"Richard seems to think that religious people - including educated ones - have weird enough mental structures that they can hallucinate basically anything if it’s congruent with their religion."
More precisely, they have weird enough mental structures to either 1) hallucinate; or 2) lie or misremember things to bring them into conformity with the views of their community. It doesn't require the people actually saw the miracle, they just had to at least say they did later. I think this is well supported by anthropological evidence.
"Suppose that 10,000 eyewitnesses say they saw Richard stab someone in broad daylight. Can the defense argue 'Well, people often hallucinate, and most of the witnesses were liberal, and the liberal worldview makes it attractive to imagine a right-wing blogger stabbing people, so who knows if he did it or not?'"
A key claim of mine is that societies that are at a much more primitive state of development are more likely to have this happen. 10,000 liberals, whatever their flaws, are not prone to the same kind of conformity-based disconnect from reality (yes yes, what is a woman and all that).
>10,000 liberals, whatever their flaws, are not prone to the same kind of conformity-based disconnect from reality (yes yes, what is a woman and all that).
It’s obviously correct and anyone who disagrees I think either has no experience with more backwards cultures or their brain has been melted by the culture war.
Can men get pregnant? Can a woman have a penis? Does average IQ differ between different races? What about crime rates? Are stereotypes generally correct? Does increasing ethnic diversity have any impact on social trust? How many unarmed black people in America are shot by police officers in an average year? -- All of these are areas, with far-reaching and immediate policy implications, on which the liberal consensus is totally detached from objective reality.
The difference is that these are disagreements on categorizing, not on the physical reality of what is happening.
When a liberal says "This woman has a penis" and a conservative disagrees, they will still agree on what they see before them. They will agree that there is a person in front of them with a penis, they will agree about what chromosomes they have, etc. The liberal will just say that the category of Woman is broader than what the conservative says.
This is fundamentally different than saying "I see a pattern of flame before me" when there is no such thing, it's not a difference of how to categorize an fact, it's a difference on what the actual facts are
I wouldn’t normally try to stereotype a huge group of people as being unable to understand the difference between arbitrary ways humans decided to group things together and objective facts about reality, but stereotypes are reliable ways to think about people now apparently so here we all are.
Perhaps this is what one would, in fact, expect, *a priori:* much "folk wisdom" obtains for a reason—and people don't even mind so crediting it, if framed as, say, "this apparently-primitive tribe has observed & preserved much surprisingly correct & useful knowledge!"; it's only when it's framed as the product of *our own dumb yokels* & *Original (Oppressive) Sin* that it ought be dismissed out of hand—which reason is, maybe, that if we developed inaccurate heuristics as a rule (heh), we'd probably thereby incur a fitness penalty.
I.e.: the average person is pretty dumb, but perhaps not dumb enough for the great mass of 'em to collectively be wrong about general judgments, from experience, on immediate & practical matters...?
Was going to try to explain that but you did it better.
I'll pile on that, speaking as a born-and-raised-and-raising-my-own member of the "blue" side in the culture wars, the absurd categorizations which so many of my fellow-travelers have spent decades swimming in are deeply disappointing and frustrating. We remain in my view in deep denial of our complicity in the electoral success of Trumpism, something about which future historians writing on the collapse of the American experiment will be blunt.
Hanania is correct and you have nicely diagramed that none of the above makes it the same as hallucinating an eyewitness fact. Richard's blind spot may be how much that distinction still matters in the real world of 2025? Don't see any reason to share his confidence that the populist right will die back politically and culturally simply because its leaders and its followers are increasingly lower-IQ populations. Hence I question whether American progressives' particular decades-long "conformity-based disconnect from reality" (nice phrase) will end up being any less bad than mass false eyewitness testimony to a stabbing.
This is a semantic dispute: the point at issue is how the labels 'men' and 'women' should be used. Both sides agree on whether person P can get pregnant, for all values of P.
> Does average IQ differ between different races? What about crime rates?
Mainstream sources that are commonly considered liberal-biased, such as Wikipedia, answer 'yes' to both of those questions. The big culture war disputes are over *why* these things are true and what should be done about them.
> Are stereotypes generally correct?
This is an imprecise question; depending on what you mean by 'stereotypes', 'generally', and 'correct', the answer that you're implying is delusional could be obviously reasonable.
> Does increasing ethnic diversity have any impact on social trust?
Is there a 'liberal consensus' on this? Obviously the first instinct of a stereotypical American liberal would be to say 'diversity is good, therefore I won't admit it has any downsides', but if you asked any serious liberal thinkers I doubt they would give a mindless answer. Social science academia is widely derided as a hotbed of liberal conformity, and yet the first google result when I search 'ethnic diversity and social trust' (no quotes) is a meta-analysis published in a mainstream journal finding a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust.
> How many unarmed black people in America are shot by police officers in an average year?
If you run a survey asking US liberals to estimate this number off the top of their heads, they'll get it wildly wrong. Which is true of many, many questions asked of people of all political persuasions. If this counts as proof that 'the liberal consensus is totally detached from objective reality', then you're setting the bar extremely low and the same trivially applies to the conservative consensus and indeed to the 'x consensus' for most x.
>Mainstream sources that are commonly considered liberal-biased, such as Wikipedia, answer 'yes' to both of those questions.
It does—but Wikipedia denies that the former question is meaningful, since there (a) is no such thing as race & (b) IQ is biased by stereotype threat, institutional racism, etc. It even repeats the ol' Lewontin's, Gradient, Multiple Intelligences, etc., Fallacies!
Rephrase the assertion to say "...an IQ gap *with a genetic component* between races", and Wikipedia no longer agrees—yet this claim is little less obviously true than was the initial one.¹
>This is an imprecise question
I really don't think it is, except insofar as "generally" might mean somewhere from—say—more than half the time to maybe three-quarters of the time. Sure, the stereotypes in question—e.g. "men are more violent than women", or "blacks are more criminal than East Asians", or "East Asians are smarter than whites", or "women are more emotional than men"—can be operationalized in various ways; but the claim (that these are true & that the Left doesn't believe so) is valid for most of them, I think, if not all.
I.e., most on the Left are unwilling to grant any permutation of "stereotypes are generally true", no matter how one interprets it—in my experience. I struggle to believe that anyone can have any experience with the average Wikipedian, or Redditor, vel sim., and think otherwise.
>If you run a survey asking US liberals to estimate this number off the top of their heads, they'll get it wildly wrong. Which is true of many, many questions asked of people of all political persuasions.
True; try something like "are more black people or white people shot by police each year?" (whether we're talking about a rate, *or* absolute numbers, IME—though responses to the former are more likely to be *universally* mistaken), or "does poverty level or racial composition better predict violent crime?", or "do black people feel better or worse about themselves, on average, than white people?", or "about what percentage of the population is homosexual?", or other such things.
........................
¹(If it *doesn't* seem obvious to you, I don't think it's worth arguing about: we'll very quickly be going through dozens of studies & the implications thereof, and in the end no one's mind will be changed regardless.)
Part of my extended family is from a small island in Micronesia and I think it would be fairer to say they have a zone of competence that is wildly different and while they would be likely to say there was some big miracle that happened they wouldn’t at all do the same kind of what is a woman thing because gender and sex are more reified in everyday experience. I will say apart from the atheist testimonies (which I have not looked into at all) I do find your explanation compelling that a lot of them just went along with it.
1) Portugal was, and is, a first world country. You might be arguing that the past is a different country though.
2) In the Fatima post Scott mentioned that plenty of skeptics saw something. The best answer is the one he tentatively came to - stare at the sun enough and you see something.
As for the transwomen debate, a religious friend of mine explains it to her daughter by saying there are souls trapped in the wrong body.
The stats I see are (adjusted to 2025) that Portugal had a gdp per capita of $3,700. Poor now but above the average then. The U.K. would be firmly middle income now at $11k. So if we stick to my original point of being poor compared to now you are right, poor compared to then you are not.
The figure for literacy is correct but in his post Scott quoted from plenty of literate people who saw something, nor can it be entirely down to mass psychosis because people who were miles away testified to seeing something. And some of these were skeptics and literate.
Therefore Scott’s conclusion - that is staring at the sun that causes the issue, seems to be well founded.
PPP per capita of $3,700 would put it at the level of Uganda today, with less than half the literacy rate. It doesn't matter if that wasn't so bad for the time. Poor peasants are poor peasants.
As for the point about literate skeptics, that was the argument addressed in the original piece.
"Portugal of the time was so third world that you would have to compare it to the poorest nations in sub-Saharan Africa to even get close."
Someone of Palestinian and Jordanian ancestry should be careful about throwing stones; the economies of those countries was also in the tank in 1917 so should we assume that, if the Portuguese were poor and stupid, then Palestinian/Jordanian are poor and stupid? Are you stupid, Richard? You seem to think you are plenty smart, but you have no problems dismissing an entire nation as being made up of illiterate fools.
I don't even particularly believe in the miracle, but I do get annoyed when an armchair analyst blithely dismisses accounts from the past with "well they were all poor, dumb, and credulous back then, unlike wonderful modern us".
Examine your own biases about any irrational beliefs you may hold, Richard. Because I'm sure you do hold some, even if you rationalise to yourself that everything you think is worked out on the highest principles of logical reasoning.
"Someone of Palestinian and Jordanian ancestry should be careful about throwing stones; the economies of those countries was also in the tank in 1917 so should we assume that, if the Portuguese were poor and stupid, then Palestinian/Jordanian are poor and stupid?"
Yes, I literally wrote that in the article that Scott linked to. I based my entire argument on it. On a related point, "conservatives don't actually read anything" is another one of the themes of my work.
You know, I was going to try and be polite but you had to go there, once again you just had to show off how big a brain you have (insult anyone who disagrees with you as obviously stupid).
My problem is that I cannot be fair to you since I dislike you so intensely, and this is based on what writings of yours that I have read. Smug self-congratulation drips and oozes from every paragraph, yet I cannot find that you are actually achieving anything more than being a big fish in a small pond.
Please try not to strain your arm muscles from patting yourself on the back so hard for your obvious superiority to us plebeians!
I'm saying this to your face because it would be hypocritical of me to say it behind your back.
I am ashamed to admit it, but while I'm making my confession in public, it is wrong to hold any secret sins back.
I don't like his face! Yes, that's an irrational impulse, a foolish reaction, not any kind of basis for judging the quality of his work, but I can't help it: when I read him skipping gaily through "all these people are morons, of course, unlike me who has the only correct opinion", my immediate visceral reaction is "do you not possess a mirror in your house, because people who live in glass houses should not throw stones and someone who looks like they had a head-on collision with a truck is in no position to call other people stupid".
That's horrible. I know it's horrible. But it's my gut speaking. Terrible opinions + looks normal? I'll fight on the opinions. Reasonable opinions + looks like he doesn't need to dress up for Hallowe'en? I can ignore the face. Terrible opinions + head of Akhenaten? I'm prejudiced before you even open your mouth:
> I cannot find that you are actually achieving anything more than being a big fish in a small pond.
In terms of persuading others? Probably not. But he was a writer on Project 2025 and the one behind getting Trump II to end EO 11246. Seems like an achievement to me.
A big name in certain circles, but how many people in the broader context have even heard of him, much less contemplate any influence he may or may not possess?
What exactly is the broader context? The whole of society? By that standard, Norman Borlaug isn't achieving anything either despite being the father of the Green Revolution.
In today's post we investigate the Miracle of Biden, wherein hundreds of people claimed to have witnessed the president performing mental feats as though he was "sharp as a tack" over a period of time when it is now known he was suffering from severe dementia. This included high-ranking politicians, journalists, and even his personal physician, all extremely well-educated people. In this essay I will
Instead of "what is a woman?", try "what is a definition? Are definitions a reliable way of understanding the world?" If you want to crack the gates of hell open a little bit, "What is science fiction? How do you know?"
Meanwhile, it's at least interesting that a substantial number of people are seriously unhappy with their gender, and I don't know if anyone is studying how gender contentment works.
I also think that people are uniquely motivated to hallucinate when it comes to religion and supposedly religious miracles. They expect and want to see supernatural phenomena.
That’s not the case when it comes to a stabbing by an unsavory character. There is no supernatural element in there.
This makes more sense in a broader context. The mind doesn't look at events in the world as one-off happenings - we more or less categorize "things that happen" into prototypical schemas with associated features attached. Whether or not a crowd of people will believe a particular interpretation of an event they are all seeing depends on what event categories, and associated features, they already had coded into their long term memory, mostly as a result of childhood socialization. Any population that shares a cohesive culture will share also share a lot of these "event categorical features", which will color their interpretation of any event they all see, more or less automatically. So the Fatima people, all being from a highly religious culture, can be expected to share a lot of event expectations - including the idea that anomalous events are probably miracles.
Note that this works equally well the other way 'round: A highly secularized population will likely categorize any anomalous event as a natural phenomenon - even if it's actually miraculous in nature.
ie, It's a human thing, not specifically a religious thing.
>Everyone who studies biochem asks themselves at some point “Why do cells need so many second messengers?” - proteins whose only point is to activate other proteins, and so on in a chain, until the last protein in the chain makes something happen.
Point of clarification: second messengers aren't proteins, they're things like cyclic AMP, Inositol trisphosphate, or calcium – intracellular signaling molecules released/produced by protein signaling. These molecules bind and activate/inhibit other downstream proteins. The point of second messengers is often that they diffuse faster and are cheaper for the cell to make than proteins.
>25: IVG advance: for the first time, scientists have successfully turned a skin cell into an egg cell
Notably, this method requires an existing egg cell, and is putting a skin cell into an egg cell instead of making a new egg cell. I wrote about this more when their mouse paper came out last year: https://denovo.substack.com/p/eggs-and-scrambled-chromosomes
I'm confused re 25. Does this mean you can't generate more egg cells this way, or do you produce a new egg cell with from the skin cell using the previous egg cell (so you end up with two egg cells)?
> In early March of this year, my sister shared a fascinating anecdote about several of her friends involuntarily becoming kidney donors while they were in Mexico getting "mommy makeovers."
I can't really fault him for mainly wanting to talk about his own kidney donation. But at least to me, 'this is how I donated my kidney' is a much less interesting tale than 'this is how these women got their kidneys stolen'. 'Fascinating' doesn't even begin to cover it.
Fascinating does almost cover the ability of Ben and Scott to just completely gloss over that and not question it at all, though. Remarkable yet unsurprising blinders on.
The thing about the flags sounds like the uncovering of a conspiracy. But isn't it simply part of ensuring a professional presentation that you secure the flag with clips to prevent it from flapping? Even if they use actual "flag clones", it seems a bit like "some politicians dye their hair".
#4--I read the linked article, and it relies on self-reported religious identity. I'm inclined toward the theory that much of the previous decline in Christian affiliation was due to "cultural Christians" no longer feeling societal pressure to call themselves Christian, rather than diehards losing their faith. Therefore, a better measure would be actual membership in a congregation or, better yet, actual rates of church attendance. (The "91% of Americans identified as Christian in 1970" stat is undermined by the fact that a minority of Americans regularly attended church in the 70s, for example). That said, I am also skeptical of the idea that there is a genuine Gen Z revival. Although I have seen a larger number of young men (but not so much women) around the pews lately.
Absolutely has, but I suspect the rate of decline in actual attendance has been less dramatic than the decline in self-reported affiliation (overwhelming majority of Greatest Gen/Boomers identifying as Christian > minority of Gen Z, versus a minority of Americans actually going to church > a somewhat smaller minority of Americans going to church).
Speaking as a former mainliner, the plight of the mainlines is a whole nother mess to unpack.
You only really had 60%-odd church attendance even in famously religious eras like the Middle Ages. I would concur that church attendance is generally a better proxy, though I think you COULD have a Christian (or other) nation where everyone believed but no one attended organized services.
I don’t believe in physics defying miracles for whatever that is worth to anyone. I’ve been interested to follow the discussions though. Even if the Fatima effect itself is explainable by some combination of knowable perceptual distortion it’s still interesting that a couple child prophets were able to induce it in enough people. To me, a miracle is either physics we don’t know yet or a stunning and poetic coincidence with moral power. I don’t think Fatima actually moves me that much because I don’t know what the moral message is of a big colorful disc spinning around.
> I was able to find an observational study showing that daily sauna use reduces dementia risk 66% (mere weekly use doesn’t cut it, sorry). Can we trust these observations? I also looked to see if Finland - where people use saunas much more than in any other country - had a lower dementia rate; unfortunately, it’s actually the highest in the world
Without doing further research on when heat shock proteins kick in, could another point of comparison be dementia rates in developed tropical countries? Since AC will be sufficiently common that people will be going in and out of high temperatures and humidity regularly and potentially continuing to work. If say Singapore has a lower dementia rate then it would somewhat support the idea that something else is making it not apply to the Finns. Although it does have the problem that there aren't that many developed areas in the high heat and humidity tropics to compare against. Undeveloped areas tend to just shelter during the hot times.
Surely there are a lot of Nordics or nordic-descended people here who can spot the obvious problem with Finland, which is that they drink in the sauna!
#32: there were a lot, lot more of these new-made names in early USSR than English Wikipedia lists. Russian-language Wikipedia has a list https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Список_имён_советского_происхождения) with hundreds of invented or repurposed names. The article admits that for many of these there is no evidence of having been used outside of literature or lists of names, but there are also many dozens of names with links to Wiki pages about real people with such names - ones notable enough to have a Wiki page. Probably the cringiest sort are repurposed surnames of various international communists or communist-adjacent people. E.g. there are at least 4 Soviet men with Wiki pages named Dzhonrid after the journalist John Reed, two named Zhores (including a fairly famous scientist) after a French socialist Jean Jaures, Roy Medvedev's name is repurposed from the surname of some Indian communist, and there's reportedly even a Devis named after Angela Davis. My personal favorite in the list is Gelij (7 men with Wiki pages), from helium; being ideologically neutral, it was still given to children after WWII.
