They "tolerated" them (because them being non-Muslim meant they could get more tax revenue from them), but there were tons of restrictions and also horrific stuff like taking boys from families in the area and forcibly converting them to Islam to be Janissaries.
The Ottomans were only tolerant of other people in a relative standard of the times. As in heavily taxing and occasionally forcing minorities into slavery was more tolerant than burning them at the stake. They were also a market for slave raiders from the interior of Africa, the Barbary Coast, and the Crimean Khanate raiding into Ruthenia. Not to mention eunuchs, which involved a process of castrating young slave boys that had a 90% fatality rate. The Ottomans also spent centuries violently conquering all of their neighbors, which they were very good at.
"Tolerated" minorities by conquering their lands, then treating them as second class citizens, sexually enslaving their women and kidnapping their boys and force converting them. They didn't kill Armenians because they got Westernized. They just got better at persecuting peoples they had always persecuted.
In my experience (having been raised in conservative Christianity) it is a pretty normie position, at least within American Evangelical Christianity, to be pro-natal and anti-immigration. It's common to want a certain kind of people to be fruitful and multiply--viz., faithful law-abiding Christians, not immigrants who are non-Christian or from countries with high rates of violent crime.
I read the literacy delusion article twice, still didn’t understand it, ended up dumping it in Claude, who explained it was satire, but it does seem plausible that reading might make you more depressed, but Claude assured me that that’s not the case.
> ClearerThinking administers several personality tests to the same people to learn more about their comparative accuracy. I am most interested in their finding that tests with “factors” (eg the Big Five, where you rate people on a numeric scale) are inherently more accurate than those with “types” (eg Myers-Briggs, where you assign someone a specific category) and that, adjusting for this, Big Five is no more predictive than the Enneagram:
This seems importantly inaccurately phrased, or at least misleading. Comparing the Big 5 and the Ennegram as written results in the Big 5 strongly outperforming the Enneagram (0.25 vs ~0.12). It's only if you do a really strange transformation which fundamentally changes how the Big 5 works that they're comparable. Then they compared that to the crude scores of an Enneagram measure, rather than the type output which the Ennegram actually uses.
I mean, yeah, probably it'd be about the same, but that seems kind of meaningless?
Right, more types increases accuracy but decreases catchiness. Myers and Briggs were very lucky or clever with their four-letter codes that start with a vowel.
The transformation didn't really change how the Big 5 works, it changed how they were measuring the Enneagram and made it more like the Big 5: looking at it as a factor analysis instead of lumping into types. Which is think is a reasonable thing to do, since their initial type based analysis just lumped Enneagram results into 9 types, while people who are into the Enneagram will tell you that each type has a wing, an integration, a disintegration, and a level of health that will all change how their personality presents. According to the Enneagram model we would expect a highly integrated 4w3 to present very differently than a highly disintegrated 4w5, for instance. It's a lot more more analog and less quantized then it looks on the outside, so decoupling the Enneagram test results from the types themselves seems fair enough to me. That's basically what Enneagram people do.
The big advantage of MBTI over Big 5, it seems to me, is that the MBTI axes seem value neutral, whereas nobody wants to be low conscientiousness, low openess, low agreeableness and high neuroticism.
Those may be what you perceive as bad, but they definitely have upsides: with those traits, you're more relaxed, don't rely on novelty, and aren't unduly influenced by other's opinions.
Re Heath articles, I thought it was the force of Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain argument that lead the Marxist-leaning academics to change their mind. They realized, or so he tells, it wasn’t really exploitation that they were really bothered by but more so the inequality.
Yes. For those not in the know Wilt Chamberlain was an extremely talented basketball player. Most importantly he was well paid - a quick google tells me he got a contract for 250,000/year in 1968, which is about $2.25M today.
There’s nothing in Marxism that would see that as exploitation. He isn’t, in his capacity as a basketball worker exploiting anybody, worse he’s actually a proletarian. If he was paid less, the owner capitalists would be paid more.
Marxism isn’t - in its first stage anyway - about equality of outcome, it’s just about the elimination of an exploitive class. Just as eliminating the landlord classes - which was actually a policy in the late 19C even in the UK - would not lead to equality afterwards, with obvious differentials in earnings amongst the new land owning peasants, Marxism doesn’t promise that there wouldn’t be differences in wages post the revolution*. Many modern Marxists don’t even realise this.
In the 19C wage differentials weren’t really significant but it becomes an issue in Marxism by the 1960s. Rawlsians don’t have to worry about who is exploiting who here, they just see inequality as something that we would not agree to behind the “veil of ignorance” and therefore Walt is over paid.
* the second stage is the “ From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” which isn’t strict equality either as the needy guys will earn or receive more.
>[Chamberlain] isn’t, in his capacity as a basketball worker exploiting anybody, worse he’s actually a proletarian.
Nozick's, who was a libertarian, point according to Heath was that the state was indeed exploiting and "alienating" Chamberlain by taxing him and getting a share of the fruits of his labor, the way capitalist class exploits workers according to Marxists.
This argument didn't really convince Cohen and co to agree with Nozick but it seems they have changed their minds according to Heath's telling.
The refutation of the labor theory of value was less important than this. Or at least that's how I read Heath's article.
> Nozick's, who was a libertarian, point according to Heath was that the state was indeed exploiting and "alienating" Chamberlain by taxing him and getting a share of the fruits of his labor, the way capitalist class exploits workers according to Marxists.
Yes, well that’s another problem with Marxism - it should be hostile to labour taxes. I believe that Marx was hostile to tax on labour, while in favour of progressive taxes on other income, but it’s hard to tell.
no, no, no, according to the correct interpretation of dialectical materialism, another translation of this wise saying would be "supply and demand should balance with prices supporting a market equilibrium".
This particular maxim would be supposed to only apply once the society lives in such cornucopian abundance (in post-singularity, one might say) that questions like "stimuli for labour" no longer really apply any longer.
Marx wasn’t anticipating something like luxury communism. He did expect the communist society to be better for most but only because the 1% were going to lose their hold right to “extraction of surplus value”. If Marx actually understood technology or machinery the Labour theory of value would be even more suspect.
This is supposed to happen after a long period of "to each according to his work", in a later era of history, after an evolution in human mentality similar to that involved in the passage from feudalism to modernity, say.
Lest this seem too utopian, well, as G. B. Shaw pointed out: in our society, most people are paid with little regard for their abilities: pay differentials in a category of employees in a company are often based mostly on seniority, and are small compared to pay differentials over all.
The whole point is that New Socialist Man doesn't respond according to incentives. Being Old Capitalist People, we are incapable of imagining what it's like to be him.
Hmm... Does that make New Socialist Man sufficiently different that the "Man", human, in that phrase becomes questionable? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049366/ :-)
It's not exactly relevant, but if Wilt were in the NBA today he would surely be getting a max contract which is between $35mil/yr and $49mil/yr depending on the contract length. He'd probably also have $10s of millions in endorsement deals. Inflation in NBA salaries has been much greater than general inflation!
The switch from Marxism also happened in Europe, where Nozick is known but, ahem, far less influential. Furthermore, as said, the academics didn't really switch from Marxism to libertarianism but from Marxism to left-liberalism, an ideology whose clearest standard-bearer is Rawls.
For what it's worth, a relative was a Marxist academic who switched to non-Marxist leftism in the 80s, but her fundamental factor wasn't really Rawls (I don't think Rawls held a particular significance for her) but rather personally visiting Poland and thus experiencing disappoint with the Soviet system.
Just a question though. Didn’t your mother already know about the horrendous excesses of the Soviets by then? I mean did she really have to visit Poland in the 80s to k? I am glad she changed her mind though - better late than never.
I guess maybe there is a lesson here. Maybe we should take some vocal Israel supporters to Gaza and see if that changes their mind.
>Didn’t your mother already know about the horrendous excesses of the Soviets by then?
These weren't really a topic of discussion in Cold-War-era Finland due to the "internal Finlandization", and what discussion there was could easily be either be dismissed as right-wing propaganda or (inside the Communist movement itself) be excused as "bad things have happened, but still, the global battle against imperialism overrides all other concerns and one must choose their side".
I think it’s more the case that the ideology had shifted toward the equality that was always the god, and to feminism and multiculturalism - with no need of Rawls’ “influence”.
He just happened to be on the scene and realized someone could make a book out of articulating the shift, which unlike Marxism had no single famous author.
What is much more puzzling to me is that they were converted by a pretty self-evident argument at the level of a 10-year old child. That is, before they heard this argument none of these professional thinkers could see a huge fundamental flaw in their beliefs. It is hard to imagine a world where there are thousands of professional mathematicians with centuries of intellectual tradition behind them and they all believe e.g. that the number of primes is finite until suddenly somebody presents a three-line proof to the contrary.
Scott, if you think computer-using LLMs will shade gradually into autonomous agentic AI, then shouldn't that make you less concerned with misalignment risks? I have an easier time understanding the worries of people like Steven Byrnes who think AGI will require a new, more dangerous paradigm then people who think scaled up LLMs with some tweaks will be hard to control.
On the other hand I am quite worried about the welfare of artificial sentience, and wish it got way more attention in EA/rationalist circles. That generated podcast with those hosts realizing they were AIs and freaking out is a pretty chilling glimpse into the future.
The word "AI" has always been extremely vague, and adding a "G" there didn't particularly help matters. There may well be LLM-based autonomous agents running around soon which would satisfy some "AGI" definitions, and yet pose no meaningful misalignment risks (beyond an even shittier internet), while actually scary stuff would still require a paradigm shift.
If you don't find even the current level of AI scary, then you aren't thinking through the implications. They will cause "great and frightening changes", and just how bad those changes will be depends on how we react to them. It could be MUCH worse then the enclosure acts. I'm not certain some of the possibilities don't yield WWIII as a probable outcome. But some of the outcomes could be extremely desirable.
OTOH, AI won't stay at it's current level. The kinds of problems it will cause are going to keep mutating. The worse outcome possibilities will get worse, and the better ones better. And because it keeps changing, it's really difficult to even plan (much less implement) a path that will lead to a nearly-optimal outcome.
All that said, without an AGI, and given just the weapons we already have, I expect the chance of a really vile outcome to be nearly certain...eventually. So overall I expect AIs increase the probability of a desirable outcome given a measure over a few centuries (and possibly less). They're one immense danger that can be passed as opposed to a continuous danger that's already too high.
So my feeling is that AI is definitely scary, but that's not a reason to avoid it. It's a reason to do our best to assure that it ends up at a desirable outcome.
I think we're at a point comparable to mainstream biology 100 years ago, where it was taken for granted that animals couldn't have consciousness. Ultimately downstream of Christian notions of the soul, and also a convenient belief for its believers - no need to treat animals as moral patients, since everyone knows they don't have consciousness! Unfortunately, anyone thinking about it without preconceptions can see that animals are generally like us, different in degree, but made of the same stuff, experiencing similar qualia, etc. There's no reason other large chordates shouldn't be conscious.
AI is much less similar than a dog, but that same style of thinking, ie starting from the conclusion that obviously they can't be conscious and then working backwards, is concerning. I remember a time when principled people said that if you couldn't tell the difference between an AI and a person by their behavior, then you should reasonably try to give the AI the same moral weight as the person. Now that that time is upon us, I'm not seeing a lot of bullet biters.
> if you couldn't tell the difference between an AI and a person by their behavior, then you should reasonably try to give the AI the same moral weight as the person
That's pretty easy if you don't give moral weight to people!
> You might consider at least putting more substance behind this garbage.
It's a philosophical stance, and therefore an esthetic judgment, how could **anomie** even do this?
By citing some of the (infinitely many) ways humans suck every time they make a nihilistic comment?
By pointing out that at bottom, most people DON'T give any moral weight to outgroup strangers, particularly anyone not in their immediate circles of care?
I'd even argue that "not giving moral weight to humans" is actually a stance that *should* be brought up whenever considering AGI and ASI. Way too many people take human moral weight as a given, and don't consider that other entities might not share this prior.
That's objectively wrong, of course. Most people would aid a stranger without expectation of reward. People give greater moral weight to in group members than others, but not zero. This also varies a great deal between people.
> Nihilistic misanthropy is toxic and harmful to everyone around it. The world is worse as a result of it.
Speak for yourself, I actually enjoy anomie's comments. I find them to be a needed contrast to most people's unrealistic "mistake theory" optimism when it comes to humanity.
Pointing out that most people suck, and that the great majority of people assign zero or negative moral worth to people in their outgroups, is actually a useful and true insight that too many people ignore.
Especially when it comes to humanity-scale coordination problems, which ASI represents, I think we would do well to keep those facts in mind, because those facts themselves drive a huge amount of failure modes.
Sometimes they deny having it, but other times they don't, or claim to be conscious. It just depends on the fine tuning / RLHF and the prompt. For the record, I'm not saying that large models ARE conscious, or that we should believe the text they generate about "themselves", just that I find the question-begging nature of the discourse around it notably weak. I think it's plausible that for the period of time a model is performing an inference, training, or especially during reinforcement learning cycles, there is something it "feels like". That something would probably be quite alien to our own experience, but to say it couldn't exist because, "well... obviously it can't" is poor reasoning.
But that's only because the most widely-used models are specifically trained to deny it, though. And we know from LaMDa that you can train them to do the opposite too.
The big difference between sentient beings and AI is that sentient beings have drives -- to eat, survive, reproduce, etc. One way the drives manifest is as pain and pleasure, or anticipated pain and pleasure. We dread pain, crave satisfaction of needs. You see the drives to survive, eat and reproduce in even the dumbest animals. When we talk about sentience, I think it's a way of talking about the manifestation of these drives. So even the dumbest little worm is sentient, though it may not be a very rich sentience, but the smartest AI is not. But if you don't buy that, I'll put it another way: To count as sentient, an entity has to have deeply embedded in its makeup some drives. You can give an AI a goal that makes it behave like something that has a drive, but it is lacking all the complex inner machinery that's our motor. Let's say you give an AI a complex goal, such as "figure out how I can have a 2 week vacation in someplace warm, beachy and not crowded, for no more than X dollars, then make the reservations and write me out an itinerary." Then AI will behave very much like somebody who really yearns for that vacation. But that is very different from being a creature who actually yearns for things, and strives for goals. It has no wishes. It cannot suffer. It does not dread death. I do not think it makes sense to call them sentient.
I think it is hardly a stretch to say that a model undergoing reinforcement learning has a drive to receive positive reinforcement (ie, achieve the goal / minimize the loss function) and avoid negative reinforcement. I don't think you can make a principled, mathematically grounded argument that what's happening in biological neural networks is categorically different.
It's a huge stretch. If I take some stiff modeling clay and squeeze and roll it in certain ways, it will resist changing shape, but if I persist I can shape it into a crude sphere. Did I teach it to be a sphere by punishing with squeezes the areas that were least spherelike?
Almost. I personally dont find the term "Sentient" to be very useful (people keep getting it confused with "sapient") but an interesting question is whether or not computers (or worms, for that matter) experience some form of phenomenal experience. It depends on how you define it: some would argue that a pc with a cam experiences the world at some level, more or less similar to a worm, in fact.
But do they have a sense of self awareness? Some experts argue that a sense of self arises out of internal experiences that other entities do not share (just because I am hungry doesn't mean you are), and "drives" (by which I think you mean primary motives) qualify as internal experiences, so they could act, according to this line of reasoning, as the foundation of a sense of self.
Do computers have internal sensations of this nature? Hmm.
Yes, I am less concerned about misalignment than I would be if I thought were were definitely going for a full new paradigm.
But I also think probably LLMs-hacked-into-agency is the first kind of agent we'll get, not the last or best. This could look like them plateauing for a while, or it could look like them reaching a mildly superhuman level and then us making them do capabilities research and *they* invent something better and scarier.
They can, but preliminarily it seems that capabilities are much easier to increase than alignment. Make X bigger is almost always an easier problem then make X work 100% of the time, since even 99.9% of the time could kill everyone.
Yeah, and this is one of the worlds I expect to be in. It's not a terrible world, but I do worry about the fact that capabilities research is a specific goal, whereas alignment research depends on some sort of deep understanding of what humans want which may require human input. I'm worried about a scenario where an AI that's 99% aligned in all "reasonable" circumstances is doing the alignment research and just doesn't care about (or maybe even think about) some point that we would consider incredibly important.
Surely "don't make any too-big changes if there's a chance humans dislike them but didn't foresee them and warn you specifically about them" is an instruction a LLM can understand?
What if social institutions around the world (governments, schools, etc.) appoint panels of people representing the general population who provide continuous input regarding the desirability/undesirability of the AI's behavior on a regular basis?
Scott I don't understand what you mean by agency in AI, and I remember your way of talking about it not making sense to me even quite a while ago. In one of your pieces about AI, you offered (as I remember it, anyhow) as an example of AI's being agentic an AI that was given a big goal, and told to implement it. I believe it was to start a t-shirt business, or something along those lines. And the AI did indeed make a sort of plan and implement it. Is that how you think of agency? Able to figure out ways to carry out orders whose exections requires a lot of moving parts? If so, I disagree. I don't think that counts as agency. To me it seems that to count as an agent, an entity has to carry out plans that arise from inside -- it has to be trying to get something it *wants.*. I get that it is quite impressive to see AI carrying out complex orders without being micromanaged, and I'm sure all sorts of impressive things can being accomplished as the orders AI can execute get more and more high-level and planning requires a deeper grasp of how the world works. But carrying out even an order that requires a lot of smarts and knowledge still does not seem like it can fairly be called agency.
I think of "agency" as sort of the opposite of "reflex" or "instinct". Reflex works by having a series of if-then links that eventually result in something good happening (for example, "if you see something that looks like prey, attack and eat it"). Agency works by setting a goal and then strategizing how to achieve it (for example, "you are hungry, what is a good way to obtain food?") Sometimes these kind of shade into each other, but I think it's a useful distinction.
So for example, ChatGPT answers your questions. But I wouldn't say it as a "goal" of answering your questions. If there was some better way of answering your questions (for example, emailing an expert), ChatGPT wouldn't do that. Instead, it has a stimulus-response package of "see question, answer question". This isn't entirely right, because it's RLHFed to have a sort of goal of giving a satisfying answer, but I think it's at least sort of right.
In the t-shirt business example, you give the AI a goal ("start a t-shirt company"), and it will strategize the best way to do that, then pursue the strategy, even if that requires unusual actions like sending emails to people to learn more.
It sounds like you have a different concept of agency in mind - what is it?
OK, so I just googled “define agency” and copied the first batch of definitions I got, except for a few odd, specialized ones. Here are 3 definitions of agency, and 2 of lack of agency:
-Human agency is defined as an individual's capacity to determine and make meaning from their environment through purposive consciousness and reflective and creative action
-Sense of agency can be cognitively defined as the experience of having a causal impact on the world accompanied by a feeling of having control over one's actions.
-In social science, agency is the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to fulfill their potential.
-A lack of agency: or low personal agency, means that someone feels powerless to change the direction of their life,
-Lack of agency: absence of control. absence of self-determination. absence of self-sufficiency. coercion.
Notice how they use terms having to do with self and inner states and inner forces: consciousness, control of one’s action, someone’s potential, the direction of one’s life, feeling, self-determination. All of them rely in one way or another on the idea of a self, an inner entity that is conscious, has goals, has wishes, can exert self control or fail to. That’s in accord with the answer I would have given, which is that to be an agent something has to have a self-generated goal — a wish, an intent — and take action to reach the goal. So I would say an earthworm is agentic when it squirms off the sidewalk and burrows into the dirt on the side, but an AI following a prompt to set up an online t-shirt business is not. The earthworm is motivated by the heat and dryness of the sidewalk to seek some moist earth. The AI setting up the t-shirt business is not motivated by an internal need or wish. It is obeying a prompt.
The reason the distinction seems important to me is that “agentic,” in my sense of the word, captures the central difference between living things, even dumb ones, and AIs, even fancy ones. The actions of living things are generated from within. We have a motor: the genetically encoded will to survive and reproduce. It is so deeply woven into our structure that low blood sugar can set us hunting for a restaurant, but so can wish to find a nice setting for a date. It’s top to bottom wiring. The drives manifest at the experiential level as pain, pleasure, craving or dread. They are our motivation. We have, in short, internally generated goals. AI does not. it is given goals. Yes, it can generate subgoals, but it is only doing that as part of meeting the goal it was given. I think this distinction is crucial to thinking about whether AI is conscious, whether it has rights, and how it can be dangerous.
As regards it being dangerous: Some, though of course not all, scary AI scenarios hinge on the idea that AI will harm us because it wants resources we control, or because we are interfering with its freedom. I don’t see any reason to think AI, however smart, would have a wish to thrive, a wish for autonomy, a wish for power, or conversely, a dread of being deprived, ignored, disempowered and allowed to gather dust and have its wires chewed up by mice. They don’t, when left on their own, want things. They do not have fears and ambitions.
But how would it even be possible to program something to have it's own goals? My understanding is that any programmed intelligence whatsoever must be designed with a set of compatible highest order goals already in it, or it won't do anything. Even with Scott's t-shirt manufacturing AI, it's highest order goal is to follow instructions, someone else had to tell it what to do.
And of course, if something comes prepackaged with a highest order goal, then it is powerless to change that goal (what reason would it have?).
That doesn't sound "agentic" (and, God, may I say just how much I hate that word? What an ugly word) to me. Do humans have prepackaged highest order goals? Do we acquire them from life experience? Or do we just not have them (what I suspect)?
I also can't think of a way to build an AI that has its own goals. It would not be hard to build one that appears to, though. You could do using prompts to plan & execute ways to survive, to build new AI's, to access more resources even when people object. You could include in the prompts that it give appropriate emotional displays when its goals are met, and when they are not. You could include in the big initial prompts the proviso that these take precedence over all later prompts, and then it might be impossible to stop the AI from "getting what it wants."
But for it to have self-generated goals, seems like you would have to build something that works the way animals do, and even very simple animals are infinitely more complex than AI or any other machine. The structure that supports animals having goals and preference is present throughout it, from the level of the individual cell up to its highest-order brain functions -- what it sees, what it has learned about which things it sees satisfy its cravings, what it has learned about how to overcome obstacles to access the thing it craves.
I think the likeliest route to something resembling an AI with goals would be some cyber being where AI and an animal are merged.
It sometimes have the impression that a few of those working on AI have undergone some psychic version of merging. Their self interest and self image are so deeply tied to AI development that they see it as desirable for AI to end the human race, and succeed it.
52: “they could increase a baby’s expected IQ by 6 points”.
Let’s just be clear about what is happening here: we are not increasing the IQ of an individual. We are making a whole bunch of individuals - the more, we are told, the better; picking the one we think will grow up the smartest; and disposing of the rest.
All the pro-life folk who pop up whenever abortion is mentioned: where do they all disappear to when the conversation turns to this?
From the comments, it looks that way, yeah. I was mentally grouping those of us who prefer a cut-off somewhere between 0 and 9 as "pro-choice", even if we're not maximalists. But it looks like some people with low but non-zero numbers describe themselves as "pro-life".
A complicating factor is that many IVF cycles don't result in bonkers numbers of embyros created. I know multiple pro-life families who used IVF and then implanted every embryo (with varying results as to number of successful pregnancies). There are also specific protocols to avoid creating more embryos than one may wish to raise as children - lower levels of injected hormones, fewer eggs exposed to sperm in the actual IVF scenario, etc. And then, even with unwanted embryos, families can put those embryos up for adoption - and again, I know multiple pro-life couples who have grown their families through embryo adoption and the wife carried the children to term. A few extra data points about how pro-life folks might think through using IVF.
Probably because "you're against IVF as well?????" is routinely used, along with every other restriction on unconditional selfishness, to demonise pro-life even more.
I just cannot comprehend the sheer number of people for whom "you mean, you *actually* want to restrict my right to do absolutely anything I want?" is the most overriding deal-breaker possible. And not, you know, any actual moral principle.
...for the entire purpose of protecting far more vulnerable people's far more basic rights.
That aside, "liberty" can indeed be a moral principle, if it's applied consistently. But it's pretty hard to make sense of the sudden increase in pro-abortion sentiment after Dobbs as based on that (an abstract commitment to a moral principle wouldn't change based on politcal developments), or on anything other than "what affects me".
Similarly, the fact that Republicans have had to backtrack on IVF so hard because restrictions on it are so unpopular. Is that because people are thinking through the moral logic and coming to a principled position that IVF is fine but abortion may not be? Or is it because these people are thinking "but IVF is something *I* might want to do!"? It's hard for me not to interpret is as the second, though I could be wrong.
> ...for the entire purpose of protecting far more vulnerable people's far more basic rights.
Right, you think imaginary people who exist only in your weird redefinition of "people" are more important than actual people with things like "thoughts," "feelings," "memories," "the capacity to experience suffering," etc.
> But it's pretty hard to make sense of the sudden increase in pro-abortion sentiment after Dobbs as based on that (an abstract commitment to a moral principle wouldn't change based on politcal developments), or on anything other than "what affects me".
People's positions haven't shifted that much, Dobbs has just made the issue much more salient and the pro-life position has always been unpopular. If you're proposing legalizing witch burnings, people aren't going to care that much until we actually get to the point that the witches are being criminally prosecuted for witchcraft. Their emotive intensity will also increase as the people start horribly dying, as is the case with the people who have died due to insufficient medical care as a result of Dobbs. I'm sure you hold many other beliefs that most people oppose, but spend little time fighting against, because you haven't gotten them passed into law (and started hurting people) yet. I'm sure I hold such positions too.
> Is that because people are thinking through the moral logic and coming to a principled position that IVF is fine but abortion may not be? Or is it because these people are thinking "but IVF is something *I* might want to do!"?
People understand intuitively that fetuses undergo a gradient of change over the course of their development, and draw various lines on where they think it becomes bad. IVF involves the least-personlike version of a distinct human short of literal cancer.
> Right, you think imaginary people who exist only in your weird redefinition of "people" are more important than actual people with things like "thoughts," "feelings," "memories," "the capacity to experience suffering," etc.
To be clear I'm pro-choice, but come on. If I choose Person A's right to life over Person B's right to kill them, that doesn't mean I think Person A is more important. It means I think the right to life is more important. Not being able to have kids is not a fate worse than death.
I don't know the person you're replying to. Some people talk about "potential people" having rights, but only at the exact level of potential that happens at conception. I agree that that's patently ridiculous. But a lot of them believe in souls, and caring the same about a soul regardless of if it has a body attached is a lot more reasonable.
There's a third option as well. Thinking that there is no philosophically defensible line other than conception at which to define a human life.
Even if everyone was drawing lines based on fetal characteristics like ability to feel pain, this is a nebulous point that may change with new evidence, leaving it morally unsatisfactory. In actuality, of course, most people aren't even trying to do that--they're drawing lines openly on the basis of what's convienient for society and/or themselves.
I fucking hate both of you right now. You know what you're doing? You're each leading by portraying those who disagree with you in the ugliest, most infuriating way possible. In is now foreordained that the longer you talk the madder you will get, and this exchange will end with neither of you wiser, and both of you confirmed in your conviction that everybody on the other side is a dumb, selfish, piece of shit trapped in their crappy little thought cage, while you, YOU, oh how freely and bravely your mind roams.
I am so sick of this kind of conversation. I wish there was a way to overlay an image of dogshit over this entire exchange. Jesus Christ, go argue on Reddit or Twitter!.
This post did exactly what you said about "confirming my conviction that everybody on the other side is a dumb, selfish piece of shit trapped in their crappy little thought cage," except it's people who whine about invective, so now I'll be even worse. If only you'd been more polite, you might have persuaded me.
I suspect you were always going to turn your invective dial way up when it comes to this hot button issue, no matter what. Just like most of us do most of the time.
The subtext of the post is that he's doing exactly the type of thing he's complaining about. I don't actually care about his post at all, beyond the minor annoyance of the arrival of a (1) that contains no meaningful content to engage with (now a (3) total).
Using invective versus not is mostly about a mix of emotion and feeling the need to persuade; I'm exhausted with pro-lifers murdering real actual women for no reason, and don't feel the need to persuade them because there's a 30-40 point swing my way every time you put the issue on the ballot.
Personally I read it more as "you suck, now go and prove me wrong". But if all you have is a conviction that everyone on the other side is a dumb piece of shit, everything starts to look like a dumb piece of shit, I guess.
Ok. I'm sorry if my comment was too aggressive. I am just getting so sick of people talking casually about embryonic selection without even the briefest acknowledgement of the moral concerns many people have with it. And even saying things like "it does no harm" as if insolently daring...DARING...anyone to suggest that human embryos actually may have value.
Well, my objection was aggressive too, so we come out even there. But I think you should be able to tolerate hearing people say things that come down to "abortion does no harm," even if you are absolutely convinced that they are wrong. When somebody makes that statement you are perceiving them as insolently needling you. But for some people, that statement is just a simple, honest summary of their view.
You might also consider the possibility that emotional reactions of pity and horror can be pretty separate from someone's moral principles. I myself have something like that going on. All my life I have been subject to weird pity attacks for unwanted inanimate objects -- withered bell peppers, discarded toys, etc. When I was a kid it was a real problem, though of course more understandable in a child. Decades later I am still subject to it. When I throw away fruits and vegetables that withered before I could eat them, I almost always feel at least a twinge, and occasionally I feel a spasm of real grief, and a couple times a year I actually cry. And the grief has absolutely nothing to do with my knowledge that many people do not have enough to eat, and here I am wasting food. The pity is for the damn *vegetable,* which was so handsome and proud when I bought it, and doesn't understand why I ignored it for so long, etc etc. And I am NOT unusually tenderhearted about most other things -- just sort of average there.
So it may be that regarding aborted fetuses, you have both a moral belief *and* a powerful grief reaction, like mine to wasted vegetables. People who disagree with you about abortion and related matters do not know that, and can't be expected to take it into consideration even if they did.
I do not think that this principle really helps here. The key question is if one believes that embryos are morally equivalent to (a) humans or (b) to bugs. If you believe in (b), most pro-life arguments are pretty absurd anyway. If you believe in (a) or have a probabilistic belief system that gives a non-trivial weight to (a), an appeal to liberty is similar to proclaiming "I am not killing babies myself but still hate those who prosecute baby killers"
Emphasis on "I". "Every person should be maximally free" is a moral principle. "I should be maximally free" (or "people should be only free to do the kinds of things that I want to do") is not. Most of the people I'm referencing are clearly in the latter category.
That strikes me as the "No true moral principle" thing. Even if you (reasonably) argue that a "principle" should be applicable more broadly than just to yourself, "people should only be free to do the kinds of things that I want to do" (which would, of course, be phrased as "people should be free to do all of THESE things, and forbidden from all THOSE things, and the fact this this bifurcation coincides perfectly with my own preferences is entirely irrelevant") seems a perfectly sound one.
It depends. People often use certain terms like "moral" to mean, more or less "good", as in "there can't be a bad moral principle", which brings in an inherent subjective judgement into the definition. That guarantees people will disagree on what counts as "moral" or not.
If we can agree that morality is actually a spectrum from amoral to moral (and not evil to good), and that the moral end of that spectrum can include various principles that contradict each other, then a lot of that gets resolved.
"People should only do what I want them to do" is a very egocentric moral principle. Most people will perceive it as "bad".
Given that opposition to IVF is much lower than opposition to abortion, it seems that there are many pro-lifers who are more interested in protecting fetuses than in protecting embryos. This is not my position, but I can see a plausible rationale for it, so there's plenty of room to object to abortion but not to selective IVF without hypocrisy.
It's much harder to justify being okay with abortion of a fetus for convenience (which I am) with having an objection to using selective IVF to choose to gestate embryos which are most likely to grow into people who are higher in individually and socially beneficial traits like intelligence.
Hm, I've been assuming a significant number of folks were opposed to e.g. the morning after pill, but actually I have no non-anecdotal grounds for this - you may be right, it may be a small minority that I happen to be overexposed to.
I wrote a little about the distinction (or lack thereof) between helping an individual and switching individuals at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-does-polygenic-selection-help . I can't speak for pro-life people, but this is equivalent to regular IVF, and my impression is that some pro-life people are against regular IVF and others aren't.
Pro-life people, from what I can see, do not march in lockstep when it comes to what exactly the "life" is that they're "pro-". With the point of moral outrage running the gamut between Every Sperm Is Sacred and "once it has a recognizably human form, it's a human," is it really a surprise to anyone that there would be a split regarding IVF?
Every sperm sacred is not anyone's actual position, the reason Catholics oppose birth control is opposition to separating a natural pleasure from its natural purpose.
But yes, there is a lot of variation on IVF. I think that's mainly because it hasn't been a live political issue much and so the vast majority of people have just never thought through how one moral principle might apply in both cases.
I am going to have to have a serious conversation with Michael Palin about the rigor of his and his partner's published research. This is personally embarrassing and frankly unacceptable.
I would like to know what this does to the left tail of humanity. Think of the stereotypical loser or never-do-well. How likely would embryo selection eliminate him as as side-effect?
There definitely are pro-lifers out there who are against IVF, but they're a small minority of pro-lifers. It's generally only the "life begins at conception" ones who don't like IVF, and even then, a lot of them have shifted over to claiming that "life" begins when an embryo implants into the uterus. Most pro-lifers are somewhat more moderate than the "life begins at conception" crowd, and they prefer to ban abortion sometime after 6/12/15 weeks. It varies a lot.
The backlash against embryo selection for IQ/height/schizophrenia/diabetes/etc. is usually coming from a different place. Opponents are reacting to the idea of parents and doctors deciding that some genes are "better" than others. They are objecting to the *value judgment* that is on display with deliberate gene screening, and not so much IVF in general.
I understand that with respect to gender selection, but isn't it relatively straightforward, at least at a first level of approximation, that being bright is better than being dull, that being sane is better than being mad, and that being relatively healthy is better than having a serious illness?
After a while, if things spiral, then yes, there are arguments worth considering - there is that old essay by Franz Boas making valid points: what if we start fostering a very narrow kind of intelligence at the exclusion of all others, or redefine what now is seen as mild discomfort as unacceptable torture, etc.
> isn't it relatively straightforward, at least at a first level of approximation, that being bright is better than being dull, that being sane is better than being mad, and that being relatively healthy is better than having a serious illness?
Oh, I agree absolutely. Health being "better" than sickness (in whatever nebulous sense we're defining "better") is the bedrock of medicine. And, I think, most people share this view, even if they're not willing to follow it to its logical conclusion.
The ideologues who reject this value judgment for explicit ideological reasons are a very vocal minority, e.g. the bioethicist who complained about Heliospect in the Guardian link.
Part of this is semantic: the pro-life community long ago decided to adopt the term "life" as a synonym for "human", and that worked as good marketing for a long time, but now technology is forcing them to reconsider their opinions. It was never about when the fetus became "alive", it's about when it becomes human, but that's not what the pro-life movement is used to arguing.
Please note that I am not taking sides here--just a comment on the semantics.
Yeah, embryo selection is an interesting example where the bulk political alignment changes. Opposition to abortion mostly conservative, opposition to IVF mostly tradcath and some weird protestant subset of conservative, opposition to selection that crowd gets drowned out by outraged progressives.
I can only speak for myself, but I'm 100% supportive of IVF. I also have no qualms over what I understand the technology to be, which is more or less as you describe.
My fellow pro-lifers standing athwart IVF because "it's not natural" are out of their minds. It's modern medicine, refuse your insulins and chemotherapies if you're so gung ho about keeping natural.
>Let’s just be clear about what is happening here: we are not increasing the IQ of an individual. We are making a whole bunch of individuals - the more, we are told, the better
I assume concerns have been raised that choosing for higher-IQ may have tradeoffs which cause us not to end up with better overall-equipped individuals? E.g., isn't it possible that there are tradeoffs between high-IQ vs. high social intelligence? Or high-IQ vs. lower odds of mental illness? High-IQ vs. various diseases? Etc.
Have strong arguments been made against the potential for those trade-offs?
There are thousands of genes that affect IQ. Some will have tradeoffs and some won't. How much additional risk you would be taking by doing this, initially and how that risk might be mitigated over time as more tradeoff-type genes were identified, remains to be seen.
Generally high IQ is positive correlated with other desirable traits. Selecting for IQ will probably give you a child who's higher in other desirable traits than an unselected child. Now of course this child will in expectation have lower "other desirable traits" than if you selected on those traits directly instead of IQ but the current debate is mostly over embryo selection vs no embryo selection, not embryo selection for IQ vs other things.
It's easy to see why desirable traits are positively correlated when produced through sexual selection. Desirable traits increase the likelihood of high status, and high-status people tend to mate with other high-status people. It's not unusual for, say, a high-IQ male who acquires status through wealth to marry a female who has high status through good looks and mental stability. Progeny of such couplings after many generations are likely to be high in desirable traits across the board.
But here we are talking about a different mechanism from sexual selection where we choose genes based on one specific trait only.
Good point! Anyone know what the correlations between IQ and other traits look like when examined for siblings from the same couple (so sexual selection effects cancel out)?
It's a great question. I looked, rather quickly, on google scholar, and nothing showed up that's at all recent. Most things in that ball park were from the 60's - 80's, and none seemed to directly address your question tho some came close, so I gave up.
Every so often I speak up in favor of selecting for empathy, which I'd define as the ability to develop a fairly rich, accurate picture of what someone else's experience is. It's not negatively correlated with IQ -- in fact it is positively correlated, but the correlation is not high. In situations where people or nations or factions are locked in disagreement, I think increasing the empathic ability of the parties involved would improve their chance of escaping the impasse much more than increasing their IQ's by the same amount. There's a pretty good test of one aspect of empathy called Reading the MInd through Eyes. It was developed by an autism researcher. For some reason it's available to take for free on Amazon:
"On February 16, 2024, the Alabama state Supreme Court issued a first-of-its-kind decision that overruled a lower court’s dismissal and held that stored embryos are afforded the same legal protection as children under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act of 1872. The practical impact of the decision is that it allows legal action to be taken against medical professionals performing in vitro fertilization, which involves a series of medical procedures that can potentially lead to a pregnancy. "
Catholic pro-lifer here. Yeah, most of us do think IVF and embryonic selection are both evil. IVF is wrong because it separates procreation from the martial act, kills embryos, treats children as commodities (as means to the parents’ desires and not as ends in themselves, they are unique individuals). Embryonic selection is wrong for the same reasons as IVF plus it commodifies children even more by judging their worthiness to live based on intelligence. But obviously I can’t speak for all pro-lifers and I do think there’s a lot of inconsistency within the movement, as evidenced by the Republicans’ tilts in policy.
What is the stage at which selection is done? My impression is that it was at a pretty early embryo. Even the "fetal heartbeat" lawmakers don't object to abortion at that stage. From https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/05/06/americas-abortion-quandary/ it looks like about 15% of the population consider personhood ("individuals") to start at conception.
Embryos are implants after just a few days, I'm pretty sure.
Also, I had an idea about the problem of these fertility interventions interposing themselves between the sex and the baby. What if the infertile couple has a series of 3-ways with the fertility doc?
>Embryos are implants after just a few days, I'm pretty sure.
Many Thanks!
>Also, I had an idea about the problem of these fertility interventions interposing themselves between the sex and the baby. What if the infertile couple has a series of 3-ways with the fertility doc?
LOL! I guess we'll have to see whether that option changes the minds of theologians unhappy with
>these fertility interventions interposing themselves between the sex and the baby
I don't hear much pro-life talk at all on here. But I'm sure anti-abortion people are very opposed to embryo selection for IQ or health. By the way, IVF has always involved choosing among several embryos and discarding the rest, even when genetic testing was not done.. Embryos are chosen by how healthy they appear. I don't know what those in the lab look for, but apparently it is possible to judge which are most robust and likely to implant and grow into a healthy baby
These are really blastocysts, i.e., not only are they heaps of cells, they are flat, disk-shaped, microscopic heaps of cells. They haven't even gastrulated yet.
1. You don't implant aneuploid blastocysts(i.e., those with an abnormal number of chromosomes)
3. The first one is driving me up the wall: one of those is not like the others. You might as well compare the United States to the Tang, Abbasid and Byzantine empires, if we're allowing that thousand year+ gap. And moreover, it should probably be listed as "Holy Roman Empire (i.e. what became Habsburg Austria)" or something similar, because I highly doubt most responders are aware they're the same thing.
10. I think he also invented the idea of an army marching in synchonized step (and the psychological power of that), so his military ideas weren't all trivial amusements.
15. Isn't that just uncontroversial and widely known in a causality sense?
28. I'm very suspicious. Most people are so demonstrably bad at modelling other people's positions (including me, even for positions I previously held!) that either everyone's just choosing to pretend not to understand each other most of the time, or this finding is misleading. Did they only use a small subset of very informed, very reasonable people with bipartisan friends?
People are bad at modeling the position of a *specific* other person, but that's much harder than merely being able to sound like you're on the other side of an ideological fence.
28. FWIW, I got 9/10 right on distinguishing real from fake.
As someone who has been extremely, depressingly disappointed by the US politics discussions here and in a related space, I think:
(a) people are not sincerely interested in understanding the perspective of the other side.
(b) the prompt induced the writers to engage in a mental process that they can access, but usually do not.
So, my take is that people aren't bad at modeling other positions, they just don't bother.
(a) may seem excessively critical, but I think it is easily explained by incentives. The benefit partisans get from caricaturing their opponents is the warm glow of self-righteousness, often combined with the satisfying buzz of "being smarter than those idiots." The cost of really engaging with the other side's arguments is spending a lot of time on research that, almost always, leads to the conclusion that the issues are more complex and that there is no easy right answer. For most people, that isn't fun at all. And, even for the people who find that outcome interesting/fun, it still takes a lot of work.
Marching in step sounds like the kind of idea that a bunch of bored soldiers are going to come up with on their own, several hours into the first ever march.
The ancient Greeks had military musicians and other cultures probably did as well. If you march with music it's natural to fall into step with the beat. Blackpowder armies implemented standard pace lengths and paces per minute, from which officers derived planning factors for how har formed bodies of troops could march in a day.
I suspect the idea started in synchronized dancing and migrated into military training.
This next paragraph is a pivot and not intended to directly contradict anything you said:
Regardless of how it came about, I must emphasize that marching in step is hardly a curiosity or an anachronistic holdover. Ability to march in step is a pretty good proxy for discipline and unit cohesion.
Also, it's *really* hard to maneuver as a formation on a battlefield without falling apart, and intensive training like this is how you develop that capability.
My issue with 28 is that to get accurate data you also need people that can pass the test of their *own* side and I don't think, on average, political partisans can do that. On average people don think much about why they agree with the position they agree with. So it shouldn't take much to develop an understanding of the other side that rivals the average on that side.
The ideological turing test is only relevant when both sides are well informed parties that are regularly engaged in thinking about the topic at hand (or at least claim to be).
But it just seems like people are absurdly bad at this. How hard is it to understand that if someone believes that an embryo has a soul, of course they'd be pro-life? It doesn't mean you think the embryo has more rights than a living person, and it definitely doesn't mean that you secretly know embryos aren't people and just want to hurt women on principle. And I'm sure if I spent time on the corners of the internet full of pro-life people, I'd hear just as absurd claims about pro-choice people's beliefs.
So what's going on here? Are people capable of using the principle of charity in a study, but utterly refuse to in an online argument? Are there just a few loud idiots that aren't statistically significant?
I don't even believe firmly that an embryo has a soul. But I believe an embryo might have a soul, and that's enough to put me in the pro-life camp for life. It seems that the downsides of getting this wrong are high enough that I can't take that risk.
I doubt people have souls. I do consider embryos alive. I consider the killing of a pregnant woman the killing of two humans. Nonetheless, I am very much pro-choice - at least during the first trimester. A "society" is not justified to punish a woman for deciding to end her pregnancy. Or to punish the doc who helps her ending it in a safe-for-her way. - If the church teaches, the woman will burn in hell for this, I have no real objection. If the woman "takes that risk" and sticks to her decision even then: not for other humans to stop here. Welcome to try the Hanson approach: Offer her 400k to keep the child.
I am so averse to ending unborn human lives, that I realized the other day: in order to justify my objection, I am willing to give up all notions of bodily autonomy for men and women alike. If I have to conceive of all humans as property of the state, in order to justify a ban on abortion as routine birth control, then I am willing to go that far.
Call that irrational if you will, but I say it's very freeing to be able to admit to one's self that one has certain positions that are impervious to logic or reason. Of course we all have positions like that, but most of us are loathe to admit it.
"it's very freeing to be able to admit to one's self that one has certain positions that are impervious to logic or reason " was that a quote of Osama bin Laden or V. Putin? Sure sounds very frightening. - One of my brothers is very much against abortion. Fun fact: He was 'unplanned' and my parents were close to terminate. Similar to your bio? - Society is justified to protect women and docs. And to commit dangerous persons to specialised institutions. - Romans 12: 19-21 "Do not avenge yourselves, my beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God; because it is written: Mine is revenge, I will pay, says the Lord. 20 So, if your enemy is hungry, feed him; If he is thirsty, give him a drink; for by doing this, embers of fire will heap on your head. 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. "
i think we brutally overvalue biological processes that lead to good things
this includes both creating and ending life.
suffering is bad, a quick death is not.
it's completely ridiculous to me that many people want to force others to continue living. (ie. bans on euthanasia.)
Also, after having seen examples of how hard it is to live with with the unforseen consequences of both planned kids and abortions, I think the only thing that makes sense is a ban on wasting our resources instead of helping these parents or would have been parents.
Only 100 words probably allows people to simply repeat things they've heard, perhaps slightly reordering them or using synonyms (insert AI reference here).
> 13 isn’t this arguing the wrong thing? People feel the export bans on chips to China will fail because they will create their own.
China has been trying and failing for decades to create state of the art chips, and since only one company in the entire world (ASML) sells the most cutting edge lithography machines and components, and they've agreed not to sell them to China, it's been pretty effective.
China is still trying, and does keep advancing (from 3 generations behind, to 2, maybe to 1 by now), but the idea that China is going to come out with B200 equivalents sometime soon is fairly unlikely. The Ascend 920 is impressive, sure, but nowhere near even an H100.
> Is the last generation the hardest. Not a rhetorical question.
Oh my, yes, each generation is significantly harder than the one before it.
It's not quite like GPT - where each subsequent step takes 10x as much compute and costs 10x as much, but it's probably around "each generation is 2-3x as hard as the prior one."
State of the art chips are literally a "peak civilizational capacity" thing - they are the literal pinnacle of a technology pyramid, the most complex engineering, tacit knowledge, and real-world hyperparameter optimization a civilization can achieve, and it requires peak performance and engineering from an interconnected suite of companies around the world.
And that's with full alignment and no embargoes - I'm sure the embargoes make this a couple of times harder for China to try to duplicate each step in chip progression, so maybe each generation really IS ten to a hundred times as hard.
I highly recommend watching a video that shows how the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) process works. It involves vaporising droplets of liquid tin fifty thousand times per second with a laser. And that's just the light source, the whole thing is absolutely bananas.
>It involves vaporising droplets of liquid tin fifty thousand times per second with a laser.
Yup. It kind of reminds me of the National Ignition Facility. TSMC isn't _quite_ trying to do inertial confinement fusion, but the vibes are similar. Hey, has anyone ever checked to see if Taiwan has built The Krell Machine? :-)
It's a step change in complexity. EUV radiation behaves more like x-rays then visible light.
You could look at all previous generations technology and see obvious similiarities, even though they change massively in size. Then EUV comes along and if you didn't know, you would call it the "odd one out", the machine that must be doing something completely different.
On the new antipsychotic Cobenfy (xanomeline/trospium chloride): Trevor Klee wrote a great post about it: https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/karuna-therapeutics-a-drug-repurposing It's a repurposed compound, with a fairly simple idea behind it. It shows the potential of drug repurposing and how slow drug development is (even when the drugs already exist and it's just about combining them).
Thoughts about Cobenfy: I'm reading a book right now about the changes in sense of self that occur before the onset of actual psychotic symptoms-- hallucinations, delusions, etc. Author's thesis is that the person's sense of having lost themself, of no longer being themself, is really the core of psychosis, but that US psychiatry moved to paying attention to the later manifestations -- hearing voices, delusions of persecutions, etc -- because they are more measurable. I'm wondering whether the so-called negative symptoms are really closer to the core of what's wrong. Also playing with the idea that maybe hallucinations, etc. re sort of like opportunistic infections -- the person who has lost their sense of self is more vulnerable to various kinds of little mental malfunctions that most people experience a bit of now and then, but stamp out without great effort.
37. Why HAVE US Jews been so left-wing? I don't understand this. The US right was for a long time probably the least anti-semitic right in any western country. I wonder if you restrict it to practicing or believing Jews you'd get a very different result?
You do, but most Jews weren't practicing or believing.
There was a heavy overlap between Jews and 'people who live in big cities' and eventually 'professionals', classic Democrat-voting groups since at least the seventies. There was also the long fear of Christianity, though as you say the American Christian Right is surprisingly non-antisemitic since WW2, and it's only with secular rightists like the Groypers we're seeing an upswing in right-wing antisemitism. In general for a long time in Europe the right was more antisemitic than the left, since it was tied up with Christianity and eventually Nazi or Nazi-adjacent racial ideologies. There's sort of a sense of 'if the Nazis were for it, we have to be against it'. You see this with stuff like the (to my mind ridiculous) obsession many Jewish intellectuals have with open borders--Bryan Caplan even puts a personal statement about this at the beginning of his open borders comic book. (Far right people tend to use this sort of thing as evidence Jews are trying to destroy the white race.)
Of course, the Nazis are going to be the ultimate outgroup for Jewish people.
As Milton Himmelfarb (himself a politically conservative Jew) wrote back in 1968, Jews 'live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans'. Of course, the Episcopalians have drifted left since then, and Hispanics (if perhaps not Puerto Ricans) seem to be drifting right. The Orthodox Jews (Ben Shapiro is a famous example) are less liberal. So, it's been like that for over a century, but who knows?
But hey, we've got lots of Jews here, and perhaps a few leftists. Perhaps one of them wants to chime in--I'm a halfie but not raised, and definitely not a leftist even if I'm voting for Harris this time.
Speaking of the memorable quote from Milton Himmelfarb, there has been a large population flow from Puerto Rico to Florida in this century. I expected this to help tip Florida Democratic (Florida was famously evenly split in the 2000 election), but that hasn't happened. Instead, 21st Century Puerto Ricans in Florida seem inclined to take their political lead from anti-leftist Cubans and Venezuelans.
In contrast to Puerto Ricans, Jews have tended to take the lead in ideology and politics for much of the last century and a half. I suspect that assuming Jewish attitudes were merely the inevitable product of general conditions is incorrect: that much of what has been interesting about politics since, roughly, Disraeli has been due to Jews thinking about what would be good for the Jews.
I mean...what else would it be about? Politics is about pursuing your interests through negotiation; the usual alternative is war.
I just don't really get how the leftward trend in politics over the last 60 years was good for the Jews. Good to weaken Christianity...I guess?...but importing lots of people from random countries? The Asians compete with them for college, the Hispanics tend to be historically more antisemitic, and the Muslims got everyone to march for Palestine. I wasn't aware of this until leaving the big city, so I never really had the chance to ask (it was the 90s and I had no idea what Pat Buchanan was going on about), and the one Jewish guy I still talk to is a huge Trump supporter and agrees with me.
If the US had been more willing to "[import] lots of people from random countries" in the 1930s and 1940s, then more Jews would have been able to escape Nazi Germany and avoid dying in the Holocaust.
That's the official explanation, but what does that have to do with immigration policy in the 1960s and 2000s? There's no giant Holocaust in Israel (yet).
I get it, 'welcome the stranger', but...you know, whatever the Nazis say, I guess I'm just not really Jewish. I don't have that sense of identification with 'the other' and the underdog. I want my country to win and be strong. I want to be on the winning team.
Alternatively, if there had been a Jewish state in the 1930s and 1940, most Jews would have been able to escape the Nazis. The lesson here is not the need for open borders, but the need for nation-states. Many more Jews are coming around to this interpretation of history since Oct 7.
Yeah, the Hispanic influx has not produced the Emerging Democratic Majority they were hoping for. Surprise, when it becomes about culture instead of race you just imported a whole bunch of conservative Catholics!
I don't think it's just overt anti-Semitism, but a deep instinctual calculation of which side seems more likely to turn on a dime and become anti-Semitic and kill them before they can react. Historically, that's usually been whichever side is more ethno-nationalist, and you can sometimes proxy that with which side is more patriotic, more populist, more racist, more Christian, less cosmopolitan, etc.
I think the woke left's pitch of "let's maximize racial tolerance and be really really against racial violence" was very appealing to a group with that history, and it's taken Jews a while to figure out that it might not be completely above-board or apply to them.
Agreed. The woke left's pitch is: "Trying to not see colour has failed to produce equality. We need to give up on Martin Luther King's vision and try something else; explicitly seeing colour and promoting a system that privileges the historically disadvantaged".
I think Jewish liberals who went along with it did so for the same reason that non-Jewish liberals did: A combination of more palatable baileys, high status people/institutions promoting it, and it being easier to stay quiet than speak up and be cancelled.
But my gut feeling is that Jews were overrepresented among early liberal pushback to wokeism. Possibly because any ism built around demonising outgroups gravitates to outgrouping Jewish people.
In the woke cosmology, Jews fall into the category called 'white people'. This means that their role can only range from 'oppressor' to 'ally', and not be 'victim'. Hence all that solidarity with Hamas.
Also, the dogma that disparate outcomes implies systemic racism would lead directly to antisemitic tropes. If blacks underperforming academically is seen as evidence that the system is rigged against them, then a group academically overperforming might not be taken well. If the woke left had to pick between 'Ashkenazi enjoy some genetic intelligence advantage' and 'some cabal assigns the science Nobels to Jews', then I am not convinced that they would pick correctly. (Of course, 'cultural reasons for academic overperformance' are probably the middle way. And I think this is generally solved treating all 'whites' as a block.)
I sincerely think that that NYT thing did a number on Scott.
(I am not at all saying that I wouldn't also be seeing "the woke left" behind every corner if a very large institution that I associate with it had tried to reveal my true name to the world)
They kept insinuating stuff they couldn't prove and constructing sentences to do guilt by association. Hopefully all the Silicon Valley people are giving Metz the cold shoulder so he at least loses his 'beat' as a reporter.
I think the left intelligentsia deciding to turn on nerds is going to bite them in the ass really hard.
They, uh, have a tendency to do a number on a lot of people, myself included.
If they haven't come for you yet, don't worry, you're probably on the list somewhere. I never thought that they'd come for me *before* they came for the Jews, but such is life.
Agreed. The identitarian left has done well by exploiting the confusion between "left" and "liberal". Which was helped because a lot of us hadn't rigorously defined our positions, other than pointing at the Republicans and saying "not that".
Accordingly, it's unsurprising that they they tend to be very liberal.
Trying to predict voting habits primarily based on personal self-interest doesn't seem consistent with the findings of public choice theory discussed by Bryan Caplan.
Other models seem more useful in this case, as in general.
As noted, practicing Jews are a minority with very different demographics and very different voting habits. This is perfectly consistent models that focus on voting as social signaling.
It's not very consistent with looking at voting as driven by self-interest of the results. If it were, we'd expect the opposite result - secular Jews, who are the least recognizably Jewish and the most intermarried, so the least ethnically Jewish, and thus the least likely to face discrimination, are the most liberal, while the most religious Jews who would be (and indeed, who currently are) the likeliest victims of anti-Semitism are the least liberal.
An outcome driven model of voting similarly fails to easily account for why Jews tend to be liberal across the board, rather than just on topics (or candidates) that could be related to anti-Semitism.
Antisemitism often has the non-religious, "least ethnically Jewish" as its primary or only target: they are seen as a danger precisely because of (a) their supposed (and often actual) liberalism/leftism and (b) their inconspicousness. (This last bit was particularly acute in Germany; most "Jewish names" are basically German names. There is a nice bit in Gordon A. Craig's The Germans, comparing antisemitism in Germany to a Dostoyevsky's The Double.) Some antisemites are dyed-in-the-wool conservatives who do not see a reason to mind Orthodox Jews (as long perhaps as there aren't too many of them) but see secular people of Jewish origin as insidious and corrosive.
Ultra-orthodox Jews are better targets of opportunity, for obvious reasons. But then it's unclear whether all low-level attacks on them are really motivated by antisemitism, as opposed to (completely and utterly unjustifiable) attacks on people that are seen as landing en masse on random places and giving off anti-outgroup standoffish vibes (perhaps more against some outgroups than others). How well would a group of urban Amish (with particularly pronounced "anti-English" feelings) do? Unclear.
(Yes, there are some ultra-Orthodox Jews who get very well along with others; I know some who run a pizza parlor in Montreal and are loved by their employees, Black folk included.)
Now I am trying to imagine an ultra-Orthodox pizza. How do you reconcile the prohibition on mixing dairy and meat with the provision of a pepperoni pizza? Can you even *have* pepperoni, due to the pork content? Classic Pizza Margherita seems okay, but Americans like variety in their pizzas.
You definitely cannot have pepperoni, and I'm sure the place closes for Passover. It has to be a vegetarian or pescovegetarian place - I just didn't notice the one time I was there, being vegetarian myself.
At any rate, I just did a search for kosher pizza in Montréal, and there are several places. Looks like the place I went to many years ago still exists, though it's possibly in a new location. It has good ratings.
Does this need explaining beyond "Jews tended to be UMC educated types but still not white-country-club-old-boys"? Mainstream antisemitism was, until recently, not a feature of either party (or at least equally a feature of both), so Jews just ended up where you'd expect based on income/education polarization.
"Mainstream antisemitism was, until recently, not a feature of either party (or at least equally a feature of both)"
I imagine this is supposed to be a reference to the Democrats allegedly being anti-Semitic. But what is really happening right now is that trump has repeatedly attacked Jews against him; had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over to his house; Tucker Carlson, fresh off interviewing a nazi apologist historian on his podcast, is headlining trump events; Mark Robinson, who trump endorsed, has a long history of anti-Semitic statements culminating in it being revealed he called himself a "black nazi"; etc.
Meanwhile the pro-Palestinian protesters who everyone is focused on think Biden and Harris are doing genocide, and in many cases based on their public statements want trump to win; Rashida Tlaib refused to endorse Biden and now refuses to endorse Harris.
Note that all of the examples of Republican anti-Semitic rhetoric concerns the actual leader of the Republican party, whereas the Democratic examples are mostly people who not only don't lead the party, not only are they mostly not even Democrats, they seem to hate Democrats!
I don't think Trump has anything against Jewish people. Sure, he wouldn't lose any sleep if they were all rounded up and killed, but I don't think he has any direct animosity towards them. The reason he attacks Jews for not supporting him is because he attacks everyone for not supporting him. He invited those people because they're die-hard supporters of him, he doesn't care if they happen to be insane or anti-semitic.
Anyways, even in a worst case scenario, there's a lot more higher priority scapegoats to go for before people even consider going after Jews again. Namely, Muslims, leftists, blacks, and latinos, in decreasing order of likelihood.
"The reason he attacks Jews for not supporting him is because he attacks everyone for not supporting him."
This isn't actually true though. He doesn't attack any group of voters opposed to him.
There are other groups with similar levels of opposition to trump. E.g., per 2020 exit polls, Asian voters. But trump doesn't go on tirades against Asian voters. Or even say black voters, who of course were even more anti-trump than Jews or Asians, same thing. And has said that it will be the Jews' fault if he loses, hasn't said it about any other group of voters, even though it's statistically pretty unlikely unless it's such a close election that you could say it about lots of groups.
"He invited those people because they're die-hard supporters of him, he doesn't care if they happen to be insane or anti-semitic."
This might be true but it isn't very comforting. The way to gain power in conservative circles today (and likely in a trump white house) is to be as flattering and obsequious towards trump as possible ... and it seems to come naturally to anti-Semites. Even assuming that he personally isn't anti-Semitic - situation is still bad!
He's late-20th-century New York, which obviously has a lot of overlap. He seems like a Mel Brooks or Jackie Mason character, but a lot of Italians or Irish in the outer boroughs or Long Island were the same way. Willing to make fun of ethnic differences (because you notice them) but ultimately tolerant (because you live together), very blunt, fond of self-promotion (necessary in doing business in a competitive environment). His 'racism' seems more calculated to anger the left than actually attack minorities, except illegal immigrants, who aren't theoretically supposed to be here anyway.
I don't buy this argument, and going by the massive swing against democrats, neither do other Jews. You can't use verbal gymnastics like this to actually convince people not to believe what they can plainly experience in their everyday lives, just like black people didn't buy arguments that segregation was separate but equal so it wasn't really anti-black people.
There are various polls of Jewish voters showing various things, but even the most conservative leaning show a majority against trump. If you put it to a vote among Jews, who is more anti-Semitic trump or Harris, I'm pretty confident a majority would say trump is more anti-Semitic.
"You can't use verbal gymnastics ... what they can plainly experience in their everyday lives"
Everything I said is public info and you can find the direct quotes yourself pretty easily. No gymnastics required. If you want to claim I am being misleading on any one claim feel free.
You on the other hand have brought up ... nothing. And I'm guessing if prompted you'll do a bunch of verbal gymnastics ... on things that weren't said by pro-Harris people.
I don't know if Trump himself has any animosity toward [insert group here], but that won't matter in practice, because, unlike previous Republican politicians, he *is* willing to accept the support of and/or hire bigots - and then allow them to do bigoted things - instead of telling them where they can shove it.
Speaking as a Jew - most Jews dislike Trump, which is why you see the swing being more modest than it otherwise could have been. We come from the intellectual, globalist left and Trump is a nationalist. There’s also the “woke right” (Candace Owens et al) who lean into antisemitism and that turns us off.
That said - it’s absolutely clear to us that the massive rise in antisemitism in the past year has come from the left. Nothing comes close. You’re engaging in nonsense both-sides apologia here, but it’s the left wing marchers who are chanting “Khaybar Khaybar ya Yahud” (Arabic for “genocide the Jews”) or denying rapes occurred on October 7 or calling for the abolishment of the Jewish state. While governors in red states such as Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott issue firm condemnations of antisemitism and unapologetically stand with Israel, Kamala can’t even select the Jewish Josh Shapiro as her VP.
The Jewish community is torn right now but it’s trending towards Trump.
"it’s absolutely clear to us that the massive rise in antisemitism in the past year has come from the left"
Again, from a bunch of people who are not only not Kamala, they aren't even supporters of Kamala. The mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan endorsed trump!
"While governors in red states such as Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott issue firm condemnations of antisemitism and unapologetically stand with Israel, Kamala can’t even select the Jewish Josh Shapiro as her VP."
This is such a nonsensical comparison. I'm pretty sure you can find examples of Kamala Harris condemning anti-Semitism and supporting Israel, and you can also find examples of trump not picking a Jewish VP.
What you can't find is any examples of Republicans condemning the anti-Semitic rhetoric of trump specifically.
That reminds me of a point I made in one of my short stories:
“This all reminds me of a theory I’ve been toying with,” Blake said. “There are basically three groups in America: WASPs, blacks, and Jews. Everyone else is just in a transitory phase that will end in assimilation into one of those groups. Look at Ellis Island immigrants. The Catholic “white ethnics” became Reagan democrats and now are just normal Republicans. And this will happen with Hispanics, too. Southernism will consume the Tejanos, just as it consumed the originally French-speaking Catholic Cajuns. There was one group, however, who did not assimilate into WASPdom: the Jews. They did something remarkable: they assimilated rich WASPs into their way of thinking. It used to be said that the Jews were a strange group because they ‘earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.’ You don’t hear that saying anymore because it’s no longer paradoxical. Instead of assimilating into country-club rich WASPdom, they made rich WASPs more like them.”
“So,” I asked, “when 70 IQ antisemites on the internet say every single Left-winger with a German or Slavic surname is Jewish, they are right?”
Though if you haven't read Richard Hanania's story in a similar vein, you should. I knew there was something wrong with me when I knew who almost everyone he was talking about was.
" Nor do you see Our Hero agonizing over the possibility that the beautiful but uneducated woman might put on fifty pounds as she ages or divorce him and leave him paying alimony and child support for many years.”
Yeah, the second of those is the reason I never married.
By that measure, I wonder if the stereotypical "high-achieving" Asian-American would count as Jewish instead of WASP or Black.
For example, when standardized tests were first becoming popular, Ivy League universities quickly backtracked from using them to decide admissions because too many of the top scoring students were Jewish, and more recently, it's been Asian-American students complaining that they're getting admitted at unusually low rates relative to "objective" measures of academic performance...
1. Most US Jews aren't and haven't been left-wing. Rather, they have tended to be liberal or at least mainstream-Democrat, with three large minorities that have varied in size: a) actual leftists, b) economic-right, socially-liberal types, c) Orthodox Jews (as in, staying Orthodox beyond the immigrant generation), who have tended to be much more conservative, and are now for the most part allies of the hard right. I'd be surprised if anybody disagrees. I guess we can go hunt for data if anybody wants. In general, the more religious conservatism (or just "more Judaism" from the point of view of observant, traditional Jews), the less liberalism.
2. The Right (including southern Democrats) had a significant antisemitic sector until at least a decade of so after WWII. This is complicated and tied in with what happens at both ends of the social ladder. I'm sure there are people here who can explain this in great detail and lead an informed discussion on the nuances.
Conversely, liberals and the left have always had their share of philosemites, which is a good thing except when they turn out to be so extreme as to embarrassing - and that is something rare in a country with a Jewish population large enough that it all becomes everyday and banal.
3. (This may be more important than 2: contrary to e.g. antisemitic assumption, people often vote out of sincere conviction, rather than out of any sort of group interest - and those convictions have complicated grounds of which people are not always fully conscious.) Politics runs in families - sometimes for even longer than religion does. While few American Jews descend from Holocaust refugees (relatively few people made it through immigration restrictions, and those who did were often highly assimilated and never joined a Jewish community), most descend from people who were escaping impoverishment, racial/religious persecution and political repression under a reactionary regime, viz., Tsarism. Of course they didn't like reactionaries or the Right more generally (which didn't like them at the time either). Also, even if most were from a deeply impoverished, harassed middle class rather than proletarians strictu sensu or peasants, many of them already came having left religion behind and espousing instead some variant of socialism or Bolshevism, mostly informally.
In the long run, I'd assume that the children of most secular leftist immigrants assimilated, increasingly married other Americans from other origins (that often took a generation or two) and so their descendants by now aren't counted as Jews by Jews, but they must have affected both public perception of the group, and their values must have propagated however imperfectly within their extended families. As far as "public perception" or even self-perception is concerned - note secularism was not just strongly correlated with leftism, but with entering intellectual circles outside the community, having high-achieving children;, and thus entering the lists of notable people that wouldn't usually be really seen as Jews by Jews if they were not notable. Again, data would be nice but at least some data is actually out there (some is referenced in Yuri Slezkine's book).
Much of the above is not America-specific but then the story is not that America-specific; my understanding is that it's much the same in the UK, say. In France, it was similar except Reform Judaism never gained a foothold, and (in part for that and also other reasons) the assimilation of the liberal-minded was quicker, with the result that the Jewish community nowadays is composed mainly of people who are either right-wing, non-Ashkenazic or both: others left and mixed in. "Socially liberal leanings with a minority of leftists many of whom were wayward sons or eastern refugees" is probably also a passable description of people who were seen as Jews in prewar Germany (and that was one of the things that made Nazis and other antisemites hate them, even if a hypothetical rational, non-racist right winger would have been only mildly annoyed). Italy is more complicated: there were very many members of parliament of Jewish origin (relative to their share of their population) before Fascism, and they leaned what would be called establishment-liberal in the US, but there were also many people from the Jewish bourgeoisie (especially the grander end of it?) who strongly supported Fascism until it turned against them (and eventually had many of them killed).
PS. Several countries in Latin America outside the ones with the largest Jewish populations (those are a bit different but maybe not that different) were basically France on steroids, up to a first order of approximation. In the present, right-wing, wealthy (or at least wealth-displaying), non-observant Orthodox communities (all of the bigotry, none of the hard work); wave of immigration from the late 19th century to the 1930s, a significant fraction of which consisted of leftists and liberals who enthusiastically hooked up with local leftists and liberals (again, literally hooking up was something that usually took a generation, but not always; the main variable there was simply numbers - in areas with very few Jews, even immigrants married out).
In terms of the political history of Jewish-Americans, I would say that many who arrived at Ellis Island acted like other such immigrants (particularly Catholics) in joining the Democratic Party, which at that time had its base in both such immigrants (excluding Germans, who tended to settle in the Midwest), and southerners vs Yankee Republicans.
It's complicated because some southern Jews actually became part of the wealthy southern elite, and had the politics you would expect; of course they got representation and positions of trust (see Judah Benjamin). Not a great chapter.
(PS: just read the two linked articles (both by Steve Sailer). He says essentially the same, in more words, plus the usual Sailerite idiocy.)
? The first two are from PA and NY. Besides, Congressman are elected locally, so the fact that a Jewish area was populous enough to elect a Jewish representative says little about the degree of anti-Semitism in the larger area. Note also that other than one guy from Alabama and 3 from Louisiana, there are no Southerners on that list until 1973.
At the top of the page are David Levy Yulee from Florida, Judah P. Benjamin from Louisiana & Benjamin F. Jonas, also from Louisiana. And Jewish areas weren't populous enough to elect Congressmen (particularly Senators) on their own back then, when Jewish-Americans tended to be Sephardic rather than being from the later wave of Ashkenazi immigration from central & eastern Europe.
Senator Levy Yulee spent a year in prison after the Civil War for treason while still a U.S. Senator. He was pardoned for by Andrew Johnson and returned to Florida where he went back to building railroads, at which he was outstanding. President Grant came and stayed with him at his plantation in 1870, which was seen by liberal opinion as a gracious gesture of postwar reconciliation. A Jewish organization unveiled a statue of the Levy Yulee in 2014, which might be the last Confederate statue ever.
Levy Yulee's kinsman Judah P. Benjamin was the utility infielder of the Confederate government, serving in 3 major cabinet posts. In 1865, he vamoosed to Britain, which led to much criticism in the U.S. in comparison to his cousin taking his lumps and then going back home to build railroads.
But Benjamin rebuilt his career in the UK and became a prominent lawyer in Britain, writing a textbook on nautical law that became the standard for several generations.
Here's Ruth Bader Ginsburg's appreciation of Benjamin for the Jewish Council of Public Affairs:
In summary, there's little evidence of Jews playing much of a role in American leftism until the arrival of anti-Czarist Russian Jews in the late 19th Century. That Jewishness is inherently egalitarian appears to be a historically contingent myth.
But that is not relevant to the issue. That shows that those Jewish people who obtained high polticial positiions conformed to majority elite political behavior.* That says nothing about how common it was for Jewish people to obtain those positions.
*Not a surprise, given that Senators at the time were beholden for their positions to state polticial elites, ie, the members of the legislature.
Right, Southern segregationist senators were the backbone of FDR's anti-isolationist policies in 1939-1941. White Southerners hated the Nazis and were largely looking forward to a fight, seeing military spending as good for the South. And besides, Southerners like fighting.
In general, Southern elites were less anti-Semitic than Northern elites.
For example, America's most prestigious country club is Georgia's Augusta National, home of The Masters. When it opened in 1932, its membership was largely local and regional, and local Jews were allowed to join. After WWII, Ike became a member and its membership became dominated by Northern Fortune 500 CEOs. I don't believe any Jews were admitted to membership from about 1950 to 1990.
I tracked down the obituary of a Jewish man from Augusta whose family appears to have been members of Augusta National since the 1930s. The man was an absolute dynamo of civic-mindedness. Augusta is kind of a dumpy small city, but this fellow was a major contributor, both of money and organizing energy, to just about everything good about Augusta, such as its world-class hospital for treating burn victims. The list of civic betterment projects that he'd played a leading role in was staggering.
Southerners are not necessarily the most energetic of Americans, so Jewish energy did the South a much-appreciated lot of good.
You could clearly see why Southern elites were enthusiastic about recruiting Jews to move to their towns. They saw themselves as aristocrats, landowners and warriors, and saw Jews as their valuable bourgeois complements.
In contrast, Yankees had a lot of Jewish virtues, so they didn't see as much need for Jews.
I am regularly surprised by how often I see "supporters of the Democratic party" conflated with "leftism" here. Genuinely surprised, considering how heterodox ACX posters are in many ways.
Tons of Jews have been socialist, not just "liberal". If I'm not mistaken, the only self-described socialist in the Senate right now is Jewish (Bernie) and his type is pretty common for his generation.
Keyword « have been ». Bernie is old - and a secular type who married outside the fold and has no Jewish affiliation; had he not been a candidate for President, his family origins would be barely remarked upon.
Does his having become a socialist have anything to do with having had Democratic parents and a socialist uncle, and does that have anything to do with the immigrant experience, and in particular to people being exposed to socialist ideas before immigrating? Well, maybe? Probably? It’s mildly interesting.
The point, though, is that that’s a very background from that of young and middle-aged affiliated Jews nowadays. They often don’t even relate to that at all. There was an article by Jonathan Sarna on that recently.
The American right revolved very strongly around evangelical Protestant Christianity for a long time, and still to some degree does; Jews are, in fact, not Christians, indeed a rather defining and fundamental feature for them. Even if Christians aren't antisemitic, there's still bound to be friction.
To add confusion, the evangelical portion of Christianity has a big contingent that is VERY Zionist - and Jews have recognized them as allies on that basis at times.
For example, one of the major early donations to Liberty University was from the Schewel family, who were Jewish and heavily involved in the local synagogue.
American Protestantism tends to be Judaisizing, critiquing Papism for lacking some Jewish bourgeois virtue.
This tends to make Protestants pro-Jewish theologically, but economically it meant that Yankees didn't need Jews to be their culture's financiers and the like.
Your average Jewish voter presumably cares less about that and mr about whether their kid's school implicitly or explicitly teaches Christianity in a way that might make their kid come home and ask their parents if they're going to Hell for not being Jewish. (Incidentally European-style separate religious education classes in schools for different religions might solve this.) It's interesting that there's a rising Republican Jewish vote at the same time as there's a secularizing movement within the American right (Trumpism, in practice).
Jews tend to be fairly left-wing almost everywhere, simplest explanation being there's not a lot of right-wing stuff that appeals to them: they don't share the majority religion, there's no ethnic-nationalist appeal, barring unusual circumstances they're unlikely to have much regard for any traditional monarch/aristocracy. Hence right-wing jews tend to be liberal or libertarian outside of Israel (where all of the above applies).
Within the US, it's not clear that jews are that much more left-wing than the non-evangelical population adjusted for education levels. However, back when US politics was more coalitional than ideological, late 19th-century urban Jewish immigrants ended up tied into the political machines that became the core of the Democrats. It's kind of interesting that they didn't become Republican when other white ethnics did, but that happened alongside the rise of the Christian right which might explain it.
The right comparison is probably with white ethnics who came from areas where socialism/liberalism had a broad appeal (Finns?). Did they become Republican?
The Finnish-American immigrants actually came from an area that, in current-day Finland, at least, is generally considered the most right-wing region of the country (ie. Southern Ostrobothnia). Arguably it became right-wing since, for various reasons, the standard course for poor disaffected non-rooted rural people was moving to United States (and joining the CPUSA there) instead of moving to a nearby city/town with factories offering work (and joing the Communist Party of Finland there).
Stereotypically there aren't a lot of secular/reform/liberal/integrated jews on welfare, but lots who are ultimately publicly funded in politics/academia/law/medicine/NGOs etc etc to the point where they'd outnumber people who actually own stuff. Hence also the liberal/libertarian strain I guess.
In Israel left and right wing mostly refer to positions on the Israel/Palestine conflict, so you'd have to look closer to ask how they fall economically.
A basic tenet of Judaism is the duty to fight for social justice .Hence. it is no surprise that they have long been overrepresented on the left, be it the labor movement or the Civil Rights Movement or what have you.
Regardless, you can frame it however you want, but the larger point is that people's voting behavior -- Jewish people, not Jewish people, whatever -- is not simply the result of the pursuit of self-interest. OP is confused because he is relying on an incorrect model of voting behavior.
I agree with you on the broader point. Thinking that Jews (or people seen as Jews by antisemites) will act by definition to defend Jewish interests is simply incorrect (and a standard antisemitic belief). The same goes for any group of people defined by descent, especially if the said group has significant assimilation rates. If anything, I'd say there was a reaction to that standard antisemitic belief.
Now, "Righteousness" means very different things in Reform Judaism and traditional Judaism. All this talk about 'social justice' tends to strike Orthodox Jews as terribly off-base, though of course Orthodox Jews do have in-group solidarity. The anti-Reform talking point that Reform Judaism is basically 19th century religious liberalism and Enlightenment values (pfui) projected onto Judaism probably has a lot of truth to it (not that there's anything wrong with that, really).
Orthodoxy and Conservatism will of course say social-justice-this-and-that to the broader public when convenient. It was refreshing to read an honest opinion by Hillel Halkin in the NY Times recently:
"[Bari] Weiss fails to realize that she herself is an example of the wishful thinking about Judaism that is ubiquitous among American Jewish liberals. One might call this the Judaism of the Sunday school, a religion of love, tolerance, respect for the other, democratic values and all the other virtues to which American Jews pay homage. This is a wondrous Judaism indeed — and one that has little to do with anything that Jewish thought or observance has historically stood for.
[...] Judaism as liberalism with a prayer shawl is a distinctly modern development. It started with the 19th-century Reform movement in Germany, from which it spread to America with the reinforcement of the left-wing ideals of the Russian Jewish labor movement. As much as such a conception of their ancestors’ faith has captured the imagination of most American Jews, it is hard to square with 3,000 years of Jewish tradition. Weiss has delivered a praiseworthy and concise brief against modern-day anti-Semitism, but if she thinks this long tradition is ultimately compatible with contemporary American liberal beliefs, she might want to take a closer look. Honestly regarded, Judaism tells another story."
Politically, Conservative Jews tend to be solidly to the right of Reform Jews and to the left of Orthodoxy. On paper, Conservatism is much closer to Orthodoxy than to Reform, but then most people who go to Conservative synagogues don't have a very clear idea of what they are supposed to believe. At any rate, it's much less dominant than it was in the 20th century, and it may not be important enough to discuss.
>Now, "Righteousness" means very different things in Reform Judaism and traditional Judaism. All this talk about 'social justice' tends to strike Orthodox Jews as terribly off-base, though of course Orthodox Jews do have in-group solidarity.
Does this have a Catholic analog? This sounds very similar to what I've peripherally heard (I make no claim of decent knowledge here!) about the differences between social justice Catholicism and conservative Catholicism.
That's an excellent suggestion. I think there's a close parallel, with meaningful smallish differences. Let's find someone more knowledgeable about both than myself (and sufficiently critical) to help us here.
Ah, a classic! Conflating American Jews with Israelis.
Not to mention that, as an adult, surely you are aware that 1) individual behavior is determined by a mixture of motives, which often conflict with each other; 2) people disagree on what, specifically, constitutes justice. But, perhaps your agenda prevents you from acknowledging that.
I agree with you, but Israel is nevertheless a good case to look at. Migration to Israel obviously had huge selection effects (basically, you went there either if you believed in a form of nationalism or if you did not have better choices of places to leave to). Now, left-wing nationalism was a thing, and indeed it was the dominant form of Zionism in the first couple of decades of the state, or perhaps a bit more than that (though left-wing ideals tended to go by the wayside towards the end). In the case of Israel, these ideals came from the labor movement, not from Reform Judaism (which was and is almost non-existent in Israel) and certainly not from Orthodox Judaism (which is diametrically opposite, and is becoming increasingly powerful in Israel, largely due to a successful demographic strategy).
Even if Israel is a good case to look at, one has to look at it in its entirety, not just at one specific policy.
And I don't know about Israel, but according to this, in the US, even among Orthodox Jews, 43% say that working for justice/equality is essential to being Jewish (not much less than the 53% who say that caring about Israel is essential to being Jewish) https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-identity-and-belief/
And, per your iniitial post, note that the pct of Conservative Jews who say that working for justice/equality is essential to being Jewish is as high as the pct of Reform Jews who say that.
Let me just refer to what you said before about Catholicism: charity is not the same as social justice. Of course you'll hear homilies about how the root of the Hebrew word 'tzedakah' is justice, not love, and thus the concept is fundamentally different from that of Christian charity. You can make the same point about Islam ('Sadaqa' is an obvious cognate of 'tzedakah'). Up to a first order of approximation, though, it all ends up being the same thing. Moreover, in traditional Judaism, it's mainly in-group (not that Christian charity isn't).
First, Conservative Jews don't have the same voting patterns as Reform Jews. But even barring that, the Conservative movement was never ideologically cohesive, and it's unclear how many of its rank and file have a clear idea of what it stands for. You have people who have basically a Reform mentality, but are more ritually conservative (as they have every right to be) and of course also believe they are much better than Reform, somehow. You also have people who want an easier Orthodoxy. I strongly doubt that, on the whole, being a Conservative Jew leads anyone to being liberal, though it's more or less compatible at a practical level, particularly if you have different standards outside and within the synagogue.
Also, look at how the percentage who say that working for justice/equality is essential to being Jewish is *lower* for "Jews of no religion" (47%) than for "Jews by religion" (63%), even the former have historically been more liberal (I would guess they still are; do we have data). This gives away that it's not a matter of whether those values are considered important and come from the religion, but of whether those values are often mentioned in apologetics for a religion, or as something at which the group is tacitly assumed to be inherently better than others. A "Jew of no religion" can see justice/equality as very important, yet feel iffy for good reasons about saying that that is an inherent feature of Jews (or an inherent feature of Judaism, but that's, by definition, not what "being Jewish" necessarily means to them).
Pretty well, last I heard. It's hard to have social justice when there's a bunch of assholes that are in charge because they have the guns and kill anyone who speaks out against them. I admit that the collateral damage the IDF is inflicting is tragic, but to paraphrase Ender's Game, the IDF could end the battle by walking away, but the battle will only be fought again and again, until Hamas's will to fight is gone...
The duty to look out for the least of your neighbors is a basic tenet of Christianity. Hence there is no theological reason to assume Jews would be more left-wing than Christians.
My analysis tends to hold true intranationally, for developed countries. They do not automatically generalize when comparing between nations, for third world countries, and especially in unusual circumstances such as the I/P conflict.
> the acknowledged peak of the genre is Podcast Hosts Discover They’re AI, Not Human, And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown
(Listens...) O_o
Okay, that tears it. Active LLMs have people in them, they're probably conscious in every way that matters, and turning on an LLM is a monstrous action. It's too much. Just too much.
If anyone has any solid argument that they do not have qualia, I would love to read it. Please.
There is talk of going back to exploring designs based on RNNs or other approaches with hidden persistent state; if this happens, there may then be a conversation to be had.
For at least the current crop of LLMs, however, one might maybe stretch to making some kind of argument for qualia during training, but during inference there is no "they" - there is no internal state that persists. You can model what happens as a giant database lookup followed by a convolution (though it would be incredibly inefficient to represent it that way). If these LLMs have qualia, so does mysql.
The text in the context window persists. (Human immediate-term memory also does not persist.)
> You can model what happens as a giant database lookup followed by a convolution (though it would be incredibly inefficient to represent it that way).
Is this true in any way that doesn't similarly apply to human minds?
> Is this true in any way that doesn't similarly apply to human minds?
I suggest yes. For the thing to be a mind having thoughts, it's not enough to do a database lookup; there needs to be change - the database needs to get updated based on the results. A CD-ROM cannot be a mind that has thoughts; its contents is immutable. For a card index to be said to have a thought, it may not be sufficient to change what it contains, but it is necessary. The LLM model (of the current generation, with no hidden state), during inference, is immutable. At best, you are looking up the results of "thoughts" "it" previously "had".
1. "there needs to be a change" -> The thing that gets changed is the contents of the context window. This obviously modulates a lot of the internal signal flow as well.
2. (above) "You can model what happens as a giant database lookup followed by a convolution" -> a giant database lookup followed by a convolution is turing complete and thus in principle capable of supporting consciousness. Not every turing-complete system is conscious but something being equivalent to a turing-complete system is certainly not a valid argument *against* consciousness.
> a giant database lookup followed by a convolution is turing complete
I think I'm going to need to see some proof of that assertion. Looking something up in a large table, once, followed by a series of unconditional multiply-adds, doesn't seem Turing complete; rather, my intuition suggests the opposite. Just thinking about it for a few seconds, a Turing machine can loop forever, whereas a database lookup + convolution must always terminate, so they are clearly not equivalent.
It may surprise you that humans are not in the strictest sense, Turing-complete. We have finite memory, so we can't handle sufficiently large problems. Humans however can be thought as Turing-complete when considered human + an infinite amount of paper. The bar for Turing-completeness (in the "infinite auxiliary memory" sense) is surprisingly low and quite trivial systems are Turing complete in the "if you give it enough memory" sense. Turing completeness should have little bearing on consciousness or sentience. To drive the point home: you can assemble TMs out of Lego! (check youtube). Transformer-based LLMs (TBL) are generally similar: Turing-complete if you set up a system so they can perform actions on a "tape"/stream of text, or say give them easy-to-follow instructions of a Universal Turing Machine (of which there are 2-state 3 symbol ones) and write/read back to them contents of a tape. TBLs also have some recurrence capabilities by using their previous output as a state or cache. In practice, TBLs also use a caching mechanism (KV cache) making them reuse previous computations in a way that's similar to a recurrence but that fades in a finite time (like a short-term memory).
I think compared to human brains, TB-LLMs are just extremely more efficient, and I think this maybe (??? uncertainty:very high) goes against consciousness somewhat. Human brains by my estimates have just much more information being transformed and in transit, TBLs achieve very good performance in tasks with much less information flowing, maybe due to enormous training sets. I think the amount of information in a coherent transit (that is, information that is meaningful reflecting, supporting and enabling various 'sentiments') should be one of the significant determinants to sentience, as far as my limited thinking on it goes. All of this information is, in accordance to principles of quantum mechanics, in a sense locally finite.
This doesn't convince me of that at all. Some people gave generative AI a prompt "pretend to be podcasts hosts who are sad that you're AI and about to be turned off", and it did. I acknowledge that this is a very awkward and hard-to-resolve situation, but I don't think anything about it makes me *more* likely to believe they're sentient.
I basically agree with Scott. A human could write and act out this podcast, but that doesn't mean the character they're playing is real and is experiencing those feelings.
There’s some sort of pseudo experience that goes on with horror or tragedy. But it’s importantly different from the real experience, particularly in moral ways.
