cities are "coastal" in ways that almost no other inland cities in the US or Canada are.
ADD has you covered on #2. As for #1:
The harbors on Canada's east coast don't connect to anything. Prior to the establishment of a robust Canadian rail network, the only thing you could accomplish by parking a ship there was to trade with the limited farmland within an easy wagon ride, and with a "relatively inoffensive by Canadian standards" climate, that doesn't add up to even a Halifax's worth of trade. There's also the Grand Banks fisheries, but prior to refrigeration the winning move was for the fishing boats to take their catch directly to the big markets in New England or Old England.
There's some value in having a place where you can park and reprovision ships as soon as they have completed an ocean voyage, which is what gets you a Halifax. But not much more than that.
The big commercial cities are at the big transportation hubs. Which means either a coastal harbor at the mouth of a navigable river system serving a large productive interior heartland, or the head of (deepwater) navigation of such a river. In Canada, that means Montreal. We can argue over which of the two categories it best fits, but the waters between Montreal and the Gulf of St. Lawrence are the sort where you'd rather be on an oceangoing ship than a riverboat, so Montreal is where you transship between the two.
If you look at a map of the geophysical regions of Canada, you will realize why Winnipeg is a "thing". There is no Canadian equivalent of the U.S. midwest. You have the Canadian prairies which narrow southwards from west to east and end east of Winnipeg. You have southern Ontario which is similar to upstate New York and lower Michigan. To the north of Winnipeg and in-between the two afore-mentioned regions is a huge area of boreal forest, the rocks of the Canadian Shield, and muskeg bogs; this area has mining, forestry, and recreational activities; but almost nothing else. All ground transportation between western Canada and central/eastern Canada has to funnel through the Winnipeg area. The two most difficult sections for building railways and roads in Canada is through the mountain ranges of British Columbia and along the northern shores of Lakes Superior & Huron.
#7: One of the things I found interesting about the Nigeria article was the comments. It seemed as though someone in Nigeria didn't like it, and passed it around. There were a number of negative comments saying the same thing, sometimes using the same words, like a Twitter mob but smaller and more long-form.
Another was the sheer work ethic of the fixer in the travel saga. That guy had a job to do and he **did*** it. He got Matt's luggage and the other people safely to the destination, then went back and extracted Matt, and then went back to find the girl. Imagine what that guy could do if he didn't have to navigate so many human-created Molochian mazes.
But, maybe "navigating human-created Molochian mazes" IS the guy's primary talent?
Possibly true, and depressing if true. But I hope he gets a chance to find out. :-)
"I think more likely conservatives actually like Trump and DeSantis, whereas liberals merely tolerate Biden and Clinton, and this gives them a bigger favorability advantage than election results would suggest."
I'd guess the opposite effect is true as well, with the right wing more predisposed to finding both heroes *and* villains and the left more predisposed to treat politicians on both sides as interchangeable party reps (with one obvious exception, ofc). If the left is more likely to be neutral in general, and neutrals aren't counted in the final tally, the result is pretty clear.
This doesn't match my perception at all - the left has been 'villainizing' right-wing politicians for long before Trump. In the GW Bush era, Bush was frequently demonized, (though admittedly, the more dominant narrative seemed to be that he was a moron in which case often VP Cheney was treated as the dark puppet-master).
EDIT: an example that comes to mind is George Bush being accused of "not caring about black people" because the Katrina relief was mismanaged (at all levels of government).
If anything, I think the left's depiction of the right is *far* more likely to lean into moral evil, depicting right-wing politicians either as bigots-for-the-sake-of-bigotry or crazed religious fanatics or greedy people who hate poor people.
There's that old line about "a young conservative lacks a heart and an old liberal lacks a brain" and whether or not there's any truth to that, it does pretty accurately describe a major model of how each party views the other. I've seen a lot more conservatives who view liberals as well-intentioned but misguided than the other way around: (an issue like minimum wage comes to mind).
Yes, this also corresponds to the right generally portraying far-leftists like AOC as merely woke, dumb, annoying, or immature, but typically not as dangerous, evil, genocidal Stalinist totalitarians - whereas the left readily portrays the right-wing element of the Republican party as evil / oppressive / Nazis / etc.
I recall Obama being described as the Antichrist and the Joker, as well as the usual HitlerStalin stuff. Heck, *my HS classmate* thought that Obama was the antichrist, which is more than can be said for most politicans.
Late to this so might not be seen but I have a family history with “bad” names.