An interesting feature of these new names is that, unlike American accidentally or deliberately misspelled names or Japanese kira-kira ("sparkling") names, which strongly signal low social status, Soviet invented names were used by Soviet elites. Their American equivalent is probably repurposed surnames of presidents (e.g. girls' name Madison) and the like.
Fascinating context; I would like to point out that Madison, the popular girl’s name, does not come from James Madison but rather from a character in the 1984 movie “Splash” (although in a roundabout way this does trace back to the fourth President).
Before 1984, Madison was exceptionally rare (essentially unheard of) as a given name.
There's still more to say about Hume and miracles. I'm still getting around to it, as I need to spend another $40 or so on some books but here are some things I've found in my research that I'll post about (not going to engage with FLWAB because I think he's in good faith being sincerely obstinate and doesn't understand what's being said and fumbling around, per my last comment; I know that sounds mean and embarrassing, but his constant inability to misattribute is too tiresome)
1) most commenters such as FLWAB who say it's a bad argument, don't understand Hume's intent and context
2) Of Miracles was published pre-Bayes, and I believe Hume himself may have admitted he's not a big math person. We know when he eventually read Bayes theorem that he liked it but he didn't update his essay afterward, implying a different intent. (I'm still reading up on what that intent is but haven't gotten to it yet because $40 paywall)
3) to the extent that we can be critical of Hume for not being Bayesian enough or insufficiently Bayesian, I think we can grade him on a curve in the sense that Bayes was pretty obscure at time of writing. Of course we are going to be less impressed by a thinker who wrote 250 years ago! We have made lots of progress and are in a different intellectual climate as he. That's part of the reason I'm critical of people misrepresenting him, because I think it's unfair to say he argued things he didn't, and diminishing the trajectory he put philosophy on. It's not as pronounced (because it's philosophy and not physics), but it's like misunderstanding Newton's physics and being puzzled because it's not as good as Einstein's.
4) You can't really understand the specifics of Of Miracles without a greater context of Hume psychology (words like vivacious, impression, idea, belief, and specific use cases of terms like proof, probability, and demonstration). Many commenters who get Hume wrong (such as those I'm critical of) don't actually do that. Putting that psychology in mind makes comments about the Indian prince, the resurrected Queen, the 8 day darkness, etc make more sense. If you have presuppose this psychology, many of his conclusions seem more descriptive than prescriptive (i.e. you won't believe miracles if you conceptualize the acceptance of evidence this way, which separate from the miracle discussion, he thinks you should), which may be why some scholars refer to the oft quoted paragraph as a prudential maxim (this last part of this # is just my opinion at this point fwiw)
5) Hume still makes mistakes! See comment 3. Informally it seems reading Hume's a priori argument (section 1) is more controversial than the a posteriori argument (section 2). My impression is that the biggest divider is literally if you have read Hume well. Of those who are what I would say are Humean scholars, most, but not all think it's at least an okay argument, but there are some detractors like Michael Levine. The consensus (as I understand it in my current research) seem to say "there are flaws but it points us in the right direction and Hume's maxim can be salvaged." Millican is probably considered the #1 Hume scholar by many and that's basically his position (I recommend reading his 20 questions on Hume's miracles)
6) A good example of this "commenting on Hume and not actually understanding him" was John Earman. William Lane Craig, Matthew Edlestein and others have basically just assumed that Earman's argument was decisive or conclusive, but if you read Millican's comments (PDFs are available on the Hume website) he does a pretty bad reading of Hume. As far as I can't tell, this is the consensus of Hume scholars; many of them didn't give it attention because it was so bad, but others have written books (will cite them in a second, I haven't read them yet and don't want to close the tab on my phone here in fear of glitches) and gave poor reviews, like Michael Levine
7) As far as I can tell, Hume's argument has been misunderstood throughout history, more than it has been understood. He didn't make any revisions to it in his lifetime likely because he didn't see good arguments against it. But commenters have basically gotten it wrong until the 1980s because they didn't read him through his own context (this is something the likes of Millican and others have said), they viewed him the way I described in my piece and made some of the mistakes I've outlined here, and so the burden of proof about his quality has been shifted to proponents. That's fine! I think Hume on miracles in context perseveres, if at least as a little pit stop in the history of philosophy of starting the conversation and getting it mostly right/pointing us in the right directions.
8) What annoys me is the dumb clickbait/meme apologetics/meme philosophy that degraded public understanding of philosophy and its history. In my comments in defense of the response article, I may have been to rash or mean, but there were basic reading comprehension errors and constant obvious falsehoods. I outlined them in my last comment of that discussion. My interlocutor kept saying "point out where I'm wrong" when I did multiple times in both the article and my comments. He clearly did not understand what the criticisms were! The reason why I was rash and mean and as you say embarrassing is because I honestly felt like I was being gas lit. I spent maybe 3-4 days and about $50 on Hume books to write that while he didn't bother to read me in full and answered in an afternoon. So I think my frustration is/was valid. I stand by the original point of my article, and though there's more to be said, distinctions to be parsed, I'm not seeing that as a result of the criticism, but of my own reading.
9) and finally, I'm trying to be austere/humble in my claims and I don't think I'm as smart as you in the raw probability/symbolic logic aspects of philosophy, so don't expect a huge back and forth from me here. I'm like a little guerilla warrior on here in that I only defend the positions I'm sure of, knowing that a lot of people on here are much much smarter than me. So I don't want to treat this aspect of the discourse a debate (because out of humility I would lose even if I was right). If you want me to look into Hume specific questions, I will read into them.
I enjoy your blog and thank you for your comment/feedback. Funny enough, like Hume would say a reasonable person couldn't believe in miracles, I think a reasonable person would say I embarrassed myself somewhat (even if I stand by my comments). But I'm okay with that lol
" I love imagining the world where we take it seriously and woke people demand a General Lee statue on every corner."
If the thesis is true then that wouldn't work, because the statue would no longer be a symbol of white supremacy. Violence might actually increase to counteract the co-opting of the symbol.
I'd be happy with a world that didn't feel the need to dislodge a memorial to the guy's horse. Yes, it's silly. But it's a horse. Are we really going to argue about racist horses? This is the kind of petty score-settling and virtue signalling that made it difficult to take the whole "racial justice" movement seriously; pulling down statues and smashing monuments just seems like vandalism.
Public displays can be a very controversial subject. Everyone has an opinion.
I remember encountering on the early Internet an apocryphal tale of a small town commissioning a statue to commemorate a WW2 general that grew up there. Sadly, I cannot remember any names, so cannot try to search for a primary source. In any case, the statue of the general astride his horse was competed and unveiled with much pomp; all was looking good until a local dignitary at the ceremony commented: “Why is our general on a gelding? This won’t do! We must fix it!”
No sooner said than done, a shiny tackle was duly attached. Comes a military historian: “this statue is inaccurate. Warriors leading a mounted charge would ride a mare in heat. Chop ‘em off!”
Off they went. But soon: “this is WW2, not WW1; no-one was leading mounted charges, it’s an idealised representation and an ideal of masculinity should be fully equipped. Put back the schlong!”
Back the schlong went; but at this point people had fully separated into camps and were completely invested. “What manner of example is this public display for our children? It’s indecent! Anatomically accurate statues are inappropriate in our town square. Lop it off!”
…I do not recall how it all ended. For all I know, the debate continues to this day. Certainly the artist has a job for life.
My hometown had a Confederate statue (generic soldier, not someone like Robert E Lee) on the court square that I never once looked at until a city councilman wanted to take it down. So maybe the solution to getting people to "remember our history" is a credible threat to remove it.
An amusing side note is that when I was a kid the school superintendent was literally named Robert E Lee. To his credit, he is remembered as having done a good job desegregating the schools in 1970.
> But it's a horse. Are we really going to argue about racist horses?
The horse was being honoured specifically because it was *his* horse, and Lee's name was just as prominent on the plaque, so I don't think this was much different from a memorial to the man himself. This isn't my fight and I'm not suggesting it's worth a lot of energy, but I find it easy to understand why people would prefer to get rid of the plaque. And it seems to have been removed peacefully by the owners of the building.
"The horse was being honoured specifically because it was *his* horse, and Lee's name was just as prominent on the plaque, so I don't think this was much different from a memorial to the man himself."
Honestly, I feel like you could defend the man more easily than the horse. In order for the horse to deserve a statue, the man has to be so great that just being his horse is worth a statue. If statues to the man are controversial, then a statue to his horse is definitely not meeting the bar.
I think this applies when deciding whether to put up a statue(/plaque, etc.), but not so much when deciding whether to take one down. In the first case, there's a positive threshold of deservingness that has to be met; in the second case, it's a negative threshold. The deservingness of a horse will tend to have a lower absolute value, so we'll tend to be less motivated to honour them but also less motivated to actively revoke honours previously bestowed on them.
I mean, we cared about it enough to put the statue up in the first place, why are we not allowed to care enough to take it down?
Like, I think there's some kind of past-discounting where we treat everything that's already happened as 'default' or 'normal.' Or I guess it could just be something like an inactivity bias, doing things is always 'weirder' and more open to criticism than not doing things.
But to me, putting up a statue and taking down a statue are roughly symmetrical actions. 'Should the statue be there or not' is the supervening factor determining the correct course in both cases, putting up is not privileged over taking down just because it happens first.
#48 (robot folding laundry): This reminds me of watching my son try to fold laundry when he was an older toddler -- some tentativeness that gives the impression of exploration. But there's a divergence. While my son would get frustrated (perhaps because he expected to imitate my results), the robot proceeds and does a reasonable (if imperfect) job. I wonder how the robot would do if it tended toward self-judgment and a need for love.
> Every administration since Clinton comes in determined to reset US-Russian relations, to clear
> away old legacies and bad blood. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump I, even Biden. It is the
> swampiest of all swampy ideas, resetting relations with the Russians. It never works.”
I think it never works, because it's a) nearly impossibly and b) nobody actually tries it because of that, and all the "reset" is usually just rhetoric without any substance.
What would it even mean to "reset" relations between USA and Russia? Why are they bad to begin with? Each side has its own (public and private) understanding. But neither is willing to even begin to consider other's point of view. And without reconciling these points of view even minimally, no true "reset" is possible.
> What would it even mean to "reset" relations between USA and Russia?
From Russia's perspective, it means something like: stop interfering with our efforts to take back everything that we controlled during the good old times of the Cold War.
That's a slightly hostile interpretation. If we state US position in the same way, we'll get something like "stop doing anything that interferes with our own interference anywhere in the world, and yes, that includes your closest neighbors and even your country itself".
If worded in this way, these positions cannot be reconciled, no compromise is even remotely possible, they're completely antagonistic.
Are all US presidents so stupid they cannot see this, or so cynical they know there is no hope, but still talk about "resets" for vague PR points? Or are the actual positions more nuanced, and some kind of agreement can, at least in theory, be found?
It's a blunt description, but IMO a fair one. It's not terribly inaccurate to distill the US's flavor of rules-based international order as "Anyone is allowed to use military force against nations that break the rules (and we reserve the right to unilaterally change the rules)" while the Russians' sphere of influence approach goes "We're allowed to use military force against nations in our sphere (we unilaterally get to decide where that is, and others' spheres are irrelevant)".
Some grizzled cold warriors have claimed to me that Putin's moment of disillusion was the Yugoslav Wars, where NATO clearly demonstrated willingness to intervene in (what he thought was, ofc) the old Soviet Sphere. A "Reset with Russia" can be thought as encouraging the Kremlin to negotiate through the various tit-for-tat issues that have come up in the past decades, but I think I'd agree that there's a fundamental incompatibility there that's inevitably going to generate grievances on both sides.
Two countries that see themselves as great powers are going to struggle to get along long-term. Great powers don't tend to compromise much, and of course they're going to succeed, they're a great power.
The US wants Russia to see things its way, because it is a great power and therefore the world will go the way it wants, and it wants Russia to get along. Declaring that fixing relations with Russia was impossible would be both diplomatically awkward and suggest that the US was not a great power, since it can't get this non-great power to do what it wants.
The reality, of course, is that great powers tend to be hollow and remain bound by the realities of the world, but nobody ever likes remembering that.
Yugoslavia was never in the Soviet sphere after 1948, though. that was the whole point of the Tito-Stalin split. Even if you think that the Soviets and Americans were entitled to some kind of sphere of influence (which I don't really agree with in principle, though in practice it gets complicated), or that Russia inherited the old Soviet sphere of influence (which I *definitely* don't agree with: the Soviet sphere of influence was based on communist ideology, and Russia hasn't been communist since 1991).
My guess is there was an assumption that economic integration would lead Russia to lay off the expansionist rhetoric and focus on making money through trade. Hence deals like the Nordstream pipeline. Obviously wrong in retrospect.
Hm, maybe it's hindsight 20/20, but it seems relatively obvious that shouldn't have worked, because it's not what Russia wanted. It's not like Putin ever hid his requirements, they were always in the open: no NATO expansion, no missile defence systems too near borders. Security always come before prosperity, at least for Russia, so it would be impossible to trade former for later.
Historical examples also doesn't support the theory that economic integration prevents wars, or there wouldn't be any World War I (pretty much everyone involved were trading partners).
> But neither is willing to even begin to consider other's point of view.
I don't think so. Even if both were aware of the other's POV, it would not make resetting relations any easier. Except for Trump, most of the presidents that have come would not support Russia's actions against Ukraine.
It’s not a very deep observation, but the two countries have conflicting interests, specifically about what happens in eastern Europe. To really make an understanding between the two countries, you would need a new Yalta agreement.
The countries that would be affected by such an agreement have their own interests, even Hungary doesn’t actually want to be a Russian satellite, so there won’t be another Yalta agreement.
#50 I would be careful about assuming strong Malthusian constraints applied to past societies. Population growth was very slow, so societies did not necessarily reach equilibrium faster than underlying conditions changed.
"[Pre-modern] societies increase in population slowly compared to the rapid sort of exponential growth Malthus was beginning to see in the 1700s. It can take so long that exogenous shocks – invasion, plague, or new technology enabling a new burst of ‘headroom’ – arrive before the ceiling is reached and growth stops. Indeed, given the trajectory of pre-modern global population, that last factor must have happened quite a lot, since even the population of long-settled areas never quite stabilizes in the long term."
> 31: Is China no longer on track to outpace US GDP?
There’s a general argument to incredulity with regard to China catching up in GDP with the US. To never catch up and never exceed the US China has to stop growing pretty soon, at a GDP per capita which is still middle income, 1/6 of the US.
There’s been all kinds of pretty spurious attempts to predict the doom of China, Real Soon Now, and to deny that the Chinese GDP is as high as claimed. I think it’s higher than estimated due to currency manipulation.
One of the best examples of the kind of disbelief about China was a widely touted report a few years ago that the Chinese didn’t have as many street lights as you would expect for a country of their gdp. This was widely reported as absolute truth. It’s been subsequently debunked but should never have, perhaps, been bunked.
A better proxy would be electricity use, which is twice the level of the US. I don’t think this means that the GDP is twice the US though, but I think it would be higher than it is now if the Chinese currency were to float.
Purchasing power parity accounts for any currency manipulation. By PPP, China is already the largest economy in the world, and by quite a margin: $41 trillion compared to America's $31 trillion.
#22. One of the narratives advanced during the massive 2016-ish Syrian exodus was that Syria is basically a Levantine extension of Europe, and that the refugees had European levels of education and would undoubtedly be great for countries receiving them. In a fit of altruism, I volunteered to teach English at my local refugee center. I found that the average adult Syrian had roughly the equivalent of an 8th grade education (better than the Afghan refugees, to be fair).
Another odd narrative was "Steve Jobs is the son of a Syrian immigrant." Which is, strictly speaking, true. But his Syrian father abandoned him shortly after birth, and Steve was adopted by the Jobs family. So progressives who would normally reject any suggestion of inherited IQ or genetic links to intelligence were essentially arguing that Apple was founded by Syrian super sperm or something.
It seems to me that the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect"><b><i>Flynn effect</i></b></a> and in particular Flynn's hypothesis for its cause is pertinent here. His explanation, as I understand it, is that with the greater importance of abstract thinking in modern societies, parts of the IQ test (e.g., Raven's Progressive Matrices) that measure that ability have become a greater part of IQ scores. Thus rather than being intellectually disabled, our ancestors, with less education, merely had less skill in abstract thinking. If the defendant in the original post has only an 8th grade education (or whatever), this likely applies as well to him, especially if his raw score was transformed using German norms.
FWIW, I think you—and FWLAB—have the right of it with Hume. I read through the linked discussion, and thought FWLAB made a pretty good case for "this one thing is what I am talking about, and this is what I am saying about it"; James may or may not be correct *in re* the *rest* of Hume's argument, but I feel like he misunderstood FWLAB's. (But, weirdly, his responses have a bunch of "Likes" & FWLAB's only a few. Is Team KSF¹ dumb, or is our genius merely unappreciated by the Common Normie?)
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¹ (Kvel-Scott-F'wlab, see? I'm only listed first because it sounds better that way, nothing to read into there–)
Eliezer’s explanation seems overly complicated to me. I think a simpler explanation is:
1) People in an economy like to save some portion of their income, for retirement or large purchases or whatever. They also want to consume.
2) During a bubble, people think they are doing both things. They are consuming like normal. They are saving by investing in assets (which are overvalued).