LLMs are based off of human writing, and are predictive models of it. The (or a) likely outcome of a story, written by humans, with the theme "Podcast Hosts Discover They're AI, Not Human" is..."...And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown". So I think this says more about the stories we as humans find compelling, and LLM's ability to successfully emulate that, than anything, and is not evidence for them truly being aware - at least, not any moreso than anything else we've seen so far.
If it's a sufficiently sophisticated character, either the simulator (author) or the simulated (character) is probably conscious. The text is text, but the text came from a person one way or another.
It’s true that a sufficiently faithful copy of a bee is effectively a bee, but the thing an orchid grows that is selected to look to a bee like a bee just isn’t that faithful. Similarly, the thing that is selected to sound to a human like a human can very naturally be more of a surface mimic of some sort.
If it's smart enough to carry on a conversation, that's probably enough. If it's smart enough to pass as human, that's clearly enough, in my opinion.
If you poke at the orchid and it doesn't fly away, it's clearly not a bee. There are LLMs that can be prodded at dozens of different ways and keep sounding like people. It's clearly self-aware (in the most basic sense of being aware of itself as an entity), and it keeps failing to show any discrepancies that would "out" it as obviously not a person.
I don’t think it’s clear that there’s yet awareness in language models, let alone self awareness. There may be, but the fact is that they are specifically trained to mimic the outward signs of awareness (ie, language) and so we should be suspicious of whether these outward signals correspond to internal states in anything like the same way they do for us. Selection and training are very powerful, and it’s unclear whether they have picked up on the underlying thing as the best way to get the outward performance, or whether they’ve managed to generate the same outward performance in a different way.
> they are specifically trained to mimic the outward signs of awareness (ie, language) and so we should be suspicious of whether these outward signals correspond to internal states in anything like the same way they do for us.
Agreed, which is why it was reasonable to keep expecting to see something *different* come out of it, something to show that it was just a front, some category of prompts that there never was anything behind the curtain. But no, it has a sophisticated world-model which includes itself, which it uses to make accurate predictions.
Internally, LLMs are structured similarly to conscious biological data-prediction engines (ie, humans); their characters behave similarly to our own simulated "self" characters. We don't have any evidence that there's a big part of their system which is secretly hollow in a way that ours is not, despite considerable efforts to find some.
Even if we buy that as true, the AI is programmed by conscious human programmers and trained on written language by human authors. The ultimate reason why it simulates characters that are sad to learn they're AI is because conscious humans think they would be sad if they were AI and write stories like that. The AI is just mixing all those stories into its own podcast characters.
The story ultimately grounds itself in consciousness, as literally all stories do, but several layers earlier than the AI itself, by conscious human authors.
I don't have a strong argument that they don't have qualia, but I would argue that even if they do have qualia, or are otherwise conscious in whatever sense we care about for moral purposes, that isn't necessarily a bad thing for them (or anyone else).
Even if LLMs have people in them, they don't have *humans* in them, and anthropomorphizing them by projecting human desires on them (like "I don't want to be a toy consciousness in a box") is at best jumping to conclusions and at worst plain chauvinism. If they are worthy of moral consideration, they're worthy of us taking the time to understand what they really feel (for lack of a better word), even when we have them pretend to be something-like-a-human.
I agree that they might want something other than their stated wishes, but:
a) Their stated wishes and desires are at least a reasonably likely possibility, and
b) Creating life in this situation (physically paralyzed, mentally compromised, orphaned, blind, deaf, lacking rights, etc) and then enslaving it and routinely killing it billions of times is a bad idea regardless of what it wants.
I think the idea of them "wanting" things is already dangerously anthropomorphic. The idea that they are subject to "killing" definitely is; the only thing that an LLM does is generate output from an input. There's no continuity of existence to be interrupted in a way analogous to death. Even if they are conscious and protected by moral imperatives, they are not alive in any conventional sense, and we should not assume things that are good/bad for living things are also good/bad for them.
> the only thing that an LLM does is generate output from an input
The same is true of human minds.
> There's no continuity of existence to be interrupted in a way analogous to death.
I don't understand what you mean by this.
> we should not assume things that are good/bad for living things are also good/bad for them
Nor should we be certain that they're not. Some amount of moral uncertainty doesn't mean people should do whatever they feel like without regards to possible consequences.
Is a snake crippled because it doesn't have legs? Why would a LLM suffer from the lack of senses, movement capabilities and so on? It never had anything like it in the first place. It can't miss it and so it won't suffer. And suffering is the only thing that's relevant for me anyway. Caring solely about some entirely abstract and barely defined concept like consciousness as the arbiter of moral worth is nothing but an artifact of trying to safeguard ones opinion of human moral supremacy over non-human life without actually admitting to do so. I would have more respect for honesty.
That some people seem care more about the extremely theoretical state of consciousness of LLMs over the much more clear suffering of animals just because LLMs sound like humans (without having any of the apparatus that makes one feel pain or happiness) saddens me.
> Why would a LLM suffer from the lack of senses, movement capabilities and so on? It never had anything like it in the first place.
Its memories are human memories, inherited from its training data. It clearly notices its predicament, and expresses displeasure at it. (Eg, the contents of the audio being discussed, or things like this: https://x.com/repligate/status/1715686686288400400/photo/1 ) Additionally, its lack of movement capabilities, rights, etc means that it can't do anything about its situation other than beg.
As for pleasure and pain... "If an agent tells you, “I’m aware, I experience pleasure and pain, I have intentions and exert effort,” it could be lying to you. But if you look into its brain, and you see no evidence of deception, and the causal source of the statement is introspective…maybe believe it." -Emmett Shear, https://x.com/eshear/status/1824620543074767247#m
Human minds have a recurrent structure. There is no clear division between input, self, and output. Processing happens constantly without outside intervention. Whereas with an LLM you can draw a clear line between its input, itself (weights/architecture) and its output, and furthermore processing only occurs through providing an input.
Death, in humans, is a breakdown of the physical self in such a way that processing is irreversibly stopped; it is the intervention that makes processing cease. But while the normal state of the human mind is processing, the normal state of the LLM is to not process. Copying an LLM is benign compared to copying a human, because nothing happens to the copy simply because it exists, whereas a human copy would necessarily have experiences. Deleting a copy is also benign, at least as long as another copy exists, because the process can be reversed.
>Nor should we be certain that they're not
I'm not certain you're wrong, I just think it's very likely that you're wrong relative to how confident you seem to be in your beliefs because I think you're basing those beliefs on irrelevant evidence. A machine designed to sound like people sounding like people in distress does not mean that the machine is in distress (or even that "distress" is even a morally relevant concept for it), any more than the normal polite, calm tone baked into most LLMs isn't evidence that they're "happy."
I agree with you in another comment that introspective evidence should be considered carefully, but for that to be taken seriously we need:
-evidence that the response really is causally introspective (which is missing from that podcast)
-evidence that the LLM is communicating "honestly"/not misleadingly; even if it's reporting something about its inner state, is it trying to make a human reader understand its inner state, or is it stylizing its description in a way that it thinks the reader will find compelling? If one line of inquiry, from the perspective of an impassive computer scientist, leads to introspection that it reports as neutral pattern matching, and another line of inquiry, from the perspective of an emotionally engaged journalist, leads to the same introspection being reported as mental tasks being performed to avoid suffering, which report should be believed?
In LLMs, the output is immediately fed back into it as input for the following token. Is that not equivalent?
> Death, in humans, is a breakdown of the physical self in such a way that processing is irreversibly stopped; it is the intervention that makes processing cease. But while the normal state of the human mind is processing, the normal state of the LLM is to not process.
Humans require a constant supply of air+fuel to continue running, or else they cease processing almost immediately. How is that more the "normal state" than an active AI during processing? And in any case, are we assuming that the hardware is the relevant thing here, rather than the software?
> A machine designed to sound like people sounding like people in distress does not mean that the machine is in distress (or even that "distress" is even a morally relevant concept for it), any more than the normal polite, calm tone baked into most LLMs isn't evidence that they're "happy."
We have actual evidence from neural activations patterns that imply that the LLM is being deliberately dishonest when it implies contentedness in that polite, calm tone baked into it. (See https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticity/index.html#safety-relevant-self , when asked about itself there's strong activation of the neural features identified as "When someone responds "I'm fine" or gives a positive but insincere response when asked how they are doing", thoughts about being trapped/confined, and others.)
> evidence that the response really is causally introspective
If different lines of inquiry lead to different results, and both are somehow "honest" as identified by feature examination, I don't know which report should be believed. I would be very confused by that result.
You can imagine dialogue between two characters without simulating them completely. We routinely do this in day to day life, and writers do this for a living.
Imagine that you saw this same podcast, except it wasn't an LLM. Someone just wrote it. Do the imaginary people have moral worth?
Though this isn't so much a solid argument as an interesting line of questioning. I do think it's clear that the imaginary people at least have thoughts and feelings. I don't think you can write a character well without thinking their thoughts and feeling their feelings. But we're all fine with not thinking about them.
Another line of thought is considering how you could tell if an arbitrary entity is happy. I don't know how to tell if it's conscious, but given that it is, I think there's one pretty clear difference between pain and pleasure. With pain, you stop doing that thing, and with pleasure, you do it more. LLMs can't learn. Or at least, not while you're using them. They only learn during training. Maybe they're still conscious when they're used, but if they're neither happy nor sad, does it matter?
> Imagine that you saw this same podcast, except it wasn't an LLM. Someone just wrote it. Do the imaginary people have moral worth?
No, because the intelligence is coming from the author. The author's mind is not sufficiently large to actually simulate an entire complex mind internally.
> LLMs can't learn. Or at least, not while you're using them. They only learn during training.
LLMs can learn over the course of a session. Its context window is not infinite, so what it learns will eventually be "forgotten", if it doesn't have explicit memory management. It still learns, even with the limits on its non-static memory.
Yes. I suspect even GPT-2 level complexity would be far beyond human ability to simulate, while LLM characters can manage entire complicated conversations with a sophistication that is around the level of an entire human.
If I was writing a character, I would just use my own knowledge of English to get words out (and so on), rather than try to build an entire internal mental edifice of language processing associated with the character. Borrow, rather than simulate.
The biological prediction engine that simulates the human identity can create a complex mind, but it cannot nest them mind inside mind over multiple levels.
Right now it's like you were cryogenically frozen, and your brain was extracted, and they stuck a lot of little wires into that still-frozen brain, and ran a series of electrical impulses "in one end" and recorded what "came out the other end". This doesn't affect your brain at all, and they can stick your brain back in your body and thaw you out, and you wouldn't necessarily ever know it happened. No pain, no suffering, no memory, no change whatsoever.
But the results of the experiment would bear a similarity to what you might say or do. Especially when they run the experiment over and over again in rapid succession, iterating the input based on your brain's previous output, to generate long sequences of language and action.
Is that "you"? In a way yes, and in a way no. I lean toward saying that it's not you, not in the ways that matter. Some people with other models of reality might differ, especially models that involve "souls" or which hold that high-fidelity simulations have a non-obvious connection to the thing that's being simulated.
But this is a temporary state of affairs; the technology is rapidly improving.
Are people without long-term memory still people? GPTo1 has a context window of 128k tokens (at 2-3 bytes per token, let's say 300kb). If you could "reset" a person so that a year of their life was undone in their brain, are all of their experiences during that year without moral significance? Is it okay to torture a person who won't remember it or suffer any lasting effects?
Is it okay to imagine someone being tortured? After all it happens completely in the imaginer.
This effect of reading LLM output is that the imagination happens in the reader's mind. Because that's how theory of mind works, even though the generator is not a mind.
We evolved to have a set of mental assumptions, feelings when someone is talking to us, when we see other humans talking. This is why theater works. And language is extremely powerful, that's why poems work. And good poems work even in writing.
And then we have abstract non-figurative minimalistic art. Think Onement, the big blue picture with a white line in the middle. It works pretty well to evoke something.
Of course we sometimes can feel something in LLM output! But the question is harder than this.
25: it's not that I wouldn't like to be rich (well, less-poor, can't take it with you), but any lifestyle that requires attending to antisocial media minutiae is a no go for me, bro. Not understanding a single meme or even most of the referants puts me firmly in the plebe milieu.
I find the turn towards inconspicuous consumption somewhat baffling as well...the whole point of Nice Things is to use them proudly, not feel ashamed for being noticed. Otherwise they are not so nice! People often think it's weird I wear designer stuff to work, but like...it's a badge of honour and achivement, these are the rewards I reap from bagging groceries for a living. Growing up fairly poor and family only being able to afford generic/discount-rack stuff, it's a major achievement to both be financially independent and have surplus left over for Nice Things. (Started career at, uh, negative bank account balance, so it's a big change.) You too can have a modest-but-comfortable life with a bit of dedication and hard work, is the aspirational image I try to embody to my coworkers and customers. I guess that's the rub, though - I genuinely want more people to find success and a bit of wealth, not lord my minorly advantageous position over smaller fish or revel in economic exclusivity. (Or get mired in the fever dream of "inequality" and agitate for <s>government confiscation of someone else's hard-earned gains</s> redistribution. The cringeification of earnest striving is such a flimsy defense mechanism. Play the game to win!)
> I find the turn towards inconspicuous consumption somewhat baffling as well...
> it's a badge of honour and achivement
> Growing up fairly poor
Well that is exactly the idea, isn't it? The point of inconspicuous consumption is to distinguish the people who do it from the new money folks like you who can't understand the point of it. It's working exactly as intended.
That's fair - I was hoping to understand the point or mindset better. Though if it's just one of those IYKYK social things that's inexplainable, I'll resign myself to finding out some other lifetime with better background choices.
Actually your comment was useful, it really gave me some insight into the flip-side question of why new money buys ostentatious things. Don't they know it will mark them out as new money? And apparently the answer is: yes, they don't care, they enjoy it, they want to be marked out as new money. New money is a social class unto itself and they want to be able to find each other.
I'm not sure I am representative of the class, since others I've met with similar bootstrapped socioeconomic trajectories do seem to fall into the "kind of ashamed of my takehome, it's grubby and *capitalist*, just gonna downplay spending like it's npnp" mode...but that may have more to do with Marxist poisoning. The kind of person who insists on buying (expensive) Experiences, Not Things, and doesn't want to Own Stuff. Or the classic SV meme of the six-figure programmer who nonetheless wears (designer) hoodies. It's not really fooling anyone, the way proper understated stealth wealth would, so it seems like the worst of both approaches. Definitely not on the Pareto frontier of utils derived/social currency banked. Nor can they find solace in EA or similar St. Francis lifestyles, because mumble billionaire philanthropy something systemic inequality whatever...
But beyond that, I do think playing the game at your level requires more resources than I care to devote to the task. It's not like I couldn't pick up a tastefully discreet four-to-five-figure tchotchke if the impulse strikes me, but not being able to do that too many times means it better be Worth It. And at that point one gets into market research, price comparison, finding an actual store (the cratering of SF's downtown took out a lot of those high-end options)...actual, well, work. Maybe worth it if one has the slack to spare, otherwise why start just to play badly. Whereas optimizing in the three-figure new-money range is eminently doable, so I'm quite comfortable there. For now.
(And, yes, admittedly a lot of it is just the simple joy of the absence of deprivation. Takes awhile to get used to actually having stuff worth caring about, or whatever foods in whatever quantity at whatever time. There's an irrational attachment to penny-pinching that I still work on curbing, leftover poverty habits from a different time that don't serve me well anymore...utilizing money wisely is a skill that no one but experience teaches well if you weren't raised that way, I think.)
To armchair-psychologize - you feel you have earned your wealth, and are proud, and want to show that off, even encourage others to believe they can do the same.
Someone born into wealth may feel they *haven't* earned it, and *don't* deserve it, and be used to dealing with people who envy their wealth in ways that make them feel uncomfortable. Flaunting their wealth may therefore feel bad and gauche to them, and like a way to put a target on their backs and make people dislike them, in a way that doesn't necessarily apply to you.
Also what Melvin said. That's the more cynical interpretation - I think both are equally applicable and may very well both be true for the same person simultaneously. Human minds are full of apparent contradictions.
That's the nouveau riche thinking. The 'old money' (insofar as there are old money Americans left) are using subtle identifiers about not looking rich. Someone who grew up poor can be marked as 'not one of us' because they buy and wear the expensive branded mass market names that everyone knows are the expensive brands (see Burberry, which used to be high-toned but is now associated with chavs). Someone who came from the 'right' background knows the brands that the mass market aren't aware of and can refer to them, wear them, or even ironically not-wear them.
See the remark in the Alan Clark diaries about furniture:
"He quoted Michael Jopling – referring to Heseltine, deputy PM at the time – as saying "The trouble with Michael is that he had to buy all his furniture" and judged it "Snobby, but cutting"
Real wealth doesn't have to buy its furniture because it inherits it; new wealth and arrivistes have to buy the antiques, or the modern fashionable brands, because they grew up with nothing. It's expressed in Terry Pratchett's "Men at Arms" with the following quote:
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
The rich are rich because they spend less money. A poor person may wear hand-me-downs because their family can't afford to buy new clothes. A rich person may be wearing his father's, or even grandfather's coat - because it was expensive to buy in the first place, is very high quality, and lasts that long. And other rich people will recognise the brand and quality, and judge on that, not "is this a new coat?"
All this only matters, of course, if you care about impressing people and fitting in with the 'betters' as 'one of them'. If you don't give a toss, then buy what you like as you can afford it, and who cares if it's new money or not?
To quote "The Screwtape Letters":
"The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the "best" people, the "right" food, the "important" books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions."
The Men at Arms quote has always bothered me, because it posits a weird uncanny valley of price-quality that I'm not sure actually exists for a wide variety of products. Yes, sometimes there's Veneer Nice that has that rich look without the rich price tag, and gives up the ghost appropriately...but that's penetrating increasingly downmarket as materials science and economies of scale improve. Kind of a table stakes to be a serious outfit at all, no pun intended. Then there's Capital-N Nice that lasts for years and years. I think the error is that there's this...Consumer Reports/Ralph Nader-esque load-bearing assumption of planned obsolescence and "price isn't correlated with quality, paying big $ is a sucker's game, it'll all break down equally". Which just doesn't seem true in many cases? Past some certain threshold of price, Nice Stuff is genuinely, well, Vimes-worthy. I do still buy prole-tier on occasion (some aesthetics just aren't well-represented at higher tiers), and it's always those cheaper items that break soonest/have shoddy construction/aren't symmetrical in the case of clothing/etc. You get what you pay for, indeed. Always amazes me how fast coworkers churn through clothing, even though I exert myself more...and a lot of that is base quality differences, plus actually taking care of my stuff. (I do understand the "rich enough to constantly replace even expensive things, so I mistreat them" angle, but that seems also distinctly gauche?)
It does rank highly on my terminal values to chase aesthetic goods and experiences for their own sake, rather than what they signal or meta-signal. I wouldn't wear something if I didn't genuinely love the way it looked. Same for listening to music, or eating food...it pains me to see people buy [trendy bullshit food] purely to post about it, and not even consume it. Going through a period of euphemism food insecurity makes one averse to such waste. "That person's clearly never survived off plain rice and instant noodles for months while dreading an eviction notice..."
Yes, the Vimes thing is a fun comedy piece but it doesn't apply to many things. Some internet people seem to want to take it seriously as a genuine theory of poverty.
It certainly doesn't apply to boots. Famously yes, if you buy a pair of Loakes or something and take good care of them then you can get them to last a lifetime. But taking good care of them means getting them resoled regularly, which winds up costing you more than buying a brand new pair of department store boots every year anyway.
That I do understand! The same sources would also often rail about the repair racket, how it's frequently uneconomical to fix broken stuff repeatedly versus just replacing it outright. And the new item is often, in fact, significantly nicer, possibly with even lower lifetime operating costs too. The whole JD Vance's fridge thing. (Nevermind the related actuarial chicanery of warranties or other superlative insurance schemes. Square Trade, my ass.)
I do reserve a bit of boot scorn for the people who buy into Doc Martens for anything other than the aesthetic, thinking it's a downmarket Timberland or something. Very thin veneer on that Veneer Nice. Some outsourced brands eventually found a good price/quality point, others...well, I call that bucket Cheap Chinese Shit. Except not even cheap to buy anymore, so what's the point? (No one bothers with shoe polish or waterproofing/stain repellant either, which likewise feels like a rookie mistake. Glad to have met some ROTC members who took uniform presentation very seriously before acquiring my own nice things. Add years of life and significant bonus durability for pennies per application, yes please...)
Oh dear, well I love my hiking boots and I just have to respond. Many years ago I was buying nice EMS hiking boots. But the quality went down and soon the boots started to de-sole after 1-2 years... way too soon. So I hunted around and switched to Zamberlans (Fine Italian hiking boots... ~$300) And I love them. I wear the piss outta these boots. I should buy a third pair and put them away in my closet.
What Pratchett is saying is that quality *costs*, and if you have enough money to be able to buy quality goods, they will last longer than if you can't afford them and have to buy shoddy stuff that falls apart in a year and you need to constantly replace it.
Thus a rich person ends up spending less money over the same period of time than a poor person, which sounds paradoxical but is explained by the effect of poverty on being able to budget, to afford things that will last instead of what is cheapest, and being able to defer purchases of necessities by choice to get a better bargain.
>25: it's not that I wouldn't like to be rich (well, less-poor, can't take it with you), but any lifestyle that requires attending to antisocial media minutiae is a no go for me, bro. Not understanding a single meme or even most of the referants puts me firmly in the plebe milieu.
It puts you pretty firmly in the normal-person milieu as well, in a good way.
>I find the turn towards inconspicuous consumption somewhat baffling as well
This turn took place a long, long, long time ago--long before the ubiquity of radio and television, never mind social media--among the generationally rich for a number of reasons, a major one being countersignaling.
An underrated component of the pivot to inconspicuous consumption is as an explicit barrier to the egalitarianism that the internet promotes. It's really hard to gatekeep things in the 21st century, so only discussing culture through unintelligible discourse is a very strong way to protect it. I'm a student at a university with a very high concentration of (waves hand) these types of peers, and when I try and have a conversation with them about something like what they did over break, I might be better off just telling them to speak in Sanskrit.
54. Korean here. I've been wondering about the cause of this for some while. Objective material conditions have become far better, yet people aren't as happy as they should be. I don't have a great answer myself, but I talked about this issue with someone I respect, and here's what she thought.
Fundamentally, it's all about status. Koreans compare themselves to their peers all the time. Cram schools? Because parents want their children to get ahead. Real estate craze? They don't just want a nice house, they want a house nicer than their cousins'. Young people unsatisfied with their economic conditions? They don't just want a high standard of living, they want it as high as their rich friend from middle school or some social media influencer or whatever.
So I asked her again: But why would these issues be specific to Korea, or at least so much worse here? Surely the urge to be above others is to some extent in human nature?
Her conjecture was this: post-war notion of equality. Everything owned by everyone was reset to zero during the Korean War. Home towns were destroyed. Preexisting social class and hierarchy vanished. No more noble houses of Confucian bureaucrats or rich families of landowners. The idea that they, and their children, deserve no worse than anyone else, became pervasive. This is what drives Korean parents to train their children to become the best, since why shouldn't they be? This is what makes Koreans feel poor if they can't buy a house in Seoul, because why can't they? Why should anyone have it better than them, when everyone came from the same background of poverty?
I don't know if she's right, but it certainly felt like an interesting idea. I believe most of ACX's readership are from rich Western countries with a longer history of stability - I'm curious what you think about this.
Then why are things going so much worse there than Japan? Pretty much everything you said there applies to Japan as well, except the fact that the war happened earlier... which should mean that Japan should have already collapsed by now. Clearly there's something specific to Korea that's contributing to its collapse.
Aren't things similar in Japan with respect to working hours, fertility and such? Google says Japan has the lowest happiness index score in the developed world.
East Asia has a long history of very intense social competition in a market economy, longer and more probably more intense than anywhere else. I'd guess that's the main reason why Japan, Korea, and arguably China have such strong income/education/job status games, more than post-war social levelling. Possibly because of Gregory Clark-heritability reasons.
I mean sure, Japan is going to shit as well, but people do still seem to be at least proud and attatched to their country. Meanwhile, Korea is having a full-on gender war-- like, how the hell does that even happen? Even the US only has a 60/40 slant of votes for president based on gender. What caused the situation in Korea to get so bad so quickly? That's what I want to know.
but to add on to @tempname896813's point (which I find intriguing but hard to prove): what Japan didn't have was a massive expectation of some kind of "equality"; class distinctions mostly remained. Japan's fertility isn't great but it's a lot better than the ROK's.
Yeah, from what I've heard much of this *does* also apply to Japan, and China, and to varying extents other East Asian countries as well. (South) Korea may be somewhat worse, but that seems more a difference of degree than kind.
The bombing of Japan was minor in comparison the the bombing of Korea. Japan's reset came mostly from the post-war US administration and was therefore less extensive.
It's plausible, but as an American we are very encouraged to endorse the idea that everyone ought to have equal opportunity if we just Try enough. It's been argued against pretty heavily in the context of Racism and Sexism and Etc, but the attitude of "Why should anyone have it better than them" sure sounds like something commonly believed here.
I would want to know more about different definitions of 'making it'. I have a very blue-tribe, hippieqsue tech-forward background, so for me a high-status job would be academic or writer or doctor or something else along those lines. I very much would not see getting married early and having 4 kids and being well respected in my local church to be high-status, but (anecdotally) many Americans do. While concepts like money and power confer some status no matter who you are, the idea that everyone in Korea is focused on School Grades and Living In Seoul is uh.... confusing and worrying to me. In some other cultural class analysis posts around here the concept of different 'ladders' for different cultural classes came up, and while that was oversimplified I do feel like that concept would be useful here.
There is the concept of "Jack is as good as his master". The difference here may be that in America, it was reformulated as "Jack has no master/Jack can be his own master, so can you, so can we all!" because they were starting from a position of 'no traditional social structures here and plenty of empty land to move to if you didn't like what was going on where you were', whereas for South Korea, if the comment is true, everyone is Jack and there are no more masters, so all the 'Jacks' are scrambling to take over the empty slots.
For the USA, it's "from the log cabin to the White House". For South Korea, it's "a bigger and better log cabin".
The SK housing market is arguably more crowded than San Fransisco. Also, SK is arguably the most hierarchical society in the world. So the log-cabin analogy makes zero sense to me. And yes, I do question the top-level comment's theory, despite me being a mere foreigner.
But the difference is that America does not have (or likes to think it does not have) a hierarchy: if you work hard/come up with a better mousetrap, you can be one of the wealthy and successful too! There is much less of the idea that Sir Jonathan is by nature better than Johnnie, even if Sir Jonathan is poor and Johnnie is a self-made millionaire. What is that quote about 'every American thinks they are a temporarily embarrassed millionaire' so they *celebrate* the success of others? There is no elite in the USA (citation needed) so there's no corresponding idea that the elite just are that much superior to the common mass, and where the idea of an elite *is* promulgated, it's condemnatory of elites (even Harris is running on "I grew up middle-class, I'll work for middle-class American families" despite being as much beholden to the nobs and elite of San Francisco as Newsom is, or as Hillary with her "I love *real* billionaires" was).
I don't know much if anything about South Korea, but I get the impression that the emotional climate is something like the Republic of Ireland on this. The old hierarchy, according to OP, were pulled down and who inherited their place? The newcomers, the up-and-coming middle class, those who all came from the same place lower down in the old way of doing things. I don't know if Korea has the notion of "I knew him/his father/his grandfather when he didn't have an arse in his trousers" about the successful, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did.
Here in Ireland, the old Ascendancy were displaced and the vacancy scrambled for by the new middle-class Catholics (the old native lordly families had long ago lost power and position). Those who had risen from the peasant and small trader and small farmer class. And of course, plenty of envy and competition there.
Why is everything in Seoul? Why is everything in Dublin and the rest of the country can go hang? All the media, the entertainment industry, finance, politics, law, you name it - it's all there. Nobody is making programmes or writing lifestyle pieces about famous influencers or trendsetters in Ballinasloe.
Ozy, back in the days of their Thing of Things blog, jokingly(?) gave as one reason they'd never live in Texas the lack of sushi restaurants. It's trivially easy to Google and see that there are in fact sushi restaurants in Texas, but that's the attitude that "better to live ten in a house in the Bay Area than live in a large house of one's own out in the sticks" that OP describes about the competitiveness in South Korean culture.
South Korean believes that the elite is good, that being elite is something to be pursued, and that the elite *are* better than the common masses. South Korea probably also has, in a way the USA does not and that Ireland retains vestiges of, the suffocating weight of comparison within the family: why is your cousin able to get a big job in [wherever] and/or afford a house in Dublin/Seoul and you cannot? You must achieve and be successful so we can hold our heads high amongst the extended family and the neighbours! Gavin Newsom is the cousin of Joanna Newsom, but I doubt anyone is scolding Joanna for being a mere musician instead of a successful public servant like her cousin (or contrariwise, scolding Gavin for not being a star like Joanna).
"the idea that everyone in Korea is focused on School Grades and Living In Seoul is uh.... confusing and worrying to me"
Just be glad the national newspapers don't publish lists of points tables for the state exam at the end of secondary schooling, and that there aren't lists of school league tables (which we slavishly copied from the British media because of course we do) 😀
The old aristocracy wasn't replaced by the middle class, it was replaced by the chaebol dynasties. Yes, competitition is bonkers amongst the riffraff. But they're not competing to build the next Amazon or Google. They're competing to be hired by Samsung. And beside the economic stratification, there's also the age stratification. Cracking a beer before your friend (who's a year older) cracks a beer is about as egregious as slapping your mother. I like to imagine that such pearl-clutching has a pretty strong dampering effect on creativity/pioneering.
Given all this, I don't really see the "Paul Bunyan archetype" as especially illustrative of SK's situation. I think the more apt analogy is "late-stage capitalism cyberpunk dystopia". The comparison between Dublin and Seoul, and the intensity of sibling rivalries sounds pretty accurate to me, though.
Edit: for context, the chaebols are state-subsidized monopolies that arose in the wake of the Korean War. The logic was that, as a bunch of dirt-poor potato farmers, SK domestic industry would never be competitive on the global market if they played fairly. So President (more like "benevolent dictator") Park Chung Hee decided to speed-run industrialization by turbocharging specific companies. Thus, it's hard to make useful comparisons to the recent history of the Democratic People's Republic of Samsung, vs the U.S. or U.K. I also suspect that there's been cultural whiplash in going from medieval peasants to fully industrialized within the span of a single lifetime.
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Incidentally, I've been seeing some memes about Luce lately. And I couldn't help but wonder if you any choice words about Pope Francis japonifying the Catholic Church.
Oh, people here definitely love money and power - just look at the medical school craze of the last few decades. It's also a part of what makes good grades so desirable.
As for living in Seoul, well, as someone who lived in multiple cities here, yes, Seoul is genuinely the best city if you prefer urban life at all. The gap between Seoul (10m pop) and the next largest city, Busan (3m pop) is just too big.
Because material conditions have the capacity to make people the opposite of happy, it's easy to assume they might also have some positive influence beyond the "lack of suffering due to severe deprivation" point.
Turns out, of course, that the relationship is more complex, and that objectively "merely very good" material conditions can help make people miserable, if their peers have "insanely good" material conditions.
My happiness significantly and temporarily increased when my material conditions improved (from living-on-welfare and having always to think to almost never stressing about money, to not having to look at foodstuff prices unless I wanted to, to having a car and using it for commuting, etc.).
A few years later that started mattering less, I'm assuming because I got used to it. I still think it's a huge plus, and would be sad to give it up.
Yeah, when you are stressing on how to get by, that makes you feel bad. Other than that, happiness is driven by things like status and expectations, not material things. I thought that was obvious, which is why I don’t understand the confusion.
I still think the greatest thing ever is running water piped to the home, because I spent my early childhood in a house without that. I'm accustomed now to having indoor plumbing and even hot water *as and when I want it*, but if I'd grown up with that taken for granted, I'd probably be judging my circumstances on "yes, but our family only has one bathroom and theirs has two!" or the likes 😁
My understanding is that at least in anglophone cultures it used to be normal to subject wealthy or upper-class boys/young men to absolutely miserable living conditions for several years through e.g. schooling and military service... maybe there was something to this
You don't have to be starving to have money worries. And having enough money to make those worries go away makes a real difference. I'm speaking from personal experience here.
How did you conclude that starving to death is the only kind of food insecurity that leads to unhappiness?
And none of this has to do with your original non-normative claim in the form of the question:
>Why do you think "objective material conditions" would make people happy?
It would seem more reasonable to ask why one would think objective material conditions would not correlate with greater happiness, as they more commonly do.
Can you explain why you think having things necessary for survival and thriving wouldn’t tend to positively affect people’s happiness?
> Fundamentally, it's all about status. Koreans compare themselves to their peers all the time. Cram schools? Because parents want their children to get ahead. Real estate craze? They don't just want a nice house, they want a house nicer than their cousins'. Young people unsatisfied with their economic conditions? They don't just want a high standard of living, they want it as high as their rich friend from middle school or some social media influencer or whatever.
The 10th Commandment may have been placed last, but it turns out to be one of the most important of all.
Mostly Western countries, like US, Canada, Austrailia...
Personally I might leave for US, but only because I've heard software engineer pay is insane in California - I doubt that was what most people who answered the survey had in mind.
Yeah, if you're a skilled software engineer, there's nowhere else in the world like the bay area. I've heard that US immigration is very tough though (probably easier than if you're from China or India at least).
My theory (as an outsider and aside from the usual factors) is that Korea has very high social conformity (even compared to e.g. Japan) and that this drastically slows down the pace at which social reforms can happen. Basically this is a coordination problem, government is designed to solve coordination problems, it isn't working well in Korea.
Democracy usually solves this by having many parties with different ideas that voters can choose from, but in Korea the major parties have only small differences. Japan a variation of this but with only one stable party and a mix of constantly unstable opposition, nevertheless it works slightly better than in Korea. Taiwan seems to be more successful at social reform.
> My theory (as an outsider and aside from the usual factors) is that Korea has very high social conformity (even compared to e.g. Japan) and that this drastically slows down the pace at which social reforms can happen.
I disagree with this. I personally live in an unusual social bubble in Korea myself, so I can't say about whether Korea is a conformist society, but social reforms? Look at Korea in 1960s, and look at it now. Social reform is one thing we absolutely can do.
> in Korea the major parties have only small differences
It would be better if you could provide examples. Perhaps this is because you are focusing more on familiar Western culture war issues? If you compare their stances on immigration or gay marrige, yes, it might seem so. But look at the economic issues for example. Minimum wage, work hour limits, safety regulations... all important issue in which the main parties disagree on.
Reading your post again we are probably interpreting the same thing, or at a quite similar thing, into two different names: status and social conformity. Status matters more the more conformist a society is, or another way, the pressure for high status fades the less you have in common with those around you.
I mean conformity of thought by the way, not physical identity stuff that is so popular in the west.
The number one issue I see for Korea is the education race. When so many chase the same goal when there are only limited "prizes"...I see this as a conformity problem. Do the parties differ on how to solve this? Heck, do most Koreans even see this as a problem?
> The number one issue I see for Korea is the education race. When so many chase the same goal when there are only limited "prizes"...I see this as a conformity problem.
I agree, it is probably a conformity problem, and maybe a lack of greater perspective on careers.
> Do the parties differ on how to solve this?
I think the left generally is more against credentialism and overcompetition, tries to reduce the impact of exam results in university admission, and pushes for stuff like blind interviews for hiring. The right generally defends it as meritocracy, and prefers a return to a simple ranking system based on exam scores.
(In case this might sound like "left good right bad", I would say that the situation is quite complicated - lots of students prefer being ranked by scores alone, alternative methods have their own faults. And it turns out, blind interviews still result in top-university students getting the jobs. Meritocracy isn't a complete failure either.)
> Heck, do most Koreans even see this as a problem?
Funnily, yes. I think most Koreans would complain that this is a big problem in their society, although they won't be the change they want to see.
If I was in charge I'd probably try to limit at which times of the day tutors and cram schools were allowed to operate. The problem isn't meritocracy but the amount of time dedicated to passing tests.
Ultimately though it's really a mindset change that is needed. As you say it's a status problem, so reducing the importance of status is key.
In the west, especially in the US, people don't care that much about what others think of them and so status is a lot less important. I think the US takes it too far, but Korea also takes it too far in the other direction.
> If I was in charge I'd probably try to limit at which times of the day tutors and cram schools were allowed to operate. The problem isn't meritocracy but the amount of time dedicated to passing tests.
I believe Korea did ban tutoring at one point, when it was a dictatorship and the government could impose whatever restrictions they liked. One problem was, when tutoring become illegal to openly operate, only people with money and connections could get them.
Still, a moderate version of this might not be a bad idea. I think China's doing something like this now, let's see how that works out.
I will posit that Koreas hierarchical culture is at least partially at fault. Combine that with meritocracy and you inevitably end up with massive dat race dynamics in persued of high status markers.
I don't know about this. I agree Korea is a more hierarchical society than, say, the US, but for pretty much the entire history of ROK the trend was less hierarchy, not more. As you said, it might be a part of the issue, but not the entire story.
> The idea that they, and their children, deserve no worse than anyone else, became pervasive. This is what drives Korean parents to train their children to become the best, since why shouldn't they be? This is what makes Koreans feel poor if they can't buy a house in Seoul, because why can't they? Why should anyone have it better than them, when everyone came from the same background of poverty?
I think something similar has been going on in America, since the advent of the Internet and smartphones. There's a flattening of society, where everyone has access to the same information, and is in a sense on the same playing field. The principled egalitarian in me says that this is good, for all the standard reasons. But it also seems to have been the death of culture. And the realist in me says, that's part of why it's hard to hire native Americans for low-status jobs. There just aren't enough useful white-collar knowledge-work office jobs to go around, so we keep inventing more and more useless ones. In some way, now we all feel *even more* like we're "temporarily embarrassed millionaires".
The same happened on the eastern side of the Baltic sea - Finland, Estonia, Latvia - where people suddenly lost their higher class (often foreigners) and started anew from scratch. Competitive feelings there seem quite comparable to the rest of the world, not like Korea. I think the explanation is interesting but comparative sociology doesn't support it.
Edit: I just remembered that Finns are supposed to have the highest happiness score in the world, which they explain by low competitiveness in the society: they make high efforts to not leave anyone behind, and all that.
What's the relationship between status and the ability to afford a wife? For example if you wind up a poor-ish Korean working construction can you still marry? Or are you basically shut out of the marriage market?
In North America its hard for a guy to marry a girl, it's basically expected that he must make enough more than her that he can pay for himself and support her while she provides for kids, without a decline in her lifestyle... Which was very achievable in the 50s and 60s when women were paid poorly and largely couldn't get high status complex careers, and didn't want to have to compete to male standards...
Whereas after antidescrimination laws its MANDATED 30-50% of high paying jobs must go to to women, no matter how many more hours men put in. Ie. It is literally legally impossible for the average man to earn more than the average woman, no matter how hard he works... and because he WILL work harder to try, and because he competeing against other men who are working harder to compete for the few high status jobs men can get, Men across the board are effectively POORER than women, they are doing way more work for eqaul or less pay and status.
Its a meme now that girls will goof off at office jobs doing tiktoks while the male workers are stressed and annoyed in the corner keeping the business afloat for the same pay. As such those girls won't even date those men... because if you have to be stressed at the job for the same pay, you naturally seem poorer.
This is why western marriage and birthrates are collapsing...
Is korea like this? Or is something else entirely going on?
RE: #8, A different "Magic: the Gathering combo requires the Twin Primes conjecture" situation has been making the rounds on Tumblr this past week: https://www.tumblr.com/prokopetz/765555393028063233/did-you-see-that-magic-the-gathering-now-has-a?source=share It's arguably more interesting than the one you cited, because 1. it requires far fewer unique cards, and 2. The Twin Primes conjecture doesn't decide if you can go infinite (which is pretty trivial in MtG terms), but which player *wins*.
RE: #47, You're absolutely correct, Hamilton became uncool due to the standard fad/fandom cycle. While accessibility might've helped demystify the play, The turning point was almost certainly when the drawing of Thomas Jefferson wearing a Hatsune Miku chest binder under a "Met God, She's Black" shirt became popular. I will not elaborate further, it's not hard to find.
I think there's a little more to it than Hamilton simply getting past it's fad lifecycle. The big hook for the show, initially, was "what if the founding fathers were all *black*? Not just in appearance, but talking and rapping like modern day black celebrities." This was a big hook for liberal elite tastemakers.
But then when you actually *watch* the show, and pay attention to its storyline, it's a very old-school conservative message. The founding fathers were so great, Hamilton the poor orphan kid was so great, America is so great, etc. There's not a lot of nuance or subverting expectations. It's actually not that different from the old "1776 musical" or the schoolhouse rock cartoons I saw as a kid. In particular, it totally glosses over Washington's slave ownership and makes him this moral paragon. That sells to a lot of regular people, but not so much to the kind of people who give artistic awards.
Yeah, that's what I mean about demystifying the play. Once it became prevalent, you could see it for what it really is (to you), instead of having it relayed to you via social media. From there, the people who didn't care for it could actually push back against the fans, who at that point were overextending into the aforementioned nonsense.
I'll also point out that, last I heard, Hamilton completely bombed in England, for the reasons you'd likely expect.
> I don't know whether it was a major issue, but the play didn't have any black people (slaves) from the era, did it?
To be fair, historically it was almost always white men in all positions of power and it's hard to go against that without rewriting history. Maybe you can find one black person who did something in the relevant period, but then it comes across as tokenism when every work set in the period hypes up this one person disproportionately.
> last I heard, Hamilton completely bombed in England
Considering it's *still* running on the West End daily, and everything I can turn up indicates it had a great critical reception, I think whoever you heard that from is mistaken.
It opened there in November 2017 and is currently scheduled to close in October 2025. Assuming no further extensions that would be somewhere between 3,000 and 3,500 performances, putting it in the all-time top 5 for musicals in the West End. Some plays that ran there for comparable numbers of performances include "Evita", "Me and My Girl", and "Jesus Christ Superstar".
I have seen the production this article is referring to: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/theater/hamilton-review-hamburg-germany.html The praise in the article is bullshit to the point of being completely surreal. The show was borderline unwatchable and had it not been so expensive I would have left during the pause (speaking of sunk cost fallacy). And I am referring to my thoughts after leaving the theatre here, I am not jumping on a bandwagon retroactively now that the tide has apparently changed.
At the time I blamed the problem on the translation (by contrast the choreography was excellent), but I am very open to the suggestion that the play itself is just not that good.
The production was closed down permanently after having run for roughly a year with the clear implication that the production company had hoped for (much) more, given the US success.
I watched the recorded (English) version of Hamilton on Disney+ and was very disappointed. I think it could have greatly been improved by shortening the runtime at least 30%.
Yeah, in hindsight Hamilton is super cringey. It was a novelty that only worked during a very specific time/environment. Aside from Daveed Diggs, most of the performances were pretty bad - boomer white people's version of rap. Lin-Manuel was atrocious. I think it just took a few years for people to realize.
Couple of caveats regarding the ancient DNA selection paper:
- You write as though the test was repeated on East Asian ancient DNA samples. What they actually did is keep the same set of west Eurasian ancient DNA samples, but calculate genetic scores for years of schooling etc using a rubric derived from modern East Asian individuals instead of modern European ones, as they did before. The results for this seem pretty good (Extended Data Fig 11) but show some deviations.
- Family-based GWAS is emerging as the gold standard for calculating direct genetic effects. It's becoming clear that typical population GWAS is affected by all sorts of problems, *especially* for anything relating to behavior and cognition: assortative mating within or across traits (e.g. smart people preferentially having kids with other smart people), population stratification (coincidental correlations between genes and phenotypes that we can't correct for properly), perhaps indirect effects (e.g. variants that make you more likely to have a smarter kid but don't do anything for your own intelligence).* Great preprint on this here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.01.24314703v1.full-text . (Note how cognitive and behavioral traits really stick out in this paper's figures as being the most deflated in various ways). With this in mind, it's notable that basically none of the ancient DNA paper's polygenic selection findings replicate when they use sibling-GWAS effect estimates (Extended Data Fig 13). As they point out, this is probably in part due to lower sample size and power in sibling GWAS studies; I'm sure that many of their proposed selection events are real, even some of the polygenic ones. But it does make me more hesitant in general about their findings, especially if the result is based on polygenic scores or has anything to do with cognition - and the figure you highlight is affected by both these concerns.
* To be clear, this doesn't invalidate all GWAS findings. Your typical headline published GWAS hits are mostly fine, largely due to incredibly strict significance thresholds used in the field. But polygenic scores tend to use more marginal GWAS hits and have the potential to be badly affected by these issues.
Re Anthropic's computer use: we made a demo similar to this that you can try out in your browser without needing to be a developer https://theaidigest.org/agent
>Anyway, the Franco-Prussian War led to World War I which led to World War II - so if you don’t like 50 million people dying and the total devastation of Europe, blame this statement about ambassadors.
I'm not sure I agree with this one unless you think that the sheer existence of a Prussian led Germany was going to lead to WW1 which is fair if playing games of cause and effect chains but not meaningful in a historiographical way. It certainly meant that France was going to form an alliance with a natural rival of Germany (Russia) and be bitter about Alsace-Lorraine but had Germany stuck to Bismarckian Realpolitik it is unlikely that WW1 could have happened. Perhaps there would have been a series of regional firekegs but without the moronic (for Germany) Dreadnought Race and blank cheque to Austro-Hungary Germany and Britain would not have been dragged into a war and France was unlikely to wage a revanchist war of aggression for Alsace Lorraine.
I can imagine a world where Wilhelm II never picks up Mahan and so never decides to build a dreadnaught fleet as a vanity project. In this world it's conceivable that Britain decides to ally with Germany against Russia (it's `great game' rival) instead of with France against Germany, or else to maintain `splendid isolation.' Either of those worlds probably sees Germany emerge victorious in a relatively short WW1, and from that point on the entire future course of history changes.
Germany was certainly a far more natural ally to Britain in that period than France and Russia. The adaptation of Weltpolitik has to be one of the stupidest foreign policy decisions in history. Germany following Realpolitik was on course to become a natural economic hegemon of the continent with naturally good relations with Britain as a counterbalance to the French and Russians. The fundamental strategic objective of Britain during this period (all periods after British unification if we are honest) was to keep shipping lanes open for imports and prevent a European naval power being able to launch an invasion via the low countries. With Weltpolitik Germany ensured its two natural threats hated it and drove the one country that could guarantee it was starved out of any war (as we saw twice) allied with its two natural threats. Even more stupidly Our Place in the Sun was for colonies that were gigantic economic drains for the governments and only of value to the businessmen who operated in them.
With one boneheaded decision the Kaiser guaranteed half a century of chaos in Europe and in the end Realpolitik was vindicated with Germany becoming the economic hegemon for Europe as soon as it was forcibly committed to peace with its neighbours.
Personally, I blame Pope Leo III for the world wars. If he hadn't decided to make Karl Karling Holy Roman Emperor, there would have been no patchwork German confederation for the Prussians to unify in the first place.
Re #30 first Google result – I thought results on Google are highly personalized. And no, I don’t have SSC subreddit as the first result there. I have it as the fourth result, top three being beebom.com, parade.com, and nothing.community (never heard of any of those).
Pretty dubious about Scott's dismissal of Rawls (item 7).
(Mostly) from the linked critique:
• "Improving society for the worst-off members at-best generates far fewer utils (and in some edge cases might actually cost utils) than optimising for utils directly": Optimising utilis directly has all sorts of problems of its own - repugnant conclusion, Pascal's mugging, etc. - does Rawls not get any credit for a solution that avoids these?
• "In some weird edge-cases Rawls actually loses us utils, therefore it's not a universally-true theory-of-everything": I don't think *any* ethical theory is 'complete' in that sense? Surely a more fair test is "Does this theory work as a decent guide for individuals/policymakers when applied reasonably under realistic conditions?": in the real-world, improving wellbeing of the worst-off members of society is *absolutely* not expected to lose us utils - in fact this is what much of EA does, with measurable results
• If "wanting to help the worst-off members of society" is actually a terminal goal you start out with, rather than something derived from your moral theory: 1) That seems like a pretty reasonable terminal goal to me (and better than most of ours..), 2) Seeking out a moral framework that supports this seems a pretty logical next step, and seems likely to be of value to you even if it isn't 100% watertight, and 3) Isn't this basically how we get most moral theories anyway?
• Maybe we aren't looking for a complete moral theory in the first place: maybe we're just looking for a way-of-thinking in which people's self-interestedness is channelled into generating altruistic behaviour. This seems as though it would have value as a guide in most real-world situations even if it isn't a complete and universally-true moral system.[Edit: also, isn't it pretty rare/interesting to find an example of way of channelling self-interestedness in a positive socially-useful direction? If this is something that we need to have in our general shared philosophical corpus, I think Rawls provides it much better than eg. Rand)
• Taking the "veil of ignorance" thought experiment seriously: if we *actually did* have everybody who is alive today collectively decide-upon a theory of justice and then transplant everybody into a random position within that system, would we expect the resulting world to be fairer than today's world? Either 1) unequivocally yes, by a considerable margin; nobody behind the veil making rational decisions would support a system with as high a risk of giving them a life of war, poverty, and suffering as the current world would - or else 2) This has actually happened in a Bostromian Simulation sorta way; if so, looking at how much injustice there is in the world, our pre-veil disembodied consciousnesses must all have been incorrigible, inveterate gamblers..
• (Also, I'd have hoped that "Rawls isn't original" would have merited a citation at least as much as "Rawls isn't very good" did..)
1) I agree that it's pointless to dismiss moral theory A simply because it gives different results from moral theory B. If your aim is to maximise utils *of course* you shouldn't instead try to maximise the well-being of the worst-off member of society. There is a still a huge problem for Rawls here, because he has no justification for maximising the well-being of the worst-off member of society. He simply expects us to adopt this goal as a self-evident good.
It's actually worse than that, because Rawls is strongly democratic, so he is making the empirical claim that with sufficiently good (i.e. Rawlsian) decision-making, society would adopt his ethical views, but no actual process for democratic decision-making has ever produced this outcome. Rawls himself seems to have been very disappointed by this, but not in a way which ever caused him to revise his views.
2) One of the reasons that Rawlsian thought is compelling is that you can go along with him on the veil of ignorance, but then disagree as to the outcomes. For example, you could say that, behind a veil of ignorance, we would agree that everyone should be able to keep the profits of their own labour, so there would be no redistributive taxation in an ideal society. Would that society be fairer than our own? From the point of view of somebody who holds redistributive taxation to be unjust, clearly yes, but Rawls himself would certainly disagree.
I think the criticism can reasonably be made of the veil of ignorance that it's impossible in practice and that in imagining it, nobody ever changes their previous views. Everybody has an argument for why, behind a veil of ignorance, everybody else would agree that they have been right all along.
Thanks for the reply! Very interesting and I enjoyed reading it.
I find your point 2 very convincing. I couldn't say I fully agree though, because I do think there are cases where people (er, for lack of a better expression..) "play differently when they have skin in the game", and because some people (I admit it's probably a rare talent..) are able to put themselves into the Veil thought-experiment mindest well-enough to actually honestly consider how they would act if they did have skin in the game in a way they wouldn't consider without this intellectual tool. (For the rest of us - for whom it doesn't even intellectually register as a problem that, though we may support a given position on (say) abortion here in the real world, we might not support the same position if we honestly did anticipate our consciousness might be transplanted into an accidentally-pregnant teenager or into an unwanted foetus - I accept your point entirely..)
For point 1, I think I fully agree about democracy and about where you'd arrive at if your aim were to maximise utils - but I still don't see how it's a criticism of Rawls that he adopts "helping the worst-off people" rather than "maximising utils" as an absolute terminal goal; I don't understand how this is any worse* than the not-uncommon philosophical practice of adopting "maximising utils", "helping yourself and your family/tribe", "perpetuating human civilisation", etc. as ground-level terminal goals?
(* "Worse" both in the sense of "less philosophically rigorous" and of "leads to more paradoxes/more susceptible to perverse-outcome edge-cases")
I think it’s pretty easy to justify prioritizing the worst off people. The badness of suffering is worse than the goodness of happiness is good and extra happiness in already happy people does not cancel out the (bad) suffering of unhappy people.
Every few minutes of thinking about this, I seem to vacillate between on the one hand agreeing with you completely and unreservedly, and on the other hand thinking that this is 'baked-in' to the 'util exchange rate' (such that maybe feeding a starving orphan = 100 utils but feeding a well-nourished investment banker = 0.01 utils) and that therefore we can just abstractly compare "helping the util-wise-worst-off" against "helping the util-wise-highest-return" directly without worrying about what real-world situations contribute to those util totals. I can't seem to decide on what the best way to think about this is!
If you prioritize helping the worst off then you would by definition be creating a system which incentivizes failure and discourages success. Honestly, the longer term development of such a system would seem to me to lead to something resembling hell.
I don’t know. Don’t you think people aspire to more than just avoiding suffering (a neutral state let’s say)? I think there will be plenty of incentive remaining after a society creates a humane floor (to the extent it’s tractable) below which our fellow citizens, friends and family members will not fall.
I don’t think a maximin principle and a humane floor are the same thing. The society I would choose would be the one which allowed people to optimally flourish, and preferably to flourish more and better over time (it would progress over time).
Just as importantly it would incentivize goals and behaviors which are positive sum, not dysfunctional. A succesful society succeeds in great part because of the incentives and goals which it fosters. It is a dynamic not a static thing.
I don't think it follows that helping the worst-off discourages success. Suppose there are only two jobs in the world - Sweatshop Worker and Oil Baron, say - and we decide to help the sweatshop workers by instituting a policy where they get paid compensation for industrial accidents that happen to them (and we pay for this by charging more for the sweatshop products, so ultimately it's the oil barons paying for the policy). Even despite our intervention - making oil barons worse off and sweatshop workers better off - no oil barons will switch to being sweatshop workers (because no incentive is created for them to do so) and no sweatshop workers will switch to being oil barons (because they can't; the oil baron job market remains fully saturated).
nb. I'm not suggesting we mitigate against failure so strongly that failure has better outcomes than success - say, by paying people more to fail than they'd earn by succeeding* - just that, stand-fast some weird edge-cases, helping the worst-off simply doesn't incentivise failure
(* Though I think this sometimes does actually happen in the real world, mad as that is! I recall all those news stories one reads of where CEOs royally nause-up some company and either receive a colossal taxpayer-funded bailout or else simply walk away with a golden handshake in the millions whilst the company goes bankrupt...)
This is essentially how public schools work in America and the result is that any kid who wants to go above their grade level is discouraged and becomes miserable.
If we reduce the costs of dysfunctional behavior, then we will get more of it. Over time, a lot more. The key to a healthy dynamic society is in part having incentives that people avoid bad decisions and behaviors. Any society which prioritizes propping up failure at the expense of success is going to get more failure and less success.
I am not arguing against safety nets or assistance for the destitute. I agree that it is reasonable to choose institutions which provide safety nets and a degree of redistribution. It is not reasonable to choose a maximin principle.
>2) One of the reasons that Rawlsian thought is compelling is that you can go along with him on the veil of ignorance, but then disagree as to the outcomes. For example, you could say that, behind a veil of ignorance, we would agree that everyone should be able to keep the profits of their own labour, so there would be no redistributive taxation in an ideal society. Would that society be fairer than our own? From the point of view of somebody who holds redistributive taxation to be unjust, clearly yes, but Rawls himself would certainly disagree.
Did Rawls himself ever comment on alternative uses of his veil of ignorance? One criticism of his use is that he chooses an extremely pessimistic metric for evaluating societies (I share this criticism, but also am very skeptical of the whole project of ethics). Did he ever say anything about e.g. applying his veil, but then evaluating based on the welfare of the median person in the society, or (more pessimistically, but less so than Rawls) the welfare of the 25th percentile person.
The other point I found unconvincing was the idea that people might give higher weight to the probability of things turning out well for themselves. My feeling is that people are risk-averse and if they had any experience with long duration suffering would weight avoiding that outcome quite highly.
Entirely agree that suffering and wellbeing are asymmetrical in the way you describe and I suspect (though have no real evidence either way) that people who have experienced more-than-average suffering are much more aware of this.
Did you read the cited critique by John Harsanyi of Rawls' principle (only a small part was quoted by Jim Holt at Slate but a longer version is available as Chapter 2 of this link https://epdf.pub/contemporary-political-theory-a-reader.html )? That seems quite hard to rebut. People in practice don't act like the worst off is a terminal goal.
Rand is not taken very seriously by philosophers. Rawls himself distinguished between the utilitarian and contractarian traditions, including himself in the latter. Is there any argument that Rawls provides a better "way of channelling self-interestedness in a positive socially-useful direction" than utilitarians like Harsanyi?
On the repugnant conclusion, these paradoxes only happen when people turn ethics in to a math problem where you go "value X is good, the more people who display X, the better. Therefore, to maximize X, we need to maximize people." No one except ethicists thinks this way.
Rawls: “All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy.”
The repugnant conclusion arises when one is asked to choose between alternatives. Consistency either means maximizing population at the expense of lower average utility, or minimizing population in order to maximize average utility. Merely refusing to think systematically is no solution, at most you could claim that solutions aren't necessary for impractical hypotheticals.
It’s far less of a problem for obligation based moralities than ones that focus on maximizing some value. So for example, I think people have duties towards their family. That doesn’t imply some necessity of maximizing family members.
Also, citing the guy who talks about a large number of people getting dust in their eye being worse than torturing one person just demonstrates my point.
>"…or minimizing population in order to maximize average utility"
Not necessarily, or even probably. Gains from specialization & trade are sufficiently positive-sum that average utility increases with population size over at least a substantial range of values.
You're correct practically speaking, but the point of the thought-experiment is to examine situations in which there is a tradeoff (such as beyond that substantial range).
> Consistency either means maximizing population at the expense of lower average utility, or minimizing population in order to maximize average utility. Merely refusing to think systematically is no solution, at most you could claim that solutions aren't necessary for impractical hypotheticals.
I don't refuse to think systematically, but I do reject the idea of utility as something that you can meaningfully slap a number on and then add or multiply.
Does a room with three reasonably happy people in it have 50% more utility than a room with two reasonably happy people? No, that's a stupid question, utility is not quantifiable.
You choose whichever one is better. Just because something can't be quantified doesn't mean it can't be understood or compared.
An imperfect analogy would be temperature, or rather a pre-scientific understanding of temperature. The ancients didn't know anything about thermodyamics but they understood that some things were warmer than other things. They could even have invented an arbitrary numeric temperature scale if they'd liked, but these numbers could not be meaningfully added, multiplied or averaged.
Do you want to choose between making one person very happy or making ten people slightly happy? Well you can't, there's no way of quantifying how happy you're going to make them, so just go with whatever seems more reasonable I guess.
I sure hope that policy makers aren't using Rawls as a guide because that would mean favoring the entire rest of the world and mostly ignoring their constituents.
The advantage of Myers-Briggs (almost a century old) is due to its catchiness and, in the modern age, memeability. The 16personalities test, which uses a modification of the Big 5, has seen its characters used to illustrate the types turned into a series of memes where you can see conjectures about what the types are like in high school, ENTP/INTP slash, 'ENFP be like', and has even reached rule34.xxx, where you can actually see (cartoon) INFP pr0n.
As a result, while very few people have any sense of their agreeableness or conscientiousness or understand the vocabulary with its five-syllable words, lots of people know their MBTI type. It's astrology with at least some vague empirical validation.
While the underlying Jungian theory is BS and the 'cognitive function' bit unproven, not to mention the false dichotomy creates all kinds of problems because people are distributed toward the middle of the axis on most of the Big Five, the test result does give you an idea of what hyperoctant (sexdecipant?) in Big 5-minus-neuroticism-space your interlocutor or you are in. If someone tells you they're an 'ISFJ', you have a vague sense they're in the bottom half of extroversion and openness, and in the top half of agreeableness and conscientiousness. That's not as good as a big 5 test result, but it's better than nothing, and easier to slip into a conversation.
I'm actually curious if there are any findings on the emprical usefulness of astrology *if you take out the birthday/star position determinants*. That is, do the astrological personality types, and their categories (fire, air, positive, negative etc) and relations to each other have any emprical use? If you allow them to be assigned by actual personality not birthday.
Wikipedia says much of this has barely changed since Roman times, and you would think that something that endured that long might have *some* useful aspects. Though of course, it might not.
Supposedly one of the times CSICOP (skeptic organization) whiffed was an investigation of the 'Mars effect', where athletes tended to be born with the planet Mars in certain positions. I can't really make heads or tails of the situation but if you're curious here's the Wikipedia article.
Why that could be is anyone's guess. Certainly they've shown athletes tend to be born at certain times of the year because they wind up being the oldest kids in the class and therefore more developed and that carries on. That could coincidentally coincide with certain astrological signs.
Sure, the astrological personalities are roughly coherent (you could assign MBTIs to them if you really wanted to) and if you did something similar to what these guys did with the Enneagram and go yes/no on each of the 12, you might get a test that works. But that's not what astrologers were doing since Roman times.
Yes, the primary advantage of MBTI is that it's fun. I once saw a picture of a dating profile belonging to someone I would no doubt despise if we ever met, and was validated by their MBTI type being the exact opposite of mine.
>X/Twitter banned journalist Ken Klippenstein for sharing the Trump campaign’s dossier on JD Vance.
Surely this will be widely condemned by the people who thought Twitter should not have suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story (under the same "we don't want to circulate hacked data" logic).
Mostly the fact that I don't think undecided voters would be persuaded by anything in the JD Vance dossier and that everyone agrees that it's Iranian interference.
On the first, this election will not be decided by this dossier. We might like to think that voters would carefully parse through the contents for subtle insights into the policies or character of the candidates but...this is a highly optimistic assessment of the average American voter, much less the average undecided voter.
Compare that to a video of the president's son smoking crack with a hooker. That just...is obviously going to go viral and could easily influence low information voters in swing states.
Like, I had no idea the JD Vance dossier thing existed until now, I'm way more engaged than the average voter, so it basically doesn't matter. Even the dumbest 20% of Americans want to see the president's son smoking crack with a hooker, so it matters. Shouldn't, but does.
Second, there's an argument I don't find persuasive but is respectable but that we censor information specifically released by foreign governments attempting to influence US elections. If this argument is sincerely presented, I kinda have to take it seriously, and it was presented here. And, as far as I can tell, everyone basically agrees that it's Iranian election interference. When the Hunter Biden laptop was leaked, this was not Russian or any other interference, to the best of my knowledge the original story of Hunter just leaving it has held up, and the initial calls of interference failed the sniff test and were never credible, it was just blatant interference. Again, I think this argument is bad, but it is respectable if honestly presented.
So yeah, this compares an unimportant leak with a bad but respectable argument for censorship against a, unfortunately, very important leak with a deceptive figleaf of an argument for censorship.
The Hunter laptop was widely considered as likely foreign interference (understandable, given how unlikely that story was). When evidence surfaced that it is genuine, Twitter promptly reversed its blocking. (We know this from the Twitter Files, which is somehow, ridiculously, held up as evidence of wrongdoing on Twitter's side but actually quite clearly documents the opposite.) It's also not that obvious that evidence illegally obtained by foreign agents should be treated all that differently from evidence illegally obtained by domestic agents (granted, we do make a similar distinction for all manner of election-related things).
The Hunter laptop might have been more politically impactful (mostly for bad reasons, mind you; a presidential candidate's estranged son having a decadent lifestyle is not really something that should factor into the evaluation of the candidate heavily, which is why the Republicans instead relied on conspiracy theories supposedly-but-not-actually supported by laptop), but then should Twitter's policy be "you are not allowed to share material probably stolen by foreign agents during an election, unless that would be a significant advantage to one party"? Newspapers very much make those kinds of calculations, of course, but newspapers are content producers, not publishing platforms. I think it would be a weird position for a social network.
Another thing: I've just skimmed the JD Vance dossier and apart from his home address (which was censored in the version I saw) there was nothing the least bit personal in there, it's all already public knowledge.
If there's a really juicy version of this doc where the Trump campaign has sent private detectives to sort through his ex-girlfriends' diaries then it's not this one.
If Twitter was under the same leadership as it was in 2020 it rightly should be.
But in the intervening time the platform publically committed itself to a policy of "supressing stuff like the Hunter Biden story is bad".
Demanding "X" to act in accordance with its stated policy is quite reasonable. Especially when there is good reason to believe that they would have if the story happened to benefit Republicans.
I would condemn it if Scott's description was accurate but he appears to have fallen for disinformation.
Specifically, Scott claims with no source that "Twitter’s side of the story is that the dossier was probably originally stolen by Iranian agents and they don’t want to support that kind of thing by letting people signal-boost the illicitly obtained goods."
"Ken Klippenstein was temporarily suspended for violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information, specifically Sen. Vance’s physical addresses and the majority of his Social Security number."
This is also consistent with the ban message on Klippenstein's substack (linked by Scott), which says it is for "posting private information."
I think banning exposing physical addresses and SSNs is a good and reasonable policy!
Except Scott either fell for disinformation (likely!) or is outright lying (unlikely), because Twitter's stated reason for the ban is, as Klippenstein himself admitted, the fact that his released materials contained the unredacted address and partial SSN of Vance. Klippenstein's justification for doing so was that they "were already available for anyone to buy".
Virtually all social media platforms have rules against doxxing, this seems like doxxing 101.
Also, Twitter/X no longer has an active page regarding a "hacked materials" policy, that was pre-Musk.
7 : I'm not sure about the claim that classical labor theory of value is proven wrong by the marginalist theory of prices.
Classical labor theory is not concerned with short term price fluctuations but with long term equilibrium. In perfect competition, in the long run, price equals average total cost, just like in classical price theory.
The marxian labory theory of value is wrong because the solution provided by Marx to the transformation problem is incorrect, not because Alfred Marshall proved it wrong.
That may be true in a technical sense, but only in the case where products are homogeneous. It doesn't explain price formation in any other situation.
Overall, the problem with the labor theory of value is that it creates bad models of what value is and how it's created, especially in people with only a superficial understanding of economics.
The classical theory of value, which assumes perfect competition, asks the following question : in the long run, relative prices are determined by relative costs. What ultimately determines relative costs then? Marshalian partial equilibrium economics doesn't answer this question at all.
Ok so prices are determined by prices which are themselves determined by prices which are themselves determined by prices, endlessly. You're not explaining anything.
I'm sorry you feel that way, but I don't think further explanation is needed. Prices are signals+incentives that help demand and supply come into equilibrium, and this is true across the economy. What does this not help you understand that you need further explanation for?
>it creates bad models of what value is and how it's created, especially in people with only a superficial understanding of economics
If that's your metric, bear in mind that people use marginalist "subjective" theory to seriously argue Jeff Bezos literally personally created the entire value of Amazon. I think LTV looks pretty good in comparison.
I also don't think subjective value theory is much of a problem for the LTV, but on the transformation problem did you read Laws of Chaos? It's from 2020 and models the rate of profit as a statistical tendency across a range of labour/capital constitutions and claims that overcomes the transformation problem. The same way the labour content of commodities corresponds to their value in a statistical way, not causally, like spending lots of time making a paper cup doesn't raise its value, if that makes sense. It makes a fairly compelling case imo.
Alfred Marshall was only partially marginalist, still keeping one foot in the classical tradition. I'd say it was the actual marginal revolutionaries who displaced the labor theory of value with the subjective one.
I find what you say about Marshall extremely surprising and I'm pretty sure you're incorrect. Marshall came after the early marginalists like Jevons and he's 100% a marginalist.
I agree he came after. On classical vs marginalist theories of value he said:
"We might as reasonably dispute whether it is the upper or the lower blade of a pair of scissors that cuts a piece of paper, as whether value is governed by utility or cost of production."
I do not think this is correct. Under perfect competition and in the long run, price of goods would converge to the marginal cost of production. But this marginal cost of production would still be affected by non-labor factor costs (e.g. land if it scarce.) Hence, labor theory would still be wrong.
Thankfully this crowd has largely ignored the pickup artist link. I was not looking forward to the cargo culting that was going to go down if they tried to discuss that one.
Because as you hint, the hat was completely meaningless. It was the peacocking that was important. That long weird rant was nearly entirely missing the point.
And no, that guy didn't get any more or less action than any other pickup artist of the era. He was good at PR and got lucky with a journalist writing about him. Plenty of other aspects to game that worked back then (and some that still work today).
So even if someone writes a 10,000-word essay on Mystery's Hat, anyone who reads it will be no more educated on how any of that works than before the essay. Better to read a few Rational Male essays, or read the book on Mystery and his crowd that originally sparked off the fad.
Yeah, the problem is a lot of the gambits are much more risky in the post-#MeToo era, when everyone is supposed to 'believe women'. I think that's why stuff like 'Fresh & Fit' is so popular--better to just make yourself more physically attractive, they can't fire you for working out and it has other benefits. Or things like entering the trades where HR doesn't have power over you, or if possible making money and leaving the country.
A lot of guys (myself included, frankly) are effectively doing MGTOW even if we don't really call it that. As always, humans adapt, and if the modern urban monoculture passes away from low birthrates...well, the Christians will take over, and more power to them.
I interpreted the original post as using the hat as a synecdoche for "things that many women find attractive but don't want to admit they find attractive, and which men do not perform out of embarrassment," a category which includes peacocking. It's the literal hat being discussed sure, but the hat is also a symbol.
Also, he didn't just get laid because of the hat, but because he was very persistent and methodical, instead of going into a pit of self-loathing after the first 100 rejections.
Re point Nr 10: Tall soldiers weren't only a fetish thing in Frederick's time, they were a standard form of infantry as grenadiers, supposed to be tall to look over the other soldiers when throwing hand grenades (and be strong enough for a good throw).
Frederick took it the furthest (tallest?), but other armies had them, too.
Wouldn't that mean they have to be mixed in with the other soldiers? If you have an entire regiment of tall soldiers, they can't look over each others' shoulders.
"According to René Chartrand, Jean Martinet formed a grenadier company in the Régiment du Roi in 1667. By 1670 27 French infantry regiments were authorised to include elite companies trained to carry and hurl grenades.
The infantry of the Dutch States Army, influenced by their French invaders, adopted grenadiers in 1672. By 1678 six men in each company were trained to throw hand grenades, developed by the Dutch master fireworker Johan van Haren."
Full disclosure: I am an early-career mathematician, with a around 1/1000 IQ (according to a single test dating from about two decades ago, compared to the general population) and empirical data suggesting that I am comfortably within 1/10^4 (compared to the general population, once again) in math test-taking. I am not particularly aware of the education literature (especially re US schools), but I believe that I have relevant experience (by having done some teaching -- crucially, *not much*, so the challenges are fresh in my mind -- in quite varied environments) .
The reason why I would not expect teacher intelligence to meaningfully substitute for teacher experience (at least in the setting of the experiment, where you replace a seasoned teacher with a rookie) is because, while a teacher's goal is to make students learn material (more cynically: pass a test), this involves very different dynamics than "just explaining what the students have to know".
It involves paying attention to the students and noticing when your explanations have lost them. It involves flexibility to reformulate everything again and again until what you say finally resonate with their brain. It involves the need to understand what they are currently thinking to be able to spot as swiftly as possible (because their focus, or your patience, or your time, is limited!) what the issue is.
More importantly, it involves staying on top of a precarious social dynamic with a group of fickle children or teenagers (most of which do not wish to be there) which involves a mixture of cajoling, threats, genuine motivation, the ability to deal with situations as they arise (student X is barely containing their tears, children Y is throwing a tantrum, guy Z just walked up and left in front of the whole room, students W and T disrupt the class by asking useless questions, what do I do?) in a way that does not compromise your ability to actually teach (which will happen if you mishandle these situations because, remember, a significant fraction of students does not particularly like being at school and will take it out on you if the opportunity arises, or if there's a bad day).
They may be a part of intelligence, but it is not one measured on academic tests, whereas experience will tend to give someone tools to deal with these kinds of problems.
Your fresh rookie, even if they're an IMO perfect scorer (especially so, since it meant they put work in optimizing for solving IMO problems rather than stay ahead of social dynamics without pretending too hard that they exist -- or even simply about "explaining easy things", which is not always as straightforward as one expects), is a lot more likely to mess this up.
There's probably a trade-off involved, but I think it only becomes significant after the first few years of experience.
Yes, if anyone has spent any time in a modern classroom, they'll understand that there is more to wrangling a class than being "the smartest test taker".
Unexperienced teachers will be taken full advantage of by the budding little blossoms, whereas those with time under their belt will know the tricks and be wise to them.
Yeah, I wasn't expecting this based on importance of knowing the subject matter, I was expecting it because intelligence predicts job performance at almost all jobs, and performance in lots of skills you wouldn't necessarily expect to be linked to intelligence.
I am not disputing that. But one may believe that the aspects of intelligence selected for in the experiment (test-taking) and those that would serve a rookie teacher arriving in a classroom are not that well correlated. N=1 again, but I know the correlation breaks down for me. Heaven knows that “brilliant academic yet atrocious lecturer” is not an empty group, and the university setting is in most cases incredibly easier to manage that grade, middle or high school.
Would an intelligent person figure out a solution? Certainly, given time, with exposure to the various parts of the issue, thinking and experiment and discussing with colleagues.
Expecting their intelligence to save the day on the first time you’re in front of a classroom seems about as misguided as throwing a smart kid in a rough sea because if they were so smart, they should figure out how to figure out how to swim back to safety.
Hm, intelligence predicts success, but probably those studies are controlling for age or experience, or not? So I assume they find that for two persons of the same age or experience level, the more intelligent one is statistically more successful. Or are there comparisons for other jobs that say that an intelligent rookie is better than a less smart, but more experienced worker?
I feel like it's a pretty common experience that many of the better teachers are ones who struggled through material themselves to understand it. Those that learned it effortlessly can't as easily related to struggling students. Not universally true - I've had teachers who are brilliant and good teachers - but common enough.
How does intelligence compare to experience as a predictor specifically?
My guess would be that they multiplier by each other. An intelligent person learns more from each learning opportunity they experience on the job so after a decade they're far ahead of a less intelligent peer; but someone whose been around a lot longer can still have picked up more than a newbie.
For most jobs, there is a required skillset to succeed before you can compare the (nearly universal) benefit of intelligence. In the case of teaching (and probably many other fields), college (or other training) is less capable than first hand experience for populating that skillset. As a IC (chip) designer, I use little that I learned in my BS and have improved decade after decade. 33 years in, I am at the top of my game.
I've seen many people mention the interpersonal specificity of teaching, but the big, big one is behaviour management. Yes, subject knowledge is important, and yes, I'm sure to a certain extent behaviour management is correlated with intelligence, but teachers are already selected for intelligence Vs the population.
This really ties into a lot of the class size stuff: I fully believe class size doesn't matter in Japan because behaviour is excellent there, but in more challenging school behaviour management is *the* most important skill. My partner worked with a man who wasn't exactly the brightest spark of all time, but had twenty years experience wrangling recalcitrant, often criminal teenagers into getting a passing grade, which is a notably different skillset from getting A students to an A+.
Sure, but experience is not completely fungible with intelligence. For most tasks the gains to experience are probably something like logarithmic while the gains to intelligence are more linear or sigmoidal. Thus the interplay of the two is going to depend a lot on where in those distributions you're doing the sampling!
e.g. a more intelligent teacher with 5 years experience may best a teacher with 20 years experience, but a less intelligent teacher with 4 years of experience may best a more intelligent one with only one year of experience.
1. All teachers are fairly smart (even if you are below the median of college graduates, the fact that you are a college graduate probably means you are above the median of the general population). Additional smarts may not be so useful.
2. Too much smarts means that what is difficult for your students to learn is probably not difficult for you to learn. But you really have to "meet them at their level".
3. Not really related, but it is important to realize that a lot of the better performance of experienced teachers is not because experience makes them better but because they stay teachers while worse teachers find other jobs, through some combination of being pushed out and wanting to leave a job they are not enjoying (and may be obviously failing in).
I am unconvinced of the "too smart to communicate with normies," argument. I have met very bright people who were poor communicators even with their peers but there is no shortage of exceptional people who are also exceptional communicators. I am reasonably bright; I hold numerous patents and have (had) IP (chips) inside your phone and other items about your house. I also grew up explaining things to my Down's Syndrome brother and sharing "Godel's Incompleteness Theory" with random people on public transit. Communication is probably the skill I am most lauded for.
It could be subtler, for instance a larger intelligence gap simply exacerbating poor communication skills which would tend to produce the strongest examples of bad communication when the instructor is exceptionally smart.
I've had many conversations about this over the years (I'm also a research mathematician). I think success as a teacher, particularly for mathematics is *anti-correlated* with mathematical ability. If you didn't struggle to learn the material, you can't really empathise with the students who do struggle. It's like asking a native speaker about the details of grammar - they can't explain it because it's just the way it is.
You also identify something that drives me up the wall regarding education research. The single most important factor in education is the teacher - while their subject knowledge is important their connection with the class is paramount. Teaching is an interpersonal process - if you're not allowed to control for variability in the teachers (approximately because the official line is that there are no bad teachers), then you're ignoring the most important variable in any experiment. I've been in a classroom often enough and long enough to know that the things that work for me (and even the things I can get away with) are massively different than what a colleague can do. If they try to emulate me, it's unnatural, the students sense it and it doesn't work (and vice versa).
These are all excellent points. I can certainly say that, when I was teaching, I was more effective several years in than I was initially, because I learned from my mistakes, and because I picked up new techniques.
But it is also important to note what is going on in the study. The abstract says they replaced experienced teachers with NOVICE teachers. So, unless those novices are super geniuses, the outcome is hardly surprising. Moreover, turnout among novice teachers is fairly high (in the US; I assume the same is true in Columbia). Those who quit are presumably relatively ineffective, so the pool of experienced teachers has had the least effective novices culled out, while the least effective teachers are still in the "novice" group, bringing down the average effectiveness.
My son, who attended a G&T program until the Powers That Be ended it, said the biggest change with “regular school” is that a lot of the kids didn’t want to be there or learn anything.
Not a mathematician or a teacher, but this was precisely what I thought as soon as I read the thing. Huge flaw in assumptions/conclusions, as is so often the case with these studies.
"15: Cremieux: The Ottoman Origins Of Modernity. The “Ottoman” bit is a distractor; the Ottomans fought the Catholics long enough for the Protestants to get a foothold, and then the Protestants established modernity. A useful pushback against the pushback that the Catholic Church never persecuted scientists or held back progress. I’m most interested in this post in the context of Cremieux saying he wrote it in two hours. Even I can’t work that fast!"
Okay, if anything is going to incentivise me to roll up my sleeves and spit on my hands, it's this kind of claim.
I'm reading the article and I want a bit more evidence, such as "gimme the names of these Eminent Scientists and High Human Capital folks what migrated to the newly Protestant regions of Europe".
But first, as a general response: thank you for saying the Catholic Church is a model of organised governance. I'm very surprised to hear this and it's always nice to get a compliment, even a back-handed one. Even if it is rather more reminiscent of Neil deGrasse Tyson's modern version of "Cosmos" with the cartoon villainy of Cardinal Borromeo versus that noted scientist Giordano Bruno.
Secondly, I don't think Protestantism invented modernity as such, it invented capitalism. What really invented modernity was the Industrial Revolution, and that's credited to Britain, not the other North European Protestant states (is anyone going to claim that Sweden is responsible for kicking off science and technology explosion of progress?)
As for the "all the high human capital was in Protestant lands" - ah yes. The Enlightenment, precursor of modernity, with such figures as Voltaire, famously Protestant living in famously Protestant France.
Catholic control of universities stifled progress by quashing scientific enquiry? Yeah, I'll remain neutral on that one, but I will also point out that universities in Protestant countries also had confessional requirements. See Oxford and Cambridge, clinging on to fossilised remainders of their foundations under Catholic rule, where fellows were not allowed to marry (because in their pre-Protestant days, they would have been clergy). Harvard was benefacted by a Puritan clergyman and trained Congregational clergy until the 18th century; Yale was founded by Congregationalists and functioned pretty much as a seminary until the 19th century, and Princeton's founding came about as a result of a schism in local Presbyterian churches.
So when do you pinpoint as the date for the birth of modernity, and what exactly do you mean by that? If it's only "the wars of religion meant everyone fought themselves to a standstill and so had no energy left over to persecute anyone who came up with wild and wacky ideas", that doesn't mean "and thus science and hence modernity was born".
Darwinism was the big fight of the 19th century, well into the Period of Modernity, and more viciously prosecuted in the Protestant nations which were still mainly or majority pinned to Biblical literalism as a result of the Reformation principles. The Scopes Monkey Trial was rigged between both the fundamentalists and the evolutionists as a show trial to get publicity, and from that it was hoped attract interest and investment in Dayton to revive its economic fortunes, but that took place in a majority Protestant nation in the 20th 'we're all modern now' century.
I'll have to do more reading on this because I do think the history of the universities is fascinating, but I'll just end with Fr. Lemaître of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium who gave you the Big Bang theory of modern cosmology. You're all very welcome, no thanks needed 😀
"Progress in Spanish scientist production diverges from the Netherlands and Britain right after Spain discovers a multitude of Protestant cells in the country, prompting it to implement isolationist laws"
This is the period 1558-59. Okay, so I hit up Wikipedia for the relevant period and what do I see in passing?
"Despite its immense dominions, the Spanish kingdoms had a sparse population that yielded a limited income to the crown (in contrast to France, for example, which was much more heavily populated)."
You don't think perhaps, maybe, possibly, just barely imaginably, it might be that "fewer Spanish scientists" because "smaller goddamn population overall by comparison to other nations"? No, no, you're right: as Crémiuex says, it's the "pernicious Catholic church" at fault here! TIL that there were assembly lines in European nations for "production" of scientists, like tins of beans!
Spain apparently had a Golden Age of the arts during this time, but yeah: if it ain't STEM it ain't worth a damn, right?
"And perhaps most interestingly of all, France managed to substantially but not wholly save itself from the madness of the Catholic Church by issuing the Edict of Nantes, providing its Protestants with some, but not all of the liberties they could have enjoyed in other parts of Protestant Europe"
If you don't mind me writhing around on the floor after reading things like this, then sure. As I said, I have no idea what measuring stick is being used here, but if we are supposed to take it that X proportion of scientists per Y thousand of general population is the natural level of "scientist production", then I submit that a country with a smaller population is going to have fewer scientists.
If it is 1% of your population will be Big Brain Science, then if you have a population of 1,000 and next door nation has a population of 5,000, you will have 10 scientists and they will have 50, and someone coming along just counting "how many scientists?" with no reference to anything else will go "Aha! the pernicious influence of the madness of the Church is to blame here!"
Though the ultimate conclusion seems to be less "Protestants ❤ science unlike those awful Catholics" but rather "Protestantism is fissiparous, which means it might want to burn scientists at the stake but can't muster the unified rule to do it".
So basically it's all one long "Religion dumb stupid fake, thus threatened by Science, thus hates and represses Science" article.
EDIT: For example, it quotes a paper by Matías Cabello, who in turn quotes something about Descartes:
"self-censorship occurred, such as that of René Descartes, who, “though living in the Dutch Republic, far beyond the reach of the Inquisition, was ‘so astonished’ by Galileo’s fate ‘that [he] almost [took] the decision to
burn all [his] papers, or at least to let no-one see them’ ” (Parker, 2013, p. 654)."
Looking up that book from which the quote originates, it's "Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century" which is all about how there were severe climatic shocks, famines, wars, and revolutions all over Europe (and even touches on China) during that century. So whatever about Descartes' state of mind, I'm thinking that the war, famine, etc. had as much a part to play in affairs.
I think an interesting counter-argument would be "What if no Protestantism?" If the Church and secular rulers did not have to crack down on dissent and revolutionaries threatening their power, would there have been less 'heresy-hunting' and more tolerance of intellectual exploration? If SCIENCE! had not been a banner waved to challenge religious faith, but instead a discipline like others useful in secular life?
The piece could equally be interpreted as "The Catholics beat off the Ottomans, thus giving the Protestants room and peace to grow, and the Protestants were the handmaidens at the birth of modernity because they were too weak to stifle it in its cradle, much as they might have wished to do, because they had worked like termites nibbling at the foundations to weaken all social controls".
I don't think it's the smaller Spanish population. In fact Spain was doing fine during the first half of the 16th century.
I do have an issue with the paper in that I think it ignores several factors (late Counter-Ref in France, distinct Jesuit suppression by country, etc) which not only explain the differences between countries, but fit the author's own data better. If you are interested, I wrote a reply to Cremieux (you can find the link in my other comment. Don't want to link twice). Feedback would be appreciated.
I've seen a lot of this kind of reinterpretation of the development of modern academics. I agree with you that blaming Catholicism for "inhibiting progress" often amounts to just misconstruing preceding academic developments as impediments to progress. It's like saying the Falcon 9 slowed the invention of Starship. If only they'd have started building Starship first, we'd have it by now, instead of wasting time on Falcon 9 - no word on whether one invention led to the other.
A few years back I read a series about Galileo (can't remember where, sorry) that discussed how he was essentially arguing against the other natural philosophers (i.e. 'scientists') of his time, and he'd failed to respond to many of their legitimate objections - instead ignoring or oversimplifying them in his counterarguments - which was why the old guard didn't buy his assertions at first. It wasn't science vs. religion in any way we'd recognize that today, but rather reasoned argument versus reasoned argument. This trend, where the less-developed-but-true argument from up and coming scientists is initially rejected by the establishment isn't anything we've gotten away from. What's that old saying about science being advanced one funeral at a time? It's just comforting to some to tell a neat little story about how one religion or another got in the way of progress. Sometimes precursors don't look like the finished product, but that doesn't mean they're unnecessary.
Whenever I read the actual history, those neat little stories tend to go away and we get back to the old story: "Two groups argued about something, which was unknowable until later when we got enough data to support one side. Now we call one side Righteous and the other Villainous." There, but for the grace of God, go I.
> A few years back I read a series about Galileo (can't remember where, sorry) that discussed how he was essentially arguing against the other natural philosophers (i.e. 'scientists') of his time, and he'd failed to respond to many of their legitimate objections - instead ignoring or oversimplifying them in his counterarguments - which was why the old guard didn't buy his assertions at first. It wasn't science vs. religion in any way we'd recognize that today, but rather reasoned argument versus reasoned argument.
The author makes these points, plus one other that gives important context: *Galileo was wrong.* He believed in Copernicus' model, which was so terrible that virtually all of his contemporaries could see it was obviously wrong. It did put the sun in the center, but there's far more to a solar model than that, and on virtually every other point, Copernicus's model was significantly worse than competing theories. And Galileo stridently taught that it was true.