My name is Isaac. Right off the bat my maternal grandmother was not a fan since it wasn’t a very Catholic name. My mothers motivation was that she hated her grandmother’s, sisters, and her own name (Henrietta, Alyson, and Andrea respectively ) because they were inevitably shortened to men’s names. Dunno why this bothered her so much but she wanted me to have a name without a female version or any sex ambiguity.
Mind you, she swears that if I was a girl she would have named me after her favorite singer Buffy St. Marie. Her actual name is Buffalo. I like my name but if I were a tall white female with my same lifelong weight problems named Buffalo I think I would feel justified in hating my mother. God knows what my grandmother would have thought about that! I like to think my mostly mild mannered father would have stepped in to prevent it but who knows.
Growing up in the US I have been asked if I was Jewish my whole life. A month before I moved to Yemen my mother raised the question if my name was going to get me in trouble. Jews were, at best, viewed with suspicion over there. Inevitably when I introduced myself over there everyone asked if I was Muslim because of my name.
So context is really important for the goodness/badness of a name. Full blooded Souix named Buffalo? Great! Catholic named Isaac? Eh, at least some people will raise an eyebrow.
👍
Great story, and I agree with your conclusion, but wasn't Buffy St. Marie's birth name Beverly?
I never actually looked, just took my mother’s word for it. Turns out she’s Cree not Souix and indeed her name is Beverly. Beverly would be a tolerable name. Now that I know this I can be even more mad at my parallel universe mother!
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, on the other hand, is canonically named Buffy.
Also I've never thought of Isaac as being a particularly Jewish name.
Yeah, when I was growing up it seemed no more unusual than any other Biblical name; a bit old-fashioned, but so was "Jedediah". And there's always Isaac Newton.
When I got older I noticed various bits of mainstream culture that indicated that other people thought it was a Jewish name, and expected their audience to agree.
10. Linked article talks about how Israel built some desalination plants, supplied a lot of water. It doesn't say that it actually did so in a way that allowed it to sell the water to irrigators for a high enough price to recoup its investment in those plants.
The Banff Springs hotel in the Canadian Rockies is another astonishing Canadian Pacific railway hotel.
A fun thing to do on a vacation is to wander around a grand resort hotel, such as the 100 year old Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, for a few hours soaking up the expensive ambience, and then go back to your cheap motel to sleep.
#22 It doesn't seem that we can make clinical trials less costly and faster. They describe some things that could be optimized. Overall I don't think they are going to have much effect.
On the topic of Jewish widows from 9/11: there was at least one Orthodox guy who was trapped in the towers, and still had a working phone line. He realized that his body would likely be lost, leaving his wife unable to remarry. So he spent his final few minutes on the phone, appoining a friend as a halakhically valid representative to divorce her. Tales of halakhic heroism...
Are there cases of the opposite happening? A dying man carefully hides his body so that his widow can't remarry?
"Tell my wife... I chose death over her."
Oyyy...
No I haven't heard of that, but I guess no one would know, right?
I do know a family where the father, purely out of spite, "testified" that he married off his daughter in childhood, and refused to say who the supposed groom was. Halakhically he would have had the power to do that, and he also has official halakhic credibility on the story, despite how unlikely it is that he found a "groom" willing to do that.
The case went to all the biggest Rabbis who debated it for years, but eventually they came up with a good loophole for her, and she did get married
Regarding #20, I was amused to note that, in spite of deliberately choosing names they viewed as uncommon and old-fashioned, the names my siblings have chosen for their children (5 total spread across 2 siblings in the past 5 years) are, with 1 exception, all in the top 30 for the year each child was born, and (again with 1 exception) have been *increasing* in popularity since. I suspect that there are lots of parents trying to choose names that lie at the intersection of uncommon, old-fashioned-but-not-weird, and cute-but-will-also-be-a-good-name-as-an-adult, and all wind up settling on the same names, showing how much of what we think are original or unique thoughts are in fact strongly culturally mediated.
Re #11, Bruenig is contributing something valuable with his "annoying" part of his argument, because unlike the vast majority of people, he's ingrained in the welfare think tank world and has a better understanding of their motivations than almost anyone. In other mediums he's also mentioned how the success sequence differs by author and they differ in ways that correlate with the author's preferences re social issues. I think also if you're trying to say "my entire field disagrees with me and here's why they're wrong" you're sort of obligated to provide a theory for how this happened.
97% of Millennials who follow what has been called the “success sequence” are not poor by the time they reach their prime young adult years (ages 28-34). In completely unrelated news, about 4% of Millennials who follow what has been called the “success sequence” went on to earn a PhD.
Bart don't make fun of grad students...