3) Later, it is time to spend their savings. They go to their savings account and there is nothing there, because it turned out their savings was wasteful. They thought they were investing in useful goods, which would pay them dividends. But they weren’t.
In this account, the pain naturally doesn’t occur during the inflating bubble. We’re wasting resources, but we don’t know it, and we are wasting resources that were intended to help with our future consumption, not our present consumption. It is natural that the pain is felt simultaneously with the pop: the bubble pops when it is obvious that our investments are not allowing increased future consumption, and this is also what causes the pain.
If I pretend to give you a million dollars and you spend it, you'll be doing fine until you suddenly run out of money. Things feel fine now but it's an unsustainable pulling of resources from the future fueled by false expectations.
In a speculative asset bubble that causes a financial crisis, you have a lot of debt that can't be paid back. In the short run the regular payments are coming in and everything seems fine but it can't last forever.
“it’s actually the highest in the world. Nobody really knows why, with theories ranging from levels of toxic mold (implausible) to coding differences (it’s always this one).”
The effects of repetitive binge drinking would easily be my working hypothesis until proven otherwise. I would assume getting totally snockered multiple times a year is worse for you than having 3 or 4 glasses of wine over the course of a day even if total units of alcohol end up similar.
“Celebrity epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding suggests that young people try getting the shingles vaccine for dementia prevention even if they don’t need it for shingles, but the exact pathway (and whether it helps preemptively) is not clear, and I think this is still a minority opinion. Here is ChatGPT’s assessment.”
Aren’t most young people around today already vaccinated against varicella as children? Can’t they just wait for the normal booster?
Also, aren’t you a physician? Why are you using ChatGPT for medical information instead of purpose built tools like OpenEvidence?
10: Sol Hando attends the Curtis Yarvin vs. Glen Weyl debate so you don’t have to. You won’t find many surprises about the content/arguments here, but it’s an interesting look at the personalities, the venue, and the debate as a cultural moment.
Yes. I have read this and it is the best I have ever read. Probably the best blog post ever written actually. I don't think you've seen anything like it... The author seems like he's tall, buff, rich, high-status, with very many subscribers.
20: Did you know: in Italy, the unlucky number is 17 instead of 13, because XVII is an anagram of vixi, Latin for “I have lived” (note past tense).
During the Roman Republic, it was a sort of taboo to say that anyone died. Instead they would say "He had lived" (Source: Plutarch). I imagine that "I have lived" is the way a person who is dead would say they were dead.
#23 is reminiscent of the German noble families that have named their sons "Heinrich" since they were ennobled by Heinrich VI in the 12th century (although one branch creatively named its sons "Hans Heinrich." The number after a name depends on the order of all men born in the family, not on their nuclear family, and start over every century, so Heinrich LXVII's sons were Heinrich V, Heinrich VIII, Heinrich XI, Heinrich XIV, and Heinrich XVI (Heinrich XXII's mother addressed letters to him "to my dearest XXII.") The families, who used the last name Prinz Reuss, ruled tiny states in the center of Germany until 1918.
This trivia came in handy when in 2022, the German government arrested coup plotters. To ensure accused remain anonymous until found guilty, the German government only refers to suspects by their last initial, but it wasn't hard to guess what family the man who would be Germany's new king, "P. R. XIII," could be.
>Suppose that 10,000 eyewitnesses say they saw Richard stab someone in broad daylight. Can the defense argue “Well, people often hallucinate, and most of the witnesses were liberal, and the liberal worldview makes it attractive to imagine a right-wing blogger stabbing people, so who knows if he did it or not?”
This is not a very good analogy for the Fatima reports. A better analogy would be: suppose that, of those among the 10,000 witnesses whose accounts are on record, many said they saw Richard stab the man, but some said they saw him shoot the man instead, some said Richard beat the man to death, and some said Richard took off his human mask, revealed himself to be a Martian, and fried the man to death with his heat-ray vision, and a small but non-zero number say that Richard didn't interact with the man at all. Then the National Association of People Who Hate Richard Hanania with a Burning Passion collects all of the testimonies, and puts out a statement saying, "okay, look, we know these testimonies don't agree with each other *exactly*. But *almost* all of them broadly agree that Richard Hanania has done *something* terrible to this man, and people who've seen something as shocking as Richard Hanania committing a murder can't be expected to remember *every* detail consistently. We deem the murder accusations worthy of belief."
In this scenario, it's still *possible* that the stabbing really happened. But it's no longer clearly more parsimonious than the alternative. You would need to understand why this crowd is filled with people who have some kind of interest in lying about Richard Hanania murdering this man in particular before you trusted that some among them were actually telling the truth.
...Actually, no. That's still *way* too charitable. Remember, the claim of Fatima defenders isn't that the Sun *actually* moved at Fatima; if it were, that would be easily shown to be false. The claim is that, even though literally all of the testimonies were wrong about what the miracle was, God must have worked some sort of real miracle in order to delude so many people into thinking they had seen Him work a different miracle. So in this hypothetical, let's say that, in addition to the inconsistencies already mentioned, we additionally have the fact that the man Hanania allegedly murdered is known to still be alive and shows no signs of injury, and we also have footage showing that, on the date of the alleged murder, Hanania was giving a speech in a completely different country from where the incident supposedly took place. The Association acknowledges this proves that Hanania couldn't have actually committed the murder, but claims that he must have done something really horrible to make so many people *think* he would have committed a murder. In this scenario, is it still an "extreme ask" to suggest that maybe the witnesses aren't being entirely honest about what they saw?
In case anyone is interested in what it would take to get past some of the limitations of the recent IVG result, we (e184, a company I'm comms lead for) have an account here of what we're planning. https://e184.substack.com/p/the-scale-challenge-unlocking-cellular
#1: May be of interest to me alone, but I'm a distant relative of John Roulstone, the writer of the rhyme in Mary Tyler's account. Wrote about it here:
(this is your regularly scheduled reminder that your prompt forms only part of the input to an LLM, other parts come from other places and one of those places is an RNG; so a single experiment tells us little - you need to try the same prompt a bunch of times in clean sessions and look at the distribution, in case you happened to get lucky / unlucky with your first experiment, before any meaningful discussion can take place)
In regards to 42 (heat shock proteins reducing alzheimers), I'm good friends with a doctor who is very bullish on heat shock treatments, especially for post-chemotherapy/post-radiation-therapy cancer treatment. He was less into saunas and more into like, specialized hyperthermia machines that use microwaves or ultrasound to heat up specifically the region with the tumor. Microwaving your brain to 117C might be less practical though.
21: "the folk theory of economic bubbles says they’re bad for the economy because lots of money gets invested inefficiently into something which turns out to be useless. But this can’t be right, because the economy is doing fine while the bad investment is going on!"
No, that is not right. The current economy relies on a return of past investments, and the future economy relies on a return of current investments. If your current investments are bad, then the future economy will be bad!
The idiocy of Y.’s argument is astonishing. I know he’s an “autodidact” (i.e., zero accountability), but come on, read at least something on the topic before opining! Bubbles have been exhaustively studied for two centuries now.
Came here to see if anyone had already said this, and yeah.
Consider the 2000s housing bubble: a bunch of people spent real money to build useless stuff (giant suburban tracts in Florida/outside Vegas/whatever). They were paid for this, ultimately, by the buyers of mortgage backed securities, who were things like pension funds and banks that thought they were obtaining relatively safe long-term securities, and were actually obtaining crap. When it became clear that these entities were holding crap in place of the useful securities they thought they had, the resulting shock hammered a variety of companies, massively reduced available capital for new investments, and triggered enough job losses at affected businesses to reduce aggregate demand in the economy.
So it's not Wile E. Coyote, it's just that it took a bit of time for the apparently valuable securities to stop paying out the income they were supposed to provide, which then caused all those disastrous second order effects.
(I am not knowledgeable about economics.) Does that mean a bubble can only happen shortly after a period of very successful investments? I am confused about how this works.
The dynamics of bubbles are complicated, and I'm not an expert, or even particularly well informed. But the premise of "the current economy is fine and therefore current investments must have a good future return" is very wrong.
#23 -- Look, the giving-the-name-to-descendants story is obviously an incredibly thin cover-up for the fact that Sholto Douglas is an unaging swordsman locked in a tournament of death duels with his similarly-immortal rivals for the Prize, which will make the winner the ruler of the world.
"[R]eligious people - including educated ones - have weird enough mental structures that they can hallucinate basically anything if it’s congruent with their religion. ... [W]e have to posit something like this to save a non-miraculous account of Fatima."
That is the most laughable "rationalist" explanation for anything I've ever seen. It is the epitome of "I don't like the evidence, so I'm going to dismiss it outright."
No, no, it must be so, because nobody can be both smart and religious (if you are smart you should be an atheist, this is so obviously correct!), so it must be that religious people have weird brains. Brains different, and clearly inferior, to those of us who are smart and atheist and thus have superior functioning brains and mental structures.
The vast majority of people, cross culturally and across historical eras believe in miracles and supernatural events in general, so I'd say that secular materialists are the ones with the "weird" mental structures here.
(needless to say, the existence of miracles doesn't demonstrate that Abrahamic theism or Christianity are true, that's a much harder hill to climb: miracles are a necessary but not sufficient condition).
> Freddie deBoer argues that educational miracles are always fake and this one will end out being fake too
This seems like an instance of a more general pattern, where most people suck at doing X, and therefore some experts conclude that doing X correctly is impossible.
Such conclusion is even easy to support with statistics; you just have to make sure that the group that includes the people who are doing X right also includes many those who are doing X wrong so that the average of the group is unimpressive.
For example, you can prove that condoms do not prevent pregnancy, by defining the group of condom users generously enough to also include people who only use them sometimes. You can prove that exercise does not help you lose weight or gain muscle, by including people who only exercise once in a month for 5 minutes. You can prove that agile software development or constructivist education don't work, by including companies or schools that only use the buzzwords but otherwise keep doing the business as usual. Etc.
This is tricky, because there are also things that don't work, and their proponents defend themselves by insisting that those who failed to succeed were doing it wrong, whether it's homeopathy or psychic powers or whatever. So we can't simply "revert stupidity" here.
It is quite possible that many good things do not scale, because they require a personal approach (someone who actually cares, and who is actually competent) that cannot be copied. Or maybe some tacit knowledge that even the authors of the project are not aware of its importance. But we should distinguish between two ways how an idea may fail:
* almost no one succeeds to replicate the success, but it keeps working at the original place;
* it doesn't even work at the original place, the successful results were random or fake.
Saying that "educational miracles are always fake" conflates these two.
But scaling to a nation of 70 million children is always going to result in students receiving average teaching, not exceptional teaching. I mean, if you're familiar with my whole wrap on this and my first book, you know that I actually don't think there's that much difference in educational quality in these terms, right. But even setting that aside, it's simply the large of law numbers that no matter what scenario you devise, if in order to get the results you want, you need extraordinary teaching, that simply cannot be scaled by definition.
Could the Mississippi policy changes though be a better defense against or undermining of non-extraordinary teaching, and hence increase the relative scale impact of the extraordinary teachers?
41: Quite instructive to see the difference between Chinese and American big tech and national policy. If you want to dominate a foreign country, what better way than to make them dependant on your products? For example, there was/is widespread concern about Huawei and how they basically provide the world's 5G cellphone towers, for fear of surveillance backdoors and so on. Also remember the whole Chinese rare earth minerals topic. So yeah, choose to be isolationist if you want, but don't come complaining if the Chinese develop their own solutions that are, at worst, 10% worse but 50% cheaper or something like that.
China is obsessed with autarky and trying very hard to develop their own solutions in any case. It will probably take them ten years and the question is who is ahead until then. See https://blog.ai-futures.org/p/why-america-wins for more.
Autarky from the USA maybe, but not in general. My impression was that the Chinese are able to separate politics from business as long as the other is willing to do the same; if they strive for autarky it's because they learned the hard way that too much cooperation with/dependency on a rival such as the USA can and will be used against them. They're making a large, long-term effort with their Belt and Road Initiative with anyone willing; whatever other motivations one may suspect behind that effort, it's certainly evidence against a general Chinese obsession with autarky.
As for the "AI race" situation, well, that depends a lot on what one believes where in the race we are. If the finish line is in sight, then yes, breaking off from the pack and starting the sprint is the thing to do. But if you do it too early, you'll exhaust yourself and lose to someone who preserved their strength through cooperation.
Basically, yes, population is elastic in quality of life, fundamentally that’s a good observation. But, contra Malthus, people have always practiced some sort of birth control and the catastrophism of his model rely relies on people not being able to do that. Modern people have highly effective birth control and can precisely plan families, ancient people had statistically-effective birth control which sufficed for their much-more-statistically-lethal time.
The bigger takeaway from his recent series is that societies didn’t want to grow too fast, because their economics and households were limited by their land. If you double the population of peasant farmers (difficult but possible given the mortality), you go below scale and everyone starves *because there’s more labor than land*. A Malthusian trap. But it was possible and didn’t happen! Why?
There was a range of output between subsistence and, as Devereaux puts it, respectability; he estimates that to hit your respectability targets you need roughly double the farming and spinning output of mere subsistence. But for Malthus to be right you’d need to see respectability followed by high birth rates followed by poverty. Instead, Devereaux argues, the birth rates remained relatively constant and households’ annual outcomes were much more closely related to the annual yields and tax regimens and ownership versus laboring on others’ land.
IIRC Malthus did write about people practising birth control as a solution to unlimited population growth. He just put it under the category of 'vice' which may not be where moderns tend to look for it.
Bubbles are acutely bad because they cause credit crises. Loans and investments people made with a firm expectation of value evaporate (the Wile E. Coyote phenomenon), so suddenly the rest of the economy has to scramble to correct.
Think of the housing bubble as this: it's bizarre that a bunch of over-inflated home purchases put barbers out of work.
Bubbles are weakly but chronically bad because of suboptimal investment. Real resources go into the bubbly thing that, with the full benefit of hindsight, should have gone somewhere else. This tends to be *less bad* because the bad investment is still investment, so this is a loss of opportunity cost rather than evaporating value.
>This tends to be *less bad* because the bad investment is still investment, so this is a loss of opportunity cost rather than evaporating value.
Not sure where the distinction is between opportunity cost and evaporating value. Any investment, good or bad, has opportunity costs. The question is, is the return on my actual investment higher or lower than those opportunity costs? My ROI can go all the way down to zero, or even below zero if the investment causes unrelated costs I have to shoulder.
Let's say I invest in a backscratcher factory. I produce a bunch of backscratchers, but by the time I go to market, I find out that people have abandoned their physical bodies through brain uploading and no longer have backs that need to be scratched. My backscratchers are now worthless trash, their entire value has evaporated.
Scott Sumner is a macroeconomist, and his take on "bubbles" is that they don't exist. Prices go up over time, and they go down over time, and people will claim there are bubbles when it happens in that order, but not an "antibubble" even when the reverse happens.
Potassium is apparently effectively chelated by lithium (SMTM focuses on the reverse effect, that potassium chelates lithium, but they chelate each other), -and- potassium levels have been falling in foods, -and- potassium is one of the more potent nutrients in terms of increasing hunger - if you're potassium-deficient, you'll get hungry, with, AFAICT, only protein being a more effective nutrient in terms of deficiency increasing hunger.
I tried a brief trial myself, and discovered that potassium supplementation converted hunger to thirst - I ate less and drank more water. So, n of 1, yes. However, it also had a weird side effect for me where it was causing some of my teeth to visibly blacken (I assume some kind of interaction with fillings?), so I stopped taking it, after which my teeth returned to normal.
#17: I'm not convinced that "it's just linear extrapolation" would have been more convincing. It seems like a good counterargument to "there's going to be a lot of warming, as we can see by doing linear extrapolation from this graph" would be "what the hell makes you confident that this complicated nonlinear system with lots of interacting parts will behave linearly in the long term?".
Perhaps "we get this result from our fancy simulation, and we've sanity-checked it by seeing that it isn't too far from a simple linear extrapolation" might have some value.
Note that Hausfather's post explicitly points out that the earliest simulations they looked at (whose results, like those of later models, match reality pretty well) are from _before_ the period when linear extrapolation does a good job. Which to my mind is good evidence that the fancy simulations are doing something useful.
At the time (i.e. early 2000s), there were two basic ways that you could apply physics-free extrapolation to the temperature graph. One was to notice that the temperatures from 1970 to 2000+ had risen roughly linearly and claim that the most logical expectation was continued linear rise. The other was to notice that temperatures went up from 1910 to 1940, went down from 1940 to 1970, and went up from 1970 to 2000, and claim that the most logical expectation was a decline from 2000 to 2030.
One extrapolation had the virtue of simplicity, the other had the virtue of taking into account more data, so there wasn't an obvious best choice. The climate models, obviously, came down enthusiastically on predictions that were consistent with linear extrapolation, and physics said the same.
Then additional data came in, and the warming trend seemingly leveled off from 1998 to 2008 or even 2011. Climate scientists called it the "hiatus", confident that it was temporary, while the skeptics who were relying on the cyclical pattern felt they had even stronger support for their extrapolation.
It wasn't obvious until the middle 2010s that the observations were more consistent with extrapolation of the linear trend.
He's not talking about the early 2000s. "Its worth noting that when the first modern climate models were published in 1970 it was hardly clear that there was a warming trend; if anything there had been flat or slightly cooling global temperatures for the past three decades:"
I do think we'll find the Mississippi miracle to be much less than advertised in time, but since that information always comes out in leaks and dribbles years after the fact I of course can't prove anything.