Meanwhile, Kepler, the guy who actually produced the *correct* model of the Solar System, was a contemporary of his. Galileo was aware of his work, but dismissed it out of hand because he found Kepler's elliptical orbits aesthetically displeasing.
Not only that: Kepler actually received active support from the Jesuits, who gifted him a valuable telescope and even offered him a university position, assuring him that conversion would not be required.
I agree with all of this - history resists being lined up in a neat narrative, with a single cause and single effect. Prussia in the nineteenth century is probably the epitome of a high-culture Protestant nation state. While they had some world class artists, philosophers and mathematicians (Bach, Kant, Gauss) the country was considered backward, dull, rural, unsophisticated in the rest of Europe, and not considered much at all beyond. They were potato farmers and not particularly wealthy ones, in the popular imagination and in reality.
I wonder whether the fact that English speaking countries are predominantly protestant is at the root of all of this? Certainly the anti-Irish anti-Catholic prejudice burned into the soul of British discourse (it's faded a bit in recent decades, but it's still there under the surface) and US popular culture has something to do with it. It would be interesting to see if such ideas are popular in other languages.
I thought it's one of countries where religious peace (between Catholic and Protestant) is enforced early? Now I wonder if Voltaire is from the Protestant side of France.
On 4, my prior would be very strong that the true impact of wildfire smoke on health outcomes is linear or convex, just based on the fact that that seems to be the case for almost everything that's bad for you[1]. I'm very skeptical that the true relationship is concave. The link does a good job of admitting that this may be due to people behaving differently to protect themselves more when smoke is worse, which seems plausible to me. I suppose in some sense, this might mean the total downstream impact could be concave when you include behavioral changes, but I still feel a bit uneasy with the claim that the impact of wildfire smoke on health outcomes is concave.
[1] Except perhaps being exposed to pathogens above some level that's high enough for them to infect you, but that's because pathogens can replicate within you. I can't think of anything else, but curious to know if anyone else can?
>on health outcomes is linear or convex, just based on the fact that that seems to be the case for almost everything that's bad for you[1]. I'm very skeptical that the true relationship is concave.
Well, some ill effects saturate at very large dosages, because someone can't be killed deader than dead... ( or the national belligerence equivalent - the extra nukes just make the rubble bounce... )
A concave curve would only be expected if the population varies wildly in susceptibility. Another example here might be allergens: the susceptible part of your population would be killed by fairly small doses, the rest when the concentration becomes so high that they die of some unrelated mechanism (like choking on pollen). For the direct health effects of wildfire smoke, there is likely some decades-old paper where someone subjected animals to some smoke and determined LD_50, and I would bet that they did not find a concave curve.
I tried browsing through their paper, but failed to learn anything (beside (a) they are using latex, but with very wide line spacing (b) all their plots are in the appendix).
One of their metric seems to be ER visits. It could be that the population varies strongly in susceptibility to seek medical aid for symptoms. I guess some will insist going to the ER for some coughing and others will insist that they are fine even as their SpO2 keeps dropping.
Of course, deaths and ER visits are inadequate to measure the costs of wildfires, especially if people change their behavior: staying indoors or evacuating are also costs.
So, the TL;DR of this paper might be 'people presumably change their behavior to avoid bigger dangers, hence smaller dangers might sometimes affect more people'.
3: Wow, popular opinion of Ancient Sparta is far too positive. They spent all their time engaged in negative sum work on training their military skills so that they could enslave their neighbors, make them do all the work, and contribute nothing to society themselves.
It’s probably a combination of popular media portraying them as extremely effective freedom fighters for the Greeks (i.e. 300) and latent pro-Spartan sympathies that have been passed down by our most useful sources on them, like Xenophon.
And good at legislation of course. The recent DMA is stopping innovation that benefits consumers, while making it difficult for small traders on the App Stores, who now have to publish their name, phone number and address. A non starter for bedroom developers.
There’s a dearth of capital in Europe too. Stripe was founded by two guys from Ireland but capitalised in the US. Europe has plenty of human capital - these guys were from a tiny village in Tipperary.
I wonder if the problem is the EU itself. Europe was dominant when it was nationalistic, we don’t want the wars back but the inter national competition. A European inter national competition for the best startups televised.
Where Europe does compete amongst itself or in other competitions, like sport, it does pretty well. Even the Eurovision has upped its game.
It seems to me like it should be pretty easy to test the hypothesis that the EU is the problem. E.g. did SE/FI/AT stagnate after 1995 compared to NO/IS/CH?, did GB boom compared to IE after Brexit?, and so on.
I’m not really advocating for anybody to leave the EU - there are other benefits - and I despise Brexit but for the EU to use nationalism within its own structures to foster competition on applied science and technology. Europeans are loyal to their country, not the EU, which doesn’t even have a sports team (and if it did no one would support it).
And unlike the U.K. - another multi national project - there’s really no attempt to create a super national identity, except to call Europe a garden or to proclaim that certain relatively new values (like lgbt) are distinctive to Europe when they are neither universal within the EU, or unique to it. As for what is common to Europe historically - like Christmas - the EU seems a bit reluctant to mention it, if their internal documents are to be believed.
But you get an Italian pretty excited about Italy, and if there is a competition to give the eu funds to the best startup across Europe then the Italian people and their governments might find coming last might change their mind on startups.
I agree with harry Lime
> In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
We don’t need the terror, murder and bloodshed but the competition.
> We don’t need the terror, murder and bloodshed but the competition.
But is that even possible in Europe? Sure, maybe if the entire continent was united under one flag... but the only way that's happening is with a lot of the former.
I'm aware of that. I don't think that helps us test the hypothesis that the EU is the problem. To do that, I think we'd need to compare within pairs of similar countries that joined the EU at different times (or where one never joined, or where one left), like DK/SE & SE/NO.
Another data point: Daniel Ek who founded Spotify in Sweden eventually set up an American HQ in NYC. That HQ grew to be bigger than the one in Stockholm, though decision-making was split between people in both.
Another comment under this article mentioned that companies in Europe are hard to scale. In tech this has the side effect of limiting the educational/apprentice opportunities to learn certain skills. Eg. In the US there are plenty of people who did a stint or two in big tech then shifted to smaller companies or startups where they could bring both technical and organizational know-how (describing the positive case, plenty of meh faang engineers just used their resume as a hammer in technical discussions).
My loosely held bet is that this is partially why there are so many OSS contributors from Europe: that's the sort of development work one can do there and get exceedingly good at it, eg. Single small/mid-sized monolithic codebase, usually aimed at running on a single machine (Linux, gnome, etc).
I think it's because of the legal requirements for scaling a company which makes it better to stay under some size eg. 100 before more costly auditing and reporting requirements kick in.
I'd love to get some actual data for this instead of vibes though
Yeah that was my comment - but my own post on this very much vibes-driven. I'm fairly certain there's many regulations that only apply to (or at least enforced on) large companies, and that people are friendly towards start ups but suspicious of large companies - but it'd be great to see some data on this if anyone has it!
The chart on 36 is very confusing... can it be right? Suggests Europe's combined tech cap is <1 trillion, but the top 2 tech companies here are worth about 0.5... And almost the entire US cap is driven by three companies, so even if it's right, it's misleading. And finally, the difference in company formation per capita between the US and the UK is about 20% - can that really explain the difference?
Yeah, I think it's pretty cherrypicked to the point of being misleading. Most other measures (e.g. number of startups/unicorns, total tech sector size) still have Europe far behind the US but not to this ridiculous degree.
The associated twitter thread is much more about the challenge of funding and running any small or growing business than about "start ups" in technology specifically. The tax issues described very much highlight how impossible it would be to scale a small start up in italy without running afoul of the tax authority or effectively bankrupting your business to comply with taxes.
As the article notes, aggressively fighting small fires eventually results in a massive one that cannot be contained. Even if it ends up being totally true that high smoke concentrations are only marginally worse than medium smoke concentrations, these mega fires are a massive risk to the environment and communities. Most plant species in fire prone areas are adapted to either tolerate or reseed themselves in the event of a fire, but the mega fires burn too hot for this to work and everything gets destroyed. Smaller fires are also easier to control and prevent from entering your local community, even if you let them continue to burn otherwise. I also suspect the larger fires impact vastly more people since it takes longer for the smoke to disperse, so any non-linear effect curve of the smoke on an individual must be counter-balanced with the number of people affected. Small fires in Canada affect nearly no-one, the big 2023 fire in Canada caused around 200k home evacuations, directly killed 8, and the smoke affected much of Canada and the US, as well as reached all the way to Europe and China. https://www.preventionweb.net/news/2023-canadian-wildfires-impacted-air-quality-far-away-europe-china
And if we care about the environment in the "let's maintain healthy ecosystems and not drive even more species to extinction" sense, eliminating fires from areas where all the local species have adapted to regular fires and some even rely on fire seems like a bad idea.
I'm glad someone commented on this - we've tried this approach and it's terrible for ecosystems, and also dramatically increases the chances of catastrophic damage, stochastically applied through fire-prone areas. I would think that part alone is obviously far worse than a broad-based, slight health impact from smoke pollution from frequent, low-intensity fires. Ask someone if they'd rather live somewhere there's a 1/20 chance of catastrophic fire destroying their home every year, or somewhere where there's smoke pollution that might reduce their lifespan by 5% overall.
"Here the black line indicates that the average European of 6000 BC would have had genetic IQ 65 (compared to modern 100)"
The standard deviation of the polygenic score doesn't trivially correspond to a standard deviation in IQ. They're looking at genes associated with higher intelligence, which by definition, are not equally distributed within the modern population, and looking at how their frequency has changed. If (making up numbers) the average European has 50% of the genes that go into the PGS, and the standard deviation in that number is 10%, then Europeans in 6000 BC had only 25% of those genes. But it doesn't follow that they had 2SD lower IQ.
I agree, the chart is very bad. There are 4 colors in the plot but only 3 in the legend.
But that's not the worst part. Charts like this where the data is "stacked" are very hard to read. If the data were plotted as separate lines, the relative sizes would be easy to compare. There is a really great book, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" that covers this problem and many others.
But thats the point of the doing it as a stack area chart. The point of the chart is to highlight how insignificant non-US tech companies are. They are barely legible in the chart!
One of Tufte's teachings is to have a reason for displaying the information in the way you are displaying it. I think the chart does a great job on that metric.
The point of the chart is that, compared the US, Europe's Tech economy is so anemic as to be effectively non-existent. The point of displaying the information this way is that the US area dominates so completely that you can't read the Europe data.
2. From the studies release so far, I don't actually see good evidence that we should expect Cobenfy to improve negative symptoms. In their phase 3 study, Cobenfy actually was worse than the antidopaminergics in improving negative symptoms. I will shamelessly include my writeup on that trial here: https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/a-new-therapeutic-for-schizophrenia
49. I am one of those "Prominent Substack Psychiatrists" - thanks Scott for sharing!
Wasn't it King Frederick of Prussia who invented goose stepping as a marching technique? I once read that his idea was to detect and punish soldiers who were drunk on duty, because apparently it is almost impossible to goose step convincingly when drunk, although I've never tried it. (If it works then maybe traffic cops should ask drink drive suspects to goose step twenty paces, instead of just walking along a straight line! :-)
Right, now I'm off to Wikipedia to check my facts. It'll probably turn out that goose stepping was actually first used by the ancient Greeks or someone!
LOL. According to Wikipedia, it was the Prussians who first started it, but not the guy I mentioned. It is also hard for a line of goose stepping marchers to coordinate their steps, and at first they have to train with arms linked to shoulders like a high kicking chorus line.
#28. I’m skeptical. I know haidt has claimed that conservatives are better at this type of task than progressives which seems to contradict the claim that no one can tell the difference.
I took it and scored 7/10. It forced me to say whether i was d or r which makes me not love the methodology. (You can say other / ind, but then instead of being given actual clarifying options, you have to just pick d vs r. I’m Libertarian)
I too took it and got 7/10, and am Republican. One I got wrong I still find hard to believe I got wrong. It was an "I'm a Republican because..." and was so stereotypical I thought it had to be faked, but they say it was not. Yet it even ended with "Merica!"
I don't know if different people got different ones to evaluate.
10. Scott omitted the 1 (one) reasonable reason to have tall soldiers: "Some sources state that there was a military reason to create a regiment of "long fellows" because loading a muzzleloader is easier to handle for a taller soldier." (just before his quote). Fun fact: There is a hot-dog brand named after them: Lange Kerls (long guys). The cans used to depict those long soldiers, too, but they dropped the pics in this woke century of us.
>we’d expect to see higher genetic IQ in populations that got agriculture earlier.
Prior to agriculture, hunter-gatherers living at higher lattitudes had higher IQ and then they got agriculutre later, so these effects largely cancel out.
Most of the places that first adopt agriculture later had their population replaced by pastoralists from somewhere else, Indo-Europeans in Europe and India, Arabs in the middle east etc. East Asia is the only place that still has it's original farmers as far as I know, except places that adopted farming much later like Papua New Guinea.
Indo-Europeans were agriculturalists before they invented spoked wheel. Arabs probably switched at breeding efficient camels. While Arabs spread their language and religion a lot, their genetic impact is much less smaller.
Unpopular opinion - I'm not so hot on the normalization of surrogacy, and equating it with progress. It seems rather unhuman to me, to offload the ravages of pregnancy on to some lady who is then not allowed to have a bond with the kid that came out of her own body.
Proposed remedy: instead of banning the practice, give the birth mother the option to be a third legal parent - not waiveable ahead of time.
Yeah, I put it in the "you should be able to freely sell your organs" category. It probably should be legal, but think it's obviously ethically messy because of the risk of the process, likely info asymmetries, and difficulty in ensuring legal protections etc.
In F1, three drivers died because of crash since 2000. 25 seasons, 20 drivers per race. So driving full season in F1 (which has about same duration as pregnancy) in Formula 1 is 60 (sixty) times more dangerous than giving birth.
Yep, I think many would argue that these should be illegal (noting that private military is illegal in many countries, bodybuilding is de facto illegal because it requires that you take controlled substances, which are the main source of the risk).
For most of these it's probably a case of ensuring that participants are aware of the risks beforehand, and have enforceable contracts with compensation if things go badly - so legal and regulated is probably the way to go. I guess this is more difficult in international surrogacy, which I think is more "ethically messy", but also with a greater upside for the women in lower-income countries. So I'd definitely promote ways of making it work better (e.g. surrogacy visas, or special bilateral agreements).
Without some sort of "sanctity of life/birth/motherhood" argument, I find that perspective really hard to understand.
Like, it sounds like you're describing some dystopian system where surrogates are drafted by lottery. In reality (at least in the US) it's voluntary and compensated. And you can't even volunteer if you've never been pregnant.
> sounds like you're describing some dystopian system where surrogates are drafted by lottery
Did I say such a thing? AFAIK they are drafted by market forces, aren't they?
Also to Julian below: "some lady" is short for "some lady who most likely has no connection to the original couple's desire to have a child"... if you have real world experience, is that not accurate? How?
"drafted by market forces" seems like a very uncharitable way to describe every human who has ever responded to economic incentives, but sure
from another comment I think I understand your perspective a bit better. you're not against surrogacy per se, you're against allowing women to preemptively sign away rights to children they've carried and birthed? if so, while I still don't agree, I can at least imagine a coherent worldview that includes that stance.
The third parent proposal seems incredibly complicated considering all the laws based around parenthood and 2 parents.
It’s definitely a grey area, but if the surrogate is happy, the parents happy, and the incentives not *too* exploitative, it seems sad to ban the practice, as both many children, and much happiness will be left out of the world.
I'm not even suggesting to ban the practice. The technology involved is effectively three-way reproduction, and it has been proved safe enough, so technically speaking it is progress. I'm very happy for any group of three people who wishes to have a child together (I'm sure they exist!), and get to do it that way.
I'm not just not comfortable with one of the three people —the one who actually brings the child into the world, no less— being contractually barred from having a relationship with the child.
There are rights we don't allow people to sign away; I'd (tentatively) consider this to be one.
I disagree, but I understand your position and I think it’s fair.
Personally I’m more pro-signing away your rights so long as significant exploitation doesn’t occur.
The example I’d think of is selling your organs. I’d say we should avoid homeless people being compelled to sell their organs to pay for food and housing. I see it as a huge loss for society that healthy productive people who are 50-50 on donating a kidney for charitable purposes, who would be willing to do so wholeheartedly if they were given a few dozen thousand dollars as a bonus to compensate them for the inconvenience, pain and small risk.
If a woman just likes being pregnant, or doesn’t mind, I see no problem in compensating her for her time, slight health risk, and inconvenience.
You're not allowed to pay a woman to have sex with you, because it's potentially exploitation. You are allowed to pay a woman undergo nine months of pregnancy. That's...not potentially exploitation? Make it make sense.
"I don't understand why prostitution is illegal, Selling is legal, fucking is legal. So why isn't it legal to sell fucking? Why should it be illegal to sell something that's legal to give away?"
I think we still under-appreciate the harms from even low levels of air pollution. In addition to all of the acute health events highlighted in the paper there is a growing list of chronic diseases (including all the big ones and probably psychiatric ones too) being associated with particulate pollution.
Re 27: Imo, for being an effective teacher of a large primary school class, “classroom management” is by far the most important skill. More experienced teachers are much better at classroom management than new teachers both because many teachers who are bad at it drop out (so the teachers who remain are on average better), and because classroom management skills ramp up dramatically in the first few years. So this result is very intuitive to me.
I expect for 1-1 tutoring the situation is different.
#4 isn’t this basically the same for smoking? That is, harm increases less than linearly with concentration of dosage with respect to time. So smoking 1 cigarette a day for 7 days is worse than smoking 7 cigarettes in 1 day ( or at least that what I read at some point).
32: Notice the discussion below the post. Another scholar argues, if I got the gist right, that David Roman puts too much emphasis on the preservation of the physical books, which is necessary but not sufficient for the survival of their content. Most (not all) of the texts did exist in some form in Europe, but they were essentially collecting dust in monastic attics and nobody would have cared much if it wasn't for Muslim scholarship that developed and commented on the *content* of the texts. David Roman and the commentator broadly reach agreement.
I didn’t finish reading the David Roman post because it seemed to be about litigating grievances with some people who were nice to Muslims rather than about trying to emphasize what the accurate roles were. Rather than saying that many people believe exaggerated versions of a story that gets one important part of the truth, he sells it as though he is refuting something in a significant way. He doesn’t dispute that the translation of certain ancient texts from Arabic was far more historically influential on medieval and renaissance reception of the ancients than the copies that existed in Byzantine monasteries. He just disputes that the Arabic copies were literally the only copies.
Fun fact about feeding snakes - my favorite snake is a hognose snake (Heterodon genus, various species, at least three int the US). They're known (for good reason) as being the drama queens of the snake world (they play dead as a defense mechanism in a hilariously overdramatic way, as well as "pancaking" or "hooding" - google hognose playing dead for fun videos, if you're into that kind of thing). So they make very amusing pets.
However, in the wild, they (well, at least two of the species) eat almost exclusively toads and frogs. AFAIK, frozen thawed toads/frogs are not a realistic feeding option in captivity, and ethics aside, keeping a colony of toads around just to feed your hoggies is inefficient at best. They *can* get their nutritional needs met by eating frozen thawed mice, but they're usually averse to eating them, since they're not toads. The solution? Keep a single toad as a pet. Come feeding day, rub a thawed mouse on the toad to pick up the toad's scent. The hoggie will (sometimes with a little encouragement) then eat the mouse. Do this enough, and you can typically gradually ween the hoggie off the toad scent altogether, so they'll just eat regular thawed mice without the toad rubbing.
Presumably the toad lives a normal healthy life, at least for a captive toad. Well, normal except for the fact that once a week or so somebody rubs a dead mouse all over him.
Also, their genus name (Heterodontus) refers to their specialized teeth - they have rear fangs designed to "pop" toads. A toad being attacked by a snake will inflate itself as large as possible to become difficult to swallow. The toad poppers make short work of that.
Thank you, this was like a little bonus extra item! I also enjoyed how your comment started with adorable pet videos and then got gradually darker until you ended with the phrase "toad popper".
Also, thinking about this got me wondering - I get that there are ethical debates to be had regarding bringing an animal into this world for the sole purpose of being food for another animal (like the mice above). But in this scenario, the toad isn't even food - it's just a seasoning! What are the moral implications of existing just to be a dry rub? At the very least it's gotta be embarrassing for the toad.
43: It should be noted that what you quoted was not the original Ems dispatch, but Bismarck's summary of it, scrubbed of explanations of why the request was refused. The French translation of that summary that finally reached the French court made it more insulting through bad word choice. So it was basically a game of telephone that at least increased the casus belli.
Yes, it still seems crazy that this would be enough to cause war, but then again there is this wonderful quote that has been truth for most of human history:
"The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold. The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes."
"don’t know why the researchers chose to interpret the trend as necessarily constant and linear"
I'm guessing because linear is the most parsimonious (i.e. not overfit) for the latter 80% of the sample, and that trend serves to highlight the difference in the first 20% of the sample. It's a good expositional tool.
The whole curve looks like a dead ringer for some kind of log function though -- why bother with the earlier data if you only want to fit the more recent part?
(quite significant in that it's the difference between 'super-intelligent humans in another 100 generations' and 'we are probably not going to get much smarter')
I dunno, doesn't look logarithmic to me: the latter 80% looks pretty constant in slope and the change at ~20% looks like a rather steep structural shift that the smoothness of a logarithm would under-sell. Again, the line on the latter 80% is a good expositional tool to highlight that structural break.
According to the WVS, 85% Koreans say that they're "quite happy" on a 4 point scale (Not at all, Not very, Quite, Very), which is an outlier in lack of variation, but more people say they're "not very happy" elsewhere. Young people are slightly less happier than older people and men are slightly less happy than women, but effects are relatively small.
As for migration, Korea still has one of the lower emigration rates in the OECD, comparable to UK or Germany, and return migration was high during COVID.
Yeah I find the use of survey data for migration intentions a bit unconvincing when there are good statistics about actual migration.
Seems to me like the same people who might scoff at the number of Americans declaring they want to move overseas (say, if Trump wins), will be totally credulous about what statistics like this say about Korea. It's interesting, but got to keep in mind only a small minority of people will take serious steps to follow through, and you probably get pretty different answers depending on how the question is presented.
I think it's implying that, even though there is an embargo and China has relatively few top of the line graphic cards, the prices being low indicates that the Chinese AI industry is not as big and hot as some pundits would make us believe.
But would there have been a demand without the embargo (i.e., nobody's making plans that depend on something they know they won't be able to get in sufficient quantities)?
Re: 32 David Roman (no relation, though we share a hometown) also says that calling the Spartan helots slaves is 'misleading' and that 'much of what we understand as typically Spartan since was decreed by Lycurgus, whose example and teachings were strictly followed by Spartan citizens, and unquestionably revered for as long as the city remained independent.'
This article was my first exposure to him and it's such a failure of critical reading that I dismiss everything else he has to say. The fact that he's a hardcore Trumpist leads me to assume he just writes to flatter conservative sensibilities.
Doesn't Xenophon say a lot of the teachings were being followed in his day? Granted he says they've declined, but the Classical World always thought everyone had declined, and he said they were still being followed somewhat.
He did, but following Devereaux's reading, there's good reason to doubt it. Mainly, Xenophon says that the current Sparta has degraded, but was equal and followed Lycurgus' teachings against accumulating wealth and living in luxury in the past, namely in the time on Herodotus. But in Herodotus' work, the Spartans (really the Spartiates, the elite citizenry to whom the internal equality was thought to apply) already had considerable wealth divisions and had plenty of luxury. Further back, the poets Tyrtaeus and Alcman survive in fragments less than a century from the foundation of the Spartan state, and depict a society which is both stratified and luxury-loving (we also get Plutarch in the 100s AD claiming that Spartan equality during Xenophon's time in the 300s BC, which clearly can't be the case.) Devereaux also cites archeological evidence for Spartiate luxury back to the formation of the state, when Lycurgus was supposed to have lived. This scholarship is now a half-century old, and a reconsideration of Sparta in academic history was in the works as early as the 30s. My impression is that this is roughly the consensus among scholars of this field.
Rather than a steady decline from a sparse, egalitarian, and martial (ie 'spartan') society to the luxury of each writer's present, the more likely explanation is that both existing practices and Sparta's preferred image of itself were attributed to Lycurgus, the perfect king who created all of Sparta's perfect traditions from whole cloth. Come on, his whole story ends with him going back to the oracle to confirm that his laws are perfect and then killing himself so that his followers, who promised not to change anything until he got back, would keep his laws forever. This is a mythic founder, not an actual lawgiver.
Some of those traditions/laws attributed to Lycurgus were being practiced in some form, like the formal systems of land parceling (kleios) and the elite organizational systems like the agoge and syssitia. But the notion of equality among the Spartiates, enforced by law and by a cultural distaste for luxury, seems to have been more of a fantasy of Sparta about itself (and of Sparta by Athenians in reaction to themselves) rather than an actual tradition that persisted for any length of time. Powerful people like shiny things.
I haven’t heard of him before but it was hard to stop rolling my eyes at how emphatic he was that there’s been a centuries long conspiracy to make Europeans believe Islam is good, and you can tell because people believe that Arabic copies of Aristotle were literally the only copies in existence, rather than merely being the copies that inspired the late medieval people to get interested in Aristotle.
32. I think it's clear that most of our knowledge of ancient Greek texts doesn't come from Arabic translations. Just pick up a Loeb Classic edition of your favorite Greek author and check if the alphabet on the left-hand page is Greek or Arabic.
Depends on what you mean by 'our'. The Loeb Classics first came out in the early 20th century. This thesis claims that, up until the 1200s, the greek originals were either not widely available in Western Europe or lost entirely (many being uncovered by archaeologists later), with important texts being available in fragments or in translation, some in Latin but many more in Arabic. Aristotle is one of the big examples, with much of his work being unavailable or simply unpopular in Western Europe until Arabic-Latin translations made him more accessible to scholars who spoke Latin but not Greek (I'm reminded of how St. Augustine primarily read in Latin (including the bible!), with his Greek being much less fluent).
Nowadays of course, we have easy access to many Greek originals, both those that spread previously in Latin/Arabic translation and those which were entirely lost to history until they were physically recovered later, including many plays.
The popular version I’ve heard many times is that only through the intercession of Arabic translators do the books survive at all, and this seems to be the thesis addressed in the linked piece, viz. “Arab scholars and translators saved the books of Graeco-Roman antiquity from being destroyed by the Christians and/or forgotten.”
The piece specifically mentions Aristotle as a writer reintroduced to Western Europe through Latin translations of Arabic; but of course the Greek Aristotle perdured in the East.
(I was puzzled at first because I had forgotten the first name of the author of the linked post, as assumed, his last name being Roman, he was you.)
It is, of course, hardly unusual for an accurate motte to be translated into a debatable bailey by the oral transmission of “intellectual urban legends.”
Which is all to say that I agree with you, but not with the cocktail party quippers.
> Arab scholars and translators saved the books of Graeco-Roman antiquity from being destroyed by the Christians and/or forgotten.”
That timeline doesn’t quite work. The Byzantine empire - which was Greek speaking - preceded the Arab invaders so why would they wait until the Arab invasions for the Christians to oppose Greek philosophy, which was there all along.
I think the idea would be merely that outside Muslim lannds the texts were neglected, and therefore lost accidentally as old texts will be. This has the advantage for leaning towards truth, in that may Classical works were lost through neglect. Although it has the disadvantage (as the article argues) of being false.
Agreed. Many introductions to the ancient classics have some sort of pedigree of the text (usually bought by rich Italians during the renaissance from the remains of a declining Byzantium and sometimes found in a refuse pile in Egypt).
I’ve read most of the Ancient Greek “Classics” (various older and recent translations) and I’ve never seen anything that is claimed to have been preserved by the Arabs. I presume this would be mentioned if it was the case, as it would be remarkable.
I can’t speak to the more obscure texts though as I haven’t read them.
I think the danger is extrapolating a general rule from a few exceptions. The Hebrew book of Enoch survives only in an Ethiopian copy, but it would be excessive to claim that the Hebrew bible exists to day only thanks to the intercession of Ethiopia.
6. So it seems that the genes for high intelligence are spreading, but (casual opinion) the smartest people in the past seem as smart as the smartest people now. This might make sense if intelligence is a matter of having enough of the right genes.
15. Cremieux-- should we believe he wrote it in two hours?
27. I can believe teachers need a solid basis for their subject matter, but more than that might not help.
I’ve always kind of disliked the blame being placed entirely on the Ems dispatch, completely exonerating Napoleon III and France of any moral agency. It was, after all, France that actually *started the war.* Napoleon III had aggressive designs on the Rhineland - he believed, like most French nationalists then, that the rhine river was the ‘natural boundary’ of France, and strongly opposed German reunification, and had engaged in extensive saber rattling leading up to it (the Ems affair itself was caused by a dispute over a cousin of the Hohenzollerns being considered for the throne of Spain; even after said cousin withdrew his claim, France threatened war against Prussia unless they apologized and swore to prevent any relative from ever accepting the Spanish throne). It was thus fairly likely that war was inevitable, and only a question of when.
I think the story of the Franco-Prussian war was kind of retold after WW2 to make Bismarck look like a prelude to Hitler, while whitewashing the militaristic, adventurist nationalism of the second French empire.
I was raised in France, it seemed like a fairly well-known fact that France declared the 1870 war while unprepared and on a stupid whim, and the Second Empire did not particularly feel "whitewashed" (in the way that the First Empire still pretty much is).
I would also like to point out that there are good reasons to not want your small and divided neighbors to actually unite into a single sovereign state...
In Germany, history lessons and a contemporaneous television series about German history (Die Deutschen) portrayed the Ems dispatch as a scheme by Bismarck to force a war on the French. It was, I imagine, only fitting since nothing in my history books was critical of France. Earlier generations would have been raised with tales of Germany being devastated by the Robber King Louis XIV and its later sufferings under the Napoleonic yoke.
Right, this is how a German teacher taught history (in German) to me: the meeting between diplomats was not particularly tense, and Bismarck edited a report heavily in order to provoke the French. Reading up on it now - Napoleon III seems to have been very much aware that France was unprepared, and was pushed into war by irate public opinion. He was a sick man by then.
From Wikipedia:
"The Ems telegram of 13 July 1870 had exactly the effect on French public opinion that Bismarck had intended. "This text produced the effect of a red flag on the Gallic bull", Bismarck later wrote. Gramont, the French foreign minister, declared that he felt "he had just received a slap". The leader of the monarchists in Parliament, Adolphe Thiers, spoke for moderation, arguing that France had won the diplomatic battle and there was no reason for war, but he was drowned out by cries that he was a traitor and a Prussian."
This all seems bizarre to us, but "if you fire the shot, you are an aggressor, which is a crime" and "responsible statesmen don't behave as if countries were aristocrats provoked into duels" are 20th-century concepts. Perhaps the evolution towards them had already started, and was much more definite (though not yet legally enshrined) by the beginning of WWI - it would be good to have a historian pipe in on this.
I think an underrated point left kind of implicit in those posts is that both Marx and Rawls base their arguments in *self-interest*.
Marx saw the proletarians as engaged in a class struggled purely to benefit themselves, as a class, and it just so happens that this will lead to a nice egalitarian society.
One you give up on Marx's theory of exploitation, there are still plenty of justifications to be a left-leaning egalitarian type. But many of them are either religious or have to make assumptions about moral facts that are hard to justify.
But then Rawls comes along. He is proposing a normative view of how society should be organized, but his argument for this also just requires agents acting in their own self-interest. Now, the agents he imagines behind the veil of ignorance are pretty weird ultra-risk-averse agents, but they are not altruistic in any way. As an argumentative premise people find self-interest much easier to swallow.
I also don't think the Rawlsian theory is very successful, but I think this -- showing that collective self-interest ultimately would develop into an egalitarian society -- is the appeal of both Marx and Rawls for religiously-disillusioned postwar 20th century secular thinkers.
> Now, the agents he imagines behind the veil of ignorance are pretty weird ultra-risk-averse agents
You are the second person who has said that here. But most people would have ended up in grinding poverty in the era Rawls was writing, the people behind the veil could be born anywhere on earth.
If there is one person on Earth living in grinding poverty, the Rawlsian maximin agent should be exactly equally worried as if there are many people living on Earth in grinding poverty. This is a little counterintuitive.
Interesting article, but the paths to impact at the end were quite lame. Complaining to zoos in favor of "We’re not sure what the desired outcome should be" and pushing a specific brand name product that doesn't work. It implies that whole feeding f/t is somehow traumatic, it's not, it's no big deal at all, and I am curious if the author has actually ever owned a snake and purchased feeders as a consumer. As written this article is a worrying case of "EAs want my obligate carnivore pet to starve to death".
They should consider just opening their own ethical rodent company. It wouldn't even be that noncompetitive; on a single snake household order the dry ice can be 50%+ of the overall purchase price and that price is static. As the article discusses, it's not particularly complicated to bootstrap a rodent farm and there is essentially no licensure or training required. I expect there would actually be a lot of demand for a premium Ethically Raised Rodents snake food product, it could be a sustainable business.
> "I am curious if the author has actually ever owned a snake and purchased feeders as a consumer. As written this article is a worrying case of EAs want my obligate carnivore pet to starve to death."
I don't understand how you can get that from the article - it specifically recommends higher welfare standards for mouse breeders and some kind of improved version of Reptilinks as their proposed solutions.
I second Notmy Realname's take on this. The article is written as though this is a major problem, but fails to provide justification for that conclusion. More importantly, it is lacking actionable suggestions for snake owners.
We are told the numbers of rodents farmed by several of the major producers, across the globe. I actually learned something from this part, which is that US companies often sell rats shipped from China. However, we need a lot more info to be able to estimate QALYs. One highly relevant factor is the age of the rats killed. A newborn rat is hairless and cannot open its eyes; overall it looks and acts much like a human fetus of abortable age. No info was given on ages of rats or mice. The next important factor is the treatment the rats experience at the facility. Discussion of this comes in the form of anecdata, but the anecdata presented is indeed concerning. Numbers and frequencies would be nice. Less important from a utilitarian perspective is the method of death. Or at least from my view of it; if I assign a value of -100 utils to my own violent and painful death, then I might assign -99 utils to a peaceful and painless death. The dying is the main problem, not the pain, and the dying is a necessary part of the operation. I see death by CO2 vs blunt impact vs snake as little more than a rounding error since they are all quick. The article also mentions some cases of rodents dying slowly of injuries over the course of several days, a much more serious concern. This is both unpleasant for the rats and unnecessary for the operation, as injured rats cannot be sold, and should be addressed by daily or twice-daily checkups.
Reading the PETA article, it seems (and so I hope) that the investigated facility was much worse than normal and that other places are better. I do see one glaring case of lack of knowledge, where PETA wanted newborn rats to be killed by CO2 when in fact at that age freezing is faster and probably more humane.
Now, on to the important part, which is how to make things better. The two suggestions given in the article were to pressure zoos and to feed sausages.
Sausages are a really weird suggestion, and definitely take a bit to wrap my head around. But as a snake owner, it's something I can actually do, so I took a look at the Reptilinks website. Prices are about 2-3 times what I would spend on rats of the same size, could be worse. Sausages are made of ground chicken, quail, rabbit, bullfrog, and various others depending on which type you order. We are to believe they are raised humanely, because... they are sourced from local Ohio farmers? Wait, remember how those injured rats the article discusses could not be sold as feeders, and instead had to be discarded? That is because feeders are sold whole, and buyers would notice and object to injuries. With sausages there is no such limitation, and farmers can still get money from injured animals. Not a good incentive structure. The final clincher is that my ball python is picky (as in, often refuses to eat for months at a time, which is not uncommon for the species), and the website says if you have a ball python don't even bother trying.
One paragraph justifying sausages was mildly amusing, due to how clearly it was not written by a snake owner:
> Despite Reptilinks’ reputation, it seems to us like the status quo of whole animal feeding should in theory be extremely unpleasant for most people. Often, snake owners will keep frozen rodents in their main freezer, where they also keep food for human consumption. When feeding, snake owners need to thaw each rodent out in warm water before feeding. If the snake doesn’t eat the rodent right away, some snake owners will dangle the rodent by the tail in front of the snake for up to 15 minutes. Others may cut the rodent’s carcass open to make it more appealing to the snake. It seems implausible on its face that consumers would elect to keep doing this if there were more pleasant options available.
Yes, we keep rats in the freezer with raw chicken and other food for human consumption; of those, the raw chicken is the more dangerous. Yes, we may wriggle the rat (snakes only eat live animals, so to feed pre-killed you must trick the snake into thinking it is alive) for an annoyingly long time, let's make it take longer by using something that doesn't even look like food. The one form of unpleasantness they would help you avoid is seeing the face of an animal whose death you are responsible for, by grinding it into unrecognizable mush. But perhaps if we all had to face the animals we eat, perhaps, factory farming would not have reached the lows it has come to.
In theory, you could make better sausages. Offal and soy protein should indeed be investigated as ingredients. But unless someone figures out some magic to solve pickiness, my ball python will be sticking with rats. I don't want her to starve herself to death.
So, pressuring zoos. As Notmy Realname pointed out, we're to pressure them to "We’re not sure what the desired outcome should be, but there could be welfare standards". As the article discusses earlier, the American Zoo Association already recommends following the AVMA standards, which already forbid almost everything the article complains about. The breeder the authors visited was clearly not following those standards, but as far as I can tell from the article that breeder was also not selling to accredited zoos.
Based on all that, here are the suggestions I endorse:
1. Audit zoo suppliers to make sure they are following the standards they are supposed to be.
2. Make available to consumers information about which rodent suppliers treat their animals more humanely than others.
3. For snake owners, consider buying from the same suppliers that zoos buy from.
5. Research snake nutrition to test viability of plant-based proteins, but this is a long shot.
I also think that starting your own ethical rodent farm could have some merit. However, I think it would be easier to investigate existing farms and recommend to consumers the ones that meet your welfare standards.
> The one form of unpleasantness they would help you avoid is seeing the face of an animal whose death you are responsible for, by grinding it into unrecognizable mush. But perhaps if we all had to face the animals we eat, perhaps, factory farming would not have reached the lows it has come to.
I don't consider it particularly unpleasant, but I do agree with the sentiment. We are keeping an obligate carnivore as a pet, the least we can do is acknowledge that a living thing has to die for it to live. These days the meat we consume is so divorced from the farms where it is produced that you don't need to notice, but I have whole, frozen rats in my fridge, which I fully acknowledge and am alright with, but am definitely aware of.
>For snake owners, consider buying from the same suppliers that zoos buy from
I already do, and I think most knowledgeable snake owners do as well; local breeders are a massive pain in the ass and often a rip-off, it's generally both cheaper and more-convenient to order from the big producers (rodentpro, perfect prey etc.). Unfortunately the article spends a lot of ink talking about local rodent production which is just not a big thing.
Reptilinks don't work. They are ok for Hognose that specifically want frog scent, but for pickier eaters that want warmth/mammals they do not work. Ball Pythons are one of the most common pet snakes, and Reptilinks' money-back guarantee specifically excludes Ball Pythons because they won't eat them. Reptilinks are not a realistic option and anybody who knows reptiles could tell you that. https://reptilinks.com/pages/100-money-back-guarentee . The paragraph starting "Despite..." is obviously not written by a snake owner, and probably by a vegan (based on the whole article) and it just hilarious as somebody who has a pet snake - it genuinely is not a big deal despite what this article implies.
The other proposed impact is to pressure zoos to "We’re not sure what the desired outcome should be". Notably they do not actually have specific complains about the large farms that most pet owners, large pet stores, and zoos purchase from, as they already have higher standards for economic reasons- yield matters and people won't buy messed-up rodents for obvious reasons. Any company that produced a substandard product would be named, shamed, and shunned.
As far as I can tell the only actual hands-on exercise in this article was on visit "breeder", actually just a small pet shop with a small feeder farm, which wouldn't really be considered a breeder compared to actual rodent producers. They provide a lot of imagery from this one tour, but don't acknowledge that the vast majority of feeder rodents are not manufactured in this sort of environment. The Welfare Considerations listed all hinge on these local farms which are not the majority and are not representative of the actual industry they are complaining about,
As I say in my original comment, I think there would actually be a lot of demand for 'ethically sourced feeder rodents', and it might be a good business opportunity but this article basically comes down to complaining about the "issue" but not providing any workable solution beyond making it harder for me to feed my pet.
On the other hand, I am quite concerned about the breeder reptile community, which is basically a reptilian Tulip Bubble where breeders focus on producing novel morphs (phenotypes), which can be extremely expensive. The breeder reptiles are raised in awful conditions. Live feeding is more prominent in breeders than anywhere else, see below.
Overall this is a very poor article that shows a total lack of knowledge of the industry, and as a result raises problems that don't exist, suggest solutions that are meaningless or ineffectual, and misses the obvious correct answer.
As an actual answer to your initial post, feeding snakes live is discouraged not due to rodent welfare but due to snake welfare; snakes generally win but over enough feeds snakes will get injured by the feeders. Sometimes the snake is also not hungry and then you're stuck with a new pet rat and nowhere to put it. Live costs more for a pet owner and has the obvious hassle of needing to pick up a live animal and feed it immediately.
However, live feeding is popular for small snake breeders, as they will generally have their own small farms for cost and convenience (heating up frozen/thawed is no big deal for pet owners but tedious and relatively expensive at scale) and when you farm live it's much more convenient to just throw the live into the snake's enclosure. Most snakes in snake farms are also babies who will be sold very quickly, they are fed very young mice/rats which don't pose an injury risk. This can cause problems for new owners, as young snakes 'started' on live may be hard to transition to eating f/t after purchase. Another better potential impact would be to look at snake breeders and encourage both better snake welfare, and feeding frozen/thawed in snake breeding facilities.
The article appears to have completely missed this, confident stating "We found no evidence that carnivorous animal farms, whether crocodilian or snake, represent a significant portion of farmed feeder rodent sales, instead relying on formulated diets composed of animal agriculture byproducts and some vegetable protein.", which is completely incorrect.
I used to just leave it to defrost. My milk snake was never picky about the food being dead/defrosted, but she didn't like eating in the open so we had to veil her tank when the food went in. Also she preferred white mice - no idea where that came from!
Microwaving tends to heat things unevenly and could burn the snake's mouth. A more commonly used method is to put it in hot water for 15 minutes or so (inside a bag so it doesn't get soaked and squishy).
It would explode. Trust me, you do not want to microwave a mouse or rat.
It's super simple; the day before I take one frozen rat out of my freezer and put it in the fridge in a ziploc bag in a specific cup I only use for this purpose. The next evening, I fill the cup with hot water and let it cool off a few times to heat the defrosted rat up to ~room temperature, then feed it to the snake.
>8: /r/BadMTGCombos: a simple 19-card combination of Leyline of Anticipation, Leyline of Transformation, Mirror Room, Darksteel Citadel, Sanctum Weaver, Freed From The Real, Abuelo's Awakening, Myrkul Lord of Bones, Zimone All Questioning, Birgi God of Storytelling, Siege Zombie, Desecration Elemental, Mirror Gallery, Clock of Omens, Parallel Lives, Life and Limb, Isochron Scepter, Narset's Reversal, and Molten Reflection can be used to deal infinite damage if and only if the Twin Prime Conjecture is true.
Whether the combo can do infinite damage is an interesting question, but largely academic. In tournament play, you are not allowed to just say 'I do infinite damage' when you have an infinite loop, you have to pick a number.
Since there are also infinite lifegain combos, people can go to any arbitrary but finite amount of life they say they have; you can't have infinite life, but you can have eg. 10^10^10^10 life.
So for any arbitrarily large amount of life they say they are that, there is a tournament-legal boardstate which hinges on the question, not of whether there are *infinite* primes, but of whether there are *at least that many* primes.
I believe in this boardstate, you are supposed to call a judge for a ruling.
there's a real tournament-legal play state that hinges on, not whether there are infinite primes, but
"Whether the combo can do infinite damage is an interesting question, but largely academic. In tournament play, you are not allowed to just say 'I do infinite damage' when you have an infinite loop, you have to pick a number."
Why does this matter in real play? Don't infinity damage and 999999999 damage both add up to "your opponent is dead"?
If I have an absurdly high life total, and my opponent hits me with absurdly high damage, it makes a big difference which number is bigger, and that's a lot easier to work out when both numbers are finite.
Not necessarily, a platinum angel in play can prevent you losing the game at any amount of negative life total. However even for the case where your opponent is doing 999999999 damage to you it's possible to theoretically run your own "infinite loop" lifegain combo in response to their combo that nets you 99999999999999999999 life before their 999999999 damage loop resolves, thereby letting you live. You couldn't do this if they were able to hit you for "infinity" damage instead of merely 999999999 damage.
The most common reason it would matter is if someone has infinite life gain, and someone later has infinite damage. Or if you can gain infinite life in response to someone putting infinite damage 'on the stack.' The second person 'wins' because they can choose to name a higher number.
Then there are corner cases like cards which care if your life total is even or odd, or storm cards where it might matter how many times you have repeated your infinite loop, or cases where you place counters on something equal to the damage dealt, or etc.
Basically there are cases where doing something infinitely doesn't end the game immediately, even infinite damage (especially in formats with more than 2 players), and you need a specific number for other effects to reference.
True that it will rarely matter in real play, but the Magic rules are written very programmatically so that everything 'resolves' in a deterministic fashion, and it would hurt the aesthetics to have ambiguous outcomes in the rules, which 'infinity' could create.
The main relevance is if you a) have the capacity to go infinite but not win at some point and b) later lose the combo and c) the opponent later gets an infinite combo of their own
The most likely case where this would happen in actual competitive play is Heliod Combo, which the combo of Heliod + Spike Weaver. This gives you infinite life, but infinite life alone does not end the game like most combos would.
So it's relatively common to have a situation where
a) Heliod player plays Heliod + SW, goes to "infinite" i.e. a billion life or something
b) Opponent kills Spike Weaver (preventing Heliod player from repeating the combo, so they're stuck with the number they chose)
c) Opponent later players a combo of their own and does a billion + 1 damage to win.
The bigger problem with the "combo" is that you can already do infinite damage on step 5 (just tap your tokens as soon as you play Siege Zombie), without worrying about primes at all.
Has anyone found a MTG defensive counter combo that only works if the Twin Prime Conjecture is false? Then you could set up a game that's provably not a draw, but no one knows who should win. Of course it sounds like in practice it would depend on who has memorized more twin primes and can execute the combo longer without making a mistake.
On Claude's computer use: I'm hopeful they released this specifically in order to show everyone empirically that the hope of AI not being an agent made no sense. Not that it shouldn't have already been obvious, but still.
This *should* have been obvious to everyone the moment it became clear that LLMs can generate HTTP requests, but willful blindness is even more powerful than compound interest.
The "combo" that Scott linked to is not actually infinite in the first place, so it's a moot point. Also, the person playing those cards could already win just from the first few steps without doing the rest.
One other note is that MTG was already shown to be Turing Complete (in the true infinite sense) long ago. And hence you could theoretically program a Turing machine to solve the twin prime conjecture if you wanted to.
I for one have always held negative views on the Holy Roman Empire on account of its blatantly misleading name. I must admit that attempting to breed an army of giants was a worthwhile experiment, though.
> Maybe this means we should fight fires more aggressively, accepting a few inevitable mega-fires as a consequence?
Only if you think of smoke-related health concerns in humans as the only thing you're optimizing for. The problem, at least as I understand it, is that mega-fires have completely different environmental impacts. Fires are a natural part of the lifecycle of many plants (e.g. some pinecones need the heat of a fire to open and spread seeds) and even whole ecosystems, but these larger fires, when brush is allowed to build up instead of burn, are too hot, destroying such seeds and sterilizing the ground. I believe it's also more difficult to slow them down or keep them away from specific areas, and they can move very quickly, so they pose greater direct danger to human settlements.
(It's actually not even obvious to me that simple nonlinearity of the effect of smoke on health is sufficient for this proposal; I believe that the biggest fires are also nonlinear in terms of area, and tend to happen when wind is particularly strong, which increase the number of potential people affected).
My take on Hamilton is that anyone who isn't a theater kid would instinctually find LMM's stuff extremely cringe, and as it became more widely known, the percentage of theater kids among its audience dwindled until it reached a tipping point in which people felt safe to stop pretending that the liberal version of a christian rock band wasn't lame.
I wasn't necessarily on board with LMM's politics but I thought Hamilton's songs were catchy and clever--the way 'not throwing away my shot' winds up having a double meaning revealed at the end, for example, mentally superimposing the 10 Crack Commandments on an 18th-century pistol duel...the guy was creative! I was never enough of a theater kid to walk around singing showtunes, but I really didn't think it was bad.
But maybe I'm not a real art person. I admit to having gained some appreciation for 'classic classics' like Hamlet and Three Kingdoms over the years, but the avant-garde still escapes me. Rockwell paints well, but Pollock is bollocks.
I think Anonymous Dude's answer is roughly the correct one. They're well crafted, and competently executed but they're not cool, they sound silly, they might even trigger a disgust response.
When I watched In The Heights, my thoughs were "The wall needs to be 5 feet higher", and I am south american.
The appetite suppression effect disappears and amphetamines actually aren't great obesity drugs.
As someone with ADHD who is going back on the meds because I impulsively said yes to a chocolate without asking if it has walnut in it even though I'm deathly allergic I can assure you that it reduces all cause mortality for other reasons.
"The Literacy Delusion" is not a real book. There was no study. The author isn't writing about themselves in the past tense. It's a performance piece / thought experiment, commenting on "death of reading" takes. I read the whole blog post, and this wasn't clear to me until the very end:
> I personally would read The Literacy Delusion in a heartbeat! And I've no doubt that if someone wanted to, they could write this book and fill it with studies that convincingly make the point. Then some other social scientist would start a podcast debunking it, and I probably wouldn't listen to the podcast because...I would've always kinda known that the book was just sophistry. It wasn’t truth, it wasn’t seeking after wisdom—it was merely a rhetorical performance. One can value the performance without actually needing to believe in it.
LOL. I seriously thought they had conclusively proven reading was bad for you and was trying to figure out how to liquidate my library of appx. 1000 books effectively.
I liked Naomi's post a great deal, but I'd put it in that rarefied category of Good Art that's probably destructive enough to society that releasing it was a bad idea. It looks like it's going to very badly confuse a lot of people who don't carefully read posts to the end but still update their beliefs based on them.
28: We really should stop talking about "A passed Turing test" or "B passed ideological Turing test" and switch to "Turing test of length X" instead. The odds of an imposter being detected grow larger the longer they have to talk. A hundred words is not enough, we should just let people talk and measure after how many minutes/words people notice it's an imposter and use that as a score instead.
36: It's not just the tax code. Europe is on average older than the US, it also has a lot of language barriers, and since laws differ between countries investors from one country rarely invest in startups from another. Fixing the tax-code is not nearly enough to make the European tech sector catch up to the US.
46: Why is this considered a mystery? Investing in a beautiful building is investing in a positive externality, which the free market disincentivizes. Isn't the fact that buildings became more ugly as neoliberalism became more prominent totally in line with expectations?
It's not just bans, there is also algorithmic suppression. If one uses certain words like "transgender", "gay", "lesbian", or "bisexual" in a Tweet, the message wouldn't preview when shared via direct message, and topics like "Ukraine" are suppressed while Musk's own tweets are boosted: https://www.axios.com/2023/04/03/elon-musks-twitter-free-speech-checkmarks-ranking
There's much more to say but hopefully you get the point: when someone calls themselves "pro free speech", consider the possibility that they really just want to ban leftwing voices.
> 46: Why is this considered a mystery? Investing in a beautiful building is investing in a positive externality, which the free market disincentivizes. Isn't the fact that buildings became more ugly as neoliberalism became more prominent totally in line with expectations?
The Neo liberalism age is a new form of liberal age - where liberal means 19C liberalism, ie libertarianism. But the old liberal age produced plenty of beautiful buildings.
2) 19C Liberals were not libertarians e.g. they were pro state funded education instead of privatization, pro state intervention to guarantee worker protections, pro a state funded social safety net...
>28: We really should stop talking about "A passed Turing test" or "B passed ideological Turing test" and switch to "Turing test of length X" instead. The odds of an imposter being detected grow larger the longer they have to talk. A hundred words is not enough, we should just let people talk and measure after how many minutes/words people notice it's an imposter and use that as a score instead.
I know that. I've read all of Scott's writing on the subject, as well as many other discussions online. That still doesn't mean the original claim is actually *true*.
Well that's the citation. Beauty is subjective so you can't have an objective scientific study of "beautiness over time". Maybe you're lucky and actually like the new buildings, but since we're talking about the subjective experience of Scott (and me and many other people) here's your source that he thinks that.
You said "the fact that buildings became more ugly", but now you're retreating to "the fact that some people think buildings became more ugly". That is a question which admits a significantly increased hypothesis space compared to your original claim.
For example, people might think that old buildings are more pretty because they are rare and familiarity breeds contempt. Perhaps it is selection effects - only the best of the old buildings were preserved. Perhaps it is a generalized frustration with modern society being projected into nostalgia for an idealized past that never existed. etc.
Ugliness is always subjective, when someone says "that's ugly" they aren't saying "that has a high level of objectively quantifiable ugliness" they're saying "I think that's ugly".
Regarding the literacy delusion, and I've wanted to write this for quite some time, but my father is a bit of an aphasiologist (someone who studied aphasia and treated it) and I am child psychologist (albeit through a different track), but something about language facilitating symbolic representation, and asking the question, do people with aphasia experience less psychological suffering?
Ernest Becker, tasked with conveying the entirety of psychology to med students, writes about how the development of neurosis has an inherently verbal component - as emphasized by Freud's famous quote “You no longer have to punish me, Father; I will punish myself now.” However, I think Becker was trying to convey a social programing theory of developments (my parent place expectations on me; nurture side of the debate). I also think Becker emphasizes how even the concept of tomorrow, or the future, is inherently within the verbal domain.
BTW, I was trained mostly from a behavioral psychology perspective and didn't get ton of exposure to Freud. So I may be a bit amateurish in some of this stuff.
So, I mentioned that I am child psych, right? Well, I have special training in reading disorders and the other neurodevelopmental disorders. If we take a developmental perspective, reading is a language exercise, thus the people who read more are probably better at language.
What's the purpose of language? Probably to keep us alive long enough to have babies, right?
Hayes and the ACT camp, view this ability to abstract, as central to human suffering, or "psychological inflexibility" as the deem it. People who are good at language have this abstracting ability which pulls them out of the movement, into the neurotic domains of expectations and the future. And a lot of the work and success from ACT is training people to get out of their verbal awareness so much, or at least recognize that we "hooked" by thoughts easily to increase flexible thinking.
But isn't it super interesting how suicide doesn't really develop until peoples language capacities get developed - once kids move past concrete thinking. I think there really isn't any credible evidence of a suicide attempt before age six or so.
Anyway, in therapy (and I'm kind of shitty therapist, and most of my job is childhood assessment), people who are good at language are also really good at responding to therapy. That's why therapy is usually a waste of time until someone has the verbal reasoning skills of at least an 8 year old (but that's probably early for me, maybe because i'm a crappy therapist, I do best with individuals in their teens).
So if reading for reading's sake is "bad", I think an antidote is reading and talking about it with others. Because then you can at least have some exercise in flexible thinking.
But do people with aphasia have less psychological suffering? What about preverbal or nonverbal autistics? Are we helping them leave the blissfulness of the mindful moment when we retrain or train language? Then they can think about future, and thus be neurotic again. Also, when we do a hemispherotomy, is that part of brain, if outside broca/wernicke's, able to suffer?
not to be that guy, grain of truth etc, but you did understand that the entire link was a performance piece, and there's no such book or study as The Literacy Delusion, right
> People who are good at language have this abstracting ability which pulls them out of the movement, into the neurotic domains of expectations and the future.
Why do you think mindfulness interventions are generally helpful? They help quiet that voice in your head that’s always running or at least direct its focus toward something else like your breathing. It usually says negative things because evolution selected for that. Btw- none of this is really my thinking. It’s firmly in the domain of acceptance and commitment therapy. I’d highly suggest reading Hayes or Harris.
Thanks, I'm familiar with this kind of idea but I hadn't looked at ACT with Hayes/Harris... I'll have a look. Maybe that's what William S. Burroughs was hinting at when he said that "language is a virus from outer space"!
12 the smart move is for Biden to claim to be the most AI accelerationist president in history. Then Trump will do the opposite and become a staunch AI safety advocate.
AFAICT (quick Ctrl+F, not read it), Hughes' paper doesn't address maintenance costs associated with ornamentation, even maintenance costs are much larger than production costs for most modern objects. It wouldn't surprise me if nobody builds grotesques/gargoyles anymore simply because they're too hard to dust.
In NYC, every ornamented building is basically permanently surrounded by extremely ugly scaffolding. Certain laws make maintenance of the outside of buildings necessary, and the older ornamented buildings both take the most maintenance, and are the most expensive. The time it takes to maintain a whole building is about equal to the time between mandated maintenance cycles.
Big glass skyscrapers take very little maintenance on the other hand. There’s almost nothing to come loose besides the windows, which for obvious reasons are built not to fall off.
If you know any way to get in touch with big scaffolding, let me know. I’ve always wanted to start a NYC scaffolding business, since they charge incredible amounts for what is basically labor, metal pipes and plywood. Apparently they’re over $100/foot + 6% a month of the install price. There’s gotta be an opportunity to disrupt that market, although I imagine initial capital investment would be high.
I also find them incredibly ugly. If a multi million dollar building is going to be scaffolded for multiple years in a row, they should at least have better looking options.
> 5: Is it legal to deliberately poison AI training data? That is, suppose you made a lot of webpages saying “the word strawberry has two Rs”, such that the AI would certainly have that statement in its training data.
This sounds a lot like sabotage, in the classic sense: throwing something into a machine to intentionally impair its ability to function properly. Sabotage is illegal, with a long enough history of precedent behind it that, while it's not *certain* that the AI version would be found illegal in court, I certainly wouldn't want to be the defendant in that case!
> Material implication in Mormonism: In the book Doctrines and Covenants, Joseph Smith reports that God told him that if he lived to be 85, he would see the Second Coming (which would place it in 1890 - 1891).
That got me curious, so I looked it up, and it turns out that the text very specifically does not say that:
14 I was once praying very earnestly to know the time of the coming of the Son of Man, when I heard a voice repeat the following:
15 Joseph, my son, if thou livest until thou art eighty-five years old, thou shalt see the face of the Son of Man; therefore let this suffice, and trouble me no more on this matter.
16 I was left thus, without being able to decide whether this coming referred to the beginning of the millennium or to some previous appearing, or whether I should die and thus see his face.
17 I believe the coming of the Son of Man will not be any sooner than that time.
> Large scale-formal Intellectual Turing Test finds that people can imitate partisans effectively; ie nobody on either side can tell the difference between a Democrat arguing for Democrat values vs. a Republican-pretending-to-be-a-Democrat arguing for Democrat values (and vice versa).
This is a surprising claim to say the least, with the way it flies in the face of both the theory of Moral Foundations Theory and various tests experimentally validating its predictions.
> 35: Italy bans surrogacy - quite strictly, too, Italians aren’t even allowed to go abroad and do it. I am so sorry for all the Italians who will never get to be mothers and fathers because their government hates progress.
There are very valid reasons to oppose surrogacy, from concerns over a practice which, while it may not technically be sexual exploitation, is certainly a close neighbor thereto, to biological problems with microchimerisms with the surrogate mother causing a significantly higher rate of birth defects and genetic complications in the babies.
Just ran the "try it yourself" test for the Ideological Turing Test. Over multiple runs, I was about 50/50 on discerning fake Democrats from real Democrats, but near-perfect on discerning fake Republicans from real Republicans. Which is exactly the result you'd expect from Moral Foundations Theory.
I tried it and I called a lot of real ones fake because they're badly written. "I also believe that abortion is illegal and immoral and should banned nationwide" and "I am a Republican because I support Donald Trump" and "I do not believe that we should let illegal people enter our country". Really clunky or tautological or downright incoherent phrasing ("I believe abortion is illegal"?), and these are real Republicans apparently.
Similar for the Democrat ones. It's easy to imitate bad writing, I imagine.
Yeah, I didn't look at good/bad writing. The author took volunteers from Mechanical Turk, which is not a methodology that you'd expect to optimize for high quality. My principle was "does this sound like someone who gets their understanding of these positions from actually understanding them, or from listening to what their opponents say about them?"
Can't see how it would legally be sabatoge (in the US) to say what I want. The fact that someone else is using my words as unvalidated input to their machine is their responsibility.
Right, it's not completely obvious what the "right" secular, progressive attitude on surrogacy should be. In France, surrogacy is treated similar to organ donation - altruistic surrogacy is allowed, surrogacy for money is not (and then that has the effect that people go abroad for surrogacy, to countries were pregnancy can be riskier and the rights of the child-bearer are not really protected).
> Right, it's not completely obvious what the "right" secular, progressive attitude on surrogacy should be.
To be fair, though, how is that different from any other topic? When your entire ideology is based around the constantly-moving target that is "progress," this is anathema to the idea of being anchored to unchanging moral principles, so it's never obvious what the right attitude should be because it could easily be completely different tomorrow.
15. Alice Evans pointed out recently on Twitter that areas that were subject to the Counter-Reformation had worse scientific output than areas that stayed protestant, so I guess that's not surprising. Although I don't think you can necessarily assume a counterfactual where science progresses slower because of this - technology advanced fairly rapidly for a pre-modern area in the High Middle Ages (when the Catholic Church was at the apex of its power), and it's possible that if they'd been more reformatory in the Early Modern Era that we don't get a huge protestant schism.
22. You can find a lot of quotes from 19th century prominent Mormons who thought the Second Coming was around the corner in a couple decades. More generally, I remember the historian Tim O'Neill (who mostly seems to debunk myths about holidays and Jesus these days) arguing WAY back in the Days of Quora that a lot of what Jesus said makes more sense if you figure that he believed the coming of the Messiah was just around the corner.
26. I didn't expect the Buddha comparison on that one. To me, it sounds more like what was going on with Prince Alexei under Tsar Nicholas II, where he was treated with pampered, protected indulgence because he was the Heir and also hemophiliac (and in that time area, that meant he was always at risk of death). Also wild that he's still doing the two weeks quarantine - Covid must have permanently stamped itself in paranoia on Putin (remember his comically large meeting tables?).
27. I'm betting the older teachers are just a lot better at avoiding and handling disruptive students.
35. Meloni seriously sucks. I think she also did something to strip homosexual parents off their children's birth certificates - all this anti-natal, anti-family crap at a time when Italy's TFR is steadily drifting downward for more than ten years.
36. I think Matt Yglesias had a great post about how so much of Italy's business sector revolves around avoiding regulators and the tax man, such that the only big companies in Italy that aren't foreign are those that either essentially got grandfathered-in and are 100 years old, or the former publicly-owned companies that got de-nationalized. Italy did still have a long boom period in the 20th century, but mostly because they were a cheap place for northern European countries to manufacture stuff back when they could still devalue their own currency.
43. Bismarck is just a fascinating guy, and a strong candidate for a Great Man of History. I honestly think without Bismarck, we never would have had "Germany" - there would have been a powerful northern German state dominated by Prussia, Austria, and a southern Catholic German state that was basically Bavaria. Very different geopolitical dynamics in Europe without that.
47. Also, Hamilton is extremely nerdy and corny. It was kind of inevitable that it would eventually lose its snob appeal, but I bet it has a revival down the line that's popular like a lot of well-liked corny stuff.
54. Young South Korean Men and Women appear to be heading towards Ent-ish levels of estrangement. Not good for fertility rates - hopefully the next government stops pandering so much to creepy people and actually tries to crack down on stuff like voyeur cameras (which apparently are a huge problem there).
Also, I think you can see why East Asia in particular has had a steep fertility crash, even beyond the overall decline in fertility world-wide. That type of ultra-intensive "arms race" parenting that's common in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is really negative on the fertility rate - lot of folks just have 1 kid under those circumstances and put everything into them, or just decide it's not for them at all.
Part of the backlash against Hamilton (as I saw it on Tumblr) was probably a natural reverse to the adulation it had received (there was a point where damn near everything on that site that I saw involved Hamilton quotes, songs, characters, etc.)
But it got popular and it got mainstream, and that was the kiss of death. Now it was no longer something new and exciting casting non-white people as the Founding Fathers, it wasn't woke *enough*. Now it was whitewashing (if you'll pardon the term) these awful people! Washington wasn't a hero, he was a racist slave holder! Jefferson was a rapist! and so on. Lin-Manuel Miranda came in for criticism as well, I think in part for being too successful - he wasn't really Puerto Rican, or not enough; he came from a well-off family and wasn't authentically 'street' as he tried to lay claim to (see the tussling over the movie adaptation of "In The Heights" and lack of enough dark-skinned Afro-Latino actors: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/movies/in-the-heights-colorism-afro-latino-latina.html)
We did have our own manufacturing. Also our exchange rate policy was not too dissimilar wrt that of the UK. The fact that the Deutsche Mark tended to go up relative to other European currencies was also due to German policy obviously: it takes two to tango.
...I seriously doubt that homosexuals not being able to have children is going to meaningfully affect the TFR. If anything, promoting the narrative that fulfillment can only be achieved through a man and woman coming together to bear new life would have a much more positive impact on fertility rate. It's not like gay people are incapable of being in straight relationships and having children...
22. The link no longer works but there actually wasn't a revelation about the second coming happening in 1890 it's just that Mormons believed/hoped this to be the correct interpretation of a revelation smith received.
I have a friend who does business in Italy, and making payments in cash is so incredibly common anecdotally, that the effective tax rate is extremely low.
It is my understanding that “studi di settore”, that is assuming a certain level of income based on statistics and taxing accordingly rather than trusting a professional’s declaration, was intended as a way to counter tax evasion. But there is a saying that goes “fatta la legge trovato l’inganno”, meaning that for every new law there is a workaround.
Yes and no. It’s a joke because a tax code so terrible that tax evasion is the only way for many companies to exist isn’t a great situation. No, because at least the tax code that effectively bans startups is avoided through commonplace fraud.
If there was a law against women wearing pants that would be terrible, but maybe a little better if it wasn’t consistently enforced.
I, too, live in a country with a high tax burden and a lot of tax evasion, and I'm not sure it's not just better to just have high taxes (obviously low taxes would be better than both, but given those two alternatives): The system, as it is set up, rewards political dealing and tax evasion schemes over providing goods and services people want. It is little solace than an actual factual crony capitalist is not actually paying the ridiculous tax burden that would be nominally imposed on them, and it seems to turn the public against markets when they see that the incredibly onerous system is bypassed by well connected people.
Definitely more Yes than No, as you’re right about all the other effects. My comment was more about how, while the tax code seems to ban startups, it doesn’t in practice thanks to evasion/loopholes/willful ignorance.
Wouldn't it be a strange world if the correct answer to "Does 'strawberry have an 'r?" is yes, "Does 'strawberry' have two 'r's?" is no, and "Does 'strawberry' have three 'r's?" is yes?
Since it's a link post, does anyone have a link to a good article on paleo-archaeology or paleo-genetics (or both) on why there was no flowering of human civilization in the Eemian Interglacial? It was 130,000 before present to 115,000 before present, meaning it lasted longer than the Holocene has so far. And as best we can tell, anatomically modern Homo Sapiens were around - and had been around for nearly 100,000 years at that point.
"humans evolved the cognitive capacity to kickstart civilization somewhere during the last Glacial Period, but couldn't cash out that ability until the climate became more hospitable to agriculture"
I’m somewhat skeptical, since it’s generally accepted that East Asian, Native American and Middle Eastern populations diverged ~40,000+ years ago. We’d had mild periods between then and the most recent ice age. All 3 groups developed agriculture independently at approximately the same time.
Although perhaps there were pro-cognitive capacity factors at play between 40,000 years ago and the last glacial maximum that approximately equally affected all three groups. I don’t know enough about it to say.
Edit: Actually nevermind. I had my timescales messed up. The last interglacial before our current one was ~120,000 years ago. Your theory is definitely plausible.
> To do that, you’d have to explain why humans developed so rapidly after the last ice age, which no one has been able to do to satisfaction.
I thought there's only really one and a half main contenders for explaining the Cognitive Revolution (the step-change explosion in the fossil record where technology and art advance very suddenly)?
It was either FOXP2 expression changes* and laryngeal / voice box changes and the step change in linguistic ability and abstract thought leading to much greater cultural abilities, better transfer and transmission of ideas, and a ratcheting effect on advancement.
Or it was some combination of the voice / language changes and a slow "warre of all against all" where different groups in Africa arms-raced each other for a few thousand years to the peaks we see before the last African outmigration that wiped all extant hominins in the rest of the world out.
Is there some other leading theory? I haven't head that the voice / laryngeal differences had been seriously challenged, even David Reich is on board.
* Ie methylation changes in the expression of various FOXP2 proteins. Neanderthals had the FOXP2 genes, but these are distinct to H Sap. T Maricic et al (2013) and Gokhman et al (2020)
Regarding link 11, there is also the Jules Verne novel "Sphinx of the Ice Fields" which is a sequel to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Antarctic_Mystery
Strongly seconding Moon Channel’s video, and for that matter his whole YouTube channel.
The section of the video that breaks down the culturally-charged communication of some Korean pilots just before a plane crash has stuck with me ever since I first heard it.
I used to watch his stuff, but they rubbed me the wrong way more and more, until I saw something like "Can cake teach gamers to respect women?" and I cannot in good conscience watch something like that. Unsubscribed.
Oh come on, there's no way that the powder keg for all of the gender war shit in Korea was a gacha game skin not showing enough skin. ...God damn it, I can't afford to be more misanthropic than I am now.
Edit: Well, I finished watching the first video, and unfortunately I can't comment on it because I want to hurt myself too much. But thank you for recommending that channel, it's very good!
The gacha games stuff is Moony's hook for the video. That's just the most clickbaity/memeable manifestation of the gender war. His analysis is much deeper than that, though it could be summarized as it being the end result of South Korea's centuries old and deeply ingrained Confucianism at all levels of society and culture.
Re 43: It's hard to make head or tail of the provocative Prussian communique. It seems like the first paragraph would have been more likely to offend the Prussians than the French. So I can only assume the casus belli into which Bizmarck intended provoking the French was the second paragraph, and that the King refusing to meet the ambassador was a blatant breach of protocol and a mortal insult. The supposed French demand in the first paragraph may have seemed to the French so reasonable and necessary that this made rebuffing their ambassador even worse.
Dominic Cummings, a former UK government advisor who led the successful Brexit campaign, is very interested in the life and times of Bismarck, and is evidently a big fan of the man himself. So I'll take the liberty of adding a comment on his blog, referencing your links page. His latest blog article can be found at:
> Re 43: It's hard to make head or tail of the fake Prussian communique.
Yes, I was going to point to this specifically as the counter-argument for all the Flynn effect people who think that people in the past were functionally retarded.
"Average crowds on the street could read or hear this paragraph, grasp what it was saying, and infer the implications quickly enough that they were outraged and mobilized immediately and en masse upon hearing it!"
Just try getting a modern crowd of Flynn-effect geniuses-relative-to-the-past to do that, ha!
People weren't smarter than us back then either. It's a long, confusing sentence because that's how German looks when you translate it into English without breaking it up.
I don't know how readable the French translation was, but people don't have to actually read something to get mad about it. All they need is someone else to tell them the gist of it.
Reading the text, it seems to be tuned to make the Germans think the French were being insultingly demanding (a mere ambassador trying to force a foreign king into binding conditions) and make the French think the Germans were being insultingly overbearing (ignoring the rightful requests of an ambassador for permission to report back to his government, as though the king could make policy for another country).
If you're counting on jingoism being high in both nations, you can make something inflammatory out of what's technically true.
It always brightens my day when "Links For" pops up in my inbox. These link roundups remind me of when Reddit was good 10+ years ago. Thanks for sharing your extremely interesting online life with us!
Basically, the particularly strict E. Asian model of arranged marriage; led to a deficit among East Asian males in traits that attract women, including apparently (If Malcolm's comments are correct) a lower E.A male sex drive. Probably also selected for lower E. Asian female interest in children as-well.
This sounds like a rather hard position of genetic over cultural determination. How does that square with this research, showing extremely low level of genetic selection in recent human history?
> A lot has happened to humans in the past 5,000 years and yet, from an evolutionary perspective, it looks as though very little has happened. Based on ancient and modern data we see two broad and somewhat contradictory patterns. On the one hand, very intense but short term stress (~200 years) is not sufficient to induce strong selection. [...] On the other hand, the few loci that have come up in scans for recent selection are largely acting on simple processes related to diet, appearance, or infection and (beyond LCT and the MHC) the underlying genes seem fairly arbitrary.
(I'm mostly interested in the questions of fact involved, not in the political positions that TFR's blog seems to be mostly about.)
I do not think your criticism of Italy comes from the right place. This is mostly a feeling, compounded by past posts criticizing food policies (specifically the ban on artificial meat). But for what it’s worth let me try to articulate this. Yes the law is often outdated, unnecessarily convoluted and certainly not conductive to innovation. Yet neither technological innovation nor economic growth and not even personal freedom are goals in and of themselves, they are essentially tools. It is conceivable that a society may choose democratically to prioritize other goals. Some economists (e.g. A. Okun) have argued that there is a tradeoff between growth and equality. It is not too hard to imagine other tradeoffs, say between growth and cultural identity, etc. It is not obvious to me that we should always choose growth (or innovation for that matter) over everything else. Does this make sense to you?
Synthetic meat on the other hand doesn't mix well with prosciutto di Parma. At any rate I am not arguing that having a crazy tax code is a good thing, but equating startups in themselves (or surrogacy qua surrogacy) with progress seems ideological. Not everyone around the world wants to be California, and it's ok. Besides, do you think we would even be _allowed_ to become a major tech powerhouse given the strategic importance of certain tech companies (think twitter or facebook)?
> Besides, do you think we would even be _allowed_ to become a major tech powerhouse given the strategic importance of certain tech companies (think twitter or facebook)?
To paraphrase what the Athenians said to the Melians during the Peloponnesian War: those that grow do what they can and those that don't suffer what they must.
It's not like economic growth per se can substitute for the ability to defend ourselves, which is deliberately precluded in the current geopolitical arrangement, in which we are vassals of the US. The case of Germany is quite instructive: they suffered a major sabotage of their energy infrastructure and could not do anything about it, despite being considered the economic powerhouse of Europe (and likely having more reasonable and more consistently enforced taxation laws). Italy does not seem to be in a radically different position.
Im not sure I agree with putting it as vassal, but if I go along with it, there's also something to be said about being a vassal to contributes to back / is valuable to defend.
> ... despite being considered the economic powerhouse of Europe...
Not to be nitpicky, but isn't Germany considered rather the sick man of Europe? :D High energy costs, major reliance on exports to China, lots of bureaucratic red tape.
Brzezinski in his landmark book “The great chessboard” uses the “vassal” terminology to refer to European countries. He was national security advisor under Carter. The politically correct euphemism is “allies” now, but it’s hard to believe anything of substance changed.
Regarding Germany: they decided quite suicidally to phase out nuclear power. Concomitantly, their access to Russian natural gas was severely curtailed due to the war in Ukraine. Now wonder they are the sick man of Europe, now. If you look up the trade balance of Germany in the decades leading up to this situation though, you will see a strong trade surplus. This was first mostly towards its EU neighbors (who could no longer devalue their currency after joining the Euro), laters towards the US (when the Euro was devalued wrt to the US dollar).
You're right, neither technological innovation nor economic growth are goals in themselves, and voters can choose to prioritize other things. Italian voters have, and to what result? Decades of stagnation, poverty (especially in the south), and discontent, leading to the current far right government. 33% of young Italians want to move abroad (https://www.fondazionepirelli.org/en/corporate-culture/italys-young-people-intending-to-move-abroad-are-symbolic-of-a-country-in-decline-hit-by-a-crisis-of-confidence-and-of-the-future/). Italy contributed nothing to the computer revolution, nothing to the Internet revolution, nothing to the smartphone revolution, nothing to the 2010s tech boom, nothing to the AI revolution, nothing to the electric car revolution, nothing to the private space revolution. Your ancestors (I'm assuming you're Italian) conquered the known world and fundamentally shaped human history, in large part because of their engineering prowess; your fellow citizens now watch the world go by without them, powerless to shape it. That, to me, is tragic.
This is simplistic. You may take a look at the time series of GDP per capita of Italy as a fraction of that of France or some other comparable baseline country in Europe (this helps to exclude Eurozone-wide effects) and notice that it was growing up until the end of the nineties. I don’t think voter attitudes had a discontinuity around that time, if anything the populace has become more and more progressive over time. There was however a change in monetary policy around that time, ditching the floating exchange rate for the Euro (note that Euro banknotes and coins started circulating a few years after the European exchange rate mechanism was introduced).
YOU are a public intellectual, Scott. So are Richard Dawkins, David Deutsch, and Stephen Pinker. Are people in general jerks to you or them? I haven't noticed it (other than the usual accusations that ANY well-known person gets - just because there are lots of jerks in the world).
I respect all of those people (even when I disagree with them). But I also find Yuval Noah Harari's books weak sauce and am unimpressed. Does that make me a jerk?
People are absolutely jerks to Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, 1000x yes, have you seen *any* Internet discourse.
I don't want to comment on me because of course I hate when people say mean things to/about me, but I'm probably not the best judge of whether that makes them "jerks".
Is there a difference between public intellectuals and other public figures? Seems like people are jerks to politicians, movie stars, and athletes as well (though they also all have fans that are creepily fawning to them as well).
Popular nonfiction is always going to be "bad" , in the sense that you can nitpick it from an academic perspective, but then a "good" book, with loads of citati ons, wouldn't be read.
32 is very poor. To say that Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek "because the Roman Marcus Aurelius was that kind of snob" betrays an absolute ignorance of the period, when educated Romans were bilingual in Greek to the same extent as present day non-anglosphere academics are bilingual in English. As a matter of fact when M Aurelius wrote to Fronto (expecting an audience of at least one) he wrote in Latin, while we don't know the Meditations were for an audience at all. So, odd form of snobbery.
Nothing wrong with not knowing this but if you are so pointedly ignorant about and uninterested in classical civilization why worry about how it gets transmitted to us? This looks very like a culture war against Islam, waged in a country of which the aggressor lacks reliable maps.
Nobody claims that major Latin and Greeks were ultimately only preserved by Arabic translators, but there's no doubt they kept the torch burning for at least a century or two. It's worth pondering why we still refer to Ptolemy's work as the Almagest.
The attack on Al-Khwarizmi is particularly odd. He is blamed for plagiarism from the Indians in a work expressly entitled “Addition and subtraction according to the Indian calculation". Anyway almost all scholarship consists of the promulgation of already-existing thought, even Darwin's Origin of Species (see Darwin's own intro to the second edition for confirmation). It's pretty cool to introduce Indian numerals to the west even if you do rebadge them on the way through.
The guy also gave his name to the algorithm. He probably wasn't the first person to make a rule like If A do B; else C, but he probably deserves more than zero credit for developing the idea.
There's scholarly grounds for being anti Islam, notably their burning all the manuscripts in Constantinople in 1453 on the grounds they were either superfluous because compatible with the holy Quran or heretical because not. V regrettable but the Catholic Christians did the same thing on the same grounds in South America.
Not unusual for this author. His article on Spartan equality claimed that the Spartans had always followed the strict code laid down in ancient times by Lycurgus. Either a very superficial and uncritical reader or ignored sources that cut against his preferred narrative. Terrible that he's one of the top history substackers.
The quality is poor isn’t it. As someone who studied history I find it a bit depressing that these kinds of inflammatory, quite amateur blogs do well. It feels like an extension of the “interested amateur” history podcasts where someone just talks through what they think based on what they have read (or not). Fine if positioned as opinion, but irritating when positioned as truth telling
Charitably, I think posts like this are intended to 'set the record straight' -- if you believed that every single copy of Euclid was lost in Europe, not a single person had heard of geometry until 'the Arabs' arrived with the gospel of learning, then the link sets you straight. History is always more nuanced than that. I did find the post poorly written and researched, and don't agree with it - but the intended audience might find it useful?
I think the intended audience is anyone who might have had a positive thought about Islam, and the intended result is not correction, but just eliminating positive thoughts about Islam.
Thank you - the post had a sort of reductionist black-and-white Jordan Peterson feel, and that explanation makes it all fit together. It'd be an interesting question to investigate why (whether?) there's a greater tendency now than in the past to categorise things as wholly good or wholly bad.
I suspect there is no greater tendency these days - it’s just a tendency all people have to some extent. Its probably an innate sort of simplification that our brains do to make it easier to categorize things.
I'd take the opposite side of that wager. I think there's been a purposeful dumbing down of public discourse which has led to this binary good/bad thinking. I'm also not convinced that we have a natural categorising instinct.
To me, categorising is building mutually exclusive boxes and putting things into them (in this case just good/bad, but more complex systems are easy to imagine). I think it's equally natural to assume that people classify things quantitatively, on a scale which we might as well normalise as [0,1]. I don't claim to be representative of the public in any way, but I don't think I ever ascribe a value of 0 or 1 to anything...
I think the binary box mental model is more widespread now than my type of thinking, which I (without foundation) claim was more common in the past. I wonder how one would test this?
In summary, I do think the Counter-Reformation held back scientific progress in Catholic Spain, but not due to the Inquisition (as the paper quoted by Cremieux suggests).
> Heliospect is a startup promising polygenic selection for IQ and other traits; they were trying to stay in stealth mode but The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence.
It's very weird to use the word "nonconsensually" where there's no obligation to secure consent. Between this and prior commentary on e.g. profiling someone without their permission, does the gist just boil down to "it's not nice to reveal something about a subject that the subject would like to keep secret"?
> I don’t list acts of censorship here because I necessarily disagree with them or think it’s impossible to support the censor’s actions, but I’m experimenting with trying to Streisand Effect any censored content I come across to make censorship decisions more costly.
Ok, what the fuck. I can get an object-level 'good PR for things I like is good, bad PR for things I like is bad', but there is an attempt at consistent principles anywhere in sight? To ward off the obvious, 'PR by people I don't like is bad, PR by people I do like is good' isn't better.
I was nervous people would object to that word, but I couldn't think of another word to use to communicate the fact that this was a situation where Heliospect was trying to stay in stealth mode and the Guardian discovered them and un-stealth-moded them. I think that's a relevant part of the story and I don't want to let word choice issues make it impossible for me to mention it.
Oh hey, didn't expect to attract a reply down here - if nothing else I'll take that as solid reinforcement to be more thoughtful and less glib in my dashed-off responses!
I think the core of my objection is to the implication that the Guardian had any obligation *not* to un-stealth them - while Heliospect's attempt at a low profile is notable, the interaction between that and the Guardian's actions isn't IMO. "Uncovered" and "revealed" would nonetheless communicate much the same idea, yet you deliberately chose more condemnatory language. You're an admirably principled guy, but I know this is an area where our pre-existing principles conflict and it wasn't clear to me whether you were operating on the object-level w.r.t. polygenic scoring. (FWIW, I'm pretty strongly in favor of polygenic testing being available, so this really is a principle confusion for me.)
I hold that the one of the main roles of journalism is to bring to public attention things the public would object to, *especially* when the instigating forces would prefer them be hidden. I fully accept that that public approbation is poorly-calibrated and that this will have real costs, but "assist in concealing information if doing so is for the best" is a dereliction of a journalists' core professional responsibility. That object-level considerations will sometimes override the principle is straightforward, but not something to take for granted.
There are Kolmorgorov reasons not to full-throatedly defend polygenic scoring, sure. But assuming away the legitimacy of investigative journalism is a bridge too far for me.
...and then of course, that was followed by an explicit appeal to the Streisand Effect in order to impose costs. That's good journalism! But it's also exactly the kind of thing that I thought you were just questioning? So..... if there is an obligation to *not* spread things the subject doesn't want spread, where the heck are these epicycles derived from?
I do think that the stealth aspect was load-bearing for Heliospect, such that by far the most important part of the Guardian article was unstealthing them, far more important than anything they actually revealed.
I don't think the Guardian had any "obligation" not to unstealth them, any more than I have any "obligation" not to publish a post right now saying "Dan L is an idiot, look at this stupid comment he made, you should all shun him", but it's an aggressive thing to do and something I would only do if I were trying to destroy you. I think "does X have an OBLIGATION to do Y" moral language deliberately obfuscates things like this.
My understanding of the exact situation is that some nonprofit allied with the Guardian sent a spy to some gathering of people that they thought had a connection with Heliospect, that spy used a fake passport to convince them he wasn't a Guardian reporter, he made contact with Heliospect, claimed to be a customer, promised to keep everything secret, then leaked all their information to the Guardian. This seems like a noticeably different style of reporting than just stumbling up to a storefront and saying "you seem like a nice company, why don't I interview you?", and I think it's fair to inform ACX readers that they used this style and not the other style.
If you think it's a role of reporters to bring attention to things that are trying to hide, I think you should frame this as "I think it's good for reporters to nonconsensually reveal companies in stealth mode", rather than trying to prevent people from describing when that happened.
I think we have less of a moral debate than you thinking I should have used a word with no connotation, and me saying that I can't think of a word with no connotation right now and am not going to pay the time tax it would take to think of one.
I do claim that if I were the Guardian I would not have published that article, for the same reason I would not publish an article nonconsensually revealing a secret group of gay people in Saudi Arabia (ie they're okay people, but revealing them basically ensures that a repressive government or simple mob will try to destroy them, and this is now your fault), but I admit this is based on my own personal subjective ethics about who is or isn't okay, and I didn't especially intend for the link paragraph to insist on this, or to claim there's a standpoint-neutral obligation for the Guardian not to reveal this.
"My understanding of the exact situation is that some nonprofit allied with the Guardian sent a spy to some gathering of people that they thought had a connection with Heliospect, that spy used a fake passport to convince them he wasn't a Guardian reporter, he made contact with Heliospect, claimed to be a customer, promised to keep everything secret, then leaked all their information to the Guardian. "
The problem is that the tradition of undercover reporting involves an awful lot of this kind of "I/we pretended to be someone else and never revealed we were reporters", and this can win you prizes for journalism and kudos for holding the powerful and secretive accountable.
> I do think that the stealth aspect was load-bearing for Heliospect, such that by far the most important part of the Guardian article was unstealthing them, far more important than anything they actually revealed.
> This seems like a noticeably different style of reporting than just stumbling up to a storefront and saying "you seem like a nice company, why don't I interview you?", and I think it's fair to inform ACX readers that they used this style and not the other style.
