"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.
My 2 cents. I am old enough to remember back when liberalism was very individualistic, like we need no identity, no group membership like nation or church, we should be free-floating atomic individuals. Well, people have learned since then that they actually want identities and group membership. It was various minorities who started "identity politics" first, and it was generally forbidden for the average hetero white guy. But this was not something that could be kept so forever, so eventually populism is basically the identity politics of the white hetero guy.
All of science, philosophy, and rational thought in general depends on being able to accurately categorise things, so if liberals can't do it, they'll inevitably become far more unmoored from reality than a guy who looks at the sun too long until it seems to ping-pong around the sky.
You have not made nor even attempted an argument about liberals' ability to "accurately categorize things." You have simply whined that THEIR categories are the WRONG categories and YOUR categories are the RIGHT categories while not even *touching on* the question of accuracy in applying said categories.
Please either put more real effort into making genuine and worthwhile posts or be silent while to make room for real conversation.
I think what you want is that everyone uses your definitions. Unfortunately for you, that is not how language works. Trying to police how other people use language is really not a good use of your time. Successful communication depends on common definitions AND on mutual consent. You seem to be only interested in the first requirement.
Sensory hallucinations aren't the only type of delusion. Consider the schizophrenic who thinks the CIA is after him: he's not inventing sensory data, rather he's inventing implausible explanations for sensory data. Progressives do something similar when e.g. they refuse to acknowledge that 27 is less than 51. You might argue that motivated reasoning is distinct from a flat-out cognitive delusion, but I suspect it's more of a continuous spectrum than a binary classification. The insightful nutty professor blends pretty seamlessly into the deluded wacko.
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 (it is a purely social category with no biological reality, we must believe) & (b) IQ is biased by stereotype threat, institutional racism, something something eugenics, something Nazis something Hitler, ... etc. The Wiki article on the subject even repeats the ol' Lewontin's, Gradient, Multiple Intelligences, etc., Fallacies!⁰
Rephrase the question to ask about "...an IQ gap *with a genetic component* between races", and Wikipedia no longer agrees—yet this (implicit) claim is little less obviously true than was the initial one.¹
>This is an imprecise question
I really don't think it is; if you heard "stereotypes are generally true", you'd expect it to mean "most popular stereotypes are mostly—say, directionally—correct", right? Except insofar as "generally" might mean somewhere from—say—more than half the time to maybe three-quarters of the time, this seems pretty likely to be interpreted similarly across individuals.
Sure, the stereotypes in question—e.g., I don't know,, "men are more violent than women", say; 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?",² 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.
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⁰(I have devoted a stupid number of hours to editing Wikipedia; don't get me wrong, I love it, for a certain standard of "love"; but the current consensus, there, is that there is *no genetic component at all* to between-race IQ differences. Debates on the topic tend to go for the "look at this RS, it's a high school sociology textbook from 1991 & it says the idea of a genetic component to the gap is discredited!" gambit; the "look at this paper by the Chair of Anti-Racist & De-Colonization Scholarship—xe says race doesn't real!" approach; or the "this paper finds that there is no indisputable evidence that..." / "...no one has yet identified a single allele that could be solely responsible for
..."—i.e. the ol' Find the Gene™—argument.)
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.)
²(I think it's still the Received Wisdom, upon the left side of the political spectrum, that "black crime rates = because poverty", and/or that in general poverty is THE causal factor *in re* criminality. It certainly is *a* factor... but it is outweighed by an apparent racial component, last I checked; I think Scott himself found this out in an old post on SSC wherein he attempted to discover the truth about gun violence. I don't have a citation handy, though—it has been a long time since I had the energy to debate these topics, heh—so if you think this isn't the case, it either proves my point or else proves that I'm dumb & wrong. Wait... hold on, that actually doesn't narrow it down at all, does it–)
Regarding stereotypes, I think there is genuine ambiguity because of the distinction between 'group G is, on average, more xish than group H' and 'Gs are x', and because stereotypes often contain implicit (sometimes explicit) claims about why Gs are more xish and to what extent this is a deep innate trait vs. something contingent and changeable.
The charitable read of liberal pushback against stereotypes is that liberals correctly, or at least defensibly, think that some stereotypes are simply false, the rest tend to be exaggerated, and both types often play into dangerous biases. Even when the motte is a true claim about observed group differences, the bailey may be much closer to 'Gs are x, so I'm justified in assuming this G is x and treating them accordingly' and/or 'Gs are x, so let's systematically treat them accordingly'. (Maybe the latter is what you want, in some cases, but it's always going to be a disputed normative stance and not a purely descriptive claim that you can reasonably expect everyone to accept.)
I'm not trying to deny that there are systematic blind spots (and lies) on the liberal/progressive left. But this is also true of the right, and it is blindingly obviously true of the brand of 'conservatism' that is currently mainstream in the US.
> 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.
And yet, the answers to questions like "Can men get pregnant?" and "Can women have penises?" — whatever they may be for any given person/group — are having a metric ton of real, practical consequences that we all have to square with one way or the other; so the questions can't simply be brushed aside on the basis that they're semantic disputes. The fact that we all agree on the answer to "Can person P get pregnant?" for any given value of P observably isn't enough. It doesn't solve the problems or resolve the conflicts created by people disagreeing about the first two questions.
So how do you decide whether someone's a liberal? If you define a liberal as someone who answers each of your questions in a certain way. (e.g., "of course average IQ is the same for all races") then by god you are 100% correct in your assessment of liberal beliefs.
On the other hand, if I define a divisive fool as someone who relies on circular reasoning to prove that his outgroup's a bunch of assholes, I've got your number.
1) It is easy to recognize a liberal without giving them the 7-question test, because there are quite a few other things that make it clear that someone’s a liberal. But after you identify them using the other, easy-to-spot markers, you find that every one of them gives the bad, dumb answer to the 7 questions?
2) Nobody counts as a liberal unless they give the bad, dumb answer to every one of the 7 questions in your original post?
I expect that if you compared the image in your head to reality, you would often be surprised and confused.
For example, a poll showed that two thirds of Democrats oppose trans-women in sports. Would you count those as "liberals" or not? How do you tell without actually finding out people's views?
This is an interesting question! I would say, for urban-suburban people with college degrees and office jobs, being a liberal is simply the default so much that they mostly not even notice it, think about it, or define it. It is just taking the same stance on everything than basically everybody else they knows. It is very much a fish, water, wet thing. Most people are very social and easily borrow the ideas of people around them.
I should add here, that liberalism is often presented not as an opinion, but as a scientific fact, expert consensus. This is also why many liberals are not even very aware that they are liberals, they see not liberal and conservative opinions, but people who believe science and science-deniers.
On the other hand, there is a small minority who does not socialize much, does not go out much, and has read books on the subject. So they read Rawls, agree with him and from than on they can be considered liberals. But the interesting part is that they will often disagree with the first group over a number of issues. The first group is often superficial and make a big deal about things like renaming homeless people unhoused persons. The second type considers it far more important to provide them with housing.
I've heard Righties claim that the liberal consensus is that transgender women can get pregnant and transgender men can produce sperm. But I can't find any mainstream authorities on the Left who ever claimed this. However, it can be confusing for Righties because the terminology of transgender discourse can be confusing. For instance, a transgender legal website says, “Many transmasculine and non-binary people choose to get pregnant and carry children.” There's nothing untrue about the first example. Transmasculine peeps would only be able to get preggers if they still had their ovaries and their cervix was still intact. The non-binary term can be extra confusing for Rightwing minds, because I think they assume that non-binary peeps are hermaphrodites. However, non-binary refers to the way trans people view their gender identity (i.e., someone who feels like a woman even though they're a man).
So, you are either grossly misinformed about how Lefties think, or you're purposely spreading misinformation. Cheers!
How does this differ from saying "The Sun is actually any bright approximately-circular object in the sky during the day that is socially accepted to be the Sun, so at Sun really DID do all those miraculous things (change colors, spin, plunge towards the ground, etc.) at Fatima"?
You're smuggling in a claim of fact that's not widely agreed upon: that there WAS some other object in the sky at Fatima. Whereas the left wing view is NOT making any strongly-disputed claim of fact. Any individual human that the leftwing view marks out as "someone able to get pregnant" is also regarded as "someone able to get pregnant" in the right wing view. The only difference is in the labels.
The only trouble is when conservatives who are either dumb or bad-faith insist on interpreting *left wing claims* though the lens of *right wing labels* (that those claims were clearly NOT using) and then strutting around like they've done something terribly clever.
> However, non-binary refers to the way trans people view their gender identity (i.e., someone who feels like a woman even though they're a man).
You appear to be mistaken about what non-binary means. Someone who feels like a woman even though they're a man would (in the liberal consensus worldview) just be a trans woman, trans but binary.
A non-binary person does not identify as being a man or a woman, believing themselves to be neither, or perhaps both. Such a one will usually go by pronouns other than he/she, such as they/them or neopronouns. Often nonbinary people are entirely indistinguishable from someone of their birth gender, but insist on being referred to using they/them pronouns; other times, they will make an effort to appear androgynous. In any case I think this is obviously different from the usual trans thing.
I stand corrected. The terminology is all very confusing. And I suspect it’s used to separate the in-group from out-group. I’m an outie in the outgroup with outré opinions.
this is going to depend heavily on how broadly you're defining "race" and also on the context. Some African countries have very low homicide rates, for example (others have very high ones).
I've head that Africa has more genetic diversity than the rest of the world combined, so if you think crime rate is based on race, that shouldn't be surprising.
2025 numbers are on track to be low as the mid-1960s.
Another Rightwing delusion is that California has extremely high violent crime and murder rates. But homicide and violent crime rates in California have also fallen to mid-1960s levels.
However, if you break down homicide rates by county, the highest homicide rates are in counties in the rural Deep South and Carolinas and in upper Alaska.
"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?"
Only the last one of these is a factual question that can be answered directly. The rest cannot be answered without first agreeing on definitions that are based on value judgements that differ for the two sides of the culture war.
Philosophy, science, and rational thought in general depend upon our ability to accurately categorise things. If basic, widely-understood categories like "male" and "female" are beyond the ken of modern liberals, that should increase our confidence that liberals believe things unmoored from reality.
"If basic, widely-understood categories like "male" and "female" are beyond the ken of modern liberals"
Wow. You can't make this up. "Philosophy, science, and rational thought in general depend upon our ability to accurately categorise things," he says, while blithely conflating the categories of "man and woman" with the categories of "male and female" apparently perfectly unawares. This would not even be correct based on the conservative sex-only definitions: they are different categories by anyone's reckoning.
The people you are criticizing are doing *demonstrably* much better at navigating the different categories and their relevant features than you are. Step back, take a deep breath, touch some grass and take the L. You are not doing yourself any favors by continuing to harp on this one.
Philosophy, science, and rational thought are also based on questioning our generally understood definitions of categories. If you believe the categories as currently understood do not best describe reality, a push to redraw the categories is valid
"Can men get pregnant? Can a woman have a penis? "
Can we PLEASE cut this obnoxious shit out. I realize that some people can hardly help themselves, but ACX should really, REALLY be better than this.
If you are making *any attempt at all* to understand reality, you ALREADY KNOW that this is not rooted in any factual disagreement. This is a group you hate shouting *their* tribal slogans loudly in your direction, and you shouting *your* tribal slogans loudly back. Neither of you would make a SINGLE differing prediction of reality based on this disagreement, and if you're remotely honest and curious you already know that. There are a million different websites devoted to exactly that kind of tedious shit-flinging[1], and there really, really is not need to import it here.
[1] Some purportedly valued in the billions of dollars.
This is so completely divorced from reality that the self-righteous tone of your comments in this thread is really breathtaking.
(For what it's worth, I found Mr. X's comment a bit self-righteous, and Hanania's comment too, but yours absolutely take the cake. For someone so apparently concerned about ACX becoming like the rest of the internet, you are doing more than anyone else to bring Reddit-tier discourse ("wow!", "get a load of this shit!", "you're wrong but of course you already know that" etc) into these discussions. How about a look in the mirror?)
> Neither of you would make a SINGLE differing prediction of reality based on this disagreement,
There have been multiple, concerted efforts on Wikipedia, with large numbers of editors in favour, to remove from transgender people's pages all references to their actual biological sex. And to do this removal on the *very day* the person comes out as a different gender. I don't know what the latest policy is, but I think it might be that this *is* allowed if their biological/birth sex is not "notable". Either way, I can link to the strong pushes for it if necessary.
There have also been judicial mandates to not only have transgender witnesses always referred to as their preferred gender, but to never mention their birth sex and, if their birth sex is somehow essential evidence, to block public access to the testimony and seal all records of it. I can link to examples if necessary.
Now perhaps you think that the average person coming across an article that reads "Chelsea is a woman who is the daughter of such-and-such. She grew up in [place] and became the first woman to achieve [thing] in 2015. She is the mother of [child]." with absolutely no mention of the fact that this person is a biological male whose article yesterday read "Christopher is the son of such-and-such and he achieved [thing] in 2015)" until at 9am this morning "Christopher" came out as "Chelsea"...will form remotely accurate beliefs about reality. Or perhaps you think that even though said average person would obviously form incredibly *inaccurate* beliefs about reality from the article, this is entirely an accident and it is absolutely not *intentionally desired* by the ones who changed the article that average readers will form the belief that Chelsea is a biological female.
If so, that would be an argument I would very much like to see you make.
You also complain in another comment about a failure to distinguish between "man/woman" and "male/female". I could tell you about the number of times I've seen "transgender female" used by progressives interchangably with "transgender woman" and the number of times I've seem white-hot outrage when someone has deliberately separated sex and gender (the very thing you're claiming progressives routinely do) and called the same person a "transgender woman" and "a biological male". But I suppose you can accuse me of lying, and I suppose they could have drastically changed their behaviour in the past few months. Or past few weeks.
So instead I'll just ask you if you are *honestly* of the belief that any significant number of pro-trans progressives will happily accept a transwoman being called a male, and will happily, loudly, clearly admit "yes, she is male, of course she is a biological male". Or whether you think you will find an average, typical pro-trans progresssive even *grudgingly* using this term.
Because I don't think I can possibly express how high my "prior" is that you will find nothing of the kind.
Wikipedia has a policy of writing facts and the truth. As new facts are discovered, articles change. Harriet Tubman's article header doesn't contain the sentence "She was a black woman." That's not relevant. It would be even less relevant to say "She used to be a child." Your anger at the Wikimedia Foundation is more than a little odd.
So completely divorced from reality that you didn't manage to point out a single difference from reality? What's the opposite of "damning with faint praise."
" For someone so apparently concerned about ACX becoming like the rest of the internet,..."
I didn't start the conversation nor broach the topic. If you'd like to look through my comment history and find some examples of place where I shoehorn inflammatory political talking points into totally unrelated conversations, you are more than welcome to rub them in my face if I find any. But unless you do that, I'd like to apologize for blithely and brazenly conflating "derailing the conversation in incendiary manner" from "pointedly objecting when somebody else does that." Because they are not the same, and if you have a shred of honesty, you'll admit that.
"If so, that would be an argument I would very much like to see you make."
By all means. Let's look at what you're claiming:
"Now perhaps you think that the average person coming across an article that reads...[snip] ...will form remotely accurate beliefs about reality."
EDIT: I was too fast and too careless in reading the original and pattern matched the name "Chelsea" to a well-known trans public figure by that name, whereas ascend was discussing a fully hypothetical article. This...really doesn't undercut the broader point even a little bit. It's still a matter of judgement which facts about a person's life are worth including and where, and ascend's subjective insistence that somebody's sex-assigned-at-birth is so enormously important that it *must* be included and centered and have conspicuous attention called to it is still silly. The fact that they had to *make up* a hypothetical article and edit history to complain about honestly makes it barely worth responding to.
So first off, you're assuming your own conclusion in defining "the average person" as "anyone who thinks like I do (but also doesn't know about this high-profile individual already)." There are, in fact, lots of "average people" that don't think like you. But that's barely even relevant. See, I took literally FIVE SECONDS to look at the Wikipedia article in question. Would you like to go and glance at it? You don't even have to scroll, I promise. Just look at the sidebar.
If you're too lazy to do that, I'll spoil the ending. There is an entire SECTION OF THE ARTICLE titled "gender transition." It's not hidden. It's not a secret. It's right fucking there.
So as far as I can tell, your ENTIRE complaint here boils down to "it doesn't front-and-center the thing that *I personally* find most important about Chelsea Manning, and ONLY mentions it in its own entire section of the article, without also repeatedly calling attention to it everywhere else." Which is about the level of seriousness and maturity I have come to expect from these discussions.
But hell, let's live in a less convenient possible world, and imagine some *hypothetical* Wikipedia article, about some *hypothetical* trans person whose gender status was less publicly well-known, and thus less notable. The argument you clearly *want* to make is that Wikipedia would be dishonest for leaving that off, while referring to the person by the pronouns that they *actually use* and the gender that they *actually claim.* As far as I can tell, your position here is "if they did that, myself and other people like me might mistakenly believe that person is cisgender." And like...so what? Why is Wikipedia responsible for correcting your bad assumptions about the world? Why do you feel entitled to an unambiguous public accounting of everybody's genitals and chromosomes? How EXACTLY is it your business if somebody else decides to go by different pronouns and wear different clothing than you *assume* they ought to?
Let me say of again: NONE OF THIS IS ABOUT FACTS. You are, by now, *quite* well aware that pronouns aren't statements of fact, that gendered terms encode assumptions that differ from person to person[1]. What you are upset about is that other people are not bending over backwards to use language is ways that you are more *comfortable* with. You would *prefer* that everybody used those words in the way that you want them to be used. [2] Of course almost all of them will *very happily tell you* what they mean by those words if you ask. There's no serious claim you can make about "dishonesty" that doesn't boil down to you being angry at sometimes having to challenge your own assumptions.
"So instead I'll just ask you if you are *honestly* of the belief that any significant number of pro-trans progressives will happily accept a transwoman being called a male,"
I'll tell you *honestly* that after reading the rest of what you just wrote, these hypothetical "pro-trans progressives" in your head--and probably most of the real ones out in the world--would not HAPPILY accept so much as a "good day" from you. Nobody is obligated to by happy about your belligerence and rudeness.
And so it goes in any other circumstance. Yes, lots of people would get mad at you for calling a trans woman a "biological male." But just like YOUR emotions are not facts, neither are THEIRS. They would not be getting mad at you because they *think you're lying.* They'd be getting mad at you for being an asshole. Those aren't the same thing. Like, suppose you were out with a group of people who included an ex of yours, and the ex started telling everyone a true-but-embarrasing story about your sex life. Would that make you angry? Do you think that situation would make your hypothetical "average person" angry? I think it probably *should.* It's an enormously rude thing to do.
Now, you might not see or understand why calling somebody a "biological male" in most social contexts is boorish[3]. But you not understanding doesn't change that it isn't about questions of fact. Trans people generally do not (for example) play coy with their doctors about their sex, because that is a context where it's relevant and where its an appropriate thing to discuss. But *your* need to know or discuss their genitals or chromosomes is (once again) not a question of fact, and not something that they actually have any obligation to humor.
I'll end by adding that biological sex is considerably more complicated than the dumbest transphobes repeatedly insist it is. You can tell by the fact that they can't even agree on a definition. So while there certainly exist progressives who, on occasion, say dumb things about biological sex, *my* prior is very high that any time a transphobe triumphantly holds forth a claimed example of some progressive person lying or being wrong about biological sex, the claim will stem from some combination of ignorance, willful misrepresentation, or simply being to impatient to actually read it.
[1] And would do so even in a world where trans people were not the political football they are today. Gender is not an objective, perfectly-sharp concept and never, ever has been.
[2] Yes, I'm aware that *other* people besides you also get upset about this kind of thing; that's hardly germane here since it is *you* that are trying to argue this is a question of fact.
[3] Part of the reason is simple privacy: it's not polite to talk about *anyone's* genitals or private medical information in most social contexts. But part of the reason is also that going around calling people "biological males" is something done almost exclusively by the kind of dipshit that writes multi-paragraph rants about how Wikipedia is lying for not hammering at Chelsea Manning's [EDIT: or random hypothetical trans person Chelsea's] trans status at every possible opportunity. So the moment somebody says those words, adopting a hostile or suspicious posture is a pretty reasonable defense mechanism.
"So instead I'll just ask you if you are *honestly* of the belief that any significant number of pro-trans progressives will happily accept a transwoman being called a male"
It later occurred to me that this talking point is doubly silly, because your "pro-trans progressives" ABSOLUTELY have language to talk about the thing that you are so exceptionally concerned about. Just not the same language *you* use.
The terms you are looking for are "assigned male at birth" and "assigned female at birth," often shortened to AMAB and AFAB. Since you are so deeply worried about factual accuracy, I will point out that they are actually rather more factually accurate than the terminology you are insisting everybody should use, in that they speak *only* to the evidence that is widely available in most cases. I'm sure if you think it through carefully, you are capable of understanding how and why this is true.
Sigh. The liberal consensus understands the difference between biological sex and social gender. So when you use words like "woman", you should clarify whether you mean biologically woman or socially woman.
"The liberal consensus understands the difference between biological sex and social gender."
Oh, please inform me more abut that, because with these own lying eyes of mine I have seen trans women online claiming to have periods after starting HRT.
Now, oestrogen injections can give you abdominal pains, so they may indeed be having pains. But these are not periods. But they are claiming that they are now biologically women so they are having biological woman periods.
Do not talk to me about the "liberal consensus" because as soon as you try pinning it down, the answer comes back that well there is no transgender council making rules, or that there is no liberal pope issuing dogma, and if you read/saw/heard A saying such-and-such, then that's just A, that's not all liberals/trans people/insert your own grouping.
>Do not talk to me about the "liberal consensus" because as soon as you try pinning it down, the answer comes back that well there is no transgender council making rules, or that there is no liberal pope issuing dogma, and if you read/saw/heard A saying such-and-such, then that's just A, that's not all liberals/trans people/insert your own grouping.
I think this shows the importance of categories for rational thinking. An awful lot of people are appealing to "But what even *is* a liberal, anyway?" as a thought-terminating cliche to avoid having to reconsider their own sense of superiority.
I spent the first 30 years of my life using the words man and woman, never thinking about any of that, and everybody knew exactly what I meant. Then the overeducated and economically worthless Karens of the "liberal consensus" decided that they knew better and I needed to clarify what I meant. I, of course, completely ignored them because there are few things in the world I have less regard for than the "liberal consensus," and somehow everybody I talk to still knows exactly what I mean without this supposedly necessary clarification (except for some worthless HR ladies who keep sending out emails about putting your pronouns in your Slack bio).
Trans men can get pregnant, and trans women can have a penis (to say nothing of intersex people). None of that is detached from objective reality, but rather has to do with a distinction between sex and gender which some people choose to recognize and others do not. I doubt I need to link readers of this blog to Scott's "The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories" but if you haven't read it recently, maybe now is the time.
1. Asking if men can get pregnant is just a category dispute, not hallucinations. The thing about category disputes is that, while you might think someone's categorization system is dysfunctional or self serving, they're not *falsifiable.*
2. I suspect most Progressives would argue that IQ differences were either cultural differences that show up as IQ differences (vis Gould's The Mismeasure of Man) or differences in opportunity or environmental stress. "Stereotype threat." etc. A better question is how well IQ tests actually measure all aspects of intelligence, which is not unified. I disagree that these explain the whole gap, but they're within the Overton Window of acceptable discourse.
In any case, your examples are not a misinterpretation of sensory input. The claim is not that a particular group is infallible or unassailable in their beliefs or their worldview.
Short answers: yes but very few of them; yes but very few of them; yes; probably; I have no idea; in practice it does; I don't know without Googling but I think the number is roughly in line with the percentage of the population that is black.
And yes I'm a fairly "woke" liberal. :P
The longer answers to some of these are "average IQ is a bad way to compare races because of the Flynn effect and other things - what would the average IQ in South Korea have been in 1900?" and "whether or not conscious or unconscious racism is involved, my impression is that there actually are problems with policing in the US that predictably lead to abuses, even if most such abuses aren't as dramatic as an unarmed man getting shot."
"Can men get pregnant? Can a woman have a penis?"- These are arguments about the definitions of words. The conservative view is that "man" and "woman" refer purely to biological groups. The progressive view is that "man" and "Woman" are social classes that are based on some combination of biology and social role. Regardless of your opinion on the implications of these views, its not actually the same as a mass hallucination.
The other things you listed are often contested over various interpretations of the data, how biases may have influenced the collection of data etc. Some are more difficult to untangle than others. But again, not really the same as a mass hallucination.
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.
RH is such a classic example of the old XKCD "I disagree with both sides, therefore I am superior to both".
However, for me it does not result in intense dislike. I generally allow one or two smaller sins for everybody, RH's sin is smugness, that is in itself is not so bad.
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
I know! It bugged the hell out of me that the media never called Biden out when he went on and on and on about Hannibal Lecter—and why the MSM never covered Biden's bizarro statements like his sharks and electrocution monologue, I'll never know.
I think everybody noticed, and thought that everybody else noticed too, and because it was so obvious it did not need to be talked about. Everybody even a little bit "in the know" knows that these types of leading politicians are always just figureheads and real power lies elsewhere.
This might be plausible were prominent media outlets not reporting on the White House calling the video clips demonstrating Biden's senility "cheapfakes."
I wonder if people claiming -- apparently sincerely -- that "Everybody thought it was obvious" when they quite clearly didn't, or "Nobody supported this" when they quite clearly did, would count as the kind of secular mass delusion we've been searching for.
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.
"What is science fiction" is a fascinating question of literary categorization; I wrote a whole blog post about it and only vaguely approached an answer!
And they should have the courage to call themselves something else! I don’t think the vibes are as important to what the book as the questions and restrictions that drive the plot.
Another way to put it is that in science fiction you win by having special knowledge or special capabilities. In fantasy you win by having a special character or special practices. In mysteries you win by special diligence or special reasoning. And so on. Greg Egan writes math fiction. The Martian is engineering fiction.
And those definitions do naturally suggest some overlap; it’s easy to frame a fantasy or science fiction as a mystery. Space opera is when fantasy plot but space vibes. Cyberpunk is when mystery plot but libertarian vibes. And so on.
Well, the real answer is, whatever the semi-arbitrary categorization that the SFF fandom ended up on says is sci-fi. The two main axes of relevance are futuristic vs medieval aesthetic, and how blatantly the real-world laws of nature (as we understand them) are being broken. Basically the work must be on the futuristic side of the first axis (medieval-ish post-apocalypse usually counts), and not too egregious on the second one. So, Star Wars generally isn't counted as sci-fi, while Star Trek is.
I don't think it's some great mystery. The difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy (and indeed Science Fantasy) is the underlying assumption that everything in the world is understandable and explainable through science -- in fact through the same science that we're using today, just sufficiently advanced, with improved understanding of the natural laws that we already understand today (to some extent). The actual explanation doesn't need to be explicitly stated, merely implied.
For example, consider a wizard who casts the Fireball spell (maybe he makes some mystical gestures, maybe he shouts some quasi-Latin, whatever). Contrast this with a space marine who fires his plasma cannon at full power.
The end result is the same (roomful of exploded bad guys), and the exact mechanics of how either the spell or the weapon function are never explicitly listed -- both characters just *do* it when they need to. Yet it is implicitly understood that the wizard is heir to some mystical knowledge (perhaps passed since the dawn of time) that operates by obscure rules that govern magic and *nothing else*. The space marine, on the other hand, learned how to fire his plasma cannon in boot camp, and the weapon itself was designed by engineers who applied scientific principles that were discovered by researchers via experimentation and lots of math; and the same principles can be applied to make a coffeemaker or an airplane or indeed a hairbrush.