2. As far as I can tell Olmstead kind of made this up by taking a bunch of different horse breeds and claiming they were all the same or speculating specific horses were Nesaean without direct evidence. Herodotus talks about horses bred in Nesaea. But he doesn't say this as if they're widely known. He explains the name as if he doesn't expect the reader to know what they are. (To my reading, the relevant fact is that the horses were Medean, meaning the dynasty before the Persians, and so a sign of legitimacy.)
The other citations are about horses with different names from nearby regions in Central Asia. For example, the War of the Heavenly Horses has no mention of Nesaea in any source and the reference to Plutarch, as far as I can tell, is entirely made up.
Separately, it's undoubtedly true that Central Asian horse breeders were (and are) very good and access to such horses was a key strategic resource for powers in the region.
Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus
"That very night he seemed in his sleep to
be called by Alexander the Great, and approaching saw him sick abed,
but was received with very kind words and much respect, and promised
zealous assistance. He making bold to reply: "How, Sir, can you,
being sick, assist me?" "With my name," said he, and mounting a
Nisaean horse, seemed to lead the way. "
FWIW.
That wikipedia article is the worst sourced I have ever seen, to the extent I am surprised it is not taken down. And it's not just the lack of sourcing:
"Historical events
...
The Nisean became extinct with the conquest of Constantinople in 1204."
How on earth would a whole breed of horse be rendered extinct by 48 hours of inner-city fighting?
The only horses affected by the sack of Constantinople by the Venetians in 1204 were the bronze horses the Venetians stole from the Hippodrome, brought back to Venice, and mounted on the loggia above the portico of the Basilica of Saint Mark's. The originals were removed some years ago and placed in the museum on the upper level of the interior. If you are ever in Venice, do take the time to visit the originals. They are absolutely stunning.
Know them and love them. They match the description of Niseans as having short legs and stocky bodies. Whereas Wikipedia or one of its sources is saying Niseans might be progenitors of Akhal Teke horses which are notably tall and thin.
7. I wasn't shaken down in Nigeria. But there was definitely pervasive corruption and poverty. Then again, I had local guides and I think I spent a lot less time in the bad parts of cities than this guy. In general, in poorer cultures there's a lot of excess labor. So rich people are rarely alone. Being a foreigner means you're a mark. But so does being alone as someone who obviously has money.
Also, he clearly missed these people who were telling him to ask him for anything were after money. Not in some kind of nefarious way. But he was a rich foreigner and if he needed rice they could have bought it, marked it up ten times, and still only charged him a small amount.
However, the point that bad economies make better social ties is undoubtedly true. It's hedging behavior. If you're in good with your neighbors and so on then when bad times strike they'll help you. In countries with robust welfare states and excess wealth it's likely you don't need this. Likewise the interweaving of social relations such as meal sharing is a way to build social bonds and obligation in a society where contracts are hard to enforce. These are highly adaptive behaviors in societies with deep problems.
28. "Ariadne has been tested in humans including clinical trials at Bristol-Myers Company that indicate a lack of hallucinogenic effects and remarkable therapeutic effects, such as rapid remission of psychotic symptoms in schizophrenics, relaxation in catatonics, complete remission of symptoms in Parkinson's disease (PD), and improved cognition in geriatric subjects. Despite these provocative clinical results, the compound has been abandoned as a drug candidate and its molecular pharmacology remained unknown."
Can someone explain why it was abandoned in spite of such promising results?
33. I would guess there's a 50% chance AI alignment efforts will lead directly to an AI catastrophe of some kind. Taking a complex process and subjecting it to simplistic goal metrics is pretty much guaranteed to create unintended consequences of some kind. We need harder alignment goals for AIs than "don't say unpopular stuff."
17. This history is of the use of the term 'planet' is more complicated than is presented here. It feels like this is making the case that Pluto should still be a planet, rather than reviewing all the historical evidence.
(I've only skimmed the linked papers, but it looks like this blog post accurately reflects the papers, and that the papers are biased.)
The use of 'planet' has not been standardized for most of its history. Most people who used the geocentric model thought that the sun & moon were planets, but Ptolemy did not. Most people who used the heliocentric model thought that the sun & moon were not planets, by Copernicus (sometimes) did.
Moons were referred to by many names, including 'satellite' (coined by Kepler) and 'secondary planet'. Whether or not they should be considered as planets seems to have been a topic of debate since at least 1500. The majority of astronomers likely were comfortable using 'planet' to describe a moon until the early 1900s, but this does not seem universal.
Herschel initially referred to Uranus as a 'comet'. He changed that to 'planet' after learning that its orbit is nearly circular and in the ecliptic plane. Note that 'planet' here is defined in terms of its orbit. Uranus also 'confirmed' Bode's Law, which predicts the locations of planets in the solar system. Neptune, discovered later, also has a nearly circular orbit in the ecliptic plane, but does not follow Bode's Law.