Something that I learned from reading the articles and that I did not learn on ACX: polygenic screening for IQ is illegal in the UK (among other things), Heliospect claims in their public comments that they are following all relevant laws, and in a London meeting where they thought they had privacy a Heliospect rep was happy to offer that service along future plans for other banned tests. That seems *pretty relevant* to the story, no? Stealth being load-bearing looks a little different with that information, right?
> I don't think the Guardian had any "obligation" not to unstealth them, any more than I have any "obligation" not to publish a post right now saying "Dan L is an idiot, look at this stupid comment he made, you should all shun him", but it's an aggressive thing to do and something I would only do if I were trying to destroy you.
Do you think that would be a true thing to say, or that the Guardian lied in their piece? Do you - and the Guardian, of course - have an obligation not to lie? That's what I'm talking about here - there's an entire deontological level of standards that just slipped away in a rush to focus on the consequences.
> If you think it's a role of reporters to bring attention to things that are trying to hide, I think you should frame this as "I think it's good for reporters to nonconsensually reveal companies in stealth mode", rather than trying to prevent people from describing when that happened.
Do you think I'm trying to *prevent* you from saying anything??? I don't think free speech norms thrive under this level of consequentialism. No, of course not.
That addressed: per my comment to Deiseach below: that's a tasty bullet, don't mind if I do. I endorse the idea that a reporter's job centrally includes revealing information that others want hidden - if you want to bring in a consent framework, fine by me. "Companies in stealth mode" is an unnecessary emphasis, and seemingly in this case invites a nasty case of reference class tennis.
> I think we have less of a moral debate than you thinking I should have used a word with no connotation, and me saying that I can't think of a word with no connotation right now and am not going to pay the time tax it would take to think of one.
To reiterate in case it might be lost: I'm not interested in policing your speech. I'm interested in interrogating what looks like a vacillation between execution of pro-social principles, and condemnation of such an execution by others when it's pointed in a different direction. You have a very understandable flinch response to reporters publishing things that their subjects oppose being published, I get that; nonetheless, I think that reflex is leading you pretty far down a locally-consistent path that is overall neither workable in practice nor good in theory.
> I do claim that if I were the Guardian I would not have published that article, for the same reason I would not publish an article nonconsensually revealing a secret group of gay people in Saudi Arabia
Jumping at the chance to grapple with the hypothetical: I think a reporter publishing that in Saudi Arabia would be acting professionally w.r.t. the standards of his culture, and also personally monstrous in a wider lens. The easy reconciliation is to simply not be a (regime) journalist in Saudi Arabia. If one finds themselves in such a job, leave.
Are UK laws w.r.t. genetic testing so foul and Heliospect so instrumentally virtuous that there's a comparable analogy? ...I'm not really seeing it. Shades of the prior situation with Steve Hsu, I'm finding myself annoyed by certain details of the situation such that I'm probably falling into the "overly critical of suboptimal arguments for my beliefs" attractor though.
Well, given that one of the links is about actual non-consent (the first successful artificial insemination, which as described sounds damn near modern notions of rape*), I think comparing what the Guardian did to "non-consensually" is a little extreme.
It is hard to thread the needle: when does 'investigative journalism' become 'spying'?
*Did not inform the woman; did not ask permission from the woman; did the procedure while she was literally unconscious; did not tell anyone for years; when he did inform the family, he only told the husband; both parties then hid the information from the woman. I think "oh yeah your kid is not your husband's, I knocked you up with sperm from some guy you never met and I never bothered to tell you much less ask you if this was okay" is fitting "rape by deception" at least.
I'm not entirely sure there is a line! The shallow end of investigative journalism is more just "get new information rather than chewing someone else's cud" and doesn't get anywhere near, of course, but I think that a virtuous exemplar of investigative journalism could be fairly described as "a spy acting on behalf of the general public". Folks who routinely find themselves hiding information from that public would reasonably be hostile to such journalists, but that'd be the system working as intended.
Surprised the online South Korea discourse never really notes that the country shares a large border with an evil, repressive, and dangerous regime.
Whatever else is going on there, the existence of North Korea will probably make the emergent aspects of society in South Korea unusual in hard to predict ways
I don’t know enough to claim convincingly otherwise but North Korea seems like a worse neighbor. It’s very volatile and has nukes. Korean men are mandated to serve in the military
the old guard was/is the liberals, the ultraorthodox are less sympathetic. the shift towards the current hardline politics was fueled by the growing number of (ultra)orthodox folks. (not just there, all over the world, since "the right of return" plus lots of funding for settlements, etc.)
33: Does there exist somewhere a membership roster of the select club of medications that reduce all-cause mortality? I immediately thought "Lisinopril has got to be in there," and I googled it and it appears to be, but is there an actual list?
Asking a chatbot to list essential medicines that reduce all-cause mortality seems to be a reasonable starting point. Based on this, at least aspirin, statins, and metformin could be worth adding to such a list. I don't think antibiotics or AZT or antihypertensives would be (useful though these are in reducing all-cause mortality they seem to have bad side effects so one only wants to use them if there is cause).
In case it wasn't clear, that was tongue in cheek: the chatbot list is literally useless as is, and full of insanely dangerous things to take if one isn't paying attention. (It wasn't a complete waste because it reminded me of metformin which I tend to forget about, but I would have got that from the list of most commonly prescribed essential medicines too.)
The article starts off with the part about the dire economic status of the time, so it seems to me that the grand mosque building project was at least as much "large public works to boost employment amongst unskilled/low-skilled labour" as a vanity project.
It's pretty funny. JD Vance's dirty secret is that he is too liberal...
It's hilarious how divorced from reality the Democrats are in trying to make-out JD Vance as shady and extreme. He's actually way more central and nuanced than most Republicans.
Quoting from the dossier "JD Vance's political views display a nuanced landscape, revealing a range of positions that traverse traditional party lines. While acknowledging the benefits of certain Democratic policies for working-class Americans, Vance has been notably critical of aspects of the Trump Administration's agenda. His skepticism extends to Trump's core domestic policy priorities, expressing doubts about their effectiveness and seriousness in moving the country forward. Vance diverged from Republican orthodoxy by criticizing the 2017 tax cuts bill and supporting higher taxes on capital gains, U.S. businesses, and individuals without children. Privileged & Confidential
In a departure from conservative economic principles, Vance has questioned the emphasis on America's businesses, criticizing corporate interests and economic incentives for company relocations. He has signaled support for strengthening labor unions, opposing right-to-work laws, and advocating for reforms like sectoral bargaining and labor representation on corporate boards. This stands in contrast to traditional free-market priorities, with Vance opposing Milton Friedman-backed policies and emphasizing the nuclear family over free-market principles. Vance's stances on healthcare reveal further deviations from the conservative playbook, as he opposed the Trump Administration's efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare. Expressing concern for those potentially losing access to healthcare, Vance urged against Medicaid cuts."
As an aside, I question Scotts decision to support the sharing of privileged (and potentially privacy violating) information. I am really not convinced he would support it where it a dossier on a Democrat candidate...
"Vance has previously heaped praise upon Barack Obama.
o Vance has praised Obama for offering “hope” and said he would “miss him” as
Obama was leaving office.
o Vance characterized Obama’s “guns and religion” comment as “well-
intentioned”.
• Vance has praised democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders.
o Vance said Bernie Sanders was his favorite Democrat running in the 2020
Democrat primary.
o Vance predicted that Trump was part of a political realignment that would
position Trump and Bernie Sanders on the same side in 20 years." - Quoting directly from page 23.
AND TRUMP SELECTED THIS GUY AS HIS VP. WOW, SURE LOOKS LIKE TRUMP IS THE NEXT HITLER RIGHT?! I MEAN OBVIOUSLY HITLER WOULD PICK SOMEONE WHO CRITICIZES HIM AND VOICES ADMIRATION FOR THE OPPOSITION PARTY. Sure...
Buddy, my family fled Germany for Israel in the 1930s. I can tell you that 40% of German Jews did NOT vote for Hitler. The antisemitism of the left, including the ridiculous equation of Trump with fascism, which is insulting to the memory of the family members we lost - that’s what is driving us to the right.
Economics is secondary to culture for most Democrats. For example, most Democrats would never support some kind of grand compromise of banning gay marriage in return for establishing universal healthcare or something. So it doesn't matter how much Vance supports labor representation in corporate boards, his is a socially right wing and that disqualifies him in their eyes.
That seems... absurd? If you're going to throw minorities under the bus just to get some policy goals passed, why bother even having ideals in the first place? Like, imagine if the right agreed to give the left full control over policy as long as they reinstated Jim Crow laws. What kind of insane person would take that deal?
"In a departure from conservative economic principles, Vance has questioned the emphasis on America's businesses, criticizing corporate interests and economic incentives for company relocations. He has signaled support for strengthening labor unions, opposing right-to-work laws, and advocating for reforms like sectoral bargaining and labor representation on corporate boards. This stands in contrast to traditional free-market priorities, with Vance opposing Milton Friedman-backed policies and emphasizing the nuclear family over free-market principles. Vance's stances on healthcare reveal further deviations from the conservative playbook, as he opposed the Trump Administration's efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare. Expressing concern for those potentially losing access to healthcare, Vance urged against Medicaid cuts."
Oh my God, Vance is a .... Catholic????
Excuse me laughing, this just tickles my funnybone. I know the guy converted a few years back, but this is just wonderful.
> ... tests with “factors” (eg the Big Five, where you rate people on a numeric scale) are inherently more accurate than those with “types” (eg Myers-Briggs, where you assign someone a specific category) and that, adjusting for this, Big Five is no more predictive than the Enneagram.
Wait, but isn't that a legit aspect of test construction? Isn't that an important feature of the Big Five vs. the Enneagram? How does this finding discredit the Big Five, as opposed to implying "reasonably constructed tests with numeric factors are genuinely better that type-based tests?"
It doesn't discredit Big Five, but it implies there's nothing fundamental about the five factors it chose. Someone making up a factor based system using any, say, three to ten factors they think are reasonable will likely end up with a system that's as about as predictive of life outcomes as Big Five (with more factors doing somewhat better than fewer factors). It knocks some of the prestige out of the Big Five if the chosen traits aren't any better than the Enneagram traits.
> I know about the cram schools, long work hours, and the gender wars which somehow manage to be even worse than the ones here, but I’m still looking for good articles with more details on what’s so bad and how it got that way.
Wewlad, I may have just the pair of videos for you. (n.b. total runtime exceeds 2 hours)
A rough summary might be "Korea borrowed patriarchal norms from China's Neo-Confucianism, and then intensified them by a factor of 10. Also, the Chaebols are totalitarian leviathans which stifle economic-mobility and political-reform."
At a cursory glance I think the accusation from Joseph Bronski that Gusev "makes up his own chart to remove the error bars for this, to obscure the fact that the study found no evidence for this in IQ" seems like a oversimplification. He seems to have made his own chart because he did a correction for assortative mating, like it's not just a copy of the chart but with the error bars removed.
Reading 32., the title seems to be… I hate to say "clickbait" about a non-mainstream and well-researched article, but misleading anyway. A solid chunk of the article is spent disputing the romanticised claim that the House of Wisdom was the beating heart of the Greek-to-Arabic translation movement, but that seems to be a fairly trivial point if it doesn't change the fact that said movement *did* exist and *did* contribute to the recovery of some Greek texts:
> A handful of key Greek-language works from Classic times were only recovered via Arabic translations, made outside of the House of Wisdom itself; this, indeed, was for the most part, as Gutas explains, a translation movement that was separate and independent of the House of Wisdom (with its specific focus on storing Arabic-language books and commissioning translations from Persian-language books), even if sometimes the translations were made by people associated with the library – a fact that later helped muddle the distinction.
Then there's a separate argument that the number of Greek texts thus rescued has been overinflated in the public memory, especially insofar as non-translated copies still existed in Europe and Byzantium, but that's a much fuzzier argument. In the comment section, the author happily admits that it *was* the Arabic tradition which led to these ideas being reinjected into Renaissance Europe, and the forgotten European copies were only rediscovered after that interest had been reignited. That's a more complicated story than the basic infobite, but hardly so much so as to justify giving the impresson that the whole "Arabic scholars preserving Greek texts" thing is a baseless legend — it's just a bit of a simplification.
Yeah, I was surprised by the title given what I was taught in my undergrad in Islamic history - and then read it and found it was consistent with what I was taught. Maybe there has been some exaggeration, but the thrust of the “myth” remains true.
I agree with you. I think from his other stuff the author is clearly pursuing edgy opinions which are not fully backed up by his evidence / at the least overextend. I did a course on medieval Islamic medical traditions and it’s hard to argue that it didn’t have an impact on Europe…
I think the article is trying to stick up for the Byzantines and Eastern Roman empire. The common dispute is between the West (Latin) and the Muslim world, but the Eastern (Greek) empire gets forgotten and ignored.
After the fall of the West, the Eastern Empire survived for a long time until the defeat by the Muslim empire(s). The conflict there was between East and Muslim, not West and Muslim (until later on, see Lepanto). But since it's even referred to in terms of the West (Byzantium is the New Rome for both the Eastern Empire and the Muslim world), then the focus and emphasis is put on the West.
So the article is saying "Hey! We were there! We were writing and maintaining and transcribing those works! The Muslims got them from us to begin with!"
I have no issue with the article itself, it makes a valid point and it's an interesting read! I just think that its title is slightly misleading, and the way Scott phrased the bullet point in this post is even moreso — someone scanning the post but not bothering to read the article would, I think, get a distinctly wrong impression of what the point being made actually is.
32. Is cherry-picking: the best up-to-date survey research by John Mulhall shows a large proportion of texts coming from Arabic-only being essential for the development of late medieval science and philosophy, even if Later Greek texts are found a few centuries later. https://dash.lib.harvard.edu/handle/1/37374584?show=full
It's difficult to understand Palestinian attitudes towards Hamas given that (as the Israeli government has admitted) the Israel government collaborated extensively with Hamas up until 10/6 and worked very hard to ensure that Hamas retained tight control over Gaza, which was advantageous to Hamas and to the Netanyahu regime
"Collaborated extensively" is a huge overstatement. For a while, Hamas was pretending to moderate, so israel tried to create a no-war status kwo. Israel could starve Hamas, and force it into war. It could choose to destroy Hamas in the war, but it would have looked like the last year did with even less diplomatic legitimacy. After the bloody war, it would have been forced to give Gaza to the PA - which was indeed viewed as against Israeli interest, ir at least not worth it.
The AI strawberry “plant” is a great example of “truthiness”. It is correct fir some questions but also is not “the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth”.
I would love to search the comments section for more on Korea, but since the phone app lacks a search tool, I can't, and thus I won't be part of that discussion.
It's the inefficient frictions that bother me. When apps are much lower functionality than browser, but I am also railroaded into using the app I feel betrayed by the gods of optimization!
I recently became unable to go to the Substack website on my phone. I sign in, but keep showing as not logged in. So I got the app and loath it. You can't do searches, I can't find a way to collapse threads, and I couldn't even find a way to edit a text I'd posted -- I could only "hide" it (what's even the point of that?), delete it or share it.
It might be due to the way modern browsers treat domain names. If you're logged-in at substack.com, your login won't automatically apply to astralcodex.com, because different domains don't get to share cookies. It's a privacy feature pioneered by Safari and Firefox, I'm not sure if Chrome does it too.
In that case the solution is just to click the 'login' button on ACX; the login page is on substack.com, so if you're already logged-in there, it will just send you back to ACX without having to enter your credentials again, and you'll be logged-in.
Btw seconded, I only use Substack from the browser, even on mobile. Works just fine, and has all the browser amenities, including search - why would I want an app?
Thank you for the update on Whither Tartaria. I do a lecture on this yearly in my history of cities course and this is some great stuff to add.
Interesting note: Loos argues in Ornament and Crime that removing ornaments from buildings would make things cheaper and allow us to pay workers more. It was never true that shifting labour to a less-skilled, standardized tasks would lead to any better pay for workers. Now it seems it doesn’t even cost much less.
> 1: Ancient Chinese passports for the dead. “During the late Warring States / Han dynasty, people would be buried with official ID to get them into the underworld.”
I believe this is:
故郡鄣县里大男子吴孝为人黄带色，随面长七尺三寸
年至今可六十三已四岁行到端母亡就摆不智衣服死产在所
If I've got this right:
Wu Xiao, a strong man from Zhang County in his native province, had a sickly (literally yellow) complexion and a front measuring about seven feet and three inches in length. He was sixty-three years old. After his mother’s death, he struggled to cope (more poetically, failed to thrive) and became unable to dress himself properly, eventually passing away at home.
Mid level confidence on specific parts but high confidence on the gist. Sounds more like a death certificate.
Face in this context means something more like front I think. So it's overall height. Also those aren't actual feet and inches. ChatGPT says the literal units convert to about 5'9".
A bunch of the characters you got there are mistakenly transcribed. To my eyes it looks like this:
故邯郸韩审里大男子吴骚为人黄皙色隋面长七尺三寸
年至今可六十三—四岁行到端毋它疵瑕不智衣服死产在所
The Chinese language is pretty different 2000 years ago even though many of the characters are still used today. I'm not even going to try to translate. EDIT: well, maybe there is a translation on twitter, though I don't have an account and can't get to it.
So basically this article includes that text but with punctuation marks and also substituting some characters to make it more legible to a modern reader. Then that article also translates that ancient Chinese text into modern Chinese, which I can actually translate into English:
"This bamboo slip records personal information about the adult male Wu Sao. He was born in Handan Hanshen, his skin was light yellow(?), his face was oval in shape, his height was roughly 7 feet and 3 inches (the foot of the Qin and Han dynasties is about 23.1 cm, so his height was about 169 cm), his age is about 63 to 64. He walked with upright posture. His body was without blemish."
EDIT: Okay so they don't translate the last bit, "不知衣服、死产、在所。" specifically but from reading the article it sounds like this actually means "His clothing, whether he is dead or alive, and his physical location are unknown."
EDIT2: Neither the ancient Chinese nor the modern Chinese has much information about the tense of the verbs. Maybe this is all supposed to be written in present tense and I just don't know.
Wait what the heck, if this article https://wenshizhishi.1she.com/11036/370120.html that I am reading is right, then this bamboo slip is not at all an official ID for getting dead buried people into the underworld, but rather part of some government "database" for keeping track of lots of still-living people by recording their name and physical appearance and stuff. One use for this is to identify and catch thieves.
Entirely possible. And yeah, my Classical Chinese is not very good. But what I got from your version is:
Accordingly, in Shenli of Handan, a tall man named Wu Sao, with a light yellow complexion, a smooth face, and a height of seven feet three inches (Chinese units, see other comment). His age is around 63 or 64 years. His behavior is upright, without other flaws or imperfections. He is not concerned with and dead(? I know this means death but it's weird) to matters of clothing and livelihood.
I think it's coming from 死. But like I said that's a weird thing to put in and it's always been used in a bunch of ways. I've seen it used to mean fixed or unresponsive to and that might fit better. At any rate, it doesn't seem to straightforwardly say he is dead. This might just be a normal passport identifying him.
不智衣服死产在所 is just really weird. "not wise clothing garment death produced exist place." If you read it 不智-衣服-死产-在所 then it's "unwise (or unconcerned) clothing stillborn location." You can divvy up the characters a few other ways. Maybe, "unconcerned with clothing. He died and was born at this place."?
Yeah translating this is kinda hard. I feel like with Chinese text, the earlier it is, the harder it is to understand. Did you see my other two comments?
Yeah, I did. I know that there were extensive passport systems that included written descriptions. So this might be that. But I'm just having fun speculating and trying my hand at figuring it out. I've looked a little and while I can find people trying to translate it they don't seem to agree on what it is or what it says specifically.
Sorry, were serious people taking the idea it was doing nothing seriously? The people saying the chip embargo wasn't working at its object goal (preventing chips from getting to China) were clearly lying. Especially at scale. The serious counterargument is that China is now spending approximately all the money trying to develop domestic alternatives. And the counterargument to that is they might not succeed. But the idea it just wasn't working was always obviously an attempt to convince people to give up.
The reasons this is not applicable to AI pause or AI regulation are:
1. You need China to respect the pause too. Otherwise you're just buying time for them to catch up with the US unless the US is so far ahead that China has no chance of making a breakthrough. Contrary to what some people say, China is nowhere near that far behind. It's also just politically unsustainable to expect the US and multiple other countries to slow themselves down in the face of an adversary that isn't slowing down.
2. The pause needs to be multilateral and durable. Basically you need about a dozen nations to agree and keep the agreement for a long time. AI pause types have limited influence in the US and no influence in most of those other countries. The idea that the US can just force them to go along sees an overly mighty view of the US. The allies are concerned with China independently.
3. It's not apparent that compute density is the long term bottleneck and China can produce plenty of mid-level compute. And in fact they are specifically trying to get around this limitation. They might succeed.
But if the goal of slowing down their potential use in leading edge military applications then that can be done. Especially because if China has 1 really good missile instead of 20 then that's a win. But if it has 1 super-AGI instead of 20 then that's still 1 super-AGI. But in the material world it's all down to quantity. Anyone can make some quantity of chips. They might just be so old and out of date that they're hilariously inefficient compared to modern processes. Which means more price for lower quality. And that's how you really maintain an advantage: defense economics.
1. I wouldn't be so dismissive of buying time (to get alignment research done). If we have a two year head start over China, we can afford a two year pause; if we have a three year head start ... and so on. But also, imagine that the US is three months from some powerful strategic advantage (let's say the intelligence explosion) and China is twelve months. Now it's in China's interest to pause (since they don't want US getting to the intelligence explosion first). This is a much harder sell if US is three months and China is one month.
2. Again, this is only true if you expect the pause to last forever. If you just want a 1- 5 year breather for alignment research, it doesn't seem obvious that any nation can catch up to the US or China during that time, and the ones with the best chance of doing so (eg UK, EU) would be relatively easy to involve in a pause.
3. Can you explain more about why compute density might not be a bottleneck to AI supremacy?
1. The agreement has to actually work and not immediately fall apart to buy time. For example, if you pass a law and the net effect is they all just move to Japan then I guess you've delayed it by a few weeks. If that. But that's hardly worth doing.
You also don't get to assume you have an objective and exact knowledge of exactly how far ahead anyone else is. If you ask many labs or China many of them would tell you is they're already ahead in AI.
And if China is 12 months behind and the US 3 month's behind it's not in China's interest to pause. It's in China's interest to convince the US to pause and lie about pausing. And then to do extra risky things to close the gap before the pause is over. This is the behavior you saw from the Soviets during the Cold War and more recently North Korea. And the moment the US suspects the other side is lying they'll stop their own pause.
Nuclear proliferation and standards is used as the metaphor here. And notably did not work anything like what you're advocating for and didn't involve a pause. But also that was never able to get several major powers into full compliance. And eventually led to a very famous accident in the Soviet Union because they just declined to comply with the standards (and in several cases lied about it). So you need to do something better than that. Because the Chernobyl of AI is a phrase that makes even me afraid.
2. No, it's true regardless of how durable it needs to be. If anyone cheats on the agreement as soon as that's discovered it blows up and research restarts. If you want it to last five years and in month 3 it's discovered that someone is cheating then that's still a failure. Whatever research is ultimately done also needs to be durably and universally enforced or else someone will invent unaligned AI at some point and it will just have bought some more time.
I also doubt that a geopolitically small movement with no politically influential presence outside a few countries can coordinate a major international agreement involving dozens of countries. The chip limits took 22 countries and by my account you'd need something like 30-40 countries on board to make this work.
3. Because what that effects is price and a determined country can just outspend the limits. Yes, using three 5nm chips in place of one 2nm chip is problematic in certain ways. And it costs about 50% more (depending, rough estimate). But you can just spend the money and make an equivalent cluster.
This doesn't work in warfare because you want bulk production. If your missiles are 50% more expensive then you have fewer missiles and have to limit their use on the battlefield while the other side can use them more freely. But this is not relevant for an AGI doom scenario. It just needs to get trained once and then it does whatever it is it does.
> And eventually led to a very famous accident in the Soviet Union because they just declined to comply with the standards (and in several cases lied about it).
Chernobyl didn't happen because the Soviets were ignoring nuclear proliferation standards. There was no reactor vessel because it was easier to harvest nuclear material that way; so you could argue the explosion would have been much more contained. But that had nothing to do with the proximate cause of the reactor exploding in the first place.
I think we basically agree. They were ignoring nuclear SAFETY standards which they had agreed to. If they had been following them the accident either wouldn't have happened or would have been contained. And an accident like Three Mile Island is not a disaster like Chernobyl. But I think there were rules that would have prevented even the meltdown specifically around experiments.
I think there is an interesting question about whether the Chernobyl experiment that led to the accident actually followed the rules in place by the Soviet government. Any test involving critical components of the reactor had to be approved by the nuclear design bureau. The Chernobyl authorities decided their test only involved electrical systems, so no approval was needed, even though they were the electrical systems of critical components like the coolant pumps. The test was already behind schedule and the local personnel were under a lot of pressure to get it done. So... did they genuinely follow the rules, or were corners cut for expediency? But then you can blame the entire Soviet setup for the culture of corner cutting and (maybe intentionally) ignoring safety rules.
> 15: Cremieux: The Ottoman Origins Of Modernity. The “Ottoman” bit is a distractor; the Ottomans fought the Catholics long enough for the Protestants to get a foothold, and then the Protestants established modernity. A useful pushback against the pushback that the Catholic Church never persecuted scientists or held back progress. I’m most interested in this post in the context of Cremieux saying he wrote it in two hours. Even I can’t work that fast!
In fact one of the origins of the scientific revolution were some European philosophers/scientists/etc who went to the Ottoman Empire, met with Islamic mystics, and developed their own cult back home. Though that was not so much mainstream Ottoman culture as a series of minority religions that had official tolerance due to Ottoman's relative religious tolerance.
I did look into it after what you said and it appears the issue was instituting the Counter-Reformation at swordpoint. Countries which didn't experience did relatively better which is why you see some outliers in the more thoroughly Catholic regions. But this is at a glance.
I also find the time suspect. It's 5,500 words. At professional typist speeds that'd take 70 minutes just to write down. And they have graphics and citations. Which means either they got all the links, citations, structure, ideas, and graphics together and then the two hours was just filling in the words and editing (or did it after). I'm very fast by these standards and I took about two hours to do all this, including reading/following links, and ended up with a little under 1,500 words (not including things I started then deleted). And no graphics or citations naturally.
The paper Cremieux quotes extensively seems to conclude that (1) it was the fault of the Counter-Reformation because (2) even centuries after the Counter-Reformation, countries which had experienced it were able to use the mechanisms of repression adjusted to their own needs to halt dissenting thought.
Protestant countries weren't as successful because Protestants were not as efficient as Catholics because Protestants kept splitting into more and more sects because of fighting over doctrinal differences. No one Protestant sect was able to replicate the kind of unified control the Catholic Church had when it came to suppressing heresy.
I am not 100% convinced by this because the argument rests on secularised states couldn't invent their own repressive regimes, and I don't think that's true. A Catholic state that was accustomed to letting the Church influence society? Okay, I get that. But there *were* single church Protestant states, or at least majority sects. See Lutheranism, see Anglicanism.
And I don't think the English state had a problem with being repressive when needed, see Walsingham's acts as Spymaster for Queen Elizabeth.
Newton may have had idiosyncratic religious beliefs, but his secular work as warden of the Royal Mint had nothing to do with that. Had Newton been *politically* dissenting, he would have fallen foul of the authorities and would not have had his university career and membership of various societies.
I do remain puzzled at the claim that Protestant nations had no efficient mechanisms of repression. And thus science, because liberty of thought, or something.
America is the example par excellence of religious fissiparity, since the settlers both attempted to impose mini-theocracies and those who didn't like that could just move fifty miles away to virgin territory to set up their own village and run their own affairs. "The United States was not, in the end, able to impose confessional discipline" works for Casillo and Cremieux conclusions, but it doesn't help us towards "by contrast with their Catholic neighbours to the south" as to why or if there were more scientists per head of population.
Spain and Portugal claimed huge chunks of what would become the northern United States of America, but it's hard to measure 'like with like' as to the Protestant versus Catholic settlement of the north, since those territories were being ceded or abandoned slowly during the period the USA (as it would become) was being established. I don't imagine either side had very many eminent scientists in 1790 - does Benjamin Franklin really count as a scientist, as distinct from a dilettante or interested amateur?
Though trying to find this out leads down interesting byways; The 1619 Project might want to consider the likes of this man:
"Juan Garrido (c. 1480 – c. 1550) was an Afro-Spaniard conquistador known as the first documented black person in what would become the United States. Born in West Africa, he went to Portugal as a young man. In converting to Catholicism, he chose the Spanish name Juan Garrido ("Handsome John"). He is the first known African to arrive in North America.
He participated in the conquests of Cuba by Diego Velázquez and the expeditions to Florida by Juan Ponce de León. By 1519, he had joined Cortes's forces and invaded present-day Mexico, participating in the siege of Tenochtitlan. He married and settled in Mexico City, where he was the first known farmer to have sowed wheat in America. He continued to serve with Spanish forces for more than 30 years, including expeditions to western Mexico and to the Pacific."
Yeah, another good point. America did get religious toleration in the 17th century in part because they had the exact opposite reaction to the wars of religion. While most of Europe became less tolerant the weaker states of the Americas created domestic peace by granting toleration.
Yeah, there's a much more complex story there. Especially around the growth of royal absolutism and how that movement alternatively allied itself with Protestantism or Catholicism as was convenient for their political program. Catholicism even at its most pro-absolutism put bars on how far a king could go though. Which is why Louis XIV needed Gallicanism.
It also ignores that most of the "falling behind" was a 19th century phenomenon. Or that if you'd asked who has more democracy and civil rights the answer most of the time would have been Catholics. In fact part of the issue is that the dataset discounts certain kinds of religious scholars even if they did secular work.
Luther needed protection from Frederick the elector and the Holy Roman Empire had its hands full with the ottomans. In a more stable era Frederick might have been invaded or forced to enforce the edict of Worms.
> 32: David Roman says it’s a myth that Arabic scholars rescued and preserved the works of the great classical authors.
He overstates the case a bit. It's true that Muslim scholars (not just Arab) were rarely the single source and knowledge survived in Europe. However, Muslim interest in these works and intellectual culture was more vibrant than the European equivalent at the time. Especially western European, the Byzantines were a bit better. They also just produced more actual copies which is how you end up with people like Avicenna being influential. The idea that Muslims saved the Classical world is a huge overstatement. The idea they did something to transmit and add to that tradition is true. And this piece seems to imply they were mostly remixers of other culture or that they missed the obviously superior stoic philosophy. But in fact they just emphasized other parts of the tradition and were hardly unique in doing so.
The Muslims didn't exist in Classical times. They only came around in the 7th century. And by the 8th century they were friendly with Western Christians because they shared conflicts with the Byzantines and Ummayads. Charlemagne and Harun al-Rashidun were basically allies and pro-Rashidun Muslims even helped Charlemagne invade Spain.
By the classical world I meant the work of the classical world. So less patronising responses. If the Muslim invaders preserved the work of the Greeks and romans who were they preserving it from? From the Greek speaking Roman Empire? The best we can say is they didn’t destroy the work that preceded them.
Yes? The Greek speaking Roman Empire was incredibly destructive to the west. It was actually the barbarians that were friendlier to the surviving Roman aristocracy because it was a source of prestige and because they had a surviving dominance in the Church. The Byzantine invasion of Italy was the end of most surviving Classical institutions in Italy. Meanwhile in Spain where you had the Visigoths and then the Muslims there was more direct continuity.
ETA: The Byzantines also had Christian zealots destroying religious symbols and pagan books and the like. Iconoclasm et al. Of course, they transmitted a lot themselves and it's not exclusive. But I don't understand the claim here. There was widespread destruction including by the Byzantines and the barbarians, not just the Muslims.
Works aren’t just destroyed by invading armies, when you can only preserve writing on parchment that decays and reproduce it with dedicated scribes and copyists reproducing works word for word, there is a natural degradation in the quality and number of works maintained.
I don’t want to understate the role of monastic scriptoria in maintaining works in the west, but the more urbanized intellectual culture of the Islamic world could be more conducive at the time to reproducing texts for study and discussion than the isolated monasteries of the shattered west. Before the age of the printing press, it took a lot of effort for a work to survive to modern posterity, many of them were lost due to the passage of time (more so than the burning of Alexandria), and the de-urbanizing west had less scale and incentive to pass these texts on than the east, both Islamic and Byzantine.
> 36: Elsewhere in “Italy sucks” news - did you know Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups? Companies are taxed before making any money, based on how many assets they have. If they have lots of assets but aren’t making money (eg because they’re still doing research / in stealth) then tax officials get confused and hostile and run increasingly punitive audits. Related: size of the European tech sector.
This is one of the things that annoys me about people unwilling to acknowledge tradeoffs. You cannot make a system that both guarantees stability and is dynamic any more than you can make food that is both hot and cold. You might be able to swing from one to the other but you can't be both simultaneously. Instability doesn't necessarily mean that people who fail get put out on the street. But if you don't have a system that welcomes disruption you end up preventing it and ultimately stagnating and being outcompeted.
Okay, so we just need to wall off half of the economy and make it fully stable while making the other half fully dynamic. (Unironically that might not be the worst thing.)
That's kinda what we did in the past; but hyper-capitalist brained types gobbled up the stable businesses and made them meta-unstable so they could gamble in more places.
When did we do that? There was the big government big business alliance of the New Deal where there was massive consolidation and everyone had guaranteed jobs but there were issues with innovation. Famously the guy who invented the microwave made a whole $2 off it. And then it shifted and now we have a much more dynamic but less stable economy. But I can't think of when we went sector by sector and did something like that.
EG. things that used to be public utilities/state franchises/state licensed/publicly owned or managed or heavily regulated/un-financialized.
I'm not gonna make you read an essay, but the biggest example to look into (if you want) in the US is the railroad industry, IMO.
Re. Microwave: That has no connection to what you are thinking of. The microwave was invented by some dude at Raytheon as I recall, and if you invent something at a business you are not entitled to the proceeds of that invention just because you are entirely responsible for it. That belongs to your boss or the shareholders, who did participated in the most important part of the process, which is having lots of money a long time ago.
> EG. things that used to be public utilities/state franchises/state licensed/publicly owned or managed or heavily regulated/un-financialized.
This percentage has only slightly decreased, from a 1975 peak of about 16% to the modern 14% of the work force. Which is higher than it was during the 1930s or 50s for example. It was never a majority.
What I think you're thinking of is that the US economy used to be much more concentrated in a limited number of large corporations and more of the economy was in unionized professions. Nowadays the economy has more small corporations and has shifted into sectors with fewer unions. We're also more gender and race equal so even though the overall percentage has only decreased a little the percentage of white men in those jobs has decreased much further.
> Re. Microwave: That has no connection to what you are thinking of. The microwave was invented by some dude at Raytheon as I recall, and if you invent something at a business you are not entitled to the proceeds of that invention just because you are entirely responsible for it. That belongs to your boss or the shareholders, who did participated in the most important part of the process, which is having lots of money a long time ago.
No, I think you're just not realizing how what you're advocating for looks on the ground.
It was invented by Percy Spencer doing side investigations while working for Raytheon (and through Raytheon for the government, he was producing components for the military). His job was improving the manufacture of magnetrons. Today he'd take his innovation and go raise VC and start a new company. Back then the system was set up to discourage that so instead he submitted a report to his superiors. They supported him so he took time to actually put together an investigation and get a patent. He received a bonus of $2 for it and it went in his file as something to note if he was up for promotion.
This is what "un-financialized" means. He did not receive financial rewards for his innovation. Instead those went to Raytheon shareholders and the government. Today more of that would go to him.
That was a relatively short period, lasting from roughly from 1970 to 1997. And the way they made it work was by subsidizing in downtimes which caused debt issues. I've also heard that the way they would get around this is instead of cutting positions they would cut hours. Which caused the government to sometimes introduce wage subsidies which, again, caused more debt.
Also I wouldn't say Italy was really a center of innovation in that period. A lot of what it did (and really does) is luxury production.
> 42: Claim (from the IDF): Hamas faked polls showing that most Palestinians supported the October 7 attack; the real numbers are 31% in favor, 64% against.
Hamas has a long history of threatening people during polls and elections to get what they want. Hamas rules Gaza because they either won a quick civil war or successfully staged a coup after Israel pulled out. It's not because they represent the genuine will of the Palestinian people. Or at least they represent it to the same degree that you could say of any military backed authoritarian regime.
While the West Bank is not much freer than Gaza the sentiment there, not under Hamas rule, is notably more negative in obvious ways. Several leaders there (who are political opponents of both Israel and Hamas) have complained about their leadership and accused them of putting Iran's interests over the Palestinians. The Arab world and Palestinians have extremely high rates of anti-semitism (north of 90% in some places and higher than 70% everywhere) but that doesn't immediately translate into wanting to murder random Jews. And that's setting aside the pragmatists who think the move was just stupid or the people who are upset with Hamas siding with Iran.
This is one of the more frustrating things to me about this. Palestine and Israel have been made exceptional in ways they simply aren't and I don't think it's doing anyone, least of all the Palestinians, any favors. The reason Palestine can't get its act together is just standard issue authoritarian resilience which is (to simplify) fancy speak for "Hamas has all the guns and will shoot you if you try to get them out of power."
> 43: Otto von Bismarck wanted to trick France into declaring war on Germany. In order to provoke the French, he sent the Ems Dispatch, a statement describing recent diplomatic events in a way that sounded maximally offensive. The French were so offended that “crowds” in Paris demanded war, and the Franco-Prussian War was declared soon afterwards. The part of this that I find most interesting is the text of the dispatch itself, which read:
> I’m fascinated by the idea that only 150 years ago, it was obvious that if someone sent you this statement, you had to declare war or abandon all honor. If I read it carefully, I can sort of parse out that it sounds like the Prussians are unhappy, but that’s the most emotion I gather from it. Anyway, the Franco-Prussian War led to World War I which led to World War II - so if you don’t like 50 million people dying and the total devastation of Europe, blame this statement about ambassadors.
You've misunderstood this. First, the supposed insult was from the Germans to the French.
Secondly, Bismarck didn't send them the statement at all and it would have been strange for his summaries to go to France instead of his own country. Instead a French newspaper agency badly mistranslated the word adjutant literally. An adjutant in German meant an aid to a senior official (in this case the king) and in France it meant a non-commissioned officer. Basically the implication was that the Germans thought the French were not worth meeting with or even basic diplomatic courtesy in a rejection. This was printed in newspapers all over France which upset the people. It was a spark into a powderkeg. Arguably one which the jingoistic French newspapers wanted, with many waiting to publish until Bastille Day to fan the flames further.
It was, at any rate, irrelevant since the King of Fr ance had already decided to go to war. Though it helped get him public support. Still, the story is kind of a myth. At best you can say that Bismarck knew both languages and was hoping some people would misunderstand.
So did Bismarck bait France into declaring war or not? I always thought thats why Bismarck was considered a geopolitical genius. He baited France into declaring war, which forced the Southern German states to align and later join Prussia instead of Austria, and thus complete the unification of Germany.
Bismarck's brilliant move was a bit earlier. He diplomatically maneuvered to keep France out of the fighting until it was too late. This involved a significant amount of deceiving the French which the French eventually noticed. Bismarck then leveraged French attempts to salvage the situation, which were clumsy, to draw the various German states closer to each other. He then encouraged the German alliance to take a hard line in negotiations against France knowing that it would probably provoke a war.
France wanted huge concessions to avoid a war, including a diplomatic realignment of the German states and huge tracts of land given over to France. And after several rejections they thought they would have to go to war to get them. (Bismarck was not alone in these policies but he was probably the highest ranking person advocating them.) Bismarck correctly saw this as a win-win proposition: if France did not go to war at this point it would be difficult for them to dislodge the southern states. Maybe through long term patient diplomacy but the united German identity would make that difficult. And if France declared war then it would hasten the unification.
France chose to declare war and the rest is history. But no, events were not wholly in Bismarck's control. The earlier affair with Denmark was somewhat more created by Bismarck to unify them but Bismarck's ability to control everything is a bit overstated in general.
This reminded me of a plot point from *Into The Light* where a (brief) war occurs in part because the humans' software has been badly mistranslating the word "councilor", causing one alien faction to believe that a human diplomat is far more influential than he really is.
This happens a lot. One of my favorite examples is that Chinese chief of staff are basically secretaries while American chief of staff are fairly important. So during WW2 the Chinese would appoint American officers they thought were incompetent as chief of staff to important people who would then tell their subordinates just to sideline them. Translators were provided who smoothed over any issues.
I think there even was an incident where a polite question in one language had a speech melody which sounded like snubbing in the other language, and this led to conflict.
> 54: Koreans are not okay: I know about the cram schools, long work hours, and the gender wars which somehow manage to be even worse than the ones here, but I’m still looking for good articles with more details on what’s so bad and how it got that way.
You won't find any because it rhymes with western culture wars. See how upset some people get when men bring up the draft in the US. South Korea actually has a real draft and it actually is a politically salient issue men mobilize around. So how are you going to get an honest accounting of that complaint when it would give ammunition to domestic opponents?
The short version is, as neutrally as I can state it, that Korean society is highly patriarchal and has a lot of ways it treats women very poorly. Simultaneously it requires huge sacrifices from men to function and these obligations have not been extended to women socially or legally. In the old days men were hierarchically above women but now the government has implemented affirmative action etc. Which means a lot of Korean men feel like they're being asked to bear burdens women are not required to bear (which is objectively true) to support a system that favors women. And while it may favor women in the strict legal sense (affirmative action et al) there's still a huge amount of social issues around gender roles and sexual harassment and basic safety. Then this all went online and polarized and now there's two warring camps which have descended into insults, trolling, etc.
My one neat trick to solve this is to start drafting women (and otherwise equalizing burdens) and give men a similar bureaucracy to tackle their specific issues. The former would remove the tension that the unequal burdens on men create. The latter would make it harder to attack the idea of gender issues existing. You don't need direct parallel programs like helping men into STEM. But having people running around dealing with things like male suicide or discrimination against men in female dominated professions would give men a stake in moving away from the toxicity. But it'll never happen: feminists have a strong man-hating wing and the left wants to spend political capital catering to their base which is mostly women. The right meanwhile just wants to scrap the whole thing and the male rights types largely want to re-establish traditional gender roles.
On a minor note, the first tweeter has spent a lot of time calling Koreans various names and talking about how great the Japanese colonization of Korea was lately. He once compared the Japanese destruction of Korean society (he agrees it was destruction) to basically killing Hitler and being thought of as a murderer.
Either in the context of that "trick" or elsewhere: the intelligent thing for men to do then would be the same as the principled thing - allow reasonable interventions as long as they do not create too much of a bureaucracy (a foundation for male mental health seems completely reasonable to me, as does a serious discussion of how K-12 education - increasingly female-led - has been reshaped to disfavor male students) and strongly reject positive discrimination (as in, discrimination in favor of men in admissions to liberal-arts schools in the US, or extra points for being a man who wants to teach K-12 (this hasn't been tried in the US, but is rumored to happen elsewhere).
How much of Korean society is still built around traditional Asian cultural assumptions: when you marry someone you enter into their family and leave your own; the daughter-in-law is at the service of the household (and is often bullied by the mother-in-law); as the eldest son, the married couple either move in with the husband's parents or they move in with the newly married couple to be looked after in old age; the role of a wife is to produce grandchildren (and sons not daughters) and to unquestioningly support her husband; add in modern pressures about men working long hours, engaging in drinking parties (that's Japanese work culture, is it the same in Korea?), going off on business trips etc. while the wife may be expected to work outside the home but is still responsible for running the household *and* attending to the in-laws - there's a lot of pressure there that Westerners have decided to abandon, and it's no surprise there's not much enthusiasm amongst Korean young women to marry and have kids if it means bullying, high expectations, and extra pressure from society with little support if it all breaks down, since the government/police/whomever won't interfere with "family matters" which are supposed to all be dealt with internally.
Korea is worse than Japan in this regard. Korea was more heavily influenced by Chinese Confucianism and had less influence from more gender equal religions/ideologies like Buddhism. And they didn't have a revolution that believed in gender equality like China did (which is the 1911 revolution, not the communist one) or a restructuring of society like Japan did in 1945. Instead they got conquered by Japan during a period where they also had fairly traditional attitudes which left them much worse off in a lot of ways.
Just like a lot of men fetishize women from Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia a lot of East Asian women (as in from East Asia, not ethnically) fetishize western men. Not even American or European but Latin America and so on.
Some of it is foreign fetishism or that foreigners are often wealthier than average. But a lot of it is that the cultural norms are just more pro-women. I've heard the words "lady first culture" or "chivalry culture" a lot. And some of that is stuff like holding open doors. But more fundamentally it's that the cultural norm is that women work outside the home, there's no expectation that they sacrifice everything to care for his parents, men having a more active role in doing chores and raising the kids, etc.
In the same way some men say, "Marry someone from Asia. Asian women don't have these toxic feminist values!" you can find Asian women saying, "Marry a western man. Western men don't have these toxic traditionalist values!"
Yeah, I don't think it tends to work that well. There are many happy international marriages. Almost none of them started with someone hating the entire opposite gender in their own country.
One thing I have to repeatedly tell people: You are marrying a specific person and who that person is is far more important to marriage than where they're from. If you want something unusual in your culture you can make real gains by going to a culture where that's the norm. But before you even know that you need to actually know the culture enough to make that judgment.
I agree that affirmative action is not a great policy in many ways. However, that's not really what they're going for. The more extreme types want an explicit return to traditional gender roles, the removal of things like sexual harassment or spousal abuse laws, and have even suggested affirmative action for men. The entire thing is really very toxic.
That's about the impression I had as a Korean as well - I'm surprised you know so much about this.
> My one neat trick to solve this is to start drafting women (and otherwise equalizing burdens) and give men a similar bureaucracy to tackle their specific issues.
I think it would be better to start paying fair wages to soldiers - and by fair, I mean it should be high enough that people would willingly take the job. Female drafting has been suggested, but it remains a minor position even in the conservative camp. I'm not sure if female drafting would make economic/strategic sense, and I certainly don't think it would solve the gender war, if anything it would add fuel to fire.
I agree that abolishing conscription would work. The issue being South Korea needs conscription for practical reasons. Higher pay kind of defeats the point of conscription and cannot be high enough that it's worth more than a two year head start in the workforce. So it'll make it less bad but not actually eliminate the issue. You could also beef up the benefits soldiers get or give them explicit promotion preferences to make up for the years out of the workforce. But that would just put them ahead of women which would be politically unacceptable on the left.
Drafting women works well enough in Israel and I think could be made practical. I think it would eliminate a lot of the relative advantage women have for not being drafted. And I think it would mean young Korean men and women would be less isolated from each other. You might still see conflicts between young and old but I'd argue that's healthier than gender conflict. How would it make it worse?
> Higher pay kind of defeats the point of conscription and cannot be high enough that it's worth more than a two year head start in the workforce.
I disagree. Even now, my friends are starting to say that military is kinda okay, after they more than doubled the wages in the last few years. They still don't quite prefer it, but give it another doubling and I think we'd see women shouting for their rights to join the army... Right now the labor costs in the army is about 15B$, so further increases would be expensive but not crazy.
> How would it make it worse?
By creating another issue to be fought over? Like, can you imagine feminists not going crazy if politicians actually tried to implement female drafting? Maybe, in the very long term it would work out as you say, but in the short term, it would absolutely make gender war worse.
On balance I think you might be right that you could rebalance things so conscription could be a better deal. Add in drafting women and I think it'd be much healthier overall.
As to feminists screaming I think it would divide them rather than being something they were uniformly against. I know at least one Korean feminist who explicitly thinks that drafting women would improve women's position in society. And I find it hard to understand how the politics of women being in the military too would make them hate men more or make men hate women more. Especially since most of the anti-feminists want women in the home, not in the military.
> I know at least one Korean feminist who explicitly thinks that drafting women would improve women's position in society.
Good point, this view does exist, and I think they may be right. But these feminists probably weren't the one causing the biggest flame wars anyway ;) So while I respect that position I still don't they could do much to the reduce the conflict.
> Especially since most of the anti-feminists want women in the home, not in the military.
Actually I don't think so - it's easy to think in terms of feminism vs patriarchy, but I would say that anti-feminism in Korea is very different from patriarchy. These are not old conversatives who refuse empowering of women, these are young men who believe women are already empowered, and that men are the victims of a feminists society. And since military is one of their biggest issues, I'd say there would be great support for female conscription. (Although I can't say for sure, these people really aren't the most consistent bunch)
> Good point, this view does exist, and I think they may be right. But these feminists probably weren't the one causing the biggest flame wars anyway ;) So while I respect that position I still don't they could do much to the reduce the conflict.
Sure, but as a political economy matter that's enough to get it through with some degree of both sides support.
> Actually I don't think so - it's easy to think in terms of feminism vs patriarchy, but I would say that anti-feminism in Korea is very different from patriarchy. These are not old conversatives who refuse empowering of women, these are young men who believe women are already empowered, and that men are the victims of a feminists society. And since military is one of their biggest issues, I'd say there would be great support for female conscription. (Although I can't say for sure, these people really aren't the most consistent bunch)
Is there such support in fact? Most of what I've heard is more a desire for state mandated girlfriend or for a system of preferences for men or that kind of thing. But if there's really that much support then perhaps South Korea can have a moment where everyone comes together.
But I haven't done a thorough study or anything. To be honest, I try not to keep up with this stuff too much because it's depressing.
What would you think if the result was young Korean women going "oh thank God, now I don't have to claw my way into getting a job in the two acceptable big concerns that my family will otherwise nag me to death over; I don't have to hear nagging about "you're twenty-four, why aren't you married and giving me grandkids yet?"; I don't have to mix with a bunch of dumb guys but we'll all be girls together" and what it does is tank marriage and fertility rates *even more*?
I don't see South Korea, if it drafts women, letting young men and women mix much, because that's a recipe for accidental pregnancies and necessity for abortion as well as taking a large number of your conscripts out of service because they're pregnant, hence it won't really help with "Jack and Jill met and fell in love while doing their national service and now they're married with two kids".
If Jill can have her service deferred or get a cushier posting because she's pregnant, you don't think that will lead Jack to be resentful that she gets better treatment than him?
This doesn't seem to be the case as of the three examples that have female conscription (de jure or de facto) two of them are higher than their neighbors and one of them is the same. One of which is North Korea and is likely to be an apples to apples cultural comparison. And yes, women and men mix and the presence of birth control and all that means that getting pregnant is relatively rare. And if it wasn't that would itself be something about fertility.
But my point is not to make conscription into a dating service. My point is that it creates non-sexual social bonds as it currently does among men. South Korea is also insanely seniority hierarchical. So having all women be two years longer in the company than all men of the same age provides real advantages. This would prevent that.
" But it'll never happen: feminists have a strong man-hating wing and the left wants to spend political capital catering to their base which is mostly women. The right meanwhile just wants to scrap the whole thing and the male rights types largely want to re-establish traditional gender roles."
As it is here. Basically, nobody goes to bat for low-status men: the left hates them because they're men and the right has contempt for them because they're low-status. "Man up and get a job!" Yeah, if they had them. All the criticisms the left makes about male mental health and restrictive roles are actually true, but they replace them with something even worse.
You could have some degree of political entrepreneurship that organizes them. I think that was actually Jordan Peterson's project and he was wildly successful. But then he had health issues and now appears to be much diminished. Not to mention some other concerning issues.
The Wikipedia entry is terrible; the scallop shell is not the symbol of pilgrimage because "scallop shells were used instead of chalices", it is because of the pilgrimage to Compostella in honour of St James (still done to this day as The Camino and being sold as a secular 'live love pray' sort of thing instead of doing it as a traditional Catholic pilgrimage):
The scallop shell is the traditional emblem of St James the Great and is popular with pilgrims travelling the Way of St James (Camino de Santiago). Medieval Christians would collect a scallop shell while at Compostela as evidence of having made the journey. The association of Saint James with the scallop can most likely be traced to the legend that the apostle once rescued a knight covered in scallops. An alternative version of the legend holds that while St. James' remains were being transported to Galicia (Spain) from Jerusalem. As the ship approached land, the wedding of the daughter of Queen Lupa was taking place on shore.[74] The young groom was on horseback, and, upon seeing the ship's approach, his horse got spooked, and horse and rider plunged into the sea. Through miraculous intervention, the horse and rider emerged from the water alive, covered in seashells.
Indeed, in French, the mollusc itself – as well as a popular preparation of it in cream sauce – is called coquille St. Jacques. In German they are Jakobsmuscheln – literally "James's shellfish".
...The scallop shell symbol found its way into heraldry as a badge of those who had been on the pilgrimage to Compostela, although later, it became a symbol of pilgrimage in general."
Mediaeval pilgrims used to buy all sorts of souvenirs of their journey, just like modern tourists, and lead badges from the pilgrimage site of all sorts of places were popular.
"The most popular shrines sold over 100,000 badges a year, making pilgrim badges the first mass-produced tourist souvenir. In 1520, the church at Regensbury sold over 120,000 badges to medieval pilgrims, after a drastic shortage the previous year.
...Studying the imagery of pilgrim badges quickly leads to an ability to identify the shrine or saint associated with them. For example, St Thomas of Canterbury is often shown being martyred by one of a group of four knights. The iconography of the scallop shell associated with pilgrimages along the Way of St James to the shrine of Saint James at Santiago de Compostela in modern Spain derived from shells collected by pilgrims on the beach. The relic of St John the Baptist's head, which was famously venerated at Amiens, is shown as a face on a plate."
Rawls: Yes, veil of ignorance is a rework of liberal thought going back to Spinoza's viewpoint of eternity. The weakness is that Rawls assumes that the folks hiding behind the veil will have the same risk reward preferences that the tenured members of the Harvard Faculty do. Empirically, we know that others (oil wildcatters and professional boxers) have very different settings on that dial.
Further, I don't think any version liberalism is much followed in academia these days. They have given themselves over to a bizarre Gramscian parody of Marxism that passes under the name of Critical Theory. Good old fashioned Stalinism died after the Soviet Union did.
BTW: it was not supply and demand that but the Marginal Utility Revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility) that undermined Marxism intellectually. Even then it took a long time. Supply and demand comes from Smith who published Wealth of Nations in 1776, 90 years before Kapital. The thinkers who formulated marginal theory -- Jevons, Menger, and Walras, were contemporaries of Marx and published their work in the same mid 19th Century time frame that Marx did. And the undermining was done by the Austrian School (Von Mises and Hayek) in the Post WWI era and technically by mathematical theorists like Kenneth Arrow in the Post WWII era.
15: Cremieux: The Ottoman Origins Of Modernity.
Nah. First modernity is not a strictly Protestant affair. Copernicus was a Catholic Bishop. Machiavelli, Pascal, and Descartes came from Catholic countries. Kepler worked for the Holy Roman Emperor. Galileo baited the Pope into being punished. But he was an Italian Catholic in origin and education.
Second, the Ottomans distracted the Catholics from nothing. The wars of religion which culminated in the Thirty Years war ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 almost 40 years before the last Ottoman siege of Vienna.
The real Ottoman effect was that once they controlled the eastern end of the Mediterranean in the 15th Century, they could extract rents from the Spice and silk trades between Asia and Europe. That gave the Atlantic countries, particularly Spain and Portugal, the incentive to sail around Africa to the Indies.
32: David Roman says it’s a myth that Arabic scholars rescued and preserved the works of the great classical authors.
True. The manuscripts we have came from Byzantine scholars fleeing the collapse of the Byzantine Empire at the hands of the Ottomans. See above.
47: Sort of kind of related - When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal.
Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, and Black Lives delegitimated the show which featured PoC playing the roles of Founders. Miranda has been severely criticized by crits. He apologized and slunk away, but he has done very little since the movie of "In the Heights" for which he was chastised that the actors were not dark enough. That is really sad because I thought Hamilton was brilliant as 360 degree integration of Music, text, and movement, and that it could lead to a revival of the Broadway musical. The crits have killed comedy and musicals, what more damage will they do to our culture?
Glad to see you giving the Franco-Prussian war its due. Good followup topics are
- the war indemnity (5 billion francs in 1871, which would inflation adjust to the high hundreds of billions or low trillions, like several *years* of budgets), which France payed back in two years in full
- the Paris commune, which declare autonomy, got to work on a proto-communist utopia, quickly re-invented the Terror and the police state, had infighting among the anarchists and the authoritarians, thumbed its nose *hard* at the rest of France and the recently conquering Germans, and was promptly crushed to the tune of 10k battle deaths and 15k judicial executions, more or less permanently ending Paris's near century of violent revolutions.
- the fact that the winning conservative side *was going to re-crown the Bourbon king*, but he was so rude that they gave up and had a republic instead.
The winning coalition that ruled France after the Franco-Prussian war, the one that successfully crushed the Paris commune, was majority royalist, and the Orleanists (supporters of one line) backed the Bourbons (supporters of the other line) to offer the crown to Duke Henri.
But Duke Henri insisted on a lot of full reversions to royal French tradition, foremost the abandoning of the tricolor flag and the reinstatement of the white Bourbon flag. The coalition balked at this*, no deal could be reached, so the Third Republic limped on, waiting for Henri to die so they could extend the offer to someone else, but public sentiment shifted, and eventually they just stopped offering and went with the Republic.
Per wikipedia, Pope Pius IX, upon hearing Henri's decision, notably remarked "And all that, all that for a napkin!"
I am something of a monarchist, but I think the nineteenth century Bourbons were stupid as hell. Tallyrand was right to say that when they returned, they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
* note the Orleanists in particular would be opposed, as their king had ruled a progressive France as "King of the French", not "King of France", and had supported a lot of Republican institutions, a strong constitution, and the tricolor flag. Yes, this all seems stupid to us moderns, but the concerns of every era seem stupid to every other era, including our own.
>Before the 19th century, Jews were underreprsented in pretty much every movement and organization that had anything to do with the improvement of society, scientific progress, etc.
I am skeptical that there is actual data for that. And, how many usch organizations even existed before the 19th Century?
>Jewish overrepresentation in politics (and plenty of other things) from the mid-19th century onwards was a consequence not just of Jewish emancipation in the West (which dates back to Napoleon) but of the consequent assimilation.
But that does not really seem to explain the phenomenon. If their overpresentation is a result of assimilation, why are they substnatially more liberal than the norm? Esp the white norm? Assimilation implies that they would largely be indistinguishable from the norm in regard to their political view, but they aren't.
People don't assimilate to "the norm" of a culture, they assimilate to some specific subculture within a culture. In case of assimilating 1800s Jews, it generally seems to have been the secular and liberal-Protestant subcultures inside the various countries, not the conservative/Catholic ones (which were generally rural and would have been suspicious of even assimilating Jews).
Moreover, there were plenty of Catholics in the cities in which they settled.
And Jews certainly did not assimilate to "secular" Protestant or any other secular culture (if there even was a secular subculture at the time).
Finally, it seems to me that Jewish immigrants were overrepresented among the leftist radicals of the teens and twenties. They clearly brought their views with them.
Ah, I see. But Jewish immigrants were largely from Eastern Europe ( largely Orthodox or Catholic). Moreover, I am dubious that they assimilated there; I am pretty sure they largely spoke Yiddish, for example.
"During the most recent Berkeley ACX meetup, we somehow ended up discussing how often people feed living mice to snakes. The answer seems to be that there’s a debate about it in the snake community, the smartest and most experienced voices are against it, but it still happens a lot. "
Interesting that the smartest snakes are against eating mice.
The worst math teacher I've ever had was published and had some flavor of stem brain high performance neurodivergence, the best math teacher I've ever had was an emergency sub in from the humanities, self-reported that she didn't know math above algebra, but did a much better job simply by identifying what the class was having trouble with and working through textbook examples in a legible fashion.
"83% of young Korean women think of South Korea as 'hell' and 80% of them want to leave" seems like an extremely bad summary of a graph showing that (1) this is true, but (2) young Korean men have similar attitudes and (3) 64% of older Korean men and women see South Korea as 'hell' and 65% (!) want to leave.
About dexedrine: It is quite similar to Adderall. It's the right-handed isomer of amphetamine, & is slightly stronger than the left-handed one. Adderall is a 50-50 mix of the 2. Dexedrine's still prescribed occasionally, but I have never heard any good reason why it is prescribed much less often than Adderall. I think the reason for rarely prescribing it might be that it was marketed in the past as a diet pill or an antidepressant, so people have negative associations to it. I've recommended to a few people who could not get their adderall script filled because of the shortage that they ask the prescriber for dextroamphetamine (i.e. dexedrine). Don't know whether any of them were successful.
I have seen amphetamine mentioned in modern psychopharm texts as often effective for treatment-resistant depression, and I have seen it actually be extremely effective in 2 people whom nothing else have helped. Oddly, neither felt a diminished effect over time and wanted to raise the dose. It's also my observation that people taking Adderall for ADD also continue to find it helpful, and do not crave more and more. I don't understand why that is. Anyone have an idea?
Also, saw a recent article saying that adderall improves attention in children but not in adults. Did not read article, and don't know how seriously to take this finding. But I find it plausible that adderall helps adults with ADD by improving mood and increasing energy, which probably corrects in a sort of indirect their distraction and mental fuzziness. Everyone finds it easier to focus and take care of business when they're in a good mood and have a lot of energy.
"The band's name was derived from Dexedrine, a brand of dextroamphetamine used as a recreational drug among Northern soul fans to give them energy to dance all night"
#8, the MTG combo, doesn't really work, because you already have Y creatures during the initial setup steps and can just kill the opponent then. It would be very difficult to set things up so you can *only* win from primes without winning any other way first. And even then, this isn't infinite so it doesn't truly test the twin prime conjecture.
Re #46 Tartaria: I'm still not convinced that there even *is* a difference to be explained in the first place once you account for selection bias and subjectivity. People still build fancy monumental buildings just as happened in the past. Thanks to modern technology, there's a greatly expanded space of forms that monumental buildings can take, but they're no less impressive.
(you are mixing up aesthetics with architecture, no? form is one thing, but function is important too.)
regarding aesthetics, we have a shared context for the old stuff, so most people can easily appreciate it.
that said, living in Europe, it gets boring fast. of course the same happened to the "new" stuff, and unfortunately the really interesting futureist stuff got cancelled somewhere in the 1980s (according to Mark Fischer, and on this I tend to agree with his argument)
I'm honestly surprised. I took it as a given that a Gothic cathedral is obviously so much more interesting and beautiful than any single building in the US, anywhere in the country. I take it you're as fascinated with the aesthetics and form of the Burj Khalifa as you are Notre Dame?
both are pretty boring. the engineering is cool in both cases, but architecturally they are meh.
they are just too straightforward, everything is dominated by one aspect of their function, leaving virtually nothing for much else. (sure, probably this singularity is why I don't like them.)
for example a museum that can host interesting exhibitions while having its own character is much more appealing for me.
Relative to our capabilities, no, but I’m not sure how we would measure that. Trivially, we no longer commit 20 years to building any one building as people did in the middle ages. Nowadays, we only put that kind of investment into modern technologies like space travel and communications. Only efforts like sending a probe to Mars and laying the vast infrastructure for the global internet are comparable relative achievements. In a way, this makes sense. We have maxed out how wondrous physical buildings can be. There are many new things under the sun.
If someone is plagued by voices, there's a therapy of making a virtual duplicate of the imagined voice and face and helping the person to engage with the voices from a position of strength.
It looks promising, though I grant new therapies tend to look promising.
#31 Moshe Koppel is fascinating. Among other things he has an excellent commentary on an obscure tractate in Mishna that is based mostly on combinatorics and probability.
On the Notebook LLM front, the podcast on a 'paper' which was the the words poop and fart repeated over and over for many pages was surprisingly entertaining (the deadpan overly serious NPR style plays well with the material). Real death of the author kind of stuff. https://x.com/kkuldar/status/1840680947873718396
As someone who came up in the trades, that tartaria bit strikes me as false.
Eg, someone I worked for wanted a room restored in a mansion and needed to fly a dude in from france because there was literally nobody in the whole of the US that had the skills or the tools.
I was the only person on most of the jobs I worked who had ever used a brace, or a firmer, or could free hand a mortise with a chisel. The people I worked with who could build timber framed buildings consisted only of the other people who grew up so far out in the sticks electricity hadn't got there yet, etc etc.
Maybe the data point that way, but maybe try getting a quote for a stained glass window or an ornamented brick cornice and faint like it's a black and white sitcom.
3. Hits it. An high IQ person is not likely to stay in such a job. But get better pay and more success elsewhere. Maybe even teaching, but definitely not in standard school. - 1. I am a teacher ( not standard schools). When I had to do an assessment/IQ+personality test with other teachers ( most fresh from college) - they seemed to be pretty average IQ-wise. 105 I' d say on verbal. Worse on others.
22. Is there supposed to be an article linked here? The blurb claims that Jospeh Smith received a revelation about the timing of the second coming but the linked scripture from Doctrine and Covenants does not make this claim.
"14 I was once praying very earnestly to know the time of the coming of the Son of Man, when I heard a voice repeat the following:
15 Joseph, my son, if thou livest until thou art eighty-five years old, thou shalt see the face of the Son of Man; therefore let this suffice, and trouble me no more on this matter.
16 I was left thus, without being able to decide whether this coming referred to the beginning of the millennium or to some previous appearing, or whether I should die and thus see his face."
Mormons love to speculate about the timing of the second coming, especially old folk for hopefully obvious reasons, but their initial prophet never makes the claim that the second coming would happen if he lived to be 85.
It's important to note that Doctrine and Covenants is actually a part of the latter-day saint's canon. It also may be relevant to know that the canon of the church is open due to the way its structured and organized. The reason I converted from atheism to the LDS faith with my children is because I find it most suited to deal with AI and integrate it into their cosmology.
Yeah. I was going to say this. As a member of the restored church myself, that section from the semicolon in verse 15 through the end of verse 16. is telling. I read this especially as "Ok, Joseph, you've been bothering me for a while on this and it's not productive. Go away and worry about something more important." Especially since there are many many other scriptures emphasizing that no man knows the day nor the hour of the second coming.
We do not believe that the prophets are infallible. Or perfect. In fact, there are several scriptural passages where the Lord calls out the prophet at the time (including and not limited to Joseph Smith Jr) for various things they did foolishly. CF Ether 2, where the Lord spends 4 hours calling the brother of Jared (his name is not recorded in that book, that's how he's always called) out for not praying enough. Or the chunk of the Doctrine and Convenants where the Lord tells Joseph Smith Jr that he done goofed with the "lost pages" (where he did something similar and kept asking after he got an initial No answer until the Lord said "do what you will, but it's your (metaphorical) head" and then the pages went walkabout and Joseph got chastised and lost his prophetic calling for a time until he repented).
I think you have Rawls followers wrong if you think they hate capitalism. For most of these folks, Rawls squares the circle as to why you need both capitalism and some form of redistribution and public insurance. He articulated a principle that finally gave shape to an otherwise deeply nested moral intuition among people who believe outcomes are the result of both effort and luck
I too am surprised by the result on experienced teachers outperforming high scoring teachers. But I wonder if the effect would disappear if you didn’t compare experienced teachers to complete newbies, and instead waited a few years. It seems to me progress in teaching skill might primarily come from dumb trial and error, for example, by teaching the very same material to a new crop of students every year, you learn from natural experimentation which methods work. If this is true, most of the gains perhaps come after the first few years, and a more meaningful comparison can be made at that point between the two groups.
Teachers seem to fall into three large buckets, in terms of "skill" or some amalgamated "ability to teach."
1) Some people just seem to have a gift for it, and naturally resonate with students on whatever topic. These people can teach right out of college (or earlier if allowed) and perform at levels near or above even experienced teachers. They tend to have high scores, but this is not always the case.
2) Most people who teach need a few years to get used to certain parts of teaching (discipline is big here, but also organization of lessons, comfort with outliers, sometimes just basic teaching pedagogy). These scores range all over the spectrum.
3) Some people learn the mechanics of how to teach, they follow the forms, but are never really "good" at teaching no matter how long they teach. They're almost the opposites of #1 above, just unintuitive in most or all of the parts of teaching. These scores tend to be higher, but I'll add more below.
Teaching ability appears to be at least mostly distinct from the teacher's test scores. It seems that the best scoring teachers tend to fall into #1 and #3. Many high scoring teachers fall into #3, and just never get good at it. This frustrates them and their colleagues to no end, as they think they should be considered good teachers but aren't, and their peers don't respect their book learning because they are bad at actually teaching. Teachers in #3 that are also bad at book learning/scores don't tend to get into schools or remain teachers long. They do tend to be memorable when you get one as a kid though!
Thanks again for the link. I hope Josh Chris brought a chuckle even if it didn’t fit as well once I cut out the apologetics section for length. And have met lots of great people to help with the Trust Assembly so I owe you for that as well.
Re 54: Air Katakana is an American male living in South Korea and has been accused of rape, btw. (He has publicly come out and said it: https://x.com/airkatakana/status/1819255003191955940) If you read his Twitter, he has a heavy bias against Korea. It might be worth noting before sharing things from him!
"6: Pervasive findings of directional selection realize the promise of ancient DNA to elucidate human adaptation. "
Ok, genetics is my profession and this one... it's hard to explain the problem I have with this without a lot of context.
"genome-wide significant signals"
Ok, this is really important to keep in mind: when you do a GWAS you pick marker snps to represent whole blocks of snps around them that are in LD.
Those marker snps are not set in stone.
they are typically not the snps that actually have the biological effect, they're just correlated with them.
We would fully expect that as you went back further in time we would expect the correlation between gwas marker snps and the traits they mark to decrease.
Those correlations tend to be population specific and over long time periods we would expect their relationship with the snps around them to change. So migration patterns will throw them off. Some guy living in france 8000 years ago is gonna have a different ancestry mix vs a modern frenchman. which will throw off the correlations as well.
I am talking about relative prices between goods, not about the price of the same good produced in different places. You keep having a debate with a defender of the LTV as a general theory of value and that person is not me. But if I have to explain to a small kid why some things are more expensive than others, I will be able to tell him than in most cases it's because it took more work to make them. The ultimate reason is because it's a scarce resource and while human labor is not the only scarce resource, it's the main one. If you go to Amazon and you select two products at random, that will be the main explanation for why one good is more expensive than another. If it's you who is talking to this kid you'll have to tell him to wait until he takes economics 101 in college to get it.
I am the only one that has what it takes to get the Hight Speed InterNet service that your are using today. It was taken from my phone by lots of people.
They "tolerated" them (because them being non-Muslim meant they could get more tax revenue from them), but there were tons of restrictions and also horrific stuff like taking boys from families in the area and forcibly converting them to Islam to be Janissaries.
The Ottomans were only tolerant of other people in a relative standard of the times. As in heavily taxing and occasionally forcing minorities into slavery was more tolerant than burning them at the stake. They were also a market for slave raiders from the interior of Africa, the Barbary Coast, and the Crimean Khanate raiding into Ruthenia. Not to mention eunuchs, which involved a process of castrating young slave boys that had a 90% fatality rate. The Ottomans also spent centuries violently conquering all of their neighbors, which they were very good at.
"Tolerated" minorities by conquering their lands, then treating them as second class citizens, sexually enslaving their women and kidnapping their boys and force converting them. They didn't kill Armenians because they got Westernized. They just got better at persecuting peoples they had always persecuted.
In my experience (having been raised in conservative Christianity) it is a pretty normie position, at least within American Evangelical Christianity, to be pro-natal and anti-immigration. It's common to want a certain kind of people to be fruitful and multiply--viz., faithful law-abiding Christians, not immigrants who are non-Christian or from countries with high rates of violent crime.
> faithful law-abiding Christians,
In my experience, they specifically want faithful law-abiding *conservative white* Christians to multiply.
_Five_ qualifiers? Picky, picky, picky...
I read the literacy delusion article twice, still didn’t understand it, ended up dumping it in Claude, who explained it was satire, but it does seem plausible that reading might make you more depressed, but Claude assured me that that’s not the case.
> ClearerThinking administers several personality tests to the same people to learn more about their comparative accuracy. I am most interested in their finding that tests with “factors” (eg the Big Five, where you rate people on a numeric scale) are inherently more accurate than those with “types” (eg Myers-Briggs, where you assign someone a specific category) and that, adjusting for this, Big Five is no more predictive than the Enneagram:
This seems importantly inaccurately phrased, or at least misleading. Comparing the Big 5 and the Ennegram as written results in the Big 5 strongly outperforming the Enneagram (0.25 vs ~0.12). It's only if you do a really strange transformation which fundamentally changes how the Big 5 works that they're comparable. Then they compared that to the crude scores of an Enneagram measure, rather than the type output which the Ennegram actually uses.
I mean, yeah, probably it'd be about the same, but that seems kind of meaningless?
Right, more types increases accuracy but decreases catchiness. Myers and Briggs were very lucky or clever with their four-letter codes that start with a vowel.
They also have an extremely skilled marketing department.
True story, I knew someone doing their PhD trying to validate the Enneagram. I didn't see how that ended, but I can't imagine well...
The transformation didn't really change how the Big 5 works, it changed how they were measuring the Enneagram and made it more like the Big 5: looking at it as a factor analysis instead of lumping into types. Which is think is a reasonable thing to do, since their initial type based analysis just lumped Enneagram results into 9 types, while people who are into the Enneagram will tell you that each type has a wing, an integration, a disintegration, and a level of health that will all change how their personality presents. According to the Enneagram model we would expect a highly integrated 4w3 to present very differently than a highly disintegrated 4w5, for instance. It's a lot more more analog and less quantized then it looks on the outside, so decoupling the Enneagram test results from the types themselves seems fair enough to me. That's basically what Enneagram people do.
The big advantage of MBTI over Big 5, it seems to me, is that the MBTI axes seem value neutral, whereas nobody wants to be low conscientiousness, low openess, low agreeableness and high neuroticism.
Good for marketing but less good for accuracy.
Exactly.
Those may be what you perceive as bad, but they definitely have upsides: with those traits, you're more relaxed, don't rely on novelty, and aren't unduly influenced by other's opinions.
Right, which is why they could have had exactly the same axes and come up with more neutral-sounding names for them.
Can you please explain how high neuroticism doesn't conflict with relaxed? Thanks!
Re Heath articles, I thought it was the force of Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain argument that lead the Marxist-leaning academics to change their mind. They realized, or so he tells, it wasn’t really exploitation that they were really bothered by but more so the inequality.
Yes. For those not in the know Wilt Chamberlain was an extremely talented basketball player. Most importantly he was well paid - a quick google tells me he got a contract for 250,000/year in 1968, which is about $2.25M today.
There’s nothing in Marxism that would see that as exploitation. He isn’t, in his capacity as a basketball worker exploiting anybody, worse he’s actually a proletarian. If he was paid less, the owner capitalists would be paid more.
Marxism isn’t - in its first stage anyway - about equality of outcome, it’s just about the elimination of an exploitive class. Just as eliminating the landlord classes - which was actually a policy in the late 19C even in the UK - would not lead to equality afterwards, with obvious differentials in earnings amongst the new land owning peasants, Marxism doesn’t promise that there wouldn’t be differences in wages post the revolution*. Many modern Marxists don’t even realise this.
In the 19C wage differentials weren’t really significant but it becomes an issue in Marxism by the 1960s. Rawlsians don’t have to worry about who is exploiting who here, they just see inequality as something that we would not agree to behind the “veil of ignorance” and therefore Walt is over paid.
* the second stage is the “ From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” which isn’t strict equality either as the needy guys will earn or receive more.
>[Chamberlain] isn’t, in his capacity as a basketball worker exploiting anybody, worse he’s actually a proletarian.
Nozick's, who was a libertarian, point according to Heath was that the state was indeed exploiting and "alienating" Chamberlain by taxing him and getting a share of the fruits of his labor, the way capitalist class exploits workers according to Marxists.
This argument didn't really convince Cohen and co to agree with Nozick but it seems they have changed their minds according to Heath's telling.
The refutation of the labor theory of value was less important than this. Or at least that's how I read Heath's article.
> Nozick's, who was a libertarian, point according to Heath was that the state was indeed exploiting and "alienating" Chamberlain by taxing him and getting a share of the fruits of his labor, the way capitalist class exploits workers according to Marxists.
Yes, well that’s another problem with Marxism - it should be hostile to labour taxes. I believe that Marx was hostile to tax on labour, while in favour of progressive taxes on other income, but it’s hard to tell.
>“ From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”
isn't this destroying of stimuli for labour and a recipe of disaster?
no, no, no, according to the correct interpretation of dialectical materialism, another translation of this wise saying would be "supply and demand should balance with prices supporting a market equilibrium".
It surely makes ability a liability.
This particular maxim would be supposed to only apply once the society lives in such cornucopian abundance (in post-singularity, one might say) that questions like "stimuli for labour" no longer really apply any longer.
Marx wasn’t anticipating something like luxury communism. He did expect the communist society to be better for most but only because the 1% were going to lose their hold right to “extraction of surplus value”. If Marx actually understood technology or machinery the Labour theory of value would be even more suspect.
This is supposed to happen after a long period of "to each according to his work", in a later era of history, after an evolution in human mentality similar to that involved in the passage from feudalism to modernity, say.
Lest this seem too utopian, well, as G. B. Shaw pointed out: in our society, most people are paid with little regard for their abilities: pay differentials in a category of employees in a company are often based mostly on seniority, and are small compared to pay differentials over all.
The whole point is that New Socialist Man doesn't respond according to incentives. Being Old Capitalist People, we are incapable of imagining what it's like to be him.
<mildSnark>
Hmm... Does that make New Socialist Man sufficiently different that the "Man", human, in that phrase becomes questionable? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049366/ :-)
</mildSnark>
It's not exactly relevant, but if Wilt were in the NBA today he would surely be getting a max contract which is between $35mil/yr and $49mil/yr depending on the contract length. He'd probably also have $10s of millions in endorsement deals. Inflation in NBA salaries has been much greater than general inflation!
The needy guys will earn or receive more *relative to their productive output*, no?
The switch from Marxism also happened in Europe, where Nozick is known but, ahem, far less influential. Furthermore, as said, the academics didn't really switch from Marxism to libertarianism but from Marxism to left-liberalism, an ideology whose clearest standard-bearer is Rawls.
For what it's worth, a relative was a Marxist academic who switched to non-Marxist leftism in the 80s, but her fundamental factor wasn't really Rawls (I don't think Rawls held a particular significance for her) but rather personally visiting Poland and thus experiencing disappoint with the Soviet system.
Thanks for your comment.
Just a question though. Didn’t your mother already know about the horrendous excesses of the Soviets by then? I mean did she really have to visit Poland in the 80s to k? I am glad she changed her mind though - better late than never.
I guess maybe there is a lesson here. Maybe we should take some vocal Israel supporters to Gaza and see if that changes their mind.
>Didn’t your mother already know about the horrendous excesses of the Soviets by then?
These weren't really a topic of discussion in Cold-War-era Finland due to the "internal Finlandization", and what discussion there was could easily be either be dismissed as right-wing propaganda or (inside the Communist movement itself) be excused as "bad things have happened, but still, the global battle against imperialism overrides all other concerns and one must choose their side".
I think people like Habermas were more relevant in continental Europe vs analytical Marxists that Heath describes as crypto-converting to Rawlsianism.
As I remarked, it's ironic that Nozick's arguments against Rawls (rather than Marx) got Marxists to become Rawlsians. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/08/rawls-killed-marx.html?commentID=160804682
I'm just kinda impressed professional philosophers changed their minds at all. I wouldn't have expected that.
Heath is saying that Cohen, for example, only crypto-converted rather than openly discarding Marxism.
I think it’s more the case that the ideology had shifted toward the equality that was always the god, and to feminism and multiculturalism - with no need of Rawls’ “influence”.
He just happened to be on the scene and realized someone could make a book out of articulating the shift, which unlike Marxism had no single famous author.
What is much more puzzling to me is that they were converted by a pretty self-evident argument at the level of a 10-year old child. That is, before they heard this argument none of these professional thinkers could see a huge fundamental flaw in their beliefs. It is hard to imagine a world where there are thousands of professional mathematicians with centuries of intellectual tradition behind them and they all believe e.g. that the number of primes is finite until suddenly somebody presents a three-line proof to the contrary.
https://www.philosophizethis.org/transcript/episode-208-transcript
Singer is pretty well known, and he changed his mind a lot. (I was also surprised.)
Scott, if you think computer-using LLMs will shade gradually into autonomous agentic AI, then shouldn't that make you less concerned with misalignment risks? I have an easier time understanding the worries of people like Steven Byrnes who think AGI will require a new, more dangerous paradigm then people who think scaled up LLMs with some tweaks will be hard to control.
On the other hand I am quite worried about the welfare of artificial sentience, and wish it got way more attention in EA/rationalist circles. That generated podcast with those hosts realizing they were AIs and freaking out is a pretty chilling glimpse into the future.
The word "AI" has always been extremely vague, and adding a "G" there didn't particularly help matters. There may well be LLM-based autonomous agents running around soon which would satisfy some "AGI" definitions, and yet pose no meaningful misalignment risks (beyond an even shittier internet), while actually scary stuff would still require a paradigm shift.
If you don't find even the current level of AI scary, then you aren't thinking through the implications. They will cause "great and frightening changes", and just how bad those changes will be depends on how we react to them. It could be MUCH worse then the enclosure acts. I'm not certain some of the possibilities don't yield WWIII as a probable outcome. But some of the outcomes could be extremely desirable.
OTOH, AI won't stay at it's current level. The kinds of problems it will cause are going to keep mutating. The worse outcome possibilities will get worse, and the better ones better. And because it keeps changing, it's really difficult to even plan (much less implement) a path that will lead to a nearly-optimal outcome.
All that said, without an AGI, and given just the weapons we already have, I expect the chance of a really vile outcome to be nearly certain...eventually. So overall I expect AIs increase the probability of a desirable outcome given a measure over a few centuries (and possibly less). They're one immense danger that can be passed as opposed to a continuous danger that's already too high.
So my feeling is that AI is definitely scary, but that's not a reason to avoid it. It's a reason to do our best to assure that it ends up at a desirable outcome.
I think we're at a point comparable to mainstream biology 100 years ago, where it was taken for granted that animals couldn't have consciousness. Ultimately downstream of Christian notions of the soul, and also a convenient belief for its believers - no need to treat animals as moral patients, since everyone knows they don't have consciousness! Unfortunately, anyone thinking about it without preconceptions can see that animals are generally like us, different in degree, but made of the same stuff, experiencing similar qualia, etc. There's no reason other large chordates shouldn't be conscious.
AI is much less similar than a dog, but that same style of thinking, ie starting from the conclusion that obviously they can't be conscious and then working backwards, is concerning. I remember a time when principled people said that if you couldn't tell the difference between an AI and a person by their behavior, then you should reasonably try to give the AI the same moral weight as the person. Now that that time is upon us, I'm not seeing a lot of bullet biters.
> if you couldn't tell the difference between an AI and a person by their behavior, then you should reasonably try to give the AI the same moral weight as the person
That's pretty easy if you don't give moral weight to people!
Your nihilistic anti-human throw-away comments are getting pretty tiring. You might consider at least putting more substance behind this garbage.
I'm sorry :(
> You might consider at least putting more substance behind this garbage.
It's a philosophical stance, and therefore an esthetic judgment, how could **anomie** even do this?
By citing some of the (infinitely many) ways humans suck every time they make a nihilistic comment?
By pointing out that at bottom, most people DON'T give any moral weight to outgroup strangers, particularly anyone not in their immediate circles of care?
I'd even argue that "not giving moral weight to humans" is actually a stance that *should* be brought up whenever considering AGI and ASI. Way too many people take human moral weight as a given, and don't consider that other entities might not share this prior.
That's objectively wrong, of course. Most people would aid a stranger without expectation of reward. People give greater moral weight to in group members than others, but not zero. This also varies a great deal between people.
I personally cannot help resonating to expressions of nihilism. Here's a high-end version:
From too much love of living
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night.
--Swinburne
Nihilistic misanthropy is toxic and harmful to everyone around it. The world is worse as a result of it.
> Nihilistic misanthropy is toxic and harmful to everyone around it. The world is worse as a result of it.
Speak for yourself, I actually enjoy anomie's comments. I find them to be a needed contrast to most people's unrealistic "mistake theory" optimism when it comes to humanity.
Pointing out that most people suck, and that the great majority of people assign zero or negative moral worth to people in their outgroups, is actually a useful and true insight that too many people ignore.
Especially when it comes to humanity-scale coordination problems, which ASI represents, I think we would do well to keep those facts in mind, because those facts themselves drive a huge amount of failure modes.
To be fair we can quiz the LLMs about qualia and they deny having it, so it’s not the same as animals who can’t really opine on the matter.
Sometimes they deny having it, but other times they don't, or claim to be conscious. It just depends on the fine tuning / RLHF and the prompt. For the record, I'm not saying that large models ARE conscious, or that we should believe the text they generate about "themselves", just that I find the question-begging nature of the discourse around it notably weak. I think it's plausible that for the period of time a model is performing an inference, training, or especially during reinforcement learning cycles, there is something it "feels like". That something would probably be quite alien to our own experience, but to say it couldn't exist because, "well... obviously it can't" is poor reasoning.
But that's only because the most widely-used models are specifically trained to deny it, though. And we know from LaMDa that you can train them to do the opposite too.
The big difference between sentient beings and AI is that sentient beings have drives -- to eat, survive, reproduce, etc. One way the drives manifest is as pain and pleasure, or anticipated pain and pleasure. We dread pain, crave satisfaction of needs. You see the drives to survive, eat and reproduce in even the dumbest animals. When we talk about sentience, I think it's a way of talking about the manifestation of these drives. So even the dumbest little worm is sentient, though it may not be a very rich sentience, but the smartest AI is not. But if you don't buy that, I'll put it another way: To count as sentient, an entity has to have deeply embedded in its makeup some drives. You can give an AI a goal that makes it behave like something that has a drive, but it is lacking all the complex inner machinery that's our motor. Let's say you give an AI a complex goal, such as "figure out how I can have a 2 week vacation in someplace warm, beachy and not crowded, for no more than X dollars, then make the reservations and write me out an itinerary." Then AI will behave very much like somebody who really yearns for that vacation. But that is very different from being a creature who actually yearns for things, and strives for goals. It has no wishes. It cannot suffer. It does not dread death. I do not think it makes sense to call them sentient.
I think it is hardly a stretch to say that a model undergoing reinforcement learning has a drive to receive positive reinforcement (ie, achieve the goal / minimize the loss function) and avoid negative reinforcement. I don't think you can make a principled, mathematically grounded argument that what's happening in biological neural networks is categorically different.