If you wanted to be a wizard, you'd have to be born with the power (or have it bestowed upon you by some mystical being); and if you wanted to be good at it, you'd need to memorize a bunch of arbitrary rules that govern magic and only magic. If you wanted to build a plasma cannon or a warp drive or a neural implant, then in principle you'd need nothing more than your senses, something to write with, and lots and lots of time (arguably tens of thousands of years, but still). Wizards are special; space marines are common.
Note that Science Fiction violates *actual* physical laws almost as much as Fantasy does: real-world science prohibits things like FTL travel and maybe even plasma cannons; and in fact there are as many made-up science-fictional FTL systems as there are fantasy magic systems. As I'd said, the difference is in the attitude, not necessarily the substance.
It's extremely hard to quantify whether a work operates with the assumption that "everything in the world is understandable and explainable through science." I would not say this is clearly true for Warhammer 40k, which involves a lot of mysticism and an entire metaphysical alternate plane of reality populated by gods that are shaped by belief and emotion. The claim that everything in 40k is theoretically explainable through science is a fine interpretation of the lore, but not more obviously supported by canon than making the same claim about ASOIAF, or Dungeons & Dragons for that matter.
By the way, would you describe HPMOR as science fiction? What about Unsong?
40K is Science Fantasy, as huge chunks of its universe operate based on eldritch whims of the Chaos Gods, and the Warp itself is a priori ineffable -- and all of these are the foundational concepts of the setting.
I must admit I have not finished Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality, but knowing what Yud is like, surely he gave magic a rational explanation. My best guess would be: they are living in a simulation and spells are cheat codes. That is how I would have done it...
FWIW I was really disappointed by the 2nd half of HPMOR. I feel like Yudkowsky kind of gave up on storytelling in favor of preaching, and the ending feels like a really weak afterthought.
Amazing! I had to check that I did not accidentally written it myself because I agree with and even kind of predicted every word. Like at the first parapgraph I thought "the author will say Star Wars is futuristic fantasy" etc.
A definition is a set of words that together have the same meaning as a word. While it is unavoidable that words sometimes have two or more meanings, it is important to avoid equivocation. Equivocation is a disorder of thought where two or more meanings of a word, or two or more words with the same sound, are confused with each other.
Technically, only terms of theory can be defined, and terms of reality can only be described.
For example we cannot define the word "communist". We can describe that there were and are people calling themselves communists, they generally agreed in this, often disagreed in that, and that is it. We cannot tell who is a "real communist" because even communists disagree about this (something, something, ice pick).
It's not obviously wrong, but it's certainly dubious. I really doubt that that kind of distinction goes along a left-right axis. I've known extremely contrarian people who were left of center and those that were right of center. They tended to be contrarian about different things, but they were equally willing to disagree with the normal consensus.
Exactly. "10,000 liberals imagining a crime that didn't happen because of ideological priors" almost perfectly describes the collective reaction to George Floyd's death. Just because it happened higher up in the cortical column (i.e. it's cognitive rather than sensory) doesn't mean it's any less of a mental malfunction. In a cognitive sense it's probably more akin to thinking that the CIA is after you, but describing the 2020 BLM riots as a mass delusion seems totally reasonable to me.
Seems to me that when it comes to political beliefs and takes on Floyd-type incidents with huge media focus, most people arrive at their views via osmosis. They and their peers and the ideas in their preferred news media are all swimming in the same liquid, and all absorb it. Along with the beliefs they also absorb ways of explaining and justifying them, and ways of refuting opposing beliefs. But at the end of all that they feel like they arrived at their beliefs by thinking over the issues. One reason I just bagged it with voting is that I realized that my beliefs had been formed mostly by osmosis. But I don't think it's reasonable to call the process a mental malfunction. I think it's normal, and pretty universal, part of being social animals. A lot of the time osmosis works well. Most people think driving 90 mph and grizzly bears and walking alone at night in the slums are dangerous, and they're right. If you just absorb those views you'll be safer. It's really only when you get to issues like what is the right way to run a country that just absorbing what those around you think isn't a decent way to arrive at a reasonable take.
I have examined my views, and I found it is mostly osmosis, but there are enough rational ones to justify voting. For example, the idea that diminishing marginal utility justifies redistribution/welfare is I think well-founded. The fact that Scandinavia before the Viking Age did not build or invent anything interesting at all suggests strongly that whatever correlations are found between skin color an IQ probably do not mean much, if we understand IQ as the kind of thing that helps people invent things. And so on.
Evolution needs time. Even with high selection pressure, it is still more than centuries.
>Inventing things has more to it than IQ
Sure, but what changed in Scandinavia between 0AD and 800 AD? It always looked like the kind of place that could use ships. The trees were always around etc.
Pre industrial revolution the strongest determining factor of IQ was whether or not you were in the very small elite group of society that got the nutrition you needed to reach full IQ at all.
> I don't think it's reasonable to call the process a mental malfunction.
Maybe not typically, but I think that process can definitely malfunction. I think the way that information propagates through a biological neural network can be thought of as osmosis too, but that doesn't mean that there can't be pathological outcomes. In humans that looks like psychosis, in groups it looks like the madness of crowds. I'm suggesting that the BLM moral panic was an instance of the latter in the same way that Fatima was. Of course one can avoid the "group delusion" explanation of Fatima by positing an omnipotent deity, just as one can rationalize BLM by supposing the existence of structural racism. The point of the comparison is to suggest that both of those rationalizations require similar leaps of unsubstantiated faith, and are therefore better explained via a social pathology model. I think that interpretation is bolstered by the various irrational absurdities of the post-2020 moral panic.
1. That Derek Chauvin was filmed with his knee on George Floyd's neck for nine minutes while Floyd repeatedly said he couldn't breathe?
2. That Floyd died during this incident?
3. That 1 caused 2? (Do you think both autopsies that claimed his death was a homicide were done by examiners that were lying, or incompetent, or all of it was forged?)
4. That any of the above reflects a crime?
And do you dispute this with such certainty that you think it's reasonable to claim that anyone who disagrees is delusional, rather than making a different, reasonable conclusion?
I dispute 3. IMO George Floyd very likely died of a fentanyl overdose, which is why he had trouble breathing before he was on the ground. It's certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt that Chauvin was responsible in any causal way, though of course there's still a reasonable argument about negligence to be made.
The delusion is the claim that Floyd's death was evidence of a conspiratorial systematic bias against black people. Making that connection is, in my view, analogous to thinking that a plane flying overhead is evidence of CIA surveillance.
Do you claim that it is delusional to believe that there exists any kind of systematic bias against black people (I don't know what qualifies as conspiratorial), or only that it is delusional to draw any connection between Floyd's death and said bias? Can you be more specific on what beliefs you think are delusional?
Well let me be clear, I don't mean delusional in the sense that it's something that would go away if someone were to take antipsychotics. This is delusional in the same sense that the Fatima experience could be described as delusional: something which is objectively false but which a large number of ideologically-primed people believe and cannot be dissuaded from. I don't think that antipsychotics would have altered the Fatima pilgrims, either, though I do think that it represents something at least analogous to a delusion. As I said elsewhere in this thread, I suspect that inaccurate beliefs lay on a spectrum with outright delusional beliefs and that there's no principled way to make a categorical distinction between them. I also think that the "madness of crowds" may have more than a superficial resemblance to schizoid-type delusions.
By that standard I would say that the entire moral panic around race relations in the 2020-22 timeframe could be classified as a mass delusion. Consider some of the more absurd claims made during this period: things like math being "white knowledge", the notion that this country was "built on slavery", calculus was invented in africa, or that racial gaps are better explained by structural racism than the endogenous qualities of individuals. I think there's a very compelling parallel between social delusions like Fatima and paranoid delusions such as being followed by the CIA: a totalizing emotionally-charged worldview (in the case of BLM it's an oppression narrative, for the schizophrenic it's a belief that they're uniquely important) that creates a strong bias to interpret all data in light of a flawed top-down narrative. So the random plane flying overhead being interpreted as proof that the CIA is following you becomes a violent felon dying of a drug overdose being proof that all institutions are racist and must be overthrown. George Floyd represents the psychotic break and the subsequent few years of moral panic were the manic episode. Again this is an analogy but in my view a compelling one. I wonder whether, if the detailed dynamics of both psychosis and moral panic were fully understood, the relationship would turn out to be more than metaphorical.
> I dispute 3. IMO George Floyd very likely died of a fentanyl overdose, which is why he had trouble breathing before he was on the ground. It's certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt that Chauvin was responsible in any causal way, though of course there's still a reasonable argument about negligence to be made.
No, George Floyd died of positional asphyxia caused by his lungs being unable to expand, that's why he died during the exact same minutes in which Derek Chauvin was applying a heavy amount of weight to his back, and why Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder.
Awful coincidence that Floyd overdosed just when Chauvin happened to be kneeling on him, despite moving around just fine seven minutes prior.
Have we considered that this could all be a Chinese conspiracy to undermine American law? They manufactured the fentanyl. Maybe there's nanobots in it.
I think that the likelihood that Derek Chauvin caused George Floyd’s death is roughly the same likelihood that OJ didn’t cause Nicole’s. Floyd likely died of a fentanyl + meth overdose in combination with coronary artery disease, which is why he had breathing difficulty even before he was on the ground.
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.
"Eyewitness testimony has long been a cornerstone of legal proceedings, often considered a powerful tool in establishing facts and determining the truth. However, recent studies and legal analyses have increasingly shown that eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable. This unreliability stems from a variety of factors, including the fallibility of human memory, the influence of stress or trauma on recall, and the potential for suggestion or bias during the identification process. In many cases, circumstantial evidence—indirect evidence that suggests a fact by implication or inference—can be a more reliable and objective means of establishing the truth."
So you could indeed have a mob of people claiming they saw X stabbing Y, with some of that mob saying that it was a shooting or a bludgeoning, not a stabbing.
Here is where I pull out a Chesterton quote, from the story "The Trees of Pride":
"I am too happy just now in thinking how wrong I have been," he answered, "to quarrel with you, doctor, about our theories. And yet, in justice to the Squire as well as myself, I should demur to your sweeping inference. I respect these peasants, I respect your regard for them; but their stories are a different matter. I think I would do anything for them but believe them. Truth and fancy, after all, are mixed in them, when in the more instructed they are separate; and I doubt if you have considered what would be involved in taking their word for anything. Half the ghosts of those who died of fever may be walking by now; and kind as these people are, I believe they might still burn a witch. No, doctor, I admit these people have been badly used, I admit they are in many ways our betters, but I still could not accept anything in their evidence."
The doctor bowed gravely and respectfully enough, and then, for the last time that day, they saw his rather sinister smile.
"Quite so," he said. "But you would have hanged me on their evidence."
Thanks for the pointer about the reliability of eye witness testimony. I have seen this emphasized in many true crime stories but it’s usually the case that the victim misidentifies the culprit - not that there is no crime or shooting.
That said, I’d be curious to know if there are cases with multiple eye witnesses being wrong.
<< So you could indeed have a mob of people claiming they saw X stabbing Y, with some of that mob saying that it was a shooting or a bludgeoning, not a stabbing.>>
I guess what I am saying is that claims about religious miracles by otherwise regular people are uniquely and perhaps independently biased and mistaken. The general unreliability of eyewitness testimony may or may not be contributing to this.
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.
I think that is true, to some extent. I've had lots of discussions with Christians, and one argument that always comes up is something like, "why would you choose to not believe in God, given that belief brings obvious benefits X, Y, and Z ?" My response to that used to be something like, "I can't just make myself believe things; when I look at the sky and see that it's blue, I can't make myself believe that it's green with purple polka dots instead". But I've had some pushback from Christians who claim that they *could* in fact do something like this, if their faith demanded of them. Some of those Christians appeared to be smart and honest.
Thus, I think that there's at least a possibility that Christian brains have a facility that atheist brains lack: the ability to convince oneself of a belief at will; and this facility (or lack thereof) is wired in at some basic level, not subject to logical argumentation (one way or the other).
Hmm, my guess is that those people are simply willing to accept that their ordinary perception is fallible to an arbitrary extent, compared to whatever way they imagine getting their divine insight. If God somehow told them that sky was green, they'd accept that as truth even if they couldn't see it, because this would make the most sense in their worldview.
I don't think it'd just about raw sensory perception, as Christians often exhibit similar patterns of thought on topics such as of morality/ethics, cosmology, history, and other such domains that are not directly accessible by the senses.
Perhaps, but I don't think this necessarily disputes my point. I personally, and many (if not most) atheists in general, cannot make myself believe that the sky is green (unless we look up and see that the sky is actually green, that is). It's not a matter of intellectual arrogance: logically speaking, I accept that it's possible that e.g. reality is a simulation and my eyes have been hacked etc. But while I can entertain the notion and follow all of the logical implications, I cannot make myself actually believe it. Even if I was truly convinced that believing in the green sky would save me from an eternity of torture, I still couldn't do it. I'd agonize over it and perhaps spend my life in fear and misery, but I'd still believe that the sky was blue. From what I can tell, at least some Christians don't have this problem: if they needed to believe in the green sky, they simply would.
Well, I as a fellow atheist, I do believe that my perception isn't an entirely accurate representation of reality, what with all those optical illusions, hidden blind spots, etc.
My main problem with religious beliefs is a different one - it doesn't seem likely that they have access to a more reliable way of getting insights into the nature of the world, which is why I don't take their outlandish stuff seriously. If I did believe that though, believing that sky is actually green if the Holy Spirit says so doesn't seem so crazy.
After all, molecular physics says that we're almost entirely empty space by volume, something I have no trouble of believing despite being unable to directly perceive. I wonder, would it be possible to truly convince anybody from 500 years ago of that, with only words.
Belief is, to a large degree, influenced by social factors. Your brain has a strong subconscious desire for the comfort that comes from social conformity. Despite its limits, this effect is quite powerful.
You can indirectly induce different beliefs in yourself by immersing yourself in a different social scene typified by different beliefs. The limits I noted mean that you're probably not going to ever believe something that is totally ABHORRENT to you. But neither are you helplessly fated to have no deliberate control over what you believe.
Of course, this is a kind of steelman. Not every Christian has this concept in mind when they talk about choosing beliefs. But this is what I mean when I talk about choosing beliefs, and I can't be the only one.
I agree with your steelman to some extent, but I don't think that all Christians who talk about choosing one's beliefs mean it this way. In addition, I doubt that your steelman is powerful enough to make someone like myself believe in the green sky (though I could be wrong).
Much as I respect your position (I probably would have held it 6 months ago honestly) I think you discount several things too easily.
For one - privileging a contemporary person's mind over a person's mind from *100* years ago in Europe seems a bit extreme. I've read books by intelligent men who grew up in Feudal Japan and only learned about Western values in adulthood - and I can relate to them and their way of thinking shockingly well. I'm of the opinion that the most intelligent ancient Greeks, Persians or Chinese were commensurate with the lower end of high IQs today. Sextus Empiricus, for example, would have an even more extreme version of skepticism regarding this event than you do.
Conversely, delusional 100 years ago and delusional today are qualitatively similar by this reasoning.
As a second point - I completely agree with the perspective that people's perceptions can be primed, e.g. via culture or immediate methods. But we have cases where it would seem that people with a strong cognitive bias *against* seeing a miracle also reported it. You are correct to point out that their accounts could just be based off recollection and distortion - but again, this seems overly dismissive.
Combined I think you would need to address:
1) How can you prove that the most reasonable witness on the ground was less trustworthy than you are? Can you be sure you would not have perceived the same thing?
2) If a reasonable, educated witness from 100 years ago, who has express reasons to discount their experience, still admits to seeing the phenomenon - what reason can you provide for that admission?
These are not intractable, but I think other commenters have also raised various versions of these points.
The visual distortion constitutes a similar level of unexpected event, minus the specific features that a religious person would take to confirm it as religiously significant.
If 49 people saw a comet and 1 person saw a dragon, our prior is on a comet. If all 50 people saw something different, what is our prior on? I think our prior is on *something* - shouldn't that much be obvious?
If fifty people ate from a particular batch of cornbread, then 40 of them saw a comet unknown to astronomy, one (who was in another town at the time) saw a dragon, and nine had seizures despite no previous history of epilepsy, my first guess would be that nothing notable actually happened in the sky, the corn was just contaminated with hallucinogenic fungus.
Given visual distortions closely matching those which can be reliably created with a particular sort of meditation (after months of setup), at an event announced months in advance, with a crowd presumably consisting mostly of people who'd spent that time diligently trying to spiritually prepare themselves... the result is barely more unexpected than a barn-raising party ending with the barn having been successfully raised, or most participants in the Boston Marathon eventually crossing the finish line.
Sometimes children make extraordinary claims; sometimes they're taken seriously; sometimes the weather is beautiful unto distraction. When those tumblers fail to line up quite so well, it doesn't end up in the history books.
I agree nothing of note happened in the sky. But I also doubt that all witnesses were immersed in diligent spiritual preparation - indeed we have secular observers there to make fun of attendees.
I think this is honestly adjacent to Machine Elves in terms of what we are getting at. If I give a bunch of people DMT and specifically explain Machine Elves beforehand, I would expect to get elevated reports of Machine Elf-experiences. The problem is that even if I did not prime them, if I asked, some people would still describe Machine Elf-experiences.
The question is where the commonalities in such experiences originate - if it's in the individual, why does it manifest in multiple people? If it's environmental, why are only some affected and there is no obvious vector? The cornbread analogy is interesting, are you referencing that hypothesis around mass hysteria and that one type of grain?
>Given visual distortions closely matching those which can be reliably created with a particular sort of meditation (after months of setup), at an event announced months in advance, with a crowd presumably consisting mostly of people who'd spent that time diligently trying to spiritually prepare themselves...
Even assuming that most of the crowd had been diligently spiritually preparing themselves (which as any actual Catholic could tell you is not necessarily a safe assumption), "spiritual preparation" in a Catholic context generally consists of fasting, praying, and going to confession more often, not doing the "particular sort of meditation" people do to reliably see mystical visions in bright lights.
> Even assuming that most of the crowd had been diligently spiritually preparing themselves
That's not an assumption, it's a logical inference from accepted facts.
If somebody without previously documented plumbing skills was publicly informed they'd have a plumbing problem in six months, then there's a partial gap in knowledge of their activities, and when the prophesied clog arrives, they deal with it in a manner typical of a plumber with a few months of experience, Occam's Razor says they learned the skill in that time.
If that happens simultaneously to ten thousand people, in the same small geographic region, protesting that "they're not the kind of people who just suddenly become plumbers" is flatly contrary to empirical observation.
> But we have cases where it would seem that people with a strong cognitive bias *against* seeing a miracle also reported it.
Do we though? The supposed skeptical reports almost all fall apart under close inspection. There's at most one case of an actually documented skeptic, and even that one is very shaky.
I'll grant that labelling skeptics and the reliability of their accounts here is a challenge - I looked back through all Scott's "Classic Accounts" and would include those, but I can see how those could be discounted.
Just think it is interesting reading those and hearing "I was devoid of any religious feeling" then five minutes later "so the sun started spinning."
Conversion stories are popular among the religious. Doesn't mean you should take them at face value. People exaggerate the extent of the conversion for dramatic effect, as well as subconscious bias.
What some call conversion, others call updating their priors ... If you have empirical evidence that I do not for an update in your beliefs, what is the epistemological status of your beliefs in my mind? Indeterminate at best. Being overly dismissive of either conclusion (that the belief is correct or incorrect) seems unproductive.
But a huge chunk of the world's population is religious. Something's wrong with calling the mental structures of half the world weird. Seems to me they make the grade as normal, even if they are not optimal when it comes to arriving at the most accurate views about various things.
Hanania's post examined the alleged skeptical accounts, and found the evidence severely wanting.
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From Scott’s list, note the interesting fact that not a single one of these people is on record as being skeptical before the event happened. The closest thing to an exception is Carlos Mendes, but by his own testimony he seems to have only become a skeptic after being bitterly disillusioned while still having a deep emotional investment in what was going on.
Imagine you hear that there was a miracle at a church service in some remote Kentucky town. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens were all there and report seeing it. That would be quite strong evidence that something strange happened, because each of these individuals has a documented record of atheism. Alternatively, imagine that among the crowd of Kentucky hill people a few retrospectively say that they were skeptics but then God spoke to them. Obviously, that’s completely different. Reading Scott’s original quote, I was expecting testimony of a handful of Sam Harris types, but instead all we’ve got, with one exception, is witnesses looking back and telling us how they felt beforehand.
People often tell stories from their lives in ways that make them sound more interesting. Saying I was always a believer is a much less compelling narrative than having been skeptical at first and then becoming convinced. Maybe some of these people were 50/50 on whether they expected to see anything, but got carried away by the energy of the crowd, and then adjusted the story in their heads by telling themselves that they had been much more skeptical than they actually were. Also, I haven’t looked into exactly when all of the testimonies Scott cites were given, but one is mentioned as having been recounted in 1960, 43 years after the event. That is a lot of time to misremember what happened during what for many of these people might have been the most emotionally charged moment of their lives.
This is a very good point. In a community built around a core belief, demand for converts with dramatic backstories often exceeds supply, so people exaggerate their prior degree of scepticism in order to seem interesting and gain status.
If Christopher Hitchens was around to witness a miracle in Kentucky, I think that would be the miracle in itself, given he died in 2011. But I'll presume you meant "back in the heyday of the Four Horsemen".
1. If your defense rests on and assumption about "societies that are at a much more primitive state of development" it seems to me that you would need a very good explanation of why this applies to early-20th century Portugal (not to mention the more modern claims). Personally, having had close relatives born in a much more rural part of the country less than two decades after Fátima, this claim seems wrong albeit not completely impossible to me.
2. I suppose a tough question would be: what would you personally need to experience/observe in order to be convinced it was a miracle, and how should that heuristic generalise to people in different eras? It is epistemologically fine to have scenarios where it is fine for direct witnesses but not anyone else to believe, but there should also be conceivable dramatic enough scenarios where everyone should believe.
The intensity of the argument with this claim in the thread below is kinda mind-blowing. I mean, even the psychiatric diagnostic process for psychosis has a clear (and obviously necessary) exception for "commonly held (in a given culture)" beliefs in how they define delusions.
I do think these phenomena are more (2) than (1) but they are everywhere and choosing "miracle" as the even remotely likely alternative explanation seems to heavily offend Ockham's razor.
>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
"for the first time, scientists have successfully turned a skin cell into an egg cell". But the article says this is old news. "So far, the technique is like the one used to create Dolly the Sheep – the world's first cloned mammal – born back in 1996."
You say that it “is not ready to be fertilised by sperm as it already contains a full suite of chromosomes”. But afaict, the whole point of the article is that they're overcoming this barrier for the time. "So the next stage is to persuade the egg to discard half of its chromosomes in a process the researchers have termed "mitomeiosis" (the word is a fusion of mitosis and meiosis, the two ways cells divide)." That's what's new.
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)?
#8. I was going to suggest that cell signaling pathways probably aren't under selective pressure for simplification. Unlike human engineering products, there's no constraint that it be understandable, and the overheads of complexity might be small. As long as the messengers are only present in low concentrations, they require little energy. And in eukaryotes, there doesn't seem to be much selection to minimize the amount of DNA, hence excess genes are cheap.
Though I have read that prokaryotes generally are under pressure to minimize the amount of DNA (ultimately because their aerobic energy generation is limited by the area of their cell membrane, not having mitochondria). So it would be an interesting comparison whether prokaryotes generally lack long, apparently redundant signaling pathways.
> 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.
I mean that’s about the extent of the story as I heard it- but that would’ve made a much more interesting read to be sure. 6 friends in their late thirties decided to go get tummy tucks and the like from a Mexican medical spa on the cheap and make a vacation out of it. They had a great time, the surgeries did what they were supposed to, and… they also had a kidney stolen each.
But you are sure the story referred to specific people your sister knew? Could you have misunderstood something, or are you sure your sister knows a bunch of women with missing kidneys?
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.
Did you know the word gullible isn't in the Oxford English Dictionary? ;-)
Honestly, though, Scott is an MD, but he didn't automatically see the absurdity of this story? The kidney harvesting myth has been around for a couple of decades, but now it's migrated to Mexico.
1. Kidney removal is a complex medical procedure. I'm not an MD, but I understand it requires some specialized (read, expensive) medical equipment, and it can't be done hastily, because...
2. ...because of the necessity for tissue matching. A successful kidney transplant would require the donor's tissue type to match the recipient's closely. A randomly stolen organ would be almost useless and would almost certainly be rejected.
3. Which leads to the logistical issues. Any kidney-thieving doctor would have to be tied into the donor databases (which I gather require all sorts of consent documentation) and then worry about transporting the kidney.
I agree with the bottom line, but, playing devil's advocate for a moment... isn't there an established procedure for getting transplantable organs from corpses? Say, somebody rides a motorcycle into a brick wall while not wearing a helmet, shows up at the ER as chunky salsa above the neck, yet mostly fine below. Obviously the donor would be in no condition to sign consent paperwork at that point. Hypothetically, a stolen kidney could be "laundered" into that system by creating a fictitious dead person for it to come from - or falsifying relevant data about a real corpse whose organs were unsalvageable.
If the actual donor is receiving some other kind of surgery anyway, kidney-specific tools could be hidden in plain sight among the stuff intended for the aboveboard procedures. One of my father's sisters, a veterinary surgeon, once acquired a highly specialized and expensive tool for extracting a tumor from a cat's ear, which I suspect anyone who wasn't a professional in the relevant field would struggle to recognize as out of place among a lineup of lockpicks and dentistry implements, much less in an actual surgical theater.
Similarly, biopsy for tissue typing might be trivially concealed among excising or repositioning whole swaths of fat and skin for cosmetic purposes.
Thanks for asking. I was curious myself. In the US. It seems like there a lot of checks in the system...
1. A physician who is *not* part of the transplant team has to sign off the death certificate. That's reassuring!
2. Organs can only be harvested from the corpse if the previously-living corpse signed up as an organ donor, or the next of kin authorize it.
3. The body undergoes a medical evaluation to make sure it's suitable for organ harvesting (e.g., it didn't have hepatitus or was HIV positive, and whether the organs are viable for transplant).
4. Tissue typing is done.
5. If the body is brain dead, it's put on a ventilator to keep it running while the organs are harvested. I don't know how long that will keep the body viable. If the body died from circulatory death, it's chilled to prevent quick decay. Again, I don't know how long chilling is good for. I suspect both options are only good for a matter of days.
6. In the US, organs are matched with potential patients through a database called UNOS (United Network for Organ Sharing). They've got some sort of weighting formula based on urgency, compatibility, and location.
7. An OPO (Organ Procurement Organization) coordinates the logistics and transport, and makes sure all the ethical and legal boxes have been checked off.
> If the actual donor is receiving some other kind of surgery anyway, kidney-specific tools could be hidden in plain sight among the stuff intended for the aboveboard procedures
I'm sure you could get the kidney out, but then what do you do with it? You need to get it into a recipient. I mean, it's possible that in Mexico there's a whole underground black market kidney transplant list that you can get yourself on, and then hang around waiting for someone to steal an appropriately-matching kidney, but what's the business model here, really? Do I pay to get myself onto the evil stolen kidney list while also waiting on the above-board donated kidney list?
If you really wanted to run a black-market Mexican kidney operation wouldn't it be cheaper and safer to just pay poor people $5000 per kidney than to steal kidneys from American tourists?