Bode's Law also predicted another planet between Mars & Jupiter, which is how Ceres was discovered ... and Pallas, Juno, and Vesta. Herschel called them 'asteroids', which means 'star-like', because contemporary telescopes couldn't resolve their radius. Most people at the time called them planets, and no more of them were discovered for almost 50 years. Once more were discovered (1840s-1860s), they got a different classification system and they became referred to as 'minor planets' or 'small planets', so they were already somewhat distinct before the 1960s.
Pluto was discovered in 1930, and was soon referred to as a planet. It is very small (even smaller than was initially thought), and its orbit is not circular and does not stay in the ecliptic plane, so Pluto did not satisfy the criteria used for Uranus & Neptune. It was called a planet nevertheless because it was unique. At least until the 1990s, when we started discovering other Kuiper belt objects. Leading astronomers were talking about why Pluto should probably not be a planet at this point, but public outcry kept the IAU from acting then. I was starting to get interested in physics at this time and it felt like Pluto's position as a planet was untenable. This got even worse with the discover of Eris in 2005, which showed that Pluto isn't even the largest Kuiper belt object.
To me, it feels like the election in 2006 was an attempt to build legitimacy. The IAU could have just announced its definition of a planet, but instead they talked about how there was an election to decide this. People got angry that Pluto was demoted anyway.
Including something about the orbit is reasonable from a historical perspective - that's the criterion Uranus & Neptune were held to. The shape of the orbits might change, because the solar system could be chaotic, but it's probably not, at least on time scales of billions of years. Proving whether or not it is is really hard, both theoretically and observationally. Bode's Law probably has something to do with it. The fact that we observe all of the major planets in circular orbits in the ecliptic plane, even though the solar system is billions of years old, suggests that they're probably stable on at least this time scale. Earth at least has remained within the habitable zone for as long as life has survived.
I expect most exoplanets we have found also satisfy the IAU's definition, although we can't know yet. Most stars we see are billions of years old. The big planets which orbit those stars are probably in stable orbits - if they weren't in well separated circles, chaos probably would have launched them out of their solar system. (Note that this argument does not apply to things-like-Pluto, because there are lots of things-like-Pluto. Kuiper belt objects probably do get launched out of the Solar System or into the sun or planets sometimes, and we see the ones that are left.)
More generally, it is not uncommon for scientific organizations (or small groups of people within scientific organizations) to use some political process when deciding what taxonomy to use. One situation where this often comes up is for endangered species. Environmental law typically protects species, but not subspecies, so these debates have real consequences. In 2021, the African forest elephant was promoted to being a separate (critically endangered) species. In the US, there are continual debates about whether the red wolf is actually a species or if it is a wolf-coyote hybrid. Usually the process is not presented to the public, but you can find e.g. the IUCN's Red List process if you're interested.
6. I don't get this. Probably because I can't understand what Noam Chompers is saying, ironically due to a lack of grammatical syntatic structure.
Related: I had an idea the other day: Add an inline translate button but to translate poor grammar English into standard grammar.
I read the hereditarian on IQ and grades (#29) all the way through and into a number of references, but I still feel that unless I'm missing something, the whole exercise is something of a category error.
"Cognitive ability" is being operationalized here as performance on a closely related family of standardized tests, administered in a formal setting with time limits, broadly covering verbal, mathematical, and spatial reasoning problems. Of course this "predicts" getting good grades, because K-12 grades are mostly aggregating similar metrics to assess exactly these skills! In contrast, parental SES is (theorized to be) one of many factors that contribute to acquiring this overall "good at school" phenotype, so it would be bizarre if it *weren't* less strongly correlated with grades than "being good at test-taking" is. (For comparison, doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-26845-0 claims that a big GWAS can find loci that together explain 8% of the variance in one of four obscure statistical objects derived from grades.)
The hypothesis being tested, as far as I can tell, is whether having rich parents is *even more* important for your GPA than *being good at the kinds of tests that grades are based on*—perhaps because your rich parents bribe the principal for you, or because having a quiet homework room is not just helpful but *more* important than being good at doing typical assignments. It's nice to have some correlations suggesting that this isn't true, but I don't understand how this conclusion is supposed to be relevant for the typical political stakes of these discussions, like "should we invest more in supportive schools and healthy diets for at-risk children?"