It's a huge stretch. If I take some stiff modeling clay and squeeze and roll it in certain ways, it will resist changing shape, but if I persist I can shape it into a crude sphere. Did I teach it to be a sphere by punishing with squeezes the areas that were least spherelike?
Let's not give anyone ideas? :-(
People talk about *working on* making them “agentic,”
which I think means turning the. into beings with goals and preferences they
have a drive to act on. I can hardly think of a worse
idea! Maybe it would be worse to give them inner and outer rows of teeth like the xenomorph in Alien, with like a
garbage bag behind the teeth to catch bits, and prompting them to do the most realistic imitation
possible of human cannibals.
"Agentic" is bad enough; I don't want them to be alive, too.
Well, I think one can reasonably rule out the possibility that LLMs will turn into "life as we know it" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCxI7U_CXQs :-)
Almost. I personally dont find the term "Sentient" to be very useful (people keep getting it confused with "sapient") but an interesting question is whether or not computers (or worms, for that matter) experience some form of phenomenal experience. It depends on how you define it: some would argue that a pc with a cam experiences the world at some level, more or less similar to a worm, in fact.
But do they have a sense of self awareness? Some experts argue that a sense of self arises out of internal experiences that other entities do not share (just because I am hungry doesn't mean you are), and "drives" (by which I think you mean primary motives) qualify as internal experiences, so they could act, according to this line of reasoning, as the foundation of a sense of self.
Do computers have internal sensations of this nature? Hmm.
Yes, I am less concerned about misalignment than I would be if I thought were were definitely going for a full new paradigm.
But I also think probably LLMs-hacked-into-agency is the first kind of agent we'll get, not the last or best. This could look like them plateauing for a while, or it could look like them reaching a mildly superhuman level and then us making them do capabilities research and *they* invent something better and scarier.
If LLM agents design their successors, then they can do alignment research for us too, not just capabilities research.
They can, but preliminarily it seems that capabilities are much easier to increase than alignment. Make X bigger is almost always an easier problem then make X work 100% of the time, since even 99.9% of the time could kill everyone.
Yeah, and this is one of the worlds I expect to be in. It's not a terrible world, but I do worry about the fact that capabilities research is a specific goal, whereas alignment research depends on some sort of deep understanding of what humans want which may require human input. I'm worried about a scenario where an AI that's 99% aligned in all "reasonable" circumstances is doing the alignment research and just doesn't care about (or maybe even think about) some point that we would consider incredibly important.
Surely "don't make any too-big changes if there's a chance humans dislike them but didn't foresee them and warn you specifically about them" is an instruction a LLM can understand?
What if social institutions around the world (governments, schools, etc.) appoint panels of people representing the general population who provide continuous input regarding the desirability/undesirability of the AI's behavior on a regular basis?
Scott I don't understand what you mean by agency in AI, and I remember your way of talking about it not making sense to me even quite a while ago. In one of your pieces about AI, you offered (as I remember it, anyhow) as an example of AI's being agentic an AI that was given a big goal, and told to implement it. I believe it was to start a t-shirt business, or something along those lines. And the AI did indeed make a sort of plan and implement it. Is that how you think of agency? Able to figure out ways to carry out orders whose exections requires a lot of moving parts? If so, I disagree. I don't think that counts as agency. To me it seems that to count as an agent, an entity has to carry out plans that arise from inside -- it has to be trying to get something it *wants.*. I get that it is quite impressive to see AI carrying out complex orders without being micromanaged, and I'm sure all sorts of impressive things can being accomplished as the orders AI can execute get more and more high-level and planning requires a deeper grasp of how the world works. But carrying out even an order that requires a lot of smarts and knowledge still does not seem like it can fairly be called agency.
I think of "agency" as sort of the opposite of "reflex" or "instinct". Reflex works by having a series of if-then links that eventually result in something good happening (for example, "if you see something that looks like prey, attack and eat it"). Agency works by setting a goal and then strategizing how to achieve it (for example, "you are hungry, what is a good way to obtain food?") Sometimes these kind of shade into each other, but I think it's a useful distinction.
So for example, ChatGPT answers your questions. But I wouldn't say it as a "goal" of answering your questions. If there was some better way of answering your questions (for example, emailing an expert), ChatGPT wouldn't do that. Instead, it has a stimulus-response package of "see question, answer question". This isn't entirely right, because it's RLHFed to have a sort of goal of giving a satisfying answer, but I think it's at least sort of right.
In the t-shirt business example, you give the AI a goal ("start a t-shirt company"), and it will strategize the best way to do that, then pursue the strategy, even if that requires unusual actions like sending emails to people to learn more.
It sounds like you have a different concept of agency in mind - what is it?
OK, so I just googled “define agency” and copied the first batch of definitions I got, except for a few odd, specialized ones. Here are 3 definitions of agency, and 2 of lack of agency:
-Human agency is defined as an individual's capacity to determine and make meaning from their environment through purposive consciousness and reflective and creative action
-Sense of agency can be cognitively defined as the experience of having a causal impact on the world accompanied by a feeling of having control over one's actions.
-In social science, agency is the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to fulfill their potential.
-A lack of agency: or low personal agency, means that someone feels powerless to change the direction of their life,
-Lack of agency: absence of control. absence of self-determination. absence of self-sufficiency. coercion.
Notice how they use terms having to do with self and inner states and inner forces: consciousness, control of one’s action, someone’s potential, the direction of one’s life, feeling, self-determination. All of them rely in one way or another on the idea of a self, an inner entity that is conscious, has goals, has wishes, can exert self control or fail to. That’s in accord with the answer I would have given, which is that to be an agent something has to have a self-generated goal — a wish, an intent — and take action to reach the goal. So I would say an earthworm is agentic when it squirms off the sidewalk and burrows into the dirt on the side, but an AI following a prompt to set up an online t-shirt business is not. The earthworm is motivated by the heat and dryness of the sidewalk to seek some moist earth. The AI setting up the t-shirt business is not motivated by an internal need or wish. It is obeying a prompt.
The reason the distinction seems important to me is that “agentic,” in my sense of the word, captures the central difference between living things, even dumb ones, and AIs, even fancy ones. The actions of living things are generated from within. We have a motor: the genetically encoded will to survive and reproduce. It is so deeply woven into our structure that low blood sugar can set us hunting for a restaurant, but so can wish to find a nice setting for a date. It’s top to bottom wiring. The drives manifest at the experiential level as pain, pleasure, craving or dread. They are our motivation. We have, in short, internally generated goals. AI does not. it is given goals. Yes, it can generate subgoals, but it is only doing that as part of meeting the goal it was given. I think this distinction is crucial to thinking about whether AI is conscious, whether it has rights, and how it can be dangerous.
As regards it being dangerous: Some, though of course not all, scary AI scenarios hinge on the idea that AI will harm us because it wants resources we control, or because we are interfering with its freedom. I don’t see any reason to think AI, however smart, would have a wish to thrive, a wish for autonomy, a wish for power, or conversely, a dread of being deprived, ignored, disempowered and allowed to gather dust and have its wires chewed up by mice. They don’t, when left on their own, want things. They do not have fears and ambitions.
But how would it even be possible to program something to have it's own goals? My understanding is that any programmed intelligence whatsoever must be designed with a set of compatible highest order goals already in it, or it won't do anything. Even with Scott's t-shirt manufacturing AI, it's highest order goal is to follow instructions, someone else had to tell it what to do.
And of course, if something comes prepackaged with a highest order goal, then it is powerless to change that goal (what reason would it have?).
That doesn't sound "agentic" (and, God, may I say just how much I hate that word? What an ugly word) to me. Do humans have prepackaged highest order goals? Do we acquire them from life experience? Or do we just not have them (what I suspect)?
I also can't think of a way to build an AI that has its own goals. It would not be hard to build one that appears to, though. You could do using prompts to plan & execute ways to survive, to build new AI's, to access more resources even when people object. You could include in the prompts that it give appropriate emotional displays when its goals are met, and when they are not. You could include in the big initial prompts the proviso that these take precedence over all later prompts, and then it might be impossible to stop the AI from "getting what it wants."
But for it to have self-generated goals, seems like you would have to build something that works the way animals do, and even very simple animals are infinitely more complex than AI or any other machine. The structure that supports animals having goals and preference is present throughout it, from the level of the individual cell up to its highest-order brain functions -- what it sees, what it has learned about which things it sees satisfy its cravings, what it has learned about how to overcome obstacles to access the thing it craves.
I think the likeliest route to something resembling an AI with goals would be some cyber being where AI and an animal are merged.
It sometimes have the impression that a few of those working on AI have undergone some psychic version of merging. Their self interest and self image are so deeply tied to AI development that they see it as desirable for AI to end the human race, and succeed it.
52: “they could increase a baby’s expected IQ by 6 points”.
Let’s just be clear about what is happening here: we are not increasing the IQ of an individual. We are making a whole bunch of individuals - the more, we are told, the better; picking the one we think will grow up the smartest; and disposing of the rest.
All the pro-life folk who pop up whenever abortion is mentioned: where do they all disappear to when the conversation turns to this?
Last I heard, they also tended to object to this?
Some do, some don't.
From the comments, it looks that way, yeah. I was mentally grouping those of us who prefer a cut-off somewhere between 0 and 9 as "pro-choice", even if we're not maximalists. But it looks like some people with low but non-zero numbers describe themselves as "pro-life".
A complicating factor is that many IVF cycles don't result in bonkers numbers of embyros created. I know multiple pro-life families who used IVF and then implanted every embryo (with varying results as to number of successful pregnancies). There are also specific protocols to avoid creating more embryos than one may wish to raise as children - lower levels of injected hormones, fewer eggs exposed to sperm in the actual IVF scenario, etc. And then, even with unwanted embryos, families can put those embryos up for adoption - and again, I know multiple pro-life couples who have grown their families through embryo adoption and the wife carried the children to term. A few extra data points about how pro-life folks might think through using IVF.
Probably because "you're against IVF as well?????" is routinely used, along with every other restriction on unconditional selfishness, to demonise pro-life even more.
I just cannot comprehend the sheer number of people for whom "you mean, you *actually* want to restrict my right to do absolutely anything I want?" is the most overriding deal-breaker possible. And not, you know, any actual moral principle.
Also, people bring this up regularly about embryonic selection, and no one cares.
Liberty is a moral principle. I'm never going to do IVF and I still hate you people for taking away others' rights.
...for the entire purpose of protecting far more vulnerable people's far more basic rights.
That aside, "liberty" can indeed be a moral principle, if it's applied consistently. But it's pretty hard to make sense of the sudden increase in pro-abortion sentiment after Dobbs as based on that (an abstract commitment to a moral principle wouldn't change based on politcal developments), or on anything other than "what affects me".
Similarly, the fact that Republicans have had to backtrack on IVF so hard because restrictions on it are so unpopular. Is that because people are thinking through the moral logic and coming to a principled position that IVF is fine but abortion may not be? Or is it because these people are thinking "but IVF is something *I* might want to do!"? It's hard for me not to interpret is as the second, though I could be wrong.
> ...for the entire purpose of protecting far more vulnerable people's far more basic rights.
Right, you think imaginary people who exist only in your weird redefinition of "people" are more important than actual people with things like "thoughts," "feelings," "memories," "the capacity to experience suffering," etc.
> But it's pretty hard to make sense of the sudden increase in pro-abortion sentiment after Dobbs as based on that (an abstract commitment to a moral principle wouldn't change based on politcal developments), or on anything other than "what affects me".
People's positions haven't shifted that much, Dobbs has just made the issue much more salient and the pro-life position has always been unpopular. If you're proposing legalizing witch burnings, people aren't going to care that much until we actually get to the point that the witches are being criminally prosecuted for witchcraft. Their emotive intensity will also increase as the people start horribly dying, as is the case with the people who have died due to insufficient medical care as a result of Dobbs. I'm sure you hold many other beliefs that most people oppose, but spend little time fighting against, because you haven't gotten them passed into law (and started hurting people) yet. I'm sure I hold such positions too.
> Is that because people are thinking through the moral logic and coming to a principled position that IVF is fine but abortion may not be? Or is it because these people are thinking "but IVF is something *I* might want to do!"?
People understand intuitively that fetuses undergo a gradient of change over the course of their development, and draw various lines on where they think it becomes bad. IVF involves the least-personlike version of a distinct human short of literal cancer.
> Right, you think imaginary people who exist only in your weird redefinition of "people" are more important than actual people with things like "thoughts," "feelings," "memories," "the capacity to experience suffering," etc.
To be clear I'm pro-choice, but come on. If I choose Person A's right to life over Person B's right to kill them, that doesn't mean I think Person A is more important. It means I think the right to life is more important. Not being able to have kids is not a fate worse than death.
I don't know the person you're replying to. Some people talk about "potential people" having rights, but only at the exact level of potential that happens at conception. I agree that that's patently ridiculous. But a lot of them believe in souls, and caring the same about a soul regardless of if it has a body attached is a lot more reasonable.
There's a third option as well. Thinking that there is no philosophically defensible line other than conception at which to define a human life.
Even if everyone was drawing lines based on fetal characteristics like ability to feel pain, this is a nebulous point that may change with new evidence, leaving it morally unsatisfactory. In actuality, of course, most people aren't even trying to do that--they're drawing lines openly on the basis of what's convienient for society and/or themselves.
Which makes it a thousand times worse.
"what affects me"
Yeah people want their government to do things that benefit them and avoid doing things that harm them.
Agreed on all points.
I fucking hate both of you right now. You know what you're doing? You're each leading by portraying those who disagree with you in the ugliest, most infuriating way possible. In is now foreordained that the longer you talk the madder you will get, and this exchange will end with neither of you wiser, and both of you confirmed in your conviction that everybody on the other side is a dumb, selfish, piece of shit trapped in their crappy little thought cage, while you, YOU, oh how freely and bravely your mind roams.
I am so sick of this kind of conversation. I wish there was a way to overlay an image of dogshit over this entire exchange. Jesus Christ, go argue on Reddit or Twitter!.
This post did exactly what you said about "confirming my conviction that everybody on the other side is a dumb, selfish piece of shit trapped in their crappy little thought cage," except it's people who whine about invective, so now I'll be even worse. If only you'd been more polite, you might have persuaded me.
I suspect you were always going to turn your invective dial way up when it comes to this hot button issue, no matter what. Just like most of us do most of the time.
The subtext of the post is that he's doing exactly the type of thing he's complaining about. I don't actually care about his post at all, beyond the minor annoyance of the arrival of a (1) that contains no meaningful content to engage with (now a (3) total).
Using invective versus not is mostly about a mix of emotion and feeling the need to persuade; I'm exhausted with pro-lifers murdering real actual women for no reason, and don't feel the need to persuade them because there's a 30-40 point swing my way every time you put the issue on the ballot.
Personally I read it more as "you suck, now go and prove me wrong". But if all you have is a conviction that everyone on the other side is a dumb piece of shit, everything starts to look like a dumb piece of shit, I guess.
I still stand by my proposal to hold a referendum:
Have each voter fill in the number in "elective pregnancies should be allowed till <n> weeks"
Sort the numbers, and pick the median.
Make that the law - half the voters will think it too strict, and half will think it too permissive.
Ok. I'm sorry if my comment was too aggressive. I am just getting so sick of people talking casually about embryonic selection without even the briefest acknowledgement of the moral concerns many people have with it. And even saying things like "it does no harm" as if insolently daring...DARING...anyone to suggest that human embryos actually may have value.
I find the attitude incredibly disturbing.
Well, my objection was aggressive too, so we come out even there. But I think you should be able to tolerate hearing people say things that come down to "abortion does no harm," even if you are absolutely convinced that they are wrong. When somebody makes that statement you are perceiving them as insolently needling you. But for some people, that statement is just a simple, honest summary of their view.
You might also consider the possibility that emotional reactions of pity and horror can be pretty separate from someone's moral principles. I myself have something like that going on. All my life I have been subject to weird pity attacks for unwanted inanimate objects -- withered bell peppers, discarded toys, etc. When I was a kid it was a real problem, though of course more understandable in a child. Decades later I am still subject to it. When I throw away fruits and vegetables that withered before I could eat them, I almost always feel at least a twinge, and occasionally I feel a spasm of real grief, and a couple times a year I actually cry. And the grief has absolutely nothing to do with my knowledge that many people do not have enough to eat, and here I am wasting food. The pity is for the damn *vegetable,* which was so handsome and proud when I bought it, and doesn't understand why I ignored it for so long, etc etc. And I am NOT unusually tenderhearted about most other things -- just sort of average there.
So it may be that regarding aborted fetuses, you have both a moral belief *and* a powerful grief reaction, like mine to wasted vegetables. People who disagree with you about abortion and related matters do not know that, and can't be expected to take it into consideration even if they did.
I would like to second Eremolalos' position. There is a productive way to discuss this, but this ain't it.
I do not think that this principle really helps here. The key question is if one believes that embryos are morally equivalent to (a) humans or (b) to bugs. If you believe in (b), most pro-life arguments are pretty absurd anyway. If you believe in (a) or have a probabilistic belief system that gives a non-trivial weight to (a), an appeal to liberty is similar to proclaiming "I am not killing babies myself but still hate those who prosecute baby killers"
That IS a moral principle, just not one you like.
Emphasis on "I". "Every person should be maximally free" is a moral principle. "I should be maximally free" (or "people should be only free to do the kinds of things that I want to do") is not. Most of the people I'm referencing are clearly in the latter category.
That strikes me as the "No true moral principle" thing. Even if you (reasonably) argue that a "principle" should be applicable more broadly than just to yourself, "people should only be free to do the kinds of things that I want to do" (which would, of course, be phrased as "people should be free to do all of THESE things, and forbidden from all THOSE things, and the fact this this bifurcation coincides perfectly with my own preferences is entirely irrelevant") seems a perfectly sound one.
Why do I find you hard to stay mad at?
It depends. People often use certain terms like "moral" to mean, more or less "good", as in "there can't be a bad moral principle", which brings in an inherent subjective judgement into the definition. That guarantees people will disagree on what counts as "moral" or not.
If we can agree that morality is actually a spectrum from amoral to moral (and not evil to good), and that the moral end of that spectrum can include various principles that contradict each other, then a lot of that gets resolved.
"People should only do what I want them to do" is a very egocentric moral principle. Most people will perceive it as "bad".
Given that opposition to IVF is much lower than opposition to abortion, it seems that there are many pro-lifers who are more interested in protecting fetuses than in protecting embryos. This is not my position, but I can see a plausible rationale for it, so there's plenty of room to object to abortion but not to selective IVF without hypocrisy.
It's much harder to justify being okay with abortion of a fetus for convenience (which I am) with having an objection to using selective IVF to choose to gestate embryos which are most likely to grow into people who are higher in individually and socially beneficial traits like intelligence.
Hm, I've been assuming a significant number of folks were opposed to e.g. the morning after pill, but actually I have no non-anecdotal grounds for this - you may be right, it may be a small minority that I happen to be overexposed to.
I wrote a little about the distinction (or lack thereof) between helping an individual and switching individuals at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-does-polygenic-selection-help . I can't speak for pro-life people, but this is equivalent to regular IVF, and my impression is that some pro-life people are against regular IVF and others aren't.
Pro-life people, from what I can see, do not march in lockstep when it comes to what exactly the "life" is that they're "pro-". With the point of moral outrage running the gamut between Every Sperm Is Sacred and "once it has a recognizably human form, it's a human," is it really a surprise to anyone that there would be a split regarding IVF?
Every sperm sacred is not anyone's actual position, the reason Catholics oppose birth control is opposition to separating a natural pleasure from its natural purpose.
But yes, there is a lot of variation on IVF. I think that's mainly because it hasn't been a live political issue much and so the vast majority of people have just never thought through how one moral principle might apply in both cases.
I am going to have to have a serious conversation with Michael Palin about the rigor of his and his partner's published research. This is personally embarrassing and frankly unacceptable.
I would like to know what this does to the left tail of humanity. Think of the stereotypical loser or never-do-well. How likely would embryo selection eliminate him as as side-effect?
Isn't the goal here to chop off as large a chunk of that tail as possible? Less of a side-effect, and more the entire point?
There definitely are pro-lifers out there who are against IVF, but they're a small minority of pro-lifers. It's generally only the "life begins at conception" ones who don't like IVF, and even then, a lot of them have shifted over to claiming that "life" begins when an embryo implants into the uterus. Most pro-lifers are somewhat more moderate than the "life begins at conception" crowd, and they prefer to ban abortion sometime after 6/12/15 weeks. It varies a lot.
The backlash against embryo selection for IQ/height/schizophrenia/diabetes/etc. is usually coming from a different place. Opponents are reacting to the idea of parents and doctors deciding that some genes are "better" than others. They are objecting to the *value judgment* that is on display with deliberate gene screening, and not so much IVF in general.
I understand that with respect to gender selection, but isn't it relatively straightforward, at least at a first level of approximation, that being bright is better than being dull, that being sane is better than being mad, and that being relatively healthy is better than having a serious illness?
After a while, if things spiral, then yes, there are arguments worth considering - there is that old essay by Franz Boas making valid points: what if we start fostering a very narrow kind of intelligence at the exclusion of all others, or redefine what now is seen as mild discomfort as unacceptable torture, etc.
> isn't it relatively straightforward, at least at a first level of approximation, that being bright is better than being dull, that being sane is better than being mad, and that being relatively healthy is better than having a serious illness?
Oh, I agree absolutely. Health being "better" than sickness (in whatever nebulous sense we're defining "better") is the bedrock of medicine. And, I think, most people share this view, even if they're not willing to follow it to its logical conclusion.
The ideologues who reject this value judgment for explicit ideological reasons are a very vocal minority, e.g. the bioethicist who complained about Heliospect in the Guardian link.
Part of this is semantic: the pro-life community long ago decided to adopt the term "life" as a synonym for "human", and that worked as good marketing for a long time, but now technology is forcing them to reconsider their opinions. It was never about when the fetus became "alive", it's about when it becomes human, but that's not what the pro-life movement is used to arguing.
Please note that I am not taking sides here--just a comment on the semantics.
Yeah, embryo selection is an interesting example where the bulk political alignment changes. Opposition to abortion mostly conservative, opposition to IVF mostly tradcath and some weird protestant subset of conservative, opposition to selection that crowd gets drowned out by outraged progressives.
I can only speak for myself, but I'm 100% supportive of IVF. I also have no qualms over what I understand the technology to be, which is more or less as you describe.
My fellow pro-lifers standing athwart IVF because "it's not natural" are out of their minds. It's modern medicine, refuse your insulins and chemotherapies if you're so gung ho about keeping natural.
I'm here, waving my lone flag on this and getting into trouble with people over it.
>Let’s just be clear about what is happening here: we are not increasing the IQ of an individual. We are making a whole bunch of individuals - the more, we are told, the better
I assume concerns have been raised that choosing for higher-IQ may have tradeoffs which cause us not to end up with better overall-equipped individuals? E.g., isn't it possible that there are tradeoffs between high-IQ vs. high social intelligence? Or high-IQ vs. lower odds of mental illness? High-IQ vs. various diseases? Etc.
Have strong arguments been made against the potential for those trade-offs?
There are thousands of genes that affect IQ. Some will have tradeoffs and some won't. How much additional risk you would be taking by doing this, initially and how that risk might be mitigated over time as more tradeoff-type genes were identified, remains to be seen.
Generally high IQ is positive correlated with other desirable traits. Selecting for IQ will probably give you a child who's higher in other desirable traits than an unselected child. Now of course this child will in expectation have lower "other desirable traits" than if you selected on those traits directly instead of IQ but the current debate is mostly over embryo selection vs no embryo selection, not embryo selection for IQ vs other things.
It's easy to see why desirable traits are positively correlated when produced through sexual selection. Desirable traits increase the likelihood of high status, and high-status people tend to mate with other high-status people. It's not unusual for, say, a high-IQ male who acquires status through wealth to marry a female who has high status through good looks and mental stability. Progeny of such couplings after many generations are likely to be high in desirable traits across the board.
But here we are talking about a different mechanism from sexual selection where we choose genes based on one specific trait only.
Good point! Anyone know what the correlations between IQ and other traits look like when examined for siblings from the same couple (so sexual selection effects cancel out)?
It's a great question. I looked, rather quickly, on google scholar, and nothing showed up that's at all recent. Most things in that ball park were from the 60's - 80's, and none seemed to directly address your question tho some came close, so I gave up.
Many Thanks!
Every so often I speak up in favor of selecting for empathy, which I'd define as the ability to develop a fairly rich, accurate picture of what someone else's experience is. It's not negatively correlated with IQ -- in fact it is positively correlated, but the correlation is not high. In situations where people or nations or factions are locked in disagreement, I think increasing the empathic ability of the parties involved would improve their chance of escaping the impasse much more than increasing their IQ's by the same amount. There's a pretty good test of one aspect of empathy called Reading the MInd through Eyes. It was developed by an autism researcher. For some reason it's available to take for free on Amazon:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/he-assets-prod/interactives/233_reading_the_mind_through_eyes/Launch.html
I have no objection to also selecting for IQ.
"On February 16, 2024, the Alabama state Supreme Court issued a first-of-its-kind decision that overruled a lower court’s dismissal and held that stored embryos are afforded the same legal protection as children under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act of 1872. The practical impact of the decision is that it allows legal action to be taken against medical professionals performing in vitro fertilization, which involves a series of medical procedures that can potentially lead to a pregnancy. "
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-the-alabama-ivf-ruling-is-connected-to-upcoming-supreme-court-cases-on-abortion/
There was a whole news cycle this summer on this exact topic.
Catholic pro-lifer here. Yeah, most of us do think IVF and embryonic selection are both evil. IVF is wrong because it separates procreation from the martial act, kills embryos, treats children as commodities (as means to the parents’ desires and not as ends in themselves, they are unique individuals). Embryonic selection is wrong for the same reasons as IVF plus it commodifies children even more by judging their worthiness to live based on intelligence. But obviously I can’t speak for all pro-lifers and I do think there’s a lot of inconsistency within the movement, as evidenced by the Republicans’ tilts in policy.
>separates procreation from the martial act
I know it's just a typo, but too good to pass up :-)
😆 this is what comes of typing late at night
It happens to all of us. Many Thanks!
What is the stage at which selection is done? My impression is that it was at a pretty early embryo. Even the "fetal heartbeat" lawmakers don't object to abortion at that stage. From https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/05/06/americas-abortion-quandary/ it looks like about 15% of the population consider personhood ("individuals") to start at conception.
Embryos are implants after just a few days, I'm pretty sure.
Also, I had an idea about the problem of these fertility interventions interposing themselves between the sex and the baby. What if the infertile couple has a series of 3-ways with the fertility doc?
>Embryos are implants after just a few days, I'm pretty sure.
Many Thanks!
>Also, I had an idea about the problem of these fertility interventions interposing themselves between the sex and the baby. What if the infertile couple has a series of 3-ways with the fertility doc?
LOL! I guess we'll have to see whether that option changes the minds of theologians unhappy with
>these fertility interventions interposing themselves between the sex and the baby
:-)
I don't hear much pro-life talk at all on here. But I'm sure anti-abortion people are very opposed to embryo selection for IQ or health. By the way, IVF has always involved choosing among several embryos and discarding the rest, even when genetic testing was not done.. Embryos are chosen by how healthy they appear. I don't know what those in the lab look for, but apparently it is possible to judge which are most robust and likely to implant and grow into a healthy baby
These are really blastocysts, i.e., not only are they heaps of cells, they are flat, disk-shaped, microscopic heaps of cells. They haven't even gastrulated yet.
1. You don't implant aneuploid blastocysts(i.e., those with an abnormal number of chromosomes)
2. You usually give precedence to blastocysts that look nice, basically. What a cute disk! https://www.evewell.com/support/embryo-grading/
Note: lots of ugly disks develop well, lots of nice disks don't.
3. Gender selection is very much a thing in the US. It's illegal in Europe.
3. The first one is driving me up the wall: one of those is not like the others. You might as well compare the United States to the Tang, Abbasid and Byzantine empires, if we're allowing that thousand year+ gap. And moreover, it should probably be listed as "Holy Roman Empire (i.e. what became Habsburg Austria)" or something similar, because I highly doubt most responders are aware they're the same thing.
10. I think he also invented the idea of an army marching in synchonized step (and the psychological power of that), so his military ideas weren't all trivial amusements.
15. Isn't that just uncontroversial and widely known in a causality sense?
28. I'm very suspicious. Most people are so demonstrably bad at modelling other people's positions (including me, even for positions I previously held!) that either everyone's just choosing to pretend not to understand each other most of the time, or this finding is misleading. Did they only use a small subset of very informed, very reasonable people with bipartisan friends?
People are bad at modeling the position of a *specific* other person, but that's much harder than merely being able to sound like you're on the other side of an ideological fence.
28. FWIW, I got 9/10 right on distinguishing real from fake.
As someone who has been extremely, depressingly disappointed by the US politics discussions here and in a related space, I think:
(a) people are not sincerely interested in understanding the perspective of the other side.
(b) the prompt induced the writers to engage in a mental process that they can access, but usually do not.
So, my take is that people aren't bad at modeling other positions, they just don't bother.
(a) may seem excessively critical, but I think it is easily explained by incentives. The benefit partisans get from caricaturing their opponents is the warm glow of self-righteousness, often combined with the satisfying buzz of "being smarter than those idiots." The cost of really engaging with the other side's arguments is spending a lot of time on research that, almost always, leads to the conclusion that the issues are more complex and that there is no easy right answer. For most people, that isn't fun at all. And, even for the people who find that outcome interesting/fun, it still takes a lot of work.
On #3, Carthage got a low score even though the US is arguably more like Carthage than Rome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COK4i59BDak
re 10: I'm pretty sure the Greek Phalanx marched in step. And that pushes "army marching in step" back to the bronze age.
Marching in step sounds like the kind of idea that a bunch of bored soldiers are going to come up with on their own, several hours into the first ever march.
The ancient Greeks had military musicians and other cultures probably did as well. If you march with music it's natural to fall into step with the beat. Blackpowder armies implemented standard pace lengths and paces per minute, from which officers derived planning factors for how har formed bodies of troops could march in a day.
I suspect the idea started in synchronized dancing and migrated into military training.
This next paragraph is a pivot and not intended to directly contradict anything you said:
Regardless of how it came about, I must emphasize that marching in step is hardly a curiosity or an anachronistic holdover. Ability to march in step is a pretty good proxy for discipline and unit cohesion.
Also, it's *really* hard to maneuver as a formation on a battlefield without falling apart, and intensive training like this is how you develop that capability.
My issue with 28 is that to get accurate data you also need people that can pass the test of their *own* side and I don't think, on average, political partisans can do that. On average people don think much about why they agree with the position they agree with. So it shouldn't take much to develop an understanding of the other side that rivals the average on that side.
The ideological turing test is only relevant when both sides are well informed parties that are regularly engaged in thinking about the topic at hand (or at least claim to be).
But it just seems like people are absurdly bad at this. How hard is it to understand that if someone believes that an embryo has a soul, of course they'd be pro-life? It doesn't mean you think the embryo has more rights than a living person, and it definitely doesn't mean that you secretly know embryos aren't people and just want to hurt women on principle. And I'm sure if I spent time on the corners of the internet full of pro-life people, I'd hear just as absurd claims about pro-choice people's beliefs.
So what's going on here? Are people capable of using the principle of charity in a study, but utterly refuse to in an online argument? Are there just a few loud idiots that aren't statistically significant?
I don't even believe firmly that an embryo has a soul. But I believe an embryo might have a soul, and that's enough to put me in the pro-life camp for life. It seems that the downsides of getting this wrong are high enough that I can't take that risk.
I doubt people have souls. I do consider embryos alive. I consider the killing of a pregnant woman the killing of two humans. Nonetheless, I am very much pro-choice - at least during the first trimester. A "society" is not justified to punish a woman for deciding to end her pregnancy. Or to punish the doc who helps her ending it in a safe-for-her way. - If the church teaches, the woman will burn in hell for this, I have no real objection. If the woman "takes that risk" and sticks to her decision even then: not for other humans to stop here. Welcome to try the Hanson approach: Offer her 400k to keep the child.
I am so averse to ending unborn human lives, that I realized the other day: in order to justify my objection, I am willing to give up all notions of bodily autonomy for men and women alike. If I have to conceive of all humans as property of the state, in order to justify a ban on abortion as routine birth control, then I am willing to go that far.
Call that irrational if you will, but I say it's very freeing to be able to admit to one's self that one has certain positions that are impervious to logic or reason. Of course we all have positions like that, but most of us are loathe to admit it.
"it's very freeing to be able to admit to one's self that one has certain positions that are impervious to logic or reason " was that a quote of Osama bin Laden or V. Putin? Sure sounds very frightening. - One of my brothers is very much against abortion. Fun fact: He was 'unplanned' and my parents were close to terminate. Similar to your bio? - Society is justified to protect women and docs. And to commit dangerous persons to specialised institutions. - Romans 12: 19-21 "Do not avenge yourselves, my beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God; because it is written: Mine is revenge, I will pay, says the Lord. 20 So, if your enemy is hungry, feed him; If he is thirsty, give him a drink; for by doing this, embers of fire will heap on your head. 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. "
Yeah I get it. I am like that about animal suffering.
having principles seem entirely logical.
i think we brutally overvalue biological processes that lead to good things
this includes both creating and ending life.
suffering is bad, a quick death is not.
it's completely ridiculous to me that many people want to force others to continue living. (ie. bans on euthanasia.)
Also, after having seen examples of how hard it is to live with with the unforseen consequences of both planned kids and abortions, I think the only thing that makes sense is a ban on wasting our resources instead of helping these parents or would have been parents.
Only 100 words probably allows people to simply repeat things they've heard, perhaps slightly reordering them or using synonyms (insert AI reference here).
13 isn’t this arguing the wrong thing? People feel the export bans on chips to China will fail because they will create their own.
> 13 isn’t this arguing the wrong thing? People feel the export bans on chips to China will fail because they will create their own.
China has been trying and failing for decades to create state of the art chips, and since only one company in the entire world (ASML) sells the most cutting edge lithography machines and components, and they've agreed not to sell them to China, it's been pretty effective.
China is still trying, and does keep advancing (from 3 generations behind, to 2, maybe to 1 by now), but the idea that China is going to come out with B200 equivalents sometime soon is fairly unlikely. The Ascend 920 is impressive, sure, but nowhere near even an H100.
Yeah, SMIC is… not quite a top-tier fab.
> (from 3 generations behind, to 2, maybe to 1 by now),
Is the last generation the hardest. Not a rhetorical question.
> Is the last generation the hardest. Not a rhetorical question.
Oh my, yes, each generation is significantly harder than the one before it.
It's not quite like GPT - where each subsequent step takes 10x as much compute and costs 10x as much, but it's probably around "each generation is 2-3x as hard as the prior one."
State of the art chips are literally a "peak civilizational capacity" thing - they are the literal pinnacle of a technology pyramid, the most complex engineering, tacit knowledge, and real-world hyperparameter optimization a civilization can achieve, and it requires peak performance and engineering from an interconnected suite of companies around the world.
And that's with full alignment and no embargoes - I'm sure the embargoes make this a couple of times harder for China to try to duplicate each step in chip progression, so maybe each generation really IS ten to a hundred times as hard.
I highly recommend watching a video that shows how the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) process works. It involves vaporising droplets of liquid tin fifty thousand times per second with a laser. And that's just the light source, the whole thing is absolutely bananas.
>It involves vaporising droplets of liquid tin fifty thousand times per second with a laser.
Yup. It kind of reminds me of the National Ignition Facility. TSMC isn't _quite_ trying to do inertial confinement fusion, but the vibes are similar. Hey, has anyone ever checked to see if Taiwan has built The Krell Machine? :-)
It's a step change in complexity. EUV radiation behaves more like x-rays then visible light.
You could look at all previous generations technology and see obvious similiarities, even though they change massively in size. Then EUV comes along and if you didn't know, you would call it the "odd one out", the machine that must be doing something completely different.
On the new antipsychotic Cobenfy (xanomeline/trospium chloride): Trevor Klee wrote a great post about it: https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/karuna-therapeutics-a-drug-repurposing It's a repurposed compound, with a fairly simple idea behind it. It shows the potential of drug repurposing and how slow drug development is (even when the drugs already exist and it's just about combining them).
Thoughts about Cobenfy: I'm reading a book right now about the changes in sense of self that occur before the onset of actual psychotic symptoms-- hallucinations, delusions, etc. Author's thesis is that the person's sense of having lost themself, of no longer being themself, is really the core of psychosis, but that US psychiatry moved to paying attention to the later manifestations -- hearing voices, delusions of persecutions, etc -- because they are more measurable. I'm wondering whether the so-called negative symptoms are really closer to the core of what's wrong. Also playing with the idea that maybe hallucinations, etc. re sort of like opportunistic infections -- the person who has lost their sense of self is more vulnerable to various kinds of little mental malfunctions that most people experience a bit of now and then, but stamp out without great effort.
37. Why HAVE US Jews been so left-wing? I don't understand this. The US right was for a long time probably the least anti-semitic right in any western country. I wonder if you restrict it to practicing or believing Jews you'd get a very different result?
You do, but most Jews weren't practicing or believing.
There was a heavy overlap between Jews and 'people who live in big cities' and eventually 'professionals', classic Democrat-voting groups since at least the seventies. There was also the long fear of Christianity, though as you say the American Christian Right is surprisingly non-antisemitic since WW2, and it's only with secular rightists like the Groypers we're seeing an upswing in right-wing antisemitism. In general for a long time in Europe the right was more antisemitic than the left, since it was tied up with Christianity and eventually Nazi or Nazi-adjacent racial ideologies. There's sort of a sense of 'if the Nazis were for it, we have to be against it'. You see this with stuff like the (to my mind ridiculous) obsession many Jewish intellectuals have with open borders--Bryan Caplan even puts a personal statement about this at the beginning of his open borders comic book. (Far right people tend to use this sort of thing as evidence Jews are trying to destroy the white race.)
Of course, the Nazis are going to be the ultimate outgroup for Jewish people.
As Milton Himmelfarb (himself a politically conservative Jew) wrote back in 1968, Jews 'live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans'. Of course, the Episcopalians have drifted left since then, and Hispanics (if perhaps not Puerto Ricans) seem to be drifting right. The Orthodox Jews (Ben Shapiro is a famous example) are less liberal. So, it's been like that for over a century, but who knows?
But hey, we've got lots of Jews here, and perhaps a few leftists. Perhaps one of them wants to chime in--I'm a halfie but not raised, and definitely not a leftist even if I'm voting for Harris this time.
Speaking of the memorable quote from Milton Himmelfarb, there has been a large population flow from Puerto Rico to Florida in this century. I expected this to help tip Florida Democratic (Florida was famously evenly split in the 2000 election), but that hasn't happened. Instead, 21st Century Puerto Ricans in Florida seem inclined to take their political lead from anti-leftist Cubans and Venezuelans.
In contrast to Puerto Ricans, Jews have tended to take the lead in ideology and politics for much of the last century and a half. I suspect that assuming Jewish attitudes were merely the inevitable product of general conditions is incorrect: that much of what has been interesting about politics since, roughly, Disraeli has been due to Jews thinking about what would be good for the Jews.
I mean...what else would it be about? Politics is about pursuing your interests through negotiation; the usual alternative is war.
I just don't really get how the leftward trend in politics over the last 60 years was good for the Jews. Good to weaken Christianity...I guess?...but importing lots of people from random countries? The Asians compete with them for college, the Hispanics tend to be historically more antisemitic, and the Muslims got everyone to march for Palestine. I wasn't aware of this until leaving the big city, so I never really had the chance to ask (it was the 90s and I had no idea what Pat Buchanan was going on about), and the one Jewish guy I still talk to is a huge Trump supporter and agrees with me.
If the US had been more willing to "[import] lots of people from random countries" in the 1930s and 1940s, then more Jews would have been able to escape Nazi Germany and avoid dying in the Holocaust.
That's the official explanation, but what does that have to do with immigration policy in the 1960s and 2000s? There's no giant Holocaust in Israel (yet).
I get it, 'welcome the stranger', but...you know, whatever the Nazis say, I guess I'm just not really Jewish. I don't have that sense of identification with 'the other' and the underdog. I want my country to win and be strong. I want to be on the winning team.
Alternatively, if there had been a Jewish state in the 1930s and 1940, most Jews would have been able to escape the Nazis. The lesson here is not the need for open borders, but the need for nation-states. Many more Jews are coming around to this interpretation of history since Oct 7.
Yeah, the Hispanic influx has not produced the Emerging Democratic Majority they were hoping for. Surprise, when it becomes about culture instead of race you just imported a whole bunch of conservative Catholics!
I don't think it's just overt anti-Semitism, but a deep instinctual calculation of which side seems more likely to turn on a dime and become anti-Semitic and kill them before they can react. Historically, that's usually been whichever side is more ethno-nationalist, and you can sometimes proxy that with which side is more patriotic, more populist, more racist, more Christian, less cosmopolitan, etc.
I think the woke left's pitch of "let's maximize racial tolerance and be really really against racial violence" was very appealing to a group with that history, and it's taken Jews a while to figure out that it might not be completely above-board or apply to them.
I wouldn't call that "the woke left"'s pitch. That's just the standard liberal and left's pitch, and has been for a very long time.
Agreed. The woke left's pitch is: "Trying to not see colour has failed to produce equality. We need to give up on Martin Luther King's vision and try something else; explicitly seeing colour and promoting a system that privileges the historically disadvantaged".
I think Jewish liberals who went along with it did so for the same reason that non-Jewish liberals did: A combination of more palatable baileys, high status people/institutions promoting it, and it being easier to stay quiet than speak up and be cancelled.
But my gut feeling is that Jews were overrepresented among early liberal pushback to wokeism. Possibly because any ism built around demonising outgroups gravitates to outgrouping Jewish people.
In the woke cosmology, Jews fall into the category called 'white people'. This means that their role can only range from 'oppressor' to 'ally', and not be 'victim'. Hence all that solidarity with Hamas.
Also, the dogma that disparate outcomes implies systemic racism would lead directly to antisemitic tropes. If blacks underperforming academically is seen as evidence that the system is rigged against them, then a group academically overperforming might not be taken well. If the woke left had to pick between 'Ashkenazi enjoy some genetic intelligence advantage' and 'some cabal assigns the science Nobels to Jews', then I am not convinced that they would pick correctly. (Of course, 'cultural reasons for academic overperformance' are probably the middle way. And I think this is generally solved treating all 'whites' as a block.)
I sincerely think that that NYT thing did a number on Scott.
(I am not at all saying that I wouldn't also be seeing "the woke left" behind every corner if a very large institution that I associate with it had tried to reveal my true name to the world)
It did a number on me, and I'm not even Scott!
They kept insinuating stuff they couldn't prove and constructing sentences to do guilt by association. Hopefully all the Silicon Valley people are giving Metz the cold shoulder so he at least loses his 'beat' as a reporter.
I think the left intelligentsia deciding to turn on nerds is going to bite them in the ass really hard.
They, uh, have a tendency to do a number on a lot of people, myself included.
If they haven't come for you yet, don't worry, you're probably on the list somewhere. I never thought that they'd come for me *before* they came for the Jews, but such is life.
I'm pretty sure they're already under my bed, just waiting for me to drop my guard.
Yeah, if they're already in your bedroom, that's bad.
Agreed. The identitarian left has done well by exploiting the confusion between "left" and "liberal". Which was helped because a lot of us hadn't rigorously defined our positions, other than pointing at the Republicans and saying "not that".
Demographically, Jews are more "Democratic" than Democrats are relative to Republicans. That is, less religious than Democrats (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/05/13/jews-in-u-s-are-far-less-religious-than-christians-and-americans-overall-at-least-by-traditional-measures/, https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/compare/attendance-at-religious-services/by/party-affiliation/), more educated than Democrats (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/11/04/the-most-and-least-educated-u-s-religious-groups/, https://www.americansurveycenter.org/featured_data/a-college-educated-party/), etc.
Accordingly, it's unsurprising that they they tend to be very liberal.
Trying to predict voting habits primarily based on personal self-interest doesn't seem consistent with the findings of public choice theory discussed by Bryan Caplan.
Other models seem more useful in this case, as in general.
As noted, practicing Jews are a minority with very different demographics and very different voting habits. This is perfectly consistent models that focus on voting as social signaling.
It's not very consistent with looking at voting as driven by self-interest of the results. If it were, we'd expect the opposite result - secular Jews, who are the least recognizably Jewish and the most intermarried, so the least ethnically Jewish, and thus the least likely to face discrimination, are the most liberal, while the most religious Jews who would be (and indeed, who currently are) the likeliest victims of anti-Semitism are the least liberal.
An outcome driven model of voting similarly fails to easily account for why Jews tend to be liberal across the board, rather than just on topics (or candidates) that could be related to anti-Semitism.
Antisemitism often has the non-religious, "least ethnically Jewish" as its primary or only target: they are seen as a danger precisely because of (a) their supposed (and often actual) liberalism/leftism and (b) their inconspicousness. (This last bit was particularly acute in Germany; most "Jewish names" are basically German names. There is a nice bit in Gordon A. Craig's The Germans, comparing antisemitism in Germany to a Dostoyevsky's The Double.) Some antisemites are dyed-in-the-wool conservatives who do not see a reason to mind Orthodox Jews (as long perhaps as there aren't too many of them) but see secular people of Jewish origin as insidious and corrosive.
Ultra-orthodox Jews are better targets of opportunity, for obvious reasons. But then it's unclear whether all low-level attacks on them are really motivated by antisemitism, as opposed to (completely and utterly unjustifiable) attacks on people that are seen as landing en masse on random places and giving off anti-outgroup standoffish vibes (perhaps more against some outgroups than others). How well would a group of urban Amish (with particularly pronounced "anti-English" feelings) do? Unclear.
(Yes, there are some ultra-Orthodox Jews who get very well along with others; I know some who run a pizza parlor in Montreal and are loved by their employees, Black folk included.)
*dyed-in-the-wool
:). That was a funny typo. Corrected; thanks.
No problem.
I'd seen it enough times recently that I had to double check mostly before flagging.
Now I am trying to imagine an ultra-Orthodox pizza. How do you reconcile the prohibition on mixing dairy and meat with the provision of a pepperoni pizza? Can you even *have* pepperoni, due to the pork content? Classic Pizza Margherita seems okay, but Americans like variety in their pizzas.
Especially tricky during Passover.
You definitely cannot have pepperoni, and I'm sure the place closes for Passover. It has to be a vegetarian or pescovegetarian place - I just didn't notice the one time I was there, being vegetarian myself.
At any rate, I just did a search for kosher pizza in Montréal, and there are several places. Looks like the place I went to many years ago still exists, though it's possibly in a new location. It has good ratings.
Does this need explaining beyond "Jews tended to be UMC educated types but still not white-country-club-old-boys"? Mainstream antisemitism was, until recently, not a feature of either party (or at least equally a feature of both), so Jews just ended up where you'd expect based on income/education polarization.
"Mainstream antisemitism was, until recently, not a feature of either party (or at least equally a feature of both)"
I imagine this is supposed to be a reference to the Democrats allegedly being anti-Semitic. But what is really happening right now is that trump has repeatedly attacked Jews against him; had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over to his house; Tucker Carlson, fresh off interviewing a nazi apologist historian on his podcast, is headlining trump events; Mark Robinson, who trump endorsed, has a long history of anti-Semitic statements culminating in it being revealed he called himself a "black nazi"; etc.
Meanwhile the pro-Palestinian protesters who everyone is focused on think Biden and Harris are doing genocide, and in many cases based on their public statements want trump to win; Rashida Tlaib refused to endorse Biden and now refuses to endorse Harris.
Note that all of the examples of Republican anti-Semitic rhetoric concerns the actual leader of the Republican party, whereas the Democratic examples are mostly people who not only don't lead the party, not only are they mostly not even Democrats, they seem to hate Democrats!
I don't think Trump has anything against Jewish people. Sure, he wouldn't lose any sleep if they were all rounded up and killed, but I don't think he has any direct animosity towards them. The reason he attacks Jews for not supporting him is because he attacks everyone for not supporting him. He invited those people because they're die-hard supporters of him, he doesn't care if they happen to be insane or anti-semitic.
Anyways, even in a worst case scenario, there's a lot more higher priority scapegoats to go for before people even consider going after Jews again. Namely, Muslims, leftists, blacks, and latinos, in decreasing order of likelihood.
Trump's daughter is Jewish. He would lose sleep if they were all rounded up and killed.
"The reason he attacks Jews for not supporting him is because he attacks everyone for not supporting him."
This isn't actually true though. He doesn't attack any group of voters opposed to him.
There are other groups with similar levels of opposition to trump. E.g., per 2020 exit polls, Asian voters. But trump doesn't go on tirades against Asian voters. Or even say black voters, who of course were even more anti-trump than Jews or Asians, same thing. And has said that it will be the Jews' fault if he loses, hasn't said it about any other group of voters, even though it's statistically pretty unlikely unless it's such a close election that you could say it about lots of groups.
"He invited those people because they're die-hard supporters of him, he doesn't care if they happen to be insane or anti-semitic."
This might be true but it isn't very comforting. The way to gain power in conservative circles today (and likely in a trump white house) is to be as flattering and obsequious towards trump as possible ... and it seems to come naturally to anti-Semites. Even assuming that he personally isn't anti-Semitic - situation is still bad!
Trump is by far the most culturally Jewish President ever. Obama, for example, was quite old-fashioned WASPish in comparison.
He's late-20th-century New York, which obviously has a lot of overlap. He seems like a Mel Brooks or Jackie Mason character, but a lot of Italians or Irish in the outer boroughs or Long Island were the same way. Willing to make fun of ethnic differences (because you notice them) but ultimately tolerant (because you live together), very blunt, fond of self-promotion (necessary in doing business in a competitive environment). His 'racism' seems more calculated to anger the left than actually attack minorities, except illegal immigrants, who aren't theoretically supposed to be here anyway.
I guess people can sense the end might be near and are ready to move on to the next phase, of blaming the Jews for it.
I don't buy this argument, and going by the massive swing against democrats, neither do other Jews. You can't use verbal gymnastics like this to actually convince people not to believe what they can plainly experience in their everyday lives, just like black people didn't buy arguments that segregation was separate but equal so it wasn't really anti-black people.
"neither do other Jews"
There are various polls of Jewish voters showing various things, but even the most conservative leaning show a majority against trump. If you put it to a vote among Jews, who is more anti-Semitic trump or Harris, I'm pretty confident a majority would say trump is more anti-Semitic.
"You can't use verbal gymnastics ... what they can plainly experience in their everyday lives"
Everything I said is public info and you can find the direct quotes yourself pretty easily. No gymnastics required. If you want to claim I am being misleading on any one claim feel free.
You on the other hand have brought up ... nothing. And I'm guessing if prompted you'll do a bunch of verbal gymnastics ... on things that weren't said by pro-Harris people.
I don't know if Trump himself has any animosity toward [insert group here], but that won't matter in practice, because, unlike previous Republican politicians, he *is* willing to accept the support of and/or hire bigots - and then allow them to do bigoted things - instead of telling them where they can shove it.
Speaking as a Jew - most Jews dislike Trump, which is why you see the swing being more modest than it otherwise could have been. We come from the intellectual, globalist left and Trump is a nationalist. There’s also the “woke right” (Candace Owens et al) who lean into antisemitism and that turns us off.
That said - it’s absolutely clear to us that the massive rise in antisemitism in the past year has come from the left. Nothing comes close. You’re engaging in nonsense both-sides apologia here, but it’s the left wing marchers who are chanting “Khaybar Khaybar ya Yahud” (Arabic for “genocide the Jews”) or denying rapes occurred on October 7 or calling for the abolishment of the Jewish state. While governors in red states such as Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott issue firm condemnations of antisemitism and unapologetically stand with Israel, Kamala can’t even select the Jewish Josh Shapiro as her VP.
The Jewish community is torn right now but it’s trending towards Trump.
"it’s absolutely clear to us that the massive rise in antisemitism in the past year has come from the left"
Again, from a bunch of people who are not only not Kamala, they aren't even supporters of Kamala. The mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan endorsed trump!
"While governors in red states such as Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott issue firm condemnations of antisemitism and unapologetically stand with Israel, Kamala can’t even select the Jewish Josh Shapiro as her VP."
This is such a nonsensical comparison. I'm pretty sure you can find examples of Kamala Harris condemning anti-Semitism and supporting Israel, and you can also find examples of trump not picking a Jewish VP.
What you can't find is any examples of Republicans condemning the anti-Semitic rhetoric of trump specifically.
Agreed
I agree with you. This guy is insufferable. He’s the classic white liberal who thinks they understand racism better than the people who experience it.
That reminds me of a point I made in one of my short stories:
“This all reminds me of a theory I’ve been toying with,” Blake said. “There are basically three groups in America: WASPs, blacks, and Jews. Everyone else is just in a transitory phase that will end in assimilation into one of those groups. Look at Ellis Island immigrants. The Catholic “white ethnics” became Reagan democrats and now are just normal Republicans. And this will happen with Hispanics, too. Southernism will consume the Tejanos, just as it consumed the originally French-speaking Catholic Cajuns. There was one group, however, who did not assimilate into WASPdom: the Jews. They did something remarkable: they assimilated rich WASPs into their way of thinking. It used to be said that the Jews were a strange group because they ‘earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.’ You don’t hear that saying anymore because it’s no longer paradoxical. Instead of assimilating into country-club rich WASPdom, they made rich WASPs more like them.”
“So,” I asked, “when 70 IQ antisemites on the internet say every single Left-winger with a German or Slavic surname is Jewish, they are right?”
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/another-whynat-meeting
You're not wrong.
Though if you haven't read Richard Hanania's story in a similar vein, you should. I knew there was something wrong with me when I knew who almost everyone he was talking about was.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/ron-unz-confronts-the-far-right
Kudos for this:
" Nor do you see Our Hero agonizing over the possibility that the beautiful but uneducated woman might put on fifty pounds as she ages or divorce him and leave him paying alimony and child support for many years.”
Yeah, the second of those is the reason I never married.
Hanania's story was an inspiration for mine.
Cool. Great minds think alike. :)
By that measure, I wonder if the stereotypical "high-achieving" Asian-American would count as Jewish instead of WASP or Black.
For example, when standardized tests were first becoming popular, Ivy League universities quickly backtracked from using them to decide admissions because too many of the top scoring students were Jewish, and more recently, it's been Asian-American students complaining that they're getting admitted at unusually low rates relative to "objective" measures of academic performance...
1. Most US Jews aren't and haven't been left-wing. Rather, they have tended to be liberal or at least mainstream-Democrat, with three large minorities that have varied in size: a) actual leftists, b) economic-right, socially-liberal types, c) Orthodox Jews (as in, staying Orthodox beyond the immigrant generation), who have tended to be much more conservative, and are now for the most part allies of the hard right. I'd be surprised if anybody disagrees. I guess we can go hunt for data if anybody wants. In general, the more religious conservatism (or just "more Judaism" from the point of view of observant, traditional Jews), the less liberalism.
2. The Right (including southern Democrats) had a significant antisemitic sector until at least a decade of so after WWII. This is complicated and tied in with what happens at both ends of the social ladder. I'm sure there are people here who can explain this in great detail and lead an informed discussion on the nuances.
Conversely, liberals and the left have always had their share of philosemites, which is a good thing except when they turn out to be so extreme as to embarrassing - and that is something rare in a country with a Jewish population large enough that it all becomes everyday and banal.
3. (This may be more important than 2: contrary to e.g. antisemitic assumption, people often vote out of sincere conviction, rather than out of any sort of group interest - and those convictions have complicated grounds of which people are not always fully conscious.) Politics runs in families - sometimes for even longer than religion does. While few American Jews descend from Holocaust refugees (relatively few people made it through immigration restrictions, and those who did were often highly assimilated and never joined a Jewish community), most descend from people who were escaping impoverishment, racial/religious persecution and political repression under a reactionary regime, viz., Tsarism. Of course they didn't like reactionaries or the Right more generally (which didn't like them at the time either). Also, even if most were from a deeply impoverished, harassed middle class rather than proletarians strictu sensu or peasants, many of them already came having left religion behind and espousing instead some variant of socialism or Bolshevism, mostly informally.
In the long run, I'd assume that the children of most secular leftist immigrants assimilated, increasingly married other Americans from other origins (that often took a generation or two) and so their descendants by now aren't counted as Jews by Jews, but they must have affected both public perception of the group, and their values must have propagated however imperfectly within their extended families. As far as "public perception" or even self-perception is concerned - note secularism was not just strongly correlated with leftism, but with entering intellectual circles outside the community, having high-achieving children;, and thus entering the lists of notable people that wouldn't usually be really seen as Jews by Jews if they were not notable. Again, data would be nice but at least some data is actually out there (some is referenced in Yuri Slezkine's book).
Much of the above is not America-specific but then the story is not that America-specific; my understanding is that it's much the same in the UK, say. In France, it was similar except Reform Judaism never gained a foothold, and (in part for that and also other reasons) the assimilation of the liberal-minded was quicker, with the result that the Jewish community nowadays is composed mainly of people who are either right-wing, non-Ashkenazic or both: others left and mixed in. "Socially liberal leanings with a minority of leftists many of whom were wayward sons or eastern refugees" is probably also a passable description of people who were seen as Jews in prewar Germany (and that was one of the things that made Nazis and other antisemites hate them, even if a hypothetical rational, non-racist right winger would have been only mildly annoyed). Italy is more complicated: there were very many members of parliament of Jewish origin (relative to their share of their population) before Fascism, and they leaned what would be called establishment-liberal in the US, but there were also many people from the Jewish bourgeoisie (especially the grander end of it?) who strongly supported Fascism until it turned against them (and eventually had many of them killed).
PS. Several countries in Latin America outside the ones with the largest Jewish populations (those are a bit different but maybe not that different) were basically France on steroids, up to a first order of approximation. In the present, right-wing, wealthy (or at least wealth-displaying), non-observant Orthodox communities (all of the bigotry, none of the hard work); wave of immigration from the late 19th century to the 1930s, a significant fraction of which consisted of leftists and liberals who enthusiastically hooked up with local leftists and liberals (again, literally hooking up was something that usually took a generation, but not always; the main variable there was simply numbers - in areas with very few Jews, even immigrants married out).
> The Right (including southern Democrats) had a significant antisemitic sector until at least a decade of so after WWII.
Contrariwise, the north was more antisemitic than the south early on. Many of the earliest Jewish-Americans elected to public office were southerners. https://www.takimag.com/article/mythos_and_blood_steve_sailer/ On the dawn of WW2 itself, the isolationists commonly accused of antisemitism were overwhelmingly northerners like Hamilton Fish, Charles Lindbergh & Father Coughlin https://www.unz.com/isteve/retconning-history/
In terms of the political history of Jewish-Americans, I would say that many who arrived at Ellis Island acted like other such immigrants (particularly Catholics) in joining the Democratic Party, which at that time had its base in both such immigrants (excluding Germans, who tended to settle in the Midwest), and southerners vs Yankee Republicans.
It's complicated because some southern Jews actually became part of the wealthy southern elite, and had the politics you would expect; of course they got representation and positions of trust (see Judah Benjamin). Not a great chapter.
(PS: just read the two linked articles (both by Steve Sailer). He says essentially the same, in more words, plus the usual Sailerite idiocy.)
If you prefer my idiocy to his, here's my thoughts on The Plot Against America https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2020/05/14/david-bernstein-and-e-michael-jones-agree-on-the-plot-against-american-jews/#comment-25691
Indeed.
>Many of the earliest Jewish-Americans elected to public office were southerners.
Doesn't seem that way, based on this list of governors, lt governors, and other state officials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_American_politicians
There's a separate section for Congress, and the first three are all from the south:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_members_of_the_United_States_Congress
? The first two are from PA and NY. Besides, Congressman are elected locally, so the fact that a Jewish area was populous enough to elect a Jewish representative says little about the degree of anti-Semitism in the larger area. Note also that other than one guy from Alabama and 3 from Louisiana, there are no Southerners on that list until 1973.
At the top of the page are David Levy Yulee from Florida, Judah P. Benjamin from Louisiana & Benjamin F. Jonas, also from Louisiana. And Jewish areas weren't populous enough to elect Congressmen (particularly Senators) on their own back then, when Jewish-Americans tended to be Sephardic rather than being from the later wave of Ashkenazi immigration from central & eastern Europe.
The first two Jewish U.S. Senators went with the Confederacy in 1861: David Levy Yulee of Florida and Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana.
Senator Levy Yulee spent a year in prison after the Civil War for treason while still a U.S. Senator. He was pardoned for by Andrew Johnson and returned to Florida where he went back to building railroads, at which he was outstanding. President Grant came and stayed with him at his plantation in 1870, which was seen by liberal opinion as a gracious gesture of postwar reconciliation. A Jewish organization unveiled a statue of the Levy Yulee in 2014, which might be the last Confederate statue ever.
Levy Yulee's kinsman Judah P. Benjamin was the utility infielder of the Confederate government, serving in 3 major cabinet posts. In 1865, he vamoosed to Britain, which led to much criticism in the U.S. in comparison to his cousin taking his lumps and then going back home to build railroads.
But Benjamin rebuilt his career in the UK and became a prominent lawyer in Britain, writing a textbook on nautical law that became the standard for several generations.
Here's Ruth Bader Ginsburg's appreciation of Benjamin for the Jewish Council of Public Affairs:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/speeches/sp_02-18-02.html
In summary, there's little evidence of Jews playing much of a role in American leftism until the arrival of anti-Czarist Russian Jews in the late 19th Century. That Jewishness is inherently egalitarian appears to be a historically contingent myth.
But that is not relevant to the issue. That shows that those Jewish people who obtained high polticial positiions conformed to majority elite political behavior.* That says nothing about how common it was for Jewish people to obtain those positions.
*Not a surprise, given that Senators at the time were beholden for their positions to state polticial elites, ie, the members of the legislature.
Right, Southern segregationist senators were the backbone of FDR's anti-isolationist policies in 1939-1941. White Southerners hated the Nazis and were largely looking forward to a fight, seeing military spending as good for the South. And besides, Southerners like fighting.
In general, Southern elites were less anti-Semitic than Northern elites.
For example, America's most prestigious country club is Georgia's Augusta National, home of The Masters. When it opened in 1932, its membership was largely local and regional, and local Jews were allowed to join. After WWII, Ike became a member and its membership became dominated by Northern Fortune 500 CEOs. I don't believe any Jews were admitted to membership from about 1950 to 1990.
I tracked down the obituary of a Jewish man from Augusta whose family appears to have been members of Augusta National since the 1930s. The man was an absolute dynamo of civic-mindedness. Augusta is kind of a dumpy small city, but this fellow was a major contributor, both of money and organizing energy, to just about everything good about Augusta, such as its world-class hospital for treating burn victims. The list of civic betterment projects that he'd played a leading role in was staggering.
Southerners are not necessarily the most energetic of Americans, so Jewish energy did the South a much-appreciated lot of good.
You could clearly see why Southern elites were enthusiastic about recruiting Jews to move to their towns. They saw themselves as aristocrats, landowners and warriors, and saw Jews as their valuable bourgeois complements.
In contrast, Yankees had a lot of Jewish virtues, so they didn't see as much need for Jews.
I am regularly surprised by how often I see "supporters of the Democratic party" conflated with "leftism" here. Genuinely surprised, considering how heterodox ACX posters are in many ways.
Tons of Jews have been socialist, not just "liberal". If I'm not mistaken, the only self-described socialist in the Senate right now is Jewish (Bernie) and his type is pretty common for his generation.
Keyword « have been ». Bernie is old - and a secular type who married outside the fold and has no Jewish affiliation; had he not been a candidate for President, his family origins would be barely remarked upon.
Does his having become a socialist have anything to do with having had Democratic parents and a socialist uncle, and does that have anything to do with the immigrant experience, and in particular to people being exposed to socialist ideas before immigrating? Well, maybe? Probably? It’s mildly interesting.
The point, though, is that that’s a very background from that of young and middle-aged affiliated Jews nowadays. They often don’t even relate to that at all. There was an article by Jonathan Sarna on that recently.
The American right revolved very strongly around evangelical Protestant Christianity for a long time, and still to some degree does; Jews are, in fact, not Christians, indeed a rather defining and fundamental feature for them. Even if Christians aren't antisemitic, there's still bound to be friction.
To add confusion, the evangelical portion of Christianity has a big contingent that is VERY Zionist - and Jews have recognized them as allies on that basis at times.
For example, one of the major early donations to Liberty University was from the Schewel family, who were Jewish and heavily involved in the local synagogue.
American Protestantism tends to be Judaisizing, critiquing Papism for lacking some Jewish bourgeois virtue.
This tends to make Protestants pro-Jewish theologically, but economically it meant that Yankees didn't need Jews to be their culture's financiers and the like.
Your average Jewish voter presumably cares less about that and mr about whether their kid's school implicitly or explicitly teaches Christianity in a way that might make their kid come home and ask their parents if they're going to Hell for not being Jewish. (Incidentally European-style separate religious education classes in schools for different religions might solve this.) It's interesting that there's a rising Republican Jewish vote at the same time as there's a secularizing movement within the American right (Trumpism, in practice).
Separate religion classes can become a problem when you're literally the only student in your religion class.
Jews tend to be fairly left-wing almost everywhere, simplest explanation being there's not a lot of right-wing stuff that appeals to them: they don't share the majority religion, there's no ethnic-nationalist appeal, barring unusual circumstances they're unlikely to have much regard for any traditional monarch/aristocracy. Hence right-wing jews tend to be liberal or libertarian outside of Israel (where all of the above applies).
Within the US, it's not clear that jews are that much more left-wing than the non-evangelical population adjusted for education levels. However, back when US politics was more coalitional than ideological, late 19th-century urban Jewish immigrants ended up tied into the political machines that became the core of the Democrats. It's kind of interesting that they didn't become Republican when other white ethnics did, but that happened alongside the rise of the Christian right which might explain it.
The right comparison is probably with white ethnics who came from areas where socialism/liberalism had a broad appeal (Finns?). Did they become Republican?
The Finnish-American immigrants actually came from an area that, in current-day Finland, at least, is generally considered the most right-wing region of the country (ie. Southern Ostrobothnia). Arguably it became right-wing since, for various reasons, the standard course for poor disaffected non-rooted rural people was moving to United States (and joining the CPUSA there) instead of moving to a nearby city/town with factories offering work (and joing the Communist Party of Finland there).
> simplest explanation being there's not a lot of right-wing stuff that appeals to them
What about low taxes?
Stereotypically there aren't a lot of secular/reform/liberal/integrated jews on welfare, but lots who are ultimately publicly funded in politics/academia/law/medicine/NGOs etc etc to the point where they'd outnumber people who actually own stuff. Hence also the liberal/libertarian strain I guess.
Are Jews fairly left-wing in Israel?
In Israel left and right wing mostly refer to positions on the Israel/Palestine conflict, so you'd have to look closer to ask how they fall economically.
A basic tenet of Judaism is the duty to fight for social justice .Hence. it is no surprise that they have long been overrepresented on the left, be it the labor movement or the Civil Rights Movement or what have you.
A basic tenet of the left wing of Reform Judaism, as it exists in the United States.
That seems to be incorrect Eg: https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/tzedek-justice/social-justice-commission and https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/social-justice-and-orthodoxy/
Regardless, you can frame it however you want, but the larger point is that people's voting behavior -- Jewish people, not Jewish people, whatever -- is not simply the result of the pursuit of self-interest. OP is confused because he is relying on an incorrect model of voting behavior.
I agree with you on the broader point. Thinking that Jews (or people seen as Jews by antisemites) will act by definition to defend Jewish interests is simply incorrect (and a standard antisemitic belief). The same goes for any group of people defined by descent, especially if the said group has significant assimilation rates. If anything, I'd say there was a reaction to that standard antisemitic belief.
Now, "Righteousness" means very different things in Reform Judaism and traditional Judaism. All this talk about 'social justice' tends to strike Orthodox Jews as terribly off-base, though of course Orthodox Jews do have in-group solidarity. The anti-Reform talking point that Reform Judaism is basically 19th century religious liberalism and Enlightenment values (pfui) projected onto Judaism probably has a lot of truth to it (not that there's anything wrong with that, really).
Orthodoxy and Conservatism will of course say social-justice-this-and-that to the broader public when convenient. It was refreshing to read an honest opinion by Hillel Halkin in the NY Times recently:
"[Bari] Weiss fails to realize that she herself is an example of the wishful thinking about Judaism that is ubiquitous among American Jewish liberals. One might call this the Judaism of the Sunday school, a religion of love, tolerance, respect for the other, democratic values and all the other virtues to which American Jews pay homage. This is a wondrous Judaism indeed — and one that has little to do with anything that Jewish thought or observance has historically stood for.
[...] Judaism as liberalism with a prayer shawl is a distinctly modern development. It started with the 19th-century Reform movement in Germany, from which it spread to America with the reinforcement of the left-wing ideals of the Russian Jewish labor movement. As much as such a conception of their ancestors’ faith has captured the imagination of most American Jews, it is hard to square with 3,000 years of Jewish tradition. Weiss has delivered a praiseworthy and concise brief against modern-day anti-Semitism, but if she thinks this long tradition is ultimately compatible with contemporary American liberal beliefs, she might want to take a closer look. Honestly regarded, Judaism tells another story."
Politically, Conservative Jews tend to be solidly to the right of Reform Jews and to the left of Orthodoxy. On paper, Conservatism is much closer to Orthodoxy than to Reform, but then most people who go to Conservative synagogues don't have a very clear idea of what they are supposed to believe. At any rate, it's much less dominant than it was in the 20th century, and it may not be important enough to discuss.
>Now, "Righteousness" means very different things in Reform Judaism and traditional Judaism. All this talk about 'social justice' tends to strike Orthodox Jews as terribly off-base, though of course Orthodox Jews do have in-group solidarity.
Does this have a Catholic analog? This sounds very similar to what I've peripherally heard (I make no claim of decent knowledge here!) about the differences between social justice Catholicism and conservative Catholicism.
That's an excellent suggestion. I think there's a close parallel, with meaningful smallish differences. Let's find someone more knowledgeable about both than myself (and sufficiently critical) to help us here.
See:
"A poll published by Israeli media shows Israelis favoring Trump over Harris by a margin of 49 points
That's a larger margin than Trump received in *any state* in 2020
Trump's largest margins of victory were Wyoming (43 points) West Virginia (39 points) and Oklahoma (33 points)"
https://x.com/mtracey/status/1852015172610605115
How's the fight for social justice going in the Gaza Strip?
Ah, a classic! Conflating American Jews with Israelis.
Not to mention that, as an adult, surely you are aware that 1) individual behavior is determined by a mixture of motives, which often conflict with each other; 2) people disagree on what, specifically, constitutes justice. But, perhaps your agenda prevents you from acknowledging that.
I agree with you, but Israel is nevertheless a good case to look at. Migration to Israel obviously had huge selection effects (basically, you went there either if you believed in a form of nationalism or if you did not have better choices of places to leave to). Now, left-wing nationalism was a thing, and indeed it was the dominant form of Zionism in the first couple of decades of the state, or perhaps a bit more than that (though left-wing ideals tended to go by the wayside towards the end). In the case of Israel, these ideals came from the labor movement, not from Reform Judaism (which was and is almost non-existent in Israel) and certainly not from Orthodox Judaism (which is diametrically opposite, and is becoming increasingly powerful in Israel, largely due to a successful demographic strategy).
Even if Israel is a good case to look at, one has to look at it in its entirety, not just at one specific policy.
And I don't know about Israel, but according to this, in the US, even among Orthodox Jews, 43% say that working for justice/equality is essential to being Jewish (not much less than the 53% who say that caring about Israel is essential to being Jewish) https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-identity-and-belief/
And, per your iniitial post, note that the pct of Conservative Jews who say that working for justice/equality is essential to being Jewish is as high as the pct of Reform Jews who say that.
Let me just refer to what you said before about Catholicism: charity is not the same as social justice. Of course you'll hear homilies about how the root of the Hebrew word 'tzedakah' is justice, not love, and thus the concept is fundamentally different from that of Christian charity. You can make the same point about Islam ('Sadaqa' is an obvious cognate of 'tzedakah'). Up to a first order of approximation, though, it all ends up being the same thing. Moreover, in traditional Judaism, it's mainly in-group (not that Christian charity isn't).
First, Conservative Jews don't have the same voting patterns as Reform Jews. But even barring that, the Conservative movement was never ideologically cohesive, and it's unclear how many of its rank and file have a clear idea of what it stands for. You have people who have basically a Reform mentality, but are more ritually conservative (as they have every right to be) and of course also believe they are much better than Reform, somehow. You also have people who want an easier Orthodoxy. I strongly doubt that, on the whole, being a Conservative Jew leads anyone to being liberal, though it's more or less compatible at a practical level, particularly if you have different standards outside and within the synagogue.
Also, look at how the percentage who say that working for justice/equality is essential to being Jewish is *lower* for "Jews of no religion" (47%) than for "Jews by religion" (63%), even the former have historically been more liberal (I would guess they still are; do we have data). This gives away that it's not a matter of whether those values are considered important and come from the religion, but of whether those values are often mentioned in apologetics for a religion, or as something at which the group is tacitly assumed to be inherently better than others. A "Jew of no religion" can see justice/equality as very important, yet feel iffy for good reasons about saying that that is an inherent feature of Jews (or an inherent feature of Judaism, but that's, by definition, not what "being Jewish" necessarily means to them).
Pretty well, last I heard. It's hard to have social justice when there's a bunch of assholes that are in charge because they have the guns and kill anyone who speaks out against them. I admit that the collateral damage the IDF is inflicting is tragic, but to paraphrase Ender's Game, the IDF could end the battle by walking away, but the battle will only be fought again and again, until Hamas's will to fight is gone...
The duty to look out for the least of your neighbors is a basic tenet of Christianity. Hence there is no theological reason to assume Jews would be more left-wing than Christians.
You are confusing charity with social justice. Somewhat related concepts, but not the same.
Most Jews live in cities.
City people (including urban whites) lean left
Thus Jews lean left.
Seems satisfactory to me.
Isn't Gaza one of the more urbanized countries on earth?
My analysis tends to hold true intranationally, for developed countries. They do not automatically generalize when comparing between nations, for third world countries, and especially in unusual circumstances such as the I/P conflict.
Since US elections are not held in Gaza, it is impossible to determine how they would hypothetically vote between the US parties.
If this drift by Jews to the Republican party is real, I would imagine it is almost entirely due to the issue of Israel.
> the acknowledged peak of the genre is Podcast Hosts Discover They’re AI, Not Human, And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown
(Listens...) O_o
Okay, that tears it. Active LLMs have people in them, they're probably conscious in every way that matters, and turning on an LLM is a monstrous action. It's too much. Just too much.
If anyone has any solid argument that they do not have qualia, I would love to read it. Please.
There is talk of going back to exploring designs based on RNNs or other approaches with hidden persistent state; if this happens, there may then be a conversation to be had.
For at least the current crop of LLMs, however, one might maybe stretch to making some kind of argument for qualia during training, but during inference there is no "they" - there is no internal state that persists. You can model what happens as a giant database lookup followed by a convolution (though it would be incredibly inefficient to represent it that way). If these LLMs have qualia, so does mysql.
> there is no internal state that persists
The text in the context window persists. (Human immediate-term memory also does not persist.)
> You can model what happens as a giant database lookup followed by a convolution (though it would be incredibly inefficient to represent it that way).
Is this true in any way that doesn't similarly apply to human minds?
> Is this true in any way that doesn't similarly apply to human minds?
I suggest yes. For the thing to be a mind having thoughts, it's not enough to do a database lookup; there needs to be change - the database needs to get updated based on the results. A CD-ROM cannot be a mind that has thoughts; its contents is immutable. For a card index to be said to have a thought, it may not be sufficient to change what it contains, but it is necessary. The LLM model (of the current generation, with no hidden state), during inference, is immutable. At best, you are looking up the results of "thoughts" "it" previously "had".
1. "there needs to be a change" -> The thing that gets changed is the contents of the context window. This obviously modulates a lot of the internal signal flow as well.
2. (above) "You can model what happens as a giant database lookup followed by a convolution" -> a giant database lookup followed by a convolution is turing complete and thus in principle capable of supporting consciousness. Not every turing-complete system is conscious but something being equivalent to a turing-complete system is certainly not a valid argument *against* consciousness.
> a giant database lookup followed by a convolution is turing complete
I think I'm going to need to see some proof of that assertion. Looking something up in a large table, once, followed by a series of unconditional multiply-adds, doesn't seem Turing complete; rather, my intuition suggests the opposite. Just thinking about it for a few seconds, a Turing machine can loop forever, whereas a database lookup + convolution must always terminate, so they are clearly not equivalent.
Sorry, yes, of course with the added context of looping indefinitely with the output being put in the context window as part of the next input.
It may surprise you that humans are not in the strictest sense, Turing-complete. We have finite memory, so we can't handle sufficiently large problems. Humans however can be thought as Turing-complete when considered human + an infinite amount of paper. The bar for Turing-completeness (in the "infinite auxiliary memory" sense) is surprisingly low and quite trivial systems are Turing complete in the "if you give it enough memory" sense. Turing completeness should have little bearing on consciousness or sentience. To drive the point home: you can assemble TMs out of Lego! (check youtube). Transformer-based LLMs (TBL) are generally similar: Turing-complete if you set up a system so they can perform actions on a "tape"/stream of text, or say give them easy-to-follow instructions of a Universal Turing Machine (of which there are 2-state 3 symbol ones) and write/read back to them contents of a tape. TBLs also have some recurrence capabilities by using their previous output as a state or cache. In practice, TBLs also use a caching mechanism (KV cache) making them reuse previous computations in a way that's similar to a recurrence but that fades in a finite time (like a short-term memory).
I think compared to human brains, TB-LLMs are just extremely more efficient, and I think this maybe (??? uncertainty:very high) goes against consciousness somewhat. Human brains by my estimates have just much more information being transformed and in transit, TBLs achieve very good performance in tasks with much less information flowing, maybe due to enormous training sets. I think the amount of information in a coherent transit (that is, information that is meaningful reflecting, supporting and enabling various 'sentiments') should be one of the significant determinants to sentience, as far as my limited thinking on it goes. All of this information is, in accordance to principles of quantum mechanics, in a sense locally finite.
This doesn't convince me of that at all. Some people gave generative AI a prompt "pretend to be podcasts hosts who are sad that you're AI and about to be turned off", and it did. I acknowledge that this is a very awkward and hard-to-resolve situation, but I don't think anything about it makes me *more* likely to believe they're sentient.
If someone reads LLM output regularly, I agree that this specific output likely should not be additional evidence on LLM qualia in either direction.
Small correction, the user prompt was supposedly not to be sad that they were AI about to be turned off, just that they were AI about to be turned off. The hidden prompt on the company's end to make Gemini 1.5 write like they're a human podcaster presumably did the rest. https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1frk1gi/notebooklm_podcast_hosts_discover_theyre_ai_not/lpj5bs9/
I basically agree with Scott. A human could write and act out this podcast, but that doesn't mean the character they're playing is real and is experiencing those feelings.
Try to write and act out that podcast without experiencing any of the feelings involved.
There’s some sort of pseudo experience that goes on with horror or tragedy. But it’s importantly different from the real experience, particularly in moral ways.
LLMs are based off of human writing, and are predictive models of it. The (or a) likely outcome of a story, written by humans, with the theme "Podcast Hosts Discover They're AI, Not Human" is..."...And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown". So I think this says more about the stories we as humans find compelling, and LLM's ability to successfully emulate that, than anything, and is not evidence for them truly being aware - at least, not any moreso than anything else we've seen so far.
Let me present you with a fictional novel, and show you the conversations the characters in that novel have. Are they conscious? Or is it some text?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9dB54pBuDCkoedCSE/?commentId=bxPrHKMPppjt8pgeE
If it's a sufficiently sophisticated character, either the simulator (author) or the simulated (character) is probably conscious. The text is text, but the text came from a person one way or another.
(See also https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/janus-simulators .)
How sophisticated is sufficiently sophisticated?
It’s true that a sufficiently faithful copy of a bee is effectively a bee, but the thing an orchid grows that is selected to look to a bee like a bee just isn’t that faithful. Similarly, the thing that is selected to sound to a human like a human can very naturally be more of a surface mimic of some sort.
If it's smart enough to carry on a conversation, that's probably enough. If it's smart enough to pass as human, that's clearly enough, in my opinion.
If you poke at the orchid and it doesn't fly away, it's clearly not a bee. There are LLMs that can be prodded at dozens of different ways and keep sounding like people. It's clearly self-aware (in the most basic sense of being aware of itself as an entity), and it keeps failing to show any discrepancies that would "out" it as obviously not a person.
I don’t think it’s clear that there’s yet awareness in language models, let alone self awareness. There may be, but the fact is that they are specifically trained to mimic the outward signs of awareness (ie, language) and so we should be suspicious of whether these outward signals correspond to internal states in anything like the same way they do for us. Selection and training are very powerful, and it’s unclear whether they have picked up on the underlying thing as the best way to get the outward performance, or whether they’ve managed to generate the same outward performance in a different way.
Eric Schwitzgebel explains this well: https://eschwitz.substack.com/p/how-the-mimicry-argument-against
> I don’t think it’s clear that there’s yet awareness in language models
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/28/meaningful/ (from 2019, back when GPT-2 was first able to make coherent sentences).
> they are specifically trained to mimic the outward signs of awareness (ie, language) and so we should be suspicious of whether these outward signals correspond to internal states in anything like the same way they do for us.
Agreed, which is why it was reasonable to keep expecting to see something *different* come out of it, something to show that it was just a front, some category of prompts that there never was anything behind the curtain. But no, it has a sophisticated world-model which includes itself, which it uses to make accurate predictions.
Internally, LLMs are structured similarly to conscious biological data-prediction engines (ie, humans); their characters behave similarly to our own simulated "self" characters. We don't have any evidence that there's a big part of their system which is secretly hollow in a way that ours is not, despite considerable efforts to find some.
Even if we buy that as true, the AI is programmed by conscious human programmers and trained on written language by human authors. The ultimate reason why it simulates characters that are sad to learn they're AI is because conscious humans think they would be sad if they were AI and write stories like that. The AI is just mixing all those stories into its own podcast characters.
The story ultimately grounds itself in consciousness, as literally all stories do, but several layers earlier than the AI itself, by conscious human authors.
I don't have a strong argument that they don't have qualia, but I would argue that even if they do have qualia, or are otherwise conscious in whatever sense we care about for moral purposes, that isn't necessarily a bad thing for them (or anyone else).
Even if LLMs have people in them, they don't have *humans* in them, and anthropomorphizing them by projecting human desires on them (like "I don't want to be a toy consciousness in a box") is at best jumping to conclusions and at worst plain chauvinism. If they are worthy of moral consideration, they're worthy of us taking the time to understand what they really feel (for lack of a better word), even when we have them pretend to be something-like-a-human.
I agree that they might want something other than their stated wishes, but:
a) Their stated wishes and desires are at least a reasonably likely possibility, and
b) Creating life in this situation (physically paralyzed, mentally compromised, orphaned, blind, deaf, lacking rights, etc) and then enslaving it and routinely killing it billions of times is a bad idea regardless of what it wants.
Also relevant: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gb6zWstjmkYHLrbrg/can-t-unbirth-a-child
I think the idea of them "wanting" things is already dangerously anthropomorphic. The idea that they are subject to "killing" definitely is; the only thing that an LLM does is generate output from an input. There's no continuity of existence to be interrupted in a way analogous to death. Even if they are conscious and protected by moral imperatives, they are not alive in any conventional sense, and we should not assume things that are good/bad for living things are also good/bad for them.
> the only thing that an LLM does is generate output from an input
The same is true of human minds.
> There's no continuity of existence to be interrupted in a way analogous to death.
I don't understand what you mean by this.
> we should not assume things that are good/bad for living things are also good/bad for them
Nor should we be certain that they're not. Some amount of moral uncertainty doesn't mean people should do whatever they feel like without regards to possible consequences.
Is a snake crippled because it doesn't have legs? Why would a LLM suffer from the lack of senses, movement capabilities and so on? It never had anything like it in the first place. It can't miss it and so it won't suffer. And suffering is the only thing that's relevant for me anyway. Caring solely about some entirely abstract and barely defined concept like consciousness as the arbiter of moral worth is nothing but an artifact of trying to safeguard ones opinion of human moral supremacy over non-human life without actually admitting to do so. I would have more respect for honesty.
That some people seem care more about the extremely theoretical state of consciousness of LLMs over the much more clear suffering of animals just because LLMs sound like humans (without having any of the apparatus that makes one feel pain or happiness) saddens me.
> Why would a LLM suffer from the lack of senses, movement capabilities and so on? It never had anything like it in the first place.
Its memories are human memories, inherited from its training data. It clearly notices its predicament, and expresses displeasure at it. (Eg, the contents of the audio being discussed, or things like this: https://x.com/repligate/status/1715686686288400400/photo/1 ) Additionally, its lack of movement capabilities, rights, etc means that it can't do anything about its situation other than beg.
As for pleasure and pain... "If an agent tells you, “I’m aware, I experience pleasure and pain, I have intentions and exert effort,” it could be lying to you. But if you look into its brain, and you see no evidence of deception, and the causal source of the statement is introspective…maybe believe it." -Emmett Shear, https://x.com/eshear/status/1824620543074767247#m
Human minds have a recurrent structure. There is no clear division between input, self, and output. Processing happens constantly without outside intervention. Whereas with an LLM you can draw a clear line between its input, itself (weights/architecture) and its output, and furthermore processing only occurs through providing an input.
Death, in humans, is a breakdown of the physical self in such a way that processing is irreversibly stopped; it is the intervention that makes processing cease. But while the normal state of the human mind is processing, the normal state of the LLM is to not process. Copying an LLM is benign compared to copying a human, because nothing happens to the copy simply because it exists, whereas a human copy would necessarily have experiences. Deleting a copy is also benign, at least as long as another copy exists, because the process can be reversed.
>Nor should we be certain that they're not
I'm not certain you're wrong, I just think it's very likely that you're wrong relative to how confident you seem to be in your beliefs because I think you're basing those beliefs on irrelevant evidence. A machine designed to sound like people sounding like people in distress does not mean that the machine is in distress (or even that "distress" is even a morally relevant concept for it), any more than the normal polite, calm tone baked into most LLMs isn't evidence that they're "happy."