The Fifth Vial is a pretty fun medical thriller about illegal organ harvesting, sometimes from tourists, but yeah the [UN organ harvesting concern](https://www.unodc.org/documents/human-trafficking/2008/BP011HumanTraffickingfortheRemovalofOrgans.pdf) suggests its much more likely to be your latter example, and that is pretty much how it plays out in Iran IIRC (the only country in the world with an actual open kidney market).
I think the incentive for the tourist option would be you're already getting their medical data, already performing surgery on them, and (theoretically) you're getting a healthier organ than the person so poor they're selling organs.
A new spin on an old urban myth, almost assuredly, but still an oddity to gloss over completely in an essay trying to argue *in favor of* kidney removal.
Tacking it onto a pre-existing set of surgeries makes a lot more sense than the old "wake up in the bathtub" story, too; it's not implausible the surgeons will have the relevant data to find a potential match beforehand and have it lined up. Reading through a UN report on organ trafficking (https://www.unodc.org/documents/human-trafficking/2008/BP011HumanTraffickingfortheRemovalofOrgans.pdf) that they seem quite confident it exists, but I note no numbers are mentioned at all. Hmm, fishy?
Though sometimes old urban legends and conspiracy theories have more than a grain of truth, like the North Korean abductions of Japanese people, that were broadly treated as a probably-racist myth until Kim Jong Il officially apologized and returned the survivors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_abductions_of_Japanese_citizens
I actually checked out that UN human organ trafficking doc. It's from 2008, and they seem to take it for granted that it's happening, but they don't offer up any data. The discussion section asks the question...
> Often surgeons who are performing illicit transplants are well-known among professional colleagues. Why are their illegal activities rarely reported to authorities?
Answer, maybe because illegal organ trafficking isn't actually happening?
'Incredible', I think kind of does. For the literal sense of 'incredible'.
Nobody in Mexico, full of poor Mexicans and even poorer South/Central Americans disconnected from their support network and desperate for opportunities, is going to illicitly harvest kidneys from pretty white UMC American women. And if they did, there's no way we'd be learning about it from an offhand blog comment by someone whose wife's friend says it happened to a bunch of her friends but, meh, we've all got other things to talk about.
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.
The 1950s in Canada must have had at least 60% weekly attendance. I think it would have been a bit lower in the United States but still in the 50% range.
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.
Whether miracles defy the odds of physics kind of depends on what your definition of "defying" is. C. S. Lewis described miracles as not violating the laws of nature, but creating a situation that would otherwise not have occurred that then follows the laws of nature. He describes a miracle as something that is interlocked with nature going forwards in time, but not backwards:
"It is...inaccurate to define a miracle as something that breaks the laws of Nature. It doesn’t. If I knock out my pipe I alter the position of a great many atoms: in the long run, and to an infinitesimal degree, of all the atoms there are. Nature digests or assimilates this event with perfect ease and harmonises it in a twinkling with all other events. It is one more bit of raw material for the laws to apply to, and they apply. I have simply thrown one event into the general cataract of events and it finds itself at home there and conforms to all other events. If God annihilates or creates or deflects a unit of matter He has created a new situation at that point. Immediately all Nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. It finds itself conforming to all the laws. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born. We see every day that physical nature is not in the least incommoded by the daily inrush of events from biological nature or from psychological nature. If events ever come from beyond Nature altogether, she will be no more incommoded by them. Be sure she will rush to the point where she is invaded, as the defensive forces rush to a cut in our finger, and there hasten to accommodate the newcomer. The moment it enters her realm it obeys all her laws. Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested. The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern. It does not violate the law’s proviso, ‘If A, then B’: it says, ‘But this time instead of A, A2,’ and Nature, speaking through all her laws, replies ‘Then B2’ and naturalises the immigrant, as she well knows how. She is an accomplished hostess.
"A miracle is emphatically not an event without cause or without results. Its cause is the activity of God: its results follow according to Natural law. In the forward direction (i.e. during the time which follows its occurrence) it is interlocked with all Nature just like any other event. Its peculiarity is that it is not in that way interlocked backwards, interlocked with the previous history of Nature. And this is just what some people find intolerable. The reason they find it intolerable is that they start by taking Nature to be the whole of reality. And they are sure that all reality must be interrelated and consistent. I agree with them. But I think they have mistaken a partial system within reality, namely Nature, for the whole. That being so, the miracle and the previous history of Nature may be interlocked after all but not in the way the Naturalist expected: rather in a much more roundabout fashion. The great complex event called Nature, and the new particular event introduced into it by the miracle, are related by their common origin in God, and doubtless, if we knew enough, most intricately related in His purpose and design, so that a Nature which had had a different history, and therefore been a different Nature, would have been invaded by different miracles or by none at all. In that way the miracles and the previous course of Nature are as well interlocked as any other two realities, but you must go back as far as their common Creator to find the interlocking. You will not find it within Nature."
CS Lewis definition of miracle --as a changed initial condition-makes no difference. Under laws of physics, any initial condition results from previous conditions.
Father Stanley Jaki, a physics PhD himself has written Miracles and Physics with the idea that there is no necessary conflict between miracles and physics.
A law of nature is an observed regularity. A miracle is an anomaly, and remains an anomaly. The miracle does not update the law but remains an exception to it,.
> 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!
Heat shock is the sudden transition from cold to hot. Sauna use is a pretty good proxy for it, because the warm water transfers heat to the body quite quickly. Tropical climates are not as good a proxy, because they have more of a slow and steady heat.
#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.
I would argue that no names are as American as repurposed president (or other major figure) names. Put a repurposed president name next to one of those surnames where you can tell it's an originally-German name that's been Anglicized and you get the most American names you can think of. Jefferson Bower. Jackson Brown. Franklin Miller.
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
For Hume, it’s something that violates a law, where a “law” is a generalization that you are so confident of that you would doubt an observation that seemed to violate it rather than doubting it. He doesn’t say much about what sort of evidence would lead you to posit something as a law, but you can’t really say much systematic about this sort of thing in a Bayesian context. It’s psychological, not logical.
Also, I think it’s a bit anachronistic to say Hume wasn’t a good Bayesian - I suspect he might have been more of a Bayesian than Bayes! (The term “bayesian” itself doesn’t appear until the mid 20th century, after Ramsey and de Finetti and Jeffreys have re-popularized versions of the idea.)
So funny enough - he wasn't a Bayesian! (not sure if I said it or SA did, but I'm reading a lot of Hume research and so I've basically learned this in the last 36 hours). The mathematical/calculation way of understanding philosophy and probability was starting around the time of Hume, but he was never really part of that tradition, conceptualizing probability as more about weighing evidence than calculating it, if that makes sense.
Historically, we know he read about Bayes in the last 10 years or so of his (Hume's) life but he didn't really update any of his philosophy accordingly, because it was trying to accomplish something different (one can assume). I think Millican and others have done a good job of updating/revising some of Hume's conclusions with Bayes in mind, but we need not do that to appreciate Hume's contribution.
Yeah, he's definitely not thinking in terms of numerical calculations. But I don't think that's essential to Bayesianism. What is essential is thinking of all reasoning in terms of uncertainty.
" 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 during a discussion of wasteful spending decisions by local authorities 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 completed 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 sculptor 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.
Caring enough to do anything typically falls out as caring enough to put in the effort to do it. Putting something up generally requires much more effort than taking it back down. So in fact, the amount of caring required to put something up is much greater than the amount for taking it down. Which means that if caring enough were enough, then we'd probably never have anything up.
In light of that, it makes more sense to require caring a lot more about taking something down than the usual amount of effort would indicate.
If people who wanted a statue taken down were required to put in the same amount of design and attention that it took to create that statue, including the experience required to know how to build it, a lot fewer statues would be taken down. And the world might be a more just, and possibly prettier place.
The statue stuff is such a small insignificant issue compared to what the whole "racial justice" movement is trying to address. I think if someone doesn't take racial justice seriously because of their view on statues that just means they never took it seriously to begin with.
The problem with these movements is that they tend to focus a lot of their time and attention on small insignificant issues.
Similarly, any "environmentalist" that spends most of their time talking about plastic straws and AI water use isn't worth taking seriously. It mostly doesn't matter exactly what they are saying. The focus on the small issue, by itself, is evidence that they lack a sense of scale, and so aren't worth taking seriously.
#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.
It does a very slow job of sloppily folding some hand towels (the easiest thing to fold) and then piles them messily into a basket. I am not impressed.
I work in robotics. On a technical level this demo is extremely impressive, far beyond what most robotics teams can reproduce. On a human level it's trivial and a bit embarrassing. Such is the nature of robotics as a field: For an example that is relatively easy (easier at least) from a technical perspective, but extremely impressive on a human level, check out pick-and-place robots like this (no affiliation): https://youtu.be/m_1G1_m3EBQ?si=4qBPZC5a_sfT-Ey-&t=8
Fair enough, and I'm not saying I could build something better. But it's a very long way from being a useful laundry assistant or otherwise passing the "laundry test", the point of which is to demonstrate that a robot can handle a messy and unpredictable real world environment and adjust its actions as needed to get good results.
Like, what is the challenge that is so impressive?
Well, traditional, "easy" robotics basically works by pre-programming every single move precisely. "19mm to the left and 3mm down, followed by an arc with a radius of 35mm ending at coordinate XYZ" etc, etc, for extremely explicit instructions that goes on for thousands or millions of lines of code for even trivial tasks. This is basically how everything from washing machines and 3D printers to entire automated assembly lines in factories work. With good hardware and careful coding this can be extremely fast and precise, but requires that everything that the system interacts with is exactly the same every time, in a way the programmer could predict and compensate for. Like, if the robot is taking components out of a stack, then you could add sensors to detect how many items are left in the stack and compensate the next movement by adjusting the position where the grabber tries to pick it up by (height of the component) * (number of components left), but if one item in the stack is placed crooked in a random way, that is a much harder problem, since you can't know ahead of time what compensation to program and when to run it. Now, this example is a mostly solved problem with computer vision and more complex code, but it illustrates the point that robotics gets harder the less predictable the environment around it is, from an extremely high baseline of 'predictable'.
Dumping out a pile of soft flimsy fabric, all of the same colour on a low-contrast background, and having the robot parse the environment, manipulate the very unpredictable fabric, while continuously adjusting it's movements in real-time response to the flopping-about of the towels is extremely difficult, and not something I've seen accomplished before. I'm impressed! But at the same time, it shows just how far we still have to go to make something like this a real thing.
("Just use a neural net and training data!" Yeah. Everyone is trying to do that, and whoever succeeds will revolutionize a thousand industries. We (as a field) are making progress though, slowly, bit-by-bit. The crooked component stack in the example above would have crashed an entire assembly line in the '80s, but is easy now (though it still happens). Waymo's etc are really pushing the boundaries on cars. A $400 robot vacuum does wonders of navigation and object avoidance that would have been revolutionary a decade ago. Progress, but slowly.)
The pick-and-place robot is placing tiny components on a circuit board. It has eight pickers on the toolhead: When it comes close to the camera the pickers dip down and pick a component each from little white tapes on spools. Then a flashing red thing that zips by: That's a camera that reads all the components to make sure they were gripped successfully, and what orientation they are in. Then the toolhead moves to each of the eight locations in turn, the pickers rotate to the correct orientation and place the components down with better-than 0.1 mm precision (just guessing here, but it would have to be at least that). The components are probably on the order of 1mm in size. If the operator sneezed with the cover open like that all the placed components would move, and the part would be ruined. When the guy pans over to the screen, we can se that it's placing ~21 000 components/hour, so about 6/second.
I've done that type of work manually for prototype boards on occasion, and I'm happy if I can reach 6 components/minute, and then I'll probably mess it up every hundred components or so. I'd be disappointed if that machine misses more than 1 in 100 000.
> 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).
America certainly thinks that it's still entitled to its sphere of influence - Putin won't be able to put nukes in Cuba any more than Khrushchev could.
Rubbish. The core US position is "let the Ukranians decide what they want". They don't want Russia, they're willing to fight and die for that position, and we have the moral obligation to help them out.
The war is not an excuse inasmuch as it was forced on them and both the things you are complaining about are completely de rigeur. Do you actually find them objectionable or you are just trying to find any argument to support Russia no matter how absurd?
That's called the draft. Pretty much every country has one, especially in wartime. It would be really weird for us to pressure Ukraine out of dislike of the fact that they have a draft.
> 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?
My guess (only a guess) is that some US presidents honestly wanted to make some moves to appease Russia, but were surprised by how intensely the countries they wanted to sacrifice didn't themselves want to be sacrificed.
I think I heard that Poland basically blackmailed Obama to let them join NATO. Biden's help to Ukraine also seemed carefully measured to prevent Russia from taking over entire Ukraine, but also to prevent Ukraine to take all its territories back. (Which from some perspective is an aggression against Russia, but from another perspective, is a concession to Russia to keep a part of the territory. Glass half-empty, half-full.) Trump would also be perfectly happy if Russia kept the territories it already controls, if only everyone stopped fighting right now and gave him the Nobel peace prize.
If you compare the military and economical power of USA and Russia (ignoring the hybrid war), USA could basically squash Russia like a bug. A few nukes would probably fly. A decisive military action could reduce the damage, but not entirely to zero. The difference is that the democratic West doesn't have the stomach to do this, while Russia doesn't give a fuck about how many people die on either side. (You can see it clearly when you compare the reactions to the tragedies of WW2: the sentiment in the West is "never again", while the popular slogan in Russia is "Можем повторить" = "we can do it again"; literally the opposite.) And when USA finally gets a sufficiently undemocratic president, he turns out to be a Russian puppet. Anyway, my point is that the fact that Russia still exists as a sovereign country, and is even allowed to keep colonies (ethnic Russians are maybe 10% of the Russian empire), if already a huge concession towards someone who lost the Cold War, and had to beg their former enemies to help feed their starving population.
So it's not that the US presidents don't do many things to appease Russia, it's just that it's never enough, because Russians keep comparing their current situation to the days of their glory. Unlike e.g. Britain or France, who accepted that their former empires are mostly gone, and learned to live with their neighbors in peace. Russia cannot even have friendly relationships with Belarus without simultaneously planning their annexation.
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).
Both of these things were part of Obama’s “Russian reset” concessions. He said public support was a requirement for joining (which ruled out countries like Ukraine, where only 20% wanted to join) and ended the missile defense plan with Poland. Russia invaded Ukraine anyway in 2014 (over EU Association, not NATO or missiles).
Although it is true that Putin was not hiding the requirement that Ukraine not do an EU Association deal. But it certainly had nothing to do with “security” in the way most people think of it (*maybe* security for the regime if Ukraine became wealthy under EU Association and Russians later demanded the same).
> which ruled out countries like Ukraine, where only 20% wanted to join
That's just pits Western propaganda machine against Russian propaganda machine, and it's easy enough to see how it ends in the long run. Certainly didn't prevent Ukraine from putting goal of NATO membership into its constitution. It's easy enough to see how a government that desires NATO membership can spend some time and money to convince the population to reach the necessary threshold of support. Or fake the polls.
> over EU Association, not NATO or missiles
I think the war actually started because the new government terminated the agreement that allowed Russian fleet to stay in Crimea.
I was wrong here, I admit. But I still think Ukraine under the new management would not prolong the agreement past 2017 when it was set to expire, and would seek NATO membership, even if Russia has not annexed Crimea. Admittedly, this is just a personal belief, not supported by any good arguments I can bring up right now.
I don't have handy sources to cite, but imo NATO expansion was always a red herring thrown out for gullible* Westerners. The reason Russia cares about NATO is that NATO membership prevents Russia from bullying countries it used to control with various means up to military force (Hungary '56, Czechoslovakia '68, Poland '80 etc.) Else why would Russia insist on no missile _defense_ systems too near borders? Central European countries with very recent histories of subjugation to Moscow know the score, which is why they spent the 90s alternately begging and bashing down doors to be let into a not too enthusiastic NATO, and which is why Poland and Czech Republic spend proportionately the most to help Ukraine now.
* 'Gullible' is not quite the right word. To quote Pushkin, "I'm not so very hard to gull, in fact I'm happy to be gulled". I.e. these are people who are looking for plausible rationalizations for policies they prefer for other reasons.
> Else why would Russia insist on no missile _defense_ systems too near borders?
Missile defence systems near borders damage MAD. I'd imagine if Russia or China tried to place modern missile defences in Mexico (or Cuba!), they would quickly find that US would go to war to prevent it.
But I agree that Russia's main goal is to be able to bully its sphere of influence. If any policymakers deluded themselves into thinking this is not the case, they do not deserve their posts. Russia sees this as the matter of survival, because it doesn't have economic or cultural clout to keep its neighbors in check (admittedly, it seems that economic power was being overestimated for some time, as Trump's attempts to wield it show; even America can't just bully other countries with tariffs and sanctions, at least not past some point).
>"I'd imagine if Russia or China tried to place modern missile defences in Mexico (or Cuba!), they would quickly find that US would go to war to prevent it."
With our missile bases in Wyoming, Montana, & North Dakota, I think interceptors that far south would be useless.
Which raises a question about the extent to which interceptors in Europe affect MAD (at least between the US & RF): both sides are pointing their ICBMs over the poles (pun left as an exercise to the reader), without meaningful overflight of Europe.
> Russia sees this as the matter of survival, because it doesn't have economic or cultural clout to keep its neighbors in check
Indeed. And instead of doing its homework and developing said clout, it keeps expending its resources on bullying weaker neighbors (that's what "sphere of influence" means; China and US and Japan are also neighbors but try bullying _them_), creating a vicious circle. It is however true that Russia with its current form of social-political organization would not survive developing said clout - I mentioned it 10+ years ago (https://candide3.wordpress.com/2014/02/08/sochi/) - so it is indeed a matter of survival for Russia understood as the form of social-political organization that has been in control of that territory for many centuries.
> And instead of doing its homework and developing said clout
Sometimes I wonder if that's even possible to do at this point. They've probably already driven off or killed anyone in their population that had the potential to accomplish anything worth a damn. Maybe this really is the only path left to them.
There were some hopes of economic growth in the early 00's (Putin's main propaganda slogan in those days was "GDP doubling"). Of course, with endemic corruption and the lack of either competitive tech or vast masses of poor peasants ready for urbanization this didn't happen, GDP in fact plateaued. So, he had to look for other way of bolstering his popularity and ambitions, and there wasn't much to choose from.
The NATO expansion argument fails against the evidence. It's plausible for Russia to be concerned about NATO expansion, and many of the things it has done under Putin make sense in that light - but not the most famously bad thing Putin did (invade Ukraine in 2022). To join NATO requires that a country have no territorial disputes, and Ukraine still claims ownership of Crimea. So long as this territorial dispute continues, Ukraine cannot join NATO, so in 2022 it was impossible for Ukraine to join NATO.
Plausibly, in 2014 Putin's only concern was NATO expansion, but it is fairly clear by rhetoric and strategy that in February 2022, his goal was the complete submission of Ukraine to Russian domination, based on the (false) theory that Ukrainians are confused Russians, thus the drive towards Kyiv and talking about how Ukraine was invented by the Bolsheviks.
The problem is that Putin and his regime do not believe in the same things that the US believes, with respect to international politics. The US basically believes in the Wilsonian model of national self-determination and democracy (in part, no doubt, because liberal democracies almost never go to war with each other); Putin sees liberal democracy as an epiphenomena of American power, like communism in the Warsaw Pact, and instead believes in realism and great power politics (and that Russia should be treated as a great power despite having a smaller GDP than Italy and being fought to a standstill by a country with a fifth its population, no geographic barriers, and rounding error foreign support). The US is very powerful and thus small deviations from general American beliefs can have large effects, but if the US was willing to spend as large a percent of its human and economic capital on military expansionism as Russia is, we would have conquered Canada and Mexico by now.
> 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.
I may have have been very clear, but what I meant is not that they are not aware of each other's POVs, but rather both sides consider other's POV completely invalid. Or, rather, US considers Russia's POV invalid, and Russia considers that it exhausted all possible offers for settlement of the differences.
Of course, not US president would support Russia's actions in Ukraine (including Trump, I believe), but it's not out of questions that some of them might eased off NATO expansion a bit, which was Russia's main concern in 00's and 10's. Of course, that would mean acknowledging that Russia has a vote in some of the world's affairs, and it seems that US cannot tolerate that.
At the same time, it's out of question for any Russian president to allow NATO ships into Crimea, but I'd think that Ukraine's EU membership might have been negotiated (if very grudgingly), and Russia had no grand worldwide designs that conflicted with American views before late 00's. Indeed, Russia was pretty eager to be US partner in 90's and early 00's (Russia provided support to US troops in Afghanistan, for example), but only as equal, or at least semi-equal.
> but it's not out of questions that some of them might eased off NATO expansion a bit, which was Russia's main concern in 00's and 10's
Between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the present day, Russia has repeatedly taken territory from neighbors by way of force. If Russia was concerned about NATO expansion, then it's only fair to point out that their neighbors had to fear Russian expansion. Only one of those happens to be non-violent, by the way - NATO expansion occurs at the request and consent of the country that asks.
Then there's the presumption in fearing NATO expansion - why? Why does Russia fear that its neighbors are part of a security alliance that, while anti-Russia, has not aggressed against the Bear itself? There is no reason to think that a war with Russia was or is in the cards if Russia simply keeps to its own borders and tries diplomatic maneuvers to retain influence in Eastern Europe.
I see arguments like yours all the time. Such arguments have sympathy for Russia, they very rarely seem to actually think about how rational or acceptable Russian demands are.
> Of course, that would mean acknowledging that Russia has a vote in some of the world's affairs, and it seems that US cannot tolerate that.
No one objects to Russia having a voice in world affairs. Russia insists that its neighbors not have theirs. You and everyone else who says things like this tend to elide this fact.
Does Cuba have a right to host Russia's nukes, if it chooses to? This is the essential humiliation that Russian nationalists are most vexed by, because in it the geopolitical asymmetry is laid most bare. I have no sympathy for this, because Russia isn't a "great power" in ways that matter, it's a gas station with nukes, to paraphrase McCain, but those nationalists need much more convincing. Of course, the presence of those very nukes is a strong protection from getting truly crushed, so I expect this nest of festering resentment is going to continue lashing out against its smug enemies in ways big and small for many years to come.
It’s not asymmetry. Nuclear weapons are not comparable to NATO. Indeed, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons and agreed not to acquire or host them in exchange for a Russian agreement to respect their borders and sovereignty in accordance with the Helsinki Final Act, which recognizes their right to join whatever alliance they wanted. (“They also have the right to belong or not to belong to international organizations, to be or not to be a party to bilateral or multilateral treaties including the right to be or not to be a party to treaties of alliance”) Few would care if Cuba joined the CSTO.
> Does Cuba have a right to host Russia's nukes, if it chooses to?
Yes, Cuba has that right. It's a narrow concession, much narrower than comparisons to that situation imply.
> This is the essential humiliation that Russian nationalists are most vexed by, because in it the geopolitical asymmetry is laid most bare.
Then they should be honest about what bothers them. That's the first step to thinking about why Ukraine and Eastern Europe might want protection from Russia.
>Then they should be honest about what bothers them.
There's an exquisitely smug word for when they try this sort of thing - whataboutism. By now they're pretty sure that the "rules-based international order" is hypocritical nonsense, barely hiding that it's actually the law of the jungle. Of course, they're screwed either way in the long term.
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.
That's no reason not to have an agreement. The bigger problem is that while it's clear what Russia wants from American, it's unclear what American might want from Russia (aside from alliance against China, but that seems like too big a price).
America wants Russia to sit down, shut up, and keep the gas flowing.
Russia thinks it's still relevant on the world stage, and is leveraging the military equipment it inherited from the USSR to sustain its Potemkin country; given the burn rate in Ukraine, hopefully that'll implode soon.
America wants Russia to stop invading and interfering with its neighbors. America doesn't much care about the gas, there is far more gas elsewhere in the world and a good chunk of it is found in America to begin with (making Russia a gas competitor to some extent).
Every president before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 made significant substantial concessions. Obama ended Bush’s missile defense shield plan, raised requirements for NATO membership, ended sanctions on Russian state arms dealers, helped Russia get into the WTO, etc.
The issue is that the points of view are not reconcilable. Ukraine wanted to be a sovereign state that could do things like make its own trade deals, and the US/EU were committed to honoring that. Russia considered Ukraine part of Russia’s sphere of influence (or even part of Russia), where they had the right to use any measures if Ukraine adopted policies they disagreed with. These views are simply not compatible.
#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."
TIL. I just sort of assumed that all societies were near the Malthusian limit most of the time. Maybe not (although it would be nice if the post had more specific data).
Yeah I find this part kneecaps the article's conclusion. Even the 10 part long series the very author writes at the same time kinda assumes people self regulate themselves to get barely neutral reproduction rate.
> 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 would think PPP is not perfect but it's overall a better reflection of China's national economic/military strength than nominal GDP (if we're limited to judging power just based on those two options). Nominal gives a better idea of China's ability to purchase imports, but PPP is a better indicator of their domestic economic power. The strong majority of China's goods and military equipment are produced domestically.
#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–)
James' post also got significantly more Likes than my own. I think the "Likes gap" might be best explained by the fact that he has more than twice as many subscribers than I do. Alternatively, maybe we are the dumb ones!
But no—can't be; I mean, surely they do not, like, follow him around on Substack, '♥️'-ing comments! Because in that case, why do *my* (4-5) subscribers not do similarly when *I* get into arguments?!–
Well he did restack my post several times, giving his audience multiple chances to click through. But I think part of it is just a game of percentages: his initial comment on my post got 5 likes, which is about 2.5% of his subscriber pool. So based on your subscribers, you should expect to get 0.125 likes per post. :-)
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.
1. It's a story about retail investors, and I'd be a bit surprised if the economic effects of bubbles were primarily about retail investors making unwise investments. I guess I don't have specific data against that, but it just seems surprising that with big financial players making multi-billion dollar moves, the main economic moving effect is all the average Joes who waste their savings.
2. People losing a significant chunk of their savings because they were in bad investments... well obviously that's bad, but why would that cause immediate, acute pain simultaneous with the pop? You say "Later, it is time to spend their savings", and the word 'later' is relevant - in this story, the pain comes 'later' when people need the savings, and obviously some people are going to be unlucky and that's going to more-or-less correspond with the pop, but you'd expect a more gradual, slow-rolling effect in this model.
It doesn't have to be about retail investors. Take as given that most people are going about earning lots of money, and then quickly spending it on luxury experiences. Maybe they save some money in bank accounts and bonds. Businesses are paying these people lots of money to pointlessly throw away valuable resources. They also hand over valuable resources to satisfy consumer spending, which is very high. The pool of real assets is in steady decline, but no one notices because the businesses are flush with money, provided by large superinvestors.
Eventually the pool of real goods runs out. Employees lose their jobs. Inflation takes off. Yada, yada.
The actual *Pop* is when some critical asset runs out, say, metal, and everything fails all at once. Most people are *investing* in jobs/careers, which doesn't directly expose them to bubbles, but can leave them bereft of assets when the job they spent years advancing vanishes into mist, and all their skills turn out to be worse than useless. This becomes even more extreme if they're in debt, as is often the case.
1) This is a story about investment writ-large. You shouldn’t take “people in an economy” to mean only retail investors. People also need to make investment/consumption decisions on behalf of companies. Meta is deciding whether to invest its capital in building out AI or improving its ad business in Asia or whatever. If it turns out AI is a bubble, Meta will have wasted billions of dollars it could have put to better use.
2) I don’t see why this would be gradual. If everyone expects AI to not be profitable enough to justify the AI investment, companies lose value, go bankrupt, etc pretty immediately. Anyone who thought they had money saved for the future is immediately disabused of that notion. It all happens at once.