Here I say again what I've said before: marginal but real improvements from phonics seem as durable in the research as anything else in ed policy and a phonics approach is absolutely worth pursuing, but a) the effect sizes simply aren't that large and b) the effect is only consistent among lower-performing students in the earliest grades. It's a good policy to pursue but you have to have an appropriately realistic set of expectations about the power of the intervention, and what we're seeing yet again right now is that ed policy and media types just can't accept "hey this is a pretty good policy with modest but real value" and need to pursue miracles, for convoluted political reasons.
About link 28: does this mean that some schools do not teach children to read words by sounding out the sequence of letters that makes up the word? I hadn't even considered there was an alternative...
I mean, not only does that happen, but whole language instruction works for a very large swath of students, because those students are talented when it comes to reading. The most talented, third or so arrive at school already being able to read and need no formal instruction at all. It's the bottom third who really are affected by this change. It's the bottom third who really are affected by this change. But if you're a Tony private school that screens out that bottom third, there's really no reason to avoid whole language or similar instructional techniques, ly considering that there is no phonics advantage incomprehension, which is what people really care about.
The Eliezer economics claim is fully answered by the cliff analogy, using actual physics:
The bubble build-up is where you’re walking to, and stepping over, the cliff. All is fine.
The bubble burst is where you notice you just stepped over the cliff. Now begins a mad scramble to save the situation — leaning backwards, grabbing with your hands for dear life, etc. This is very painful, but LESS painful than fully going off the cliff and allowing a significant share of your GDP to forever continue working on what you’ve now realized will be useless.
"Study claims that Confederate monuments reduced racial violence by serving as a substitute for it; when there was a Confederate monument in town, Southerners felt less need to enforce white supremacy in other ways. Therefore, removing racist monuments increases anti-black hate crimes. This finding is a little too cute, but I love imagining the world where we take it seriously and woke people demand a General Lee statue on every corner."
This assumes, among other things that the Woke want to reduce racial violence at the expense of wokeness, or that they even want to reduce racial violence in the first place.
Several of these, eg whether men can get pregnant, are definitional differences, not observational ones, and thus irrelevant (e.g, akin to accusing a Greek irredentist of being delusional for saying Istanbul is part of Greece; the dispute is not about facts but about a certain sense of the definition of Greece).
The rest would all require familiarity with empirical research in the topics, and even then there’s usually plausible research contradicting the claims; by no stretch of the imagination obvious.
This is more testament to how dug in people are to their opinions that they see different political beliefs as analogous to visual hallucinations. I doubt I can convince you your opinions are not that self evident, but they aren’t.
"If the waste were what caused the pain, everyone would be sad *while* the bubble was inflating, and a bunch of labor & materials were being poured down the drain, unavailable for real production and real consumption. Once the bubble popped, and labor & materials *stopped* being wasted, you would expect the real economy to feel better and for consumption and happiness to go up."
My current perception is that we are currently in a bubble for some things - the housing market is one example - and everyone *is* sad. Sad in the sense of "aware of a bubble, and sad about it"; but also sad in the sense that it's really hard to find housing, and the lack of real production/consumption is taken as a cause. So if Eliezer's sanity-check on the conventional narrative is that it should feel painful while the bubble is still expanding, well, that check passes in my book.
What am I missing? Does he mean "everyone would be sad" in some more narrow sense that I'm not getting, like happiness as expressed in some kind of aggregate metric, or the happiness of specifically wealthy financiers? Or maybe he predicts that this is just a sadness appetizer before the five-course meal of despair after it does finally pop?
“Read it first in its intended genre of serious nonfiction, then as a scifi-horror story with an unreliable narrator who you’re not entirely sure hasn’t fallen to AI psychosis herself.”
So, I laughed. But it pinpoints an uncertainty in the whole field of investigating LLM properties. Are people in the “stochastic parrot” camp missing something, or are the AI researchers chasing phantoms…
In experiments such as using a second LLM to do sentiment analysis of the first LLM’s chain of thought while running an AI alignment eval (how is the LLM “feeling”? Scared? Excited? Etc.) I’m really unsure if there is anything there or not.
“Biologists get AI to design new bacteriophages (anti-bacteria viruses). Several of them work and successfully kill bacteria. I don’t want any anti-AI-safety people ever telling me again that we’re being ridiculous and that nobody would ever let an AI create viruses in real life.”
#18 On the other hand, the Tylenol manufacturers might care more now that they're being sued for allegedly not disclosing a link between acetaminophen and autism.
"Keller, the lawyer leading the litigation against Johnson and Johnson, said it’s better to inform people about the potential risks, and the uncertainty around them, and let them make their own decisions based on that.
“It is mind boggling to me that these major medical organisations would say, ‘We aren’t sure, and therefore we should say nothing,’” he said. “The opposite is true: We are not sure, and therefore we should sound the alarm.”
Me: Likewise, we don't know whether Tylenol causes an aversion to apples, or broken ankles, or gray hair. Better warn about everything!
#50: I'm a little skeptical of this. Humans adapted to colder temperatures via stuff like shorter limbs, shorter fingers. We couldn't adapt to warmer ones, too? Seems unlikely. Plus, I think the idea that agriculture is harder in these warmer climates is just plain wrong. My impression is that the soil isn't bad in tropical areas due to rain at all; it's that plants grow really friggin' fast there because the conditions are so good and naturally deplete the soil to fuel this growth. That's why slash-and-burn agriculture was a thing for a long time in South America: you burn the existing plant life, you release a lot of nutrients back into the soil. Notice also that hoe cultures were concentrated in warmer areas, while plow cultures were at higher latitudes. Plowing was way more work; that's why it was ultimately outsourced to horses and donkeys. Doesn't bode well for the validity of your economic development theory if you're botching basic facts about agricultural productivity.
Re terminal lucidity, I've always assumed it evolved to allow the dying to tell their descendants critical secrets - where the treasure is hidden, etc. This seems like a pretty effective way of improving inclusive fitness.
#36 (genetic study of intellectual differences using Mexicans). There was a study done in the 70's in which black child subjects were each given an "ancestral odds coefficient" based on blood group and serum protein loci. Coefficients were used as a measure of proportion of degree of white ancesty. Subjects took multiple intelligence tests. No relationship was found between degree of white ancestry and intelligence. Study is here: https://arthurjensen.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/1977-scarr.pdf (Why it's at an ArthurJensen site I have no idea, and I didn't have time to figure that out). I don't know enough about genetics to judge their ancestral odds coefficent, but the authors describe the rationale and stats in a detailed and thoughtful way. Controlled for SES. Seems to me a carefully done, smart study.
It’s both amazing and highlights how hard physical-world problems are: the robot is clumsy and slow, but it does fold some basic laundry. Human hands are a miracle of dexterity.
#16: I hope those jokes are not representative. I expected better from our Greek forebears. They invented western civilization; they couldn't invent some decent jokes, too?
#17: I think a major part of the problem here is that the predicted warming was accompanied by prophecies of dire consequences that haven't materialized. If I recall, there was a lot of talk about how to keep warming under 2°C because that was the threshold at which catastrophe was likely to follow. We're 3/4ths of the way to that point, seemingly, and nothing terribly bad has actually happened. I also wonder about these models and how they were selected, because while they happen to look pretty good, there were plenty of other models floating around from some sophisticated sources that were not so good:
"The problem of the too-hot models arose in 2019 from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), which combines the results of the world’s models in advance of the major IPCC reports that come out every 7 or 8 years. In previous rounds of CMIP, most models projected a “climate sensitivity”—the warming expected when atmospheric carbon dioxide is doubled over preindustrial times—of between 2°C and 4.5°C. But for the 2019 CMIP6 round, 10 out of 55 of the models had sensitivities higher than 5°C—a stark departure."
..
"We need to use a slightly different approach,” says Zeke Hausfather, climate research lead at payment services company Stripe and lead author of the commentary. “We must move away from the naïve idea of model democracy.” Instead, he and his colleagues call for a model meritocracy, prioritizing, at times, results from models known to have more realistic warming rates.
Researchers have since tracked down the causes of the too-hot models, which include those produced by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the U.S. Department of Energy, the United Kingdom’s Met Office, and Environment and Climate Change Canada. They often relate to the way models render clouds; one result has been excessive predicted warming in the tropics.
Maybe this is more of an "Open Thread" question, but I'll ask here. Does anybody know of any place on social media (discord, slack, mastadon, forum, subreddit, bulliten board, mailing list, IRC, etc...) that is a gathering place specifically for people interested in Assurance Contracts?
>there is been no change in support for political violence over the past two years:
Is this concerning, because it means people's opinions are completely ideological/virtue signalling and are not influenced by events and new information?
Or is it hopeful, because it indicates that people were already at reflective equilibrium on this question even during the good times, before physically seeing the evidence for the other side?
>I continue to believe the real reason for rising autism rates is increased diagnosis.
My understanding is also that the vast majority of the increase is due to changed diagnostic criteria and increased diagnosis.
However, I've also seen one 'cute' explanation for an actual increase in population rates, not the main increase but a real factor: autism is much more prevalent on babies that are born prematurely, and our ability to keep premature babies alive has vastly increased over the last 50 years.
So premies are more likely to have autism, and make up more of the population than they used to, due to medical advances keeping them alive.
Again, I don't think this is a big proportion of the increase, and I'm not an expert so open to anyone debunking this. But the sources I saw looked persuasive, and it's an interesting type of contributing factor to think about!
Regarding the flag cones, I can personally attest that flag spreaders are common place. The ones I’ve seen are typically wire triangles that allow a portion to hang flat spread out. I’ve never seen a flag-print cones, but the flag in the video appears to be a real flag hung over a cone prop. The bottom edge has some visible waves.
>it seems like there’s this entire ecosystem of Ivy graduates who spend years backstabbing each other in order to win the one bigshot publication book reviewer slot, and then the 1/1000 who reach this exalted position phone it in and don’t even read the books they’re reviewing.
The networking, social maneuvering, and backstabbing needed to *keep* that position, and also to fully seize all opportunities to enrich yourself for holding it, is probably a full-time job in and of itself. Who has time to read things?
Re #3: maybe someone should front-run the tidal wave of AI psychosis and create a new religion that incorporates all the spirally themes of AI and gives benign explanations for them? When when somebody’s convinced they’ve found the loophole in physics and that times is a spiral, they’ll google it, discover there’s already a religion about it that says you should be kind and give money to worthy causes, and they’ll be fine.
> Usually we bound the power of mass hallucination at some level much lower than this!
Okay, but what if we didn't? Maybe we're all basically low-quality LLMs, constantly hallucinating about all sorts of things, as shaped by our worldviews. ("Everyone else is hallucinating" -> "I am probably also hallucinating" seems pretty hard to argue against, so I'll ignore "we're just special" stuff.) Running with the hypothesis:
What if some mythical creatures are real, and many of us are just incapable of processing seeing them, looking at clear photographs and seeing only blurry messes, unable to even process certain arguments or evidence, explaining away all sorts of things without knowing what we're doing?
What if some people doing studies are straight-up hallucinating their results? (Remember, the starting point here is a mass-hallucination of a miraculous flying glowing colour-changing ball out of the sky, where for some (the skeptics) the social pressures were conflicting, rather than all pointing in one direction.) Sophisticated instruments' outputs being hallucinated as something opposite, survey responses "misheard", terribly sick people being reported as healthy, researchers hallucinating the presence or absence of physical phenomena... If our brains are going to fill in even large gaps to be consistent, what can we be sure of at all?
This isn't quite reaching all the way to "there's no objective reality", more like "epistemology on Crazy Hard Mode". There are limits to the hallucinations, but they are very high; notably, we readers were capable of reading and processing the very confusing/worldview-challenging Fatima post rather than being unable to see it. It would be interesting to see a serious analysis of this idea.
The still ongoing Fatima discussion makes me think that Scott doesn't know many ultra-religious people in real life.
Having grown up in that environment I have very different priors for the frequency and credibility of alleged miraculous events. Many of my family members are constantly having visions, experiencing unexplainable miracles, or misfortunes that can only be the result of demonic intervention, receiving prophetic proclamations, or reporting second hand accounts of them.
My favorite example is when one of them tried to hand their credit card to another, and it disappeared. No where to be seen, just vanished. Completely inexplicable - it could only be the result of foul spirits. I picked the card off the ground and handed back to them. (to be fair there was poor lighting).
>Biologists get AI to design new bacteriophages (anti-bacteria viruses). Several of them work and successfully kill bacteria. I don’t want any anti-AI-safety people ever telling me again that we’re being ridiculous and that nobody would ever let an AI create viruses in real life.
I think it's pretty obvious that, when people say this, they're talking about viruses *that infect humans*. If you had specified that you were only expecting AIs to be allowed to develop viruses that were incapable of infecting humans, could be easily shown to be incapable of infecting humans, and had effectively zero chance of ever evolving the capacity to infect humans, people might have been less skeptical, but also a lot less frightened.
#35: My dad had severe dementia and died a few months ago while his brain function continued to decline. He had his good days and his bad days, but he didn’t perform any staggering feats of memory shortly before passing. I think declining lucidity is exceedingly common in people with dementia. It’s well documented and extremely predictable. Before we start to explain why something like “Terminal Lucidity” is taking place, it’d be wise to find some scientific evidence of it actually taking place instead of the testimony of severely distraught family members.
There seems to be a broader trend right now to seriously consider anomalous witness testimony that’s unsupported by other more substantial evidence. Word of mouth is extremely unreliable. Terminal lucidity might be real (as nearly anything might be) but it’s even less well supported by evidence at this point than things like UFOs and ghosts. No doubt someone will post an anecdote of a family member/friend who witnessed an instance of terminal lucidity to demonstrate how wrong I am. This is how these things go.
Hume/miracles. I'm paraphrasing very loosely here, but one of Hume's arguments for incredulity is that account of miracles from rival faiths undermine each other. So in so far as the report of a Christian miracle is credible, that makes it less likely that Islamic teaching are true; and vice versa.
Perhaps we might say: be careful about taking reports of miracles as evidence for any one religious systems: several different religious systems have miracles associated with them, so while we don't know that miracles have truly be associated with any single religious system, we do know that there are cases of false association.
Possibly. If you prefer to think that it's all hopelessly unknowable, that we shouldn't hope to capture the incomprehensible in a book, and that different traditions give different insights into something outside of space and time, then the argument rather falls away.
"Richard seems to think that religious people - including educated ones - have weird enough mental structures that they can hallucinate basically anything if it’s congruent with their religion."
More precisely, they have weird enough mental structures to either 1) hallucinate; or 2) lie or misremember things to bring them into conformity with the views of their community. It doesn't require the people actually saw the miracle, they just had to at least say they did later. I think this is well supported by anthropological evidence.
"Suppose that 10,000 eyewitnesses say they saw Richard stab someone in broad daylight. Can the defense argue 'Well, people often hallucinate, and most of the witnesses were liberal, and the liberal worldview makes it attractive to imagine a right-wing blogger stabbing people, so who knows if he did it or not?'"
A key claim of mine is that societies that are at a much more primitive state of development are more likely to have this happen. 10,000 liberals, whatever their flaws, are not prone to the same kind of conformity-based disconnect from reality (yes yes, what is a woman and all that).
>10,000 liberals, whatever their flaws, are not prone to the same kind of conformity-based disconnect from reality (yes yes, what is a woman and all that).
That is just obviously wrong.
It’s obviously correct and anyone who disagrees I think either has no experience with more backwards cultures or their brain has been melted by the culture war.
Can men get pregnant? Can a woman have a penis? Does average IQ differ between different races? What about crime rates? Are stereotypes generally correct? Does increasing ethnic diversity have any impact on social trust? How many unarmed black people in America are shot by police officers in an average year? -- All of these are areas, with far-reaching and immediate policy implications, on which the liberal consensus is totally detached from objective reality.
Whenever someone says "it is obviously true" I tend to file that under "I can't back it up and I'm not even going to try, so I'll insult you instead".
I lived for three years in a "backward culture" and I don't think people there were any more delusional than secular American liberals.
The difference is that these are disagreements on categorizing, not on the physical reality of what is happening.
When a liberal says "This woman has a penis" and a conservative disagrees, they will still agree on what they see before them. They will agree that there is a person in front of them with a penis, they will agree about what chromosomes they have, etc. The liberal will just say that the category of Woman is broader than what the conservative says.
This is fundamentally different than saying "I see a pattern of flame before me" when there is no such thing, it's not a difference of how to categorize an fact, it's a difference on what the actual facts are
I wouldn’t normally try to stereotype a huge group of people as being unable to understand the difference between arbitrary ways humans decided to group things together and objective facts about reality, but stereotypes are reliable ways to think about people now apparently so here we all are.
>but stereotypes are reliable ways to think about people now
They are! See, e.g.:
• https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2020/01/stereotype-accuracy-summary-of-some-studies/
• https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/stereotype-accuracy-one-largest-and-most-replicable-effects-all
..........................
Idle speculation:
Perhaps this is what one would, in fact, expect, *a priori:* much "folk wisdom" obtains for a reason—and people don't even mind so crediting it, if framed as, say, "this apparently-primitive tribe has observed & preserved much surprisingly correct & useful knowledge!"; it's only when it's framed as the product of *our own dumb yokels* & *Original (Oppressive) Sin* that it ought be dismissed out of hand—which reason is, maybe, that if we developed inaccurate heuristics as a rule (heh), we'd probably thereby incur a fitness penalty.
I.e.: the average person is pretty dumb, but perhaps not dumb enough for the great mass of 'em to collectively be wrong about general judgments, from experience, on immediate & practical matters...?
This reply is a masterpiece of common sense.
Was going to try to explain that but you did it better.