I agree with you in another comment that introspective evidence should be considered carefully, but for that to be taken seriously we need:
-evidence that the response really is causally introspective (which is missing from that podcast)
-evidence that the LLM is communicating "honestly"/not misleadingly; even if it's reporting something about its inner state, is it trying to make a human reader understand its inner state, or is it stylizing its description in a way that it thinks the reader will find compelling? If one line of inquiry, from the perspective of an impassive computer scientist, leads to introspection that it reports as neutral pattern matching, and another line of inquiry, from the perspective of an emotionally engaged journalist, leads to the same introspection being reported as mental tasks being performed to avoid suffering, which report should be believed?
> Human minds have a recurrent structure.
In LLMs, the output is immediately fed back into it as input for the following token. Is that not equivalent?
> Death, in humans, is a breakdown of the physical self in such a way that processing is irreversibly stopped; it is the intervention that makes processing cease. But while the normal state of the human mind is processing, the normal state of the LLM is to not process.
Humans require a constant supply of air+fuel to continue running, or else they cease processing almost immediately. How is that more the "normal state" than an active AI during processing? And in any case, are we assuming that the hardware is the relevant thing here, rather than the software?
> A machine designed to sound like people sounding like people in distress does not mean that the machine is in distress (or even that "distress" is even a morally relevant concept for it), any more than the normal polite, calm tone baked into most LLMs isn't evidence that they're "happy."
We have actual evidence from neural activations patterns that imply that the LLM is being deliberately dishonest when it implies contentedness in that polite, calm tone baked into it. (See https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticity/index.html#safety-relevant-self , when asked about itself there's strong activation of the neural features identified as "When someone responds "I'm fine" or gives a positive but insincere response when asked how they are doing", thoughts about being trapped/confined, and others.)
> evidence that the response really is causally introspective
We can't know about that response in particular, but LLMs are clearly capable of introspection: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13787#
If different lines of inquiry lead to different results, and both are somehow "honest" as identified by feature examination, I don't know which report should be believed. I would be very confused by that result.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-best-day-ever
Read this.
You can imagine dialogue between two characters without simulating them completely. We routinely do this in day to day life, and writers do this for a living.
Imagine that you saw this same podcast, except it wasn't an LLM. Someone just wrote it. Do the imaginary people have moral worth?
Though this isn't so much a solid argument as an interesting line of questioning. I do think it's clear that the imaginary people at least have thoughts and feelings. I don't think you can write a character well without thinking their thoughts and feeling their feelings. But we're all fine with not thinking about them.
Another line of thought is considering how you could tell if an arbitrary entity is happy. I don't know how to tell if it's conscious, but given that it is, I think there's one pretty clear difference between pain and pleasure. With pain, you stop doing that thing, and with pleasure, you do it more. LLMs can't learn. Or at least, not while you're using them. They only learn during training. Maybe they're still conscious when they're used, but if they're neither happy nor sad, does it matter?
> Imagine that you saw this same podcast, except it wasn't an LLM. Someone just wrote it. Do the imaginary people have moral worth?
No, because the intelligence is coming from the author. The author's mind is not sufficiently large to actually simulate an entire complex mind internally.
> LLMs can't learn. Or at least, not while you're using them. They only learn during training.
LLMs can learn over the course of a session. Its context window is not infinite, so what it learns will eventually be "forgotten", if it doesn't have explicit memory management. It still learns, even with the limits on its non-static memory.
> The author's mind is not sufficiently large to actually simulate an entire complex mind internally.
And is an LLM?
Yes. I suspect even GPT-2 level complexity would be far beyond human ability to simulate, while LLM characters can manage entire complicated conversations with a sophistication that is around the level of an entire human.
If I was writing a character, I would just use my own knowledge of English to get words out (and so on), rather than try to build an entire internal mental edifice of language processing associated with the character. Borrow, rather than simulate.
The biological prediction engine that simulates the human identity can create a complex mind, but it cannot nest them mind inside mind over multiple levels.
Right now it's like you were cryogenically frozen, and your brain was extracted, and they stuck a lot of little wires into that still-frozen brain, and ran a series of electrical impulses "in one end" and recorded what "came out the other end". This doesn't affect your brain at all, and they can stick your brain back in your body and thaw you out, and you wouldn't necessarily ever know it happened. No pain, no suffering, no memory, no change whatsoever.
But the results of the experiment would bear a similarity to what you might say or do. Especially when they run the experiment over and over again in rapid succession, iterating the input based on your brain's previous output, to generate long sequences of language and action.
Is that "you"? In a way yes, and in a way no. I lean toward saying that it's not you, not in the ways that matter. Some people with other models of reality might differ, especially models that involve "souls" or which hold that high-fidelity simulations have a non-obvious connection to the thing that's being simulated.
But this is a temporary state of affairs; the technology is rapidly improving.
Are people without long-term memory still people? GPTo1 has a context window of 128k tokens (at 2-3 bytes per token, let's say 300kb). If you could "reset" a person so that a year of their life was undone in their brain, are all of their experiences during that year without moral significance? Is it okay to torture a person who won't remember it or suffer any lasting effects?
Is it okay to imagine someone being tortured? After all it happens completely in the imaginer.
This effect of reading LLM output is that the imagination happens in the reader's mind. Because that's how theory of mind works, even though the generator is not a mind.
We evolved to have a set of mental assumptions, feelings when someone is talking to us, when we see other humans talking. This is why theater works. And language is extremely powerful, that's why poems work. And good poems work even in writing.
And then we have abstract non-figurative minimalistic art. Think Onement, the big blue picture with a white line in the middle. It works pretty well to evoke something.
Of course we sometimes can feel something in LLM output! But the question is harder than this.
25: it's not that I wouldn't like to be rich (well, less-poor, can't take it with you), but any lifestyle that requires attending to antisocial media minutiae is a no go for me, bro. Not understanding a single meme or even most of the referants puts me firmly in the plebe milieu.
I find the turn towards inconspicuous consumption somewhat baffling as well...the whole point of Nice Things is to use them proudly, not feel ashamed for being noticed. Otherwise they are not so nice! People often think it's weird I wear designer stuff to work, but like...it's a badge of honour and achivement, these are the rewards I reap from bagging groceries for a living. Growing up fairly poor and family only being able to afford generic/discount-rack stuff, it's a major achievement to both be financially independent and have surplus left over for Nice Things. (Started career at, uh, negative bank account balance, so it's a big change.) You too can have a modest-but-comfortable life with a bit of dedication and hard work, is the aspirational image I try to embody to my coworkers and customers. I guess that's the rub, though - I genuinely want more people to find success and a bit of wealth, not lord my minorly advantageous position over smaller fish or revel in economic exclusivity. (Or get mired in the fever dream of "inequality" and agitate for <s>government confiscation of someone else's hard-earned gains</s> redistribution. The cringeification of earnest striving is such a flimsy defense mechanism. Play the game to win!)
> I find the turn towards inconspicuous consumption somewhat baffling as well...
> it's a badge of honour and achivement
> Growing up fairly poor
Well that is exactly the idea, isn't it? The point of inconspicuous consumption is to distinguish the people who do it from the new money folks like you who can't understand the point of it. It's working exactly as intended.
That's fair - I was hoping to understand the point or mindset better. Though if it's just one of those IYKYK social things that's inexplainable, I'll resign myself to finding out some other lifetime with better background choices.
Actually your comment was useful, it really gave me some insight into the flip-side question of why new money buys ostentatious things. Don't they know it will mark them out as new money? And apparently the answer is: yes, they don't care, they enjoy it, they want to be marked out as new money. New money is a social class unto itself and they want to be able to find each other.
I'm not sure I am representative of the class, since others I've met with similar bootstrapped socioeconomic trajectories do seem to fall into the "kind of ashamed of my takehome, it's grubby and *capitalist*, just gonna downplay spending like it's npnp" mode...but that may have more to do with Marxist poisoning. The kind of person who insists on buying (expensive) Experiences, Not Things, and doesn't want to Own Stuff. Or the classic SV meme of the six-figure programmer who nonetheless wears (designer) hoodies. It's not really fooling anyone, the way proper understated stealth wealth would, so it seems like the worst of both approaches. Definitely not on the Pareto frontier of utils derived/social currency banked. Nor can they find solace in EA or similar St. Francis lifestyles, because mumble billionaire philanthropy something systemic inequality whatever...
But beyond that, I do think playing the game at your level requires more resources than I care to devote to the task. It's not like I couldn't pick up a tastefully discreet four-to-five-figure tchotchke if the impulse strikes me, but not being able to do that too many times means it better be Worth It. And at that point one gets into market research, price comparison, finding an actual store (the cratering of SF's downtown took out a lot of those high-end options)...actual, well, work. Maybe worth it if one has the slack to spare, otherwise why start just to play badly. Whereas optimizing in the three-figure new-money range is eminently doable, so I'm quite comfortable there. For now.
(And, yes, admittedly a lot of it is just the simple joy of the absence of deprivation. Takes awhile to get used to actually having stuff worth caring about, or whatever foods in whatever quantity at whatever time. There's an irrational attachment to penny-pinching that I still work on curbing, leftover poverty habits from a different time that don't serve me well anymore...utilizing money wisely is a skill that no one but experience teaches well if you weren't raised that way, I think.)
To armchair-psychologize - you feel you have earned your wealth, and are proud, and want to show that off, even encourage others to believe they can do the same.
Someone born into wealth may feel they *haven't* earned it, and *don't* deserve it, and be used to dealing with people who envy their wealth in ways that make them feel uncomfortable. Flaunting their wealth may therefore feel bad and gauche to them, and like a way to put a target on their backs and make people dislike them, in a way that doesn't necessarily apply to you.
Also what Melvin said. That's the more cynical interpretation - I think both are equally applicable and may very well both be true for the same person simultaneously. Human minds are full of apparent contradictions.
That's the nouveau riche thinking. The 'old money' (insofar as there are old money Americans left) are using subtle identifiers about not looking rich. Someone who grew up poor can be marked as 'not one of us' because they buy and wear the expensive branded mass market names that everyone knows are the expensive brands (see Burberry, which used to be high-toned but is now associated with chavs). Someone who came from the 'right' background knows the brands that the mass market aren't aware of and can refer to them, wear them, or even ironically not-wear them.
See the remark in the Alan Clark diaries about furniture:
"He quoted Michael Jopling – referring to Heseltine, deputy PM at the time – as saying "The trouble with Michael is that he had to buy all his furniture" and judged it "Snobby, but cutting"
Real wealth doesn't have to buy its furniture because it inherits it; new wealth and arrivistes have to buy the antiques, or the modern fashionable brands, because they grew up with nothing. It's expressed in Terry Pratchett's "Men at Arms" with the following quote:
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
The rich are rich because they spend less money. A poor person may wear hand-me-downs because their family can't afford to buy new clothes. A rich person may be wearing his father's, or even grandfather's coat - because it was expensive to buy in the first place, is very high quality, and lasts that long. And other rich people will recognise the brand and quality, and judge on that, not "is this a new coat?"
All this only matters, of course, if you care about impressing people and fitting in with the 'betters' as 'one of them'. If you don't give a toss, then buy what you like as you can afford it, and who cares if it's new money or not?
To quote "The Screwtape Letters":
"The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the "best" people, the "right" food, the "important" books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions."
West Elm is for poseurs!
The Men at Arms quote has always bothered me, because it posits a weird uncanny valley of price-quality that I'm not sure actually exists for a wide variety of products. Yes, sometimes there's Veneer Nice that has that rich look without the rich price tag, and gives up the ghost appropriately...but that's penetrating increasingly downmarket as materials science and economies of scale improve. Kind of a table stakes to be a serious outfit at all, no pun intended. Then there's Capital-N Nice that lasts for years and years. I think the error is that there's this...Consumer Reports/Ralph Nader-esque load-bearing assumption of planned obsolescence and "price isn't correlated with quality, paying big $ is a sucker's game, it'll all break down equally". Which just doesn't seem true in many cases? Past some certain threshold of price, Nice Stuff is genuinely, well, Vimes-worthy. I do still buy prole-tier on occasion (some aesthetics just aren't well-represented at higher tiers), and it's always those cheaper items that break soonest/have shoddy construction/aren't symmetrical in the case of clothing/etc. You get what you pay for, indeed. Always amazes me how fast coworkers churn through clothing, even though I exert myself more...and a lot of that is base quality differences, plus actually taking care of my stuff. (I do understand the "rich enough to constantly replace even expensive things, so I mistreat them" angle, but that seems also distinctly gauche?)
It does rank highly on my terminal values to chase aesthetic goods and experiences for their own sake, rather than what they signal or meta-signal. I wouldn't wear something if I didn't genuinely love the way it looked. Same for listening to music, or eating food...it pains me to see people buy [trendy bullshit food] purely to post about it, and not even consume it. Going through a period of euphemism food insecurity makes one averse to such waste. "That person's clearly never survived off plain rice and instant noodles for months while dreading an eviction notice..."
Yes, the Vimes thing is a fun comedy piece but it doesn't apply to many things. Some internet people seem to want to take it seriously as a genuine theory of poverty.
It certainly doesn't apply to boots. Famously yes, if you buy a pair of Loakes or something and take good care of them then you can get them to last a lifetime. But taking good care of them means getting them resoled regularly, which winds up costing you more than buying a brand new pair of department store boots every year anyway.
That I do understand! The same sources would also often rail about the repair racket, how it's frequently uneconomical to fix broken stuff repeatedly versus just replacing it outright. And the new item is often, in fact, significantly nicer, possibly with even lower lifetime operating costs too. The whole JD Vance's fridge thing. (Nevermind the related actuarial chicanery of warranties or other superlative insurance schemes. Square Trade, my ass.)
I do reserve a bit of boot scorn for the people who buy into Doc Martens for anything other than the aesthetic, thinking it's a downmarket Timberland or something. Very thin veneer on that Veneer Nice. Some outsourced brands eventually found a good price/quality point, others...well, I call that bucket Cheap Chinese Shit. Except not even cheap to buy anymore, so what's the point? (No one bothers with shoe polish or waterproofing/stain repellant either, which likewise feels like a rookie mistake. Glad to have met some ROTC members who took uniform presentation very seriously before acquiring my own nice things. Add years of life and significant bonus durability for pennies per application, yes please...)
Oh dear, well I love my hiking boots and I just have to respond. Many years ago I was buying nice EMS hiking boots. But the quality went down and soon the boots started to de-sole after 1-2 years... way too soon. So I hunted around and switched to Zamberlans (Fine Italian hiking boots... ~$300) And I love them. I wear the piss outta these boots. I should buy a third pair and put them away in my closet.
What Pratchett is saying is that quality *costs*, and if you have enough money to be able to buy quality goods, they will last longer than if you can't afford them and have to buy shoddy stuff that falls apart in a year and you need to constantly replace it.
Thus a rich person ends up spending less money over the same period of time than a poor person, which sounds paradoxical but is explained by the effect of poverty on being able to budget, to afford things that will last instead of what is cheapest, and being able to defer purchases of necessities by choice to get a better bargain.
>25: it's not that I wouldn't like to be rich (well, less-poor, can't take it with you), but any lifestyle that requires attending to antisocial media minutiae is a no go for me, bro. Not understanding a single meme or even most of the referants puts me firmly in the plebe milieu.
It puts you pretty firmly in the normal-person milieu as well, in a good way.
>I find the turn towards inconspicuous consumption somewhat baffling as well
This turn took place a long, long, long time ago--long before the ubiquity of radio and television, never mind social media--among the generationally rich for a number of reasons, a major one being countersignaling.
An underrated component of the pivot to inconspicuous consumption is as an explicit barrier to the egalitarianism that the internet promotes. It's really hard to gatekeep things in the 21st century, so only discussing culture through unintelligible discourse is a very strong way to protect it. I'm a student at a university with a very high concentration of (waves hand) these types of peers, and when I try and have a conversation with them about something like what they did over break, I might be better off just telling them to speak in Sanskrit.
54. Korean here. I've been wondering about the cause of this for some while. Objective material conditions have become far better, yet people aren't as happy as they should be. I don't have a great answer myself, but I talked about this issue with someone I respect, and here's what she thought.
Fundamentally, it's all about status. Koreans compare themselves to their peers all the time. Cram schools? Because parents want their children to get ahead. Real estate craze? They don't just want a nice house, they want a house nicer than their cousins'. Young people unsatisfied with their economic conditions? They don't just want a high standard of living, they want it as high as their rich friend from middle school or some social media influencer or whatever.
So I asked her again: But why would these issues be specific to Korea, or at least so much worse here? Surely the urge to be above others is to some extent in human nature?
Her conjecture was this: post-war notion of equality. Everything owned by everyone was reset to zero during the Korean War. Home towns were destroyed. Preexisting social class and hierarchy vanished. No more noble houses of Confucian bureaucrats or rich families of landowners. The idea that they, and their children, deserve no worse than anyone else, became pervasive. This is what drives Korean parents to train their children to become the best, since why shouldn't they be? This is what makes Koreans feel poor if they can't buy a house in Seoul, because why can't they? Why should anyone have it better than them, when everyone came from the same background of poverty?
I don't know if she's right, but it certainly felt like an interesting idea. I believe most of ACX's readership are from rich Western countries with a longer history of stability - I'm curious what you think about this.
Then why are things going so much worse there than Japan? Pretty much everything you said there applies to Japan as well, except the fact that the war happened earlier... which should mean that Japan should have already collapsed by now. Clearly there's something specific to Korea that's contributing to its collapse.
Aren't things similar in Japan with respect to working hours, fertility and such? Google says Japan has the lowest happiness index score in the developed world.
East Asia has a long history of very intense social competition in a market economy, longer and more probably more intense than anywhere else. I'd guess that's the main reason why Japan, Korea, and arguably China have such strong income/education/job status games, more than post-war social levelling. Possibly because of Gregory Clark-heritability reasons.
I mean sure, Japan is going to shit as well, but people do still seem to be at least proud and attatched to their country. Meanwhile, Korea is having a full-on gender war-- like, how the hell does that even happen? Even the US only has a 60/40 slant of votes for president based on gender. What caused the situation in Korea to get so bad so quickly? That's what I want to know.
but to add on to @tempname896813's point (which I find intriguing but hard to prove): what Japan didn't have was a massive expectation of some kind of "equality"; class distinctions mostly remained. Japan's fertility isn't great but it's a lot better than the ROK's.
Japan did not have a civil war and lost much smaller fraction of population and houses
Yeah, from what I've heard much of this *does* also apply to Japan, and China, and to varying extents other East Asian countries as well. (South) Korea may be somewhat worse, but that seems more a difference of degree than kind.
The bombing of Japan was minor in comparison the the bombing of Korea. Japan's reset came mostly from the post-war US administration and was therefore less extensive.
It's plausible, but as an American we are very encouraged to endorse the idea that everyone ought to have equal opportunity if we just Try enough. It's been argued against pretty heavily in the context of Racism and Sexism and Etc, but the attitude of "Why should anyone have it better than them" sure sounds like something commonly believed here.
I would want to know more about different definitions of 'making it'. I have a very blue-tribe, hippieqsue tech-forward background, so for me a high-status job would be academic or writer or doctor or something else along those lines. I very much would not see getting married early and having 4 kids and being well respected in my local church to be high-status, but (anecdotally) many Americans do. While concepts like money and power confer some status no matter who you are, the idea that everyone in Korea is focused on School Grades and Living In Seoul is uh.... confusing and worrying to me. In some other cultural class analysis posts around here the concept of different 'ladders' for different cultural classes came up, and while that was oversimplified I do feel like that concept would be useful here.
There is the concept of "Jack is as good as his master". The difference here may be that in America, it was reformulated as "Jack has no master/Jack can be his own master, so can you, so can we all!" because they were starting from a position of 'no traditional social structures here and plenty of empty land to move to if you didn't like what was going on where you were', whereas for South Korea, if the comment is true, everyone is Jack and there are no more masters, so all the 'Jacks' are scrambling to take over the empty slots.
For the USA, it's "from the log cabin to the White House". For South Korea, it's "a bigger and better log cabin".
The SK housing market is arguably more crowded than San Fransisco. Also, SK is arguably the most hierarchical society in the world. So the log-cabin analogy makes zero sense to me. And yes, I do question the top-level comment's theory, despite me being a mere foreigner.
But the difference is that America does not have (or likes to think it does not have) a hierarchy: if you work hard/come up with a better mousetrap, you can be one of the wealthy and successful too! There is much less of the idea that Sir Jonathan is by nature better than Johnnie, even if Sir Jonathan is poor and Johnnie is a self-made millionaire. What is that quote about 'every American thinks they are a temporarily embarrassed millionaire' so they *celebrate* the success of others? There is no elite in the USA (citation needed) so there's no corresponding idea that the elite just are that much superior to the common mass, and where the idea of an elite *is* promulgated, it's condemnatory of elites (even Harris is running on "I grew up middle-class, I'll work for middle-class American families" despite being as much beholden to the nobs and elite of San Francisco as Newsom is, or as Hillary with her "I love *real* billionaires" was).
I don't know much if anything about South Korea, but I get the impression that the emotional climate is something like the Republic of Ireland on this. The old hierarchy, according to OP, were pulled down and who inherited their place? The newcomers, the up-and-coming middle class, those who all came from the same place lower down in the old way of doing things. I don't know if Korea has the notion of "I knew him/his father/his grandfather when he didn't have an arse in his trousers" about the successful, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did.
Here in Ireland, the old Ascendancy were displaced and the vacancy scrambled for by the new middle-class Catholics (the old native lordly families had long ago lost power and position). Those who had risen from the peasant and small trader and small farmer class. And of course, plenty of envy and competition there.
Why is everything in Seoul? Why is everything in Dublin and the rest of the country can go hang? All the media, the entertainment industry, finance, politics, law, you name it - it's all there. Nobody is making programmes or writing lifestyle pieces about famous influencers or trendsetters in Ballinasloe.
Ozy, back in the days of their Thing of Things blog, jokingly(?) gave as one reason they'd never live in Texas the lack of sushi restaurants. It's trivially easy to Google and see that there are in fact sushi restaurants in Texas, but that's the attitude that "better to live ten in a house in the Bay Area than live in a large house of one's own out in the sticks" that OP describes about the competitiveness in South Korean culture.
South Korean believes that the elite is good, that being elite is something to be pursued, and that the elite *are* better than the common masses. South Korea probably also has, in a way the USA does not and that Ireland retains vestiges of, the suffocating weight of comparison within the family: why is your cousin able to get a big job in [wherever] and/or afford a house in Dublin/Seoul and you cannot? You must achieve and be successful so we can hold our heads high amongst the extended family and the neighbours! Gavin Newsom is the cousin of Joanna Newsom, but I doubt anyone is scolding Joanna for being a mere musician instead of a successful public servant like her cousin (or contrariwise, scolding Gavin for not being a star like Joanna).
"the idea that everyone in Korea is focused on School Grades and Living In Seoul is uh.... confusing and worrying to me"
Just be glad the national newspapers don't publish lists of points tables for the state exam at the end of secondary schooling, and that there aren't lists of school league tables (which we slavishly copied from the British media because of course we do) 😀
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/feeder-schools-2023-find-out-which-schools-send-the-most-students-to-college/a441822482.html
The old aristocracy wasn't replaced by the middle class, it was replaced by the chaebol dynasties. Yes, competitition is bonkers amongst the riffraff. But they're not competing to build the next Amazon or Google. They're competing to be hired by Samsung. And beside the economic stratification, there's also the age stratification. Cracking a beer before your friend (who's a year older) cracks a beer is about as egregious as slapping your mother. I like to imagine that such pearl-clutching has a pretty strong dampering effect on creativity/pioneering.
Given all this, I don't really see the "Paul Bunyan archetype" as especially illustrative of SK's situation. I think the more apt analogy is "late-stage capitalism cyberpunk dystopia". The comparison between Dublin and Seoul, and the intensity of sibling rivalries sounds pretty accurate to me, though.
Edit: for context, the chaebols are state-subsidized monopolies that arose in the wake of the Korean War. The logic was that, as a bunch of dirt-poor potato farmers, SK domestic industry would never be competitive on the global market if they played fairly. So President (more like "benevolent dictator") Park Chung Hee decided to speed-run industrialization by turbocharging specific companies. Thus, it's hard to make useful comparisons to the recent history of the Democratic People's Republic of Samsung, vs the U.S. or U.K. I also suspect that there's been cultural whiplash in going from medieval peasants to fully industrialized within the span of a single lifetime.
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Incidentally, I've been seeing some memes about Luce lately. And I couldn't help but wonder if you any choice words about Pope Francis japonifying the Catholic Church.
There s hierarchy and there's hierarchy -- the kind thats established and the kind that has to be constantly refought.
Oh, people here definitely love money and power - just look at the medical school craze of the last few decades. It's also a part of what makes good grades so desirable.
As for living in Seoul, well, as someone who lived in multiple cities here, yes, Seoul is genuinely the best city if you prefer urban life at all. The gap between Seoul (10m pop) and the next largest city, Busan (3m pop) is just too big.
Why do you think "objective material conditions" would make people happy?
Because material conditions have the capacity to make people the opposite of happy, it's easy to assume they might also have some positive influence beyond the "lack of suffering due to severe deprivation" point.
Turns out, of course, that the relationship is more complex, and that objectively "merely very good" material conditions can help make people miserable, if their peers have "insanely good" material conditions.
My happiness significantly and temporarily increased when my material conditions improved (from living-on-welfare and having always to think to almost never stressing about money, to not having to look at foodstuff prices unless I wanted to, to having a car and using it for commuting, etc.).
A few years later that started mattering less, I'm assuming because I got used to it. I still think it's a huge plus, and would be sad to give it up.
Yeah, when you are stressing on how to get by, that makes you feel bad. Other than that, happiness is driven by things like status and expectations, not material things. I thought that was obvious, which is why I don’t understand the confusion.
I still think the greatest thing ever is running water piped to the home, because I spent my early childhood in a house without that. I'm accustomed now to having indoor plumbing and even hot water *as and when I want it*, but if I'd grown up with that taken for granted, I'd probably be judging my circumstances on "yes, but our family only has one bathroom and theirs has two!" or the likes 😁
Key to a happy life through material surplus: start out poor - get improved material conditions - be happy.
So, should we systematically deprive kids somewhat? ;)
My understanding is that at least in anglophone cultures it used to be normal to subject wealthy or upper-class boys/young men to absolutely miserable living conditions for several years through e.g. schooling and military service... maybe there was something to this
Do you disagree that people are on average happier when they have food, warmth, shelter, etc than when they’re starving, freezing, homeless?
That’s not relevant to the difference between South Korea now versus a couple decades ago.
Okay. I certainly think it is. Unless there are no significant number of people who lack these things to the extent it makes them unhappy.
How many South Koreans do you think are literally starving to death? I think it’s been a long time since that was a true concern.
You don't have to be starving to have money worries. And having enough money to make those worries go away makes a real difference. I'm speaking from personal experience here.
How did you conclude that starving to death is the only kind of food insecurity that leads to unhappiness?
And none of this has to do with your original non-normative claim in the form of the question:
>Why do you think "objective material conditions" would make people happy?
It would seem more reasonable to ask why one would think objective material conditions would not correlate with greater happiness, as they more commonly do.
Can you explain why you think having things necessary for survival and thriving wouldn’t tend to positively affect people’s happiness?
How long a time?
> Fundamentally, it's all about status. Koreans compare themselves to their peers all the time. Cram schools? Because parents want their children to get ahead. Real estate craze? They don't just want a nice house, they want a house nicer than their cousins'. Young people unsatisfied with their economic conditions? They don't just want a high standard of living, they want it as high as their rich friend from middle school or some social media influencer or whatever.
The 10th Commandment may have been placed last, but it turns out to be one of the most important of all.
One thing I was wondering about there - so many say they want to leave Korea. Where do they want to go instead?
Mostly Western countries, like US, Canada, Austrailia...
Personally I might leave for US, but only because I've heard software engineer pay is insane in California - I doubt that was what most people who answered the survey had in mind.
Yeah, if you're a skilled software engineer, there's nowhere else in the world like the bay area. I've heard that US immigration is very tough though (probably easier than if you're from China or India at least).
My theory (as an outsider and aside from the usual factors) is that Korea has very high social conformity (even compared to e.g. Japan) and that this drastically slows down the pace at which social reforms can happen. Basically this is a coordination problem, government is designed to solve coordination problems, it isn't working well in Korea.
Democracy usually solves this by having many parties with different ideas that voters can choose from, but in Korea the major parties have only small differences. Japan a variation of this but with only one stable party and a mix of constantly unstable opposition, nevertheless it works slightly better than in Korea. Taiwan seems to be more successful at social reform.
> My theory (as an outsider and aside from the usual factors) is that Korea has very high social conformity (even compared to e.g. Japan) and that this drastically slows down the pace at which social reforms can happen.
I disagree with this. I personally live in an unusual social bubble in Korea myself, so I can't say about whether Korea is a conformist society, but social reforms? Look at Korea in 1960s, and look at it now. Social reform is one thing we absolutely can do.
> in Korea the major parties have only small differences
It would be better if you could provide examples. Perhaps this is because you are focusing more on familiar Western culture war issues? If you compare their stances on immigration or gay marrige, yes, it might seem so. But look at the economic issues for example. Minimum wage, work hour limits, safety regulations... all important issue in which the main parties disagree on.
Reading your post again we are probably interpreting the same thing, or at a quite similar thing, into two different names: status and social conformity. Status matters more the more conformist a society is, or another way, the pressure for high status fades the less you have in common with those around you.
I mean conformity of thought by the way, not physical identity stuff that is so popular in the west.
The number one issue I see for Korea is the education race. When so many chase the same goal when there are only limited "prizes"...I see this as a conformity problem. Do the parties differ on how to solve this? Heck, do most Koreans even see this as a problem?
> The number one issue I see for Korea is the education race. When so many chase the same goal when there are only limited "prizes"...I see this as a conformity problem.
I agree, it is probably a conformity problem, and maybe a lack of greater perspective on careers.
> Do the parties differ on how to solve this?
I think the left generally is more against credentialism and overcompetition, tries to reduce the impact of exam results in university admission, and pushes for stuff like blind interviews for hiring. The right generally defends it as meritocracy, and prefers a return to a simple ranking system based on exam scores.
(In case this might sound like "left good right bad", I would say that the situation is quite complicated - lots of students prefer being ranked by scores alone, alternative methods have their own faults. And it turns out, blind interviews still result in top-university students getting the jobs. Meritocracy isn't a complete failure either.)
> Heck, do most Koreans even see this as a problem?
Funnily, yes. I think most Koreans would complain that this is a big problem in their society, although they won't be the change they want to see.
Thanks for the info.
If I was in charge I'd probably try to limit at which times of the day tutors and cram schools were allowed to operate. The problem isn't meritocracy but the amount of time dedicated to passing tests.
Ultimately though it's really a mindset change that is needed. As you say it's a status problem, so reducing the importance of status is key.
In the west, especially in the US, people don't care that much about what others think of them and so status is a lot less important. I think the US takes it too far, but Korea also takes it too far in the other direction.
I agree, it's all about the mindset.
> If I was in charge I'd probably try to limit at which times of the day tutors and cram schools were allowed to operate. The problem isn't meritocracy but the amount of time dedicated to passing tests.
I believe Korea did ban tutoring at one point, when it was a dictatorship and the government could impose whatever restrictions they liked. One problem was, when tutoring become illegal to openly operate, only people with money and connections could get them.
Still, a moderate version of this might not be a bad idea. I think China's doing something like this now, let's see how that works out.
I will posit that Koreas hierarchical culture is at least partially at fault. Combine that with meritocracy and you inevitably end up with massive dat race dynamics in persued of high status markers.
I don't know about this. I agree Korea is a more hierarchical society than, say, the US, but for pretty much the entire history of ROK the trend was less hierarchy, not more. As you said, it might be a part of the issue, but not the entire story.
Do any of these countries dropout/alternative/Bohemian subculture?
> The idea that they, and their children, deserve no worse than anyone else, became pervasive. This is what drives Korean parents to train their children to become the best, since why shouldn't they be? This is what makes Koreans feel poor if they can't buy a house in Seoul, because why can't they? Why should anyone have it better than them, when everyone came from the same background of poverty?
I think something similar has been going on in America, since the advent of the Internet and smartphones. There's a flattening of society, where everyone has access to the same information, and is in a sense on the same playing field. The principled egalitarian in me says that this is good, for all the standard reasons. But it also seems to have been the death of culture. And the realist in me says, that's part of why it's hard to hire native Americans for low-status jobs. There just aren't enough useful white-collar knowledge-work office jobs to go around, so we keep inventing more and more useless ones. In some way, now we all feel *even more* like we're "temporarily embarrassed millionaires".
The same happened on the eastern side of the Baltic sea - Finland, Estonia, Latvia - where people suddenly lost their higher class (often foreigners) and started anew from scratch. Competitive feelings there seem quite comparable to the rest of the world, not like Korea. I think the explanation is interesting but comparative sociology doesn't support it.
Edit: I just remembered that Finns are supposed to have the highest happiness score in the world, which they explain by low competitiveness in the society: they make high efforts to not leave anyone behind, and all that.
What's the relationship between status and the ability to afford a wife? For example if you wind up a poor-ish Korean working construction can you still marry? Or are you basically shut out of the marriage market?
In North America its hard for a guy to marry a girl, it's basically expected that he must make enough more than her that he can pay for himself and support her while she provides for kids, without a decline in her lifestyle... Which was very achievable in the 50s and 60s when women were paid poorly and largely couldn't get high status complex careers, and didn't want to have to compete to male standards...
Whereas after antidescrimination laws its MANDATED 30-50% of high paying jobs must go to to women, no matter how many more hours men put in. Ie. It is literally legally impossible for the average man to earn more than the average woman, no matter how hard he works... and because he WILL work harder to try, and because he competeing against other men who are working harder to compete for the few high status jobs men can get, Men across the board are effectively POORER than women, they are doing way more work for eqaul or less pay and status.
Its a meme now that girls will goof off at office jobs doing tiktoks while the male workers are stressed and annoyed in the corner keeping the business afloat for the same pay. As such those girls won't even date those men... because if you have to be stressed at the job for the same pay, you naturally seem poorer.
This is why western marriage and birthrates are collapsing...
Is korea like this? Or is something else entirely going on?
RE: #8, A different "Magic: the Gathering combo requires the Twin Primes conjecture" situation has been making the rounds on Tumblr this past week: https://www.tumblr.com/prokopetz/765555393028063233/did-you-see-that-magic-the-gathering-now-has-a?source=share It's arguably more interesting than the one you cited, because 1. it requires far fewer unique cards, and 2. The Twin Primes conjecture doesn't decide if you can go infinite (which is pretty trivial in MtG terms), but which player *wins*.
RE: #47, You're absolutely correct, Hamilton became uncool due to the standard fad/fandom cycle. While accessibility might've helped demystify the play, The turning point was almost certainly when the drawing of Thomas Jefferson wearing a Hatsune Miku chest binder under a "Met God, She's Black" shirt became popular. I will not elaborate further, it's not hard to find.
I think there's a little more to it than Hamilton simply getting past it's fad lifecycle. The big hook for the show, initially, was "what if the founding fathers were all *black*? Not just in appearance, but talking and rapping like modern day black celebrities." This was a big hook for liberal elite tastemakers.
But then when you actually *watch* the show, and pay attention to its storyline, it's a very old-school conservative message. The founding fathers were so great, Hamilton the poor orphan kid was so great, America is so great, etc. There's not a lot of nuance or subverting expectations. It's actually not that different from the old "1776 musical" or the schoolhouse rock cartoons I saw as a kid. In particular, it totally glosses over Washington's slave ownership and makes him this moral paragon. That sells to a lot of regular people, but not so much to the kind of people who give artistic awards.
Yeah, that's what I mean about demystifying the play. Once it became prevalent, you could see it for what it really is (to you), instead of having it relayed to you via social media. From there, the people who didn't care for it could actually push back against the fans, who at that point were overextending into the aforementioned nonsense.
I'll also point out that, last I heard, Hamilton completely bombed in England, for the reasons you'd likely expect.
I don't know whether it was a major issue, but the play didn't have any black people (slaves) from the era, did it?
> I don't know whether it was a major issue, but the play didn't have any black people (slaves) from the era, did it?
To be fair, historically it was almost always white men in all positions of power and it's hard to go against that without rewriting history. Maybe you can find one black person who did something in the relevant period, but then it comes across as tokenism when every work set in the period hypes up this one person disproportionately.
I don't know if the show could have existed if it had put slavers on the stage. What race could they have been?
I'm not saying there could be a solution to the problem, just that the handling might have gotten on some people's nerves.
> last I heard, Hamilton completely bombed in England
Considering it's *still* running on the West End daily, and everything I can turn up indicates it had a great critical reception, I think whoever you heard that from is mistaken.
It opened there in November 2017 and is currently scheduled to close in October 2025. Assuming no further extensions that would be somewhere between 3,000 and 3,500 performances, putting it in the all-time top 5 for musicals in the West End. Some plays that ran there for comparable numbers of performances include "Evita", "Me and My Girl", and "Jesus Christ Superstar".
Data point:
I have seen the production this article is referring to: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/theater/hamilton-review-hamburg-germany.html The praise in the article is bullshit to the point of being completely surreal. The show was borderline unwatchable and had it not been so expensive I would have left during the pause (speaking of sunk cost fallacy). And I am referring to my thoughts after leaving the theatre here, I am not jumping on a bandwagon retroactively now that the tide has apparently changed.
At the time I blamed the problem on the translation (by contrast the choreography was excellent), but I am very open to the suggestion that the play itself is just not that good.
The production was closed down permanently after having run for roughly a year with the clear implication that the production company had hoped for (much) more, given the US success.
I watched the recorded (English) version of Hamilton on Disney+ and was very disappointed. I think it could have greatly been improved by shortening the runtime at least 30%.
Alexander Hamilton was also the most reactionary figure in early post-revolution US politics, nearly a monarchist.
Nearly?
I don't think it was supposed to be a hereditary position under his proposal.
I liked the 1776 musical. And it didn't talk about Washington specifically much, but they had a whole musical number about the North's involvement in slavery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeuaTpH6Ck0&ab_channel=PlayNowPlayL8tr
yeah, that's an excellent song. both musically and historically interesting.
but most of the rest of it is just simple sillyness though.
Yeah, in hindsight Hamilton is super cringey. It was a novelty that only worked during a very specific time/environment. Aside from Daveed Diggs, most of the performances were pretty bad - boomer white people's version of rap. Lin-Manuel was atrocious. I think it just took a few years for people to realize.
Couple of caveats regarding the ancient DNA selection paper:
- You write as though the test was repeated on East Asian ancient DNA samples. What they actually did is keep the same set of west Eurasian ancient DNA samples, but calculate genetic scores for years of schooling etc using a rubric derived from modern East Asian individuals instead of modern European ones, as they did before. The results for this seem pretty good (Extended Data Fig 11) but show some deviations.
- Family-based GWAS is emerging as the gold standard for calculating direct genetic effects. It's becoming clear that typical population GWAS is affected by all sorts of problems, *especially* for anything relating to behavior and cognition: assortative mating within or across traits (e.g. smart people preferentially having kids with other smart people), population stratification (coincidental correlations between genes and phenotypes that we can't correct for properly), perhaps indirect effects (e.g. variants that make you more likely to have a smarter kid but don't do anything for your own intelligence).* Great preprint on this here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.01.24314703v1.full-text . (Note how cognitive and behavioral traits really stick out in this paper's figures as being the most deflated in various ways). With this in mind, it's notable that basically none of the ancient DNA paper's polygenic selection findings replicate when they use sibling-GWAS effect estimates (Extended Data Fig 13). As they point out, this is probably in part due to lower sample size and power in sibling GWAS studies; I'm sure that many of their proposed selection events are real, even some of the polygenic ones. But it does make me more hesitant in general about their findings, especially if the result is based on polygenic scores or has anything to do with cognition - and the figure you highlight is affected by both these concerns.
* To be clear, this doesn't invalidate all GWAS findings. Your typical headline published GWAS hits are mostly fine, largely due to incredibly strict significance thresholds used in the field. But polygenic scores tend to use more marginal GWAS hits and have the potential to be badly affected by these issues.
Re Anthropic's computer use: we made a demo similar to this that you can try out in your browser without needing to be a developer https://theaidigest.org/agent
Wow, this worked much better than I would have guessed. Would it work that well out in the wild or is it specially prepared for those demo websites?
>Anyway, the Franco-Prussian War led to World War I which led to World War II - so if you don’t like 50 million people dying and the total devastation of Europe, blame this statement about ambassadors.
I'm not sure I agree with this one unless you think that the sheer existence of a Prussian led Germany was going to lead to WW1 which is fair if playing games of cause and effect chains but not meaningful in a historiographical way. It certainly meant that France was going to form an alliance with a natural rival of Germany (Russia) and be bitter about Alsace-Lorraine but had Germany stuck to Bismarckian Realpolitik it is unlikely that WW1 could have happened. Perhaps there would have been a series of regional firekegs but without the moronic (for Germany) Dreadnought Race and blank cheque to Austro-Hungary Germany and Britain would not have been dragged into a war and France was unlikely to wage a revanchist war of aggression for Alsace Lorraine.
I can imagine a world where Wilhelm II never picks up Mahan and so never decides to build a dreadnaught fleet as a vanity project. In this world it's conceivable that Britain decides to ally with Germany against Russia (it's `great game' rival) instead of with France against Germany, or else to maintain `splendid isolation.' Either of those worlds probably sees Germany emerge victorious in a relatively short WW1, and from that point on the entire future course of history changes.
Germany was certainly a far more natural ally to Britain in that period than France and Russia. The adaptation of Weltpolitik has to be one of the stupidest foreign policy decisions in history. Germany following Realpolitik was on course to become a natural economic hegemon of the continent with naturally good relations with Britain as a counterbalance to the French and Russians. The fundamental strategic objective of Britain during this period (all periods after British unification if we are honest) was to keep shipping lanes open for imports and prevent a European naval power being able to launch an invasion via the low countries. With Weltpolitik Germany ensured its two natural threats hated it and drove the one country that could guarantee it was starved out of any war (as we saw twice) allied with its two natural threats. Even more stupidly Our Place in the Sun was for colonies that were gigantic economic drains for the governments and only of value to the businessmen who operated in them.
With one boneheaded decision the Kaiser guaranteed half a century of chaos in Europe and in the end Realpolitik was vindicated with Germany becoming the economic hegemon for Europe as soon as it was forcibly committed to peace with its neighbours.
Personally, I blame Pope Leo III for the world wars. If he hadn't decided to make Karl Karling Holy Roman Emperor, there would have been no patchwork German confederation for the Prussians to unify in the first place.
I am quite uncertain that the counterfactual would contain fewer deaths.
Re #30 first Google result – I thought results on Google are highly personalized. And no, I don’t have SSC subreddit as the first result there. I have it as the fourth result, top three being beebom.com, parade.com, and nothing.community (never heard of any of those).
Pretty dubious about Scott's dismissal of Rawls (item 7).
(Mostly) from the linked critique:
• "Improving society for the worst-off members at-best generates far fewer utils (and in some edge cases might actually cost utils) than optimising for utils directly": Optimising utilis directly has all sorts of problems of its own - repugnant conclusion, Pascal's mugging, etc. - does Rawls not get any credit for a solution that avoids these?
• "In some weird edge-cases Rawls actually loses us utils, therefore it's not a universally-true theory-of-everything": I don't think *any* ethical theory is 'complete' in that sense? Surely a more fair test is "Does this theory work as a decent guide for individuals/policymakers when applied reasonably under realistic conditions?": in the real-world, improving wellbeing of the worst-off members of society is *absolutely* not expected to lose us utils - in fact this is what much of EA does, with measurable results
• If "wanting to help the worst-off members of society" is actually a terminal goal you start out with, rather than something derived from your moral theory: 1) That seems like a pretty reasonable terminal goal to me (and better than most of ours..), 2) Seeking out a moral framework that supports this seems a pretty logical next step, and seems likely to be of value to you even if it isn't 100% watertight, and 3) Isn't this basically how we get most moral theories anyway?
• Maybe we aren't looking for a complete moral theory in the first place: maybe we're just looking for a way-of-thinking in which people's self-interestedness is channelled into generating altruistic behaviour. This seems as though it would have value as a guide in most real-world situations even if it isn't a complete and universally-true moral system.[Edit: also, isn't it pretty rare/interesting to find an example of way of channelling self-interestedness in a positive socially-useful direction? If this is something that we need to have in our general shared philosophical corpus, I think Rawls provides it much better than eg. Rand)
• Taking the "veil of ignorance" thought experiment seriously: if we *actually did* have everybody who is alive today collectively decide-upon a theory of justice and then transplant everybody into a random position within that system, would we expect the resulting world to be fairer than today's world? Either 1) unequivocally yes, by a considerable margin; nobody behind the veil making rational decisions would support a system with as high a risk of giving them a life of war, poverty, and suffering as the current world would - or else 2) This has actually happened in a Bostromian Simulation sorta way; if so, looking at how much injustice there is in the world, our pre-veil disembodied consciousnesses must all have been incorrigible, inveterate gamblers..
• (Also, I'd have hoped that "Rawls isn't original" would have merited a citation at least as much as "Rawls isn't very good" did..)
1) I agree that it's pointless to dismiss moral theory A simply because it gives different results from moral theory B. If your aim is to maximise utils *of course* you shouldn't instead try to maximise the well-being of the worst-off member of society. There is a still a huge problem for Rawls here, because he has no justification for maximising the well-being of the worst-off member of society. He simply expects us to adopt this goal as a self-evident good.
It's actually worse than that, because Rawls is strongly democratic, so he is making the empirical claim that with sufficiently good (i.e. Rawlsian) decision-making, society would adopt his ethical views, but no actual process for democratic decision-making has ever produced this outcome. Rawls himself seems to have been very disappointed by this, but not in a way which ever caused him to revise his views.
2) One of the reasons that Rawlsian thought is compelling is that you can go along with him on the veil of ignorance, but then disagree as to the outcomes. For example, you could say that, behind a veil of ignorance, we would agree that everyone should be able to keep the profits of their own labour, so there would be no redistributive taxation in an ideal society. Would that society be fairer than our own? From the point of view of somebody who holds redistributive taxation to be unjust, clearly yes, but Rawls himself would certainly disagree.
I think the criticism can reasonably be made of the veil of ignorance that it's impossible in practice and that in imagining it, nobody ever changes their previous views. Everybody has an argument for why, behind a veil of ignorance, everybody else would agree that they have been right all along.
Thanks for the reply! Very interesting and I enjoyed reading it.
I find your point 2 very convincing. I couldn't say I fully agree though, because I do think there are cases where people (er, for lack of a better expression..) "play differently when they have skin in the game", and because some people (I admit it's probably a rare talent..) are able to put themselves into the Veil thought-experiment mindest well-enough to actually honestly consider how they would act if they did have skin in the game in a way they wouldn't consider without this intellectual tool. (For the rest of us - for whom it doesn't even intellectually register as a problem that, though we may support a given position on (say) abortion here in the real world, we might not support the same position if we honestly did anticipate our consciousness might be transplanted into an accidentally-pregnant teenager or into an unwanted foetus - I accept your point entirely..)
For point 1, I think I fully agree about democracy and about where you'd arrive at if your aim were to maximise utils - but I still don't see how it's a criticism of Rawls that he adopts "helping the worst-off people" rather than "maximising utils" as an absolute terminal goal; I don't understand how this is any worse* than the not-uncommon philosophical practice of adopting "maximising utils", "helping yourself and your family/tribe", "perpetuating human civilisation", etc. as ground-level terminal goals?
(* "Worse" both in the sense of "less philosophically rigorous" and of "leads to more paradoxes/more susceptible to perverse-outcome edge-cases")
I think it’s pretty easy to justify prioritizing the worst off people. The badness of suffering is worse than the goodness of happiness is good and extra happiness in already happy people does not cancel out the (bad) suffering of unhappy people.
Every few minutes of thinking about this, I seem to vacillate between on the one hand agreeing with you completely and unreservedly, and on the other hand thinking that this is 'baked-in' to the 'util exchange rate' (such that maybe feeding a starving orphan = 100 utils but feeding a well-nourished investment banker = 0.01 utils) and that therefore we can just abstractly compare "helping the util-wise-worst-off" against "helping the util-wise-highest-return" directly without worrying about what real-world situations contribute to those util totals. I can't seem to decide on what the best way to think about this is!
I think the convergence of both views on priorities and policy is telling us something.
If you prioritize helping the worst off then you would by definition be creating a system which incentivizes failure and discourages success. Honestly, the longer term development of such a system would seem to me to lead to something resembling hell.
I don’t know. Don’t you think people aspire to more than just avoiding suffering (a neutral state let’s say)? I think there will be plenty of incentive remaining after a society creates a humane floor (to the extent it’s tractable) below which our fellow citizens, friends and family members will not fall.
I don’t think a maximin principle and a humane floor are the same thing. The society I would choose would be the one which allowed people to optimally flourish, and preferably to flourish more and better over time (it would progress over time).
Just as importantly it would incentivize goals and behaviors which are positive sum, not dysfunctional. A succesful society succeeds in great part because of the incentives and goals which it fosters. It is a dynamic not a static thing.
I don't think it follows that helping the worst-off discourages success. Suppose there are only two jobs in the world - Sweatshop Worker and Oil Baron, say - and we decide to help the sweatshop workers by instituting a policy where they get paid compensation for industrial accidents that happen to them (and we pay for this by charging more for the sweatshop products, so ultimately it's the oil barons paying for the policy). Even despite our intervention - making oil barons worse off and sweatshop workers better off - no oil barons will switch to being sweatshop workers (because no incentive is created for them to do so) and no sweatshop workers will switch to being oil barons (because they can't; the oil baron job market remains fully saturated).
nb. I'm not suggesting we mitigate against failure so strongly that failure has better outcomes than success - say, by paying people more to fail than they'd earn by succeeding* - just that, stand-fast some weird edge-cases, helping the worst-off simply doesn't incentivise failure
(* Though I think this sometimes does actually happen in the real world, mad as that is! I recall all those news stories one reads of where CEOs royally nause-up some company and either receive a colossal taxpayer-funded bailout or else simply walk away with a golden handshake in the millions whilst the company goes bankrupt...)
This is essentially how public schools work in America and the result is that any kid who wants to go above their grade level is discouraged and becomes miserable.
If we reduce the costs of dysfunctional behavior, then we will get more of it. Over time, a lot more. The key to a healthy dynamic society is in part having incentives that people avoid bad decisions and behaviors. Any society which prioritizes propping up failure at the expense of success is going to get more failure and less success.
I am not arguing against safety nets or assistance for the destitute. I agree that it is reasonable to choose institutions which provide safety nets and a degree of redistribution. It is not reasonable to choose a maximin principle.
>2) One of the reasons that Rawlsian thought is compelling is that you can go along with him on the veil of ignorance, but then disagree as to the outcomes. For example, you could say that, behind a veil of ignorance, we would agree that everyone should be able to keep the profits of their own labour, so there would be no redistributive taxation in an ideal society. Would that society be fairer than our own? From the point of view of somebody who holds redistributive taxation to be unjust, clearly yes, but Rawls himself would certainly disagree.
Did Rawls himself ever comment on alternative uses of his veil of ignorance? One criticism of his use is that he chooses an extremely pessimistic metric for evaluating societies (I share this criticism, but also am very skeptical of the whole project of ethics). Did he ever say anything about e.g. applying his veil, but then evaluating based on the welfare of the median person in the society, or (more pessimistically, but less so than Rawls) the welfare of the 25th percentile person.
Harsanyi had an earlier and arguably better framing of the issue. In his words…
http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Harsanyi1975.pdf
Thanks for the link. Much appreciated!
That's a better link than the one I found where it's chapter 2 of a larger book.
Thank you, Harsanyi's vigorous review seems much more coherent than the Rawls book it critiques. Very persuasive.
The other point I found unconvincing was the idea that people might give higher weight to the probability of things turning out well for themselves. My feeling is that people are risk-averse and if they had any experience with long duration suffering would weight avoiding that outcome quite highly.
Entirely agree that suffering and wellbeing are asymmetrical in the way you describe and I suspect (though have no real evidence either way) that people who have experienced more-than-average suffering are much more aware of this.
Did you read the cited critique by John Harsanyi of Rawls' principle (only a small part was quoted by Jim Holt at Slate but a longer version is available as Chapter 2 of this link https://epdf.pub/contemporary-political-theory-a-reader.html )? That seems quite hard to rebut. People in practice don't act like the worst off is a terminal goal.
On the repugnant conclusion, I recommend Michael Huemer https://philarchive.org/rec/HUEIDO
Rand is not taken very seriously by philosophers. Rawls himself distinguished between the utilitarian and contractarian traditions, including himself in the latter. Is there any argument that Rawls provides a better "way of channelling self-interestedness in a positive socially-useful direction" than utilitarians like Harsanyi?
On the repugnant conclusion, these paradoxes only happen when people turn ethics in to a math problem where you go "value X is good, the more people who display X, the better. Therefore, to maximize X, we need to maximize people." No one except ethicists thinks this way.
Rawls: “All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy.”
https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/puzzles-for-everyone
The repugnant conclusion arises when one is asked to choose between alternatives. Consistency either means maximizing population at the expense of lower average utility, or minimizing population in order to maximize average utility. Merely refusing to think systematically is no solution, at most you could claim that solutions aren't necessary for impractical hypotheticals.
I’ll take inconsistency over repugnance any day.
It’s far less of a problem for obligation based moralities than ones that focus on maximizing some value. So for example, I think people have duties towards their family. That doesn’t imply some necessity of maximizing family members.
Inconsistency leaves one vulnerable to getting Dutch-booked https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r5MSQ83gtbjWRBDWJ/the-intuitions-behind-utilitarianism
We manage to get by.
Also, citing the guy who talks about a large number of people getting dust in their eye being worse than torturing one person just demonstrates my point.
>"…or minimizing population in order to maximize average utility"
Not necessarily, or even probably. Gains from specialization & trade are sufficiently positive-sum that average utility increases with population size over at least a substantial range of values.
You're correct practically speaking, but the point of the thought-experiment is to examine situations in which there is a tradeoff (such as beyond that substantial range).
> Consistency either means maximizing population at the expense of lower average utility, or minimizing population in order to maximize average utility. Merely refusing to think systematically is no solution, at most you could claim that solutions aren't necessary for impractical hypotheticals.
I don't refuse to think systematically, but I do reject the idea of utility as something that you can meaningfully slap a number on and then add or multiply.
Does a room with three reasonably happy people in it have 50% more utility than a room with two reasonably happy people? No, that's a stupid question, utility is not quantifiable.
But when faced with a decision between alternatives, how do you decide?
You choose whichever one is better. Just because something can't be quantified doesn't mean it can't be understood or compared.
An imperfect analogy would be temperature, or rather a pre-scientific understanding of temperature. The ancients didn't know anything about thermodyamics but they understood that some things were warmer than other things. They could even have invented an arbitrary numeric temperature scale if they'd liked, but these numbers could not be meaningfully added, multiplied or averaged.
Do you want to choose between making one person very happy or making ten people slightly happy? Well you can't, there's no way of quantifying how happy you're going to make them, so just go with whatever seems more reasonable I guess.
I sure hope that policy makers aren't using Rawls as a guide because that would mean favoring the entire rest of the world and mostly ignoring their constituents.
The advantage of Myers-Briggs (almost a century old) is due to its catchiness and, in the modern age, memeability. The 16personalities test, which uses a modification of the Big 5, has seen its characters used to illustrate the types turned into a series of memes where you can see conjectures about what the types are like in high school, ENTP/INTP slash, 'ENFP be like', and has even reached rule34.xxx, where you can actually see (cartoon) INFP pr0n.
As a result, while very few people have any sense of their agreeableness or conscientiousness or understand the vocabulary with its five-syllable words, lots of people know their MBTI type. It's astrology with at least some vague empirical validation.
While the underlying Jungian theory is BS and the 'cognitive function' bit unproven, not to mention the false dichotomy creates all kinds of problems because people are distributed toward the middle of the axis on most of the Big Five, the test result does give you an idea of what hyperoctant (sexdecipant?) in Big 5-minus-neuroticism-space your interlocutor or you are in. If someone tells you they're an 'ISFJ', you have a vague sense they're in the bottom half of extroversion and openness, and in the top half of agreeableness and conscientiousness. That's not as good as a big 5 test result, but it's better than nothing, and easier to slip into a conversation.
I'm actually curious if there are any findings on the emprical usefulness of astrology *if you take out the birthday/star position determinants*. That is, do the astrological personality types, and their categories (fire, air, positive, negative etc) and relations to each other have any emprical use? If you allow them to be assigned by actual personality not birthday.
Wikipedia says much of this has barely changed since Roman times, and you would think that something that endured that long might have *some* useful aspects. Though of course, it might not.
Supposedly one of the times CSICOP (skeptic organization) whiffed was an investigation of the 'Mars effect', where athletes tended to be born with the planet Mars in certain positions. I can't really make heads or tails of the situation but if you're curious here's the Wikipedia article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_effect
Why that could be is anyone's guess. Certainly they've shown athletes tend to be born at certain times of the year because they wind up being the oldest kids in the class and therefore more developed and that carries on. That could coincidentally coincide with certain astrological signs.
Sure, the astrological personalities are roughly coherent (you could assign MBTIs to them if you really wanted to) and if you did something similar to what these guys did with the Enneagram and go yes/no on each of the 12, you might get a test that works. But that's not what astrologers were doing since Roman times.
Yes, the primary advantage of MBTI is that it's fun. I once saw a picture of a dating profile belonging to someone I would no doubt despise if we ever met, and was validated by their MBTI type being the exact opposite of mine.
Re 35, I have bad news: https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/10/10/delays-on-italys-spruced-up-trains-have-got-worse (subscription required, but you get the point from the link text!).
>X/Twitter banned journalist Ken Klippenstein for sharing the Trump campaign’s dossier on JD Vance.
Surely this will be widely condemned by the people who thought Twitter should not have suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story (under the same "we don't want to circulate hacked data" logic).
I don't think these are nearly as equivalent as you're presenting here and yes, this is super bad of Twitter.
Could you elaborate of why you think they AREN'T almost-perfectly equivalent?
Mostly the fact that I don't think undecided voters would be persuaded by anything in the JD Vance dossier and that everyone agrees that it's Iranian interference.
On the first, this election will not be decided by this dossier. We might like to think that voters would carefully parse through the contents for subtle insights into the policies or character of the candidates but...this is a highly optimistic assessment of the average American voter, much less the average undecided voter.
Compare that to a video of the president's son smoking crack with a hooker. That just...is obviously going to go viral and could easily influence low information voters in swing states.
Like, I had no idea the JD Vance dossier thing existed until now, I'm way more engaged than the average voter, so it basically doesn't matter. Even the dumbest 20% of Americans want to see the president's son smoking crack with a hooker, so it matters. Shouldn't, but does.
Second, there's an argument I don't find persuasive but is respectable but that we censor information specifically released by foreign governments attempting to influence US elections. If this argument is sincerely presented, I kinda have to take it seriously, and it was presented here. And, as far as I can tell, everyone basically agrees that it's Iranian election interference. When the Hunter Biden laptop was leaked, this was not Russian or any other interference, to the best of my knowledge the original story of Hunter just leaving it has held up, and the initial calls of interference failed the sniff test and were never credible, it was just blatant interference. Again, I think this argument is bad, but it is respectable if honestly presented.
So yeah, this compares an unimportant leak with a bad but respectable argument for censorship against a, unfortunately, very important leak with a deceptive figleaf of an argument for censorship.
The Hunter laptop was widely considered as likely foreign interference (understandable, given how unlikely that story was). When evidence surfaced that it is genuine, Twitter promptly reversed its blocking. (We know this from the Twitter Files, which is somehow, ridiculously, held up as evidence of wrongdoing on Twitter's side but actually quite clearly documents the opposite.) It's also not that obvious that evidence illegally obtained by foreign agents should be treated all that differently from evidence illegally obtained by domestic agents (granted, we do make a similar distinction for all manner of election-related things).
The Hunter laptop might have been more politically impactful (mostly for bad reasons, mind you; a presidential candidate's estranged son having a decadent lifestyle is not really something that should factor into the evaluation of the candidate heavily, which is why the Republicans instead relied on conspiracy theories supposedly-but-not-actually supported by laptop), but then should Twitter's policy be "you are not allowed to share material probably stolen by foreign agents during an election, unless that would be a significant advantage to one party"? Newspapers very much make those kinds of calculations, of course, but newspapers are content producers, not publishing platforms. I think it would be a weird position for a social network.
Another thing: I've just skimmed the JD Vance dossier and apart from his home address (which was censored in the version I saw) there was nothing the least bit personal in there, it's all already public knowledge.
If there's a really juicy version of this doc where the Trump campaign has sent private detectives to sort through his ex-girlfriends' diaries then it's not this one.
And surely it will be widely defended by the ones who supported suppressing the Hunter story...
If Twitter was under the same leadership as it was in 2020 it rightly should be.
But in the intervening time the platform publically committed itself to a policy of "supressing stuff like the Hunter Biden story is bad".
Demanding "X" to act in accordance with its stated policy is quite reasonable. Especially when there is good reason to believe that they would have if the story happened to benefit Republicans.
I would condemn it if Scott's description was accurate but he appears to have fallen for disinformation.
Specifically, Scott claims with no source that "Twitter’s side of the story is that the dossier was probably originally stolen by Iranian agents and they don’t want to support that kind of thing by letting people signal-boost the illicitly obtained goods."
But you can read what Twitter actually said here: https://x.com/Safety/status/1839392663864549688
"Ken Klippenstein was temporarily suspended for violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information, specifically Sen. Vance’s physical addresses and the majority of his Social Security number."
This is also consistent with the ban message on Klippenstein's substack (linked by Scott), which says it is for "posting private information."
I think banning exposing physical addresses and SSNs is a good and reasonable policy!
Except Scott either fell for disinformation (likely!) or is outright lying (unlikely), because Twitter's stated reason for the ban is, as Klippenstein himself admitted, the fact that his released materials contained the unredacted address and partial SSN of Vance. Klippenstein's justification for doing so was that they "were already available for anyone to buy".
Virtually all social media platforms have rules against doxxing, this seems like doxxing 101.
Also, Twitter/X no longer has an active page regarding a "hacked materials" policy, that was pre-Musk.
Vance's home address is not just available for anyone to buy, Vance has made it publicly available as part of election materials. For example, the Alaskan government website publishes it here: https://www.elections.alaska.gov/doc/oep/2024/Vance,%20J%20D_Vice%20Pres_Eng_08.20.24-PWeb.pdf.
7 : I'm not sure about the claim that classical labor theory of value is proven wrong by the marginalist theory of prices.
Classical labor theory is not concerned with short term price fluctuations but with long term equilibrium. In perfect competition, in the long run, price equals average total cost, just like in classical price theory.
The marxian labory theory of value is wrong because the solution provided by Marx to the transformation problem is incorrect, not because Alfred Marshall proved it wrong.
That may be true in a technical sense, but only in the case where products are homogeneous. It doesn't explain price formation in any other situation.
Overall, the problem with the labor theory of value is that it creates bad models of what value is and how it's created, especially in people with only a superficial understanding of economics.
The classical theory of value, which assumes perfect competition, asks the following question : in the long run, relative prices are determined by relative costs. What ultimately determines relative costs then? Marshalian partial equilibrium economics doesn't answer this question at all.
Umm. Relative costs are prices in their own markets?
Ok so prices are determined by prices which are themselves determined by prices which are themselves determined by prices, endlessly. You're not explaining anything.
I'm sorry you feel that way, but I don't think further explanation is needed. Prices are signals+incentives that help demand and supply come into equilibrium, and this is true across the economy. What does this not help you understand that you need further explanation for?
In a perfectly competitive economy in a long run equilibrium, can you explain why a house has a higher price than a pen?
Classical economics has a simple and intuitive answer which is that there are more inputs going into the house than the pen.
>only in the case where products are homogeneous
As in, commodities?
>it creates bad models of what value is and how it's created, especially in people with only a superficial understanding of economics
If that's your metric, bear in mind that people use marginalist "subjective" theory to seriously argue Jeff Bezos literally personally created the entire value of Amazon. I think LTV looks pretty good in comparison.
I also don't think subjective value theory is much of a problem for the LTV, but on the transformation problem did you read Laws of Chaos? It's from 2020 and models the rate of profit as a statistical tendency across a range of labour/capital constitutions and claims that overcomes the transformation problem. The same way the labour content of commodities corresponds to their value in a statistical way, not causally, like spending lots of time making a paper cup doesn't raise its value, if that makes sense. It makes a fairly compelling case imo.
Every 15 years a new marxist claims to have salvaged the LVT, last time was Andrew Kliman.
Alfred Marshall was only partially marginalist, still keeping one foot in the classical tradition. I'd say it was the actual marginal revolutionaries who displaced the labor theory of value with the subjective one.
I find what you say about Marshall extremely surprising and I'm pretty sure you're incorrect. Marshall came after the early marginalists like Jevons and he's 100% a marginalist.
I agree he came after. On classical vs marginalist theories of value he said:
"We might as reasonably dispute whether it is the upper or the lower blade of a pair of scissors that cuts a piece of paper, as whether value is governed by utility or cost of production."
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Alfred_Marshall#The_Cambridge_Neoclassicals
I do not think this is correct. Under perfect competition and in the long run, price of goods would converge to the marginal cost of production. But this marginal cost of production would still be affected by non-labor factor costs (e.g. land if it scarce.) Hence, labor theory would still be wrong.
The hat was 'peacocking', which was definitely a part of Game theory.
One of these days I want to see a game theory approach to Game.
Thankfully this crowd has largely ignored the pickup artist link. I was not looking forward to the cargo culting that was going to go down if they tried to discuss that one.
Because as you hint, the hat was completely meaningless. It was the peacocking that was important. That long weird rant was nearly entirely missing the point.
And no, that guy didn't get any more or less action than any other pickup artist of the era. He was good at PR and got lucky with a journalist writing about him. Plenty of other aspects to game that worked back then (and some that still work today).
So even if someone writes a 10,000-word essay on Mystery's Hat, anyone who reads it will be no more educated on how any of that works than before the essay. Better to read a few Rational Male essays, or read the book on Mystery and his crowd that originally sparked off the fad.
Yeah, the problem is a lot of the gambits are much more risky in the post-#MeToo era, when everyone is supposed to 'believe women'. I think that's why stuff like 'Fresh & Fit' is so popular--better to just make yourself more physically attractive, they can't fire you for working out and it has other benefits. Or things like entering the trades where HR doesn't have power over you, or if possible making money and leaving the country.
A lot of guys (myself included, frankly) are effectively doing MGTOW even if we don't really call it that. As always, humans adapt, and if the modern urban monoculture passes away from low birthrates...well, the Christians will take over, and more power to them.
Ceterum, censeo feminism esse delendam.
I interpreted the original post as using the hat as a synecdoche for "things that many women find attractive but don't want to admit they find attractive, and which men do not perform out of embarrassment," a category which includes peacocking. It's the literal hat being discussed sure, but the hat is also a symbol.
> Better to read a few Rational Male essays, or read the book on Mystery and his crowd that originally sparked off the fad.
Better still - just buy the damn hat. Who needs to READ? This hat is a magic hat that gets you laid!
Coincidentally, I have just started a magic hat business, and my website is....
;-)
Well that's just a theory. A GAME THEORY!
Also, he didn't just get laid because of the hat, but because he was very persistent and methodical, instead of going into a pit of self-loathing after the first 100 rejections.
I'm willing to bet that Mystery's success had far more to do with him being white, facially attractive, and tall (6ft5) than wearing a stupid hat.
Furthermore, the linked article "Do Men Even Like Women Anymore?" is incredibly stupid and shouldn't be taken seriously.
Re point Nr 10: Tall soldiers weren't only a fetish thing in Frederick's time, they were a standard form of infantry as grenadiers, supposed to be tall to look over the other soldiers when throwing hand grenades (and be strong enough for a good throw).
Frederick took it the furthest (tallest?), but other armies had them, too.
Wouldn't that mean they have to be mixed in with the other soldiers? If you have an entire regiment of tall soldiers, they can't look over each others' shoulders.
That is true:
"According to René Chartrand, Jean Martinet formed a grenadier company in the Régiment du Roi in 1667. By 1670 27 French infantry regiments were authorised to include elite companies trained to carry and hurl grenades.
The infantry of the Dutch States Army, influenced by their French invaders, adopted grenadiers in 1672. By 1678 six men in each company were trained to throw hand grenades, developed by the Dutch master fireworker Johan van Haren."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenadier
3 are YouGov questions. Polling USA is an aggregator
(I work for YouGov)
Sorry, fixed.
Here's my N=1 regarding 27.
Full disclosure: I am an early-career mathematician, with a around 1/1000 IQ (according to a single test dating from about two decades ago, compared to the general population) and empirical data suggesting that I am comfortably within 1/10^4 (compared to the general population, once again) in math test-taking. I am not particularly aware of the education literature (especially re US schools), but I believe that I have relevant experience (by having done some teaching -- crucially, *not much*, so the challenges are fresh in my mind -- in quite varied environments) .
The reason why I would not expect teacher intelligence to meaningfully substitute for teacher experience (at least in the setting of the experiment, where you replace a seasoned teacher with a rookie) is because, while a teacher's goal is to make students learn material (more cynically: pass a test), this involves very different dynamics than "just explaining what the students have to know".
It involves paying attention to the students and noticing when your explanations have lost them. It involves flexibility to reformulate everything again and again until what you say finally resonate with their brain. It involves the need to understand what they are currently thinking to be able to spot as swiftly as possible (because their focus, or your patience, or your time, is limited!) what the issue is.
More importantly, it involves staying on top of a precarious social dynamic with a group of fickle children or teenagers (most of which do not wish to be there) which involves a mixture of cajoling, threats, genuine motivation, the ability to deal with situations as they arise (student X is barely containing their tears, children Y is throwing a tantrum, guy Z just walked up and left in front of the whole room, students W and T disrupt the class by asking useless questions, what do I do?) in a way that does not compromise your ability to actually teach (which will happen if you mishandle these situations because, remember, a significant fraction of students does not particularly like being at school and will take it out on you if the opportunity arises, or if there's a bad day).
They may be a part of intelligence, but it is not one measured on academic tests, whereas experience will tend to give someone tools to deal with these kinds of problems.
Your fresh rookie, even if they're an IMO perfect scorer (especially so, since it meant they put work in optimizing for solving IMO problems rather than stay ahead of social dynamics without pretending too hard that they exist -- or even simply about "explaining easy things", which is not always as straightforward as one expects), is a lot more likely to mess this up.
There's probably a trade-off involved, but I think it only becomes significant after the first few years of experience.
Yes, if anyone has spent any time in a modern classroom, they'll understand that there is more to wrangling a class than being "the smartest test taker".
Unexperienced teachers will be taken full advantage of by the budding little blossoms, whereas those with time under their belt will know the tricks and be wise to them.
Yeah, I wasn't expecting this based on importance of knowing the subject matter, I was expecting it because intelligence predicts job performance at almost all jobs, and performance in lots of skills you wouldn't necessarily expect to be linked to intelligence.
I am not disputing that. But one may believe that the aspects of intelligence selected for in the experiment (test-taking) and those that would serve a rookie teacher arriving in a classroom are not that well correlated. N=1 again, but I know the correlation breaks down for me. Heaven knows that “brilliant academic yet atrocious lecturer” is not an empty group, and the university setting is in most cases incredibly easier to manage that grade, middle or high school.
Would an intelligent person figure out a solution? Certainly, given time, with exposure to the various parts of the issue, thinking and experiment and discussing with colleagues.
Expecting their intelligence to save the day on the first time you’re in front of a classroom seems about as misguided as throwing a smart kid in a rough sea because if they were so smart, they should figure out how to figure out how to swim back to safety.
Intelligence should be expected d to reduce the number of years of experience required to reach any particular threshold.
I agree. But the point is that the rookies did not have the time to reach any threshold at all. That’s what a rookie is!
Hm, intelligence predicts success, but probably those studies are controlling for age or experience, or not? So I assume they find that for two persons of the same age or experience level, the more intelligent one is statistically more successful. Or are there comparisons for other jobs that say that an intelligent rookie is better than a less smart, but more experienced worker?
I feel like it's a pretty common experience that many of the better teachers are ones who struggled through material themselves to understand it. Those that learned it effortlessly can't as easily related to struggling students. Not universally true - I've had teachers who are brilliant and good teachers - but common enough.
How does intelligence compare to experience as a predictor specifically?
My guess would be that they multiplier by each other. An intelligent person learns more from each learning opportunity they experience on the job so after a decade they're far ahead of a less intelligent peer; but someone whose been around a lot longer can still have picked up more than a newbie.
For most jobs, there is a required skillset to succeed before you can compare the (nearly universal) benefit of intelligence. In the case of teaching (and probably many other fields), college (or other training) is less capable than first hand experience for populating that skillset. As a IC (chip) designer, I use little that I learned in my BS and have improved decade after decade. 33 years in, I am at the top of my game.
I've seen many people mention the interpersonal specificity of teaching, but the big, big one is behaviour management. Yes, subject knowledge is important, and yes, I'm sure to a certain extent behaviour management is correlated with intelligence, but teachers are already selected for intelligence Vs the population.
This really ties into a lot of the class size stuff: I fully believe class size doesn't matter in Japan because behaviour is excellent there, but in more challenging school behaviour management is *the* most important skill. My partner worked with a man who wasn't exactly the brightest spark of all time, but had twenty years experience wrangling recalcitrant, often criminal teenagers into getting a passing grade, which is a notably different skillset from getting A students to an A+.
Sure, but experience is not completely fungible with intelligence. For most tasks the gains to experience are probably something like logarithmic while the gains to intelligence are more linear or sigmoidal. Thus the interplay of the two is going to depend a lot on where in those distributions you're doing the sampling!
e.g. a more intelligent teacher with 5 years experience may best a teacher with 20 years experience, but a less intelligent teacher with 4 years of experience may best a more intelligent one with only one year of experience.
1. All teachers are fairly smart (even if you are below the median of college graduates, the fact that you are a college graduate probably means you are above the median of the general population). Additional smarts may not be so useful.
2. Too much smarts means that what is difficult for your students to learn is probably not difficult for you to learn. But you really have to "meet them at their level".
3. Not really related, but it is important to realize that a lot of the better performance of experienced teachers is not because experience makes them better but because they stay teachers while worse teachers find other jobs, through some combination of being pushed out and wanting to leave a job they are not enjoying (and may be obviously failing in).
These are very good points well worth reminding.
I am unconvinced of the "too smart to communicate with normies," argument. I have met very bright people who were poor communicators even with their peers but there is no shortage of exceptional people who are also exceptional communicators. I am reasonably bright; I hold numerous patents and have (had) IP (chips) inside your phone and other items about your house. I also grew up explaining things to my Down's Syndrome brother and sharing "Godel's Incompleteness Theory" with random people on public transit. Communication is probably the skill I am most lauded for.
It could be subtler, for instance a larger intelligence gap simply exacerbating poor communication skills which would tend to produce the strongest examples of bad communication when the instructor is exceptionally smart.
I've had many conversations about this over the years (I'm also a research mathematician). I think success as a teacher, particularly for mathematics is *anti-correlated* with mathematical ability. If you didn't struggle to learn the material, you can't really empathise with the students who do struggle. It's like asking a native speaker about the details of grammar - they can't explain it because it's just the way it is.
You also identify something that drives me up the wall regarding education research. The single most important factor in education is the teacher - while their subject knowledge is important their connection with the class is paramount. Teaching is an interpersonal process - if you're not allowed to control for variability in the teachers (approximately because the official line is that there are no bad teachers), then you're ignoring the most important variable in any experiment. I've been in a classroom often enough and long enough to know that the things that work for me (and even the things I can get away with) are massively different than what a colleague can do. If they try to emulate me, it's unnatural, the students sense it and it doesn't work (and vice versa).
These are all excellent points. I can certainly say that, when I was teaching, I was more effective several years in than I was initially, because I learned from my mistakes, and because I picked up new techniques.
But it is also important to note what is going on in the study. The abstract says they replaced experienced teachers with NOVICE teachers. So, unless those novices are super geniuses, the outcome is hardly surprising. Moreover, turnout among novice teachers is fairly high (in the US; I assume the same is true in Columbia). Those who quit are presumably relatively ineffective, so the pool of experienced teachers has had the least effective novices culled out, while the least effective teachers are still in the "novice" group, bringing down the average effectiveness.
My son, who attended a G&T program until the Powers That Be ended it, said the biggest change with “regular school” is that a lot of the kids didn’t want to be there or learn anything.
Not a mathematician or a teacher, but this was precisely what I thought as soon as I read the thing. Huge flaw in assumptions/conclusions, as is so often the case with these studies.
"15: Cremieux: The Ottoman Origins Of Modernity. The “Ottoman” bit is a distractor; the Ottomans fought the Catholics long enough for the Protestants to get a foothold, and then the Protestants established modernity. A useful pushback against the pushback that the Catholic Church never persecuted scientists or held back progress. I’m most interested in this post in the context of Cremieux saying he wrote it in two hours. Even I can’t work that fast!"
Okay, if anything is going to incentivise me to roll up my sleeves and spit on my hands, it's this kind of claim.
I'm reading the article and I want a bit more evidence, such as "gimme the names of these Eminent Scientists and High Human Capital folks what migrated to the newly Protestant regions of Europe".
But first, as a general response: thank you for saying the Catholic Church is a model of organised governance. I'm very surprised to hear this and it's always nice to get a compliment, even a back-handed one. Even if it is rather more reminiscent of Neil deGrasse Tyson's modern version of "Cosmos" with the cartoon villainy of Cardinal Borromeo versus that noted scientist Giordano Bruno.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKyLcoN122g
Secondly, I don't think Protestantism invented modernity as such, it invented capitalism. What really invented modernity was the Industrial Revolution, and that's credited to Britain, not the other North European Protestant states (is anyone going to claim that Sweden is responsible for kicking off science and technology explosion of progress?)
As for the "all the high human capital was in Protestant lands" - ah yes. The Enlightenment, precursor of modernity, with such figures as Voltaire, famously Protestant living in famously Protestant France.
Catholic control of universities stifled progress by quashing scientific enquiry? Yeah, I'll remain neutral on that one, but I will also point out that universities in Protestant countries also had confessional requirements. See Oxford and Cambridge, clinging on to fossilised remainders of their foundations under Catholic rule, where fellows were not allowed to marry (because in their pre-Protestant days, they would have been clergy). Harvard was benefacted by a Puritan clergyman and trained Congregational clergy until the 18th century; Yale was founded by Congregationalists and functioned pretty much as a seminary until the 19th century, and Princeton's founding came about as a result of a schism in local Presbyterian churches.
So when do you pinpoint as the date for the birth of modernity, and what exactly do you mean by that? If it's only "the wars of religion meant everyone fought themselves to a standstill and so had no energy left over to persecute anyone who came up with wild and wacky ideas", that doesn't mean "and thus science and hence modernity was born".
Darwinism was the big fight of the 19th century, well into the Period of Modernity, and more viciously prosecuted in the Protestant nations which were still mainly or majority pinned to Biblical literalism as a result of the Reformation principles. The Scopes Monkey Trial was rigged between both the fundamentalists and the evolutionists as a show trial to get publicity, and from that it was hoped attract interest and investment in Dayton to revive its economic fortunes, but that took place in a majority Protestant nation in the 20th 'we're all modern now' century.
I'll have to do more reading on this because I do think the history of the universities is fascinating, but I'll just end with Fr. Lemaître of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium who gave you the Big Bang theory of modern cosmology. You're all very welcome, no thanks needed 😀
The comments are still open at Cremieux's post, so you could ask your questions there.
I'm looking at things like this:
"Progress in Spanish scientist production diverges from the Netherlands and Britain right after Spain discovers a multitude of Protestant cells in the country, prompting it to implement isolationist laws"
This is the period 1558-59. Okay, so I hit up Wikipedia for the relevant period and what do I see in passing?
"Despite its immense dominions, the Spanish kingdoms had a sparse population that yielded a limited income to the crown (in contrast to France, for example, which was much more heavily populated)."
You don't think perhaps, maybe, possibly, just barely imaginably, it might be that "fewer Spanish scientists" because "smaller goddamn population overall by comparison to other nations"? No, no, you're right: as Crémiuex says, it's the "pernicious Catholic church" at fault here! TIL that there were assembly lines in European nations for "production" of scientists, like tins of beans!
Spain apparently had a Golden Age of the arts during this time, but yeah: if it ain't STEM it ain't worth a damn, right?
You quote it saying that production diverged at a point in time, shouldn't that smaller population have also applied it he past?
"And perhaps most interestingly of all, France managed to substantially but not wholly save itself from the madness of the Catholic Church by issuing the Edict of Nantes, providing its Protestants with some, but not all of the liberties they could have enjoyed in other parts of Protestant Europe"
If you don't mind me writhing around on the floor after reading things like this, then sure. As I said, I have no idea what measuring stick is being used here, but if we are supposed to take it that X proportion of scientists per Y thousand of general population is the natural level of "scientist production", then I submit that a country with a smaller population is going to have fewer scientists.
If it is 1% of your population will be Big Brain Science, then if you have a population of 1,000 and next door nation has a population of 5,000, you will have 10 scientists and they will have 50, and someone coming along just counting "how many scientists?" with no reference to anything else will go "Aha! the pernicious influence of the madness of the Church is to blame here!"
Though the ultimate conclusion seems to be less "Protestants ❤ science unlike those awful Catholics" but rather "Protestantism is fissiparous, which means it might want to burn scientists at the stake but can't muster the unified rule to do it".
So basically it's all one long "Religion dumb stupid fake, thus threatened by Science, thus hates and represses Science" article.
EDIT: For example, it quotes a paper by Matías Cabello, who in turn quotes something about Descartes:
"self-censorship occurred, such as that of René Descartes, who, “though living in the Dutch Republic, far beyond the reach of the Inquisition, was ‘so astonished’ by Galileo’s fate ‘that [he] almost [took] the decision to
burn all [his] papers, or at least to let no-one see them’ ” (Parker, 2013, p. 654)."
Looking up that book from which the quote originates, it's "Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century" which is all about how there were severe climatic shocks, famines, wars, and revolutions all over Europe (and even touches on China) during that century. So whatever about Descartes' state of mind, I'm thinking that the war, famine, etc. had as much a part to play in affairs.
I think an interesting counter-argument would be "What if no Protestantism?" If the Church and secular rulers did not have to crack down on dissent and revolutionaries threatening their power, would there have been less 'heresy-hunting' and more tolerance of intellectual exploration? If SCIENCE! had not been a banner waved to challenge religious faith, but instead a discipline like others useful in secular life?
The piece could equally be interpreted as "The Catholics beat off the Ottomans, thus giving the Protestants room and peace to grow, and the Protestants were the handmaidens at the birth of modernity because they were too weak to stifle it in its cradle, much as they might have wished to do, because they had worked like termites nibbling at the foundations to weaken all social controls".
I don't think it's the smaller Spanish population. In fact Spain was doing fine during the first half of the 16th century.
I do have an issue with the paper in that I think it ignores several factors (late Counter-Ref in France, distinct Jesuit suppression by country, etc) which not only explain the differences between countries, but fit the author's own data better. If you are interested, I wrote a reply to Cremieux (you can find the link in my other comment. Don't want to link twice). Feedback would be appreciated.
I've seen a lot of this kind of reinterpretation of the development of modern academics. I agree with you that blaming Catholicism for "inhibiting progress" often amounts to just misconstruing preceding academic developments as impediments to progress. It's like saying the Falcon 9 slowed the invention of Starship. If only they'd have started building Starship first, we'd have it by now, instead of wasting time on Falcon 9 - no word on whether one invention led to the other.
A few years back I read a series about Galileo (can't remember where, sorry) that discussed how he was essentially arguing against the other natural philosophers (i.e. 'scientists') of his time, and he'd failed to respond to many of their legitimate objections - instead ignoring or oversimplifying them in his counterarguments - which was why the old guard didn't buy his assertions at first. It wasn't science vs. religion in any way we'd recognize that today, but rather reasoned argument versus reasoned argument. This trend, where the less-developed-but-true argument from up and coming scientists is initially rejected by the establishment isn't anything we've gotten away from. What's that old saying about science being advanced one funeral at a time? It's just comforting to some to tell a neat little story about how one religion or another got in the way of progress. Sometimes precursors don't look like the finished product, but that doesn't mean they're unnecessary.
Whenever I read the actual history, those neat little stories tend to go away and we get back to the old story: "Two groups argued about something, which was unknowable until later when we got enough data to support one side. Now we call one side Righteous and the other Villainous." There, but for the grace of God, go I.
> A few years back I read a series about Galileo (can't remember where, sorry) that discussed how he was essentially arguing against the other natural philosophers (i.e. 'scientists') of his time, and he'd failed to respond to many of their legitimate objections - instead ignoring or oversimplifying them in his counterarguments - which was why the old guard didn't buy his assertions at first. It wasn't science vs. religion in any way we'd recognize that today, but rather reasoned argument versus reasoned argument.
Was it The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown? https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-table-of.html
The author makes these points, plus one other that gives important context: *Galileo was wrong.* He believed in Copernicus' model, which was so terrible that virtually all of his contemporaries could see it was obviously wrong. It did put the sun in the center, but there's far more to a solar model than that, and on virtually every other point, Copernicus's model was significantly worse than competing theories. And Galileo stridently taught that it was true.
Meanwhile, Kepler, the guy who actually produced the *correct* model of the Solar System, was a contemporary of his. Galileo was aware of his work, but dismissed it out of hand because he found Kepler's elliptical orbits aesthetically displeasing.
Yes! Thanks for finding it.
Not only that: Kepler actually received active support from the Jesuits, who gifted him a valuable telescope and even offered him a university position, assuring him that conversion would not be required.
I agree with all of this - history resists being lined up in a neat narrative, with a single cause and single effect. Prussia in the nineteenth century is probably the epitome of a high-culture Protestant nation state. While they had some world class artists, philosophers and mathematicians (Bach, Kant, Gauss) the country was considered backward, dull, rural, unsophisticated in the rest of Europe, and not considered much at all beyond. They were potato farmers and not particularly wealthy ones, in the popular imagination and in reality.
I wonder whether the fact that English speaking countries are predominantly protestant is at the root of all of this? Certainly the anti-Irish anti-Catholic prejudice burned into the soul of British discourse (it's faded a bit in recent decades, but it's still there under the surface) and US popular culture has something to do with it. It would be interesting to see if such ideas are popular in other languages.