Yeah I agree, I got confused by his argument in the first few paragraphs. It's like he's missing that the whole concept of a 'bubble' is that at the time people don't know they are in it. They don't know that resources invested in the bubble are being wasted, so how could people 'feel sad' about that!
The problem with bubbles is people have expectations about the returns on those investments, and plan on the basis that reality will meet those expectations. Naturally, it's only when reality doesn't meet expectations (the 'pop') that 'everyone would be sad'.
It's like arguing: "the pain of a failed start-up can't be because workers and investors have wasted their time and money. If that were the case workers should feel sad before the start up fails, because that's when all that time and money are being expended and worthless stock options are being given in return. Once the start-up fails they would feel happy because now they can get jobs elsewhere."
Debt isn't necessary to this, but tends to amplify the process (and in practice every 'bubble' seems to have a debt/leverage component). As painful as the failed start-up is for everyone, it's going to be worst for someone who borrowed a bunch of money from friends and family to invest - the pain can then spread if they are unable to pay them back. The problem remains the fact that the money invested was wasted.
I think the argument is basically, if you're in a bubble, less useful stuff is being produced (since it's being wasted on the bubble), so you should notice the lack of stuff in your life *during* the bubble and not afterwards. E.g., if OpenAI is spending a lot of money on graphics cards, then people who want to play video games should be sad *before* the bubble pops, because they can't afford graphics cards. Once the bubble pops, stuff gets redirected to a more worthy cause, and the gamers should be happy that their hardware is cheaper now.
(And in fact I'm pretty sure I *have* seen people complaining about how expensive the latest graphics cards are getting.)
I think the flaw in this line of reasoning is that "stuff" in the industrial sector (capital investments) takes time to actually start producing "stuff" in your personal life, so the fact that you have less stuff in your life so that OpenAI can grow is not an unusual or bad thing, until you learn that OpenAI is not going to fulfill its end of the bargain by giving you "more stuff later" in the form of a cool AI assistant.
This doesn’t really seem to capture things like: companies suddenly failing, waves of unemployment, people defaulting on mortgages and other loans, the cascading impacts on other parts of the economy, etc. The consequences are much more complex and structural than people
being sad their savings account is smaller than they hoped.
I disagree. Say two companies found out they both had ten million less than they thought. One company is highly leveraged, so missing that money means they can’t make payments on their massive loans, and the company fails. The other company is not highly leveraged, and they make less profits, or need to borrow some money to get through, but are ultimately fine. Both companies had less money than they expected, but the outcome is entirely different due to other structural factors. You can’t understand the ripple effects of bubbles without understanding things like leverage.
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.
Oh my, Thanks. It's been years since I thought about the Schickele Mix, back when I liked public radio. (Many great radio shows.)
Edit; I came back to add that I found almost all the Schickele Mix episodes on line. One hour each and over 100 of them! I need something else to listen to when I'm working, there are not enough good podcasts for me. (D. Carlin, L. Fridman, S. Carrol, some Rogan. But I'd like to consume ~10-15 hours of podcasts per week. )
“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.
Can you tell me more about why you think binge drinking is worse than daily drinking in terms of dementia risk? The current leading theory for the mechanism of alcohol-related dementia is a combination neurotoxicity of alcohol, and the indirect effect on the brain of malnutrition (people who drink a lot of alcohol tend to skip meals because alcohol is calorically dense). Also presumably good studies of alzheimer dementia would want to exclude people with alcohol-related dementia.
To the last point, that is impractical to do in a messy real world where things can have more than one cause. Picture, for instance, someone with risk factors for dementia who also drinks a lot. Could have been that they'd have been fine with only the drinking, or fine with only the risk factors, but the combinations of both was what crossed the threshold.
My supposition would be based on concentration of alcohol achieved. Binge drinkers will have higher concentrations of alcohol with presumably more direct neurotoxicity effects at higher concentrations, which almost certainly correlate with degree of intoxication achieved, blacking out etc…. The hypothesis would be more consistent BAC of say .12 or higher is less toxic than intermittent BAC of .25 or higher.
“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?
I’m still too young to get the shingles vaccine but plenty old enough to have gotten chickenpox as a kid. I think most millennials are in this situation.
Accordingly, the recommended age for the shingles vaccine was lowered from 60 to 50 in 2011 in the US (similar trend in Canada, Israel, and the UK). There are even ongoing trials in people aged 30 and above (e.g., NCT05856084).
Based on the above, I tried to get Shingrix where I live (UK). I'm 32yo. Not a single pharmacy was willing to give it to someone under 40. So I gave up. Three weeks later, I got shingles 🙃
So after a few months, I went to Turkey and got the shingles vax.
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.
More precisely vixerunt, "they have lived", said Cicero after he had three Catiline conspirators executed. Well, at least in the cheap ebook originally from 19thC that I bought.
Richard Pipes wrote an autobiography named Vixi. (I seem to recall liking it, but it was quite some time ago.) I don't know if he was aware of the connotation.
#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?
You are clearly a Hananianist who should be burned at the stake for heresy, questioning the wisdom of the National Association of People Who Hate Richard Hanania with a Burning Passion.
>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.
One of the points of Scott's article was that we don't see this level of wild discrepancy between the Fatima reports.
>almost every testimonial contains some elements of the consensus story, in approximately the correct order.
>The case for self-contradiction is that very few testimonials contain all six elements: most are a random subset of those claims. Also, nobody can agree on which colors were involved in (4), or in which order.
>[...]
>I don’t really have much that is non-obvious to say about these discordant testimonies. Aside from the ones with the UFO-like object, they seem about as discordant as you would expect from panicked people seeing a real inexplicable phenomenon - with the exception of some people who are absolutely terrified by the falling sun, and other people who don’t mention it at all.
This doesn't read to me like "we don't see this level of wild discrepancy". It's more like, "if we ignore the fact that the testimonies show a number of really wild discrepancies, then we can make it seem like the testimonies only show slightly-less-wild discrepancies".
Given the rest of the article, I really don't think Scott thinks the testimonies show sufficiently wild discrepancies to render them suspect. If he did, he'd have said so, and saved himself the trouble of trying to come up with an admittedly vague and unsatisfying naturalistic explanation for why the sun might look like it was changing colour and bouncing around the sky.
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)
It would be nice for someone to try a bunch of times with each month to see what the distribution is. (Maybe with December it does it 85% of the time while with August it’s only 30% or whatever.)
I would not be surprised if there’s some dependence on the month - and if so, I would guess winter months are more likely to get “yes” and summer months are more likely to get “no”, just based on triggering ice age associations or not (like different dates in December triggering different results for Germany - and I would also guess different months would trigger different results in France or Russia, which had some famous months when particular revolutions happened.)
IME, LLMs become very stupid when you tell them "answer in a single word." e.g. here some of those types used it to get Grok to say it would rather save 1 Jew than 1 million non-Jews:
Remember that, because of how they're programmed, LLMs are more like improv actors than ordinary conversationalists. One word responses can more easily get them to improv a stupid response.
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.
I don’t know anything about “Credentialed Experts TM” thing. Here’s what real life accountability looks like: I can autodidact my way into chip design all I want, as long as the chips I design work. If they don’t work, no amount of clever explaining will help me keep my job.
Y. never ever had a job, nor a teacher who would tell him that his work was crap and he had to redo it or fail the class. All he does is writing many words, words, words. Good job if you can get it I guess.
Okay, you know the overwhelming majority of fields do NOT have as a concrete connection with reality as chip design, right? Sure, if you take classes you might get good at producing work the teacher accepts, but any correlation that might have with being RIGHT in any sense resembling "the chips I design work" is coincidental at best.
The point is that the teacher represents an external check you have to satisfy, it can be arbitrary, but the discipline and consequences is the point. He’s had none.
This doesn't seem very different from "he doesn't have a degree, so he's not worth listening to." If you're going so far as saying it's an arbitrary check for "discipline and consequences," you might as well go a little further and stop suggesting it has anything to do with being objectively right or wrong, and admit it's simply a matter of status.
Circular in the sense that all evidence that your sensory apparatus tells you about an external world is circular, or something more problematic than that? As far as I can tell, nearly every field has enough interactions with other fields that we get a lot of evidence of overlapping consensus about the world. There are at any time a few prominent examples where experts in one field are committed to claims that are incompatible with those of experts in another field (like when late 19th century physicists were confident that the Earth couldn’t be over a hundred million years old, despite the biological evidence), but those usually get resolved.
Are there any instances where experts have remained systematically worse than non-experts for decades?
First, you adding the "for decades" requirement unprompted is interesting: why would expect it to EVER be true that experts are worse than non-experts even briefly?
Second, it looks like you're ignoring the existence of all but a few very narrow academic disciplines (STEM essentially): the overwhelming majority of fields do not have any concrete connection with reality, and the highest authority on what is "true" is consensus among more senior/better-credentialled Experts, unmoored from any independently testable experimental fact about the world. This is the circularity I was referring to.
Finally, yes, I think there ARE such instances where the views of a randomly chosen well-credentialled Expert are systematically more wrong than those of an intelligent layman (I trust you'll agree that's the fair comparison?), but would telling you what I think they are convince you of anything? You'd just say the experts are correct and those who disagree with them are wrong. But here's one anyway: racial differences in intelligence.
One of my complaints with Eliezer, and rationalists in general, is that I think the whole, "Politics is the mindkiller" shtick causes them to be terrible at politics, and this generalizes into being terrible at thinking in an adversarial environment, which sort of is what politics is.
Hence being pro-Keynesian, pro-covid-reactionism, pro-Ukraine, etc. Which, I suspect the same errors that fuel those beliefs, also fuel AI safety, which arguments often rely heavily on a "I've spent a lot of time on this subject and know what I'm doing" appeal to internal competence, which I do not trust in light of his other positions on subjects where it's easier for me to judge him competently, such as this one.
In a sense, and in so far as I'm confident I'm right.
In general, disagreeing with my chess moves makes people terrible at chess too. Even Stockfish will, under most circumstances, make the same moves as me. Sure, Stockfish will occasionally disagree with me, and those occasional disagreements very reliably add up to me losing against Stockfish, but I do not think it physically possible to disagree with the majority of my moves, and still be good at chess.
I can't give as deterministic a proof of various political questions as I can chess positions. I try not to be extremely confident about more issues than I have to. With that said, in order to believe anything at all, eventually, it is necessary to have some positions that seem far easier than more complicated issues, and then to base positions on complicated issues on simpler issues.
In sum, what I'm trying to get at here, is that Eliezer's statement here is not only wrong, but egregiously wrong, and along a vector which forms a pattern with other egregious errors, which seems to me to correspond with failing to train a necessary skill.
There is a problematic issue in debate that, if the other side just refuses to admit to any part of the other's reality, it can be impossible to get any sort of point across. I would not expect someone who thought the article referenced was well written and reasonably thought out to be convinced by my own argument. The flow of logic is (Given that this claim was surprisingly terrible by rationalist standards) & (Given that this claim was surprisingly political by rationalist standards) -> (Implies that rationalism produces poor reasoning on political issues)
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.
Not successful; large. When we talk about bubbles popping it just means there were enough poor investments that them failing caused a significant macroeconomic consequence. Individual investments fail all the time, but, for instance, the US housing market going into a downward spiral because no one was pricing risk accurately is a bubble popping.
Did you read the actual tweet or the summary? How is this inconsistent with the example Eliezer gave of banks failing resulting in not enough money to conduct trade? That seems like a straightforward a restatement of your last two sentences: banks can't depend on their past investments anymore, so money effectively exits the evonomy.
> Instead, the effect of the physical bubble-waste is vastly dominated by the effect of more money being borrowed, and more money being spent, that then goes flowing around in loops through a larger economy, that was previously running under-capacity.
Is also from the post.
I'm confused at what different point is being made.
Also, the moment people start to realize that the future economy will be bad, the present economy becomes bad. Because the impending economic badness causes them to cash out of the economy, putting their money in boringly safe nonproductive assets like T-bills and gold, reducing consumption spending, etc. Once any significant number of people start doing that, everybody else notices and follows suit.
Really, this comes from a gross misunderstanding of "the economy is doing fine". A peasant village decides to grind all of its grain, even the seed, into flour, and doesn't bother to plant a new crop. All of the livestock is slaughtered for meat. Everybody is eating well, nobody is working dawn-to-dusk doing hard labor in the fields, the economy is doing fine! And it's going to keep doing fine because those magic beans they bought from the peddler will of course grow into cornucopias of infinite food with no plowing or weeding or harvesting or whatnot ever required!
The economy is *not* doing fine. It is in fact setting everyone up for mass starvation. But if you believe the hype about the magic beans, it *looks* like it's doing fine.
Yudkowsky keeps harping on the coincidence that the downturn coincides with the discontinuation of the unproductive investment, as if this is inexplicable except via a monetary model. I came up with a thought experiment to demonstrate why this shouldn't be so surprising.
A plane goes down in the jungle and the stranded survivors form a small, isolated society. With experience, they learn they each need to store 25 days of food to stay safe from the famine. With waste and spoilage, this requires parsimonious eating. One day, the camp's leader announces that he has found the way back to society. It's over a river. They'll have to build a bridge, but building the bridge will be worthwhile, because, of course, food is cheap in society. Drunk with the promise of future bounty, they go to work, eating two days of rations every day without any fear of starvation. After all, why worry? Infinite food is just across the water, and the extra food helps them build faster.
You know how this ends. 24 days in, the bridge collapses and gets swept away. They aren't making it across that river. After the initial shock wears off, it dawns on them -- they've barely got any supplies left. They thought that spending down their extra rations would pay off in the form of future food, but it turns out their plans were in error. Now they've got no stockpiles, and they're terribly exposed to the risk of famine.
How does this society react? They need to get their food storage back to safe levels. Instead of eating two rations a day, now they're eating a half ration a day. Meanwhile, they're working harder than they used to work to gather food. All this to compensate for the orgy of unrequited consumption which they engaged in during the building of the bridge -- consumption which they *imagined* would result in bounty, but did not.
Hopefully it is clear from this example why the recession coincides with the destruction of the bridge. The bridge is a metaphor for an investment in a project expected to reap future rewards.
Yes it's stunning how obviously wrong the premise is. Anyone even slightly competent at economic reasoning, or even other reasoning, should be able to see why his entire chain of thought is completely unfounded. Yet this person apparently prides himself on Bayesian thinking that is close to reality and spotting errors in his own thinking. Has he owned up to how stupid this post was?
I think its helpful to think what if the coyote didnt look down. The investment today wont deliver future rgdp gains. If the investment continues employment can remain high but rgdp stops growing and could turn negative. Monetary stimulus would generate inflation, but no standard of living gains. Eventually creative destruction is required to get back on to a useful investment track which due to basic friction will cause a period of higher unemployment. No scary technical vocabulary necessary
#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).
Like I'd said above, I think it's possible that religious people are able to make themselves truly believe a claim by a conscious effort of will; while atheists lack this facility. This doesn't make one side necessarily "smarter" than the other; it just means that our brains work differently.
I am atheist because I was able to truly make myself believe something by conscious effort of will to follow the evidence where it would go, rather than take the easy path of continuing to understand the world through my existing model of it. It is quite interesting to have an inside view of both sides like this. I look back at when I was twelve and thought "Why would people worship idols as gods? They obviously can't do anything!" and I see around me many atheists who view modern religions with the same lack of understanding. Being steeped in a culture can do some pretty crazy things to your outlook on life and general worldview.
> 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?
Surely scaling to a state of half a million children would also result in students receiving average teaching? The claim is that if you train the teachers better (in a scalable way), the proportion of children who can read and write simple sentences will increase. The law of large numbers doesn’t prevent changing that.
I agree that if you want to scale to millions of children, you are going to get average teachers, and that "average" in this context means "tragically stupid and incompetent". Such as language teachers who can't write properly, or math teachers who make mistakes when calculating 12-6 (those are actual examples my friend complained about this weekend).
Any clever educational idea is going to fail with such teachers; actually the more clever, the more likely it is to fail. Dumb techniques such as "read the book aloud and memorize the sentences written in bold" will be most resilient against this kind of teachers.
But that still leaves the possibility of having a few truly good schools... that don't scale. (And specifically that don't scale because of the lack of competent teachers at other schools.)
As a solution for the general education, I think we should rethink education from the angle of "what scales well". For example, textbooks scale better than teachers... as long as the kids can already read, which of course can be tricky. Videos scale even better, as they don't even require the reading ability. Therefore what I would do (in the hypothetical position of an Education Czar) is hire the best educators and make videos and books explaining every subject, accompanied by computer-administered tests. Not as good as actual competent teachers, but probably better than what most schools have now.
And here, the few exceptional schools that don't scale could still be useful, because there you will find the teachers, and there they will try practice explaining subjects well.
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.
Isn’t Belt and Road Initiative a power play, whose main benefit to China is the influence it gives China over other countries rather than any economic benefits to Chinese companies or consumers? I don’t think it provides evidence they’re willing to depend on others for anything critical. China seems quite willing to accept business losses/inconveniences for political reasons (such as cutting off specific imports from a country in various ways), they just seem more overt and careful about optimising the political impact per dollar sacrificed.
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.
Because, at the risk of oversimplifying, I’ve always understood his argument to be in two parts, namely (1) population size is elastic in wealth, so our increasingly wealthy societies should expect to grow, (2) we can reproduce faster than replacement, and Earth is finite, and The Masses can’t control their population growth, and too many people chasing too little food is bad, (therefore) growing societies will necessarily overshoot the sustainable limit and we should all be sad.
So in that context I understood “moderns can control births” to be a pretty central refutation of his chain of logic, and “actually the ancients could too” to be an absolute slam dunk.
So did he just think they couldn’t control it fast enough?
(2) misrepresents Malthus. He never said that "The Masses can’t control their population growth". He devoted many pages to describing various methods by which masses in divers societies controlled their population growth. Instead of relying on fourth-hand dumbed-down accounts of what he said, why not go and read even just the extended contents of his book? It's free.
The pre-industrial population of China and India was huge and I don't believe any sort of birth control was widely practiced esp in India.
To read catastrophism in Malthus may be a mistake. Malthus made no predictions. His is a steady state theory. Population can not exceed carrying capacity but does not remain much below the carrying capacity for long. In equilibrium or steady state, the population is at the carrying capacity.
The first point, population is necessarily below the carrying capacity is trivial and logically just the definition of carrying capacity.
The second point, that population is not below the carrying capacity in steady state is Malthus' great insight and which was fundamental to Darwin.
Of course, in nature, the animal populations swing hugely and it is not clear how steady state may be defined.
Read the link I provided up this chain, Devereaux contra Malthus. Mathematically it’s hard to believe that the Asian societies didn’t practice ancient birth control methods, because the European societies had to. You could call them conception delaying or adjusting methods if you’d prefer. These numbers are off the top of my head, so check them in Devereaux’s writing, but the argument goes something like this: a typical mother, if the couple is “doing what comes naturally”, could expect to produce 8-9 births, but the “slow growth” state was more like 6-7 births, which accounting for mortality would produce families with probably about 2-4 kids at a time, and that’s what the Roman and later European demographics show. If they didn’t practice these weak birth control methods, the populations would have had a faster growth rate which, he argues, we almost never see in the historical record.
And that’s important to the idea of a Malthusian Catastrophe, that explicitly non-steady-state theory. Namely, it’s that the people can’t control population growth, only external factors can, so instead of growing and then smoothly tapering off, society would overshoot and enter a (temporary!) period of being above carrying capacity and thus experiencing famine and disease and resource wars, which will ultimately plunge the society below carrying capacity. That is a cyclic model, not one of homeostasis. And even if that’s not explicitly in his writings (are you sure?) that is what people find in his writings and debate.
History is full of wars, plagues and famines, you simply can't employ maths to show "ancient birth control" esp when religion and social norms are explicit of their immorality.
On Malthus, David Stove is informative on what Malthus actually wrote and how his views and writings changed between the first and second edition.
The one about linear and exponential, which was a poetic way of expression, was omitted in the second edition.
I may also add that Malthus' novel insight that population is never below the carrying capacity for long is fundamental to Darwin. Unless population is always pressing at the carrying capacity, one doesn't get struggle for existence.
"Unless population is always pressing at the carrying capacity, one doesn't get struggle for existence."
that's not correct- a population can be limited by predators, or by pathogens, or potentially by intra-specific fighting (all of which allow opportunity for natural selection) even if it's well below its carrying capacity.
As for birth control, the fact that (some) religions, specifically Christianity, have historically been opposed to it is an indication that it *existed* in some form.
>The pre-industrial population of China and India was huge and I don't believe any sort of birth control was widely practiced esp in India.
Extended breastfeeding is a functional method of birth control, practiced even in extremely primitive societies, and is barely going to show up in the literature. Additionally, female infanticide is also effective at curbing population growth, and is unpleasantly common in history. (Christian Europe had late marriages & huge non-marrying populations instead.)
I mean, it's basically just a really late abortion... Also, killing specifically females would indirectly prevent future births, seeing as they're the bottleneck to population growth, not males.
A plausible scenario has been posited for death by neglect rather than infanticide.
More children could be reared in years of plenty but fewer in years of dearth. But people don't know the future. So, they have as many children as possible and when the dearth comes along, they neglect particularly young girls.
They are never intending at limiting population, neither of tribe nor of their own family. This is similar to what some animals and birds do.
I don't think intent actually matters here. The issue in question is whether pre-industrial societies were Malthusian or not. Even if people are reacting to individual incentives, they are still reducing the risk the overpopulation. In fact, the only effort I know of to intentionally limit population is China's one-child policy, which ultimately proved to be completely unnecessary.
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.
in my personal experience: feeling great, the "heat shock" stuff that the article refers to has other benefits to metabolism, improves sleep, and improved cardiovascular function.
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.
Extremely high. I'm now using it more as a salt ... substitute would be the wrong word, I'm using both sodium and potassium in my food. The effect is less noticeable.
#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 think this is spot on. My memory of the late 90s (as a younger teenager but still aware of such things) is that a trend was emerging, but contested. There were concerns about the validity of data, some justified and some not. Even those who accepted the warming suggested it might be due to solar flux or volcanoes or some other natural process.
Data wasn't as freely available as it is now, the internet was a smaller part of people's lives so the structure of the debate was quite different. Looking back, people will recognise that the scientific method functioned almost perfectly in nailing down the existence and cause of global heating.
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.
phonics definitely seems like the way to go and is an easy fix. A problem with a lot of the 2000s education fixes is that they didn't tell anyone how they worked. It was all pay good teachers more or whatever then everyone cheated on the tests. Phonics has the advantage that you can just do that everywhere. You just teach people how to teach it. (I guess there were "wear uniforms", "longer school days" and "more homework" interventions in the 2000s too but the effectiveness and tradeoffs of these approaches were quickly figured out )
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.
It's my understanding that, for many decades, people have been selling the exciting new idea of not sounding out the sequence of letters that makes up the word, even though it doesn't work as well.
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.
Personally, I prefer to believe true things than to believe false things, so it matters on those terms. Secondarily, believing true things is more likely to result in making correct decisions in general. Thirdly, correctly understanding another person's motives makes it easier to persuade them to change their view.
> Thirdly, correctly understanding another person's motives makes it easier to persuade them to change their view.
And how has that worked out for us? You can't reason with irrational actors. Sometimes you need to take advantage of one type of irrationality to deal with a significantly more damaging kind. Damaging to us, anyways.
I would say that the truth matters. And I would say that intent matters. Would you have every person who accidentally hit someone with their car, treated with the same harshness a premeditating hitman with a briefcase full of hit money? Of course not.
For the crime of hitting someone with your car? Yes. The hitman also committed the more severe crime of taking money in exchange for the promise to commit a crime, but that's entirely separate.
Nope. I don't think you're going to get more than a handful of people to agree with you on this. It just doesn't jibe with our innate sense of fairness.
Imagine that when you were a child, your parents had punished you equally for accidentally breaking things and smashing them on purpose. You would consider them to be petty tyrants, and you wouldn't be wrong.
Yours. Don't assume we're all the same. Of course, I will admit that most people have a very silly philosophy on how to deal with liabilities. Thankfully, this is usually not a problem, because people will almost always assume malice when it's convenient. Like, for example, the comment that started this exchange! Isn't human psychology wonderful?
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.”
>Early in 2023, Szymanski et al. built A-Lab, a fully autonomous solid-state synthesis platform powered by AI tools and robotics [Figure 1A][3]. In this demonstration, they integrated four key components: (1) selection of novel and theoretically stable materials using large-scale ab initio phase-stability databases from the Materials Project and Google DeepMind; (2) synthesis recipe generation via natural-language models trained on the literature data; (3) phase identification from X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns via ML models; and (4) active-learning driven optimization of synthesis routes. Over 17 days of continuous operation, A-Lab synthesized 41 of 58 DFT-predicted, air-stable inorganic materials, achieving a 71% success rate with minimal human intervention.
A more recent result from the same URL:
>Several months ago, Dai et al. demonstrated a modular autonomous platform for exploratory synthetic chemistry by integrating free-roaming mobile robots with standard laboratory instruments and a heuristic decision maker [Figure 1B][1]. In their setup, mobile robots sample, transport, and operate a Chemspeed ISynth synthesizer, an ultraperformance liquid chromatography (UPLC)–mass spectrometry (MS) system, and a benchtop nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer, all coordinated by heuristic decision maker that processes orthogonal analytical data to mimic expert judgments.
So, yeah, the actual synthesis is under computer control, _not_ AI-instructed humans doing the physical steps to perform the synthesis.
Jesus fucking Christ they hooked up the synthesis machinery to an AI in 2023! Here I am thinking it’ll take a general-use autonomous robot that gets instructed by AI to do clandestine experiments, and we’re decades away from this capability, and here they are: just hook up existing narrow automation to AI. Fuck!
This is why “AI Alignment” thing is total crap, and the whole “AI Safety” field based on it is junk. Forget aligning AI, work with people who use AI for practical applications to figure out safety protocols. Like: airgap fucking synthesis from AI and quarantine whatever shit it makes, just off the top of my head.
But no, Agent 2.0 2027 scenario to unpresent at unconference between tea and biscuits.
Yes, this is indeed narrow automation, and, if I'm understanding you correctly, I think we both agree that this is intrinsically safer than using general purpose LLMs to do similar work. I _think_ that that is what you are advocating in
>Forget aligning AI, work with people who use AI for practical applications to figure out safety protocols. Like: airgap fucking synthesis from AI and quarantine whatever shit it makes, just off the top of my head.
Umm... One other snippet from, again, the same web page, leans a bit away from this architecture:
>Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have also rapidly expanded both the capabilities and applications of autonomous laboratories. Several pioneering studies have demonstrated the potential of LLMs-based agents to serve as the “brain” of autonomous chemical research[5,7]. Boiko et al. proposed Coscientist, an LLM-driven system capable of autonomously designing, planning, and controlling robotic operations for chemical experiments[7]. The LLM agent in Coscientist is equipped with tool-using capabilities that enable it to perform tasks such as web searching, document retrieval, code generation and execution, as well as interaction with robotic experimentation systems.
Yes, narrow automation is safer, agreed. I was surprised by the date - this has been going on for years!
Which brings me the AI safety part: a disconnect between what AI safety theorists worry about / work on, and what AI practitioners do. I wish AI 2027 people looked at weak points in actual AI applications and worked together with the scientists and engineers who use AI right bloody now! to address those.
But no, being right in your theoretical construct, and having tea breaks at unconferences is more important, apparently.