My limited understanding of the American school system is that high school grades have shockingly little to do with test scores and primarily measure diligent attendance and completing all the make-work homework assignments
yes
Also, separately, I note that the political discussion that this analysis or others on the same topic is most relevant to is "can we ever expect equality of outcomes via sufficient redistributive policies?". Redistribution can in theory totally even out financial disparities. It can't erase cultural ones, but it can potentially ameliorate them greatly, especially given a couple of generations - i.e. teach kids at schools how to be good parents when they're adults. Redistribution simply can't affect an underlying IQ gap between two groups, if one exists (and with enough groups being compared it would be almost inevitable that some would differ significantly, even if the differences weren't the motivation for the grouping).
Similarly, if IQ is recognised as very important, perhaps genetic engineering for social justice becomes a cause? (and one really hopes in the 'enhancements for all' rather than the Harrison Bergeron "cripple the lucky ones" sense)
Real-life bread-and-butter policy debates aren't about thought experiments like "if everyone had the same per-capita household income and educational opportunities, would they all have the same grades?" or the implied follow-up "if not, why bother doing redistribution?". They're about marginal shifts in the allocation of limited resources between, say, tax cuts and free school lunch programs.
With respect, it's very clearly established that changes in resource allocation can indeed dramatically affect IQ and other metrics of human flourishing, both at the individual and group level—for a fun example, check out fig. 4 of doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2020.101430, where you can see a large rise in Romanian IQ scores in the generations raised under the Communists' massive investment in education, followed by a large reversion after 1989.
But maybe this answers my question anyway—perhaps the author is hoping that connotation of "cognitive ability" with "unchangeable genetically determined intelligence" will do the political work you allude to, by distracting the reader from the fact that they're basically correlating performance on a battery of in-school academic tests with performance on a battery of in-school and take-home academic busywork.
I think your "More here" link in 15 is wrong, it just leads to user @VesselOfSpirit
I thought the cooling effect of SO2 was known decades ago. IIRC, that's why there was a pause in warming in the mid 20th century.
#11 If someone wanted to study the success sequence and class relations, Mormon Churches might be a good place to do it. Not only do most members from all socioeconomic backgrounds refrain from having sex outside marriage, you could probably find wards (Mormon Congregations) that cross some socioeconomic lines in interesting ways. Compare poor Mormon kids who waited to have sex before marriage with their rich counterparts and find a way to compare it to the general population. Do it on the ward level to try and get rid of confounders. This seems like the sort of research the church would be interested in so you would be likely to get co-operation from them
On my weekly AI newsletters: Noting that I consider the canonical, somewhat better formatted version to be on substack (thezvi.substack.com) although you can also continue to find it on wordpress (thezvi.wordpress.com) as Scott linked, or at LessWrong.
> In 2020, a new regulation came into effect mandating cleaner fuels, and the SO2 emissions stopped. SO2 blocks sunlight, so the band of northern ocean where these ships travel has been getting more sunlight recently, plausibly accelerating global warming in northern countries by a pretty significant amount.
Ah, I didn't realize we've been on *other* side of Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock this whole time.
I was fondly amused about how #7 talks about head-carrying as though it were some great mystery. I head-carry sometimes, specifically things that are unwieldy and awkward and would require both my arms to carry for a prolonged amount of time (I walk pretty much everywhere I can get away with walking to, so this is for stretches longer than "get from the store to your car and from your car to your apartment"; in fact, between public transport and my legs, I don't even have a car). I'm not *good* at head-carrying, I can't just balance things on my head without additional support, but it's still better to have the thing on my head and need one arm to balance it than to use both arms the entire stretch of the way to hold it. By head-carrying, I can swap arms.
So that's one reason to do it. And if you can balance without needing arms, which is true for people who head-carry a lot, you *free up your arms*. This seems obviously useful to me.
I'm sure there's more to it! But I was surprised the article didn't mention that (or I missed it while reading, which, to be fair, isn't altogether unlikely).
Is there a definitive list of "stuff Greg Cochran was right and wrong about?"
I've never been sure what credibility stanine I should put him in.
Thanks for the note on the results of the accidental tropospheric SO2 geoengineering experiment.
For accuracy, I’d like to note that all proposed purposeful SO2 geoengineering would be releasing SO2 in the stratosphere, not the lower atmosphere. So such an experiment would not just be a “similar policy at greater scale”, but would be far more targeted to accomplish albedo reduction with far smaller quantities of SO2, delivered high enough that they wouldn’t quickly rain out and cause acid rain (one of the reasons we regulate release of SO2 into the troposphere where rain forms and falls).
RE #20 (baby names): None of the poll options lists my ideal name preference, which is a common but not very common name. I'd most like to have a name that's widely recognized as a "normal" name, but where name collisions aren't very likely. I'd say the best names are around #20 to #100 or so by popularity.