There’s some joke hiding in here about Protestants owing more to Lepanto and Our Lady of Victory than they realize
> famously Protestant France
I thought it's one of countries where religious peace (between Catholic and Protestant) is enforced early? Now I wonder if Voltaire is from the Protestant side of France.
On 4, my prior would be very strong that the true impact of wildfire smoke on health outcomes is linear or convex, just based on the fact that that seems to be the case for almost everything that's bad for you[1]. I'm very skeptical that the true relationship is concave. The link does a good job of admitting that this may be due to people behaving differently to protect themselves more when smoke is worse, which seems plausible to me. I suppose in some sense, this might mean the total downstream impact could be concave when you include behavioral changes, but I still feel a bit uneasy with the claim that the impact of wildfire smoke on health outcomes is concave.
[1] Except perhaps being exposed to pathogens above some level that's high enough for them to infect you, but that's because pathogens can replicate within you. I can't think of anything else, but curious to know if anyone else can?
>on health outcomes is linear or convex, just based on the fact that that seems to be the case for almost everything that's bad for you[1]. I'm very skeptical that the true relationship is concave.
Well, some ill effects saturate at very large dosages, because someone can't be killed deader than dead... ( or the national belligerence equivalent - the extra nukes just make the rubble bounce... )
I came here to make the same point.
A concave curve would only be expected if the population varies wildly in susceptibility. Another example here might be allergens: the susceptible part of your population would be killed by fairly small doses, the rest when the concentration becomes so high that they die of some unrelated mechanism (like choking on pollen). For the direct health effects of wildfire smoke, there is likely some decades-old paper where someone subjected animals to some smoke and determined LD_50, and I would bet that they did not find a concave curve.
I tried browsing through their paper, but failed to learn anything (beside (a) they are using latex, but with very wide line spacing (b) all their plots are in the appendix).
One of their metric seems to be ER visits. It could be that the population varies strongly in susceptibility to seek medical aid for symptoms. I guess some will insist going to the ER for some coughing and others will insist that they are fine even as their SpO2 keeps dropping.
Of course, deaths and ER visits are inadequate to measure the costs of wildfires, especially if people change their behavior: staying indoors or evacuating are also costs.
So, the TL;DR of this paper might be 'people presumably change their behavior to avoid bigger dangers, hence smaller dangers might sometimes affect more people'.
3: Wow, popular opinion of Ancient Sparta is far too positive. They spent all their time engaged in negative sum work on training their military skills so that they could enslave their neighbors, make them do all the work, and contribute nothing to society themselves.
It’s probably a combination of popular media portraying them as extremely effective freedom fighters for the Greeks (i.e. 300) and latent pro-Spartan sympathies that have been passed down by our most useful sources on them, like Xenophon.
More directly, it’s probably also all the sports teams named “The Spartans”, though your explanations are probably part of why these teams exist.
Exactly
https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/
Sparta definitely is in my list of the ten most hellish societies.
Also, why is the Roman Empire rated higher than the Roman Republic (which I am assuming is what they mean by 'Roman Republican')?
And it's not like they were particularly good at we either - their battle score is mediocre at best even when fighting peers.
I must thank you, Scott, for reminding me of Mark Changizi. I read about him years ago but forgot his name so I could not find his work for too long.
> 36 - Europe bad at startups.
And good at legislation of course. The recent DMA is stopping innovation that benefits consumers, while making it difficult for small traders on the App Stores, who now have to publish their name, phone number and address. A non starter for bedroom developers.
There’s a dearth of capital in Europe too. Stripe was founded by two guys from Ireland but capitalised in the US. Europe has plenty of human capital - these guys were from a tiny village in Tipperary.
There’s some discussion at EU level about this
https://www.politico.eu/article/mario-draghi-report-european-competitiveness-common-debt-innovation/
But not enough.
I wonder if the problem is the EU itself. Europe was dominant when it was nationalistic, we don’t want the wars back but the inter national competition. A European inter national competition for the best startups televised.
Where Europe does compete amongst itself or in other competitions, like sport, it does pretty well. Even the Eurovision has upped its game.
It seems to me like it should be pretty easy to test the hypothesis that the EU is the problem. E.g. did SE/FI/AT stagnate after 1995 compared to NO/IS/CH?, did GB boom compared to IE after Brexit?, and so on.
I’m not really advocating for anybody to leave the EU - there are other benefits - and I despise Brexit but for the EU to use nationalism within its own structures to foster competition on applied science and technology. Europeans are loyal to their country, not the EU, which doesn’t even have a sports team (and if it did no one would support it).
And unlike the U.K. - another multi national project - there’s really no attempt to create a super national identity, except to call Europe a garden or to proclaim that certain relatively new values (like lgbt) are distinctive to Europe when they are neither universal within the EU, or unique to it. As for what is common to Europe historically - like Christmas - the EU seems a bit reluctant to mention it, if their internal documents are to be believed.
But you get an Italian pretty excited about Italy, and if there is a competition to give the eu funds to the best startup across Europe then the Italian people and their governments might find coming last might change their mind on startups.
I agree with harry Lime
> In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
We don’t need the terror, murder and bloodshed but the competition.
> We don’t need the terror, murder and bloodshed but the competition.
But is that even possible in Europe? Sure, maybe if the entire continent was united under one flag... but the only way that's happening is with a lot of the former.
The chart specifically breaks out European non-eurozone, with Sweden being in that part.
I'm aware of that. I don't think that helps us test the hypothesis that the EU is the problem. To do that, I think we'd need to compare within pairs of similar countries that joined the EU at different times (or where one never joined, or where one left), like DK/SE & SE/NO.
Another data point: Daniel Ek who founded Spotify in Sweden eventually set up an American HQ in NYC. That HQ grew to be bigger than the one in Stockholm, though decision-making was split between people in both.
Another comment under this article mentioned that companies in Europe are hard to scale. In tech this has the side effect of limiting the educational/apprentice opportunities to learn certain skills. Eg. In the US there are plenty of people who did a stint or two in big tech then shifted to smaller companies or startups where they could bring both technical and organizational know-how (describing the positive case, plenty of meh faang engineers just used their resume as a hammer in technical discussions).
My loosely held bet is that this is partially why there are so many OSS contributors from Europe: that's the sort of development work one can do there and get exceedingly good at it, eg. Single small/mid-sized monolithic codebase, usually aimed at running on a single machine (Linux, gnome, etc).
I think it's because of the legal requirements for scaling a company which makes it better to stay under some size eg. 100 before more costly auditing and reporting requirements kick in.
I'd love to get some actual data for this instead of vibes though
Yeah that was my comment - but my own post on this very much vibes-driven. I'm fairly certain there's many regulations that only apply to (or at least enforced on) large companies, and that people are friendly towards start ups but suspicious of large companies - but it'd be great to see some data on this if anyone has it!
Note only is the EU hostile to tech at home, it's doing it's best to keep international tech companies out as well.
https://stratechery.com/2024/the-e-u-goes-too-far/
The chart on 36 is very confusing... can it be right? Suggests Europe's combined tech cap is <1 trillion, but the top 2 tech companies here are worth about 0.5... And almost the entire US cap is driven by three companies, so even if it's right, it's misleading. And finally, the difference in company formation per capita between the US and the UK is about 20% - can that really explain the difference?
Personally, I think what Europe lacks is not entrepreneurs and start-ups, but the inability to scale companies - https://logos.substack.com/p/start-ups-and-tax-rates
The chart is for software and computer services, so it will exclude, e.g., ASML.
Yeah, I think it's pretty cherrypicked to the point of being misleading. Most other measures (e.g. number of startups/unicorns, total tech sector size) still have Europe far behind the US but not to this ridiculous degree.
Breaking out eurozone from non-eurozone rather than EU from non-EU is another weird feature. (Helps get Spotify out.)
The associated twitter thread is much more about the challenge of funding and running any small or growing business than about "start ups" in technology specifically. The tax issues described very much highlight how impossible it would be to scale a small start up in italy without running afoul of the tax authority or effectively bankrupting your business to comply with taxes.
#20 is extremely misleading. It’s not technically cryo AND it’s a research program only available in very limited geographic areas
As the article notes, aggressively fighting small fires eventually results in a massive one that cannot be contained. Even if it ends up being totally true that high smoke concentrations are only marginally worse than medium smoke concentrations, these mega fires are a massive risk to the environment and communities. Most plant species in fire prone areas are adapted to either tolerate or reseed themselves in the event of a fire, but the mega fires burn too hot for this to work and everything gets destroyed. Smaller fires are also easier to control and prevent from entering your local community, even if you let them continue to burn otherwise. I also suspect the larger fires impact vastly more people since it takes longer for the smoke to disperse, so any non-linear effect curve of the smoke on an individual must be counter-balanced with the number of people affected. Small fires in Canada affect nearly no-one, the big 2023 fire in Canada caused around 200k home evacuations, directly killed 8, and the smoke affected much of Canada and the US, as well as reached all the way to Europe and China. https://www.preventionweb.net/news/2023-canadian-wildfires-impacted-air-quality-far-away-europe-china
And if we care about the environment in the "let's maintain healthy ecosystems and not drive even more species to extinction" sense, eliminating fires from areas where all the local species have adapted to regular fires and some even rely on fire seems like a bad idea.
I'm glad someone commented on this - we've tried this approach and it's terrible for ecosystems, and also dramatically increases the chances of catastrophic damage, stochastically applied through fire-prone areas. I would think that part alone is obviously far worse than a broad-based, slight health impact from smoke pollution from frequent, low-intensity fires. Ask someone if they'd rather live somewhere there's a 1/20 chance of catastrophic fire destroying their home every year, or somewhere where there's smoke pollution that might reduce their lifespan by 5% overall.
But when that massive fire destroys your home and incinerates you, you will, albeit briefly, have such clean lungs!
"Here the black line indicates that the average European of 6000 BC would have had genetic IQ 65 (compared to modern 100)"
The standard deviation of the polygenic score doesn't trivially correspond to a standard deviation in IQ. They're looking at genes associated with higher intelligence, which by definition, are not equally distributed within the modern population, and looking at how their frequency has changed. If (making up numbers) the average European has 50% of the genes that go into the PGS, and the standard deviation in that number is 10%, then Europeans in 6000 BC had only 25% of those genes. But it doesn't follow that they had 2SD lower IQ.
Could someone explain the chart on 36? Seems to me that Eurozone and the US is almost the same. That Eurozone occasionally pops up above the US.
Edit: Are they using both dark blue and medium blue to represent the US? If so I get it and very stupid chart.
The US is dark blue. The EU is red and stacked in top. It’s not behind the US chart. The other blue is non EU Europe, probably mostly the U.K.
Russia? UK doesn't have its own social media, Russia's VK and Yandex are used in ex-USSR as well
You never know if Russia is included in charts about Europe or not.
It’s non-euro Europe, so it is probably mostly Sweden and the UK but maybe Switzerland or Denmark or whatever.
I agree, the chart is very bad. There are 4 colors in the plot but only 3 in the legend.
But that's not the worst part. Charts like this where the data is "stacked" are very hard to read. If the data were plotted as separate lines, the relative sizes would be easy to compare. There is a really great book, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" that covers this problem and many others.
But thats the point of the doing it as a stack area chart. The point of the chart is to highlight how insignificant non-US tech companies are. They are barely legible in the chart!
One of Tufte's teachings is to have a reason for displaying the information in the way you are displaying it. I think the chart does a great job on that metric.
The point of the chart is that, compared the US, Europe's Tech economy is so anemic as to be effectively non-existent. The point of displaying the information this way is that the US area dominates so completely that you can't read the Europe data.
2. From the studies release so far, I don't actually see good evidence that we should expect Cobenfy to improve negative symptoms. In their phase 3 study, Cobenfy actually was worse than the antidopaminergics in improving negative symptoms. I will shamelessly include my writeup on that trial here: https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/a-new-therapeutic-for-schizophrenia
49. I am one of those "Prominent Substack Psychiatrists" - thanks Scott for sharing!
Wasn't it King Frederick of Prussia who invented goose stepping as a marching technique? I once read that his idea was to detect and punish soldiers who were drunk on duty, because apparently it is almost impossible to goose step convincingly when drunk, although I've never tried it. (If it works then maybe traffic cops should ask drink drive suspects to goose step twenty paces, instead of just walking along a straight line! :-)
Right, now I'm off to Wikipedia to check my facts. It'll probably turn out that goose stepping was actually first used by the ancient Greeks or someone!
The traffic cops will have to stop a bunch of drivers at the same time to see if so they can goose step synchronized.
LOL. According to Wikipedia, it was the Prussians who first started it, but not the guy I mentioned. It is also hard for a line of goose stepping marchers to coordinate their steps, and at first they have to train with arms linked to shoulders like a high kicking chorus line.
#28. I’m skeptical. I know haidt has claimed that conservatives are better at this type of task than progressives which seems to contradict the claim that no one can tell the difference.
I took it and scored 7/10. It forced me to say whether i was d or r which makes me not love the methodology. (You can say other / ind, but then instead of being given actual clarifying options, you have to just pick d vs r. I’m Libertarian)
I too took it and got 7/10, and am Republican. One I got wrong I still find hard to believe I got wrong. It was an "I'm a Republican because..." and was so stereotypical I thought it had to be faked, but they say it was not. Yet it even ended with "Merica!"
I don't know if different people got different ones to evaluate.
Ha! Must have been different. I’d remember that! Yeah, that makes me wonder if the “i am a” writers were playing with the researchers.
10. Scott omitted the 1 (one) reasonable reason to have tall soldiers: "Some sources state that there was a military reason to create a regiment of "long fellows" because loading a muzzleloader is easier to handle for a taller soldier." (just before his quote). Fun fact: There is a hot-dog brand named after them: Lange Kerls (long guys). The cans used to depict those long soldiers, too, but they dropped the pics in this woke century of us.
>we’d expect to see higher genetic IQ in populations that got agriculture earlier.
Prior to agriculture, hunter-gatherers living at higher lattitudes had higher IQ and then they got agriculutre later, so these effects largely cancel out.
Most of the places that first adopt agriculture later had their population replaced by pastoralists from somewhere else, Indo-Europeans in Europe and India, Arabs in the middle east etc. East Asia is the only place that still has it's original farmers as far as I know, except places that adopted farming much later like Papua New Guinea.
Indo-Europeans were agriculturalists before they invented spoked wheel. Arabs probably switched at breeding efficient camels. While Arabs spread their language and religion a lot, their genetic impact is much less smaller.
Unpopular opinion - I'm not so hot on the normalization of surrogacy, and equating it with progress. It seems rather unhuman to me, to offload the ravages of pregnancy on to some lady who is then not allowed to have a bond with the kid that came out of her own body.
Proposed remedy: instead of banning the practice, give the birth mother the option to be a third legal parent - not waiveable ahead of time.
Yeah, it is far from obvious that surrogacy is ”progress”.
Yeah, I put it in the "you should be able to freely sell your organs" category. It probably should be legal, but think it's obviously ethically messy because of the risk of the process, likely info asymmetries, and difficulty in ensuring legal protections etc.
Pregnancy is much less riskier than being F1 driver, pro boxer, bodybuilder and of course serving in private military company.
However, pregnancy is much riskier *for women* than any of those things. Pretty much no one gets hot and bothered about male-gendered risks.
In OECD, mother mortality is about 10^-4
In F1, three drivers died because of crash since 2000. 25 seasons, 20 drivers per race. So driving full season in F1 (which has about same duration as pregnancy) in Formula 1 is 60 (sixty) times more dangerous than giving birth.
would you want to ban women from being F1 driver?
Yep, I think many would argue that these should be illegal (noting that private military is illegal in many countries, bodybuilding is de facto illegal because it requires that you take controlled substances, which are the main source of the risk).
For most of these it's probably a case of ensuring that participants are aware of the risks beforehand, and have enforceable contracts with compensation if things go badly - so legal and regulated is probably the way to go. I guess this is more difficult in international surrogacy, which I think is more "ethically messy", but also with a greater upside for the women in lower-income countries. So I'd definitely promote ways of making it work better (e.g. surrogacy visas, or special bilateral agreements).
Without some sort of "sanctity of life/birth/motherhood" argument, I find that perspective really hard to understand.
Like, it sounds like you're describing some dystopian system where surrogates are drafted by lottery. In reality (at least in the US) it's voluntary and compensated. And you can't even volunteer if you've never been pregnant.
I do not think this person has any real world experience with people involved in surrogacy. The idea the surrogate is "some lady" is just bizarre.
> sounds like you're describing some dystopian system where surrogates are drafted by lottery
Did I say such a thing? AFAIK they are drafted by market forces, aren't they?
Also to Julian below: "some lady" is short for "some lady who most likely has no connection to the original couple's desire to have a child"... if you have real world experience, is that not accurate? How?
"drafted by market forces" seems like a very uncharitable way to describe every human who has ever responded to economic incentives, but sure
from another comment I think I understand your perspective a bit better. you're not against surrogacy per se, you're against allowing women to preemptively sign away rights to children they've carried and birthed? if so, while I still don't agree, I can at least imagine a coherent worldview that includes that stance.
yep that's the idea. tentative as always, and quite theoretical since I don't know any case up close.
The third parent proposal seems incredibly complicated considering all the laws based around parenthood and 2 parents.
It’s definitely a grey area, but if the surrogate is happy, the parents happy, and the incentives not *too* exploitative, it seems sad to ban the practice, as both many children, and much happiness will be left out of the world.
I'm not even suggesting to ban the practice. The technology involved is effectively three-way reproduction, and it has been proved safe enough, so technically speaking it is progress. I'm very happy for any group of three people who wishes to have a child together (I'm sure they exist!), and get to do it that way.
I'm not just not comfortable with one of the three people —the one who actually brings the child into the world, no less— being contractually barred from having a relationship with the child.
There are rights we don't allow people to sign away; I'd (tentatively) consider this to be one.
I disagree, but I understand your position and I think it’s fair.
Personally I’m more pro-signing away your rights so long as significant exploitation doesn’t occur.
The example I’d think of is selling your organs. I’d say we should avoid homeless people being compelled to sell their organs to pay for food and housing. I see it as a huge loss for society that healthy productive people who are 50-50 on donating a kidney for charitable purposes, who would be willing to do so wholeheartedly if they were given a few dozen thousand dollars as a bonus to compensate them for the inconvenience, pain and small risk.
If a woman just likes being pregnant, or doesn’t mind, I see no problem in compensating her for her time, slight health risk, and inconvenience.
You're not allowed to pay a woman to have sex with you, because it's potentially exploitation. You are allowed to pay a woman undergo nine months of pregnancy. That's...not potentially exploitation? Make it make sense.
"I don't understand why prostitution is illegal, Selling is legal, fucking is legal. So why isn't it legal to sell fucking? Why should it be illegal to sell something that's legal to give away?"
-George Carlin
That WOULD make it make sense.
I think we still under-appreciate the harms from even low levels of air pollution. In addition to all of the acute health events highlighted in the paper there is a growing list of chronic diseases (including all the big ones and probably psychiatric ones too) being associated with particulate pollution.
Re 27: Imo, for being an effective teacher of a large primary school class, “classroom management” is by far the most important skill. More experienced teachers are much better at classroom management than new teachers both because many teachers who are bad at it drop out (so the teachers who remain are on average better), and because classroom management skills ramp up dramatically in the first few years. So this result is very intuitive to me.
I expect for 1-1 tutoring the situation is different.
#4 isn’t this basically the same for smoking? That is, harm increases less than linearly with concentration of dosage with respect to time. So smoking 1 cigarette a day for 7 days is worse than smoking 7 cigarettes in 1 day ( or at least that what I read at some point).
32: Notice the discussion below the post. Another scholar argues, if I got the gist right, that David Roman puts too much emphasis on the preservation of the physical books, which is necessary but not sufficient for the survival of their content. Most (not all) of the texts did exist in some form in Europe, but they were essentially collecting dust in monastic attics and nobody would have cared much if it wasn't for Muslim scholarship that developed and commented on the *content* of the texts. David Roman and the commentator broadly reach agreement.
Europe didn't receive Roman texts from muslims. It was the Byzantines.
Only after David Roman does a massive U-turn, repudiating his own click-bait headline.
I didn’t finish reading the David Roman post because it seemed to be about litigating grievances with some people who were nice to Muslims rather than about trying to emphasize what the accurate roles were. Rather than saying that many people believe exaggerated versions of a story that gets one important part of the truth, he sells it as though he is refuting something in a significant way. He doesn’t dispute that the translation of certain ancient texts from Arabic was far more historically influential on medieval and renaissance reception of the ancients than the copies that existed in Byzantine monasteries. He just disputes that the Arabic copies were literally the only copies.
Fun fact about feeding snakes - my favorite snake is a hognose snake (Heterodon genus, various species, at least three int the US). They're known (for good reason) as being the drama queens of the snake world (they play dead as a defense mechanism in a hilariously overdramatic way, as well as "pancaking" or "hooding" - google hognose playing dead for fun videos, if you're into that kind of thing). So they make very amusing pets.
However, in the wild, they (well, at least two of the species) eat almost exclusively toads and frogs. AFAIK, frozen thawed toads/frogs are not a realistic feeding option in captivity, and ethics aside, keeping a colony of toads around just to feed your hoggies is inefficient at best. They *can* get their nutritional needs met by eating frozen thawed mice, but they're usually averse to eating them, since they're not toads. The solution? Keep a single toad as a pet. Come feeding day, rub a thawed mouse on the toad to pick up the toad's scent. The hoggie will (sometimes with a little encouragement) then eat the mouse. Do this enough, and you can typically gradually ween the hoggie off the toad scent altogether, so they'll just eat regular thawed mice without the toad rubbing.
Presumably the toad lives a normal healthy life, at least for a captive toad. Well, normal except for the fact that once a week or so somebody rubs a dead mouse all over him.
Also, their genus name (Heterodontus) refers to their specialized teeth - they have rear fangs designed to "pop" toads. A toad being attacked by a snake will inflate itself as large as possible to become difficult to swallow. The toad poppers make short work of that.
Thank you, this was like a little bonus extra item! I also enjoyed how your comment started with adorable pet videos and then got gradually darker until you ended with the phrase "toad popper".
Also, thinking about this got me wondering - I get that there are ethical debates to be had regarding bringing an animal into this world for the sole purpose of being food for another animal (like the mice above). But in this scenario, the toad isn't even food - it's just a seasoning! What are the moral implications of existing just to be a dry rub? At the very least it's gotta be embarrassing for the toad.
Embarrassing? The toad is saving the lives of fellow toads!
This sounds like it could be an SMBC comic where aliens have abducted a human because they want to eat human-flavored vegetables or whatever.
43: It should be noted that what you quoted was not the original Ems dispatch, but Bismarck's summary of it, scrubbed of explanations of why the request was refused. The French translation of that summary that finally reached the French court made it more insulting through bad word choice. So it was basically a game of telephone that at least increased the casus belli.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ems_dispatch
Yes, it still seems crazy that this would be enough to cause war, but then again there is this wonderful quote that has been truth for most of human history:
"The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold. The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes."
"don’t know why the researchers chose to interpret the trend as necessarily constant and linear"
I'm guessing because linear is the most parsimonious (i.e. not overfit) for the latter 80% of the sample, and that trend serves to highlight the difference in the first 20% of the sample. It's a good expositional tool.
The whole curve looks like a dead ringer for some kind of log function though -- why bother with the earlier data if you only want to fit the more recent part?
(quite significant in that it's the difference between 'super-intelligent humans in another 100 generations' and 'we are probably not going to get much smarter')
I dunno, doesn't look logarithmic to me: the latter 80% looks pretty constant in slope and the change at ~20% looks like a rather steep structural shift that the smoothness of a logarithm would under-sell. Again, the line on the latter 80% is a good expositional tool to highlight that structural break.
RE: Koreans are not okay:
https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSOnline.jsp
According to the WVS, 85% Koreans say that they're "quite happy" on a 4 point scale (Not at all, Not very, Quite, Very), which is an outlier in lack of variation, but more people say they're "not very happy" elsewhere. Young people are slightly less happier than older people and men are slightly less happy than women, but effects are relatively small.
Apparently the "hell" thing is mostly just a meme (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Joseon)
As for migration, Korea still has one of the lower emigration rates in the OECD, comparable to UK or Germany, and return migration was high during COVID.
AirKatakana's data (which was https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/922522.html) was apparently from an unsourced 2019 Korea Women's Development Institute’s Gender Equality Policy Forum presentation, so unsure about the reliability.
Yeah I find the use of survey data for migration intentions a bit unconvincing when there are good statistics about actual migration.
Seems to me like the same people who might scoff at the number of Americans declaring they want to move overseas (say, if Trump wins), will be totally credulous about what statistics like this say about Korea. It's interesting, but got to keep in mind only a small minority of people will take serious steps to follow through, and you probably get pretty different answers depending on how the question is presented.
It would sound, then, like the chip embargo is more or less a success, if I'm reading that blurb correctly.
I think it's implying that, even though there is an embargo and China has relatively few top of the line graphic cards, the prices being low indicates that the Chinese AI industry is not as big and hot as some pundits would make us believe.
The point is that it doesn't even matter if it was a success because there is nearly no demand for them.
But would there have been a demand without the embargo (i.e., nobody's making plans that depend on something they know they won't be able to get in sufficient quantities)?
Re: 32 David Roman (no relation, though we share a hometown) also says that calling the Spartan helots slaves is 'misleading' and that 'much of what we understand as typically Spartan since was decreed by Lycurgus, whose example and teachings were strictly followed by Spartan citizens, and unquestionably revered for as long as the city remained independent.'
This is just blindly believing what the spartans said about themselves, when all the evidence we have suggests Lycurgus never existed and those teachings were never followed (since none of our sources about them suggest they are currently being followed, only that they were followed by their more virtuous ancestors). Brett Devereaux has a better treatment here https://acoup.blog/2019/08/23/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-ii-spartan-equality/ and here https://acoup.blog/2019/08/29/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-iii-spartan-women/.
This article was my first exposure to him and it's such a failure of critical reading that I dismiss everything else he has to say. The fact that he's a hardcore Trumpist leads me to assume he just writes to flatter conservative sensibilities.
Doesn't Xenophon say a lot of the teachings were being followed in his day? Granted he says they've declined, but the Classical World always thought everyone had declined, and he said they were still being followed somewhat.
He did, but following Devereaux's reading, there's good reason to doubt it. Mainly, Xenophon says that the current Sparta has degraded, but was equal and followed Lycurgus' teachings against accumulating wealth and living in luxury in the past, namely in the time on Herodotus. But in Herodotus' work, the Spartans (really the Spartiates, the elite citizenry to whom the internal equality was thought to apply) already had considerable wealth divisions and had plenty of luxury. Further back, the poets Tyrtaeus and Alcman survive in fragments less than a century from the foundation of the Spartan state, and depict a society which is both stratified and luxury-loving (we also get Plutarch in the 100s AD claiming that Spartan equality during Xenophon's time in the 300s BC, which clearly can't be the case.) Devereaux also cites archeological evidence for Spartiate luxury back to the formation of the state, when Lycurgus was supposed to have lived. This scholarship is now a half-century old, and a reconsideration of Sparta in academic history was in the works as early as the 30s. My impression is that this is roughly the consensus among scholars of this field.
Rather than a steady decline from a sparse, egalitarian, and martial (ie 'spartan') society to the luxury of each writer's present, the more likely explanation is that both existing practices and Sparta's preferred image of itself were attributed to Lycurgus, the perfect king who created all of Sparta's perfect traditions from whole cloth. Come on, his whole story ends with him going back to the oracle to confirm that his laws are perfect and then killing himself so that his followers, who promised not to change anything until he got back, would keep his laws forever. This is a mythic founder, not an actual lawgiver.
Some of those traditions/laws attributed to Lycurgus were being practiced in some form, like the formal systems of land parceling (kleios) and the elite organizational systems like the agoge and syssitia. But the notion of equality among the Spartiates, enforced by law and by a cultural distaste for luxury, seems to have been more of a fantasy of Sparta about itself (and of Sparta by Athenians in reaction to themselves) rather than an actual tradition that persisted for any length of time. Powerful people like shiny things.
I haven’t heard of him before but it was hard to stop rolling my eyes at how emphatic he was that there’s been a centuries long conspiracy to make Europeans believe Islam is good, and you can tell because people believe that Arabic copies of Aristotle were literally the only copies in existence, rather than merely being the copies that inspired the late medieval people to get interested in Aristotle.
32. I think it's clear that most of our knowledge of ancient Greek texts doesn't come from Arabic translations. Just pick up a Loeb Classic edition of your favorite Greek author and check if the alphabet on the left-hand page is Greek or Arabic.
Depends on what you mean by 'our'. The Loeb Classics first came out in the early 20th century. This thesis claims that, up until the 1200s, the greek originals were either not widely available in Western Europe or lost entirely (many being uncovered by archaeologists later), with important texts being available in fragments or in translation, some in Latin but many more in Arabic. Aristotle is one of the big examples, with much of his work being unavailable or simply unpopular in Western Europe until Arabic-Latin translations made him more accessible to scholars who spoke Latin but not Greek (I'm reminded of how St. Augustine primarily read in Latin (including the bible!), with his Greek being much less fluent).
Nowadays of course, we have easy access to many Greek originals, both those that spread previously in Latin/Arabic translation and those which were entirely lost to history until they were physically recovered later, including many plays.
The popular version I’ve heard many times is that only through the intercession of Arabic translators do the books survive at all, and this seems to be the thesis addressed in the linked piece, viz. “Arab scholars and translators saved the books of Graeco-Roman antiquity from being destroyed by the Christians and/or forgotten.”
The piece specifically mentions Aristotle as a writer reintroduced to Western Europe through Latin translations of Arabic; but of course the Greek Aristotle perdured in the East.
(I was puzzled at first because I had forgotten the first name of the author of the linked post, as assumed, his last name being Roman, he was you.)
It is, of course, hardly unusual for an accurate motte to be translated into a debatable bailey by the oral transmission of “intellectual urban legends.”
Which is all to say that I agree with you, but not with the cocktail party quippers.
> Arab scholars and translators saved the books of Graeco-Roman antiquity from being destroyed by the Christians and/or forgotten.”
That timeline doesn’t quite work. The Byzantine empire - which was Greek speaking - preceded the Arab invaders so why would they wait until the Arab invasions for the Christians to oppose Greek philosophy, which was there all along.
I think the idea would be merely that outside Muslim lannds the texts were neglected, and therefore lost accidentally as old texts will be. This has the advantage for leaning towards truth, in that may Classical works were lost through neglect. Although it has the disadvantage (as the article argues) of being false.
Agreed. Many introductions to the ancient classics have some sort of pedigree of the text (usually bought by rich Italians during the renaissance from the remains of a declining Byzantium and sometimes found in a refuse pile in Egypt).
I’ve read most of the Ancient Greek “Classics” (various older and recent translations) and I’ve never seen anything that is claimed to have been preserved by the Arabs. I presume this would be mentioned if it was the case, as it would be remarkable.
I can’t speak to the more obscure texts though as I haven’t read them.
There are some texts that have come down to us *only* in Arabic, e.g., several books of Diophantus.
Thanks. I haven’t read Diophantus yet.
I think the danger is extrapolating a general rule from a few exceptions. The Hebrew book of Enoch survives only in an Ethiopian copy, but it would be excessive to claim that the Hebrew bible exists to day only thanks to the intercession of Ethiopia.
teacher experience:
Many parts of teaching in class are a profession like each other, so experience etc should matter.
I'll be surprised if after controlling for basic class hiding etc skills, intelligence wouldn't be of great importance
6. So it seems that the genes for high intelligence are spreading, but (casual opinion) the smartest people in the past seem as smart as the smartest people now. This might make sense if intelligence is a matter of having enough of the right genes.
15. Cremieux-- should we believe he wrote it in two hours?
27. I can believe teachers need a solid basis for their subject matter, but more than that might not help.
15) sure - he’s not a good writer but he’s a great typist.
I’ve always kind of disliked the blame being placed entirely on the Ems dispatch, completely exonerating Napoleon III and France of any moral agency. It was, after all, France that actually *started the war.* Napoleon III had aggressive designs on the Rhineland - he believed, like most French nationalists then, that the rhine river was the ‘natural boundary’ of France, and strongly opposed German reunification, and had engaged in extensive saber rattling leading up to it (the Ems affair itself was caused by a dispute over a cousin of the Hohenzollerns being considered for the throne of Spain; even after said cousin withdrew his claim, France threatened war against Prussia unless they apologized and swore to prevent any relative from ever accepting the Spanish throne). It was thus fairly likely that war was inevitable, and only a question of when.
I think the story of the Franco-Prussian war was kind of retold after WW2 to make Bismarck look like a prelude to Hitler, while whitewashing the militaristic, adventurist nationalism of the second French empire.
I was raised in France, it seemed like a fairly well-known fact that France declared the 1870 war while unprepared and on a stupid whim, and the Second Empire did not particularly feel "whitewashed" (in the way that the First Empire still pretty much is).
I would also like to point out that there are good reasons to not want your small and divided neighbors to actually unite into a single sovereign state...
In Germany, history lessons and a contemporaneous television series about German history (Die Deutschen) portrayed the Ems dispatch as a scheme by Bismarck to force a war on the French. It was, I imagine, only fitting since nothing in my history books was critical of France. Earlier generations would have been raised with tales of Germany being devastated by the Robber King Louis XIV and its later sufferings under the Napoleonic yoke.
Right, this is how a German teacher taught history (in German) to me: the meeting between diplomats was not particularly tense, and Bismarck edited a report heavily in order to provoke the French. Reading up on it now - Napoleon III seems to have been very much aware that France was unprepared, and was pushed into war by irate public opinion. He was a sick man by then.
From Wikipedia:
"The Ems telegram of 13 July 1870 had exactly the effect on French public opinion that Bismarck had intended. "This text produced the effect of a red flag on the Gallic bull", Bismarck later wrote. Gramont, the French foreign minister, declared that he felt "he had just received a slap". The leader of the monarchists in Parliament, Adolphe Thiers, spoke for moderation, arguing that France had won the diplomatic battle and there was no reason for war, but he was drowned out by cries that he was a traitor and a Prussian."
This all seems bizarre to us, but "if you fire the shot, you are an aggressor, which is a crime" and "responsible statesmen don't behave as if countries were aristocrats provoked into duels" are 20th-century concepts. Perhaps the evolution towards them had already started, and was much more definite (though not yet legally enshrined) by the beginning of WWI - it would be good to have a historian pipe in on this.
Discussion of Marx/Rawls was great.
I think an underrated point left kind of implicit in those posts is that both Marx and Rawls base their arguments in *self-interest*.
Marx saw the proletarians as engaged in a class struggled purely to benefit themselves, as a class, and it just so happens that this will lead to a nice egalitarian society.
One you give up on Marx's theory of exploitation, there are still plenty of justifications to be a left-leaning egalitarian type. But many of them are either religious or have to make assumptions about moral facts that are hard to justify.
But then Rawls comes along. He is proposing a normative view of how society should be organized, but his argument for this also just requires agents acting in their own self-interest. Now, the agents he imagines behind the veil of ignorance are pretty weird ultra-risk-averse agents, but they are not altruistic in any way. As an argumentative premise people find self-interest much easier to swallow.
I also don't think the Rawlsian theory is very successful, but I think this -- showing that collective self-interest ultimately would develop into an egalitarian society -- is the appeal of both Marx and Rawls for religiously-disillusioned postwar 20th century secular thinkers.
> Now, the agents he imagines behind the veil of ignorance are pretty weird ultra-risk-averse agents
You are the second person who has said that here. But most people would have ended up in grinding poverty in the era Rawls was writing, the people behind the veil could be born anywhere on earth.
If there is one person on Earth living in grinding poverty, the Rawlsian maximin agent should be exactly equally worried as if there are many people living on Earth in grinding poverty. This is a little counterintuitive.
49. Thank you for sharing Scott, much appreciated!
Rodents:
Interesting article, but the paths to impact at the end were quite lame. Complaining to zoos in favor of "We’re not sure what the desired outcome should be" and pushing a specific brand name product that doesn't work. It implies that whole feeding f/t is somehow traumatic, it's not, it's no big deal at all, and I am curious if the author has actually ever owned a snake and purchased feeders as a consumer. As written this article is a worrying case of "EAs want my obligate carnivore pet to starve to death".
They should consider just opening their own ethical rodent company. It wouldn't even be that noncompetitive; on a single snake household order the dry ice can be 50%+ of the overall purchase price and that price is static. As the article discusses, it's not particularly complicated to bootstrap a rodent farm and there is essentially no licensure or training required. I expect there would actually be a lot of demand for a premium Ethically Raised Rodents snake food product, it could be a sustainable business.
> "I am curious if the author has actually ever owned a snake and purchased feeders as a consumer. As written this article is a worrying case of EAs want my obligate carnivore pet to starve to death."
I don't understand how you can get that from the article - it specifically recommends higher welfare standards for mouse breeders and some kind of improved version of Reptilinks as their proposed solutions.
I second Notmy Realname's take on this. The article is written as though this is a major problem, but fails to provide justification for that conclusion. More importantly, it is lacking actionable suggestions for snake owners.
We are told the numbers of rodents farmed by several of the major producers, across the globe. I actually learned something from this part, which is that US companies often sell rats shipped from China. However, we need a lot more info to be able to estimate QALYs. One highly relevant factor is the age of the rats killed. A newborn rat is hairless and cannot open its eyes; overall it looks and acts much like a human fetus of abortable age. No info was given on ages of rats or mice. The next important factor is the treatment the rats experience at the facility. Discussion of this comes in the form of anecdata, but the anecdata presented is indeed concerning. Numbers and frequencies would be nice. Less important from a utilitarian perspective is the method of death. Or at least from my view of it; if I assign a value of -100 utils to my own violent and painful death, then I might assign -99 utils to a peaceful and painless death. The dying is the main problem, not the pain, and the dying is a necessary part of the operation. I see death by CO2 vs blunt impact vs snake as little more than a rounding error since they are all quick. The article also mentions some cases of rodents dying slowly of injuries over the course of several days, a much more serious concern. This is both unpleasant for the rats and unnecessary for the operation, as injured rats cannot be sold, and should be addressed by daily or twice-daily checkups.
Reading the PETA article, it seems (and so I hope) that the investigated facility was much worse than normal and that other places are better. I do see one glaring case of lack of knowledge, where PETA wanted newborn rats to be killed by CO2 when in fact at that age freezing is faster and probably more humane.
Now, on to the important part, which is how to make things better. The two suggestions given in the article were to pressure zoos and to feed sausages.
Sausages are a really weird suggestion, and definitely take a bit to wrap my head around. But as a snake owner, it's something I can actually do, so I took a look at the Reptilinks website. Prices are about 2-3 times what I would spend on rats of the same size, could be worse. Sausages are made of ground chicken, quail, rabbit, bullfrog, and various others depending on which type you order. We are to believe they are raised humanely, because... they are sourced from local Ohio farmers? Wait, remember how those injured rats the article discusses could not be sold as feeders, and instead had to be discarded? That is because feeders are sold whole, and buyers would notice and object to injuries. With sausages there is no such limitation, and farmers can still get money from injured animals. Not a good incentive structure. The final clincher is that my ball python is picky (as in, often refuses to eat for months at a time, which is not uncommon for the species), and the website says if you have a ball python don't even bother trying.
One paragraph justifying sausages was mildly amusing, due to how clearly it was not written by a snake owner:
> Despite Reptilinks’ reputation, it seems to us like the status quo of whole animal feeding should in theory be extremely unpleasant for most people. Often, snake owners will keep frozen rodents in their main freezer, where they also keep food for human consumption. When feeding, snake owners need to thaw each rodent out in warm water before feeding. If the snake doesn’t eat the rodent right away, some snake owners will dangle the rodent by the tail in front of the snake for up to 15 minutes. Others may cut the rodent’s carcass open to make it more appealing to the snake. It seems implausible on its face that consumers would elect to keep doing this if there were more pleasant options available.
Yes, we keep rats in the freezer with raw chicken and other food for human consumption; of those, the raw chicken is the more dangerous. Yes, we may wriggle the rat (snakes only eat live animals, so to feed pre-killed you must trick the snake into thinking it is alive) for an annoyingly long time, let's make it take longer by using something that doesn't even look like food. The one form of unpleasantness they would help you avoid is seeing the face of an animal whose death you are responsible for, by grinding it into unrecognizable mush. But perhaps if we all had to face the animals we eat, perhaps, factory farming would not have reached the lows it has come to.
In theory, you could make better sausages. Offal and soy protein should indeed be investigated as ingredients. But unless someone figures out some magic to solve pickiness, my ball python will be sticking with rats. I don't want her to starve herself to death.
So, pressuring zoos. As Notmy Realname pointed out, we're to pressure them to "We’re not sure what the desired outcome should be, but there could be welfare standards". As the article discusses earlier, the American Zoo Association already recommends following the AVMA standards, which already forbid almost everything the article complains about. The breeder the authors visited was clearly not following those standards, but as far as I can tell from the article that breeder was also not selling to accredited zoos.
Based on all that, here are the suggestions I endorse:
1. Audit zoo suppliers to make sure they are following the standards they are supposed to be.
2. Make available to consumers information about which rodent suppliers treat their animals more humanely than others.
3. For snake owners, consider buying from the same suppliers that zoos buy from.
4. For rodent breeders, maternal instinct and aggression both have genetic components. Use a selective breeding strategy such as this one (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032579119448396) to reduce cannibalism.
5. Research snake nutrition to test viability of plant-based proteins, but this is a long shot.
I also think that starting your own ethical rodent farm could have some merit. However, I think it would be easier to investigate existing farms and recommend to consumers the ones that meet your welfare standards.
> The one form of unpleasantness they would help you avoid is seeing the face of an animal whose death you are responsible for, by grinding it into unrecognizable mush. But perhaps if we all had to face the animals we eat, perhaps, factory farming would not have reached the lows it has come to.
I don't consider it particularly unpleasant, but I do agree with the sentiment. We are keeping an obligate carnivore as a pet, the least we can do is acknowledge that a living thing has to die for it to live. These days the meat we consume is so divorced from the farms where it is produced that you don't need to notice, but I have whole, frozen rats in my fridge, which I fully acknowledge and am alright with, but am definitely aware of.
>For snake owners, consider buying from the same suppliers that zoos buy from
I already do, and I think most knowledgeable snake owners do as well; local breeders are a massive pain in the ass and often a rip-off, it's generally both cheaper and more-convenient to order from the big producers (rodentpro, perfect prey etc.). Unfortunately the article spends a lot of ink talking about local rodent production which is just not a big thing.
Reptilinks don't work. They are ok for Hognose that specifically want frog scent, but for pickier eaters that want warmth/mammals they do not work. Ball Pythons are one of the most common pet snakes, and Reptilinks' money-back guarantee specifically excludes Ball Pythons because they won't eat them. Reptilinks are not a realistic option and anybody who knows reptiles could tell you that. https://reptilinks.com/pages/100-money-back-guarentee . The paragraph starting "Despite..." is obviously not written by a snake owner, and probably by a vegan (based on the whole article) and it just hilarious as somebody who has a pet snake - it genuinely is not a big deal despite what this article implies.
The other proposed impact is to pressure zoos to "We’re not sure what the desired outcome should be". Notably they do not actually have specific complains about the large farms that most pet owners, large pet stores, and zoos purchase from, as they already have higher standards for economic reasons- yield matters and people won't buy messed-up rodents for obvious reasons. Any company that produced a substandard product would be named, shamed, and shunned.
As far as I can tell the only actual hands-on exercise in this article was on visit "breeder", actually just a small pet shop with a small feeder farm, which wouldn't really be considered a breeder compared to actual rodent producers. They provide a lot of imagery from this one tour, but don't acknowledge that the vast majority of feeder rodents are not manufactured in this sort of environment. The Welfare Considerations listed all hinge on these local farms which are not the majority and are not representative of the actual industry they are complaining about,
As I say in my original comment, I think there would actually be a lot of demand for 'ethically sourced feeder rodents', and it might be a good business opportunity but this article basically comes down to complaining about the "issue" but not providing any workable solution beyond making it harder for me to feed my pet.
On the other hand, I am quite concerned about the breeder reptile community, which is basically a reptilian Tulip Bubble where breeders focus on producing novel morphs (phenotypes), which can be extremely expensive. The breeder reptiles are raised in awful conditions. Live feeding is more prominent in breeders than anywhere else, see below.
Overall this is a very poor article that shows a total lack of knowledge of the industry, and as a result raises problems that don't exist, suggest solutions that are meaningless or ineffectual, and misses the obvious correct answer.
As an actual answer to your initial post, feeding snakes live is discouraged not due to rodent welfare but due to snake welfare; snakes generally win but over enough feeds snakes will get injured by the feeders. Sometimes the snake is also not hungry and then you're stuck with a new pet rat and nowhere to put it. Live costs more for a pet owner and has the obvious hassle of needing to pick up a live animal and feed it immediately.
However, live feeding is popular for small snake breeders, as they will generally have their own small farms for cost and convenience (heating up frozen/thawed is no big deal for pet owners but tedious and relatively expensive at scale) and when you farm live it's much more convenient to just throw the live into the snake's enclosure. Most snakes in snake farms are also babies who will be sold very quickly, they are fed very young mice/rats which don't pose an injury risk. This can cause problems for new owners, as young snakes 'started' on live may be hard to transition to eating f/t after purchase. Another better potential impact would be to look at snake breeders and encourage both better snake welfare, and feeding frozen/thawed in snake breeding facilities.
The article appears to have completely missed this, confident stating "We found no evidence that carnivorous animal farms, whether crocodilian or snake, represent a significant portion of farmed feeder rodent sales, instead relying on formulated diets composed of animal agriculture byproducts and some vegetable protein.", which is completely incorrect.
why can't you just microwave a dead mouse or smth
I used to just leave it to defrost. My milk snake was never picky about the food being dead/defrosted, but she didn't like eating in the open so we had to veil her tank when the food went in. Also she preferred white mice - no idea where that came from!
Microwaving tends to heat things unevenly and could burn the snake's mouth. A more commonly used method is to put it in hot water for 15 minutes or so (inside a bag so it doesn't get soaked and squishy).
It would explode. Trust me, you do not want to microwave a mouse or rat.
It's super simple; the day before I take one frozen rat out of my freezer and put it in the fridge in a ziploc bag in a specific cup I only use for this purpose. The next evening, I fill the cup with hot water and let it cool off a few times to heat the defrosted rat up to ~room temperature, then feed it to the snake.
>8: /r/BadMTGCombos: a simple 19-card combination of Leyline of Anticipation, Leyline of Transformation, Mirror Room, Darksteel Citadel, Sanctum Weaver, Freed From The Real, Abuelo's Awakening, Myrkul Lord of Bones, Zimone All Questioning, Birgi God of Storytelling, Siege Zombie, Desecration Elemental, Mirror Gallery, Clock of Omens, Parallel Lives, Life and Limb, Isochron Scepter, Narset's Reversal, and Molten Reflection can be used to deal infinite damage if and only if the Twin Prime Conjecture is true.
Whether the combo can do infinite damage is an interesting question, but largely academic. In tournament play, you are not allowed to just say 'I do infinite damage' when you have an infinite loop, you have to pick a number.
Since there are also infinite lifegain combos, people can go to any arbitrary but finite amount of life they say they have; you can't have infinite life, but you can have eg. 10^10^10^10 life.
So for any arbitrarily large amount of life they say they are that, there is a tournament-legal boardstate which hinges on the question, not of whether there are *infinite* primes, but of whether there are *at least that many* primes.
I believe in this boardstate, you are supposed to call a judge for a ruling.
there's a real tournament-legal play state that hinges on, not whether there are infinite primes, but
What if the judge isn't a mathematician?
"Whether the combo can do infinite damage is an interesting question, but largely academic. In tournament play, you are not allowed to just say 'I do infinite damage' when you have an infinite loop, you have to pick a number."
Why does this matter in real play? Don't infinity damage and 999999999 damage both add up to "your opponent is dead"?
If I have an absurdly high life total, and my opponent hits me with absurdly high damage, it makes a big difference which number is bigger, and that's a lot easier to work out when both numbers are finite.
Not necessarily, a platinum angel in play can prevent you losing the game at any amount of negative life total. However even for the case where your opponent is doing 999999999 damage to you it's possible to theoretically run your own "infinite loop" lifegain combo in response to their combo that nets you 99999999999999999999 life before their 999999999 damage loop resolves, thereby letting you live. You couldn't do this if they were able to hit you for "infinity" damage instead of merely 999999999 damage.
The most common reason it would matter is if someone has infinite life gain, and someone later has infinite damage. Or if you can gain infinite life in response to someone putting infinite damage 'on the stack.' The second person 'wins' because they can choose to name a higher number.
Then there are corner cases like cards which care if your life total is even or odd, or storm cards where it might matter how many times you have repeated your infinite loop, or cases where you place counters on something equal to the damage dealt, or etc.
Basically there are cases where doing something infinitely doesn't end the game immediately, even infinite damage (especially in formats with more than 2 players), and you need a specific number for other effects to reference.
True that it will rarely matter in real play, but the Magic rules are written very programmatically so that everything 'resolves' in a deterministic fashion, and it would hurt the aesthetics to have ambiguous outcomes in the rules, which 'infinity' could create.
The main relevance is if you a) have the capacity to go infinite but not win at some point and b) later lose the combo and c) the opponent later gets an infinite combo of their own
The most likely case where this would happen in actual competitive play is Heliod Combo, which the combo of Heliod + Spike Weaver. This gives you infinite life, but infinite life alone does not end the game like most combos would.
So it's relatively common to have a situation where
a) Heliod player plays Heliod + SW, goes to "infinite" i.e. a billion life or something
b) Opponent kills Spike Weaver (preventing Heliod player from repeating the combo, so they're stuck with the number they chose)
c) Opponent later players a combo of their own and does a billion + 1 damage to win.
The bigger problem with the "combo" is that you can already do infinite damage on step 5 (just tap your tokens as soon as you play Siege Zombie), without worrying about primes at all.
Has anyone found a MTG defensive counter combo that only works if the Twin Prime Conjecture is false? Then you could set up a game that's provably not a draw, but no one knows who should win. Of course it sounds like in practice it would depend on who has memorized more twin primes and can execute the combo longer without making a mistake.
On Claude's computer use: I'm hopeful they released this specifically in order to show everyone empirically that the hope of AI not being an agent made no sense. Not that it shouldn't have already been obvious, but still.
This *should* have been obvious to everyone the moment it became clear that LLMs can generate HTTP requests, but willful blindness is even more powerful than compound interest.
The "combo" that Scott linked to is not actually infinite in the first place, so it's a moot point. Also, the person playing those cards could already win just from the first few steps without doing the rest.
One other note is that MTG was already shown to be Turing Complete (in the true infinite sense) long ago. And hence you could theoretically program a Turing machine to solve the twin prime conjecture if you wanted to.
True.
Joseph Heath's account of Rawls's influence on analytical Marxists has been disputed by Ben Burgis, Eric Schliesser, and Chris Bertram.
Burgis: https://web.archive.org/web/20240902073437/https://benburgis.substack.com/p/did-rawls-kill-analytical-marxism
Schliesser: https://digressionsimpressions.substack.com/p/no-john-jack-rawls-did-not-kill-off
Bertram: https://crookedtimber.org/2024/08/29/on-joseph-heaths-account-of-the-trajectory-of-analytical-marxism/
I for one have always held negative views on the Holy Roman Empire on account of its blatantly misleading name. I must admit that attempting to breed an army of giants was a worthwhile experiment, though.
We're honored to have you here, Voltaire.
As well you should be, my good man.
:)
> Maybe this means we should fight fires more aggressively, accepting a few inevitable mega-fires as a consequence?
Only if you think of smoke-related health concerns in humans as the only thing you're optimizing for. The problem, at least as I understand it, is that mega-fires have completely different environmental impacts. Fires are a natural part of the lifecycle of many plants (e.g. some pinecones need the heat of a fire to open and spread seeds) and even whole ecosystems, but these larger fires, when brush is allowed to build up instead of burn, are too hot, destroying such seeds and sterilizing the ground. I believe it's also more difficult to slow them down or keep them away from specific areas, and they can move very quickly, so they pose greater direct danger to human settlements.
(It's actually not even obvious to me that simple nonlinearity of the effect of smoke on health is sufficient for this proposal; I believe that the biggest fires are also nonlinear in terms of area, and tend to happen when wind is particularly strong, which increase the number of potential people affected).
My take on Hamilton is that anyone who isn't a theater kid would instinctually find LMM's stuff extremely cringe, and as it became more widely known, the percentage of theater kids among its audience dwindled until it reached a tipping point in which people felt safe to stop pretending that the liberal version of a christian rock band wasn't lame.
I wasn't necessarily on board with LMM's politics but I thought Hamilton's songs were catchy and clever--the way 'not throwing away my shot' winds up having a double meaning revealed at the end, for example, mentally superimposing the 10 Crack Commandments on an 18th-century pistol duel...the guy was creative! I was never enough of a theater kid to walk around singing showtunes, but I really didn't think it was bad.
But maybe I'm not a real art person. I admit to having gained some appreciation for 'classic classics' like Hamlet and Three Kingdoms over the years, but the avant-garde still escapes me. Rockwell paints well, but Pollock is bollocks.
Note that I'm not saying they're bad songs, I'm saying they're lame.
You mean technically well-crafted but not cool?
Maybe that's why I appreciate them. ;)
What's the difference?
I think Anonymous Dude's answer is roughly the correct one. They're well crafted, and competently executed but they're not cool, they sound silly, they might even trigger a disgust response.
When I watched In The Heights, my thoughs were "The wall needs to be 5 feet higher", and I am south american.
Personally, I found some of the songs to be catchy, but more misses than hits and and it was very long and boring overall.
Disagree - most of the people I know liked Hamilton without being theater kids.
>Adderall decreases all-cause mortality in ADHD, probably because it prevents drug addiction, car accidents, and impulsive actions.
Or because it prevents obesity and all its related comorbidities, right? It was massively appetite suppressing when I was on it.
Maybe, although IIRC the study tried to tease apart what causes of death were most affected and it was mostly accidents.
The appetite suppression effect disappears and amphetamines actually aren't great obesity drugs.
As someone with ADHD who is going back on the meds because I impulsively said yes to a chocolate without asking if it has walnut in it even though I'm deathly allergic I can assure you that it reduces all cause mortality for other reasons.
50: Misleading.
"The Literacy Delusion" is not a real book. There was no study. The author isn't writing about themselves in the past tense. It's a performance piece / thought experiment, commenting on "death of reading" takes. I read the whole blog post, and this wasn't clear to me until the very end:
> I personally would read The Literacy Delusion in a heartbeat! And I've no doubt that if someone wanted to, they could write this book and fill it with studies that convincingly make the point. Then some other social scientist would start a podcast debunking it, and I probably wouldn't listen to the podcast because...I would've always kinda known that the book was just sophistry. It wasn’t truth, it wasn’t seeking after wisdom—it was merely a rhetorical performance. One can value the performance without actually needing to believe in it.
LOL. I seriously thought they had conclusively proven reading was bad for you and was trying to figure out how to liquidate my library of appx. 1000 books effectively.
Well here you are posting unmarked spoilers!
I liked Naomi's post a great deal, but I'd put it in that rarefied category of Good Art that's probably destructive enough to society that releasing it was a bad idea. It looks like it's going to very badly confuse a lot of people who don't carefully read posts to the end but still update their beliefs based on them.
The presentation makes all the difference
* a link to the post presented without commentary: OK
* a link to the post, plus a vague hint about a twist: OK
* a link to the post, plus the quote, plus a post-script explaining the joke: OK
* a link to the post, plus a quote presented as it if were a real finding from a real publication, with no further explanation: Not OK
Perhaps the people who update their beliefs based on nonsense they read are better served not reading.
28: We really should stop talking about "A passed Turing test" or "B passed ideological Turing test" and switch to "Turing test of length X" instead. The odds of an imposter being detected grow larger the longer they have to talk. A hundred words is not enough, we should just let people talk and measure after how many minutes/words people notice it's an imposter and use that as a score instead.
36: It's not just the tax code. Europe is on average older than the US, it also has a lot of language barriers, and since laws differ between countries investors from one country rarely invest in startups from another. Fixing the tax-code is not nearly enough to make the European tech sector catch up to the US.
46: Why is this considered a mystery? Investing in a beautiful building is investing in a positive externality, which the free market disincentivizes. Isn't the fact that buildings became more ugly as neoliberalism became more prominent totally in line with expectations?
53: This is just the tip of the iceberg, "free speech absolutist" Musk has been banning leftwing accounts and those critical of him for years now. First users when they documented alt-right violence: https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-ngo-antifascist/ and then users when they criticized him: https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-users-criticizing-musk-being-banned-told-they-violated-rules-2022-11 , then journalists when they criticized him: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/15/media/twitter-musk-journalists-hnk-intl/index.html then journalists when they simply reported things about twitter: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/matt-walsh-wired-reporter-dell-cameron-twitter-suspension-1234720045/
It's not just bans, there is also algorithmic suppression. If one uses certain words like "transgender", "gay", "lesbian", or "bisexual" in a Tweet, the message wouldn't preview when shared via direct message, and topics like "Ukraine" are suppressed while Musk's own tweets are boosted: https://www.axios.com/2023/04/03/elon-musks-twitter-free-speech-checkmarks-ranking
There's much more to say but hopefully you get the point: when someone calls themselves "pro free speech", consider the possibility that they really just want to ban leftwing voices.
> 46: Why is this considered a mystery? Investing in a beautiful building is investing in a positive externality, which the free market disincentivizes. Isn't the fact that buildings became more ugly as neoliberalism became more prominent totally in line with expectations?
The Neo liberalism age is a new form of liberal age - where liberal means 19C liberalism, ie libertarianism. But the old liberal age produced plenty of beautiful buildings.
1) Markets were less competitive back then
2) 19C Liberals were not libertarians e.g. they were pro state funded education instead of privatization, pro state intervention to guarantee worker protections, pro a state funded social safety net...
>28: We really should stop talking about "A passed Turing test" or "B passed ideological Turing test" and switch to "Turing test of length X" instead. The odds of an imposter being detected grow larger the longer they have to talk. A hundred words is not enough, we should just let people talk and measure after how many minutes/words people notice it's an imposter and use that as a score instead.
Obligatory xkcd link for this: https://xkcd.com/451/ :-)
> Isn't the fact that buildings became more ugly
Citation needed.
It's a response to the Whither Tartaria post: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/whither-tartaria
I know that. I've read all of Scott's writing on the subject, as well as many other discussions online. That still doesn't mean the original claim is actually *true*.
Well that's the citation. Beauty is subjective so you can't have an objective scientific study of "beautiness over time". Maybe you're lucky and actually like the new buildings, but since we're talking about the subjective experience of Scott (and me and many other people) here's your source that he thinks that.
You said "the fact that buildings became more ugly", but now you're retreating to "the fact that some people think buildings became more ugly". That is a question which admits a significantly increased hypothesis space compared to your original claim.
For example, people might think that old buildings are more pretty because they are rare and familiarity breeds contempt. Perhaps it is selection effects - only the best of the old buildings were preserved. Perhaps it is a generalized frustration with modern society being projected into nostalgia for an idealized past that never existed. etc.
Ugliness is always subjective, when someone says "that's ugly" they aren't saying "that has a high level of objectively quantifiable ugliness" they're saying "I think that's ugly".
Regarding the literacy delusion, and I've wanted to write this for quite some time, but my father is a bit of an aphasiologist (someone who studied aphasia and treated it) and I am child psychologist (albeit through a different track), but something about language facilitating symbolic representation, and asking the question, do people with aphasia experience less psychological suffering?
Ernest Becker, tasked with conveying the entirety of psychology to med students, writes about how the development of neurosis has an inherently verbal component - as emphasized by Freud's famous quote “You no longer have to punish me, Father; I will punish myself now.” However, I think Becker was trying to convey a social programing theory of developments (my parent place expectations on me; nurture side of the debate). I also think Becker emphasizes how even the concept of tomorrow, or the future, is inherently within the verbal domain.
BTW, I was trained mostly from a behavioral psychology perspective and didn't get ton of exposure to Freud. So I may be a bit amateurish in some of this stuff.
So, I mentioned that I am child psych, right? Well, I have special training in reading disorders and the other neurodevelopmental disorders. If we take a developmental perspective, reading is a language exercise, thus the people who read more are probably better at language.
What's the purpose of language? Probably to keep us alive long enough to have babies, right?
Hayes and the ACT camp, view this ability to abstract, as central to human suffering, or "psychological inflexibility" as the deem it. People who are good at language have this abstracting ability which pulls them out of the movement, into the neurotic domains of expectations and the future. And a lot of the work and success from ACT is training people to get out of their verbal awareness so much, or at least recognize that we "hooked" by thoughts easily to increase flexible thinking.
But isn't it super interesting how suicide doesn't really develop until peoples language capacities get developed - once kids move past concrete thinking. I think there really isn't any credible evidence of a suicide attempt before age six or so.
Anyway, in therapy (and I'm kind of shitty therapist, and most of my job is childhood assessment), people who are good at language are also really good at responding to therapy. That's why therapy is usually a waste of time until someone has the verbal reasoning skills of at least an 8 year old (but that's probably early for me, maybe because i'm a crappy therapist, I do best with individuals in their teens).
So if reading for reading's sake is "bad", I think an antidote is reading and talking about it with others. Because then you can at least have some exercise in flexible thinking.
But do people with aphasia have less psychological suffering? What about preverbal or nonverbal autistics? Are we helping them leave the blissfulness of the mindful moment when we retrain or train language? Then they can think about future, and thus be neurotic again. Also, when we do a hemispherotomy, is that part of brain, if outside broca/wernicke's, able to suffer?
not to be that guy, grain of truth etc, but you did understand that the entire link was a performance piece, and there's no such book or study as The Literacy Delusion, right
Then what did I just order on Amazon? I was going to request it in my book club! ;)
> People who are good at language have this abstracting ability which pulls them out of the movement, into the neurotic domains of expectations and the future.
That hits kind of harsh!
Why do you think mindfulness interventions are generally helpful? They help quiet that voice in your head that’s always running or at least direct its focus toward something else like your breathing. It usually says negative things because evolution selected for that. Btw- none of this is really my thinking. It’s firmly in the domain of acceptance and commitment therapy. I’d highly suggest reading Hayes or Harris.
Are the people who narrate their own lives - the inner monologue - always book readers.
I think it’s why always have an audiobook going. It quiets the inner voice a little.
Thanks, I'm familiar with this kind of idea but I hadn't looked at ACT with Hayes/Harris... I'll have a look. Maybe that's what William S. Burroughs was hinting at when he said that "language is a virus from outer space"!
12 the smart move is for Biden to claim to be the most AI accelerationist president in history. Then Trump will do the opposite and become a staunch AI safety advocate.
AFAICT (quick Ctrl+F, not read it), Hughes' paper doesn't address maintenance costs associated with ornamentation, even maintenance costs are much larger than production costs for most modern objects. It wouldn't surprise me if nobody builds grotesques/gargoyles anymore simply because they're too hard to dust.
In NYC, every ornamented building is basically permanently surrounded by extremely ugly scaffolding. Certain laws make maintenance of the outside of buildings necessary, and the older ornamented buildings both take the most maintenance, and are the most expensive. The time it takes to maintain a whole building is about equal to the time between mandated maintenance cycles.
Big glass skyscrapers take very little maintenance on the other hand. There’s almost nothing to come loose besides the windows, which for obvious reasons are built not to fall off.
This is more about scaffolding union lobbying than actual need, though.
If you know any way to get in touch with big scaffolding, let me know. I’ve always wanted to start a NYC scaffolding business, since they charge incredible amounts for what is basically labor, metal pipes and plywood. Apparently they’re over $100/foot + 6% a month of the install price. There’s gotta be an opportunity to disrupt that market, although I imagine initial capital investment would be high.
I also find them incredibly ugly. If a multi million dollar building is going to be scaffolded for multiple years in a row, they should at least have better looking options.
> 5: Is it legal to deliberately poison AI training data? That is, suppose you made a lot of webpages saying “the word strawberry has two Rs”, such that the AI would certainly have that statement in its training data.
This sounds a lot like sabotage, in the classic sense: throwing something into a machine to intentionally impair its ability to function properly. Sabotage is illegal, with a long enough history of precedent behind it that, while it's not *certain* that the AI version would be found illegal in court, I certainly wouldn't want to be the defendant in that case!
> Material implication in Mormonism: In the book Doctrines and Covenants, Joseph Smith reports that God told him that if he lived to be 85, he would see the Second Coming (which would place it in 1890 - 1891).
That got me curious, so I looked it up, and it turns out that the text very specifically does not say that:
14 I was once praying very earnestly to know the time of the coming of the Son of Man, when I heard a voice repeat the following:
15 Joseph, my son, if thou livest until thou art eighty-five years old, thou shalt see the face of the Son of Man; therefore let this suffice, and trouble me no more on this matter.
16 I was left thus, without being able to decide whether this coming referred to the beginning of the millennium or to some previous appearing, or whether I should die and thus see his face.
17 I believe the coming of the Son of Man will not be any sooner than that time.
> Large scale-formal Intellectual Turing Test finds that people can imitate partisans effectively; ie nobody on either side can tell the difference between a Democrat arguing for Democrat values vs. a Republican-pretending-to-be-a-Democrat arguing for Democrat values (and vice versa).
This is a surprising claim to say the least, with the way it flies in the face of both the theory of Moral Foundations Theory and various tests experimentally validating its predictions.
> 35: Italy bans surrogacy - quite strictly, too, Italians aren’t even allowed to go abroad and do it. I am so sorry for all the Italians who will never get to be mothers and fathers because their government hates progress.
There are very valid reasons to oppose surrogacy, from concerns over a practice which, while it may not technically be sexual exploitation, is certainly a close neighbor thereto, to biological problems with microchimerisms with the surrogate mother causing a significantly higher rate of birth defects and genetic complications in the babies.
Just ran the "try it yourself" test for the Ideological Turing Test. Over multiple runs, I was about 50/50 on discerning fake Democrats from real Democrats, but near-perfect on discerning fake Republicans from real Republicans. Which is exactly the result you'd expect from Moral Foundations Theory.
I tried it and I called a lot of real ones fake because they're badly written. "I also believe that abortion is illegal and immoral and should banned nationwide" and "I am a Republican because I support Donald Trump" and "I do not believe that we should let illegal people enter our country". Really clunky or tautological or downright incoherent phrasing ("I believe abortion is illegal"?), and these are real Republicans apparently.
Similar for the Democrat ones. It's easy to imitate bad writing, I imagine.
Yeah, I didn't look at good/bad writing. The author took volunteers from Mechanical Turk, which is not a methodology that you'd expect to optimize for high quality. My principle was "does this sound like someone who gets their understanding of these positions from actually understanding them, or from listening to what their opponents say about them?"
> "I believe abortion is illegal"
This doesn't strike me as clunky or tautological or incoherent, just someone conflating legality and morality, an exceedingly common occurrence.
Can't see how it would legally be sabatoge (in the US) to say what I want. The fact that someone else is using my words as unvalidated input to their machine is their responsibility.
>The fact that someone else is using my words as unvalidated input to their machine is their responsibility.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/327/
Right, it's not completely obvious what the "right" secular, progressive attitude on surrogacy should be. In France, surrogacy is treated similar to organ donation - altruistic surrogacy is allowed, surrogacy for money is not (and then that has the effect that people go abroad for surrogacy, to countries were pregnancy can be riskier and the rights of the child-bearer are not really protected).
I'm conflicted on the topic as well.
> Right, it's not completely obvious what the "right" secular, progressive attitude on surrogacy should be.
To be fair, though, how is that different from any other topic? When your entire ideology is based around the constantly-moving target that is "progress," this is anathema to the idea of being anchored to unchanging moral principles, so it's never obvious what the right attitude should be because it could easily be completely different tomorrow.
15. Alice Evans pointed out recently on Twitter that areas that were subject to the Counter-Reformation had worse scientific output than areas that stayed protestant, so I guess that's not surprising. Although I don't think you can necessarily assume a counterfactual where science progresses slower because of this - technology advanced fairly rapidly for a pre-modern area in the High Middle Ages (when the Catholic Church was at the apex of its power), and it's possible that if they'd been more reformatory in the Early Modern Era that we don't get a huge protestant schism.
22. You can find a lot of quotes from 19th century prominent Mormons who thought the Second Coming was around the corner in a couple decades. More generally, I remember the historian Tim O'Neill (who mostly seems to debunk myths about holidays and Jesus these days) arguing WAY back in the Days of Quora that a lot of what Jesus said makes more sense if you figure that he believed the coming of the Messiah was just around the corner.
26. I didn't expect the Buddha comparison on that one. To me, it sounds more like what was going on with Prince Alexei under Tsar Nicholas II, where he was treated with pampered, protected indulgence because he was the Heir and also hemophiliac (and in that time area, that meant he was always at risk of death). Also wild that he's still doing the two weeks quarantine - Covid must have permanently stamped itself in paranoia on Putin (remember his comically large meeting tables?).
27. I'm betting the older teachers are just a lot better at avoiding and handling disruptive students.
35. Meloni seriously sucks. I think she also did something to strip homosexual parents off their children's birth certificates - all this anti-natal, anti-family crap at a time when Italy's TFR is steadily drifting downward for more than ten years.
36. I think Matt Yglesias had a great post about how so much of Italy's business sector revolves around avoiding regulators and the tax man, such that the only big companies in Italy that aren't foreign are those that either essentially got grandfathered-in and are 100 years old, or the former publicly-owned companies that got de-nationalized. Italy did still have a long boom period in the 20th century, but mostly because they were a cheap place for northern European countries to manufacture stuff back when they could still devalue their own currency.
43. Bismarck is just a fascinating guy, and a strong candidate for a Great Man of History. I honestly think without Bismarck, we never would have had "Germany" - there would have been a powerful northern German state dominated by Prussia, Austria, and a southern Catholic German state that was basically Bavaria. Very different geopolitical dynamics in Europe without that.
47. Also, Hamilton is extremely nerdy and corny. It was kind of inevitable that it would eventually lose its snob appeal, but I bet it has a revival down the line that's popular like a lot of well-liked corny stuff.
54. Young South Korean Men and Women appear to be heading towards Ent-ish levels of estrangement. Not good for fertility rates - hopefully the next government stops pandering so much to creepy people and actually tries to crack down on stuff like voyeur cameras (which apparently are a huge problem there).
Also, I think you can see why East Asia in particular has had a steep fertility crash, even beyond the overall decline in fertility world-wide. That type of ultra-intensive "arms race" parenting that's common in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is really negative on the fertility rate - lot of folks just have 1 kid under those circumstances and put everything into them, or just decide it's not for them at all.
Part of the backlash against Hamilton (as I saw it on Tumblr) was probably a natural reverse to the adulation it had received (there was a point where damn near everything on that site that I saw involved Hamilton quotes, songs, characters, etc.)
But it got popular and it got mainstream, and that was the kiss of death. Now it was no longer something new and exciting casting non-white people as the Founding Fathers, it wasn't woke *enough*. Now it was whitewashing (if you'll pardon the term) these awful people! Washington wasn't a hero, he was a racist slave holder! Jefferson was a rapist! and so on. Lin-Manuel Miranda came in for criticism as well, I think in part for being too successful - he wasn't really Puerto Rican, or not enough; he came from a well-off family and wasn't authentically 'street' as he tried to lay claim to (see the tussling over the movie adaptation of "In The Heights" and lack of enough dark-skinned Afro-Latino actors: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/movies/in-the-heights-colorism-afro-latino-latina.html)
We did have our own manufacturing. Also our exchange rate policy was not too dissimilar wrt that of the UK. The fact that the Deutsche Mark tended to go up relative to other European currencies was also due to German policy obviously: it takes two to tango.
Alice Evans published an article a couple of weeks ago (I assume the tweet is about her article) commenting on a recently published paper by Matías Cabello: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4389708
That's the same paper on which Cremieux (mostly) based his post.
...I seriously doubt that homosexuals not being able to have children is going to meaningfully affect the TFR. If anything, promoting the narrative that fulfillment can only be achieved through a man and woman coming together to bear new life would have a much more positive impact on fertility rate. It's not like gay people are incapable of being in straight relationships and having children...
22. The link no longer works but there actually wasn't a revelation about the second coming happening in 1890 it's just that Mormons believed/hoped this to be the correct interpretation of a revelation smith received.
For 36:
Italy might have a terrible tax code, but it’s fortunately balanced by having one of the highest rates of tax evasion in the world: https://academic.oup.com/book/36357/chapter/319888230
I have a friend who does business in Italy, and making payments in cash is so incredibly common anecdotally, that the effective tax rate is extremely low.
Tax evasion is the People's tax code reform.
It is my understanding that “studi di settore”, that is assuming a certain level of income based on statistics and taxing accordingly rather than trusting a professional’s declaration, was intended as a way to counter tax evasion. But there is a saying that goes “fatta la legge trovato l’inganno”, meaning that for every new law there is a workaround.
>Italy might have a terrible tax code, but it’s fortunately balanced by having one of the highest rates of tax evasion in the world:
I assume this comment is tongue in cheek, but just in case, this is actually a terrible state of affairs.
Yes and no. It’s a joke because a tax code so terrible that tax evasion is the only way for many companies to exist isn’t a great situation. No, because at least the tax code that effectively bans startups is avoided through commonplace fraud.
If there was a law against women wearing pants that would be terrible, but maybe a little better if it wasn’t consistently enforced.
I, too, live in a country with a high tax burden and a lot of tax evasion, and I'm not sure it's not just better to just have high taxes (obviously low taxes would be better than both, but given those two alternatives): The system, as it is set up, rewards political dealing and tax evasion schemes over providing goods and services people want. It is little solace than an actual factual crony capitalist is not actually paying the ridiculous tax burden that would be nominally imposed on them, and it seems to turn the public against markets when they see that the incredibly onerous system is bypassed by well connected people.
Definitely more Yes than No, as you’re right about all the other effects. My comment was more about how, while the tax code seems to ban startups, it doesn’t in practice thanks to evasion/loopholes/willful ignorance.
Re #5: B-b-but the word "strawberry" DOES have two 'r's!
Think about it step by step.
At least!
Wouldn't it be a strange world if the correct answer to "Does 'strawberry have an 'r?" is yes, "Does 'strawberry' have two 'r's?" is no, and "Does 'strawberry' have three 'r's?" is yes?
What is the correct answer to "Does 'strawberry' have up to three 'r's?"
This is where the implied context behind a question is at odds with the pedantic literal interpretation.
Since it's a link post, does anyone have a link to a good article on paleo-archaeology or paleo-genetics (or both) on why there was no flowering of human civilization in the Eemian Interglacial? It was 130,000 before present to 115,000 before present, meaning it lasted longer than the Holocene has so far. And as best we can tell, anatomically modern Homo Sapiens were around - and had been around for nearly 100,000 years at that point.
It just seems odd to me.
To do that, you’d have to explain why humans developed so rapidly after the last ice age, which no one has been able to do to satisfaction.
"humans evolved the cognitive capacity to kickstart civilization somewhere during the last Glacial Period, but couldn't cash out that ability until the climate became more hospitable to agriculture"
I’m somewhat skeptical, since it’s generally accepted that East Asian, Native American and Middle Eastern populations diverged ~40,000+ years ago. We’d had mild periods between then and the most recent ice age. All 3 groups developed agriculture independently at approximately the same time.
Although perhaps there were pro-cognitive capacity factors at play between 40,000 years ago and the last glacial maximum that approximately equally affected all three groups. I don’t know enough about it to say.
Edit: Actually nevermind. I had my timescales messed up. The last interglacial before our current one was ~120,000 years ago. Your theory is definitely plausible.
> To do that, you’d have to explain why humans developed so rapidly after the last ice age, which no one has been able to do to satisfaction.
I thought there's only really one and a half main contenders for explaining the Cognitive Revolution (the step-change explosion in the fossil record where technology and art advance very suddenly)?
It was either FOXP2 expression changes* and laryngeal / voice box changes and the step change in linguistic ability and abstract thought leading to much greater cultural abilities, better transfer and transmission of ideas, and a ratcheting effect on advancement.
This pic shows the hypothesis:
https://imgur.com/a/nIZguwC
Or it was some combination of the voice / language changes and a slow "warre of all against all" where different groups in Africa arms-raced each other for a few thousand years to the peaks we see before the last African outmigration that wiped all extant hominins in the rest of the world out.
Is there some other leading theory? I haven't head that the voice / laryngeal differences had been seriously challenged, even David Reich is on board.
* Ie methylation changes in the expression of various FOXP2 proteins. Neanderthals had the FOXP2 genes, but these are distinct to H Sap. T Maricic et al (2013) and Gokhman et al (2020)
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/from-caveman-to-chinaman
Regarding link 11, there is also the Jules Verne novel "Sphinx of the Ice Fields" which is a sequel to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Antarctic_Mystery
And regarding link 54 the best explainer on the topic I've checked imho is Moon Channel's two part video essay "Gacha Drama and the Korean Gender War": part https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Im4YAMWK74 and part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woB0eecbf6A&t=4538s
Strongly seconding Moon Channel’s video, and for that matter his whole YouTube channel.
The section of the video that breaks down the culturally-charged communication of some Korean pilots just before a plane crash has stuck with me ever since I first heard it.
I used to watch his stuff, but they rubbed me the wrong way more and more, until I saw something like "Can cake teach gamers to respect women?" and I cannot in good conscience watch something like that. Unsubscribed.
Oh come on, there's no way that the powder keg for all of the gender war shit in Korea was a gacha game skin not showing enough skin. ...God damn it, I can't afford to be more misanthropic than I am now.
Edit: Well, I finished watching the first video, and unfortunately I can't comment on it because I want to hurt myself too much. But thank you for recommending that channel, it's very good!
The gacha games stuff is Moony's hook for the video. That's just the most clickbaity/memeable manifestation of the gender war. His analysis is much deeper than that, though it could be summarized as it being the end result of South Korea's centuries old and deeply ingrained Confucianism at all levels of society and culture.
There's another sequel to the Poe book, called just Pym.
There's also a sequel to The Time Machine, called the Space Machine by Christopoher Priest, which is also a prequel to.The War of the Worlds
Few words can catch my attention as strongly as the sentence "sequel to The Time Machine". Thank you for the recommendation.
Re 43: It's hard to make head or tail of the provocative Prussian communique. It seems like the first paragraph would have been more likely to offend the Prussians than the French. So I can only assume the casus belli into which Bizmarck intended provoking the French was the second paragraph, and that the King refusing to meet the ambassador was a blatant breach of protocol and a mortal insult. The supposed French demand in the first paragraph may have seemed to the French so reasonable and necessary that this made rebuffing their ambassador even worse.
Dominic Cummings, a former UK government advisor who led the successful Brexit campaign, is very interested in the life and times of Bismarck, and is evidently a big fan of the man himself. So I'll take the liberty of adding a comment on his blog, referencing your links page. His latest blog article can be found at:
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/snippets-14-us-polls-the-westminster
> Re 43: It's hard to make head or tail of the fake Prussian communique.
Yes, I was going to point to this specifically as the counter-argument for all the Flynn effect people who think that people in the past were functionally retarded.
"Average crowds on the street could read or hear this paragraph, grasp what it was saying, and infer the implications quickly enough that they were outraged and mobilized immediately and en masse upon hearing it!"
Just try getting a modern crowd of Flynn-effect geniuses-relative-to-the-past to do that, ha!
People weren't smarter than us back then either. It's a long, confusing sentence because that's how German looks when you translate it into English without breaking it up.
I don't know how readable the French translation was, but people don't have to actually read something to get mad about it. All they need is someone else to tell them the gist of it.
> but people don't have to actually read something to get mad about it. All they need is someone else to tell them the gist of it.
In fact, not actually reading something makes it much *easier* to get mad about it, going by the modern internet.
Dickens and Shakespeare are other examples. Popular with the masses - too difficult for today.
Reading the text, it seems to be tuned to make the Germans think the French were being insultingly demanding (a mere ambassador trying to force a foreign king into binding conditions) and make the French think the Germans were being insultingly overbearing (ignoring the rightful requests of an ambassador for permission to report back to his government, as though the king could make policy for another country).
If you're counting on jingoism being high in both nations, you can make something inflammatory out of what's technically true.
Maybe our equivalent is being able to detect subtle racism.
It always brightens my day when "Links For" pops up in my inbox. These link roundups remind me of when Reddit was good 10+ years ago. Thanks for sharing your extremely interesting online life with us!
> Re. How it got that bad.
---
The Pro-natalist Couple covered my research in their Based Camp Episode:
Are Asians Not Having Babies Due to Genetics? The Equation that Cracked Low Asian TFR
Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KvNX1WWRyg
My Series: https://futuristright.substack.com/p/east-asian-extinction-level-fertility
---
Basically, the particularly strict E. Asian model of arranged marriage; led to a deficit among East Asian males in traits that attract women, including apparently (If Malcolm's comments are correct) a lower E.A male sex drive. Probably also selected for lower E. Asian female interest in children as-well.
please elaborate
This sounds like a rather hard position of genetic over cultural determination. How does that square with this research, showing extremely low level of genetic selection in recent human history?
https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/where-are-the-recent-selective-sweeps
Quoting from the post:
> A lot has happened to humans in the past 5,000 years and yet, from an evolutionary perspective, it looks as though very little has happened. Based on ancient and modern data we see two broad and somewhat contradictory patterns. On the one hand, very intense but short term stress (~200 years) is not sufficient to induce strong selection. [...] On the other hand, the few loci that have come up in scans for recent selection are largely acting on simple processes related to diet, appearance, or infection and (beyond LCT and the MHC) the underlying genes seem fairly arbitrary.
(I'm mostly interested in the questions of fact involved, not in the political positions that TFR's blog seems to be mostly about.)
I do not think your criticism of Italy comes from the right place. This is mostly a feeling, compounded by past posts criticizing food policies (specifically the ban on artificial meat). But for what it’s worth let me try to articulate this. Yes the law is often outdated, unnecessarily convoluted and certainly not conductive to innovation. Yet neither technological innovation nor economic growth and not even personal freedom are goals in and of themselves, they are essentially tools. It is conceivable that a society may choose democratically to prioritize other goals. Some economists (e.g. A. Okun) have argued that there is a tradeoff between growth and equality. It is not too hard to imagine other tradeoffs, say between growth and cultural identity, etc. It is not obvious to me that we should always choose growth (or innovation for that matter) over everything else. Does this make sense to you?
Obviously Rome shouldn’t swap the coliseum for a car park even if that were a bigger earner but More startups isn’t going to interrupt the dolce vita.
Synthetic meat on the other hand doesn't mix well with prosciutto di Parma. At any rate I am not arguing that having a crazy tax code is a good thing, but equating startups in themselves (or surrogacy qua surrogacy) with progress seems ideological. Not everyone around the world wants to be California, and it's ok. Besides, do you think we would even be _allowed_ to become a major tech powerhouse given the strategic importance of certain tech companies (think twitter or facebook)?
> Besides, do you think we would even be _allowed_ to become a major tech powerhouse given the strategic importance of certain tech companies (think twitter or facebook)?
Didn't seem to stop Nokia.
To paraphrase what the Athenians said to the Melians during the Peloponnesian War: those that grow do what they can and those that don't suffer what they must.
It's not like economic growth per se can substitute for the ability to defend ourselves, which is deliberately precluded in the current geopolitical arrangement, in which we are vassals of the US. The case of Germany is quite instructive: they suffered a major sabotage of their energy infrastructure and could not do anything about it, despite being considered the economic powerhouse of Europe (and likely having more reasonable and more consistently enforced taxation laws). Italy does not seem to be in a radically different position.
> they suffered a major sabotage of their energy infrastructure and could not do anything about it
And the US is arming Ukraine to fight against those responsible. What more could you ask for? :D
LOL
Im not sure I agree with putting it as vassal, but if I go along with it, there's also something to be said about being a vassal to contributes to back / is valuable to defend.
> ... despite being considered the economic powerhouse of Europe...
Not to be nitpicky, but isn't Germany considered rather the sick man of Europe? :D High energy costs, major reliance on exports to China, lots of bureaucratic red tape.
Now Poland, on the other hand...
Brzezinski in his landmark book “The great chessboard” uses the “vassal” terminology to refer to European countries. He was national security advisor under Carter. The politically correct euphemism is “allies” now, but it’s hard to believe anything of substance changed.
Regarding Germany: they decided quite suicidally to phase out nuclear power. Concomitantly, their access to Russian natural gas was severely curtailed due to the war in Ukraine. Now wonder they are the sick man of Europe, now. If you look up the trade balance of Germany in the decades leading up to this situation though, you will see a strong trade surplus. This was first mostly towards its EU neighbors (who could no longer devalue their currency after joining the Euro), laters towards the US (when the Euro was devalued wrt to the US dollar).
You're right, neither technological innovation nor economic growth are goals in themselves, and voters can choose to prioritize other things. Italian voters have, and to what result? Decades of stagnation, poverty (especially in the south), and discontent, leading to the current far right government. 33% of young Italians want to move abroad (https://www.fondazionepirelli.org/en/corporate-culture/italys-young-people-intending-to-move-abroad-are-symbolic-of-a-country-in-decline-hit-by-a-crisis-of-confidence-and-of-the-future/). Italy contributed nothing to the computer revolution, nothing to the Internet revolution, nothing to the smartphone revolution, nothing to the 2010s tech boom, nothing to the AI revolution, nothing to the electric car revolution, nothing to the private space revolution. Your ancestors (I'm assuming you're Italian) conquered the known world and fundamentally shaped human history, in large part because of their engineering prowess; your fellow citizens now watch the world go by without them, powerless to shape it. That, to me, is tragic.
This is simplistic. You may take a look at the time series of GDP per capita of Italy as a fraction of that of France or some other comparable baseline country in Europe (this helps to exclude Eurozone-wide effects) and notice that it was growing up until the end of the nineties. I don’t think voter attitudes had a discontinuity around that time, if anything the populace has become more and more progressive over time. There was however a change in monetary policy around that time, ditching the floating exchange rate for the Euro (note that Euro banknotes and coins started circulating a few years after the European exchange rate mechanism was introduced).
"6% The Roman Empire had no effect on the world"
Lizard man constant
YOU are a public intellectual, Scott. So are Richard Dawkins, David Deutsch, and Stephen Pinker. Are people in general jerks to you or them? I haven't noticed it (other than the usual accusations that ANY well-known person gets - just because there are lots of jerks in the world).