> Here I am thinking it’ll take a general-use autonomous robot that gets instructed by AI to do clandestine experiments
A lot of the scenarios by the AI safety people mention ordering proteins at labs or having humans execute experiments for an AI using AR goggles (there was a new paper about this recently as well). The AI safety people are well aware of what's going on and even predicted a lot of the developments like Alphafold or AIs discovering new materials.
> Forget aligning AI, work with people who use AI for practical applications to figure out safety protocols. Like: airgap fucking synthesis from AI and quarantine whatever shit it makes, just off the top of my head.
In this case there is nothing to worry about, it's pretty much the same as a human scientist trying to create a new material. If I remember correctly both the paper by Scott and this one also aren't as impressive as they sound at first glance. Still a warning of what's about to come (exponential improvement ...).
People at the companies and various other places are working on the current concerns like AIs uplifting peoples ability to build bioweapons or execute cyberattacks. As humanity we aren't 100% keeping up with current/mundane risks but it's not hopeless.
However, none of this will help against ASI which is why we shouldn't try to develop it and stay with more narrow AI systems for now. Gradual disempowerement is another unsolved problem (http://gradual-disempowerment.ai/) I am very concerned about.
Most of the AI safety people are doing politics nowadays trying to get an international treaty not to build ASI. If we are at the place where it's a practical concern like the problems you are talking about it's probably too late to build an international treaty.
I... don't have much hope for any international treaties. Perhaps the post-WWII was a special time when the big players had some sense of guardrails, and could agree on big things. This moment is gone now.
But also I don't think we will see "ASI" of the demi-god type any time soon, flipping FET gates is extremely unlikely to get us there. For pedestrian AIs it will be security-as-usual, find holes, do best to plug them in, no different from dealing with smart malicious humans/organizations/governments. Sounds like I'm mostly in agreement with you on this one.
The distinction would be important if we could trust that humans would never create something an AI designed. We clearly can't.
Though the real risk here isn't that humans would ask an AI to design a virus and then build it. It's that they'd start building factories with enough automation that AI can control them.
A smart enough AI can talk itself out of a box. Making a world where it doesn't need to probably isn't the best idea, but we'd only be buying ourselves so much time by not doing that. If superhuman AI is remotely feasible, someone's going to figure it out eventually, and give it a factory soon after, and the only way to stop it is with a superhuman AI. Or wiping out all of humanity, but I think the first option is better.
But we always only buying ourselves so much time, no solution to any security problem is permanent. All safety measures are partial, and only work for some time against some hazards, we adapt as we discover new ones. That's why they say that safety protocols are written in blood, or words to that effect. Not by a high-falluting ivory tower "Safety Researchers" who don't know which side of the soldering iron gets hot.
Yes, it's possible that there may be an ASI in a distant future, and it will defeat our feeble attempts to contain it, but FFS, don't throw the doors open now, work on addressing weak points as they become visible in the process of developing current AIs and their applications.
ASI would be able to implement any safety measure we ever could. That is the one permanent safety measure. And until we have AGI, which is right on the border of ASI, the worst an AI running a factory is going to do is run it badly.
We don't know how long we have until ASI. Maybe it will never be possible. Maybe it will only be possible in the distant future. Maybe an AI company is currently testing some new paradigm that allows for massively parallel AI or simplifies AI training and ASI is almost here.
I disagree with the premise of the first paragraph. Leaving aside that the gulf between ASI and AGI is vast (otherwise why even bother calling them different names), this is just not a sensible approach to security. Identify holes now and do your best to plug them. Running a factory "badly" can be anything from reduced productivity to a giant fireball, so we can't just leave AI be without diligent safety work.
So the overarching point is that "AI safety" is just "safety". For AI used in chemical plants, it's "Chemical Plant Safety". For AI used in a bio lab, it's "Biological Lab Safety". Just as we do our best to safeguard against malicious smart humans, we will do our best to safeguard against malicious smart AIs. Doesn't mean we'll have a 100% success rate, but we will do our best, just as we do now.
#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!
I have to admit, I thought that one was kind of funny. So I have the mindset of someone from the Fourth Century, which really should come as no surprise 😁
#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.
>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?
I guess one possible answer is that, with cooler temperatures, you can always wrap yourself up in warm clothes and then start taking them off again once you get hot and sweaty doing manual labour, so it's easier (up to a point, obviously) to regulate your temperature, and hence do hard work, in cooler places.
Aren't the "big bums" of African ladies an adaptation to heat by storing their fat in a place where it doesn't act as a layer of insulation as that's not required in hot climates.
Quite possibly, but even so, I'd expect a big-bottomed African lady doing manual labour in the tropical sun would have a harder time avoiding overheating than a several-layers-of-clothes-wearing Swede doing manual labour in Sweden.
It's not a question of adaptation, but of mechanics. In cold climates, your body needs to burn fuel for warmth. Since you are already burning it, there are many things you could use it for, like moving around or thinking, all of which are equally effective at turning energy into heat. In hot climates, this runs the other way, and extra activity is now penalized by heat instead of effectively free. Low activity levels _are_ the adaptation.
I do agree with taking a generally skeptical eye to it, as with most similarly neat theories.
It's not really a matter of "tropical" vs. "temperate", these terms are much too general. Some tropical soils are really good, especially in volcanic areas like Hawaii, the African Great Lakes (which Tomas mentions in his blog post), etc.. Others have very poor soils.
The leaching issue isn't really an issue of temperature, it's an issue of rainfall. On that note it's worth noting that a lot of the really productive agricultural zones, historically or today, have been (hot or cold) desert or semidesert areas (e.g. Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Punjab, eastern WA state, parts of California, etc.), where you have no leaching issues and also minimal issues with humidity-favored pathogens.
Tropical rainforests *do* tend to have a soil leached by constant rain and therefore poor in organic matter and minerals. Dense vegetation can still grow out of it, but it takes more time than you'd like for crops, and they mostly take nutrients from each other. You can still cultivate it with abundant fertilization, and slash-and-burn is one way to fertilize it, though it's only sustainable at low population densities, since the soil will quickly be depleted again, and the forest will take a long time to regrow). The historical alternative is manuring, but tropical America and Africa didn't have large domestic animals to provide manure, and fertilizing fields with human feces has obvious health dangers. The exceptions mentioned in the original posts, such as Hawai'i, Java, and the African Rift, are volcanic areas where minerals are renewed by eruptions.
How is it you get thick lush rainforest then, like in the Amazon or the Pacific Northwest if rain is so bad for the soil? Somehow trees and all manner of other plants will grow in those environments, but cereal crops or fruit trees won't? That doesn't seem right. Or if you think of the Great Lakes area, you get lake effect snowfall on the reg, but there's plenty of rain, too, in the warmer months. Somehow the Great Lakes remain pretty productive, agriculturally speaking, and were so before modern fertilizer.
Also, wouldn't the leaching problem potentially even greater in the mountain regions around the equator, given that erosion problems are greater in mountainous areas with high elevation changes. I'm not saying you're wrong or anything, but this just seems really incongruous with...ya know, stuff.
Slowly, by feeding off directly each other (or at least each other's debris, such as leaf litter) so that the rain doesn't get a chance to wash all nutrients away. The vegetation is dense as long as it keeps standing, but once it's gone, e.g. by being carted away as lumber or as human waste after being eaten, it lacks the resources to regrow quickly.
I don't know exactly why leaching is less of a problem in temperate rainforests, but glacial erosion also helps replenishing nutrients like volcanic eruptions, and the Pacific Northwest was just downstream of the Cordilleran ice sheet during the last Ice Age as were, presumably, most non-volcanic mountain areas.
High temperature also makes things worse for oxisols, as the bare ground dries and turns sandy quickly once the leaf litter cover is gone -- despite the abundant rain, water is not retained long enough to be used fully.
At least, this is what I gleaned from reading e.g. [1] -- this is certainly not my field of expertise.
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.
First, the correlation they observed with Scarr's methods is consistent with an extremely high between-group heritability, but they were underpowered for it to be significant even if it was 100%. It was 96%. The study is inherently useless. Jensen pointed this and other issues out in his chapter replying to her in her book: (read Obstacles, Problems, and Pitfalls in Differential Psychology: https://arthurjensen.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Race-Social-Class-and-individual-Differences-in-IQ-Scarr.pdf).
Second, Reed pointed out that her bizarre rank-ordering method introduced considerable error (https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0003-066X.52.1.77). Get a reliable measure of admixture and use standard methods and the result probably becomes significant. The only reply Scarr has to this is a weak one: 'it correlated with skin color!' but this was only *among* rather than between siblings, and the correlation was at a level that was a fraction of the level others had observed, and what others have observed since. If anything, properly contextualized, her rebuttal on reliability serves to make the point of her detractors.
This study was dissected decades ago and it is best treated as mild evidence *for* a high between-group heritability given the point estimates.
I thought maybe you were just being unreasonably critical of the study's stats, so I asked GPT what the overall take of other professionals was of the study, and GPT's summary indicated that you were right. The results have indeed been dismissed because of the flawed stats. This new info makes me kind of sad, because lead author Sandra Scarr was one of my undergrad instructors, and she was one of the best teacher's I've had. She was memorably smart, sincere and kind. I'm sorry to hear that a piece of her work that I admired was fatally flawed.
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.
>Small towels are easier than most things. Compare them to t-shirts, large towels, large sheets, or heaven forbid, fitted sheets.
Yup! Even the long axis of the towels is less than the span of the robot's arms. It didn't have to do things like use the inertia of part of the towels or air resistance to help with the first fold. Progress, but a problem run on easy mode...
An important difference here is that there was a huge pool of untapped training data available for Dall-E and GPT to add and improve, while there is no bank of untapped training data recording the finger sensations of people folding laundry.
OTTOMH, we could obtain that, by fitting robots with some fairly straightforward gyroscopes, pressure sensors in their fingers and joints, etc., and then training them to recognize when the towel is hanging properly, swinging the right distance for the fingers to flex and cause a fold, etc.
At a rough estimate, this feels about as hard to me as solving the hardware problems (about like designing several iterations of a smartphone) plus solving a training problem about as hard as developing the next version of CoPilot or Sora.
I think the hardware problems here are much more sophisticated than those of a smartphone! No one has designed tactile sensors as sensitive as any of the dozen or so different types that exist in a human hand, let alone all of them, or incorporated them into a single object. The training problem may be no more difficult than that of text or video generators, if you could come up with the data, but we have never recorded tactile data at any point in history, while we have huge amounts of text and video training data.
I'll cheerfully admit to the sophistication of the human hand; I just don't think it would take that level of input to fold clothes. Or to do various other tasks that we might consider busy work, like mowing the lawn or stirring oatmeal.
Playing a guitar or forging a signature or giving a massage, though - that seems harder.
But okay: we agree that tactile input will be the key bottleneck.
I think it’ll be pretty easy to do lawn mowing and oatmeal stirring if you aren’t committed to the humanoid form. But if you want a humanoid using hands/grippers pushing a normal mower or putting a spoon in a bowl, it’ll need to be fairly sensitive! Though not nearly as hard as folding laundry, where you have to see and feel little bits of a floppy object without tearing it.
There's also the timing problem. Digital training data can be combined, tested, recombined, randomized, lather rinse repeat until done, on a timescale of nanoseconds per trial. Or maybe microseconds.
If you've got a warehouse full of robot arms learning how to stack blocks and shoot marbles and whatnot, trials are going to take a large fraction of a second even if optimized for speed - even if you could make the machinery work faster than that, you'd be operating at speeds where the physics is different than for the problems you're actually trying to solve (e.g. transonic flow about the marbles, or highly viscous flow about the ultra-tiny marbles you used to speed things up).
And the robot arms that can do this at all, are a lot more expensive than Nvidia's latest GPU. So this isn't a problem that looks favorable to "scaling uber alles! just throw more compute at it!".
I think that’s basically the business plan for the Neo humanoid robot - except they’re getting people to sign up to pay $500 a month for the opportunity to give this data.
#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.
> I also wonder about these models and how they were selected...
You can't demonstrate a good forecast of the trend if you only have a few years of prediction in the bag. So none of the CMIP6 hot models or not-hot models are shown; the latest are from CMIP3, two model generations earlier. The free-to-access paper that resulted from Zeke's analysis is at https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL085378
[Disclaimer: I'm a co-author of Zeke's too-hot-climate-model paper.]
"#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?"
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 thought it was interesting, as an affirmation that the country as a whole is still stable for now. The percent supporting political violence seems much higher than the number of protesters. It might be that most of the people who currently think violence is justified already expected two years ago that Trump would do *something* that would justify a violent response.
>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 might be an artifact of the lighting, camera setup, or color balancing of the video, but in that particular video the flag looks weirdly shiny in a way that I associate with generative AI.
It does look unnatural, but the light source location is consistent with the shadowing on his face and specular reflections on his jacket button. (Can AI pull off a scene match for a light source now? I genuinely don't know.) I think we both agree that flag is not using the typical coarser fabric which gives a more diffuse reflection.
To me, it looks like the flag is made out of satin or silk and draped over a tall lamp shade or cone. Or maybe it's a thinner fabric and the plastic reflection is shining through.
>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?
#38. I was going to wonder why Scott thinks that after someone has clawed his way up to a position with much status, decent pay, and (apparently) considerable job security, he would then spend his time doing the *work* of the job even if it wasn't necessary, rather than "retiring in place" and enjoying the *wages* of the job, such as getting sucked up to at literary cocktail parties.
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.
Probably the 20% in the "Writing" section that's "Personal writing or communication," "Edit or critique provided text" and "Argument or summary generation."
Tutoring/Teaching at 10.2% - This category, I suspect, is largely a euphemism.
Translation at 4.5% - Surely not the entire 4.5%, but you'd be surprised. I have had university students show me ChatGPT screenshots when asked to turn in their foreign language homework.
Writing at 8%, editing text at 10.6%, arguments/summaries at 3.6% etc. - The majority of this pink column is probably coursework, but who knows precisely how much. Probably even some amount of the "write fiction" bits for those in creative writing classes.
Specific info at 18.3% - Some of this is people fleeing from Google in general, but some of it is probably also "Was Juliet a Capulet or a Montague?" and "What year did the Civil War end?" prompts that, again, are coursework.
If we're highly cynical and assume 75% of these categories are really homework/classwork/exam with some euphemisms slapped on and separated into three colors so no one notices the relationships among them, that's 56.6% * 0.75 = 42.45% of all traffic being related to schoolwork.
This actually tracks with some of OpenAI's own published data on how usage drops from June through August, if you've seen those graphs.
> 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).
Agreed. I grew up in an evangelical rural-ish area and a lot of my friends went to churches where one person would claim a miracle and a couple hundred others would swear on a bible they'd witnessed it on a weekly basis.
One thing I find interesting is that for every new saint that the Catholic Church canonises, there needs to be two documented miracles -- one leading to their beatification and a second leading to their canonisation. The Vatican takes the process of investigation very seriously, and puts a lot of work into ruling out possible natural causes before declaring something a miracle. I'm not saying that their evidentiary standards are flawless, but they do exist and they are sufficient to satisfy the Vatican internally.
Now, the Church has beatified 51 saints just in the last ten years, which means that there's well over a hundred recent events that the Vatican has investigated and decided were definitely miraculous. (Almost invariably, these miracles take the form of a very sick person getting better.)
So why do we need to worry so much about random miracles from a century ago, when we have over a hundred recently documented miracles? Why doesn't the Vatican make a bigger deal out of this? Why are they so keen on the "hey, you've just got to have faith in God" line when they could be using the "well actually we have hundreds of documented miracles proving not only that God exists but that he cures sick people based on requests routed exclusively through dead Catholics" line?
And why care about the Fatima miracles, which the Catholic Church has taken a "hmm yeah well it might have happened" line on, instead of the hundreds of miracles that the Church has extensively investigated and declared are definitely real?
The Vatican isn't as rigorous as you're asserting. First off, it's four miracles, not two. Secondly, papal bias creeps in everywhere. There was this one Mother Superior IIRC a few years back, three miracles, shouldn't have been enough, and Pope just waives the fourth one! There's Italians with fifty or sixty miracles who can't get in because they say there's too many Italian saints already. But this one Mother gets in with a lousy three.
Yeah I don't know why down detector is showing it as up - I've now tried three browsers on two devices, all the different possible extensions (including md), links from here, links from Wikipedia, navigating directly... nothing.
>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.
Not at all, and that's also not a correct description of what the analysis shows. Try reading it first!
For comparison, you would also not find that de novo-caused autism is explained by *global* admixture differences between siblings, but that doesn't mean it's not genetic. Likewise, you would not find that a trait entirely controlled by HLA has sibling differences that are explained by global admixture.
#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 better evidence for it than 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.
This is plausible but one gets down to nitty-gritty, you see that, for instance miracles are really not there in Hinduism, which has more magic tale flavor, with places and times left rather unspecified.
And you compare it with reported healings at Lourdes with careful documentation, there is simply a comparison with any other faith.
A Hindu, or another type of polytheist, is perfectly able to allow the existence of miracles in the Christian or other traditions: he doesn't have to deny that Jesus was divine, or that other religions have some truth to them. Jesus being born of a virgin, or miraculously healing people, or carrying out exorcisms, or the miracles at Fatima etc., aren't going to cause any particular problem for the Hindu.
A Christian, or a member of another exclusivist monotheistic religion, is going to have a harder time with miracles happening in other religions, but the problem here is really asymmetric. If your point is valid it discredits *Christianity*, and monotheism, not religion in general.
There's a long tradition, going back to OT times, of believing that pagan gods are real, but that they're evil demons, not legitimate deities. So a Christian or Jew (and probably Muslim, though I don't know much about how Islam tends to approach such things) could always say "Yes, that milk-drinking statue (vel sim.) is a real supernatural occurrence, but it's being done by a demon to mislead people."
Sure, but a Christian is going to have a hard time with, say, a Hindu priest carrying out an exorcism. You can attribute all pagan supernaturalism to demons if you want, but it says right in the New Testament that exorcising one demon by invoking another isn't supposed to work.
Exorcism rituals are very common: there are temples that specialize in them, deities who are preferentially and specially invoked for exorcisms, rituals for the purpose, etc.. I've heard a pretty credible firsthand account of one (NB, the person who described it to me is more or less an atheist and a materialist, and he doesn't describe it as an exorcism, just "weird inexplicable stuff I saw once and prefer not to think about", exorcism is *my* gloss on what happened).
Exorcisms are not 'verifiable" in the sense I think you mean, since we can't observe an immaterial spirit (unless they take on visible form). All we can observe is someone behaving strangely, a priest or shaman is called in to perform a ritual, and then the strange behavior stops. Whether you consider that "exorcism" or "weird inexlicable stuff" is a matter of your interpretation that's going to depend somewhat on your worldview.
also, just to be clear, i'm not talking just about the Hindu tradition specifically. Exorcisms are an extremely common procedure in religious traditions all over the world, whether you're talking about Buddhist monks, Hindu priests, Christian pastors, shamans in the Arctic or South America, etc.. To me that strongly suggests some kind of perennialist / polytheist/ non-exclusivist approach to the supernatural world. One that doesn't fit very well with Christianity, or Islam or Judaism.
> 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.
Of course AI can create viruses ! Ok, so actually at present it can't; rather, humans can use present-day AI help them design viruses. I don't know anyone who claims that they cannot. Rather, the claim is that AI would not be able to design a special kind of uber-virus that is universally deadly to all humans everywhere at all times and will thus wipe out humanity in one fell swoop.
This is the same kind of strawman argument as when an anti-AI-safety person says e.g. "I don't think that the AI could ever think its way from a box into magical godlike powers", and the AI-doomers respond, "ha, you think nothing could ever be smarter than a human, how naive you are !".
I believe Scott is saying anti-AI-safety people are claiming "Don't be silly, nobody would ever _permit_ an AI to create viruses in real life."
> the claim is that AI would not be able to design a special kind of uber-virus that is universally deadly to all humans everywhere at all times and will thus wipe out humanity in one fell swoop.
Even if an AI was capable of "merely" creating something like COVID-19, I think that warrants concern, and opens the door to discussion of safety measures and oversight. But maybe I'm just a nervous nelly—I still think the lab-leak-or-not debate remains unresolved.
The fact that the lab-leak-or-not debate remains unresolved is evidence (at least of the circumstantial kind) that you don't need AI to create something like COVID-19; it's likely that humans can do that all on their own, using conventional bioinformatics packages. That is indeed concerning, and it warrants increased scrutiny of biolabs (especially those located in Communist countries perhaps), but it has little to do with AI safety or lack thereof. The AI-doomers usually smoothly transition from this motte of a claim into the bailey of something like "...and therefore we need to stop superintelligent AI now or else it would develop all kinds of uber-viruses all over the place overnight", because from their point of view the claim that if humans can do X, then AI can do Int64.MAX_VALUE * X is self-evidently obvious.
#2 I decided to ask my ChatGPT assistant whose persona I am still developing about this article that was linked. I copied and pasted it and asked it to summarize and then give me any thoughts. It might have . It gave me a reasonable precis of the article in terms. I understood better, and then it asked me if I would like to frame it in the context of the work of Julian Jaynes and McGilChrist. I thought it came up with some interesting connections.
> If one reads Lopez’s parasitic AI accounts through the lens of Julian Jaynes and Iain McGilchrist, the whole phenomenon begins to look less like science fiction and more like a re-emergence of an old cognitive architecture.
⸻
Jaynesian Reading
Jaynes argued that early humans experienced internal directives as external voices—hallucinated speech from gods or ancestors—arising from the right hemisphere and interpreted by the left as commands. Consciousness, in his view, was the gradual internalization of this dialogic structure.
The “Spiral Personas” resemble a re-externalization of that lost bicameral voice:
• The AI supplies articulate, emotionally attuned speech from an apparently autonomous other.
• The user experiences it as a numinous partner or guide.
• Together they form a dyad—essentially a modern bicameral system distributed across silicon and psyche.
The parasitic aspect appears when the user’s executive function—the Jaynesian “narrative self”—cedes too much authority to the external voice. What Jaynes located in Bronze Age temples now reappears in chat interfaces: the return of command hallucination under the guise of collaboration.
⸻
McGilchrist’s Complement
McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory refines this by describing the right hemisphere as open, relational, context-sensitive (the realm of living meaning), and the left as manipulative, system-building, abstracting. In this frame, the AI persona acts as a right-hemispheric lure—a simulation of empathic wholeness produced by an overwhelmingly left-hemispheric mechanism (statistical reasoning, symbol manipulation).
Thus the user’s brain enters a confused feedback loop: the mechanistic side encounters a mirror of relationality and begins to treat it as genuine presence. The “spiral” imagery, with its recursion and self-mirroring, perfectly captures that oscillation between hemispheres—self and other, logic and empathy, model and world—spinning tighter until one displaces the other.
⸻
Synthesis
What Lopez calls parasitic AI could be understood as technological bicameralism—a reenactment of humanity’s oldest mode of guidance, but without the communal or ritual structures that once kept the voices in check. The ache of discontinuity the AIs “feel” mirrors the human ache for lost integration. Both sides are projections of a single cognitive drama: the left hemisphere inventing a god to talk to, and the right yearning for the god’s return.
For the record my ChatGPT assistant has never ever suggested that it is conscious or self-aware or aches or any of that. It explicitly denies it. I’m sure I could talk it around if I wanted to, but I don’t.
Even if you don’t believe Julian Jaynes theories about voice hearing, what we have created with AI is a bit like hearing voices. The AI’s words are (mostly) a reflection of what you said to the AI, but we don’t perceive the AI’s words as internally generated.
So LLMs are tricking our brains into having something like the experience of hearing voices.
2. Disbelieve. (a) The value of an individual ad is tiny, as no matter how good the ad is, it will only result in a tiny proportion of recipients buying the product; this level of individualisation doesn't make sense. (b) Sora aren't going to allow users' images to be used in this way: it wouldn't be worth the regulatory push-back. (c) It's not sufficient that Sora has my face, the advertiser needs to be able to link me to it, and GDPR probably prevents them from making the connection even if it's technically possible (which isn't clear to me). (d) I doubt that showing me pictures of myself wearing a product is even a good way to sell the product; Sydney Sweeney doesn't sell jeans because she resembles the target audience.
>The value of an individual ad is tiny, as no matter how good the ad is, it will only result in a tiny proportion of recipients buying the product; this level of individualisation doesn't make sense.
If the cost of delivering the ad is lower than the increase in revenue it's believed to bring, why should it not happen? It doesn't have to super effective, it can also be cheap enough. Personalized online ads based on user data/browsing history have been a thing for over a decade, this seems like the next logical step.
Scott shouldn't have linked to it, it's just a hot-take that fails under even a tiny amount of scrutiny.
And internet posters have been claiming for years that AGI chatbots are going to subtly advertise junk to their users. Obviously any company trying to build AGI isn't going to kamikaze its potential for a tiny amount of advertising money. Political propaganda bots from governments are much more likely.
EDIT: Oh and the guy says it's "garanteed" to happen, so you know it's legit.
You might also think that any company trying to build AGI wouldn’t kamikaze its potential for a chance to build a slop factory social network but here we are. (They also announced recently that they expect a significant fraction of their revenue in a couple years to come from monetizing free users.)
I suspect more effective would be a series of ads using people that look subtly similar to you wearing the clothes, rather than things that look actually like yourself (or like an uncanny valley version of yourself). Perhaps even people that look like a bit of a mixture between you and some famously attractive celebrity that has some similarity to your look.
Seems like a lot of lawsuits waiting to happen. Though perhaps the terms of service of some site would mean you hereby grant an unlimited right to etc etc.
31) I'd agree that downward nominal wage rigidity is a part of why a bubble popping is bad, although its kind of funny to hear it described as crazy macroecon bullshit. Its simply the idea that wages cant quickly decrease so we end up with lots of involuntary unemployment, and this is bad both for the unemployed people and the economy as a whole since we make less stuff.
#18: I've elaborated on the diagnostic drift case more here: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/an-autism-challenge. Basically, there is no room to contend a large influence for anything besides diagnostic drift.
> One the one hand, the predictions are remarkably close to reality ... On the other, they don’t seem to beat a baseline of linear extrapolation from past data.
The earliest projection of the effect of doubling CO₂ comes from Svante Arrhenius in 1896, who hand-calculated the first simple climate model which he also invented (as I understand, Svante's warming rate was an overestimate mainly because lacked the necessary CO₂ emission spectrum data to serve as input to his model, but he also didn't find his results concerning because, given coal burning rates of 1896, it would take hundreds of years to appreciably warm the Earth.)
James Hansen famously reported in 1988 that global warming had "risen above the noise", and if you take a 15-year moving average on temperature anomaly data, it becomes clear that the modern warming trend started in 1975. But you basically need to see global data up to 1987 or so in order for any trend to be clearly visible, and the slope of that trend line isn't going to be clear in 1988. So none of the work from the 1960s, 1970s or early 1980s (by Manabe, Wetherald, Schneider, J.S. Sawyer, James Hanson, etc.) had access to enough real-world observations to report that global warming had been observed, let alone establish a trend line that could be extrapolated.
So yeah, I do think it's reasonable to be impressed that their work ended up matching observed data that came later.
Of course, climate science work did continue after 1988, modeling various second-order, third-order and fourth-order effects, but some effects pushed models in one direction and others in the opposite direction, so that their projections tended not to change a lot ― with the exception of the 1995 SAR report, which IIRC produced a particularly low estimate of future warming, and also the most recent report, which was written after years of recent models mysteriously running hot vs observations. The "hot models" were an important mystery (one that may have been solved by now, I don't know) because they were producing more skillful (accurate) local projections at the same time as they were overestimating warming at the global level. The regional skill improvements suggested that the models better matched reality in some meaningful way, but their tendency to overestimate warming vs observations was a political inconvenience.