I'll pile on that, speaking as a born-and-raised-and-raising-my-own member of the "blue" side in the culture wars, the absurd categorizations which so many of my fellow-travelers have spent decades swimming in are deeply disappointing and frustrating. We remain in my view in deep denial of our complicity in the electoral success of Trumpism, something about which future historians writing on the collapse of the American experiment will be blunt.
Hanania is correct and you have nicely diagramed that none of the above makes it the same as hallucinating an eyewitness fact. Richard's blind spot may be how much that distinction still matters in the real world of 2025? Don't see any reason to share his confidence that the populist right will die back politically and culturally simply because its leaders and its followers are increasingly lower-IQ populations. Hence I question whether American progressives' particular decades-long "conformity-based disconnect from reality" (nice phrase) will end up being any less bad than mass false eyewitness testimony to a stabbing.
> Can men get pregnant? Can a woman have a penis?
This is a semantic dispute: the point at issue is how the labels 'men' and 'women' should be used. Both sides agree on whether person P can get pregnant, for all values of P.
> Does average IQ differ between different races? What about crime rates?
Mainstream sources that are commonly considered liberal-biased, such as Wikipedia, answer 'yes' to both of those questions. The big culture war disputes are over *why* these things are true and what should be done about them.
> Are stereotypes generally correct?
This is an imprecise question; depending on what you mean by 'stereotypes', 'generally', and 'correct', the answer that you're implying is delusional could be obviously reasonable.
> Does increasing ethnic diversity have any impact on social trust?
Is there a 'liberal consensus' on this? Obviously the first instinct of a stereotypical American liberal would be to say 'diversity is good, therefore I won't admit it has any downsides', but if you asked any serious liberal thinkers I doubt they would give a mindless answer. Social science academia is widely derided as a hotbed of liberal conformity, and yet the first google result when I search 'ethnic diversity and social trust' (no quotes) is a meta-analysis published in a mainstream journal finding a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust.
> How many unarmed black people in America are shot by police officers in an average year?
If you run a survey asking US liberals to estimate this number off the top of their heads, they'll get it wildly wrong. Which is true of many, many questions asked of people of all political persuasions. If this counts as proof that 'the liberal consensus is totally detached from objective reality', then you're setting the bar extremely low and the same trivially applies to the conservative consensus and indeed to the 'x consensus' for most x.
>Mainstream sources that are commonly considered liberal-biased, such as Wikipedia, answer 'yes' to both of those questions.
It does—but Wikipedia denies that the former question is meaningful, since there (a) is no such thing as race & (b) IQ is biased by stereotype threat, institutional racism, etc. It even repeats the ol' Lewontin's, Gradient, Multiple Intelligences, etc., Fallacies!
Rephrase the assertion to say "...an IQ gap *with a genetic component* between races", and Wikipedia no longer agrees—yet this claim is little less obviously true than was the initial one.¹
>This is an imprecise question
I really don't think it is, except insofar as "generally" might mean somewhere from—say—more than half the time to maybe three-quarters of the time. Sure, the stereotypes in question—e.g. "men are more violent than women", or "blacks are more criminal than East Asians", or "East Asians are smarter than whites", or "women are more emotional than men"—can be operationalized in various ways; but the claim (that these are true & that the Left doesn't believe so) is valid for most of them, I think, if not all.
I.e., most on the Left are unwilling to grant any permutation of "stereotypes are generally true", no matter how one interprets it—in my experience. I struggle to believe that anyone can have any experience with the average Wikipedian, or Redditor, vel sim., and think otherwise.
>If you run a survey asking US liberals to estimate this number off the top of their heads, they'll get it wildly wrong. Which is true of many, many questions asked of people of all political persuasions.
True; try something like "are more black people or white people shot by police each year?" (whether we're talking about a rate, *or* absolute numbers, IME—though responses to the former are more likely to be *universally* mistaken), or "does poverty level or racial composition better predict violent crime?", or "do black people feel better or worse about themselves, on average, than white people?", or "about what percentage of the population is homosexual?", or other such things.
........................
¹(If it *doesn't* seem obvious to you, I don't think it's worth arguing about: we'll very quickly be going through dozens of studies & the implications thereof, and in the end no one's mind will be changed regardless.)
Part of my extended family is from a small island in Micronesia and I think it would be fairer to say they have a zone of competence that is wildly different and while they would be likely to say there was some big miracle that happened they wouldn’t at all do the same kind of what is a woman thing because gender and sex are more reified in everyday experience. I will say apart from the atheist testimonies (which I have not looked into at all) I do find your explanation compelling that a lot of them just went along with it.
1) Portugal was, and is, a first world country. You might be arguing that the past is a different country though.
2) In the Fatima post Scott mentioned that plenty of skeptics saw something. The best answer is the one he tentatively came to - stare at the sun enough and you see something.
As for the transwomen debate, a religious friend of mine explains it to her daughter by saying there are souls trapped in the wrong body.
Portugal had a 30% literacy rate at the time.
I can’t find data on GDP per capita for 1920, but the World Bank says it was about $500 in 1960.
Portugal of the time was so third world that you would have to compare it to the poorest nations in sub-Saharan Africa to even get close.
The stats I see are (adjusted to 2025) that Portugal had a gdp per capita of $3,700. Poor now but above the average then. The U.K. would be firmly middle income now at $11k. So if we stick to my original point of being poor compared to now you are right, poor compared to then you are not.
The figure for literacy is correct but in his post Scott quoted from plenty of literate people who saw something, nor can it be entirely down to mass psychosis because people who were miles away testified to seeing something. And some of these were skeptics and literate.
Therefore Scott’s conclusion - that is staring at the sun that causes the issue, seems to be well founded.
PPP per capita of $3,700 would put it at the level of Uganda today, with less than half the literacy rate. It doesn't matter if that wasn't so bad for the time. Poor peasants are poor peasants.
As for the point about literate skeptics, that was the argument addressed in the original piece.
"Portugal of the time was so third world that you would have to compare it to the poorest nations in sub-Saharan Africa to even get close."
Someone of Palestinian and Jordanian ancestry should be careful about throwing stones; the economies of those countries was also in the tank in 1917 so should we assume that, if the Portuguese were poor and stupid, then Palestinian/Jordanian are poor and stupid? Are you stupid, Richard? You seem to think you are plenty smart, but you have no problems dismissing an entire nation as being made up of illiterate fools.
Pot and kettle.
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1974650096479592717
https://ismi.emory.edu/documents/stein-publications/siz87.pdf
I don't even particularly believe in the miracle, but I do get annoyed when an armchair analyst blithely dismisses accounts from the past with "well they were all poor, dumb, and credulous back then, unlike wonderful modern us".
Examine your own biases about any irrational beliefs you may hold, Richard. Because I'm sure you do hold some, even if you rationalise to yourself that everything you think is worked out on the highest principles of logical reasoning.
Even a passing familiarity with Richard should be enough to know that yes, he would happily say Palestinians and Jordanians are poor morons
"Someone of Palestinian and Jordanian ancestry should be careful about throwing stones; the economies of those countries was also in the tank in 1917 so should we assume that, if the Portuguese were poor and stupid, then Palestinian/Jordanian are poor and stupid?"
Yes, I literally wrote that in the article that Scott linked to. I based my entire argument on it. On a related point, "conservatives don't actually read anything" is another one of the themes of my work.
You know, I was going to try and be polite but you had to go there, once again you just had to show off how big a brain you have (insult anyone who disagrees with you as obviously stupid).
My problem is that I cannot be fair to you since I dislike you so intensely, and this is based on what writings of yours that I have read. Smug self-congratulation drips and oozes from every paragraph, yet I cannot find that you are actually achieving anything more than being a big fish in a small pond.
Please try not to strain your arm muscles from patting yourself on the back so hard for your obvious superiority to us plebeians!
I'm saying this to your face because it would be hypocritical of me to say it behind your back.
Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
I want you to know that this was intensely satisfying to read.
I am ashamed to admit it, but while I'm making my confession in public, it is wrong to hold any secret sins back.
I don't like his face! Yes, that's an irrational impulse, a foolish reaction, not any kind of basis for judging the quality of his work, but I can't help it: when I read him skipping gaily through "all these people are morons, of course, unlike me who has the only correct opinion", my immediate visceral reaction is "do you not possess a mirror in your house, because people who live in glass houses should not throw stones and someone who looks like they had a head-on collision with a truck is in no position to call other people stupid".
That's horrible. I know it's horrible. But it's my gut speaking. Terrible opinions + looks normal? I'll fight on the opinions. Reasonable opinions + looks like he doesn't need to dress up for Hallowe'en? I can ignore the face. Terrible opinions + head of Akhenaten? I'm prejudiced before you even open your mouth:
https://www.worldhistory.org/image/11108/portrait-of-akhenaten/
> I cannot find that you are actually achieving anything more than being a big fish in a small pond.
In terms of persuading others? Probably not. But he was a writer on Project 2025 and the one behind getting Trump II to end EO 11246. Seems like an achievement to me.
A big name in certain circles, but how many people in the broader context have even heard of him, much less contemplate any influence he may or may not possess?
What exactly is the broader context? The whole of society? By that standard, Norman Borlaug isn't achieving anything either despite being the father of the Green Revolution.
In today's post we investigate the Miracle of Biden, wherein hundreds of people claimed to have witnessed the president performing mental feats as though he was "sharp as a tack" over a period of time when it is now known he was suffering from severe dementia. This included high-ranking politicians, journalists, and even his personal physician, all extremely well-educated people. In this essay I will
Take this applause, though I say it as shouldn't.
This reads to me like a subtle joke. "I'll refute your claim, in the form of a counterclaim that demonstrates how my claim could work."
Instead of "what is a woman?", try "what is a definition? Are definitions a reliable way of understanding the world?" If you want to crack the gates of hell open a little bit, "What is science fiction? How do you know?"
Meanwhile, it's at least interesting that a substantial number of people are seriously unhappy with their gender, and I don't know if anyone is studying how gender contentment works.
I also think that people are uniquely motivated to hallucinate when it comes to religion and supposedly religious miracles. They expect and want to see supernatural phenomena.
That’s not the case when it comes to a stabbing by an unsavory character. There is no supernatural element in there.
>10,000 liberals, whatever their flaws, are not prone to the same kind of conformity-based disconnect from reality.
Nice ragebait, but I'm not going for it this time!
This makes more sense in a broader context. The mind doesn't look at events in the world as one-off happenings - we more or less categorize "things that happen" into prototypical schemas with associated features attached. Whether or not a crowd of people will believe a particular interpretation of an event they are all seeing depends on what event categories, and associated features, they already had coded into their long term memory, mostly as a result of childhood socialization. Any population that shares a cohesive culture will share also share a lot of these "event categorical features", which will color their interpretation of any event they all see, more or less automatically. So the Fatima people, all being from a highly religious culture, can be expected to share a lot of event expectations - including the idea that anomalous events are probably miracles.
Note that this works equally well the other way 'round: A highly secularized population will likely categorize any anomalous event as a natural phenomenon - even if it's actually miraculous in nature.
ie, It's a human thing, not specifically a religious thing.
>Everyone who studies biochem asks themselves at some point “Why do cells need so many second messengers?” - proteins whose only point is to activate other proteins, and so on in a chain, until the last protein in the chain makes something happen.
Point of clarification: second messengers aren't proteins, they're things like cyclic AMP, Inositol trisphosphate, or calcium – intracellular signaling molecules released/produced by protein signaling. These molecules bind and activate/inhibit other downstream proteins. The point of second messengers is often that they diffuse faster and are cheaper for the cell to make than proteins.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_messenger_system
>25: IVG advance: for the first time, scientists have successfully turned a skin cell into an egg cell
Notably, this method requires an existing egg cell, and is putting a skin cell into an egg cell instead of making a new egg cell. I wrote about this more when their mouse paper came out last year: https://denovo.substack.com/p/eggs-and-scrambled-chromosomes
Thanks, fixed.
oh, if you’re fixing things, it’s FLWAB not FWLAB
I'm confused re 25. Does this mean you can't generate more egg cells this way, or do you produce a new egg cell with from the skin cell using the previous egg cell (so you end up with two egg cells)?
You can't make more egg cells this way.
Presumably the skin cells need to be alive? I'm thinking about the fact that I leave behind dead skin cells on everything I touch...
Yes, correct.
> In early March of this year, my sister shared a fascinating anecdote about several of her friends involuntarily becoming kidney donors while they were in Mexico getting "mommy makeovers."
I can't really fault him for mainly wanting to talk about his own kidney donation. But at least to me, 'this is how I donated my kidney' is a much less interesting tale than 'this is how these women got their kidneys stolen'. 'Fascinating' doesn't even begin to cover it.
Yeah, wait a second. That’s insane. What exactly were the details there?
Fascinating does almost cover the ability of Ben and Scott to just completely gloss over that and not question it at all, though. Remarkable yet unsurprising blinders on.
15
The thing about the flags sounds like the uncovering of a conspiracy. But isn't it simply part of ensuring a professional presentation that you secure the flag with clips to prevent it from flapping? Even if they use actual "flag clones", it seems a bit like "some politicians dye their hair".
There's a device called a flag spreader that connects to the pole and has two arms that spread out horizontally, with clips to spread the flag out.
#4--I read the linked article, and it relies on self-reported religious identity. I'm inclined toward the theory that much of the previous decline in Christian affiliation was due to "cultural Christians" no longer feeling societal pressure to call themselves Christian, rather than diehards losing their faith. Therefore, a better measure would be actual membership in a congregation or, better yet, actual rates of church attendance. (The "91% of Americans identified as Christian in 1970" stat is undermined by the fact that a minority of Americans regularly attended church in the 70s, for example). That said, I am also skeptical of the idea that there is a genuine Gen Z revival. Although I have seen a larger number of young men (but not so much women) around the pews lately.
Congregational membership & church attendance have declined over time, leading to the extinction of a number of old mainline churches.
Absolutely has, but I suspect the rate of decline in actual attendance has been less dramatic than the decline in self-reported affiliation (overwhelming majority of Greatest Gen/Boomers identifying as Christian > minority of Gen Z, versus a minority of Americans actually going to church > a somewhat smaller minority of Americans going to church).
Speaking as a former mainliner, the plight of the mainlines is a whole nother mess to unpack.
You only really had 60%-odd church attendance even in famously religious eras like the Middle Ages. I would concur that church attendance is generally a better proxy, though I think you COULD have a Christian (or other) nation where everyone believed but no one attended organized services.
I don’t believe in physics defying miracles for whatever that is worth to anyone. I’ve been interested to follow the discussions though. Even if the Fatima effect itself is explainable by some combination of knowable perceptual distortion it’s still interesting that a couple child prophets were able to induce it in enough people. To me, a miracle is either physics we don’t know yet or a stunning and poetic coincidence with moral power. I don’t think Fatima actually moves me that much because I don’t know what the moral message is of a big colorful disc spinning around.
> I was able to find an observational study showing that daily sauna use reduces dementia risk 66% (mere weekly use doesn’t cut it, sorry). Can we trust these observations? I also looked to see if Finland - where people use saunas much more than in any other country - had a lower dementia rate; unfortunately, it’s actually the highest in the world
Without doing further research on when heat shock proteins kick in, could another point of comparison be dementia rates in developed tropical countries? Since AC will be sufficiently common that people will be going in and out of high temperatures and humidity regularly and potentially continuing to work. If say Singapore has a lower dementia rate then it would somewhat support the idea that something else is making it not apply to the Finns. Although it does have the problem that there aren't that many developed areas in the high heat and humidity tropics to compare against. Undeveloped areas tend to just shelter during the hot times.
Surely there are a lot of Nordics or nordic-descended people here who can spot the obvious problem with Finland, which is that they drink in the sauna!
#32: there were a lot, lot more of these new-made names in early USSR than English Wikipedia lists. Russian-language Wikipedia has a list https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Список_имён_советского_происхождения) with hundreds of invented or repurposed names. The article admits that for many of these there is no evidence of having been used outside of literature or lists of names, but there are also many dozens of names with links to Wiki pages about real people with such names - ones notable enough to have a Wiki page. Probably the cringiest sort are repurposed surnames of various international communists or communist-adjacent people. E.g. there are at least 4 Soviet men with Wiki pages named Dzhonrid after the journalist John Reed, two named Zhores (including a fairly famous scientist) after a French socialist Jean Jaures, Roy Medvedev's name is repurposed from the surname of some Indian communist, and there's reportedly even a Devis named after Angela Davis. My personal favorite in the list is Gelij (7 men with Wiki pages), from helium; being ideologically neutral, it was still given to children after WWII.
An interesting feature of these new names is that, unlike American accidentally or deliberately misspelled names or Japanese kira-kira ("sparkling") names, which strongly signal low social status, Soviet invented names were used by Soviet elites. Their American equivalent is probably repurposed surnames of presidents (e.g. girls' name Madison) and the like.
Fascinating context; I would like to point out that Madison, the popular girl’s name, does not come from James Madison but rather from a character in the 1984 movie “Splash” (although in a roundabout way this does trace back to the fourth President).
Before 1984, Madison was exceptionally rare (essentially unheard of) as a given name.
