> 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.
+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.