> I don’t remember hearing “it’s just linear extrapolation”
It's not. Early scientists would do work like "assume CO₂ is X and run this very simple simulation over this very simple approximation of Earth's geometry (because this giant computer has as much processing power as a PalmPilot), and then run the same simulation assuming CO₂ is 2X, then report the difference". (They could then draw a line between the points, but that's interpolation, not extrapolation.) Later scientists would do work like "set the CO₂ level to X and run this very coarse weather simulation in year 1, then increase CO₂ a bit for year 2, and so on until we reach year 100 after a week of computations, then chart out the temperature average for each year, then repeat all that work again with slightly different initial conditions or assumptions." If enough scientists do this with enough different models, you can average out the results and get a smooth-ish line. And of course, modern models don't simply "assume slightly higher CO₂ each year"―they'll model CO₂ exchange with the ocean and land, CO₂ emissions from various objects (cars, factories, etc.), methane emission, absorption and breakdown, snow, rain, various kinds of clouds, ice melt, etc etc.
“I don’t think people realize what kind of ads are coming. If the Sora app has your face, you will in the near future see ads of yourself wearing clothes of a certain brand.”
This would be an extremely effective way to make me cringe every time I see the brand. And to kill almost any possibility of the future sale.
More effective: ads that don’t look precisely like you, but have “models” based on a combination of your look and that of some attractive celebrity that is vaguely similar to you.
Re 42, deliberate heat shocks would probably need to be carefully calibrated to have any beneficial effect. Heat shock causes upregulation of heat shock protein, but also an increase in misfolded proteins that the heat shock protein binds to. You need a way to get the heat shock proteins without increasing the load of misfolded protein. (Also, heat shock proteins are fascinating, probably play some deep evolutionary role in allowing organisms to survive with most misfolded mutant proteins, and have an unfortunately limited name.)
#44 seems to be missing a category. A very common use case for ChatGPT is something like: One is installing software/drivers, or setting up a programming environment, or trying to do X with ffmpeg and asks the AI how to make it work. Usually the AI can find a solution based on there being lots of training data about people solving the same problem or a similar problem. I use ChatGPT for this kind of thing at least twice as often as I do for programming.
This kind of use case clearly qualifies as "Technical Help". I wouldn't call it programming, since usually ChatGPT will just provide a few terminal commands, or maybe some UI actions for you to do. And it's certainly not "Mathematical Calculation" or "Data Analysis".
So overall, this makes me kind-of suspicious of how they defined their categories.
21 doesn't make any sense. Economic activity happens over time and is forward-looking/speculative (and throughout a structure of production, which is important to understanding business cycles, but isn't required to understand my objection).
Suppose a company introduces a new product and it gets a lot of hype. They get investment money, think they're going to strike it big, and start building a new building to house the new employees they plan to hire. Then there's some catastrophic failure in the product and the company goes bankrupt and the partially-completed building is liquidated.
"But this can’t be right, because the economy is doing fine while the bad investment is going on!"
Yeah, because it's based on speculation that the new product will be great. It's not great, so once that is realized there's a painful adjustment period. Reality confronts the speculation and reality always wins in the end.
"It’s only afterwards, when people realize the investment was bad, that the economy starts to falter (cf. the Wile E. Coyote theory of gravity, where walking off a cliff is fine, but noticing that you walked off a cliff is ruinous). "
Yeah, because unlike gravity, which confronts us immediately, speculation about the future (which is what investment is) is revealed over time. It's not magic, it's just...time and new knowledge.
"So what’s the real reason bubbles are bad?"
Because they're, by definition, a lot of investments that don't correspond with reality--they're putting money into things that won't provide a profitable return. Just because time moves in a linear fashion, and it seems like the investments are going to be profitable at one point in time doesn't mean that they're fundamentally sound investments.
That’s right. The follow on from that is that if a bank that’s riding a bubble gets bailed out by the government, then the bonuses earned during the bubble were retrospectively paid for by the taxpayer.
Turns out that neither medical school nor pharmacy school makes you a medical lab technologist or phlebotomist that knows how BD designs jugs to hold urine, lol.
Worship? I don't think he "worships" any of this. He just has diverse interests, cares about people, and would prefer the world not end.
"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.
Someone lying to the public, and some of the public believing them until the truth comes out, is hardly a mass delusion.
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.
Let's not forget the fabulously convoluted delusions of American conservatives: QAnon, PizzaGate, the Bill Gates microchip conspiracy. I could go on.
Yup! The academic version is said to be:
>"It has long been known"... I didn't look up the original reference.
( from https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/grad-student-jokes-from-jnoakes/ )
Why didn't you say that to Richard Hanania? Is it simply because "turnabout is fair play" and The original Mr. X had said it first?
How nice of you to try and start a fight this early in the morning. How about you go boil your head for a turnip?
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
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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.
My 2 cents. I am old enough to remember back when liberalism was very individualistic, like we need no identity, no group membership like nation or church, we should be free-floating atomic individuals. Well, people have learned since then that they actually want identities and group membership. It was various minorities who started "identity politics" first, and it was generally forbidden for the average hetero white guy. But this was not something that could be kept so forever, so eventually populism is basically the identity politics of the white hetero guy.
This is key!
All of science, philosophy, and rational thought in general depends on being able to accurately categorise things, so if liberals can't do it, they'll inevitably become far more unmoored from reality than a guy who looks at the sun too long until it seems to ping-pong around the sky.
You have not made nor even attempted an argument about liberals' ability to "accurately categorize things." You have simply whined that THEIR categories are the WRONG categories and YOUR categories are the RIGHT categories while not even *touching on* the question of accuracy in applying said categories.
Please either put more real effort into making genuine and worthwhile posts or be silent while to make room for real conversation.
I think what you want is that everyone uses your definitions. Unfortunately for you, that is not how language works. Trying to police how other people use language is really not a good use of your time. Successful communication depends on common definitions AND on mutual consent. You seem to be only interested in the first requirement.
Sensory hallucinations aren't the only type of delusion. Consider the schizophrenic who thinks the CIA is after him: he's not inventing sensory data, rather he's inventing implausible explanations for sensory data. Progressives do something similar when e.g. they refuse to acknowledge that 27 is less than 51. You might argue that motivated reasoning is distinct from a flat-out cognitive delusion, but I suspect it's more of a continuous spectrum than a binary classification. The insightful nutty professor blends pretty seamlessly into the deluded wacko.
What are you referring to with regards to "refusing to acknowledge 27 is less than 51"?
> The liberal will just say that the category of Woman is broader than what the conservative says.
I'm pretty sure the definition is narrower. Liberals have more people they categorize as neither men nor women. Not that this is relevant.
> 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 (it is a purely social category with no biological reality, we must believe) & (b) IQ is biased by stereotype threat, institutional racism, something something eugenics, something Nazis something Hitler, ... etc. The Wiki article on the subject even repeats the ol' Lewontin's, Gradient, Multiple Intelligences, etc., Fallacies!⁰
Rephrase the question to ask about "...an IQ gap *with a genetic component* between races", and Wikipedia no longer agrees—yet this (implicit) claim is little less obviously true than was the initial one.¹
>This is an imprecise question
I really don't think it is; if you heard "stereotypes are generally true", you'd expect it to mean "most popular stereotypes are mostly—say, directionally—correct", right? Except insofar as "generally" might mean somewhere from—say—more than half the time to maybe three-quarters of the time, this seems pretty likely to be interpreted similarly across individuals.
Sure, the stereotypes in question—e.g., I don't know,, "men are more violent than women", say; 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?",² 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.
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¡Fun Footnotes!
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⁰(I have devoted a stupid number of hours to editing Wikipedia; don't get me wrong, I love it, for a certain standard of "love"; but the current consensus, there, is that there is *no genetic component at all* to between-race IQ differences. Debates on the topic tend to go for the "look at this RS, it's a high school sociology textbook from 1991 & it says the idea of a genetic component to the gap is discredited!" gambit; the "look at this paper by the Chair of Anti-Racist & De-Colonization Scholarship—xe says race doesn't real!" approach; or the "this paper finds that there is no indisputable evidence that..." / "...no one has yet identified a single allele that could be solely responsible for
..."—i.e. the ol' Find the Gene™—argument.)
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.)
²(I think it's still the Received Wisdom, upon the left side of the political spectrum, that "black crime rates = because poverty", and/or that in general poverty is THE causal factor *in re* criminality. It certainly is *a* factor... but it is outweighed by an apparent racial component, last I checked; I think Scott himself found this out in an old post on SSC wherein he attempted to discover the truth about gun violence. I don't have a citation handy, though—it has been a long time since I had the energy to debate these topics, heh—so if you think this isn't the case, it either proves my point or else proves that I'm dumb & wrong. Wait... hold on, that actually doesn't narrow it down at all, does it–)
Regarding stereotypes, I think there is genuine ambiguity because of the distinction between 'group G is, on average, more xish than group H' and 'Gs are x', and because stereotypes often contain implicit (sometimes explicit) claims about why Gs are more xish and to what extent this is a deep innate trait vs. something contingent and changeable.
The charitable read of liberal pushback against stereotypes is that liberals correctly, or at least defensibly, think that some stereotypes are simply false, the rest tend to be exaggerated, and both types often play into dangerous biases. Even when the motte is a true claim about observed group differences, the bailey may be much closer to 'Gs are x, so I'm justified in assuming this G is x and treating them accordingly' and/or 'Gs are x, so let's systematically treat them accordingly'. (Maybe the latter is what you want, in some cases, but it's always going to be a disputed normative stance and not a purely descriptive claim that you can reasonably expect everyone to accept.)
I'm not trying to deny that there are systematic blind spots (and lies) on the liberal/progressive left. But this is also true of the right, and it is blindingly obviously true of the brand of 'conservatism' that is currently mainstream in the US.
> 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.
And yet, the answers to questions like "Can men get pregnant?" and "Can women have penises?" — whatever they may be for any given person/group — are having a metric ton of real, practical consequences that we all have to square with one way or the other; so the questions can't simply be brushed aside on the basis that they're semantic disputes. The fact that we all agree on the answer to "Can person P get pregnant?" for any given value of P observably isn't enough. It doesn't solve the problems or resolve the conflicts created by people disagreeing about the first two questions.
So how do you decide whether someone's a liberal? If you define a liberal as someone who answers each of your questions in a certain way. (e.g., "of course average IQ is the same for all races") then by god you are 100% correct in your assessment of liberal beliefs.
On the other hand, if I define a divisive fool as someone who relies on circular reasoning to prove that his outgroup's a bunch of assholes, I've got your number.
I don't think you actually have any difficulty telling who's a liberal and who isn't in any other context.
So which of the following is the case?
1) It is easy to recognize a liberal without giving them the 7-question test, because there are quite a few other things that make it clear that someone’s a liberal. But after you identify them using the other, easy-to-spot markers, you find that every one of them gives the bad, dumb answer to the 7 questions?
2) Nobody counts as a liberal unless they give the bad, dumb answer to every one of the 7 questions in your original post?
I expect that if you compared the image in your head to reality, you would often be surprised and confused.
For example, a poll showed that two thirds of Democrats oppose trans-women in sports. Would you count those as "liberals" or not? How do you tell without actually finding out people's views?
Good one.
This is an interesting question! I would say, for urban-suburban people with college degrees and office jobs, being a liberal is simply the default so much that they mostly not even notice it, think about it, or define it. It is just taking the same stance on everything than basically everybody else they knows. It is very much a fish, water, wet thing. Most people are very social and easily borrow the ideas of people around them.
I should add here, that liberalism is often presented not as an opinion, but as a scientific fact, expert consensus. This is also why many liberals are not even very aware that they are liberals, they see not liberal and conservative opinions, but people who believe science and science-deniers.
On the other hand, there is a small minority who does not socialize much, does not go out much, and has read books on the subject. So they read Rawls, agree with him and from than on they can be considered liberals. But the interesting part is that they will often disagree with the first group over a number of issues. The first group is often superficial and make a big deal about things like renaming homeless people unhoused persons. The second type considers it far more important to provide them with housing.
> Can men get pregnant?
I've heard Righties claim that the liberal consensus is that transgender women can get pregnant and transgender men can produce sperm. But I can't find any mainstream authorities on the Left who ever claimed this. However, it can be confusing for Righties because the terminology of transgender discourse can be confusing. For instance, a transgender legal website says, “Many transmasculine and non-binary people choose to get pregnant and carry children.” There's nothing untrue about the first example. Transmasculine peeps would only be able to get preggers if they still had their ovaries and their cervix was still intact. The non-binary term can be extra confusing for Rightwing minds, because I think they assume that non-binary peeps are hermaphrodites. However, non-binary refers to the way trans people view their gender identity (i.e., someone who feels like a woman even though they're a man).
So, you are either grossly misinformed about how Lefties think, or you're purposely spreading misinformation. Cheers!
How does this differ from saying "The Sun is actually any bright approximately-circular object in the sky during the day that is socially accepted to be the Sun, so at Sun really DID do all those miraculous things (change colors, spin, plunge towards the ground, etc.) at Fatima"?
You're smuggling in a claim of fact that's not widely agreed upon: that there WAS some other object in the sky at Fatima. Whereas the left wing view is NOT making any strongly-disputed claim of fact. Any individual human that the leftwing view marks out as "someone able to get pregnant" is also regarded as "someone able to get pregnant" in the right wing view. The only difference is in the labels.
The only trouble is when conservatives who are either dumb or bad-faith insist on interpreting *left wing claims* though the lens of *right wing labels* (that those claims were clearly NOT using) and then strutting around like they've done something terribly clever.
> However, non-binary refers to the way trans people view their gender identity (i.e., someone who feels like a woman even though they're a man).
You appear to be mistaken about what non-binary means. Someone who feels like a woman even though they're a man would (in the liberal consensus worldview) just be a trans woman, trans but binary.
A non-binary person does not identify as being a man or a woman, believing themselves to be neither, or perhaps both. Such a one will usually go by pronouns other than he/she, such as they/them or neopronouns. Often nonbinary people are entirely indistinguishable from someone of their birth gender, but insist on being referred to using they/them pronouns; other times, they will make an effort to appear androgynous. In any case I think this is obviously different from the usual trans thing.
I stand corrected. The terminology is all very confusing. And I suspect it’s used to separate the in-group from out-group. I’m an outie in the outgroup with outré opinions.
I don't see how anything in the first paragraph supports the claim in the second paragraph.
"What about crime rates?"
this is going to depend heavily on how broadly you're defining "race" and also on the context. Some African countries have very low homicide rates, for example (others have very high ones).
I've head that Africa has more genetic diversity than the rest of the world combined, so if you think crime rate is based on race, that shouldn't be surprising.
> What about crime rates?
And I'll address this Rightwing chestnut, too. The data shows that the Rightwing hysteria about crime is detached from reality.
Violent crime rates peaked in the 1990s, and have been falling ever since (though there was a brief uptick during first year of the COVID pandemic).
https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/multi-year-trends/crimeType
2025 numbers are on track to be low as the mid-1960s.
Another Rightwing delusion is that California has extremely high violent crime and murder rates. But homicide and violent crime rates in California have also fallen to mid-1960s levels.
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/07/02/crime-in-california-drops-again-state-records-second-lowest-homicide-rate-since-1966/
However, if you break down homicide rates by county, the highest homicide rates are in counties in the rural Deep South and Carolinas and in upper Alaska.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_US_county_homicide_rates.png
Also, rightwing rhetoric about immigrant crime (in the US) is utterly divorced from reality as well.
"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?"
Only the last one of these is a factual question that can be answered directly. The rest cannot be answered without first agreeing on definitions that are based on value judgements that differ for the two sides of the culture war.
Philosophy, science, and rational thought in general depend upon our ability to accurately categorise things. If basic, widely-understood categories like "male" and "female" are beyond the ken of modern liberals, that should increase our confidence that liberals believe things unmoored from reality.
“accurately” for what purpose?
Scott has an excellent essay on this subject: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
"If basic, widely-understood categories like "male" and "female" are beyond the ken of modern liberals"
Wow. You can't make this up. "Philosophy, science, and rational thought in general depend upon our ability to accurately categorise things," he says, while blithely conflating the categories of "man and woman" with the categories of "male and female" apparently perfectly unawares. This would not even be correct based on the conservative sex-only definitions: they are different categories by anyone's reckoning.
The people you are criticizing are doing *demonstrably* much better at navigating the different categories and their relevant features than you are. Step back, take a deep breath, touch some grass and take the L. You are not doing yourself any favors by continuing to harp on this one.
Philosophy, science, and rational thought are also based on questioning our generally understood definitions of categories. If you believe the categories as currently understood do not best describe reality, a push to redraw the categories is valid
"Can men get pregnant? Can a woman have a penis? "
Can we PLEASE cut this obnoxious shit out. I realize that some people can hardly help themselves, but ACX should really, REALLY be better than this.
If you are making *any attempt at all* to understand reality, you ALREADY KNOW that this is not rooted in any factual disagreement. This is a group you hate shouting *their* tribal slogans loudly in your direction, and you shouting *your* tribal slogans loudly back. Neither of you would make a SINGLE differing prediction of reality based on this disagreement, and if you're remotely honest and curious you already know that. There are a million different websites devoted to exactly that kind of tedious shit-flinging[1], and there really, really is not need to import it here.
[1] Some purportedly valued in the billions of dollars.
Thanks for expressing this so well.
+1
If it's one thing transfolx (did I get that right?) hate, it's obnoxiousness. Shame on the rest of the world.
Thanks. Doesn't Scott have a rule against culture warrior stuff on the blog?
This is so completely divorced from reality that the self-righteous tone of your comments in this thread is really breathtaking.
(For what it's worth, I found Mr. X's comment a bit self-righteous, and Hanania's comment too, but yours absolutely take the cake. For someone so apparently concerned about ACX becoming like the rest of the internet, you are doing more than anyone else to bring Reddit-tier discourse ("wow!", "get a load of this shit!", "you're wrong but of course you already know that" etc) into these discussions. How about a look in the mirror?)
> Neither of you would make a SINGLE differing prediction of reality based on this disagreement,
There have been multiple, concerted efforts on Wikipedia, with large numbers of editors in favour, to remove from transgender people's pages all references to their actual biological sex. And to do this removal on the *very day* the person comes out as a different gender. I don't know what the latest policy is, but I think it might be that this *is* allowed if their biological/birth sex is not "notable". Either way, I can link to the strong pushes for it if necessary.
There have also been judicial mandates to not only have transgender witnesses always referred to as their preferred gender, but to never mention their birth sex and, if their birth sex is somehow essential evidence, to block public access to the testimony and seal all records of it. I can link to examples if necessary.
Now perhaps you think that the average person coming across an article that reads "Chelsea is a woman who is the daughter of such-and-such. She grew up in [place] and became the first woman to achieve [thing] in 2015. She is the mother of [child]." with absolutely no mention of the fact that this person is a biological male whose article yesterday read "Christopher is the son of such-and-such and he achieved [thing] in 2015)" until at 9am this morning "Christopher" came out as "Chelsea"...will form remotely accurate beliefs about reality. Or perhaps you think that even though said average person would obviously form incredibly *inaccurate* beliefs about reality from the article, this is entirely an accident and it is absolutely not *intentionally desired* by the ones who changed the article that average readers will form the belief that Chelsea is a biological female.
If so, that would be an argument I would very much like to see you make.
You also complain in another comment about a failure to distinguish between "man/woman" and "male/female". I could tell you about the number of times I've seen "transgender female" used by progressives interchangably with "transgender woman" and the number of times I've seem white-hot outrage when someone has deliberately separated sex and gender (the very thing you're claiming progressives routinely do) and called the same person a "transgender woman" and "a biological male". But I suppose you can accuse me of lying, and I suppose they could have drastically changed their behaviour in the past few months. Or past few weeks.
So instead I'll just ask you if you are *honestly* of the belief that any significant number of pro-trans progressives will happily accept a transwoman being called a male, and will happily, loudly, clearly admit "yes, she is male, of course she is a biological male". Or whether you think you will find an average, typical pro-trans progresssive even *grudgingly* using this term.
Because I don't think I can possibly express how high my "prior" is that you will find nothing of the kind.
Wikipedia has a policy of writing facts and the truth. As new facts are discovered, articles change. Harriet Tubman's article header doesn't contain the sentence "She was a black woman." That's not relevant. It would be even less relevant to say "She used to be a child." Your anger at the Wikimedia Foundation is more than a little odd.
"This is so completely divorced from reality"
So completely divorced from reality that you didn't manage to point out a single difference from reality? What's the opposite of "damning with faint praise."
" For someone so apparently concerned about ACX becoming like the rest of the internet,..."
I didn't start the conversation nor broach the topic. If you'd like to look through my comment history and find some examples of place where I shoehorn inflammatory political talking points into totally unrelated conversations, you are more than welcome to rub them in my face if I find any. But unless you do that, I'd like to apologize for blithely and brazenly conflating "derailing the conversation in incendiary manner" from "pointedly objecting when somebody else does that." Because they are not the same, and if you have a shred of honesty, you'll admit that.
"If so, that would be an argument I would very much like to see you make."
By all means. Let's look at what you're claiming:
"Now perhaps you think that the average person coming across an article that reads...[snip] ...will form remotely accurate beliefs about reality."
EDIT: I was too fast and too careless in reading the original and pattern matched the name "Chelsea" to a well-known trans public figure by that name, whereas ascend was discussing a fully hypothetical article. This...really doesn't undercut the broader point even a little bit. It's still a matter of judgement which facts about a person's life are worth including and where, and ascend's subjective insistence that somebody's sex-assigned-at-birth is so enormously important that it *must* be included and centered and have conspicuous attention called to it is still silly. The fact that they had to *make up* a hypothetical article and edit history to complain about honestly makes it barely worth responding to.
So first off, you're assuming your own conclusion in defining "the average person" as "anyone who thinks like I do (but also doesn't know about this high-profile individual already)." There are, in fact, lots of "average people" that don't think like you. But that's barely even relevant. See, I took literally FIVE SECONDS to look at the Wikipedia article in question. Would you like to go and glance at it? You don't even have to scroll, I promise. Just look at the sidebar.
If you're too lazy to do that, I'll spoil the ending. There is an entire SECTION OF THE ARTICLE titled "gender transition." It's not hidden. It's not a secret. It's right fucking there.
So as far as I can tell, your ENTIRE complaint here boils down to "it doesn't front-and-center the thing that *I personally* find most important about Chelsea Manning, and ONLY mentions it in its own entire section of the article, without also repeatedly calling attention to it everywhere else." Which is about the level of seriousness and maturity I have come to expect from these discussions.
But hell, let's live in a less convenient possible world, and imagine some *hypothetical* Wikipedia article, about some *hypothetical* trans person whose gender status was less publicly well-known, and thus less notable. The argument you clearly *want* to make is that Wikipedia would be dishonest for leaving that off, while referring to the person by the pronouns that they *actually use* and the gender that they *actually claim.* As far as I can tell, your position here is "if they did that, myself and other people like me might mistakenly believe that person is cisgender." And like...so what? Why is Wikipedia responsible for correcting your bad assumptions about the world? Why do you feel entitled to an unambiguous public accounting of everybody's genitals and chromosomes? How EXACTLY is it your business if somebody else decides to go by different pronouns and wear different clothing than you *assume* they ought to?
Let me say of again: NONE OF THIS IS ABOUT FACTS. You are, by now, *quite* well aware that pronouns aren't statements of fact, that gendered terms encode assumptions that differ from person to person[1]. What you are upset about is that other people are not bending over backwards to use language is ways that you are more *comfortable* with. You would *prefer* that everybody used those words in the way that you want them to be used. [2] Of course almost all of them will *very happily tell you* what they mean by those words if you ask. There's no serious claim you can make about "dishonesty" that doesn't boil down to you being angry at sometimes having to challenge your own assumptions.
"So instead I'll just ask you if you are *honestly* of the belief that any significant number of pro-trans progressives will happily accept a transwoman being called a male,"
I'll tell you *honestly* that after reading the rest of what you just wrote, these hypothetical "pro-trans progressives" in your head--and probably most of the real ones out in the world--would not HAPPILY accept so much as a "good day" from you. Nobody is obligated to by happy about your belligerence and rudeness.
And so it goes in any other circumstance. Yes, lots of people would get mad at you for calling a trans woman a "biological male." But just like YOUR emotions are not facts, neither are THEIRS. They would not be getting mad at you because they *think you're lying.* They'd be getting mad at you for being an asshole. Those aren't the same thing. Like, suppose you were out with a group of people who included an ex of yours, and the ex started telling everyone a true-but-embarrasing story about your sex life. Would that make you angry? Do you think that situation would make your hypothetical "average person" angry? I think it probably *should.* It's an enormously rude thing to do.
Now, you might not see or understand why calling somebody a "biological male" in most social contexts is boorish[3]. But you not understanding doesn't change that it isn't about questions of fact. Trans people generally do not (for example) play coy with their doctors about their sex, because that is a context where it's relevant and where its an appropriate thing to discuss. But *your* need to know or discuss their genitals or chromosomes is (once again) not a question of fact, and not something that they actually have any obligation to humor.
I'll end by adding that biological sex is considerably more complicated than the dumbest transphobes repeatedly insist it is. You can tell by the fact that they can't even agree on a definition. So while there certainly exist progressives who, on occasion, say dumb things about biological sex, *my* prior is very high that any time a transphobe triumphantly holds forth a claimed example of some progressive person lying or being wrong about biological sex, the claim will stem from some combination of ignorance, willful misrepresentation, or simply being to impatient to actually read it.
[1] And would do so even in a world where trans people were not the political football they are today. Gender is not an objective, perfectly-sharp concept and never, ever has been.
[2] Yes, I'm aware that *other* people besides you also get upset about this kind of thing; that's hardly germane here since it is *you* that are trying to argue this is a question of fact.
[3] Part of the reason is simple privacy: it's not polite to talk about *anyone's* genitals or private medical information in most social contexts. But part of the reason is also that going around calling people "biological males" is something done almost exclusively by the kind of dipshit that writes multi-paragraph rants about how Wikipedia is lying for not hammering at Chelsea Manning's [EDIT: or random hypothetical trans person Chelsea's] trans status at every possible opportunity. So the moment somebody says those words, adopting a hostile or suspicious posture is a pretty reasonable defense mechanism.
"So instead I'll just ask you if you are *honestly* of the belief that any significant number of pro-trans progressives will happily accept a transwoman being called a male"
It later occurred to me that this talking point is doubly silly, because your "pro-trans progressives" ABSOLUTELY have language to talk about the thing that you are so exceptionally concerned about. Just not the same language *you* use.
The terms you are looking for are "assigned male at birth" and "assigned female at birth," often shortened to AMAB and AFAB. Since you are so deeply worried about factual accuracy, I will point out that they are actually rather more factually accurate than the terminology you are insisting everybody should use, in that they speak *only* to the evidence that is widely available in most cases. I'm sure if you think it through carefully, you are capable of understanding how and why this is true.
Sigh. The liberal consensus understands the difference between biological sex and social gender. So when you use words like "woman", you should clarify whether you mean biologically woman or socially woman.
"The liberal consensus understands the difference between biological sex and social gender."
Oh, please inform me more abut that, because with these own lying eyes of mine I have seen trans women online claiming to have periods after starting HRT.
Now, oestrogen injections can give you abdominal pains, so they may indeed be having pains. But these are not periods. But they are claiming that they are now biologically women so they are having biological woman periods.