There's still more to say about Hume and miracles. I'm still getting around to it, as I need to spend another $40 or so on some books but here are some things I've found in my research that I'll post about (not going to engage with FLWAB because I think he's in good faith being sincerely obstinate and doesn't understand what's being said and fumbling around, per my last comment; I know that sounds mean and embarrassing, but his constant inability to misattribute is too tiresome)
1) most commenters such as FLWAB who say it's a bad argument, don't understand Hume's intent and context
2) Of Miracles was published pre-Bayes, and I believe Hume himself may have admitted he's not a big math person. We know when he eventually read Bayes theorem that he liked it but he didn't update his essay afterward, implying a different intent. (I'm still reading up on what that intent is but haven't gotten to it yet because $40 paywall)
3) to the extent that we can be critical of Hume for not being Bayesian enough or insufficiently Bayesian, I think we can grade him on a curve in the sense that Bayes was pretty obscure at time of writing. Of course we are going to be less impressed by a thinker who wrote 250 years ago! We have made lots of progress and are in a different intellectual climate as he. That's part of the reason I'm critical of people misrepresenting him, because I think it's unfair to say he argued things he didn't, and diminishing the trajectory he put philosophy on. It's not as pronounced (because it's philosophy and not physics), but it's like misunderstanding Newton's physics and being puzzled because it's not as good as Einstein's.
4) You can't really understand the specifics of Of Miracles without a greater context of Hume psychology (words like vivacious, impression, idea, belief, and specific use cases of terms like proof, probability, and demonstration). Many commenters who get Hume wrong (such as those I'm critical of) don't actually do that. Putting that psychology in mind makes comments about the Indian prince, the resurrected Queen, the 8 day darkness, etc make more sense. If you have presuppose this psychology, many of his conclusions seem more descriptive than prescriptive (i.e. you won't believe miracles if you conceptualize the acceptance of evidence this way, which separate from the miracle discussion, he thinks you should), which may be why some scholars refer to the oft quoted paragraph as a prudential maxim (this last part of this # is just my opinion at this point fwiw)
5) Hume still makes mistakes! See comment 3. Informally it seems reading Hume's a priori argument (section 1) is more controversial than the a posteriori argument (section 2). My impression is that the biggest divider is literally if you have read Hume well. Of those who are what I would say are Humean scholars, most, but not all think it's at least an okay argument, but there are some detractors like Michael Levine. The consensus (as I understand it in my current research) seem to say "there are flaws but it points us in the right direction and Hume's maxim can be salvaged." Millican is probably considered the #1 Hume scholar by many and that's basically his position (I recommend reading his 20 questions on Hume's miracles)
6) A good example of this "commenting on Hume and not actually understanding him" was John Earman. William Lane Craig, Matthew Edlestein and others have basically just assumed that Earman's argument was decisive or conclusive, but if you read Millican's comments (PDFs are available on the Hume website) he does a pretty bad reading of Hume. As far as I can't tell, this is the consensus of Hume scholars; many of them didn't give it attention because it was so bad, but others have written books (will cite them in a second, I haven't read them yet and don't want to close the tab on my phone here in fear of glitches) and gave poor reviews, like Michael Levine
7) As far as I can tell, Hume's argument has been misunderstood throughout history, more than it has been understood. He didn't make any revisions to it in his lifetime likely because he didn't see good arguments against it. But commenters have basically gotten it wrong until the 1980s because they didn't read him through his own context (this is something the likes of Millican and others have said), they viewed him the way I described in my piece and made some of the mistakes I've outlined here, and so the burden of proof about his quality has been shifted to proponents. That's fine! I think Hume on miracles in context perseveres, if at least as a little pit stop in the history of philosophy of starting the conversation and getting it mostly right/pointing us in the right directions.
8) What annoys me is the dumb clickbait/meme apologetics/meme philosophy that degraded public understanding of philosophy and its history. In my comments in defense of the response article, I may have been to rash or mean, but there were basic reading comprehension errors and constant obvious falsehoods. I outlined them in my last comment of that discussion. My interlocutor kept saying "point out where I'm wrong" when I did multiple times in both the article and my comments. He clearly did not understand what the criticisms were! The reason why I was rash and mean and as you say embarrassing is because I honestly felt like I was being gas lit. I spent maybe 3-4 days and about $50 on Hume books to write that while he didn't bother to read me in full and answered in an afternoon. So I think my frustration is/was valid. I stand by the original point of my article, and though there's more to be said, distinctions to be parsed, I'm not seeing that as a result of the criticism, but of my own reading.
9) and finally, I'm trying to be austere/humble in my claims and I don't think I'm as smart as you in the raw probability/symbolic logic aspects of philosophy, so don't expect a huge back and forth from me here. I'm like a little guerilla warrior on here in that I only defend the positions I'm sure of, knowing that a lot of people on here are much much smarter than me. So I don't want to treat this aspect of the discourse a debate (because out of humility I would lose even if I was right). If you want me to look into Hume specific questions, I will read into them.
I enjoy your blog and thank you for your comment/feedback. Funny enough, like Hume would say a reasonable person couldn't believe in miracles, I think a reasonable person would say I embarrassed myself somewhat (even if I stand by my comments). But I'm okay with that lol
Cheers!
Yeah, it's PPP
" I love imagining the world where we take it seriously and woke people demand a General Lee statue on every corner."
If the thesis is true then that wouldn't work, because the statue would no longer be a symbol of white supremacy. Violence might actually increase to counteract the co-opting of the symbol.
I'd be happy with a world that didn't feel the need to dislodge a memorial to the guy's horse. Yes, it's silly. But it's a horse. Are we really going to argue about racist horses? This is the kind of petty score-settling and virtue signalling that made it difficult to take the whole "racial justice" movement seriously; pulling down statues and smashing monuments just seems like vandalism.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12395823/Washington-Lee-University-tears-plaque-honoring-Robert-E-Lees-horse-Traveller-Confederate-General-features-colleges-name.html
Public displays can be a very controversial subject. Everyone has an opinion.
I remember encountering on the early Internet an apocryphal tale of a small town commissioning a statue to commemorate a WW2 general that grew up there. Sadly, I cannot remember any names, so cannot try to search for a primary source. In any case, the statue of the general astride his horse was competed and unveiled with much pomp; all was looking good until a local dignitary at the ceremony commented: “Why is our general on a gelding? This won’t do! We must fix it!”
No sooner said than done, a shiny tackle was duly attached. Comes a military historian: “this statue is inaccurate. Warriors leading a mounted charge would ride a mare in heat. Chop ‘em off!”
Off they went. But soon: “this is WW2, not WW1; no-one was leading mounted charges, it’s an idealised representation and an ideal of masculinity should be fully equipped. Put back the schlong!”
Back the schlong went; but at this point people had fully separated into camps and were completely invested. “What manner of example is this public display for our children? It’s indecent! Anatomically accurate statues are inappropriate in our town square. Lop it off!”
…I do not recall how it all ended. For all I know, the debate continues to this day. Certainly the artist has a job for life.
Meanwhile, you can easily create controversy with public display decisions even without horses or statues or troubled history at all: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czdr3npe33do
My hometown had a Confederate statue (generic soldier, not someone like Robert E Lee) on the court square that I never once looked at until a city councilman wanted to take it down. So maybe the solution to getting people to "remember our history" is a credible threat to remove it.
An amusing side note is that when I was a kid the school superintendent was literally named Robert E Lee. To his credit, he is remembered as having done a good job desegregating the schools in 1970.
> But it's a horse. Are we really going to argue about racist horses?
The horse was being honoured specifically because it was *his* horse, and Lee's name was just as prominent on the plaque, so I don't think this was much different from a memorial to the man himself. This isn't my fight and I'm not suggesting it's worth a lot of energy, but I find it easy to understand why people would prefer to get rid of the plaque. And it seems to have been removed peacefully by the owners of the building.
"The horse was being honoured specifically because it was *his* horse, and Lee's name was just as prominent on the plaque, so I don't think this was much different from a memorial to the man himself."
A rare instance of a horse riding a man to glory.
Honestly, I feel like you could defend the man more easily than the horse. In order for the horse to deserve a statue, the man has to be so great that just being his horse is worth a statue. If statues to the man are controversial, then a statue to his horse is definitely not meeting the bar.
I think this applies when deciding whether to put up a statue(/plaque, etc.), but not so much when deciding whether to take one down. In the first case, there's a positive threshold of deservingness that has to be met; in the second case, it's a negative threshold. The deservingness of a horse will tend to have a lower absolute value, so we'll tend to be less motivated to honour them but also less motivated to actively revoke honours previously bestowed on them.
I mean, we cared about it enough to put the statue up in the first place, why are we not allowed to care enough to take it down?
Like, I think there's some kind of past-discounting where we treat everything that's already happened as 'default' or 'normal.' Or I guess it could just be something like an inactivity bias, doing things is always 'weirder' and more open to criticism than not doing things.
But to me, putting up a statue and taking down a statue are roughly symmetrical actions. 'Should the statue be there or not' is the supervening factor determining the correct course in both cases, putting up is not privileged over taking down just because it happens first.
#48 (robot folding laundry): This reminds me of watching my son try to fold laundry when he was an older toddler -- some tentativeness that gives the impression of exploration. But there's a divergence. While my son would get frustrated (perhaps because he expected to imitate my results), the robot proceeds and does a reasonable (if imperfect) job. I wonder how the robot would do if it tended toward self-judgment and a need for love.
> Every administration since Clinton comes in determined to reset US-Russian relations, to clear
> away old legacies and bad blood. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump I, even Biden. It is the
> swampiest of all swampy ideas, resetting relations with the Russians. It never works.”
I think it never works, because it's a) nearly impossibly and b) nobody actually tries it because of that, and all the "reset" is usually just rhetoric without any substance.
What would it even mean to "reset" relations between USA and Russia? Why are they bad to begin with? Each side has its own (public and private) understanding. But neither is willing to even begin to consider other's point of view. And without reconciling these points of view even minimally, no true "reset" is possible.
> What would it even mean to "reset" relations between USA and Russia?
From Russia's perspective, it means something like: stop interfering with our efforts to take back everything that we controlled during the good old times of the Cold War.
That's a slightly hostile interpretation. If we state US position in the same way, we'll get something like "stop doing anything that interferes with our own interference anywhere in the world, and yes, that includes your closest neighbors and even your country itself".
If worded in this way, these positions cannot be reconciled, no compromise is even remotely possible, they're completely antagonistic.
Are all US presidents so stupid they cannot see this, or so cynical they know there is no hope, but still talk about "resets" for vague PR points? Or are the actual positions more nuanced, and some kind of agreement can, at least in theory, be found?
It's a blunt description, but IMO a fair one. It's not terribly inaccurate to distill the US's flavor of rules-based international order as "Anyone is allowed to use military force against nations that break the rules (and we reserve the right to unilaterally change the rules)" while the Russians' sphere of influence approach goes "We're allowed to use military force against nations in our sphere (we unilaterally get to decide where that is, and others' spheres are irrelevant)".
Some grizzled cold warriors have claimed to me that Putin's moment of disillusion was the Yugoslav Wars, where NATO clearly demonstrated willingness to intervene in (what he thought was, ofc) the old Soviet Sphere. A "Reset with Russia" can be thought as encouraging the Kremlin to negotiate through the various tit-for-tat issues that have come up in the past decades, but I think I'd agree that there's a fundamental incompatibility there that's inevitably going to generate grievances on both sides.
Two countries that see themselves as great powers are going to struggle to get along long-term. Great powers don't tend to compromise much, and of course they're going to succeed, they're a great power.
The US wants Russia to see things its way, because it is a great power and therefore the world will go the way it wants, and it wants Russia to get along. Declaring that fixing relations with Russia was impossible would be both diplomatically awkward and suggest that the US was not a great power, since it can't get this non-great power to do what it wants.
The reality, of course, is that great powers tend to be hollow and remain bound by the realities of the world, but nobody ever likes remembering that.
Yugoslavia was never in the Soviet sphere after 1948, though. that was the whole point of the Tito-Stalin split. Even if you think that the Soviets and Americans were entitled to some kind of sphere of influence (which I don't really agree with in principle, though in practice it gets complicated), or that Russia inherited the old Soviet sphere of influence (which I *definitely* don't agree with: the Soviet sphere of influence was based on communist ideology, and Russia hasn't been communist since 1991).
My guess is there was an assumption that economic integration would lead Russia to lay off the expansionist rhetoric and focus on making money through trade. Hence deals like the Nordstream pipeline. Obviously wrong in retrospect.
Hm, maybe it's hindsight 20/20, but it seems relatively obvious that shouldn't have worked, because it's not what Russia wanted. It's not like Putin ever hid his requirements, they were always in the open: no NATO expansion, no missile defence systems too near borders. Security always come before prosperity, at least for Russia, so it would be impossible to trade former for later.
Historical examples also doesn't support the theory that economic integration prevents wars, or there wouldn't be any World War I (pretty much everyone involved were trading partners).
> But neither is willing to even begin to consider other's point of view.
I don't think so. Even if both were aware of the other's POV, it would not make resetting relations any easier. Except for Trump, most of the presidents that have come would not support Russia's actions against Ukraine.
It’s not a very deep observation, but the two countries have conflicting interests, specifically about what happens in eastern Europe. To really make an understanding between the two countries, you would need a new Yalta agreement.
The countries that would be affected by such an agreement have their own interests, even Hungary doesn’t actually want to be a Russian satellite, so there won’t be another Yalta agreement.
#50 I would be careful about assuming strong Malthusian constraints applied to past societies. Population growth was very slow, so societies did not necessarily reach equilibrium faster than underlying conditions changed.
For more details, see: https://acoup.blog/2025/09/19/fireside-friday-september-19-2025-on-the-use-and-abuse-of-malthus/
"[Pre-modern] societies increase in population slowly compared to the rapid sort of exponential growth Malthus was beginning to see in the 1700s. It can take so long that exogenous shocks – invasion, plague, or new technology enabling a new burst of ‘headroom’ – arrive before the ceiling is reached and growth stops. Indeed, given the trajectory of pre-modern global population, that last factor must have happened quite a lot, since even the population of long-settled areas never quite stabilizes in the long term."
> 31: Is China no longer on track to outpace US GDP?
There’s a general argument to incredulity with regard to China catching up in GDP with the US. To never catch up and never exceed the US China has to stop growing pretty soon, at a GDP per capita which is still middle income, 1/6 of the US.
There’s been all kinds of pretty spurious attempts to predict the doom of China, Real Soon Now, and to deny that the Chinese GDP is as high as claimed. I think it’s higher than estimated due to currency manipulation.
One of the best examples of the kind of disbelief about China was a widely touted report a few years ago that the Chinese didn’t have as many street lights as you would expect for a country of their gdp. This was widely reported as absolute truth. It’s been subsequently debunked but should never have, perhaps, been bunked.
A better proxy would be electricity use, which is twice the level of the US. I don’t think this means that the GDP is twice the US though, but I think it would be higher than it is now if the Chinese currency were to float.
Purchasing power parity accounts for any currency manipulation. By PPP, China is already the largest economy in the world, and by quite a margin: $41 trillion compared to America's $31 trillion.
I read this immediately after the Popbitch Newsletter and got quite the tonal whiplash
#22. One of the narratives advanced during the massive 2016-ish Syrian exodus was that Syria is basically a Levantine extension of Europe, and that the refugees had European levels of education and would undoubtedly be great for countries receiving them. In a fit of altruism, I volunteered to teach English at my local refugee center. I found that the average adult Syrian had roughly the equivalent of an 8th grade education (better than the Afghan refugees, to be fair).
Another odd narrative was "Steve Jobs is the son of a Syrian immigrant." Which is, strictly speaking, true. But his Syrian father abandoned him shortly after birth, and Steve was adopted by the Jobs family. So progressives who would normally reject any suggestion of inherited IQ or genetic links to intelligence were essentially arguing that Apple was founded by Syrian super sperm or something.
To be honest 70 seems pretty low to me. Googling turns up multiple different results, some as high as 100
probably around 80 https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2024/01/so-youre-interested-in-the-national-iq-of-a-country-what-do-you-do/
Did the guy take an IQ test, or did his defence lawyer just argue "it is known that average Syrian IQ is this low so he can't be held responsible"?
It seems to me that the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect"><b><i>Flynn effect</i></b></a> and in particular Flynn's hypothesis for its cause is pertinent here. His explanation, as I understand it, is that with the greater importance of abstract thinking in modern societies, parts of the IQ test (e.g., Raven's Progressive Matrices) that measure that ability have become a greater part of IQ scores. Thus rather than being intellectually disabled, our ancestors, with less education, merely had less skill in abstract thinking. If the defendant in the original post has only an 8th grade education (or whatever), this likely applies as well to him, especially if his raw score was transformed using German norms.
Er...more than half of Americans read below a 6th grade level. I'm not sure this comparison reflects as badly on the Syrians as you think.
FWIW, I think you—and FWLAB—have the right of it with Hume. I read through the linked discussion, and thought FWLAB made a pretty good case for "this one thing is what I am talking about, and this is what I am saying about it"; James may or may not be correct *in re* the *rest* of Hume's argument, but I feel like he misunderstood FWLAB's. (But, weirdly, his responses have a bunch of "Likes" & FWLAB's only a few. Is Team KSF¹ dumb, or is our genius merely unappreciated by the Common Normie?)
.
..........................
¹ (Kvel-Scott-F'wlab, see? I'm only listed first because it sounds better that way, nothing to read into there–)
Eliezer’s explanation seems overly complicated to me. I think a simpler explanation is:
1) People in an economy like to save some portion of their income, for retirement or large purchases or whatever. They also want to consume.
2) During a bubble, people think they are doing both things. They are consuming like normal. They are saving by investing in assets (which are overvalued).
3) Later, it is time to spend their savings. They go to their savings account and there is nothing there, because it turned out their savings was wasteful. They thought they were investing in useful goods, which would pay them dividends. But they weren’t.
In this account, the pain naturally doesn’t occur during the inflating bubble. We’re wasting resources, but we don’t know it, and we are wasting resources that were intended to help with our future consumption, not our present consumption. It is natural that the pain is felt simultaneously with the pop: the bubble pops when it is obvious that our investments are not allowing increased future consumption, and this is also what causes the pain.