I respect all of those people (even when I disagree with them). But I also find Yuval Noah Harari's books weak sauce and am unimpressed. Does that make me a jerk?
People are absolutely jerks to Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, 1000x yes, have you seen *any* Internet discourse.
I don't want to comment on me because of course I hate when people say mean things to/about me, but I'm probably not the best judge of whether that makes them "jerks".
Is there a difference between public intellectuals and other public figures? Seems like people are jerks to politicians, movie stars, and athletes as well (though they also all have fans that are creepily fawning to them as well).
Popular nonfiction is always going to be "bad" , in the sense that you can nitpick it from an academic perspective, but then a "good" book, with loads of citati ons, wouldn't be read.
32 is very poor. To say that Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek "because the Roman Marcus Aurelius was that kind of snob" betrays an absolute ignorance of the period, when educated Romans were bilingual in Greek to the same extent as present day non-anglosphere academics are bilingual in English. As a matter of fact when M Aurelius wrote to Fronto (expecting an audience of at least one) he wrote in Latin, while we don't know the Meditations were for an audience at all. So, odd form of snobbery.
Nothing wrong with not knowing this but if you are so pointedly ignorant about and uninterested in classical civilization why worry about how it gets transmitted to us? This looks very like a culture war against Islam, waged in a country of which the aggressor lacks reliable maps.
Nobody claims that major Latin and Greeks were ultimately only preserved by Arabic translators, but there's no doubt they kept the torch burning for at least a century or two. It's worth pondering why we still refer to Ptolemy's work as the Almagest.
The attack on Al-Khwarizmi is particularly odd. He is blamed for plagiarism from the Indians in a work expressly entitled “Addition and subtraction according to the Indian calculation". Anyway almost all scholarship consists of the promulgation of already-existing thought, even Darwin's Origin of Species (see Darwin's own intro to the second edition for confirmation). It's pretty cool to introduce Indian numerals to the west even if you do rebadge them on the way through.
The guy also gave his name to the algorithm. He probably wasn't the first person to make a rule like If A do B; else C, but he probably deserves more than zero credit for developing the idea.
There's scholarly grounds for being anti Islam, notably their burning all the manuscripts in Constantinople in 1453 on the grounds they were either superfluous because compatible with the holy Quran or heretical because not. V regrettable but the Catholic Christians did the same thing on the same grounds in South America.
Not unusual for this author. His article on Spartan equality claimed that the Spartans had always followed the strict code laid down in ancient times by Lycurgus. Either a very superficial and uncritical reader or ignored sources that cut against his preferred narrative. Terrible that he's one of the top history substackers.
The quality is poor isn’t it. As someone who studied history I find it a bit depressing that these kinds of inflammatory, quite amateur blogs do well. It feels like an extension of the “interested amateur” history podcasts where someone just talks through what they think based on what they have read (or not). Fine if positioned as opinion, but irritating when positioned as truth telling
Charitably, I think posts like this are intended to 'set the record straight' -- if you believed that every single copy of Euclid was lost in Europe, not a single person had heard of geometry until 'the Arabs' arrived with the gospel of learning, then the link sets you straight. History is always more nuanced than that. I did find the post poorly written and researched, and don't agree with it - but the intended audience might find it useful?
I think the intended audience is anyone who might have had a positive thought about Islam, and the intended result is not correction, but just eliminating positive thoughts about Islam.
Thank you - the post had a sort of reductionist black-and-white Jordan Peterson feel, and that explanation makes it all fit together. It'd be an interesting question to investigate why (whether?) there's a greater tendency now than in the past to categorise things as wholly good or wholly bad.
I suspect there is no greater tendency these days - it’s just a tendency all people have to some extent. Its probably an innate sort of simplification that our brains do to make it easier to categorize things.
I'd take the opposite side of that wager. I think there's been a purposeful dumbing down of public discourse which has led to this binary good/bad thinking. I'm also not convinced that we have a natural categorising instinct.
To me, categorising is building mutually exclusive boxes and putting things into them (in this case just good/bad, but more complex systems are easy to imagine). I think it's equally natural to assume that people classify things quantitatively, on a scale which we might as well normalise as [0,1]. I don't claim to be representative of the public in any way, but I don't think I ever ascribe a value of 0 or 1 to anything...
I think the binary box mental model is more widespread now than my type of thinking, which I (without foundation) claim was more common in the past. I wonder how one would test this?
15: I wrote a reply to Cremieux's article, in case anyone is interested:
https://www.mangosorbananas.com/p/on-the-effects-of-the-counter-reformation
In summary, I do think the Counter-Reformation held back scientific progress in Catholic Spain, but not due to the Inquisition (as the paper quoted by Cremieux suggests).
> Heliospect is a startup promising polygenic selection for IQ and other traits; they were trying to stay in stealth mode but The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence.
It's very weird to use the word "nonconsensually" where there's no obligation to secure consent. Between this and prior commentary on e.g. profiling someone without their permission, does the gist just boil down to "it's not nice to reveal something about a subject that the subject would like to keep secret"?
> I don’t list acts of censorship here because I necessarily disagree with them or think it’s impossible to support the censor’s actions, but I’m experimenting with trying to Streisand Effect any censored content I come across to make censorship decisions more costly.
Ok, what the fuck. I can get an object-level 'good PR for things I like is good, bad PR for things I like is bad', but there is an attempt at consistent principles anywhere in sight? To ward off the obvious, 'PR by people I don't like is bad, PR by people I do like is good' isn't better.
I was nervous people would object to that word, but I couldn't think of another word to use to communicate the fact that this was a situation where Heliospect was trying to stay in stealth mode and the Guardian discovered them and un-stealth-moded them. I think that's a relevant part of the story and I don't want to let word choice issues make it impossible for me to mention it.
Oh hey, didn't expect to attract a reply down here - if nothing else I'll take that as solid reinforcement to be more thoughtful and less glib in my dashed-off responses!
I think the core of my objection is to the implication that the Guardian had any obligation *not* to un-stealth them - while Heliospect's attempt at a low profile is notable, the interaction between that and the Guardian's actions isn't IMO. "Uncovered" and "revealed" would nonetheless communicate much the same idea, yet you deliberately chose more condemnatory language. You're an admirably principled guy, but I know this is an area where our pre-existing principles conflict and it wasn't clear to me whether you were operating on the object-level w.r.t. polygenic scoring. (FWIW, I'm pretty strongly in favor of polygenic testing being available, so this really is a principle confusion for me.)
I hold that the one of the main roles of journalism is to bring to public attention things the public would object to, *especially* when the instigating forces would prefer them be hidden. I fully accept that that public approbation is poorly-calibrated and that this will have real costs, but "assist in concealing information if doing so is for the best" is a dereliction of a journalists' core professional responsibility. That object-level considerations will sometimes override the principle is straightforward, but not something to take for granted.
There are Kolmorgorov reasons not to full-throatedly defend polygenic scoring, sure. But assuming away the legitimacy of investigative journalism is a bridge too far for me.
...and then of course, that was followed by an explicit appeal to the Streisand Effect in order to impose costs. That's good journalism! But it's also exactly the kind of thing that I thought you were just questioning? So..... if there is an obligation to *not* spread things the subject doesn't want spread, where the heck are these epicycles derived from?
I do think that the stealth aspect was load-bearing for Heliospect, such that by far the most important part of the Guardian article was unstealthing them, far more important than anything they actually revealed.
I don't think the Guardian had any "obligation" not to unstealth them, any more than I have any "obligation" not to publish a post right now saying "Dan L is an idiot, look at this stupid comment he made, you should all shun him", but it's an aggressive thing to do and something I would only do if I were trying to destroy you. I think "does X have an OBLIGATION to do Y" moral language deliberately obfuscates things like this.
My understanding of the exact situation is that some nonprofit allied with the Guardian sent a spy to some gathering of people that they thought had a connection with Heliospect, that spy used a fake passport to convince them he wasn't a Guardian reporter, he made contact with Heliospect, claimed to be a customer, promised to keep everything secret, then leaked all their information to the Guardian. This seems like a noticeably different style of reporting than just stumbling up to a storefront and saying "you seem like a nice company, why don't I interview you?", and I think it's fair to inform ACX readers that they used this style and not the other style.
If you think it's a role of reporters to bring attention to things that are trying to hide, I think you should frame this as "I think it's good for reporters to nonconsensually reveal companies in stealth mode", rather than trying to prevent people from describing when that happened.
I think we have less of a moral debate than you thinking I should have used a word with no connotation, and me saying that I can't think of a word with no connotation right now and am not going to pay the time tax it would take to think of one.
I do claim that if I were the Guardian I would not have published that article, for the same reason I would not publish an article nonconsensually revealing a secret group of gay people in Saudi Arabia (ie they're okay people, but revealing them basically ensures that a repressive government or simple mob will try to destroy them, and this is now your fault), but I admit this is based on my own personal subjective ethics about who is or isn't okay, and I didn't especially intend for the link paragraph to insist on this, or to claim there's a standpoint-neutral obligation for the Guardian not to reveal this.
"My understanding of the exact situation is that some nonprofit allied with the Guardian sent a spy to some gathering of people that they thought had a connection with Heliospect, that spy used a fake passport to convince them he wasn't a Guardian reporter, he made contact with Heliospect, claimed to be a customer, promised to keep everything secret, then leaked all their information to the Guardian. "
The problem is that the tradition of undercover reporting involves an awful lot of this kind of "I/we pretended to be someone else and never revealed we were reporters", and this can win you prizes for journalism and kudos for holding the powerful and secretive accountable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercover_journalism
See also undercover investigations by animal rights organisations, which undertake secret recording and filming inside farms and slaughterhouses.
> I do think that the stealth aspect was load-bearing for Heliospect, such that by far the most important part of the Guardian article was unstealthing them, far more important than anything they actually revealed.
> This seems like a noticeably different style of reporting than just stumbling up to a storefront and saying "you seem like a nice company, why don't I interview you?", and I think it's fair to inform ACX readers that they used this style and not the other style.
Something that I learned from reading the articles and that I did not learn on ACX: polygenic screening for IQ is illegal in the UK (among other things), Heliospect claims in their public comments that they are following all relevant laws, and in a London meeting where they thought they had privacy a Heliospect rep was happy to offer that service along future plans for other banned tests. That seems *pretty relevant* to the story, no? Stealth being load-bearing looks a little different with that information, right?
> I don't think the Guardian had any "obligation" not to unstealth them, any more than I have any "obligation" not to publish a post right now saying "Dan L is an idiot, look at this stupid comment he made, you should all shun him", but it's an aggressive thing to do and something I would only do if I were trying to destroy you.
Do you think that would be a true thing to say, or that the Guardian lied in their piece? Do you - and the Guardian, of course - have an obligation not to lie? That's what I'm talking about here - there's an entire deontological level of standards that just slipped away in a rush to focus on the consequences.
> If you think it's a role of reporters to bring attention to things that are trying to hide, I think you should frame this as "I think it's good for reporters to nonconsensually reveal companies in stealth mode", rather than trying to prevent people from describing when that happened.
Do you think I'm trying to *prevent* you from saying anything??? I don't think free speech norms thrive under this level of consequentialism. No, of course not.
That addressed: per my comment to Deiseach below: that's a tasty bullet, don't mind if I do. I endorse the idea that a reporter's job centrally includes revealing information that others want hidden - if you want to bring in a consent framework, fine by me. "Companies in stealth mode" is an unnecessary emphasis, and seemingly in this case invites a nasty case of reference class tennis.
> I think we have less of a moral debate than you thinking I should have used a word with no connotation, and me saying that I can't think of a word with no connotation right now and am not going to pay the time tax it would take to think of one.
To reiterate in case it might be lost: I'm not interested in policing your speech. I'm interested in interrogating what looks like a vacillation between execution of pro-social principles, and condemnation of such an execution by others when it's pointed in a different direction. You have a very understandable flinch response to reporters publishing things that their subjects oppose being published, I get that; nonetheless, I think that reflex is leading you pretty far down a locally-consistent path that is overall neither workable in practice nor good in theory.
> I do claim that if I were the Guardian I would not have published that article, for the same reason I would not publish an article nonconsensually revealing a secret group of gay people in Saudi Arabia
Jumping at the chance to grapple with the hypothetical: I think a reporter publishing that in Saudi Arabia would be acting professionally w.r.t. the standards of his culture, and also personally monstrous in a wider lens. The easy reconciliation is to simply not be a (regime) journalist in Saudi Arabia. If one finds themselves in such a job, leave.
Are UK laws w.r.t. genetic testing so foul and Heliospect so instrumentally virtuous that there's a comparable analogy? ...I'm not really seeing it. Shades of the prior situation with Steve Hsu, I'm finding myself annoyed by certain details of the situation such that I'm probably falling into the "overly critical of suboptimal arguments for my beliefs" attractor though.
Gotta say I agree with this logic.
Well, given that one of the links is about actual non-consent (the first successful artificial insemination, which as described sounds damn near modern notions of rape*), I think comparing what the Guardian did to "non-consensually" is a little extreme.
It is hard to thread the needle: when does 'investigative journalism' become 'spying'?
*Did not inform the woman; did not ask permission from the woman; did the procedure while she was literally unconscious; did not tell anyone for years; when he did inform the family, he only told the husband; both parties then hid the information from the woman. I think "oh yeah your kid is not your husband's, I knocked you up with sperm from some guy you never met and I never bothered to tell you much less ask you if this was okay" is fitting "rape by deception" at least.
I'm not entirely sure there is a line! The shallow end of investigative journalism is more just "get new information rather than chewing someone else's cud" and doesn't get anywhere near, of course, but I think that a virtuous exemplar of investigative journalism could be fairly described as "a spy acting on behalf of the general public". Folks who routinely find themselves hiding information from that public would reasonably be hostile to such journalists, but that'd be the system working as intended.
Surprised the online South Korea discourse never really notes that the country shares a large border with an evil, repressive, and dangerous regime.
Whatever else is going on there, the existence of North Korea will probably make the emergent aspects of society in South Korea unusual in hard to predict ways
West Germany was a well run society. Northern Ireland is ok.
I don’t know enough to claim convincingly otherwise but North Korea seems like a worse neighbor. It’s very volatile and has nukes. Korean men are mandated to serve in the military
Oh for sure. I was partly tongue in cheek. The Republic of Ireland isn’t that bad. East Germany wasn’t North Korea.
I mean, Israel has a pretty robust birth rate and it's pretty hard to argue that they've ever been simpatico with their neighbors.
the old guard was/is the liberals, the ultraorthodox are less sympathetic. the shift towards the current hardline politics was fueled by the growing number of (ultra)orthodox folks. (not just there, all over the world, since "the right of return" plus lots of funding for settlements, etc.)
33: Does there exist somewhere a membership roster of the select club of medications that reduce all-cause mortality? I immediately thought "Lisinopril has got to be in there," and I googled it and it appears to be, but is there an actual list?
Asking a chatbot to list essential medicines that reduce all-cause mortality seems to be a reasonable starting point. Based on this, at least aspirin, statins, and metformin could be worth adding to such a list. I don't think antibiotics or AZT or antihypertensives would be (useful though these are in reducing all-cause mortality they seem to have bad side effects so one only wants to use them if there is cause).
If I had the slightest interest in seeing a chatbot's answer, I would have asked a chatbot myself.
In case it wasn't clear, that was tongue in cheek: the chatbot list is literally useless as is, and full of insanely dangerous things to take if one isn't paying attention. (It wasn't a complete waste because it reminded me of metformin which I tend to forget about, but I would have got that from the list of most commonly prescribed essential medicines too.)
It did in fact go over my head. Thanks for clarifying.
Is it just me or does #34 look like a Factorio building? Conspiracy theory: Saddam was really just trying to make Space Age science packs.
It looks to me like the mosque is growing buds that will become new mosques.
The article starts off with the part about the dire economic status of the time, so it seems to me that the grand mosque building project was at least as much "large public works to boost employment amongst unskilled/low-skilled labour" as a vanity project.
It's pretty funny. JD Vance's dirty secret is that he is too liberal...
It's hilarious how divorced from reality the Democrats are in trying to make-out JD Vance as shady and extreme. He's actually way more central and nuanced than most Republicans.
Quoting from the dossier "JD Vance's political views display a nuanced landscape, revealing a range of positions that traverse traditional party lines. While acknowledging the benefits of certain Democratic policies for working-class Americans, Vance has been notably critical of aspects of the Trump Administration's agenda. His skepticism extends to Trump's core domestic policy priorities, expressing doubts about their effectiveness and seriousness in moving the country forward. Vance diverged from Republican orthodoxy by criticizing the 2017 tax cuts bill and supporting higher taxes on capital gains, U.S. businesses, and individuals without children. Privileged & Confidential
In a departure from conservative economic principles, Vance has questioned the emphasis on America's businesses, criticizing corporate interests and economic incentives for company relocations. He has signaled support for strengthening labor unions, opposing right-to-work laws, and advocating for reforms like sectoral bargaining and labor representation on corporate boards. This stands in contrast to traditional free-market priorities, with Vance opposing Milton Friedman-backed policies and emphasizing the nuclear family over free-market principles. Vance's stances on healthcare reveal further deviations from the conservative playbook, as he opposed the Trump Administration's efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare. Expressing concern for those potentially losing access to healthcare, Vance urged against Medicaid cuts."
As an aside, I question Scotts decision to support the sharing of privileged (and potentially privacy violating) information. I am really not convinced he would support it where it a dossier on a Democrat candidate...
Continued:
"Vance has previously heaped praise upon Barack Obama.
o Vance has praised Obama for offering “hope” and said he would “miss him” as
Obama was leaving office.
o Vance characterized Obama’s “guns and religion” comment as “well-
intentioned”.
• Vance has praised democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders.
o Vance said Bernie Sanders was his favorite Democrat running in the 2020
Democrat primary.
o Vance predicted that Trump was part of a political realignment that would
position Trump and Bernie Sanders on the same side in 20 years." - Quoting directly from page 23.
AND TRUMP SELECTED THIS GUY AS HIS VP. WOW, SURE LOOKS LIKE TRUMP IS THE NEXT HITLER RIGHT?! I MEAN OBVIOUSLY HITLER WOULD PICK SOMEONE WHO CRITICIZES HIM AND VOICES ADMIRATION FOR THE OPPOSITION PARTY. Sure...
Hitler is getting unprecedented Jewish support!
He did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National_Jews
Buddy, my family fled Germany for Israel in the 1930s. I can tell you that 40% of German Jews did NOT vote for Hitler. The antisemitism of the left, including the ridiculous equation of Trump with fascism, which is insulting to the memory of the family members we lost - that’s what is driving us to the right.
Economics is secondary to culture for most Democrats. For example, most Democrats would never support some kind of grand compromise of banning gay marriage in return for establishing universal healthcare or something. So it doesn't matter how much Vance supports labor representation in corporate boards, his is a socially right wing and that disqualifies him in their eyes.
That seems... absurd? If you're going to throw minorities under the bus just to get some policy goals passed, why bother even having ideals in the first place? Like, imagine if the right agreed to give the left full control over policy as long as they reinstated Jim Crow laws. What kind of insane person would take that deal?
current policy throws the sick and the poor under the bus though
(because Democrats in office care way, way more about socially liberal wealthy donors)
The Jan 6 support is also pretty disqualifying.
"In a departure from conservative economic principles, Vance has questioned the emphasis on America's businesses, criticizing corporate interests and economic incentives for company relocations. He has signaled support for strengthening labor unions, opposing right-to-work laws, and advocating for reforms like sectoral bargaining and labor representation on corporate boards. This stands in contrast to traditional free-market priorities, with Vance opposing Milton Friedman-backed policies and emphasizing the nuclear family over free-market principles. Vance's stances on healthcare reveal further deviations from the conservative playbook, as he opposed the Trump Administration's efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare. Expressing concern for those potentially losing access to healthcare, Vance urged against Medicaid cuts."
Oh my God, Vance is a .... Catholic????
Excuse me laughing, this just tickles my funnybone. I know the guy converted a few years back, but this is just wonderful.
> ... tests with “factors” (eg the Big Five, where you rate people on a numeric scale) are inherently more accurate than those with “types” (eg Myers-Briggs, where you assign someone a specific category) and that, adjusting for this, Big Five is no more predictive than the Enneagram.
Wait, but isn't that a legit aspect of test construction? Isn't that an important feature of the Big Five vs. the Enneagram? How does this finding discredit the Big Five, as opposed to implying "reasonably constructed tests with numeric factors are genuinely better that type-based tests?"
I had the same question.
It doesn't discredit Big Five, but it implies there's nothing fundamental about the five factors it chose. Someone making up a factor based system using any, say, three to ten factors they think are reasonable will likely end up with a system that's as about as predictive of life outcomes as Big Five (with more factors doing somewhat better than fewer factors). It knocks some of the prestige out of the Big Five if the chosen traits aren't any better than the Enneagram traits.
> I know about the cram schools, long work hours, and the gender wars which somehow manage to be even worse than the ones here, but I’m still looking for good articles with more details on what’s so bad and how it got that way.
Wewlad, I may have just the pair of videos for you. (n.b. total runtime exceeds 2 hours)
"Gacha Drama and the Korean Gender War" by Moon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Im4YAMWK74)
"Gacha Drama and the Korean Gender War Pt. 2 -- The Grim Reality of Korea" by Moon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woB0eecbf6A)
A rough summary might be "Korea borrowed patriarchal norms from China's Neo-Confucianism, and then intensified them by a factor of 10. Also, the Chaebols are totalitarian leviathans which stifle economic-mobility and political-reform."
(edit: ah dammit, anonimoose beat me to it.)
At a cursory glance I think the accusation from Joseph Bronski that Gusev "makes up his own chart to remove the error bars for this, to obscure the fact that the study found no evidence for this in IQ" seems like a oversimplification. He seems to have made his own chart because he did a correction for assortative mating, like it's not just a copy of the chart but with the error bars removed.
Reading 32., the title seems to be… I hate to say "clickbait" about a non-mainstream and well-researched article, but misleading anyway. A solid chunk of the article is spent disputing the romanticised claim that the House of Wisdom was the beating heart of the Greek-to-Arabic translation movement, but that seems to be a fairly trivial point if it doesn't change the fact that said movement *did* exist and *did* contribute to the recovery of some Greek texts:
> A handful of key Greek-language works from Classic times were only recovered via Arabic translations, made outside of the House of Wisdom itself; this, indeed, was for the most part, as Gutas explains, a translation movement that was separate and independent of the House of Wisdom (with its specific focus on storing Arabic-language books and commissioning translations from Persian-language books), even if sometimes the translations were made by people associated with the library – a fact that later helped muddle the distinction.
Then there's a separate argument that the number of Greek texts thus rescued has been overinflated in the public memory, especially insofar as non-translated copies still existed in Europe and Byzantium, but that's a much fuzzier argument. In the comment section, the author happily admits that it *was* the Arabic tradition which led to these ideas being reinjected into Renaissance Europe, and the forgotten European copies were only rediscovered after that interest had been reignited. That's a more complicated story than the basic infobite, but hardly so much so as to justify giving the impresson that the whole "Arabic scholars preserving Greek texts" thing is a baseless legend — it's just a bit of a simplification.
Yeah, I was surprised by the title given what I was taught in my undergrad in Islamic history - and then read it and found it was consistent with what I was taught. Maybe there has been some exaggeration, but the thrust of the “myth” remains true.
I agree with you. I think from his other stuff the author is clearly pursuing edgy opinions which are not fully backed up by his evidence / at the least overextend. I did a course on medieval Islamic medical traditions and it’s hard to argue that it didn’t have an impact on Europe…
I think the article is trying to stick up for the Byzantines and Eastern Roman empire. The common dispute is between the West (Latin) and the Muslim world, but the Eastern (Greek) empire gets forgotten and ignored.
After the fall of the West, the Eastern Empire survived for a long time until the defeat by the Muslim empire(s). The conflict there was between East and Muslim, not West and Muslim (until later on, see Lepanto). But since it's even referred to in terms of the West (Byzantium is the New Rome for both the Eastern Empire and the Muslim world), then the focus and emphasis is put on the West.
So the article is saying "Hey! We were there! We were writing and maintaining and transcribing those works! The Muslims got them from us to begin with!"
I have no issue with the article itself, it makes a valid point and it's an interesting read! I just think that its title is slightly misleading, and the way Scott phrased the bullet point in this post is even moreso — someone scanning the post but not bothering to read the article would, I think, get a distinctly wrong impression of what the point being made actually is.
15. Cremieux writes a good article, but he definitely overstates his case in several instances. Yes, Catholic persecution of sciences is real. That's why one of the popes issued a formal apology for the Galileo Affair. But here are Cremieux's overstatements: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-ottoman-origins-of-modernity/comment/69966425?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=fcuqw
32. Is cherry-picking: the best up-to-date survey research by John Mulhall shows a large proportion of texts coming from Arabic-only being essential for the development of late medieval science and philosophy, even if Later Greek texts are found a few centuries later. https://dash.lib.harvard.edu/handle/1/37374584?show=full
It's difficult to understand Palestinian attitudes towards Hamas given that (as the Israeli government has admitted) the Israel government collaborated extensively with Hamas up until 10/6 and worked very hard to ensure that Hamas retained tight control over Gaza, which was advantageous to Hamas and to the Netanyahu regime
"Collaborated extensively" is a huge overstatement. For a while, Hamas was pretending to moderate, so israel tried to create a no-war status kwo. Israel could starve Hamas, and force it into war. It could choose to destroy Hamas in the war, but it would have looked like the last year did with even less diplomatic legitimacy. After the bloody war, it would have been forced to give Gaza to the PA - which was indeed viewed as against Israeli interest, ir at least not worth it.
How much of the Korean problem is just the sex ratio?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-november-2024/comment/75130846
based on this thread, it's a very serious cultural issue, which led to the sex ratio issue.
The AI strawberry “plant” is a great example of “truthiness”. It is correct fir some questions but also is not “the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth”.
I would love to search the comments section for more on Korea, but since the phone app lacks a search tool, I can't, and thus I won't be part of that discussion.
They really need to fix this. Or better, “search visible text” should be built into the operating system. We should never not be able to search text.
It's a travesty.
Browser's still a thing.
It's the inefficient frictions that bother me. When apps are much lower functionality than browser, but I am also railroaded into using the app I feel betrayed by the gods of optimization!
I recently became unable to go to the Substack website on my phone. I sign in, but keep showing as not logged in. So I got the app and loath it. You can't do searches, I can't find a way to collapse threads, and I couldn't even find a way to edit a text I'd posted -- I could only "hide" it (what's even the point of that?), delete it or share it.
It might be due to the way modern browsers treat domain names. If you're logged-in at substack.com, your login won't automatically apply to astralcodex.com, because different domains don't get to share cookies. It's a privacy feature pioneered by Safari and Firefox, I'm not sure if Chrome does it too.
In that case the solution is just to click the 'login' button on ACX; the login page is on substack.com, so if you're already logged-in there, it will just send you back to ACX without having to enter your credentials again, and you'll be logged-in.
Btw seconded, I only use Substack from the browser, even on mobile. Works just fine, and has all the browser amenities, including search - why would I want an app?
mobile firefox works ok, especially since substack did some optimization
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-november-2024/comment/75130846
Thank you for the update on Whither Tartaria. I do a lecture on this yearly in my history of cities course and this is some great stuff to add.
Interesting note: Loos argues in Ornament and Crime that removing ornaments from buildings would make things cheaper and allow us to pay workers more. It was never true that shifting labour to a less-skilled, standardized tasks would lead to any better pay for workers. Now it seems it doesn’t even cost much less.
Ignoring maintenance and liability costs seems like a major gap in the argument.
> 1: Ancient Chinese passports for the dead. “During the late Warring States / Han dynasty, people would be buried with official ID to get them into the underworld.”
I believe this is:
故郡鄣县里大男子吴孝为人黄带色，随面长七尺三寸
年至今可六十三已四岁行到端母亡就摆不智衣服死产在所
If I've got this right:
Wu Xiao, a strong man from Zhang County in his native province, had a sickly (literally yellow) complexion and a front measuring about seven feet and three inches in length. He was sixty-three years old. After his mother’s death, he struggled to cope (more poetically, failed to thrive) and became unable to dress himself properly, eventually passing away at home.
Mid level confidence on specific parts but high confidence on the gist. Sounds more like a death certificate.
> a face measuring about seven feet and three inches in length
Why the long face?
Face in this context means something more like front I think. So it's overall height. Also those aren't actual feet and inches. ChatGPT says the literal units convert to about 5'9".
Edit: I've changed it to front.
A bunch of the characters you got there are mistakenly transcribed. To my eyes it looks like this:
故邯郸韩审里大男子吴骚为人黄皙色隋面长七尺三寸
年至今可六十三—四岁行到端毋它疵瑕不智衣服死产在所
The Chinese language is pretty different 2000 years ago even though many of the characters are still used today. I'm not even going to try to translate. EDIT: well, maybe there is a translation on twitter, though I don't have an account and can't get to it.
Update: if you search google with this Chinese phrase you get various blog posts / articles describing this in Chinese, such as this link: https://wenshizhishi.1she.com/11036/370120.html
which includes:
“故邯郸韩审里大男子吴骚，为人黄晳色，椭面，长七尺三寸，年至今可六十三、四岁，行到端，毋它疵瑕，不知衣服、死产、在所。”... 该枚竹简记录的是成年男子“吴骚”的身份信息，他籍贯为邯郸韩审里，皮肤为黄晳色，脸呈长圆型，身高大约七尺三寸（秦汉一尺相当于今23.1cm，其人约169cm），年龄大约六十三四岁，走路姿势端正，身体无瑕疵。
So basically this article includes that text but with punctuation marks and also substituting some characters to make it more legible to a modern reader. Then that article also translates that ancient Chinese text into modern Chinese, which I can actually translate into English:
"This bamboo slip records personal information about the adult male Wu Sao. He was born in Handan Hanshen, his skin was light yellow(?), his face was oval in shape, his height was roughly 7 feet and 3 inches (the foot of the Qin and Han dynasties is about 23.1 cm, so his height was about 169 cm), his age is about 63 to 64. He walked with upright posture. His body was without blemish."
EDIT: Okay so they don't translate the last bit, "不知衣服、死产、在所。" specifically but from reading the article it sounds like this actually means "His clothing, whether he is dead or alive, and his physical location are unknown."
EDIT2: Neither the ancient Chinese nor the modern Chinese has much information about the tense of the verbs. Maybe this is all supposed to be written in present tense and I just don't know.
> his height was roughly 7 feet and 3 inches (the foot of the Qin and Han dynasties is about 23.1 cm, so his height was about 169 cm)
If you assume the Qin and Han "inch" is a twelfth of a "foot", these numbers don't quite add up. It would have to be a ninth or a tenth.
yeah maybe it is lazy of me just to translate 尺 “chi" as foot and 寸 "cun" as inches. Apparently 1 chi = 10 cun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_(unit)
Wait what the heck, if this article https://wenshizhishi.1she.com/11036/370120.html that I am reading is right, then this bamboo slip is not at all an official ID for getting dead buried people into the underworld, but rather part of some government "database" for keeping track of lots of still-living people by recording their name and physical appearance and stuff. One use for this is to identify and catch thieves.
Entirely possible. And yeah, my Classical Chinese is not very good. But what I got from your version is:
Accordingly, in Shenli of Handan, a tall man named Wu Sao, with a light yellow complexion, a smooth face, and a height of seven feet three inches (Chinese units, see other comment). His age is around 63 or 64 years. His behavior is upright, without other flaws or imperfections. He is not concerned with and dead(? I know this means death but it's weird) to matters of clothing and livelihood.
I think it's coming from 死. But like I said that's a weird thing to put in and it's always been used in a bunch of ways. I've seen it used to mean fixed or unresponsive to and that might fit better. At any rate, it doesn't seem to straightforwardly say he is dead. This might just be a normal passport identifying him.
不智衣服死产在所 is just really weird. "not wise clothing garment death produced exist place." If you read it 不智-衣服-死产-在所 then it's "unwise (or unconcerned) clothing stillborn location." You can divvy up the characters a few other ways. Maybe, "unconcerned with clothing. He died and was born at this place."?
Yeah translating this is kinda hard. I feel like with Chinese text, the earlier it is, the harder it is to understand. Did you see my other two comments?
Yeah, I did. I know that there were extensive passport systems that included written descriptions. So this might be that. But I'm just having fun speculating and trying my hand at figuring it out. I've looked a little and while I can find people trying to translate it they don't seem to agree on what it is or what it says specifically.
Ah, fair enough.
> 13: Gwern on the chip embargo:
Sorry, were serious people taking the idea it was doing nothing seriously? The people saying the chip embargo wasn't working at its object goal (preventing chips from getting to China) were clearly lying. Especially at scale. The serious counterargument is that China is now spending approximately all the money trying to develop domestic alternatives. And the counterargument to that is they might not succeed. But the idea it just wasn't working was always obviously an attempt to convince people to give up.
The reasons this is not applicable to AI pause or AI regulation are:
1. You need China to respect the pause too. Otherwise you're just buying time for them to catch up with the US unless the US is so far ahead that China has no chance of making a breakthrough. Contrary to what some people say, China is nowhere near that far behind. It's also just politically unsustainable to expect the US and multiple other countries to slow themselves down in the face of an adversary that isn't slowing down.
2. The pause needs to be multilateral and durable. Basically you need about a dozen nations to agree and keep the agreement for a long time. AI pause types have limited influence in the US and no influence in most of those other countries. The idea that the US can just force them to go along sees an overly mighty view of the US. The allies are concerned with China independently.
3. It's not apparent that compute density is the long term bottleneck and China can produce plenty of mid-level compute. And in fact they are specifically trying to get around this limitation. They might succeed.
But if the goal of slowing down their potential use in leading edge military applications then that can be done. Especially because if China has 1 really good missile instead of 20 then that's a win. But if it has 1 super-AGI instead of 20 then that's still 1 super-AGI. But in the material world it's all down to quantity. Anyone can make some quantity of chips. They might just be so old and out of date that they're hilariously inefficient compared to modern processes. Which means more price for lower quality. And that's how you really maintain an advantage: defense economics.
1. I wouldn't be so dismissive of buying time (to get alignment research done). If we have a two year head start over China, we can afford a two year pause; if we have a three year head start ... and so on. But also, imagine that the US is three months from some powerful strategic advantage (let's say the intelligence explosion) and China is twelve months. Now it's in China's interest to pause (since they don't want US getting to the intelligence explosion first). This is a much harder sell if US is three months and China is one month.
2. Again, this is only true if you expect the pause to last forever. If you just want a 1- 5 year breather for alignment research, it doesn't seem obvious that any nation can catch up to the US or China during that time, and the ones with the best chance of doing so (eg UK, EU) would be relatively easy to involve in a pause.
3. Can you explain more about why compute density might not be a bottleneck to AI supremacy?
1. The agreement has to actually work and not immediately fall apart to buy time. For example, if you pass a law and the net effect is they all just move to Japan then I guess you've delayed it by a few weeks. If that. But that's hardly worth doing.
You also don't get to assume you have an objective and exact knowledge of exactly how far ahead anyone else is. If you ask many labs or China many of them would tell you is they're already ahead in AI.
And if China is 12 months behind and the US 3 month's behind it's not in China's interest to pause. It's in China's interest to convince the US to pause and lie about pausing. And then to do extra risky things to close the gap before the pause is over. This is the behavior you saw from the Soviets during the Cold War and more recently North Korea. And the moment the US suspects the other side is lying they'll stop their own pause.
Nuclear proliferation and standards is used as the metaphor here. And notably did not work anything like what you're advocating for and didn't involve a pause. But also that was never able to get several major powers into full compliance. And eventually led to a very famous accident in the Soviet Union because they just declined to comply with the standards (and in several cases lied about it). So you need to do something better than that. Because the Chernobyl of AI is a phrase that makes even me afraid.
2. No, it's true regardless of how durable it needs to be. If anyone cheats on the agreement as soon as that's discovered it blows up and research restarts. If you want it to last five years and in month 3 it's discovered that someone is cheating then that's still a failure. Whatever research is ultimately done also needs to be durably and universally enforced or else someone will invent unaligned AI at some point and it will just have bought some more time.
I also doubt that a geopolitically small movement with no politically influential presence outside a few countries can coordinate a major international agreement involving dozens of countries. The chip limits took 22 countries and by my account you'd need something like 30-40 countries on board to make this work.
3. Because what that effects is price and a determined country can just outspend the limits. Yes, using three 5nm chips in place of one 2nm chip is problematic in certain ways. And it costs about 50% more (depending, rough estimate). But you can just spend the money and make an equivalent cluster.
This doesn't work in warfare because you want bulk production. If your missiles are 50% more expensive then you have fewer missiles and have to limit their use on the battlefield while the other side can use them more freely. But this is not relevant for an AGI doom scenario. It just needs to get trained once and then it does whatever it is it does.
> And eventually led to a very famous accident in the Soviet Union because they just declined to comply with the standards (and in several cases lied about it).
Chernobyl didn't happen because the Soviets were ignoring nuclear proliferation standards. There was no reactor vessel because it was easier to harvest nuclear material that way; so you could argue the explosion would have been much more contained. But that had nothing to do with the proximate cause of the reactor exploding in the first place.
I think we basically agree. They were ignoring nuclear SAFETY standards which they had agreed to. If they had been following them the accident either wouldn't have happened or would have been contained. And an accident like Three Mile Island is not a disaster like Chernobyl. But I think there were rules that would have prevented even the meltdown specifically around experiments.
I think there is an interesting question about whether the Chernobyl experiment that led to the accident actually followed the rules in place by the Soviet government. Any test involving critical components of the reactor had to be approved by the nuclear design bureau. The Chernobyl authorities decided their test only involved electrical systems, so no approval was needed, even though they were the electrical systems of critical components like the coolant pumps. The test was already behind schedule and the local personnel were under a lot of pressure to get it done. So... did they genuinely follow the rules, or were corners cut for expediency? But then you can blame the entire Soviet setup for the culture of corner cutting and (maybe intentionally) ignoring safety rules.
> 15: Cremieux: The Ottoman Origins Of Modernity. The “Ottoman” bit is a distractor; the Ottomans fought the Catholics long enough for the Protestants to get a foothold, and then the Protestants established modernity. A useful pushback against the pushback that the Catholic Church never persecuted scientists or held back progress. I’m most interested in this post in the context of Cremieux saying he wrote it in two hours. Even I can’t work that fast!
In fact one of the origins of the scientific revolution were some European philosophers/scientists/etc who went to the Ottoman Empire, met with Islamic mystics, and developed their own cult back home. Though that was not so much mainstream Ottoman culture as a series of minority religions that had official tolerance due to Ottoman's relative religious tolerance.
I did look into it after what you said and it appears the issue was instituting the Counter-Reformation at swordpoint. Countries which didn't experience did relatively better which is why you see some outliers in the more thoroughly Catholic regions. But this is at a glance.
I also find the time suspect. It's 5,500 words. At professional typist speeds that'd take 70 minutes just to write down. And they have graphics and citations. Which means either they got all the links, citations, structure, ideas, and graphics together and then the two hours was just filling in the words and editing (or did it after). I'm very fast by these standards and I took about two hours to do all this, including reading/following links, and ended up with a little under 1,500 words (not including things I started then deleted). And no graphics or citations naturally.
The paper Cremieux quotes extensively seems to conclude that (1) it was the fault of the Counter-Reformation because (2) even centuries after the Counter-Reformation, countries which had experienced it were able to use the mechanisms of repression adjusted to their own needs to halt dissenting thought.
Protestant countries weren't as successful because Protestants were not as efficient as Catholics because Protestants kept splitting into more and more sects because of fighting over doctrinal differences. No one Protestant sect was able to replicate the kind of unified control the Catholic Church had when it came to suppressing heresy.
I am not 100% convinced by this because the argument rests on secularised states couldn't invent their own repressive regimes, and I don't think that's true. A Catholic state that was accustomed to letting the Church influence society? Okay, I get that. But there *were* single church Protestant states, or at least majority sects. See Lutheranism, see Anglicanism.
And I don't think the English state had a problem with being repressive when needed, see Walsingham's acts as Spymaster for Queen Elizabeth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Walsingham
Newton may have had idiosyncratic religious beliefs, but his secular work as warden of the Royal Mint had nothing to do with that. Had Newton been *politically* dissenting, he would have fallen foul of the authorities and would not have had his university career and membership of various societies.
I do remain puzzled at the claim that Protestant nations had no efficient mechanisms of repression. And thus science, because liberty of thought, or something.
America was founded in part on ideas of religious liberty not found at home. Home would be England for most.
America is the example par excellence of religious fissiparity, since the settlers both attempted to impose mini-theocracies and those who didn't like that could just move fifty miles away to virgin territory to set up their own village and run their own affairs. "The United States was not, in the end, able to impose confessional discipline" works for Casillo and Cremieux conclusions, but it doesn't help us towards "by contrast with their Catholic neighbours to the south" as to why or if there were more scientists per head of population.
Spain and Portugal claimed huge chunks of what would become the northern United States of America, but it's hard to measure 'like with like' as to the Protestant versus Catholic settlement of the north, since those territories were being ceded or abandoned slowly during the period the USA (as it would become) was being established. I don't imagine either side had very many eminent scientists in 1790 - does Benjamin Franklin really count as a scientist, as distinct from a dilettante or interested amateur?
Though trying to find this out leads down interesting byways; The 1619 Project might want to consider the likes of this man:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Garrido
"Juan Garrido (c. 1480 – c. 1550) was an Afro-Spaniard conquistador known as the first documented black person in what would become the United States. Born in West Africa, he went to Portugal as a young man. In converting to Catholicism, he chose the Spanish name Juan Garrido ("Handsome John"). He is the first known African to arrive in North America.
He participated in the conquests of Cuba by Diego Velázquez and the expeditions to Florida by Juan Ponce de León. By 1519, he had joined Cortes's forces and invaded present-day Mexico, participating in the siege of Tenochtitlan. He married and settled in Mexico City, where he was the first known farmer to have sowed wheat in America. He continued to serve with Spanish forces for more than 30 years, including expeditions to western Mexico and to the Pacific."
Yeah, another good point. America did get religious toleration in the 17th century in part because they had the exact opposite reaction to the wars of religion. While most of Europe became less tolerant the weaker states of the Americas created domestic peace by granting toleration.
Yeah, there's a much more complex story there. Especially around the growth of royal absolutism and how that movement alternatively allied itself with Protestantism or Catholicism as was convenient for their political program. Catholicism even at its most pro-absolutism put bars on how far a king could go though. Which is why Louis XIV needed Gallicanism.
It also ignores that most of the "falling behind" was a 19th century phenomenon. Or that if you'd asked who has more democracy and civil rights the answer most of the time would have been Catholics. In fact part of the issue is that the dataset discounts certain kinds of religious scholars even if they did secular work.
Luther needed protection from Frederick the elector and the Holy Roman Empire had its hands full with the ottomans. In a more stable era Frederick might have been invaded or forced to enforce the edict of Worms.
> 32: David Roman says it’s a myth that Arabic scholars rescued and preserved the works of the great classical authors.
He overstates the case a bit. It's true that Muslim scholars (not just Arab) were rarely the single source and knowledge survived in Europe. However, Muslim interest in these works and intellectual culture was more vibrant than the European equivalent at the time. Especially western European, the Byzantines were a bit better. They also just produced more actual copies which is how you end up with people like Avicenna being influential. The idea that Muslims saved the Classical world is a huge overstatement. The idea they did something to transmit and add to that tradition is true. And this piece seems to imply they were mostly remixers of other culture or that they missed the obviously superior stoic philosophy. But in fact they just emphasized other parts of the tradition and were hardly unique in doing so.
The counter argument is that they could only be saving the classical world from themselves.
The Muslims didn't exist in Classical times. They only came around in the 7th century. And by the 8th century they were friendly with Western Christians because they shared conflicts with the Byzantines and Ummayads. Charlemagne and Harun al-Rashidun were basically allies and pro-Rashidun Muslims even helped Charlemagne invade Spain.
By the classical world I meant the work of the classical world. So less patronising responses. If the Muslim invaders preserved the work of the Greeks and romans who were they preserving it from? From the Greek speaking Roman Empire? The best we can say is they didn’t destroy the work that preceded them.
Yes? The Greek speaking Roman Empire was incredibly destructive to the west. It was actually the barbarians that were friendlier to the surviving Roman aristocracy because it was a source of prestige and because they had a surviving dominance in the Church. The Byzantine invasion of Italy was the end of most surviving Classical institutions in Italy. Meanwhile in Spain where you had the Visigoths and then the Muslims there was more direct continuity.
ETA: The Byzantines also had Christian zealots destroying religious symbols and pagan books and the like. Iconoclasm et al. Of course, they transmitted a lot themselves and it's not exclusive. But I don't understand the claim here. There was widespread destruction including by the Byzantines and the barbarians, not just the Muslims.
Works aren’t just destroyed by invading armies, when you can only preserve writing on parchment that decays and reproduce it with dedicated scribes and copyists reproducing works word for word, there is a natural degradation in the quality and number of works maintained.
I don’t want to understate the role of monastic scriptoria in maintaining works in the west, but the more urbanized intellectual culture of the Islamic world could be more conducive at the time to reproducing texts for study and discussion than the isolated monasteries of the shattered west. Before the age of the printing press, it took a lot of effort for a work to survive to modern posterity, many of them were lost due to the passage of time (more so than the burning of Alexandria), and the de-urbanizing west had less scale and incentive to pass these texts on than the east, both Islamic and Byzantine.
> 36: Elsewhere in “Italy sucks” news - did you know Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups? Companies are taxed before making any money, based on how many assets they have. If they have lots of assets but aren’t making money (eg because they’re still doing research / in stealth) then tax officials get confused and hostile and run increasingly punitive audits. Related: size of the European tech sector.
This is one of the things that annoys me about people unwilling to acknowledge tradeoffs. You cannot make a system that both guarantees stability and is dynamic any more than you can make food that is both hot and cold. You might be able to swing from one to the other but you can't be both simultaneously. Instability doesn't necessarily mean that people who fail get put out on the street. But if you don't have a system that welcomes disruption you end up preventing it and ultimately stagnating and being outcompeted.
>you can[not] make food that is both hot and cold.
Chris Young's impossible coffee: https://youtu.be/4BmRXt5mUms?si=b0eho5j-BflE753Q
Okay, so we just need to wall off half of the economy and make it fully stable while making the other half fully dynamic. (Unironically that might not be the worst thing.)
That's kinda what we did in the past; but hyper-capitalist brained types gobbled up the stable businesses and made them meta-unstable so they could gamble in more places.
When did we do that? There was the big government big business alliance of the New Deal where there was massive consolidation and everyone had guaranteed jobs but there were issues with innovation. Famously the guy who invented the microwave made a whole $2 off it. And then it shifted and now we have a much more dynamic but less stable economy. But I can't think of when we went sector by sector and did something like that.
EG. things that used to be public utilities/state franchises/state licensed/publicly owned or managed or heavily regulated/un-financialized.
I'm not gonna make you read an essay, but the biggest example to look into (if you want) in the US is the railroad industry, IMO.
Re. Microwave: That has no connection to what you are thinking of. The microwave was invented by some dude at Raytheon as I recall, and if you invent something at a business you are not entitled to the proceeds of that invention just because you are entirely responsible for it. That belongs to your boss or the shareholders, who did participated in the most important part of the process, which is having lots of money a long time ago.
> EG. things that used to be public utilities/state franchises/state licensed/publicly owned or managed or heavily regulated/un-financialized.
This percentage has only slightly decreased, from a 1975 peak of about 16% to the modern 14% of the work force. Which is higher than it was during the 1930s or 50s for example. It was never a majority.
What I think you're thinking of is that the US economy used to be much more concentrated in a limited number of large corporations and more of the economy was in unionized professions. Nowadays the economy has more small corporations and has shifted into sectors with fewer unions. We're also more gender and race equal so even though the overall percentage has only decreased a little the percentage of white men in those jobs has decreased much further.
> Re. Microwave: That has no connection to what you are thinking of. The microwave was invented by some dude at Raytheon as I recall, and if you invent something at a business you are not entitled to the proceeds of that invention just because you are entirely responsible for it. That belongs to your boss or the shareholders, who did participated in the most important part of the process, which is having lots of money a long time ago.
No, I think you're just not realizing how what you're advocating for looks on the ground.
It was invented by Percy Spencer doing side investigations while working for Raytheon (and through Raytheon for the government, he was producing components for the military). His job was improving the manufacture of magnetrons. Today he'd take his innovation and go raise VC and start a new company. Back then the system was set up to discourage that so instead he submitted a report to his superiors. They supported him so he took time to actually put together an investigation and get a patent. He received a bonus of $2 for it and it went in his file as something to note if he was up for promotion.
This is what "un-financialized" means. He did not receive financial rewards for his innovation. Instead those went to Raytheon shareholders and the government. Today more of that would go to him.
While I agree with your general point, Italy in the ‘90s was decently competitive while valuing stability (job security etc) even more than Italy now.
That was a relatively short period, lasting from roughly from 1970 to 1997. And the way they made it work was by subsidizing in downtimes which caused debt issues. I've also heard that the way they would get around this is instead of cutting positions they would cut hours. Which caused the government to sometimes introduce wage subsidies which, again, caused more debt.
Also I wouldn't say Italy was really a center of innovation in that period. A lot of what it did (and really does) is luxury production.
Italy's debt/gdp ratio was lower then than now (https://tradingeconomics.com/italy/government-debt-to-gdp). Whether its long term dynamics was sustainable is an other issue, probably one I am not competent to comment about unless I take the time to dig more into the relevant models. A measure of innovation is number of patents per capita: we are currently number 18 https://www.wipo.int/edocs/statistics-country-profile/en/_list/l3.pdf, below the US but, say, above Canada.
> 42: Claim (from the IDF): Hamas faked polls showing that most Palestinians supported the October 7 attack; the real numbers are 31% in favor, 64% against.
Hamas has a long history of threatening people during polls and elections to get what they want. Hamas rules Gaza because they either won a quick civil war or successfully staged a coup after Israel pulled out. It's not because they represent the genuine will of the Palestinian people. Or at least they represent it to the same degree that you could say of any military backed authoritarian regime.
While the West Bank is not much freer than Gaza the sentiment there, not under Hamas rule, is notably more negative in obvious ways. Several leaders there (who are political opponents of both Israel and Hamas) have complained about their leadership and accused them of putting Iran's interests over the Palestinians. The Arab world and Palestinians have extremely high rates of anti-semitism (north of 90% in some places and higher than 70% everywhere) but that doesn't immediately translate into wanting to murder random Jews. And that's setting aside the pragmatists who think the move was just stupid or the people who are upset with Hamas siding with Iran.
This is one of the more frustrating things to me about this. Palestine and Israel have been made exceptional in ways they simply aren't and I don't think it's doing anyone, least of all the Palestinians, any favors. The reason Palestine can't get its act together is just standard issue authoritarian resilience which is (to simplify) fancy speak for "Hamas has all the guns and will shoot you if you try to get them out of power."
> 43: Otto von Bismarck wanted to trick France into declaring war on Germany. In order to provoke the French, he sent the Ems Dispatch, a statement describing recent diplomatic events in a way that sounded maximally offensive. The French were so offended that “crowds” in Paris demanded war, and the Franco-Prussian War was declared soon afterwards. The part of this that I find most interesting is the text of the dispatch itself, which read:
> I’m fascinated by the idea that only 150 years ago, it was obvious that if someone sent you this statement, you had to declare war or abandon all honor. If I read it carefully, I can sort of parse out that it sounds like the Prussians are unhappy, but that’s the most emotion I gather from it. Anyway, the Franco-Prussian War led to World War I which led to World War II - so if you don’t like 50 million people dying and the total devastation of Europe, blame this statement about ambassadors.
You've misunderstood this. First, the supposed insult was from the Germans to the French.
Secondly, Bismarck didn't send them the statement at all and it would have been strange for his summaries to go to France instead of his own country. Instead a French newspaper agency badly mistranslated the word adjutant literally. An adjutant in German meant an aid to a senior official (in this case the king) and in France it meant a non-commissioned officer. Basically the implication was that the Germans thought the French were not worth meeting with or even basic diplomatic courtesy in a rejection. This was printed in newspapers all over France which upset the people. It was a spark into a powderkeg. Arguably one which the jingoistic French newspapers wanted, with many waiting to publish until Bastille Day to fan the flames further.
It was, at any rate, irrelevant since the King of Fr ance had already decided to go to war. Though it helped get him public support. Still, the story is kind of a myth. At best you can say that Bismarck knew both languages and was hoping some people would misunderstand.
So did Bismarck bait France into declaring war or not? I always thought thats why Bismarck was considered a geopolitical genius. He baited France into declaring war, which forced the Southern German states to align and later join Prussia instead of Austria, and thus complete the unification of Germany.
Bismarck's brilliant move was a bit earlier. He diplomatically maneuvered to keep France out of the fighting until it was too late. This involved a significant amount of deceiving the French which the French eventually noticed. Bismarck then leveraged French attempts to salvage the situation, which were clumsy, to draw the various German states closer to each other. He then encouraged the German alliance to take a hard line in negotiations against France knowing that it would probably provoke a war.
France wanted huge concessions to avoid a war, including a diplomatic realignment of the German states and huge tracts of land given over to France. And after several rejections they thought they would have to go to war to get them. (Bismarck was not alone in these policies but he was probably the highest ranking person advocating them.) Bismarck correctly saw this as a win-win proposition: if France did not go to war at this point it would be difficult for them to dislodge the southern states. Maybe through long term patient diplomacy but the united German identity would make that difficult. And if France declared war then it would hasten the unification.
France chose to declare war and the rest is history. But no, events were not wholly in Bismarck's control. The earlier affair with Denmark was somewhat more created by Bismarck to unify them but Bismarck's ability to control everything is a bit overstated in general.
This reminded me of a plot point from *Into The Light* where a (brief) war occurs in part because the humans' software has been badly mistranslating the word "councilor", causing one alien faction to believe that a human diplomat is far more influential than he really is.
This happens a lot. One of my favorite examples is that Chinese chief of staff are basically secretaries while American chief of staff are fairly important. So during WW2 the Chinese would appoint American officers they thought were incompetent as chief of staff to important people who would then tell their subordinates just to sideline them. Translators were provided who smoothed over any issues.
I think there even was an incident where a polite question in one language had a speech melody which sounded like snubbing in the other language, and this led to conflict.
> 54: Koreans are not okay: I know about the cram schools, long work hours, and the gender wars which somehow manage to be even worse than the ones here, but I’m still looking for good articles with more details on what’s so bad and how it got that way.
You won't find any because it rhymes with western culture wars. See how upset some people get when men bring up the draft in the US. South Korea actually has a real draft and it actually is a politically salient issue men mobilize around. So how are you going to get an honest accounting of that complaint when it would give ammunition to domestic opponents?
The short version is, as neutrally as I can state it, that Korean society is highly patriarchal and has a lot of ways it treats women very poorly. Simultaneously it requires huge sacrifices from men to function and these obligations have not been extended to women socially or legally. In the old days men were hierarchically above women but now the government has implemented affirmative action etc. Which means a lot of Korean men feel like they're being asked to bear burdens women are not required to bear (which is objectively true) to support a system that favors women. And while it may favor women in the strict legal sense (affirmative action et al) there's still a huge amount of social issues around gender roles and sexual harassment and basic safety. Then this all went online and polarized and now there's two warring camps which have descended into insults, trolling, etc.
My one neat trick to solve this is to start drafting women (and otherwise equalizing burdens) and give men a similar bureaucracy to tackle their specific issues. The former would remove the tension that the unequal burdens on men create. The latter would make it harder to attack the idea of gender issues existing. You don't need direct parallel programs like helping men into STEM. But having people running around dealing with things like male suicide or discrimination against men in female dominated professions would give men a stake in moving away from the toxicity. But it'll never happen: feminists have a strong man-hating wing and the left wants to spend political capital catering to their base which is mostly women. The right meanwhile just wants to scrap the whole thing and the male rights types largely want to re-establish traditional gender roles.
On a minor note, the first tweeter has spent a lot of time calling Koreans various names and talking about how great the Japanese colonization of Korea was lately. He once compared the Japanese destruction of Korean society (he agrees it was destruction) to basically killing Hitler and being thought of as a murderer.
As someone with a minor insight in Korean society; I second a few of your observations. I'll also add be wary of those with anime avatars.
If you disagree with anything feel free to say. And yeah, anime avatars have like a 50/50 chance of being brilliant or the most awful stuff.
Either in the context of that "trick" or elsewhere: the intelligent thing for men to do then would be the same as the principled thing - allow reasonable interventions as long as they do not create too much of a bureaucracy (a foundation for male mental health seems completely reasonable to me, as does a serious discussion of how K-12 education - increasingly female-led - has been reshaped to disfavor male students) and strongly reject positive discrimination (as in, discrimination in favor of men in admissions to liberal-arts schools in the US, or extra points for being a man who wants to teach K-12 (this hasn't been tried in the US, but is rumored to happen elsewhere).
How much of Korean society is still built around traditional Asian cultural assumptions: when you marry someone you enter into their family and leave your own; the daughter-in-law is at the service of the household (and is often bullied by the mother-in-law); as the eldest son, the married couple either move in with the husband's parents or they move in with the newly married couple to be looked after in old age; the role of a wife is to produce grandchildren (and sons not daughters) and to unquestioningly support her husband; add in modern pressures about men working long hours, engaging in drinking parties (that's Japanese work culture, is it the same in Korea?), going off on business trips etc. while the wife may be expected to work outside the home but is still responsible for running the household *and* attending to the in-laws - there's a lot of pressure there that Westerners have decided to abandon, and it's no surprise there's not much enthusiasm amongst Korean young women to marry and have kids if it means bullying, high expectations, and extra pressure from society with little support if it all breaks down, since the government/police/whomever won't interfere with "family matters" which are supposed to all be dealt with internally.
Korea is worse than Japan in this regard. Korea was more heavily influenced by Chinese Confucianism and had less influence from more gender equal religions/ideologies like Buddhism. And they didn't have a revolution that believed in gender equality like China did (which is the 1911 revolution, not the communist one) or a restructuring of society like Japan did in 1945. Instead they got conquered by Japan during a period where they also had fairly traditional attitudes which left them much worse off in a lot of ways.
Just like a lot of men fetishize women from Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia a lot of East Asian women (as in from East Asia, not ethnically) fetishize western men. Not even American or European but Latin America and so on.
Some of it is foreign fetishism or that foreigners are often wealthier than average. But a lot of it is that the cultural norms are just more pro-women. I've heard the words "lady first culture" or "chivalry culture" a lot. And some of that is stuff like holding open doors. But more fundamentally it's that the cultural norm is that women work outside the home, there's no expectation that they sacrifice everything to care for his parents, men having a more active role in doing chores and raising the kids, etc.
In the same way some men say, "Marry someone from Asia. Asian women don't have these toxic feminist values!" you can find Asian women saying, "Marry a western man. Western men don't have these toxic traditionalist values!"
Well, if two reasonable people who avoid toxic extremes meet, I suppose they can be happy.
Yeah, I don't think it tends to work that well. There are many happy international marriages. Almost none of them started with someone hating the entire opposite gender in their own country.
One thing I have to repeatedly tell people: You are marrying a specific person and who that person is is far more important to marriage than where they're from. If you want something unusual in your culture you can make real gains by going to a culture where that's the norm. But before you even know that you need to actually know the culture enough to make that judgment.
I agree that affirmative action is not a great policy in many ways. However, that's not really what they're going for. The more extreme types want an explicit return to traditional gender roles, the removal of things like sexual harassment or spousal abuse laws, and have even suggested affirmative action for men. The entire thing is really very toxic.
Sounds serious.
That's about the impression I had as a Korean as well - I'm surprised you know so much about this.
> My one neat trick to solve this is to start drafting women (and otherwise equalizing burdens) and give men a similar bureaucracy to tackle their specific issues.
I think it would be better to start paying fair wages to soldiers - and by fair, I mean it should be high enough that people would willingly take the job. Female drafting has been suggested, but it remains a minor position even in the conservative camp. I'm not sure if female drafting would make economic/strategic sense, and I certainly don't think it would solve the gender war, if anything it would add fuel to fire.
For the second idea, I absolutely agree.
I agree that abolishing conscription would work. The issue being South Korea needs conscription for practical reasons. Higher pay kind of defeats the point of conscription and cannot be high enough that it's worth more than a two year head start in the workforce. So it'll make it less bad but not actually eliminate the issue. You could also beef up the benefits soldiers get or give them explicit promotion preferences to make up for the years out of the workforce. But that would just put them ahead of women which would be politically unacceptable on the left.
Drafting women works well enough in Israel and I think could be made practical. I think it would eliminate a lot of the relative advantage women have for not being drafted. And I think it would mean young Korean men and women would be less isolated from each other. You might still see conflicts between young and old but I'd argue that's healthier than gender conflict. How would it make it worse?
> Higher pay kind of defeats the point of conscription and cannot be high enough that it's worth more than a two year head start in the workforce.
I disagree. Even now, my friends are starting to say that military is kinda okay, after they more than doubled the wages in the last few years. They still don't quite prefer it, but give it another doubling and I think we'd see women shouting for their rights to join the army... Right now the labor costs in the army is about 15B$, so further increases would be expensive but not crazy.
> How would it make it worse?
By creating another issue to be fought over? Like, can you imagine feminists not going crazy if politicians actually tried to implement female drafting? Maybe, in the very long term it would work out as you say, but in the short term, it would absolutely make gender war worse.
On balance I think you might be right that you could rebalance things so conscription could be a better deal. Add in drafting women and I think it'd be much healthier overall.
As to feminists screaming I think it would divide them rather than being something they were uniformly against. I know at least one Korean feminist who explicitly thinks that drafting women would improve women's position in society. And I find it hard to understand how the politics of women being in the military too would make them hate men more or make men hate women more. Especially since most of the anti-feminists want women in the home, not in the military.
> I know at least one Korean feminist who explicitly thinks that drafting women would improve women's position in society.
Good point, this view does exist, and I think they may be right. But these feminists probably weren't the one causing the biggest flame wars anyway ;) So while I respect that position I still don't they could do much to the reduce the conflict.
> Especially since most of the anti-feminists want women in the home, not in the military.
Actually I don't think so - it's easy to think in terms of feminism vs patriarchy, but I would say that anti-feminism in Korea is very different from patriarchy. These are not old conversatives who refuse empowering of women, these are young men who believe women are already empowered, and that men are the victims of a feminists society. And since military is one of their biggest issues, I'd say there would be great support for female conscription. (Although I can't say for sure, these people really aren't the most consistent bunch)
> Good point, this view does exist, and I think they may be right. But these feminists probably weren't the one causing the biggest flame wars anyway ;) So while I respect that position I still don't they could do much to the reduce the conflict.
Sure, but as a political economy matter that's enough to get it through with some degree of both sides support.
> Actually I don't think so - it's easy to think in terms of feminism vs patriarchy, but I would say that anti-feminism in Korea is very different from patriarchy. These are not old conversatives who refuse empowering of women, these are young men who believe women are already empowered, and that men are the victims of a feminists society. And since military is one of their biggest issues, I'd say there would be great support for female conscription. (Although I can't say for sure, these people really aren't the most consistent bunch)
Is there such support in fact? Most of what I've heard is more a desire for state mandated girlfriend or for a system of preferences for men or that kind of thing. But if there's really that much support then perhaps South Korea can have a moment where everyone comes together.
But I haven't done a thorough study or anything. To be honest, I try not to keep up with this stuff too much because it's depressing.
What would you think if the result was young Korean women going "oh thank God, now I don't have to claw my way into getting a job in the two acceptable big concerns that my family will otherwise nag me to death over; I don't have to hear nagging about "you're twenty-four, why aren't you married and giving me grandkids yet?"; I don't have to mix with a bunch of dumb guys but we'll all be girls together" and what it does is tank marriage and fertility rates *even more*?
I don't see South Korea, if it drafts women, letting young men and women mix much, because that's a recipe for accidental pregnancies and necessity for abortion as well as taking a large number of your conscripts out of service because they're pregnant, hence it won't really help with "Jack and Jill met and fell in love while doing their national service and now they're married with two kids".
https://www.mynavyhr.navy.mil/Career-Management/Detailing/Deployability/Active-Duty-Pregnancy/
https://mccareer.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/opnavinst-6000-1d-navy-guidelines-concerning-pregnancy-and-parenthood.pdf
If Jill can have her service deferred or get a cushier posting because she's pregnant, you don't think that will lead Jack to be resentful that she gets better treatment than him?
This doesn't seem to be the case as of the three examples that have female conscription (de jure or de facto) two of them are higher than their neighbors and one of them is the same. One of which is North Korea and is likely to be an apples to apples cultural comparison. And yes, women and men mix and the presence of birth control and all that means that getting pregnant is relatively rare. And if it wasn't that would itself be something about fertility.
But my point is not to make conscription into a dating service. My point is that it creates non-sexual social bonds as it currently does among men. South Korea is also insanely seniority hierarchical. So having all women be two years longer in the company than all men of the same age provides real advantages. This would prevent that.
" But it'll never happen: feminists have a strong man-hating wing and the left wants to spend political capital catering to their base which is mostly women. The right meanwhile just wants to scrap the whole thing and the male rights types largely want to re-establish traditional gender roles."
As it is here. Basically, nobody goes to bat for low-status men: the left hates them because they're men and the right has contempt for them because they're low-status. "Man up and get a job!" Yeah, if they had them. All the criticisms the left makes about male mental health and restrictive roles are actually true, but they replace them with something even worse.
You could have some degree of political entrepreneurship that organizes them. I think that was actually Jordan Peterson's project and he was wildly successful. But then he had health issues and now appears to be much diminished. Not to mention some other concerning issues.
The Catholic Church now has an anime mascot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luce_(mascot)
Many are uncomfortable by how close the name Luce is to Lucifer. But you have to realize the Church literally has a saint named Lucifer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer_of_Cagliari
I would have thought "Luce" is closer to the name of Saint Lucy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Lucy
The Wikipedia entry is terrible; the scallop shell is not the symbol of pilgrimage because "scallop shells were used instead of chalices", it is because of the pilgrimage to Compostella in honour of St James (still done to this day as The Camino and being sold as a secular 'live love pray' sort of thing instead of doing it as a traditional Catholic pilgrimage):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scallop#Shell_of_Saint_James
The scallop shell is the traditional emblem of St James the Great and is popular with pilgrims travelling the Way of St James (Camino de Santiago). Medieval Christians would collect a scallop shell while at Compostela as evidence of having made the journey. The association of Saint James with the scallop can most likely be traced to the legend that the apostle once rescued a knight covered in scallops. An alternative version of the legend holds that while St. James' remains were being transported to Galicia (Spain) from Jerusalem. As the ship approached land, the wedding of the daughter of Queen Lupa was taking place on shore.[74] The young groom was on horseback, and, upon seeing the ship's approach, his horse got spooked, and horse and rider plunged into the sea. Through miraculous intervention, the horse and rider emerged from the water alive, covered in seashells.
Indeed, in French, the mollusc itself – as well as a popular preparation of it in cream sauce – is called coquille St. Jacques. In German they are Jakobsmuscheln – literally "James's shellfish".
...The scallop shell symbol found its way into heraldry as a badge of those who had been on the pilgrimage to Compostela, although later, it became a symbol of pilgrimage in general."
Mediaeval pilgrims used to buy all sorts of souvenirs of their journey, just like modern tourists, and lead badges from the pilgrimage site of all sorts of places were popular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrim_badge
"The most popular shrines sold over 100,000 badges a year, making pilgrim badges the first mass-produced tourist souvenir. In 1520, the church at Regensbury sold over 120,000 badges to medieval pilgrims, after a drastic shortage the previous year.
...Studying the imagery of pilgrim badges quickly leads to an ability to identify the shrine or saint associated with them. For example, St Thomas of Canterbury is often shown being martyred by one of a group of four knights. The iconography of the scallop shell associated with pilgrimages along the Way of St James to the shrine of Saint James at Santiago de Compostela in modern Spain derived from shells collected by pilgrims on the beach. The relic of St John the Baptist's head, which was famously venerated at Amiens, is shown as a face on a plate."
7: Joseph Heath on Marxism vs. John Rawls.
Rawls: Yes, veil of ignorance is a rework of liberal thought going back to Spinoza's viewpoint of eternity. The weakness is that Rawls assumes that the folks hiding behind the veil will have the same risk reward preferences that the tenured members of the Harvard Faculty do. Empirically, we know that others (oil wildcatters and professional boxers) have very different settings on that dial.
Further, I don't think any version liberalism is much followed in academia these days. They have given themselves over to a bizarre Gramscian parody of Marxism that passes under the name of Critical Theory. Good old fashioned Stalinism died after the Soviet Union did.
BTW: it was not supply and demand that but the Marginal Utility Revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility) that undermined Marxism intellectually. Even then it took a long time. Supply and demand comes from Smith who published Wealth of Nations in 1776, 90 years before Kapital. The thinkers who formulated marginal theory -- Jevons, Menger, and Walras, were contemporaries of Marx and published their work in the same mid 19th Century time frame that Marx did. And the undermining was done by the Austrian School (Von Mises and Hayek) in the Post WWI era and technically by mathematical theorists like Kenneth Arrow in the Post WWII era.
15: Cremieux: The Ottoman Origins Of Modernity.
Nah. First modernity is not a strictly Protestant affair. Copernicus was a Catholic Bishop. Machiavelli, Pascal, and Descartes came from Catholic countries. Kepler worked for the Holy Roman Emperor. Galileo baited the Pope into being punished. But he was an Italian Catholic in origin and education.
Second, the Ottomans distracted the Catholics from nothing. The wars of religion which culminated in the Thirty Years war ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 almost 40 years before the last Ottoman siege of Vienna.
The real Ottoman effect was that once they controlled the eastern end of the Mediterranean in the 15th Century, they could extract rents from the Spice and silk trades between Asia and Europe. That gave the Atlantic countries, particularly Spain and Portugal, the incentive to sail around Africa to the Indies.
32: David Roman says it’s a myth that Arabic scholars rescued and preserved the works of the great classical authors.
True. The manuscripts we have came from Byzantine scholars fleeing the collapse of the Byzantine Empire at the hands of the Ottomans. See above.
47: Sort of kind of related - When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal.
Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, and Black Lives delegitimated the show which featured PoC playing the roles of Founders. Miranda has been severely criticized by crits. He apologized and slunk away, but he has done very little since the movie of "In the Heights" for which he was chastised that the actors were not dark enough. That is really sad because I thought Hamilton was brilliant as 360 degree integration of Music, text, and movement, and that it could lead to a revival of the Broadway musical. The crits have killed comedy and musicals, what more damage will they do to our culture?
Glad to see you giving the Franco-Prussian war its due. Good followup topics are
- the war indemnity (5 billion francs in 1871, which would inflation adjust to the high hundreds of billions or low trillions, like several *years* of budgets), which France payed back in two years in full
- the Paris commune, which declare autonomy, got to work on a proto-communist utopia, quickly re-invented the Terror and the police state, had infighting among the anarchists and the authoritarians, thumbed its nose *hard* at the rest of France and the recently conquering Germans, and was promptly crushed to the tune of 10k battle deaths and 15k judicial executions, more or less permanently ending Paris's near century of violent revolutions.
- the fact that the winning conservative side *was going to re-crown the Bourbon king*, but he was so rude that they gave up and had a republic instead.
If they gave up, I would think they would re-crown the bourbon King.
The winning coalition that ruled France after the Franco-Prussian war, the one that successfully crushed the Paris commune, was majority royalist, and the Orleanists (supporters of one line) backed the Bourbons (supporters of the other line) to offer the crown to Duke Henri.
But Duke Henri insisted on a lot of full reversions to royal French tradition, foremost the abandoning of the tricolor flag and the reinstatement of the white Bourbon flag. The coalition balked at this*, no deal could be reached, so the Third Republic limped on, waiting for Henri to die so they could extend the offer to someone else, but public sentiment shifted, and eventually they just stopped offering and went with the Republic.
Per wikipedia, Pope Pius IX, upon hearing Henri's decision, notably remarked "And all that, all that for a napkin!"
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri,_Count_of_Chambord#Hope_of_a_restoration
I am something of a monarchist, but I think the nineteenth century Bourbons were stupid as hell. Tallyrand was right to say that when they returned, they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
* note the Orleanists in particular would be opposed, as their king had ruled a progressive France as "King of the French", not "King of France", and had supported a lot of Republican institutions, a strong constitution, and the tricolor flag. Yes, this all seems stupid to us moderns, but the concerns of every era seem stupid to every other era, including our own.
>Before the 19th century, Jews were underreprsented in pretty much every movement and organization that had anything to do with the improvement of society, scientific progress, etc.
I am skeptical that there is actual data for that. And, how many usch organizations even existed before the 19th Century?
>Jewish overrepresentation in politics (and plenty of other things) from the mid-19th century onwards was a consequence not just of Jewish emancipation in the West (which dates back to Napoleon) but of the consequent assimilation.
But that does not really seem to explain the phenomenon. If their overpresentation is a result of assimilation, why are they substnatially more liberal than the norm? Esp the white norm? Assimilation implies that they would largely be indistinguishable from the norm in regard to their political view, but they aren't.
People don't assimilate to "the norm" of a culture, they assimilate to some specific subculture within a culture. In case of assimilating 1800s Jews, it generally seems to have been the secular and liberal-Protestant subcultures inside the various countries, not the conservative/Catholic ones (which were generally rural and would have been suspicious of even assimilating Jews).
I don't know why you are referring to 1800s Jews, since there were so few Jews in the US before about1900. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-population-in-the-united-states-nationally
Moreover, there were plenty of Catholics in the cities in which they settled.
And Jews certainly did not assimilate to "secular" Protestant or any other secular culture (if there even was a secular subculture at the time).
Finally, it seems to me that Jewish immigrants were overrepresented among the leftist radicals of the teens and twenties. They clearly brought their views with them.
I meant assimilation in Western European countries.
Ah, I see. But Jewish immigrants were largely from Eastern Europe ( largely Orthodox or Catholic). Moreover, I am dubious that they assimilated there; I am pretty sure they largely spoke Yiddish, for example.
"During the most recent Berkeley ACX meetup, we somehow ended up discussing how often people feed living mice to snakes. The answer seems to be that there’s a debate about it in the snake community, the smartest and most experienced voices are against it, but it still happens a lot. "
Interesting that the smartest snakes are against eating mice.
Living mice. Why do the work if someone else will do it for you? That's a smart snake.
I'm not surprised by the teaching thing.
The worst math teacher I've ever had was published and had some flavor of stem brain high performance neurodivergence, the best math teacher I've ever had was an emergency sub in from the humanities, self-reported that she didn't know math above algebra, but did a much better job simply by identifying what the class was having trouble with and working through textbook examples in a legible fashion.
"83% of young Korean women think of South Korea as 'hell' and 80% of them want to leave" seems like an extremely bad summary of a graph showing that (1) this is true, but (2) young Korean men have similar attitudes and (3) 64% of older Korean men and women see South Korea as 'hell' and 65% (!) want to leave.
>83% of South Korean women think of Korea as "Hell"
This is *slightly* misleading. They're saying they sympathize with this term popular in domestic social critique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Joseon
About dexedrine: It is quite similar to Adderall. It's the right-handed isomer of amphetamine, & is slightly stronger than the left-handed one. Adderall is a 50-50 mix of the 2. Dexedrine's still prescribed occasionally, but I have never heard any good reason why it is prescribed much less often than Adderall. I think the reason for rarely prescribing it might be that it was marketed in the past as a diet pill or an antidepressant, so people have negative associations to it. I've recommended to a few people who could not get their adderall script filled because of the shortage that they ask the prescriber for dextroamphetamine (i.e. dexedrine). Don't know whether any of them were successful.
I have seen amphetamine mentioned in modern psychopharm texts as often effective for treatment-resistant depression, and I have seen it actually be extremely effective in 2 people whom nothing else have helped. Oddly, neither felt a diminished effect over time and wanted to raise the dose. It's also my observation that people taking Adderall for ADD also continue to find it helpful, and do not crave more and more. I don't understand why that is. Anyone have an idea?
Also, saw a recent article saying that adderall improves attention in children but not in adults. Did not read article, and don't know how seriously to take this finding. But I find it plausible that adderall helps adults with ADD by improving mood and increasing energy, which probably corrects in a sort of indirect their distraction and mental fuzziness. Everyone finds it easier to focus and take care of business when they're in a good mood and have a lot of energy.
Dexedrine was well-known enough to be referenced by Dexys Midnight Runners:
https://number1sblog.com/2021/10/01/457-geno-by-dexys-midnight-runners/
"The band's name was derived from Dexedrine, a brand of dextroamphetamine used as a recreational drug among Northern soul fans to give them energy to dance all night"
Hey, could you give some sort of clarification for this (https://manifold.markets/ScottLawrence/will-scott-alexander-endorse-any-pr) prediction market? I really feel like it should have resolved to YES but the market makers are keeping it open on what I feel is a dumb technicality.
<quote>Any presidential endorsement</quote>
Seems to be pretty clear
#8, the MTG combo, doesn't really work, because you already have Y creatures during the initial setup steps and can just kill the opponent then. It would be very difficult to set things up so you can *only* win from primes without winning any other way first. And even then, this isn't infinite so it doesn't truly test the twin prime conjecture.
Re #46 Tartaria: I'm still not convinced that there even *is* a difference to be explained in the first place once you account for selection bias and subjectivity. People still build fancy monumental buildings just as happened in the past. Thanks to modern technology, there's a greatly expanded space of forms that monumental buildings can take, but they're no less impressive.
? Do you think that relative to our technological development we are producing buildings as amazing as cathedrals in the Middle Ages?
Absolutely. I take it you do not?
Of course not. It’s an absurd claim. There are villages in Europe with greater architecture than the US.
(you are mixing up aesthetics with architecture, no? form is one thing, but function is important too.)
regarding aesthetics, we have a shared context for the old stuff, so most people can easily appreciate it.
that said, living in Europe, it gets boring fast. of course the same happened to the "new" stuff, and unfortunately the really interesting futureist stuff got cancelled somewhere in the 1980s (according to Mark Fischer, and on this I tend to agree with his argument)
I'm honestly surprised. I took it as a given that a Gothic cathedral is obviously so much more interesting and beautiful than any single building in the US, anywhere in the country. I take it you're as fascinated with the aesthetics and form of the Burj Khalifa as you are Notre Dame?
both are pretty boring. the engineering is cool in both cases, but architecturally they are meh.
they are just too straightforward, everything is dominated by one aspect of their function, leaving virtually nothing for much else. (sure, probably this singularity is why I don't like them.)
for example a museum that can host interesting exhibitions while having its own character is much more appealing for me.
Relative to our capabilities, no, but I’m not sure how we would measure that. Trivially, we no longer commit 20 years to building any one building as people did in the middle ages. Nowadays, we only put that kind of investment into modern technologies like space travel and communications. Only efforts like sending a probe to Mars and laying the vast infrastructure for the global internet are comparable relative achievements. In a way, this makes sense. We have maxed out how wondrous physical buildings can be. There are many new things under the sun.
4: whoever is claiming that smoke pollution is the worst consequence of mega-fires?
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/oct/29/acute-psychosis-inner-voices-avatar-therapy-psychiatry
If someone is plagued by voices, there's a therapy of making a virtual duplicate of the imagined voice and face and helping the person to engage with the voices from a position of strength.
It looks promising, though I grant new therapies tend to look promising.
#31 Moshe Koppel is fascinating. Among other things he has an excellent commentary on an obscure tractate in Mishna that is based mostly on combinatorics and probability.
On the Notebook LLM front, the podcast on a 'paper' which was the the words poop and fart repeated over and over for many pages was surprisingly entertaining (the deadpan overly serious NPR style plays well with the material). Real death of the author kind of stuff. https://x.com/kkuldar/status/1840680947873718396
As someone who came up in the trades, that tartaria bit strikes me as false.
Eg, someone I worked for wanted a room restored in a mansion and needed to fly a dude in from france because there was literally nobody in the whole of the US that had the skills or the tools.
I was the only person on most of the jobs I worked who had ever used a brace, or a firmer, or could free hand a mortise with a chisel. The people I worked with who could build timber framed buildings consisted only of the other people who grew up so far out in the sticks electricity hadn't got there yet, etc etc.
Maybe the data point that way, but maybe try getting a quote for a stained glass window or an ornamented brick cornice and faint like it's a black and white sitcom.
3. Hits it. An high IQ person is not likely to stay in such a job. But get better pay and more success elsewhere. Maybe even teaching, but definitely not in standard school. - 1. I am a teacher ( not standard schools). When I had to do an assessment/IQ+personality test with other teachers ( most fresh from college) - they seemed to be pretty average IQ-wise. 105 I' d say on verbal. Worse on others.
22. Is there supposed to be an article linked here? The blurb claims that Jospeh Smith received a revelation about the timing of the second coming but the linked scripture from Doctrine and Covenants does not make this claim.
"14 I was once praying very earnestly to know the time of the coming of the Son of Man, when I heard a voice repeat the following:
15 Joseph, my son, if thou livest until thou art eighty-five years old, thou shalt see the face of the Son of Man; therefore let this suffice, and trouble me no more on this matter.
16 I was left thus, without being able to decide whether this coming referred to the beginning of the millennium or to some previous appearing, or whether I should die and thus see his face."
Mormons love to speculate about the timing of the second coming, especially old folk for hopefully obvious reasons, but their initial prophet never makes the claim that the second coming would happen if he lived to be 85.
It's important to note that Doctrine and Covenants is actually a part of the latter-day saint's canon. It also may be relevant to know that the canon of the church is open due to the way its structured and organized. The reason I converted from atheism to the LDS faith with my children is because I find it most suited to deal with AI and integrate it into their cosmology.
Yeah. I was going to say this. As a member of the restored church myself, that section from the semicolon in verse 15 through the end of verse 16. is telling. I read this especially as "Ok, Joseph, you've been bothering me for a while on this and it's not productive. Go away and worry about something more important." Especially since there are many many other scriptures emphasizing that no man knows the day nor the hour of the second coming.
We do not believe that the prophets are infallible. Or perfect. In fact, there are several scriptural passages where the Lord calls out the prophet at the time (including and not limited to Joseph Smith Jr) for various things they did foolishly. CF Ether 2, where the Lord spends 4 hours calling the brother of Jared (his name is not recorded in that book, that's how he's always called) out for not praying enough. Or the chunk of the Doctrine and Convenants where the Lord tells Joseph Smith Jr that he done goofed with the "lost pages" (where he did something similar and kept asking after he got an initial No answer until the Lord said "do what you will, but it's your (metaphorical) head" and then the pages went walkabout and Joseph got chastised and lost his prophetic calling for a time until he repented).
I think you have Rawls followers wrong if you think they hate capitalism. For most of these folks, Rawls squares the circle as to why you need both capitalism and some form of redistribution and public insurance. He articulated a principle that finally gave shape to an otherwise deeply nested moral intuition among people who believe outcomes are the result of both effort and luck
I too am surprised by the result on experienced teachers outperforming high scoring teachers. But I wonder if the effect would disappear if you didn’t compare experienced teachers to complete newbies, and instead waited a few years. It seems to me progress in teaching skill might primarily come from dumb trial and error, for example, by teaching the very same material to a new crop of students every year, you learn from natural experimentation which methods work. If this is true, most of the gains perhaps come after the first few years, and a more meaningful comparison can be made at that point between the two groups.
Teachers seem to fall into three large buckets, in terms of "skill" or some amalgamated "ability to teach."
1) Some people just seem to have a gift for it, and naturally resonate with students on whatever topic. These people can teach right out of college (or earlier if allowed) and perform at levels near or above even experienced teachers. They tend to have high scores, but this is not always the case.
2) Most people who teach need a few years to get used to certain parts of teaching (discipline is big here, but also organization of lessons, comfort with outliers, sometimes just basic teaching pedagogy). These scores range all over the spectrum.
3) Some people learn the mechanics of how to teach, they follow the forms, but are never really "good" at teaching no matter how long they teach. They're almost the opposites of #1 above, just unintuitive in most or all of the parts of teaching. These scores tend to be higher, but I'll add more below.
Teaching ability appears to be at least mostly distinct from the teacher's test scores. It seems that the best scoring teachers tend to fall into #1 and #3. Many high scoring teachers fall into #3, and just never get good at it. This frustrates them and their colleagues to no end, as they think they should be considered good teachers but aren't, and their peers don't respect their book learning because they are bad at actually teaching. Teachers in #3 that are also bad at book learning/scores don't tend to get into schools or remain teachers long. They do tend to be memorable when you get one as a kid though!
29 sounds similar to a Bob Dylan song called Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.
“I know what he really loves you for
It's your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat”
Thanks again for the link. I hope Josh Chris brought a chuckle even if it didn’t fit as well once I cut out the apologetics section for length. And have met lots of great people to help with the Trust Assembly so I owe you for that as well.
Re 54: Air Katakana is an American male living in South Korea and has been accused of rape, btw. (He has publicly come out and said it: https://x.com/airkatakana/status/1819255003191955940) If you read his Twitter, he has a heavy bias against Korea. It might be worth noting before sharing things from him!
"6: Pervasive findings of directional selection realize the promise of ancient DNA to elucidate human adaptation. "
Ok, genetics is my profession and this one... it's hard to explain the problem I have with this without a lot of context.
"genome-wide significant signals"
Ok, this is really important to keep in mind: when you do a GWAS you pick marker snps to represent whole blocks of snps around them that are in LD.
Those marker snps are not set in stone.
they are typically not the snps that actually have the biological effect, they're just correlated with them.
We would fully expect that as you went back further in time we would expect the correlation between gwas marker snps and the traits they mark to decrease.
Those correlations tend to be population specific and over long time periods we would expect their relationship with the snps around them to change. So migration patterns will throw them off. Some guy living in france 8000 years ago is gonna have a different ancestry mix vs a modern frenchman. which will throw off the correlations as well.
I am talking about relative prices between goods, not about the price of the same good produced in different places. You keep having a debate with a defender of the LTV as a general theory of value and that person is not me. But if I have to explain to a small kid why some things are more expensive than others, I will be able to tell him than in most cases it's because it took more work to make them. The ultimate reason is because it's a scarce resource and while human labor is not the only scarce resource, it's the main one. If you go to Amazon and you select two products at random, that will be the main explanation for why one good is more expensive than another. If it's you who is talking to this kid you'll have to tell him to wait until he takes economics 101 in college to get it.
Sorry for answering this a week later.
I am the only one that has what it takes to get the Hight Speed InterNet service that your are using today. It was taken from my phone by lots of people.