Do not talk to me about the "liberal consensus" because as soon as you try pinning it down, the answer comes back that well there is no transgender council making rules, or that there is no liberal pope issuing dogma, and if you read/saw/heard A saying such-and-such, then that's just A, that's not all liberals/trans people/insert your own grouping.
>Do not talk to me about the "liberal consensus" because as soon as you try pinning it down, the answer comes back that well there is no transgender council making rules, or that there is no liberal pope issuing dogma, and if you read/saw/heard A saying such-and-such, then that's just A, that's not all liberals/trans people/insert your own grouping.
I think this shows the importance of categories for rational thinking. An awful lot of people are appealing to "But what even *is* a liberal, anyway?" as a thought-terminating cliche to avoid having to reconsider their own sense of superiority.
I spent the first 30 years of my life using the words man and woman, never thinking about any of that, and everybody knew exactly what I meant. Then the overeducated and economically worthless Karens of the "liberal consensus" decided that they knew better and I needed to clarify what I meant. I, of course, completely ignored them because there are few things in the world I have less regard for than the "liberal consensus," and somehow everybody I talk to still knows exactly what I mean without this supposedly necessary clarification (except for some worthless HR ladies who keep sending out emails about putting your pronouns in your Slack bio).
Trans men can get pregnant, and trans women can have a penis (to say nothing of intersex people). None of that is detached from objective reality, but rather has to do with a distinction between sex and gender which some people choose to recognize and others do not. I doubt I need to link readers of this blog to Scott's "The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories" but if you haven't read it recently, maybe now is the time.
1. Asking if men can get pregnant is just a category dispute, not hallucinations. The thing about category disputes is that, while you might think someone's categorization system is dysfunctional or self serving, they're not *falsifiable.*
2. I suspect most Progressives would argue that IQ differences were either cultural differences that show up as IQ differences (vis Gould's The Mismeasure of Man) or differences in opportunity or environmental stress. "Stereotype threat." etc. A better question is how well IQ tests actually measure all aspects of intelligence, which is not unified. I disagree that these explain the whole gap, but they're within the Overton Window of acceptable discourse.
In any case, your examples are not a misinterpretation of sensory input. The claim is not that a particular group is infallible or unassailable in their beliefs or their worldview.
Short answers: yes but very few of them; yes but very few of them; yes; probably; I have no idea; in practice it does; I don't know without Googling but I think the number is roughly in line with the percentage of the population that is black.
And yes I'm a fairly "woke" liberal. :P
The longer answers to some of these are "average IQ is a bad way to compare races because of the Flynn effect and other things - what would the average IQ in South Korea have been in 1900?" and "whether or not conscious or unconscious racism is involved, my impression is that there actually are problems with policing in the US that predictably lead to abuses, even if most such abuses aren't as dramatic as an unarmed man getting shot."
"Can men get pregnant? Can a woman have a penis?"- These are arguments about the definitions of words. The conservative view is that "man" and "woman" refer purely to biological groups. The progressive view is that "man" and "Woman" are social classes that are based on some combination of biology and social role. Regardless of your opinion on the implications of these views, its not actually the same as a mass hallucination.
The other things you listed are often contested over various interpretations of the data, how biases may have influenced the collection of data etc. Some are more difficult to untangle than others. But again, not really the same as a mass hallucination.
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.
For comparison, what was the GDP per capita of Lebanon?
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.
RH is such a classic example of the old XKCD "I disagree with both sides, therefore I am superior to both".
However, for me it does not result in intense dislike. I generally allow one or two smaller sins for everybody, RH's sin is smugness, that is in itself is not so bad.
He is the conservative embodiment of the personality type that makes people hate the left.
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.
I know! It bugged the hell out of me that the media never called Biden out when he went on and on and on about Hannibal Lecter—and why the MSM never covered Biden's bizarro statements like his sharks and electrocution monologue, I'll never know.
I think everybody noticed, and thought that everybody else noticed too, and because it was so obvious it did not need to be talked about. Everybody even a little bit "in the know" knows that these types of leading politicians are always just figureheads and real power lies elsewhere.
Lots of people vehemently denied that Biden was showing any signs of cognitive decline. Maybe they were all just lying, though.
This might be plausible were prominent media outlets not reporting on the White House calling the video clips demonstrating Biden's senility "cheapfakes."
I wonder if people claiming -- apparently sincerely -- that "Everybody thought it was obvious" when they quite clearly didn't, or "Nobody supported this" when they quite clearly did, would count as the kind of secular mass delusion we've been searching for.
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.
"What is science fiction" is a fascinating question of literary categorization; I wrote a whole blog post about it and only vaguely approached an answer!
Link to the blog post?
https://papyrusrampant.substack.com/p/the-thin-line-between-science-fiction
"The Thin Line Between Science Fiction and Fantasy"
Or as Damon Knight put it, "Science fiction is that thing we point at, when we point at something and say 'that is science fiction'".
https://www.artandpopularculture.com/Science_fiction_is_what_we_point_to_when_we_say_it
The pornography definition, one might call it. But who is this 'we', Damon?
Indeed, and what about when "we" disagree among ourselves?
It’s science fiction if the plot is advanced by on-screen investigative science; otherwise it’s just sparkling space opera or cyberpunk.
A far more restrictive definition than many I've seen... you'd even omit much of what's usually called hard sci-fi!
And they should have the courage to call themselves something else! I don’t think the vibes are as important to what the book as the questions and restrictions that drive the plot.
Another way to put it is that in science fiction you win by having special knowledge or special capabilities. In fantasy you win by having a special character or special practices. In mysteries you win by special diligence or special reasoning. And so on. Greg Egan writes math fiction. The Martian is engineering fiction.
And those definitions do naturally suggest some overlap; it’s easy to frame a fantasy or science fiction as a mystery. Space opera is when fantasy plot but space vibes. Cyberpunk is when mystery plot but libertarian vibes. And so on.
Well, the real answer is, whatever the semi-arbitrary categorization that the SFF fandom ended up on says is sci-fi. The two main axes of relevance are futuristic vs medieval aesthetic, and how blatantly the real-world laws of nature (as we understand them) are being broken. Basically the work must be on the futuristic side of the first axis (medieval-ish post-apocalypse usually counts), and not too egregious on the second one. So, Star Wars generally isn't counted as sci-fi, while Star Trek is.
I don't think it's some great mystery. The difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy (and indeed Science Fantasy) is the underlying assumption that everything in the world is understandable and explainable through science -- in fact through the same science that we're using today, just sufficiently advanced, with improved understanding of the natural laws that we already understand today (to some extent). The actual explanation doesn't need to be explicitly stated, merely implied.
For example, consider a wizard who casts the Fireball spell (maybe he makes some mystical gestures, maybe he shouts some quasi-Latin, whatever). Contrast this with a space marine who fires his plasma cannon at full power.
The end result is the same (roomful of exploded bad guys), and the exact mechanics of how either the spell or the weapon function are never explicitly listed -- both characters just *do* it when they need to. Yet it is implicitly understood that the wizard is heir to some mystical knowledge (perhaps passed since the dawn of time) that operates by obscure rules that govern magic and *nothing else*. The space marine, on the other hand, learned how to fire his plasma cannon in boot camp, and the weapon itself was designed by engineers who applied scientific principles that were discovered by researchers via experimentation and lots of math; and the same principles can be applied to make a coffeemaker or an airplane or indeed a hairbrush.
If you wanted to be a wizard, you'd have to be born with the power (or have it bestowed upon you by some mystical being); and if you wanted to be good at it, you'd need to memorize a bunch of arbitrary rules that govern magic and only magic. If you wanted to build a plasma cannon or a warp drive or a neural implant, then in principle you'd need nothing more than your senses, something to write with, and lots and lots of time (arguably tens of thousands of years, but still). Wizards are special; space marines are common.
Note that Science Fiction violates *actual* physical laws almost as much as Fantasy does: real-world science prohibits things like FTL travel and maybe even plasma cannons; and in fact there are as many made-up science-fictional FTL systems as there are fantasy magic systems. As I'd said, the difference is in the attitude, not necessarily the substance.
It's extremely hard to quantify whether a work operates with the assumption that "everything in the world is understandable and explainable through science." I would not say this is clearly true for Warhammer 40k, which involves a lot of mysticism and an entire metaphysical alternate plane of reality populated by gods that are shaped by belief and emotion. The claim that everything in 40k is theoretically explainable through science is a fine interpretation of the lore, but not more obviously supported by canon than making the same claim about ASOIAF, or Dungeons & Dragons for that matter.
By the way, would you describe HPMOR as science fiction? What about Unsong?
Does the 40K canon really give a scientific explanation for how Orcs work their magic?
40K is Science Fantasy, as huge chunks of its universe operate based on eldritch whims of the Chaos Gods, and the Warp itself is a priori ineffable -- and all of these are the foundational concepts of the setting.
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science.
There are fantasy novels that understand magic as a kind of science, and those are my favorites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivers_of_London_(book_series)
I must admit I have not finished Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality, but knowing what Yud is like, surely he gave magic a rational explanation. My best guess would be: they are living in a simulation and spells are cheat codes. That is how I would have done it...
FWIW I was really disappointed by the 2nd half of HPMOR. I feel like Yudkowsky kind of gave up on storytelling in favor of preaching, and the ending feels like a really weak afterthought.
Amazing! I had to check that I did not accidentally written it myself because I agree with and even kind of predicted every word. Like at the first parapgraph I thought "the author will say Star Wars is futuristic fantasy" etc.
Thank you!
A definition is a set of words that together have the same meaning as a word. While it is unavoidable that words sometimes have two or more meanings, it is important to avoid equivocation. Equivocation is a disorder of thought where two or more meanings of a word, or two or more words with the same sound, are confused with each other.
Technically, only terms of theory can be defined, and terms of reality can only be described.
For example we cannot define the word "communist". We can describe that there were and are people calling themselves communists, they generally agreed in this, often disagreed in that, and that is it. We cannot tell who is a "real communist" because even communists disagree about this (something, something, ice pick).
It's not obviously wrong, but it's certainly dubious. I really doubt that that kind of distinction goes along a left-right axis. I've known extremely contrarian people who were left of center and those that were right of center. They tended to be contrarian about different things, but they were equally willing to disagree with the normal consensus.
Exactly. "10,000 liberals imagining a crime that didn't happen because of ideological priors" almost perfectly describes the collective reaction to George Floyd's death. Just because it happened higher up in the cortical column (i.e. it's cognitive rather than sensory) doesn't mean it's any less of a mental malfunction. In a cognitive sense it's probably more akin to thinking that the CIA is after you, but describing the 2020 BLM riots as a mass delusion seems totally reasonable to me.
Seems to me that when it comes to political beliefs and takes on Floyd-type incidents with huge media focus, most people arrive at their views via osmosis. They and their peers and the ideas in their preferred news media are all swimming in the same liquid, and all absorb it. Along with the beliefs they also absorb ways of explaining and justifying them, and ways of refuting opposing beliefs. But at the end of all that they feel like they arrived at their beliefs by thinking over the issues. One reason I just bagged it with voting is that I realized that my beliefs had been formed mostly by osmosis. But I don't think it's reasonable to call the process a mental malfunction. I think it's normal, and pretty universal, part of being social animals. A lot of the time osmosis works well. Most people think driving 90 mph and grizzly bears and walking alone at night in the slums are dangerous, and they're right. If you just absorb those views you'll be safer. It's really only when you get to issues like what is the right way to run a country that just absorbing what those around you think isn't a decent way to arrive at a reasonable take.
I have examined my views, and I found it is mostly osmosis, but there are enough rational ones to justify voting. For example, the idea that diminishing marginal utility justifies redistribution/welfare is I think well-founded. The fact that Scandinavia before the Viking Age did not build or invent anything interesting at all suggests strongly that whatever correlations are found between skin color an IQ probably do not mean much, if we understand IQ as the kind of thing that helps people invent things. And so on.
Your last premise does not follow at all. It's pretty much nonsensical and you should doubt your other views in light of it.
Just to provide some substance, alternative interpretations:
Modern correlations between IQ and skin color didn't exist in the pre-viking age (Scandinavians became more intelligent recently)
Inventing things has more to it than IQ, so not inventing things =/= having low IQ or IQ not meaning much
pre-vikings actually did invent stuff and you're factually wrong
etc.
>(Scandinavians became more intelligent recently)
Evolution needs time. Even with high selection pressure, it is still more than centuries.
>Inventing things has more to it than IQ
Sure, but what changed in Scandinavia between 0AD and 800 AD? It always looked like the kind of place that could use ships. The trees were always around etc.
Pre industrial revolution the strongest determining factor of IQ was whether or not you were in the very small elite group of society that got the nutrition you needed to reach full IQ at all.
Agreed, mostly.
> I don't think it's reasonable to call the process a mental malfunction.
Maybe not typically, but I think that process can definitely malfunction. I think the way that information propagates through a biological neural network can be thought of as osmosis too, but that doesn't mean that there can't be pathological outcomes. In humans that looks like psychosis, in groups it looks like the madness of crowds. I'm suggesting that the BLM moral panic was an instance of the latter in the same way that Fatima was. Of course one can avoid the "group delusion" explanation of Fatima by positing an omnipotent deity, just as one can rationalize BLM by supposing the existence of structural racism. The point of the comparison is to suggest that both of those rationalizations require similar leaps of unsubstantiated faith, and are therefore better explained via a social pathology model. I think that interpretation is bolstered by the various irrational absurdities of the post-2020 moral panic.
Which claim, exactly, are you disputing?
1. That Derek Chauvin was filmed with his knee on George Floyd's neck for nine minutes while Floyd repeatedly said he couldn't breathe?
2. That Floyd died during this incident?
3. That 1 caused 2? (Do you think both autopsies that claimed his death was a homicide were done by examiners that were lying, or incompetent, or all of it was forged?)
4. That any of the above reflects a crime?
And do you dispute this with such certainty that you think it's reasonable to claim that anyone who disagrees is delusional, rather than making a different, reasonable conclusion?
I dispute 3. IMO George Floyd very likely died of a fentanyl overdose, which is why he had trouble breathing before he was on the ground. It's certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt that Chauvin was responsible in any causal way, though of course there's still a reasonable argument about negligence to be made.
The delusion is the claim that Floyd's death was evidence of a conspiratorial systematic bias against black people. Making that connection is, in my view, analogous to thinking that a plane flying overhead is evidence of CIA surveillance.
Do you claim that it is delusional to believe that there exists any kind of systematic bias against black people (I don't know what qualifies as conspiratorial), or only that it is delusional to draw any connection between Floyd's death and said bias? Can you be more specific on what beliefs you think are delusional?
Well let me be clear, I don't mean delusional in the sense that it's something that would go away if someone were to take antipsychotics. This is delusional in the same sense that the Fatima experience could be described as delusional: something which is objectively false but which a large number of ideologically-primed people believe and cannot be dissuaded from. I don't think that antipsychotics would have altered the Fatima pilgrims, either, though I do think that it represents something at least analogous to a delusion. As I said elsewhere in this thread, I suspect that inaccurate beliefs lay on a spectrum with outright delusional beliefs and that there's no principled way to make a categorical distinction between them. I also think that the "madness of crowds" may have more than a superficial resemblance to schizoid-type delusions.
By that standard I would say that the entire moral panic around race relations in the 2020-22 timeframe could be classified as a mass delusion. Consider some of the more absurd claims made during this period: things like math being "white knowledge", the notion that this country was "built on slavery", calculus was invented in africa, or that racial gaps are better explained by structural racism than the endogenous qualities of individuals. I think there's a very compelling parallel between social delusions like Fatima and paranoid delusions such as being followed by the CIA: a totalizing emotionally-charged worldview (in the case of BLM it's an oppression narrative, for the schizophrenic it's a belief that they're uniquely important) that creates a strong bias to interpret all data in light of a flawed top-down narrative. So the random plane flying overhead being interpreted as proof that the CIA is following you becomes a violent felon dying of a drug overdose being proof that all institutions are racist and must be overthrown. George Floyd represents the psychotic break and the subsequent few years of moral panic were the manic episode. Again this is an analogy but in my view a compelling one. I wonder whether, if the detailed dynamics of both psychosis and moral panic were fully understood, the relationship would turn out to be more than metaphorical.
> I dispute 3. IMO George Floyd very likely died of a fentanyl overdose, which is why he had trouble breathing before he was on the ground. It's certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt that Chauvin was responsible in any causal way, though of course there's still a reasonable argument about negligence to be made.
No, George Floyd died of positional asphyxia caused by his lungs being unable to expand, that's why he died during the exact same minutes in which Derek Chauvin was applying a heavy amount of weight to his back, and why Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder.
Awful coincidence that Floyd overdosed just when Chauvin happened to be kneeling on him, despite moving around just fine seven minutes prior.
Have we considered that this could all be a Chinese conspiracy to undermine American law? They manufactured the fentanyl. Maybe there's nanobots in it.
Are you claiming that George Floyd was not murdered?
I think that the likelihood that Derek Chauvin caused George Floyd’s death is roughly the same likelihood that OJ didn’t cause Nicole’s. Floyd likely died of a fentanyl + meth overdose in combination with coronary artery disease, which is why he had breathing difficulty even before he was on the ground.
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.
"That’s not the case when it comes to a stabbing by an unsavory character. There is no supernatural element in there."
No, but there is the unreliability of witnesses:
https://www.malmlegal.com/blog/the-unreliability-of-eyewitness-testimony-and-the-importance-of-circumstantial-evidence/
"Eyewitness testimony has long been a cornerstone of legal proceedings, often considered a powerful tool in establishing facts and determining the truth. However, recent studies and legal analyses have increasingly shown that eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable. This unreliability stems from a variety of factors, including the fallibility of human memory, the influence of stress or trauma on recall, and the potential for suggestion or bias during the identification process. In many cases, circumstantial evidence—indirect evidence that suggests a fact by implication or inference—can be a more reliable and objective means of establishing the truth."
So you could indeed have a mob of people claiming they saw X stabbing Y, with some of that mob saying that it was a shooting or a bludgeoning, not a stabbing.
Here is where I pull out a Chesterton quote, from the story "The Trees of Pride":
"I am too happy just now in thinking how wrong I have been," he answered, "to quarrel with you, doctor, about our theories. And yet, in justice to the Squire as well as myself, I should demur to your sweeping inference. I respect these peasants, I respect your regard for them; but their stories are a different matter. I think I would do anything for them but believe them. Truth and fancy, after all, are mixed in them, when in the more instructed they are separate; and I doubt if you have considered what would be involved in taking their word for anything. Half the ghosts of those who died of fever may be walking by now; and kind as these people are, I believe they might still burn a witch. No, doctor, I admit these people have been badly used, I admit they are in many ways our betters, but I still could not accept anything in their evidence."
The doctor bowed gravely and respectfully enough, and then, for the last time that day, they saw his rather sinister smile.
"Quite so," he said. "But you would have hanged me on their evidence."
Thanks for the pointer about the reliability of eye witness testimony. I have seen this emphasized in many true crime stories but it’s usually the case that the victim misidentifies the culprit - not that there is no crime or shooting.
That said, I’d be curious to know if there are cases with multiple eye witnesses being wrong.
<< So you could indeed have a mob of people claiming they saw X stabbing Y, with some of that mob saying that it was a shooting or a bludgeoning, not a stabbing.>>
I guess what I am saying is that claims about religious miracles by otherwise regular people are uniquely and perhaps independently biased and mistaken. The general unreliability of eyewitness testimony may or may not be contributing to this.
Do you see a connection between your Chesterton quote and what Richard wrote on peasants and his relatives?
I get that you hate his guts, but you are not doing yourself or this comment section any favors like this.
P.S. IMHO, you're overengaging on this blog even if you don't let the hate flow freely...
>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.
I think that is true, to some extent. I've had lots of discussions with Christians, and one argument that always comes up is something like, "why would you choose to not believe in God, given that belief brings obvious benefits X, Y, and Z ?" My response to that used to be something like, "I can't just make myself believe things; when I look at the sky and see that it's blue, I can't make myself believe that it's green with purple polka dots instead". But I've had some pushback from Christians who claim that they *could* in fact do something like this, if their faith demanded of them. Some of those Christians appeared to be smart and honest.
Thus, I think that there's at least a possibility that Christian brains have a facility that atheist brains lack: the ability to convince oneself of a belief at will; and this facility (or lack thereof) is wired in at some basic level, not subject to logical argumentation (one way or the other).
Hmm, my guess is that those people are simply willing to accept that their ordinary perception is fallible to an arbitrary extent, compared to whatever way they imagine getting their divine insight. If God somehow told them that sky was green, they'd accept that as truth even if they couldn't see it, because this would make the most sense in their worldview.
I don't think it'd just about raw sensory perception, as Christians often exhibit similar patterns of thought on topics such as of morality/ethics, cosmology, history, and other such domains that are not directly accessible by the senses.
Sure, they see themselves just as fallible in those domains as well.
Perhaps, but I don't think this necessarily disputes my point. I personally, and many (if not most) atheists in general, cannot make myself believe that the sky is green (unless we look up and see that the sky is actually green, that is). It's not a matter of intellectual arrogance: logically speaking, I accept that it's possible that e.g. reality is a simulation and my eyes have been hacked etc. But while I can entertain the notion and follow all of the logical implications, I cannot make myself actually believe it. Even if I was truly convinced that believing in the green sky would save me from an eternity of torture, I still couldn't do it. I'd agonize over it and perhaps spend my life in fear and misery, but I'd still believe that the sky was blue. From what I can tell, at least some Christians don't have this problem: if they needed to believe in the green sky, they simply would.
Well, I as a fellow atheist, I do believe that my perception isn't an entirely accurate representation of reality, what with all those optical illusions, hidden blind spots, etc.
My main problem with religious beliefs is a different one - it doesn't seem likely that they have access to a more reliable way of getting insights into the nature of the world, which is why I don't take their outlandish stuff seriously. If I did believe that though, believing that sky is actually green if the Holy Spirit says so doesn't seem so crazy.
After all, molecular physics says that we're almost entirely empty space by volume, something I have no trouble of believing despite being unable to directly perceive. I wonder, would it be possible to truly convince anybody from 500 years ago of that, with only words.
Belief is, to a large degree, influenced by social factors. Your brain has a strong subconscious desire for the comfort that comes from social conformity. Despite its limits, this effect is quite powerful.
You can indirectly induce different beliefs in yourself by immersing yourself in a different social scene typified by different beliefs. The limits I noted mean that you're probably not going to ever believe something that is totally ABHORRENT to you. But neither are you helplessly fated to have no deliberate control over what you believe.
Of course, this is a kind of steelman. Not every Christian has this concept in mind when they talk about choosing beliefs. But this is what I mean when I talk about choosing beliefs, and I can't be the only one.
I agree with your steelman to some extent, but I don't think that all Christians who talk about choosing one's beliefs mean it this way. In addition, I doubt that your steelman is powerful enough to make someone like myself believe in the green sky (though I could be wrong).
A simpler explanation could be that you simply don't surround yourself with religious people. If you would, they would sooner or later convert you.
If religious people have different mental structures from the religiously unaffiliated then it is the unaffiliated that are the "weird" ones: after all, 75.8% of people are religious. (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/06/09/how-the-global-religious-landscape-changed-from-2010-to-2020/)
Much as I respect your position (I probably would have held it 6 months ago honestly) I think you discount several things too easily.
For one - privileging a contemporary person's mind over a person's mind from *100* years ago in Europe seems a bit extreme. I've read books by intelligent men who grew up in Feudal Japan and only learned about Western values in adulthood - and I can relate to them and their way of thinking shockingly well. I'm of the opinion that the most intelligent ancient Greeks, Persians or Chinese were commensurate with the lower end of high IQs today. Sextus Empiricus, for example, would have an even more extreme version of skepticism regarding this event than you do.
Conversely, delusional 100 years ago and delusional today are qualitatively similar by this reasoning.
As a second point - I completely agree with the perspective that people's perceptions can be primed, e.g. via culture or immediate methods. But we have cases where it would seem that people with a strong cognitive bias *against* seeing a miracle also reported it. You are correct to point out that their accounts could just be based off recollection and distortion - but again, this seems overly dismissive.
Combined I think you would need to address:
1) How can you prove that the most reasonable witness on the ground was less trustworthy than you are? Can you be sure you would not have perceived the same thing?
2) If a reasonable, educated witness from 100 years ago, who has express reasons to discount their experience, still admits to seeing the phenomenon - what reason can you provide for that admission?
These are not intractable, but I think other commenters have also raised various versions of these points.
Big fan though!
> But we have cases where it would seem that people with a strong cognitive bias *against* seeing a miracle also reported it.
The specific Christian-theology-themed parts, or just the visual distortion?
The visual distortion constitutes a similar level of unexpected event, minus the specific features that a religious person would take to confirm it as religiously significant.
If 49 people saw a comet and 1 person saw a dragon, our prior is on a comet. If all 50 people saw something different, what is our prior on? I think our prior is on *something* - shouldn't that much be obvious?
If fifty people ate from a particular batch of cornbread, then 40 of them saw a comet unknown to astronomy, one (who was in another town at the time) saw a dragon, and nine had seizures despite no previous history of epilepsy, my first guess would be that nothing notable actually happened in the sky, the corn was just contaminated with hallucinogenic fungus.
Given visual distortions closely matching those which can be reliably created with a particular sort of meditation (after months of setup), at an event announced months in advance, with a crowd presumably consisting mostly of people who'd spent that time diligently trying to spiritually prepare themselves... the result is barely more unexpected than a barn-raising party ending with the barn having been successfully raised, or most participants in the Boston Marathon eventually crossing the finish line.
Sometimes children make extraordinary claims; sometimes they're taken seriously; sometimes the weather is beautiful unto distraction. When those tumblers fail to line up quite so well, it doesn't end up in the history books.
I agree nothing of note happened in the sky. But I also doubt that all witnesses were immersed in diligent spiritual preparation - indeed we have secular observers there to make fun of attendees.
I think this is honestly adjacent to Machine Elves in terms of what we are getting at. If I give a bunch of people DMT and specifically explain Machine Elves beforehand, I would expect to get elevated reports of Machine Elf-experiences. The problem is that even if I did not prime them, if I asked, some people would still describe Machine Elf-experiences.
The question is where the commonalities in such experiences originate - if it's in the individual, why does it manifest in multiple people? If it's environmental, why are only some affected and there is no obvious vector? The cornbread analogy is interesting, are you referencing that hypothesis around mass hysteria and that one type of grain?
>Given visual distortions closely matching those which can be reliably created with a particular sort of meditation (after months of setup), at an event announced months in advance, with a crowd presumably consisting mostly of people who'd spent that time diligently trying to spiritually prepare themselves...
Even assuming that most of the crowd had been diligently spiritually preparing themselves (which as any actual Catholic could tell you is not necessarily a safe assumption), "spiritual preparation" in a Catholic context generally consists of fasting, praying, and going to confession more often, not doing the "particular sort of meditation" people do to reliably see mystical visions in bright lights.
> Even assuming that most of the crowd had been diligently spiritually preparing themselves
That's not an assumption, it's a logical inference from accepted facts.
If somebody without previously documented plumbing skills was publicly informed they'd have a plumbing problem in six months, then there's a partial gap in knowledge of their activities, and when the prophesied clog arrives, they deal with it in a manner typical of a plumber with a few months of experience, Occam's Razor says they learned the skill in that time.
If that happens simultaneously to ten thousand people, in the same small geographic region, protesting that "they're not the kind of people who just suddenly become plumbers" is flatly contrary to empirical observation.