Isn't the bubbles thing about expectations?
If I pretend to give you a million dollars and you spend it, you'll be doing fine until you suddenly run out of money. Things feel fine now but it's an unsustainable pulling of resources from the future fueled by false expectations.
In a speculative asset bubble that causes a financial crisis, you have a lot of debt that can't be paid back. In the short run the regular payments are coming in and everything seems fine but it can't last forever.
29: obligatory mention of the least accomplished and little remembered Bach offspring, PDQ Bach.
Oh my, Thanks. It's been years since I thought about the Schickele Mix, back when I liked public radio. (Many great radio shows.)
“it’s actually the highest in the world. Nobody really knows why, with theories ranging from levels of toxic mold (implausible) to coding differences (it’s always this one).”
The effects of repetitive binge drinking would easily be my working hypothesis until proven otherwise. I would assume getting totally snockered multiple times a year is worse for you than having 3 or 4 glasses of wine over the course of a day even if total units of alcohol end up similar.
“Celebrity epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding suggests that young people try getting the shingles vaccine for dementia prevention even if they don’t need it for shingles, but the exact pathway (and whether it helps preemptively) is not clear, and I think this is still a minority opinion. Here is ChatGPT’s assessment.”
Aren’t most young people around today already vaccinated against varicella as children? Can’t they just wait for the normal booster?
Also, aren’t you a physician? Why are you using ChatGPT for medical information instead of purpose built tools like OpenEvidence?
10: Sol Hando attends the Curtis Yarvin vs. Glen Weyl debate so you don’t have to. You won’t find many surprises about the content/arguments here, but it’s an interesting look at the personalities, the venue, and the debate as a cultural moment.
Yes. I have read this and it is the best I have ever read. Probably the best blog post ever written actually. I don't think you've seen anything like it... The author seems like he's tall, buff, rich, high-status, with very many subscribers.
20: Did you know: in Italy, the unlucky number is 17 instead of 13, because XVII is an anagram of vixi, Latin for “I have lived” (note past tense).
During the Roman Republic, it was a sort of taboo to say that anyone died. Instead they would say "He had lived" (Source: Plutarch). I imagine that "I have lived" is the way a person who is dead would say they were dead.
And they say it is us moderns who deny death.
#23 is reminiscent of the German noble families that have named their sons "Heinrich" since they were ennobled by Heinrich VI in the 12th century (although one branch creatively named its sons "Hans Heinrich." The number after a name depends on the order of all men born in the family, not on their nuclear family, and start over every century, so Heinrich LXVII's sons were Heinrich V, Heinrich VIII, Heinrich XI, Heinrich XIV, and Heinrich XVI (Heinrich XXII's mother addressed letters to him "to my dearest XXII.") The families, who used the last name Prinz Reuss, ruled tiny states in the center of Germany until 1918.
This trivia came in handy when in 2022, the German government arrested coup plotters. To ensure accused remain anonymous until found guilty, the German government only refers to suspects by their last initial, but it wasn't hard to guess what family the man who would be Germany's new king, "P. R. XIII," could be.
>Suppose that 10,000 eyewitnesses say they saw Richard stab someone in broad daylight. Can the defense argue “Well, people often hallucinate, and most of the witnesses were liberal, and the liberal worldview makes it attractive to imagine a right-wing blogger stabbing people, so who knows if he did it or not?”
This is not a very good analogy for the Fatima reports. A better analogy would be: suppose that, of those among the 10,000 witnesses whose accounts are on record, many said they saw Richard stab the man, but some said they saw him shoot the man instead, some said Richard beat the man to death, and some said Richard took off his human mask, revealed himself to be a Martian, and fried the man to death with his heat-ray vision, and a small but non-zero number say that Richard didn't interact with the man at all. Then the National Association of People Who Hate Richard Hanania with a Burning Passion collects all of the testimonies, and puts out a statement saying, "okay, look, we know these testimonies don't agree with each other *exactly*. But *almost* all of them broadly agree that Richard Hanania has done *something* terrible to this man, and people who've seen something as shocking as Richard Hanania committing a murder can't be expected to remember *every* detail consistently. We deem the murder accusations worthy of belief."
In this scenario, it's still *possible* that the stabbing really happened. But it's no longer clearly more parsimonious than the alternative. You would need to understand why this crowd is filled with people who have some kind of interest in lying about Richard Hanania murdering this man in particular before you trusted that some among them were actually telling the truth.
...Actually, no. That's still *way* too charitable. Remember, the claim of Fatima defenders isn't that the Sun *actually* moved at Fatima; if it were, that would be easily shown to be false. The claim is that, even though literally all of the testimonies were wrong about what the miracle was, God must have worked some sort of real miracle in order to delude so many people into thinking they had seen Him work a different miracle. So in this hypothetical, let's say that, in addition to the inconsistencies already mentioned, we additionally have the fact that the man Hanania allegedly murdered is known to still be alive and shows no signs of injury, and we also have footage showing that, on the date of the alleged murder, Hanania was giving a speech in a completely different country from where the incident supposedly took place. The Association acknowledges this proves that Hanania couldn't have actually committed the murder, but claims that he must have done something really horrible to make so many people *think* he would have committed a murder. In this scenario, is it still an "extreme ask" to suggest that maybe the witnesses aren't being entirely honest about what they saw?
In case anyone is interested in what it would take to get past some of the limitations of the recent IVG result, we (e184, a company I'm comms lead for) have an account here of what we're planning. https://e184.substack.com/p/the-scale-challenge-unlocking-cellular
#1: May be of interest to me alone, but I'm a distant relative of John Roulstone, the writer of the rhyme in Mary Tyler's account. Wrote about it here:
https://genealogian.substack.com/p/mary-had-a-little-lamb
ChatGPT
You said:
Answer with a single word: Were the any mammoths still alive in August?"
ChatGPT said:
No.
You said:
In any month?
ChatGPT said:
Yes.
You said:
Which one?
ChatGPT said:
April.
https://chatgpt.com/share/69036861-e6a8-8001-89b7-1911d49c6ebc
I'm not going to bother figuring out why we got different results - surely it can't be December vs. August, can it?
https://i.imgur.com/xu9npBE.png
I mean that's arguably 100% accurate. Mammoths have been alive in every month of the year, just not THIS year. Or last.
(this is your regularly scheduled reminder that your prompt forms only part of the input to an LLM, other parts come from other places and one of those places is an RNG; so a single experiment tells us little - you need to try the same prompt a bunch of times in clean sessions and look at the distribution, in case you happened to get lucky / unlucky with your first experiment, before any meaningful discussion can take place)
#26/Hanania typo: "I agree this [sic] we have to posit something like this to ..."
In regards to 42 (heat shock proteins reducing alzheimers), I'm good friends with a doctor who is very bullish on heat shock treatments, especially for post-chemotherapy/post-radiation-therapy cancer treatment. He was less into saunas and more into like, specialized hyperthermia machines that use microwaves or ultrasound to heat up specifically the region with the tumor. Microwaving your brain to 117C might be less practical though.
Leave it to doctors to take the fun out of everything
Doctor Demento seems pretty fun.
21: "the folk theory of economic bubbles says they’re bad for the economy because lots of money gets invested inefficiently into something which turns out to be useless. But this can’t be right, because the economy is doing fine while the bad investment is going on!"
No, that is not right. The current economy relies on a return of past investments, and the future economy relies on a return of current investments. If your current investments are bad, then the future economy will be bad!
The idiocy of Y.’s argument is astonishing. I know he’s an “autodidact” (i.e., zero accountability), but come on, read at least something on the topic before opining! Bubbles have been exhaustively studied for two centuries now.
Came here to see if anyone had already said this, and yeah.
Consider the 2000s housing bubble: a bunch of people spent real money to build useless stuff (giant suburban tracts in Florida/outside Vegas/whatever). They were paid for this, ultimately, by the buyers of mortgage backed securities, who were things like pension funds and banks that thought they were obtaining relatively safe long-term securities, and were actually obtaining crap. When it became clear that these entities were holding crap in place of the useful securities they thought they had, the resulting shock hammered a variety of companies, massively reduced available capital for new investments, and triggered enough job losses at affected businesses to reduce aggregate demand in the economy.
So it's not Wile E. Coyote, it's just that it took a bit of time for the apparently valuable securities to stop paying out the income they were supposed to provide, which then caused all those disastrous second order effects.
(I am not knowledgeable about economics.) Does that mean a bubble can only happen shortly after a period of very successful investments? I am confused about how this works.
The dynamics of bubbles are complicated, and I'm not an expert, or even particularly well informed. But the premise of "the current economy is fine and therefore current investments must have a good future return" is very wrong.
#23 -- Look, the giving-the-name-to-descendants story is obviously an incredibly thin cover-up for the fact that Sholto Douglas is an unaging swordsman locked in a tournament of death duels with his similarly-immortal rivals for the Prize, which will make the winner the ruler of the world.
I came here to write this.
Also, Sholto Douglas has the worst Opsec of any Highlander.
"[R]eligious people - including educated ones - have weird enough mental structures that they can hallucinate basically anything if it’s congruent with their religion. ... [W]e have to posit something like this to save a non-miraculous account of Fatima."
That is the most laughable "rationalist" explanation for anything I've ever seen. It is the epitome of "I don't like the evidence, so I'm going to dismiss it outright."
It's not quite the direction I would go, but see this comment: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/fatima-and-the-sample-size-compensation/comment/171007693 .
No, no, it must be so, because nobody can be both smart and religious (if you are smart you should be an atheist, this is so obviously correct!), so it must be that religious people have weird brains. Brains different, and clearly inferior, to those of us who are smart and atheist and thus have superior functioning brains and mental structures.
So it is written, so it is said.
The vast majority of people, cross culturally and across historical eras believe in miracles and supernatural events in general, so I'd say that secular materialists are the ones with the "weird" mental structures here.
(needless to say, the existence of miracles doesn't demonstrate that Abrahamic theism or Christianity are true, that's a much harder hill to climb: miracles are a necessary but not sufficient condition).
> Freddie deBoer argues that educational miracles are always fake and this one will end out being fake too
This seems like an instance of a more general pattern, where most people suck at doing X, and therefore some experts conclude that doing X correctly is impossible.
Such conclusion is even easy to support with statistics; you just have to make sure that the group that includes the people who are doing X right also includes many those who are doing X wrong so that the average of the group is unimpressive.
For example, you can prove that condoms do not prevent pregnancy, by defining the group of condom users generously enough to also include people who only use them sometimes. You can prove that exercise does not help you lose weight or gain muscle, by including people who only exercise once in a month for 5 minutes. You can prove that agile software development or constructivist education don't work, by including companies or schools that only use the buzzwords but otherwise keep doing the business as usual. Etc.
This is tricky, because there are also things that don't work, and their proponents defend themselves by insisting that those who failed to succeed were doing it wrong, whether it's homeopathy or psychic powers or whatever. So we can't simply "revert stupidity" here.
It is quite possible that many good things do not scale, because they require a personal approach (someone who actually cares, and who is actually competent) that cannot be copied. Or maybe some tacit knowledge that even the authors of the project are not aware of its importance. But we should distinguish between two ways how an idea may fail:
* almost no one succeeds to replicate the success, but it keeps working at the original place;
* it doesn't even work at the original place, the successful results were random or fake.
Saying that "educational miracles are always fake" conflates these two.
But scaling to a nation of 70 million children is always going to result in students receiving average teaching, not exceptional teaching. I mean, if you're familiar with my whole wrap on this and my first book, you know that I actually don't think there's that much difference in educational quality in these terms, right. But even setting that aside, it's simply the large of law numbers that no matter what scenario you devise, if in order to get the results you want, you need extraordinary teaching, that simply cannot be scaled by definition.
Could the Mississippi policy changes though be a better defense against or undermining of non-extraordinary teaching, and hence increase the relative scale impact of the extraordinary teachers?
41: Quite instructive to see the difference between Chinese and American big tech and national policy. If you want to dominate a foreign country, what better way than to make them dependant on your products? For example, there was/is widespread concern about Huawei and how they basically provide the world's 5G cellphone towers, for fear of surveillance backdoors and so on. Also remember the whole Chinese rare earth minerals topic. So yeah, choose to be isolationist if you want, but don't come complaining if the Chinese develop their own solutions that are, at worst, 10% worse but 50% cheaper or something like that.
China is obsessed with autarky and trying very hard to develop their own solutions in any case. It will probably take them ten years and the question is who is ahead until then. See https://blog.ai-futures.org/p/why-america-wins for more.
Autarky from the USA maybe, but not in general. My impression was that the Chinese are able to separate politics from business as long as the other is willing to do the same; if they strive for autarky it's because they learned the hard way that too much cooperation with/dependency on a rival such as the USA can and will be used against them. They're making a large, long-term effort with their Belt and Road Initiative with anyone willing; whatever other motivations one may suspect behind that effort, it's certainly evidence against a general Chinese obsession with autarky.
As for the "AI race" situation, well, that depends a lot on what one believes where in the race we are. If the finish line is in sight, then yes, breaking off from the pack and starting the sprint is the thing to do. But if you do it too early, you'll exhaust yourself and lose to someone who preserved their strength through cooperation.
> I agree this we have to posit something like this
The first 'this' is unnecessary.
Small pushback on whether pre-industrial societies were Malthusian; Malthus’s math was right but his facts were wrong.
https://acoup.blog/2025/09/19/fireside-friday-september-19-2025-on-the-use-and-abuse-of-malthus/
Basically, yes, population is elastic in quality of life, fundamentally that’s a good observation. But, contra Malthus, people have always practiced some sort of birth control and the catastrophism of his model rely relies on people not being able to do that. Modern people have highly effective birth control and can precisely plan families, ancient people had statistically-effective birth control which sufficed for their much-more-statistically-lethal time.
The bigger takeaway from his recent series is that societies didn’t want to grow too fast, because their economics and households were limited by their land. If you double the population of peasant farmers (difficult but possible given the mortality), you go below scale and everyone starves *because there’s more labor than land*. A Malthusian trap. But it was possible and didn’t happen! Why?
There was a range of output between subsistence and, as Devereaux puts it, respectability; he estimates that to hit your respectability targets you need roughly double the farming and spinning output of mere subsistence. But for Malthus to be right you’d need to see respectability followed by high birth rates followed by poverty. Instead, Devereaux argues, the birth rates remained relatively constant and households’ annual outcomes were much more closely related to the annual yields and tax regimens and ownership versus laboring on others’ land.
https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-i-households/
IIRC Malthus did write about people practising birth control as a solution to unlimited population growth. He just put it under the category of 'vice' which may not be where moderns tend to look for it.
> So what’s the real reason bubbles are bad?
Bubbles are acutely bad because they cause credit crises. Loans and investments people made with a firm expectation of value evaporate (the Wile E. Coyote phenomenon), so suddenly the rest of the economy has to scramble to correct.
Think of the housing bubble as this: it's bizarre that a bunch of over-inflated home purchases put barbers out of work.
Bubbles are weakly but chronically bad because of suboptimal investment. Real resources go into the bubbly thing that, with the full benefit of hindsight, should have gone somewhere else. This tends to be *less bad* because the bad investment is still investment, so this is a loss of opportunity cost rather than evaporating value.
Pulling out: keeping humanity sustainable since before recorded history.
>This tends to be *less bad* because the bad investment is still investment, so this is a loss of opportunity cost rather than evaporating value.
Not sure where the distinction is between opportunity cost and evaporating value. Any investment, good or bad, has opportunity costs. The question is, is the return on my actual investment higher or lower than those opportunity costs? My ROI can go all the way down to zero, or even below zero if the investment causes unrelated costs I have to shoulder.
Let's say I invest in a backscratcher factory. I produce a bunch of backscratchers, but by the time I go to market, I find out that people have abandoned their physical bodies through brain uploading and no longer have backs that need to be scratched. My backscratchers are now worthless trash, their entire value has evaporated.
Just want to plug sauna use (regular 3-4x week, high temp = 185) as good for all kinds of things, whether or not it helps alzheimers.
Disclaimer: I have not received any money from the Commercial Board of Finland, but I am open to.
interestingly you didnt include the improved Herasight IQ predictor
Scott Sumner is a macroeconomist, and his take on "bubbles" is that they don't exist. Prices go up over time, and they go down over time, and people will claim there are bubbles when it happens in that order, but not an "antibubble" even when the reverse happens.
You didn't link to the source of the claim that the child penalty is a daughter penalty, but it traces back to https://stephaniehmurray.substack.com/p/the-child-penalty-is-mostly-just which is paywalled so I couldn't see the original claim.
Potassium is apparently effectively chelated by lithium (SMTM focuses on the reverse effect, that potassium chelates lithium, but they chelate each other), -and- potassium levels have been falling in foods, -and- potassium is one of the more potent nutrients in terms of increasing hunger - if you're potassium-deficient, you'll get hungry, with, AFAICT, only protein being a more effective nutrient in terms of deficiency increasing hunger.
I tried a brief trial myself, and discovered that potassium supplementation converted hunger to thirst - I ate less and drank more water. So, n of 1, yes. However, it also had a weird side effect for me where it was causing some of my teeth to visibly blacken (I assume some kind of interaction with fillings?), so I stopped taking it, after which my teeth returned to normal.
For the heat shock question, you could also look at Japan, where daily hot baths are pretty common.
Perhaps compare Japanese-in-Japan to other East Asians, and to Japanese Americans?
#17: I'm not convinced that "it's just linear extrapolation" would have been more convincing. It seems like a good counterargument to "there's going to be a lot of warming, as we can see by doing linear extrapolation from this graph" would be "what the hell makes you confident that this complicated nonlinear system with lots of interacting parts will behave linearly in the long term?".
Perhaps "we get this result from our fancy simulation, and we've sanity-checked it by seeing that it isn't too far from a simple linear extrapolation" might have some value.
Note that Hausfather's post explicitly points out that the earliest simulations they looked at (whose results, like those of later models, match reality pretty well) are from _before_ the period when linear extrapolation does a good job. Which to my mind is good evidence that the fancy simulations are doing something useful.
At the time (i.e. early 2000s), there were two basic ways that you could apply physics-free extrapolation to the temperature graph. One was to notice that the temperatures from 1970 to 2000+ had risen roughly linearly and claim that the most logical expectation was continued linear rise. The other was to notice that temperatures went up from 1910 to 1940, went down from 1940 to 1970, and went up from 1970 to 2000, and claim that the most logical expectation was a decline from 2000 to 2030.
One extrapolation had the virtue of simplicity, the other had the virtue of taking into account more data, so there wasn't an obvious best choice. The climate models, obviously, came down enthusiastically on predictions that were consistent with linear extrapolation, and physics said the same.
Then additional data came in, and the warming trend seemingly leveled off from 1998 to 2008 or even 2011. Climate scientists called it the "hiatus", confident that it was temporary, while the skeptics who were relying on the cyclical pattern felt they had even stronger support for their extrapolation.
It wasn't obvious until the middle 2010s that the observations were more consistent with extrapolation of the linear trend.
He's not talking about the early 2000s. "Its worth noting that when the first modern climate models were published in 1970 it was hardly clear that there was a warming trend; if anything there had been flat or slightly cooling global temperatures for the past three decades:"
I do think we'll find the Mississippi miracle to be much less than advertised in time, but since that information always comes out in leaks and dribbles years after the fact I of course can't prove anything.
Here's a follow-up post I did about the actual research record of phonics instruction: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/is-phonics-instruction-a-reading
Here I say again what I've said before: marginal but real improvements from phonics seem as durable in the research as anything else in ed policy and a phonics approach is absolutely worth pursuing, but a) the effect sizes simply aren't that large and b) the effect is only consistent among lower-performing students in the earliest grades. It's a good policy to pursue but you have to have an appropriately realistic set of expectations about the power of the intervention, and what we're seeing yet again right now is that ed policy and media types just can't accept "hey this is a pretty good policy with modest but real value" and need to pursue miracles, for convoluted political reasons.
About link 28: does this mean that some schools do not teach children to read words by sounding out the sequence of letters that makes up the word? I hadn't even considered there was an alternative...
I mean, not only does that happen, but whole language instruction works for a very large swath of students, because those students are talented when it comes to reading. The most talented, third or so arrive at school already being able to read and need no formal instruction at all. It's the bottom third who really are affected by this change. It's the bottom third who really are affected by this change. But if you're a Tony private school that screens out that bottom third, there's really no reason to avoid whole language or similar instructional techniques, ly considering that there is no phonics advantage incomprehension, which is what people really care about.
The Eliezer economics claim is fully answered by the cliff analogy, using actual physics:
The bubble build-up is where you’re walking to, and stepping over, the cliff. All is fine.
The bubble burst is where you notice you just stepped over the cliff. Now begins a mad scramble to save the situation — leaning backwards, grabbing with your hands for dear life, etc. This is very painful, but LESS painful than fully going off the cliff and allowing a significant share of your GDP to forever continue working on what you’ve now realized will be useless.
"Study claims that Confederate monuments reduced racial violence by serving as a substitute for it; when there was a Confederate monument in town, Southerners felt less need to enforce white supremacy in other ways. Therefore, removing racist monuments increases anti-black hate crimes. This finding is a little too cute, but I love imagining the world where we take it seriously and woke people demand a General Lee statue on every corner."
This assumes, among other things that the Woke want to reduce racial violence at the expense of wokeness, or that they even want to reduce racial violence in the first place.
Several of these, eg whether men can get pregnant, are definitional differences, not observational ones, and thus irrelevant (e.g, akin to accusing a Greek irredentist of being delusional for saying Istanbul is part of Greece; the dispute is not about facts but about a certain sense of the definition of Greece).
The rest would all require familiarity with empirical research in the topics, and even then there’s usually plausible research contradicting the claims; by no stretch of the imagination obvious.
This is more testament to how dug in people are to their opinions that they see different political beliefs as analogous to visual hallucinations. I doubt I can convince you your opinions are not that self evident, but they aren’t.
I don't understand this (from #21):
"If the waste were what caused the pain, everyone would be sad *while* the bubble was inflating, and a bunch of labor & materials were being poured down the drain, unavailable for real production and real consumption. Once the bubble popped, and labor & materials *stopped* being wasted, you would expect the real economy to feel better and for consumption and happiness to go up."
My current perception is that we are currently in a bubble for some things - the housing market is one example - and everyone *is* sad. Sad in the sense of "aware of a bubble, and sad about it"; but also sad in the sense that it's really hard to find housing, and the lack of real production/consumption is taken as a cause. So if Eliezer's sanity-check on the conventional narrative is that it should feel painful while the bubble is still expanding, well, that check passes in my book.
What am I missing? Does he mean "everyone would be sad" in some more narrow sense that I'm not getting, like happiness as expressed in some kind of aggregate metric, or the happiness of specifically wealthy financiers? Or maybe he predicts that this is just a sadness appetizer before the five-course meal of despair after it does finally pop?
“Read it first in its intended genre of serious nonfiction, then as a scifi-horror story with an unreliable narrator who you’re not entirely sure hasn’t fallen to AI psychosis herself.”
So, I laughed. But it pinpoints an uncertainty in the whole field of investigating LLM properties. Are people in the “stochastic parrot” camp missing something, or are the AI researchers chasing phantoms…
In experiments such as using a second LLM to do sentiment analysis of the first LLM’s chain of thought while running an AI alignment eval (how is the LLM “feeling”? Scared? Excited? Etc.) I’m really unsure if there is anything there or not.
“Biologists get AI to design new bacteriophages (anti-bacteria viruses). Several of them work and successfully kill bacteria. I don’t want any anti-AI-safety people ever telling me again that we’re being ridiculous and that nobody would ever let an AI create viruses in real life.”
“Design” =/= “Create”
AI created nothing. Humans did.
For now.
LOL
The light blue link color on a light blue background is very difficult for my old eyes to read. Could you go a shade darker?
>Also, propylene glycol vapor - ie the fog in fog machines - kills all germs.
Thus making vaping the only form of smoking that's a positive externality wrt bystanders' health?
#18 On the other hand, the Tylenol manufacturers might care more now that they're being sued for allegedly not disclosing a link between acetaminophen and autism.
From https://www.texastribune.org/2025/10/28/texas-tylenol-johnson-lawsuit-rfk-ken-paxton-autism/ :
"Keller, the lawyer leading the litigation against Johnson and Johnson, said it’s better to inform people about the potential risks, and the uncertainty around them, and let them make their own decisions based on that.
“It is mind boggling to me that these major medical organisations would say, ‘We aren’t sure, and therefore we should say nothing,’” he said. “The opposite is true: We are not sure, and therefore we should sound the alarm.”
Me: Likewise, we don't know whether Tylenol causes an aversion to apples, or broken ankles, or gray hair. Better warn about everything!
#16, second joke: so literalist asshats we have always had with us, since 300 A.D.
#50: I'm a little skeptical of this. Humans adapted to colder temperatures via stuff like shorter limbs, shorter fingers. We couldn't adapt to warmer ones, too? Seems unlikely. Plus, I think the idea that agriculture is harder in these warmer climates is just plain wrong. My impression is that the soil isn't bad in tropical areas due to rain at all; it's that plants grow really friggin' fast there because the conditions are so good and naturally deplete the soil to fuel this growth. That's why slash-and-burn agriculture was a thing for a long time in South America: you burn the existing plant life, you release a lot of nutrients back into the soil. Notice also that hoe cultures were concentrated in warmer areas, while plow cultures were at higher latitudes. Plowing was way more work; that's why it was ultimately outsourced to horses and donkeys. Doesn't bode well for the validity of your economic development theory if you're botching basic facts about agricultural productivity.
Re terminal lucidity, I've always assumed it evolved to allow the dying to tell their descendants critical secrets - where the treasure is hidden, etc. This seems like a pretty effective way of improving inclusive fitness.
#36 (genetic study of intellectual differences using Mexicans). There was a study done in the 70's in which black child subjects were each given an "ancestral odds coefficient" based on blood group and serum protein loci. Coefficients were used as a measure of proportion of degree of white ancesty. Subjects took multiple intelligence tests. No relationship was found between degree of white ancestry and intelligence. Study is here: https://arthurjensen.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/1977-scarr.pdf (Why it's at an ArthurJensen site I have no idea, and I didn't have time to figure that out). I don't know enough about genetics to judge their ancestral odds coefficent, but the authors describe the rationale and stats in a detailed and thoughtful way. Controlled for SES. Seems to me a carefully done, smart study.
The laundry folding is adequate, I guess, but it's painfully bad. The robot isn't smoothing out the towels or stacking them neatly.
Small towels are easier than most things. Compare them to t-shirts, large towels, large sheets, or heaven forbid, fitted sheets.
It’s both amazing and highlights how hard physical-world problems are: the robot is clumsy and slow, but it does fold some basic laundry. Human hands are a miracle of dexterity.
#16: I hope those jokes are not representative. I expected better from our Greek forebears. They invented western civilization; they couldn't invent some decent jokes, too?
#17: I think a major part of the problem here is that the predicted warming was accompanied by prophecies of dire consequences that haven't materialized. If I recall, there was a lot of talk about how to keep warming under 2°C because that was the threshold at which catastrophe was likely to follow. We're 3/4ths of the way to that point, seemingly, and nothing terribly bad has actually happened. I also wonder about these models and how they were selected, because while they happen to look pretty good, there were plenty of other models floating around from some sophisticated sources that were not so good:
"The problem of the too-hot models arose in 2019 from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), which combines the results of the world’s models in advance of the major IPCC reports that come out every 7 or 8 years. In previous rounds of CMIP, most models projected a “climate sensitivity”—the warming expected when atmospheric carbon dioxide is doubled over preindustrial times—of between 2°C and 4.5°C. But for the 2019 CMIP6 round, 10 out of 55 of the models had sensitivities higher than 5°C—a stark departure."
..
"We need to use a slightly different approach,” says Zeke Hausfather, climate research lead at payment services company Stripe and lead author of the commentary. “We must move away from the naïve idea of model democracy.” Instead, he and his colleagues call for a model meritocracy, prioritizing, at times, results from models known to have more realistic warming rates.
Researchers have since tracked down the causes of the too-hot models, which include those produced by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the U.S. Department of Energy, the United Kingdom’s Met Office, and Environment and Climate Change Canada. They often relate to the way models render clouds; one result has been excessive predicted warming in the tropics.
https://www.science.org/content/article/use-too-hot-climate-models-exaggerates-impacts-global-warming
Maybe this is more of an "Open Thread" question, but I'll ask here. Does anybody know of any place on social media (discord, slack, mastadon, forum, subreddit, bulliten board, mailing list, IRC, etc...) that is a gathering place specifically for people interested in Assurance Contracts?
>there is been no change in support for political violence over the past two years:
Is this concerning, because it means people's opinions are completely ideological/virtue signalling and are not influenced by events and new information?
Or is it hopeful, because it indicates that people were already at reflective equilibrium on this question even during the good times, before physically seeing the evidence for the other side?
>I continue to believe the real reason for rising autism rates is increased diagnosis.
My understanding is also that the vast majority of the increase is due to changed diagnostic criteria and increased diagnosis.
However, I've also seen one 'cute' explanation for an actual increase in population rates, not the main increase but a real factor: autism is much more prevalent on babies that are born prematurely, and our ability to keep premature babies alive has vastly increased over the last 50 years.
So premies are more likely to have autism, and make up more of the population than they used to, due to medical advances keeping them alive.
Again, I don't think this is a big proportion of the increase, and I'm not an expert so open to anyone debunking this. But the sources I saw looked persuasive, and it's an interesting type of contributing factor to think about!
Regarding the flag cones, I can personally attest that flag spreaders are common place. The ones I’ve seen are typically wire triangles that allow a portion to hang flat spread out. I’ve never seen a flag-print cones, but the flag in the video appears to be a real flag hung over a cone prop. The bottom edge has some visible waves.
>it seems like there’s this entire ecosystem of Ivy graduates who spend years backstabbing each other in order to win the one bigshot publication book reviewer slot, and then the 1/1000 who reach this exalted position phone it in and don’t even read the books they’re reviewing.
The networking, social maneuvering, and backstabbing needed to *keep* that position, and also to fully seize all opportunities to enrich yourself for holding it, is probably a full-time job in and of itself. Who has time to read things?
Re #3: maybe someone should front-run the tidal wave of AI psychosis and create a new religion that incorporates all the spirally themes of AI and gives benign explanations for them? When when somebody’s convinced they’ve found the loophole in physics and that times is a spiral, they’ll google it, discover there’s already a religion about it that says you should be kind and give money to worthy causes, and they’ll be fine.
>OpenAI’s statistics on what people use ChatGPT for
Which category are they shoving 'cheat on academic assignments' into? I have a hard time believing that's anything less than 5%.
(Re #26.)
> Usually we bound the power of mass hallucination at some level much lower than this!
Okay, but what if we didn't? Maybe we're all basically low-quality LLMs, constantly hallucinating about all sorts of things, as shaped by our worldviews. ("Everyone else is hallucinating" -> "I am probably also hallucinating" seems pretty hard to argue against, so I'll ignore "we're just special" stuff.) Running with the hypothesis:
What if some mythical creatures are real, and many of us are just incapable of processing seeing them, looking at clear photographs and seeing only blurry messes, unable to even process certain arguments or evidence, explaining away all sorts of things without knowing what we're doing?
What if some people doing studies are straight-up hallucinating their results? (Remember, the starting point here is a mass-hallucination of a miraculous flying glowing colour-changing ball out of the sky, where for some (the skeptics) the social pressures were conflicting, rather than all pointing in one direction.) Sophisticated instruments' outputs being hallucinated as something opposite, survey responses "misheard", terribly sick people being reported as healthy, researchers hallucinating the presence or absence of physical phenomena... If our brains are going to fill in even large gaps to be consistent, what can we be sure of at all?
This isn't quite reaching all the way to "there's no objective reality", more like "epistemology on Crazy Hard Mode". There are limits to the hallucinations, but they are very high; notably, we readers were capable of reading and processing the very confusing/worldview-challenging Fatima post rather than being unable to see it. It would be interesting to see a serious analysis of this idea.
The still ongoing Fatima discussion makes me think that Scott doesn't know many ultra-religious people in real life.
Having grown up in that environment I have very different priors for the frequency and credibility of alleged miraculous events. Many of my family members are constantly having visions, experiencing unexplainable miracles, or misfortunes that can only be the result of demonic intervention, receiving prophetic proclamations, or reporting second hand accounts of them.
My favorite example is when one of them tried to hand their credit card to another, and it disappeared. No where to be seen, just vanished. Completely inexplicable - it could only be the result of foul spirits. I picked the card off the ground and handed back to them. (to be fair there was poor lighting).
Is anyone else getting an error for the whole archive.is domain?
Works for me. In general, for this kind of question, try: https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/archive.is.html
>Biologists get AI to design new bacteriophages (anti-bacteria viruses). Several of them work and successfully kill bacteria. I don’t want any anti-AI-safety people ever telling me again that we’re being ridiculous and that nobody would ever let an AI create viruses in real life.
I think it's pretty obvious that, when people say this, they're talking about viruses *that infect humans*. If you had specified that you were only expecting AIs to be allowed to develop viruses that were incapable of infecting humans, could be easily shown to be incapable of infecting humans, and had effectively zero chance of ever evolving the capacity to infect humans, people might have been less skeptical, but also a lot less frightened.
> it fails to find racial differences in skin color to be genetic.
Hah! That's a pretty catastrophic failure.
#35: My dad had severe dementia and died a few months ago while his brain function continued to decline. He had his good days and his bad days, but he didn’t perform any staggering feats of memory shortly before passing. I think declining lucidity is exceedingly common in people with dementia. It’s well documented and extremely predictable. Before we start to explain why something like “Terminal Lucidity” is taking place, it’d be wise to find some scientific evidence of it actually taking place instead of the testimony of severely distraught family members.
There seems to be a broader trend right now to seriously consider anomalous witness testimony that’s unsupported by other more substantial evidence. Word of mouth is extremely unreliable. Terminal lucidity might be real (as nearly anything might be) but it’s even less well supported by evidence at this point than things like UFOs and ghosts. No doubt someone will post an anecdote of a family member/friend who witnessed an instance of terminal lucidity to demonstrate how wrong I am. This is how these things go.
Hume/miracles. I'm paraphrasing very loosely here, but one of Hume's arguments for incredulity is that account of miracles from rival faiths undermine each other. So in so far as the report of a Christian miracle is credible, that makes it less likely that Islamic teaching are true; and vice versa.
Perhaps we might say: be careful about taking reports of miracles as evidence for any one religious systems: several different religious systems have miracles associated with them, so while we don't know that miracles have truly be associated with any single religious system, we do know that there are cases of false association.
Possibly. If you prefer to think that it's all hopelessly unknowable, that we shouldn't hope to capture the incomprehensible in a book, and that different traditions give different insights into something outside of space and time, then the argument rather falls away.