> But we have cases where it would seem that people with a strong cognitive bias *against* seeing a miracle also reported it.
Do we though? The supposed skeptical reports almost all fall apart under close inspection. There's at most one case of an actually documented skeptic, and even that one is very shaky.
I'll grant that labelling skeptics and the reliability of their accounts here is a challenge - I looked back through all Scott's "Classic Accounts" and would include those, but I can see how those could be discounted.
Just think it is interesting reading those and hearing "I was devoid of any religious feeling" then five minutes later "so the sun started spinning."
Conversion stories are popular among the religious. Doesn't mean you should take them at face value. People exaggerate the extent of the conversion for dramatic effect, as well as subconscious bias.
What some call conversion, others call updating their priors ... If you have empirical evidence that I do not for an update in your beliefs, what is the epistemological status of your beliefs in my mind? Indeterminate at best. Being overly dismissive of either conclusion (that the belief is correct or incorrect) seems unproductive.
But a huge chunk of the world's population is religious. Something's wrong with calling the mental structures of half the world weird. Seems to me they make the grade as normal, even if they are not optimal when it comes to arriving at the most accurate views about various things.
Weren't there a bunch of secular liberals there at Fatima, and didn't at least some of them see the phenomenon?
Hanania's post examined the alleged skeptical accounts, and found the evidence severely wanting.
---
From Scott’s list, note the interesting fact that not a single one of these people is on record as being skeptical before the event happened. The closest thing to an exception is Carlos Mendes, but by his own testimony he seems to have only become a skeptic after being bitterly disillusioned while still having a deep emotional investment in what was going on.
Imagine you hear that there was a miracle at a church service in some remote Kentucky town. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens were all there and report seeing it. That would be quite strong evidence that something strange happened, because each of these individuals has a documented record of atheism. Alternatively, imagine that among the crowd of Kentucky hill people a few retrospectively say that they were skeptics but then God spoke to them. Obviously, that’s completely different. Reading Scott’s original quote, I was expecting testimony of a handful of Sam Harris types, but instead all we’ve got, with one exception, is witnesses looking back and telling us how they felt beforehand.
People often tell stories from their lives in ways that make them sound more interesting. Saying I was always a believer is a much less compelling narrative than having been skeptical at first and then becoming convinced. Maybe some of these people were 50/50 on whether they expected to see anything, but got carried away by the energy of the crowd, and then adjusted the story in their heads by telling themselves that they had been much more skeptical than they actually were. Also, I haven’t looked into exactly when all of the testimonies Scott cites were given, but one is mentioned as having been recounted in 1960, 43 years after the event. That is a lot of time to misremember what happened during what for many of these people might have been the most emotionally charged moment of their lives.
This is a very good point. In a community built around a core belief, demand for converts with dramatic backstories often exceeds supply, so people exaggerate their prior degree of scepticism in order to seem interesting and gain status.
If Christopher Hitchens was around to witness a miracle in Kentucky, I think that would be the miracle in itself, given he died in 2011. But I'll presume you meant "back in the heyday of the Four Horsemen".
Yes, that is the natural assumption that any fair-minded reader would make.
1. If your defense rests on and assumption about "societies that are at a much more primitive state of development" it seems to me that you would need a very good explanation of why this applies to early-20th century Portugal (not to mention the more modern claims). Personally, having had close relatives born in a much more rural part of the country less than two decades after Fátima, this claim seems wrong albeit not completely impossible to me.
2. I suppose a tough question would be: what would you personally need to experience/observe in order to be convinced it was a miracle, and how should that heuristic generalise to people in different eras? It is epistemologically fine to have scenarios where it is fine for direct witnesses but not anyone else to believe, but there should also be conceivable dramatic enough scenarios where everyone should believe.
The intensity of the argument with this claim in the thread below is kinda mind-blowing. I mean, even the psychiatric diagnostic process for psychosis has a clear (and obviously necessary) exception for "commonly held (in a given culture)" beliefs in how they define delusions.
I do think these phenomena are more (2) than (1) but they are everywhere and choosing "miracle" as the even remotely likely alternative explanation seems to heavily offend Ockham's razor.
>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
Further corrections on 25:
You say:
"for the first time, scientists have successfully turned a skin cell into an egg cell". But the article says this is old news. "So far, the technique is like the one used to create Dolly the Sheep – the world's first cloned mammal – born back in 1996."
You say that it “is not ready to be fertilised by sperm as it already contains a full suite of chromosomes”. But afaict, the whole point of the article is that they're overcoming this barrier for the time. "So the next stage is to persuade the egg to discard half of its chromosomes in a process the researchers have termed "mitomeiosis" (the word is a fusion of mitosis and meiosis, the two ways cells divide)." That's what's new.
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.
#8. I was going to suggest that cell signaling pathways probably aren't under selective pressure for simplification. Unlike human engineering products, there's no constraint that it be understandable, and the overheads of complexity might be small. As long as the messengers are only present in low concentrations, they require little energy. And in eukaryotes, there doesn't seem to be much selection to minimize the amount of DNA, hence excess genes are cheap.
Though I have read that prokaryotes generally are under pressure to minimize the amount of DNA (ultimately because their aerobic energy generation is limited by the area of their cell membrane, not having mitochondria). So it would be an interesting comparison whether prokaryotes generally lack long, apparently redundant signaling pathways.
> 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?
I mean that’s about the extent of the story as I heard it- but that would’ve made a much more interesting read to be sure. 6 friends in their late thirties decided to go get tummy tucks and the like from a Mexican medical spa on the cheap and make a vacation out of it. They had a great time, the surgeries did what they were supposed to, and… they also had a kidney stolen each.
This is definitely an urban legend.
But you are sure the story referred to specific people your sister knew? Could you have misunderstood something, or are you sure your sister knows a bunch of women with missing kidneys?
It was specifically 6 women that I know from high school.
Then what are you waiting for, go talk to them and pitch the NYT your exposé on kidney theft in Mexico.
Sounds like total BS.
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.
Did you know the word gullible isn't in the Oxford English Dictionary? ;-)
Honestly, though, Scott is an MD, but he didn't automatically see the absurdity of this story? The kidney harvesting myth has been around for a couple of decades, but now it's migrated to Mexico.
1. Kidney removal is a complex medical procedure. I'm not an MD, but I understand it requires some specialized (read, expensive) medical equipment, and it can't be done hastily, because...
2. ...because of the necessity for tissue matching. A successful kidney transplant would require the donor's tissue type to match the recipient's closely. A randomly stolen organ would be almost useless and would almost certainly be rejected.
3. Which leads to the logistical issues. Any kidney-thieving doctor would have to be tied into the donor databases (which I gather require all sorts of consent documentation) and then worry about transporting the kidney.
This is almost certainly an urban myth.
I agree with the bottom line, but, playing devil's advocate for a moment... isn't there an established procedure for getting transplantable organs from corpses? Say, somebody rides a motorcycle into a brick wall while not wearing a helmet, shows up at the ER as chunky salsa above the neck, yet mostly fine below. Obviously the donor would be in no condition to sign consent paperwork at that point. Hypothetically, a stolen kidney could be "laundered" into that system by creating a fictitious dead person for it to come from - or falsifying relevant data about a real corpse whose organs were unsalvageable.
If the actual donor is receiving some other kind of surgery anyway, kidney-specific tools could be hidden in plain sight among the stuff intended for the aboveboard procedures. One of my father's sisters, a veterinary surgeon, once acquired a highly specialized and expensive tool for extracting a tumor from a cat's ear, which I suspect anyone who wasn't a professional in the relevant field would struggle to recognize as out of place among a lineup of lockpicks and dentistry implements, much less in an actual surgical theater.
Similarly, biopsy for tissue typing might be trivially concealed among excising or repositioning whole swaths of fat and skin for cosmetic purposes.
Thanks for asking. I was curious myself. In the US. It seems like there a lot of checks in the system...
1. A physician who is *not* part of the transplant team has to sign off the death certificate. That's reassuring!
2. Organs can only be harvested from the corpse if the previously-living corpse signed up as an organ donor, or the next of kin authorize it.
3. The body undergoes a medical evaluation to make sure it's suitable for organ harvesting (e.g., it didn't have hepatitus or was HIV positive, and whether the organs are viable for transplant).
4. Tissue typing is done.
5. If the body is brain dead, it's put on a ventilator to keep it running while the organs are harvested. I don't know how long that will keep the body viable. If the body died from circulatory death, it's chilled to prevent quick decay. Again, I don't know how long chilling is good for. I suspect both options are only good for a matter of days.
6. In the US, organs are matched with potential patients through a database called UNOS (United Network for Organ Sharing). They've got some sort of weighting formula based on urgency, compatibility, and location.
7. An OPO (Organ Procurement Organization) coordinates the logistics and transport, and makes sure all the ethical and legal boxes have been checked off.
> If the actual donor is receiving some other kind of surgery anyway, kidney-specific tools could be hidden in plain sight among the stuff intended for the aboveboard procedures
I'm sure you could get the kidney out, but then what do you do with it? You need to get it into a recipient. I mean, it's possible that in Mexico there's a whole underground black market kidney transplant list that you can get yourself on, and then hang around waiting for someone to steal an appropriately-matching kidney, but what's the business model here, really? Do I pay to get myself onto the evil stolen kidney list while also waiting on the above-board donated kidney list?
If you really wanted to run a black-market Mexican kidney operation wouldn't it be cheaper and safer to just pay poor people $5000 per kidney than to steal kidneys from American tourists?
The Fifth Vial is a pretty fun medical thriller about illegal organ harvesting, sometimes from tourists, but yeah the [UN organ harvesting concern](https://www.unodc.org/documents/human-trafficking/2008/BP011HumanTraffickingfortheRemovalofOrgans.pdf) suggests its much more likely to be your latter example, and that is pretty much how it plays out in Iran IIRC (the only country in the world with an actual open kidney market).
I think the incentive for the tourist option would be you're already getting their medical data, already performing surgery on them, and (theoretically) you're getting a healthier organ than the person so poor they're selling organs.
A new spin on an old urban myth, almost assuredly, but still an oddity to gloss over completely in an essay trying to argue *in favor of* kidney removal.
Tacking it onto a pre-existing set of surgeries makes a lot more sense than the old "wake up in the bathtub" story, too; it's not implausible the surgeons will have the relevant data to find a potential match beforehand and have it lined up. Reading through a UN report on organ trafficking (https://www.unodc.org/documents/human-trafficking/2008/BP011HumanTraffickingfortheRemovalofOrgans.pdf) that they seem quite confident it exists, but I note no numbers are mentioned at all. Hmm, fishy?
Though sometimes old urban legends and conspiracy theories have more than a grain of truth, like the North Korean abductions of Japanese people, that were broadly treated as a probably-racist myth until Kim Jong Il officially apologized and returned the survivors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_abductions_of_Japanese_citizens
I actually checked out that UN human organ trafficking doc. It's from 2008, and they seem to take it for granted that it's happening, but they don't offer up any data. The discussion section asks the question...
> Often surgeons who are performing illicit transplants are well-known among professional colleagues. Why are their illegal activities rarely reported to authorities?
Answer, maybe because illegal organ trafficking isn't actually happening?
'Incredible', I think kind of does. For the literal sense of 'incredible'.
Nobody in Mexico, full of poor Mexicans and even poorer South/Central Americans disconnected from their support network and desperate for opportunities, is going to illicitly harvest kidneys from pretty white UMC American women. And if they did, there's no way we'd be learning about it from an offhand blog comment by someone whose wife's friend says it happened to a bunch of her friends but, meh, we've all got other things to talk about.
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.
The 1950s in Canada must have had at least 60% weekly attendance. I think it would have been a bit lower in the United States but still in the 50% range.
The last 15 or so converts in my congregation have all been men. Not sure what's up with that.
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.
Whether miracles defy the odds of physics kind of depends on what your definition of "defying" is. C. S. Lewis described miracles as not violating the laws of nature, but creating a situation that would otherwise not have occurred that then follows the laws of nature. He describes a miracle as something that is interlocked with nature going forwards in time, but not backwards:
"It is...inaccurate to define a miracle as something that breaks the laws of Nature. It doesn’t. If I knock out my pipe I alter the position of a great many atoms: in the long run, and to an infinitesimal degree, of all the atoms there are. Nature digests or assimilates this event with perfect ease and harmonises it in a twinkling with all other events. It is one more bit of raw material for the laws to apply to, and they apply. I have simply thrown one event into the general cataract of events and it finds itself at home there and conforms to all other events. If God annihilates or creates or deflects a unit of matter He has created a new situation at that point. Immediately all Nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. It finds itself conforming to all the laws. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born. We see every day that physical nature is not in the least incommoded by the daily inrush of events from biological nature or from psychological nature. If events ever come from beyond Nature altogether, she will be no more incommoded by them. Be sure she will rush to the point where she is invaded, as the defensive forces rush to a cut in our finger, and there hasten to accommodate the newcomer. The moment it enters her realm it obeys all her laws. Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested. The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern. It does not violate the law’s proviso, ‘If A, then B’: it says, ‘But this time instead of A, A2,’ and Nature, speaking through all her laws, replies ‘Then B2’ and naturalises the immigrant, as she well knows how. She is an accomplished hostess.
"A miracle is emphatically not an event without cause or without results. Its cause is the activity of God: its results follow according to Natural law. In the forward direction (i.e. during the time which follows its occurrence) it is interlocked with all Nature just like any other event. Its peculiarity is that it is not in that way interlocked backwards, interlocked with the previous history of Nature. And this is just what some people find intolerable. The reason they find it intolerable is that they start by taking Nature to be the whole of reality. And they are sure that all reality must be interrelated and consistent. I agree with them. But I think they have mistaken a partial system within reality, namely Nature, for the whole. That being so, the miracle and the previous history of Nature may be interlocked after all but not in the way the Naturalist expected: rather in a much more roundabout fashion. The great complex event called Nature, and the new particular event introduced into it by the miracle, are related by their common origin in God, and doubtless, if we knew enough, most intricately related in His purpose and design, so that a Nature which had had a different history, and therefore been a different Nature, would have been invaded by different miracles or by none at all. In that way the miracles and the previous course of Nature are as well interlocked as any other two realities, but you must go back as far as their common Creator to find the interlocking. You will not find it within Nature."
Yes I agree with this. God’s nature being natural to Himself cannot be violated.
CS Lewis definition of miracle --as a changed initial condition-makes no difference. Under laws of physics, any initial condition results from previous conditions.
Father Stanley Jaki, a physics PhD himself has written Miracles and Physics with the idea that there is no necessary conflict between miracles and physics.
A law of nature is an observed regularity. A miracle is an anomaly, and remains an anomaly. The miracle does not update the law but remains an exception to it,.
> 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!
Heat shock is the sudden transition from cold to hot. Sauna use is a pretty good proxy for it, because the warm water transfers heat to the body quite quickly. Tropical climates are not as good a proxy, because they have more of a slow and steady heat.
#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.
Wasn't there a Rem who married a Ninel? A high-ranking secret person, I think.
I would argue that no names are as American as repurposed president (or other major figure) names. Put a repurposed president name next to one of those surnames where you can tell it's an originally-German name that's been Anglicized and you get the most American names you can think of. Jefferson Bower. Jackson Brown. Franklin Miller.
This is compelling, but my counterpoint is that the most American name is Lawrence Eagleburger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Eagleburger
Still partially fits the thesis: https://en.geneanet.org/surnames/EAGLEBURGER
Franklin Miller's parents could just be Chaucer fans
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!
What even is the definition of a miracle?
For Hume, it’s something that violates a law, where a “law” is a generalization that you are so confident of that you would doubt an observation that seemed to violate it rather than doubting it. He doesn’t say much about what sort of evidence would lead you to posit something as a law, but you can’t really say much systematic about this sort of thing in a Bayesian context. It’s psychological, not logical.
Interesting, thanks!
Thank you for this.
Also, I think it’s a bit anachronistic to say Hume wasn’t a good Bayesian - I suspect he might have been more of a Bayesian than Bayes! (The term “bayesian” itself doesn’t appear until the mid 20th century, after Ramsey and de Finetti and Jeffreys have re-popularized versions of the idea.)
So funny enough - he wasn't a Bayesian! (not sure if I said it or SA did, but I'm reading a lot of Hume research and so I've basically learned this in the last 36 hours). The mathematical/calculation way of understanding philosophy and probability was starting around the time of Hume, but he was never really part of that tradition, conceptualizing probability as more about weighing evidence than calculating it, if that makes sense.
Historically, we know he read about Bayes in the last 10 years or so of his (Hume's) life but he didn't really update any of his philosophy accordingly, because it was trying to accomplish something different (one can assume). I think Millican and others have done a good job of updating/revising some of Hume's conclusions with Bayes in mind, but we need not do that to appreciate Hume's contribution.
Yeah, he's definitely not thinking in terms of numerical calculations. But I don't think that's essential to Bayesianism. What is essential is thinking of all reasoning in terms of uncertainty.
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 during a discussion of wasteful spending decisions by local authorities 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 completed 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 sculptor 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.
Nah, every horse deserves a statue. And every cat.
(This case didn't have any statues, though. They were changing out the text of the gravestone where the horse was buried.)
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.
>But to me, putting up a statue and taking down a statue are roughly symmetrical actions.
<mildSnark>
Put it on a hydraulic lift tied to upvotes and downvotes? :-)
</mildSnark>
Caring enough to do anything typically falls out as caring enough to put in the effort to do it. Putting something up generally requires much more effort than taking it back down. So in fact, the amount of caring required to put something up is much greater than the amount for taking it down. Which means that if caring enough were enough, then we'd probably never have anything up.
In light of that, it makes more sense to require caring a lot more about taking something down than the usual amount of effort would indicate.
If people who wanted a statue taken down were required to put in the same amount of design and attention that it took to create that statue, including the experience required to know how to build it, a lot fewer statues would be taken down. And the world might be a more just, and possibly prettier place.
Loss aversion is a well studied heuristic. (I'm not defending Lee here.)
The statue stuff is such a small insignificant issue compared to what the whole "racial justice" movement is trying to address. I think if someone doesn't take racial justice seriously because of their view on statues that just means they never took it seriously to begin with.
The problem with these movements is that they tend to focus a lot of their time and attention on small insignificant issues.
Similarly, any "environmentalist" that spends most of their time talking about plastic straws and AI water use isn't worth taking seriously. It mostly doesn't matter exactly what they are saying. The focus on the small issue, by itself, is evidence that they lack a sense of scale, and so aren't worth taking seriously.
Curious about how you would feel if there was a statue of Oliver Cromwell in the middle of Dublin
Better analogy would be of a statue of Oliver Cromwell in Huntingdon.
Location is everything.
#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.
It does a very slow job of sloppily folding some hand towels (the easiest thing to fold) and then piles them messily into a basket. I am not impressed.
I work in robotics. On a technical level this demo is extremely impressive, far beyond what most robotics teams can reproduce. On a human level it's trivial and a bit embarrassing. Such is the nature of robotics as a field: For an example that is relatively easy (easier at least) from a technical perspective, but extremely impressive on a human level, check out pick-and-place robots like this (no affiliation): https://youtu.be/m_1G1_m3EBQ?si=4qBPZC5a_sfT-Ey-&t=8
Fair enough, and I'm not saying I could build something better. But it's a very long way from being a useful laundry assistant or otherwise passing the "laundry test", the point of which is to demonstrate that a robot can handle a messy and unpredictable real world environment and adjust its actions as needed to get good results.
I completely agree!
I can't tell what the robot in that video is accomplishing.
Besides folding laundry like a 4 year old? 😂
Like, what is the challenge that is so impressive?
Well, traditional, "easy" robotics basically works by pre-programming every single move precisely. "19mm to the left and 3mm down, followed by an arc with a radius of 35mm ending at coordinate XYZ" etc, etc, for extremely explicit instructions that goes on for thousands or millions of lines of code for even trivial tasks. This is basically how everything from washing machines and 3D printers to entire automated assembly lines in factories work. With good hardware and careful coding this can be extremely fast and precise, but requires that everything that the system interacts with is exactly the same every time, in a way the programmer could predict and compensate for. Like, if the robot is taking components out of a stack, then you could add sensors to detect how many items are left in the stack and compensate the next movement by adjusting the position where the grabber tries to pick it up by (height of the component) * (number of components left), but if one item in the stack is placed crooked in a random way, that is a much harder problem, since you can't know ahead of time what compensation to program and when to run it. Now, this example is a mostly solved problem with computer vision and more complex code, but it illustrates the point that robotics gets harder the less predictable the environment around it is, from an extremely high baseline of 'predictable'.
Dumping out a pile of soft flimsy fabric, all of the same colour on a low-contrast background, and having the robot parse the environment, manipulate the very unpredictable fabric, while continuously adjusting it's movements in real-time response to the flopping-about of the towels is extremely difficult, and not something I've seen accomplished before. I'm impressed! But at the same time, it shows just how far we still have to go to make something like this a real thing.
I like Marques Brownlee's take on a similar robot that turns out to be 99% teleoperated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j31dmodZ-5c
("Just use a neural net and training data!" Yeah. Everyone is trying to do that, and whoever succeeds will revolutionize a thousand industries. We (as a field) are making progress though, slowly, bit-by-bit. The crooked component stack in the example above would have crashed an entire assembly line in the '80s, but is easy now (though it still happens). Waymo's etc are really pushing the boundaries on cars. A $400 robot vacuum does wonders of navigation and object avoidance that would have been revolutionary a decade ago. Progress, but slowly.)
The video you linked, I mean.
Oh, I see 😂
The pick-and-place robot is placing tiny components on a circuit board. It has eight pickers on the toolhead: When it comes close to the camera the pickers dip down and pick a component each from little white tapes on spools. Then a flashing red thing that zips by: That's a camera that reads all the components to make sure they were gripped successfully, and what orientation they are in. Then the toolhead moves to each of the eight locations in turn, the pickers rotate to the correct orientation and place the components down with better-than 0.1 mm precision (just guessing here, but it would have to be at least that). The components are probably on the order of 1mm in size. If the operator sneezed with the cover open like that all the placed components would move, and the part would be ruined. When the guy pans over to the screen, we can se that it's placing ~21 000 components/hour, so about 6/second.
I've done that type of work manually for prototype boards on occasion, and I'm happy if I can reach 6 components/minute, and then I'll probably mess it up every hundred components or so. I'd be disappointed if that machine misses more than 1 in 100 000.
> 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).
America certainly thinks that it's still entitled to its sphere of influence - Putin won't be able to put nukes in Cuba any more than Khrushchev could.
Rubbish. The core US position is "let the Ukranians decide what they want". They don't want Russia, they're willing to fight and die for that position, and we have the moral obligation to help them out.
the government (for which the war is an excuse to outlaw their rivals and cancel elections) is willing to force young men at gunpoint to fight and die
The war is not an excuse inasmuch as it was forced on them and both the things you are complaining about are completely de rigeur. Do you actually find them objectionable or you are just trying to find any argument to support Russia no matter how absurd?
That's called the draft. Pretty much every country has one, especially in wartime. It would be really weird for us to pressure Ukraine out of dislike of the fact that they have a draft.
Nah, that's just a typical US government's hobby - trying to find and protect democracy where there is none to be found.
In what way is the Ukraine not a democracy?
> That's a slightly hostile interpretation.
Yes. Also, you didn't say "wrong".
> 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?
My guess (only a guess) is that some US presidents honestly wanted to make some moves to appease Russia, but were surprised by how intensely the countries they wanted to sacrifice didn't themselves want to be sacrificed.
I think I heard that Poland basically blackmailed Obama to let them join NATO. Biden's help to Ukraine also seemed carefully measured to prevent Russia from taking over entire Ukraine, but also to prevent Ukraine to take all its territories back. (Which from some perspective is an aggression against Russia, but from another perspective, is a concession to Russia to keep a part of the territory. Glass half-empty, half-full.) Trump would also be perfectly happy if Russia kept the territories it already controls, if only everyone stopped fighting right now and gave him the Nobel peace prize.
If you compare the military and economical power of USA and Russia (ignoring the hybrid war), USA could basically squash Russia like a bug. A few nukes would probably fly. A decisive military action could reduce the damage, but not entirely to zero. The difference is that the democratic West doesn't have the stomach to do this, while Russia doesn't give a fuck about how many people die on either side. (You can see it clearly when you compare the reactions to the tragedies of WW2: the sentiment in the West is "never again", while the popular slogan in Russia is "Можем повторить" = "we can do it again"; literally the opposite.) And when USA finally gets a sufficiently undemocratic president, he turns out to be a Russian puppet. Anyway, my point is that the fact that Russia still exists as a sovereign country, and is even allowed to keep colonies (ethnic Russians are maybe 10% of the Russian empire), if already a huge concession towards someone who lost the Cold War, and had to beg their former enemies to help feed their starving population.
So it's not that the US presidents don't do many things to appease Russia, it's just that it's never enough, because Russians keep comparing their current situation to the days of their glory. Unlike e.g. Britain or France, who accepted that their former empires are mostly gone, and learned to live with their neighbors in peace. Russia cannot even have friendly relationships with Belarus without simultaneously planning their annexation.
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).
Both of these things were part of Obama’s “Russian reset” concessions. He said public support was a requirement for joining (which ruled out countries like Ukraine, where only 20% wanted to join) and ended the missile defense plan with Poland. Russia invaded Ukraine anyway in 2014 (over EU Association, not NATO or missiles).
Although it is true that Putin was not hiding the requirement that Ukraine not do an EU Association deal. But it certainly had nothing to do with “security” in the way most people think of it (*maybe* security for the regime if Ukraine became wealthy under EU Association and Russians later demanded the same).
> which ruled out countries like Ukraine, where only 20% wanted to join
That's just pits Western propaganda machine against Russian propaganda machine, and it's easy enough to see how it ends in the long run. Certainly didn't prevent Ukraine from putting goal of NATO membership into its constitution. It's easy enough to see how a government that desires NATO membership can spend some time and money to convince the population to reach the necessary threshold of support. Or fake the polls.
> over EU Association, not NATO or missiles
I think the war actually started because the new government terminated the agreement that allowed Russian fleet to stay in Crimea.
> Certainly didn't prevent Ukraine from putting goal of NATO membership into its constitution.
I don’t understand this argument. It didn’t stop it because public opinion shifted massively after Russia invaded and occupied Crimea and the Donbas.
> I think the war actually started because the new government terminated the agreement that allowed Russian fleet to stay in Crimea.
This did not happen; please cite a source. Russia terminated the agreement after invading.
I was wrong here, I admit. But I still think Ukraine under the new management would not prolong the agreement past 2017 when it was set to expire, and would seek NATO membership, even if Russia has not annexed Crimea. Admittedly, this is just a personal belief, not supported by any good arguments I can bring up right now.
I don't have handy sources to cite, but imo NATO expansion was always a red herring thrown out for gullible* Westerners. The reason Russia cares about NATO is that NATO membership prevents Russia from bullying countries it used to control with various means up to military force (Hungary '56, Czechoslovakia '68, Poland '80 etc.) Else why would Russia insist on no missile _defense_ systems too near borders? Central European countries with very recent histories of subjugation to Moscow know the score, which is why they spent the 90s alternately begging and bashing down doors to be let into a not too enthusiastic NATO, and which is why Poland and Czech Republic spend proportionately the most to help Ukraine now.
* 'Gullible' is not quite the right word. To quote Pushkin, "I'm not so very hard to gull, in fact I'm happy to be gulled". I.e. these are people who are looking for plausible rationalizations for policies they prefer for other reasons.
> Else why would Russia insist on no missile _defense_ systems too near borders?
Missile defence systems near borders damage MAD. I'd imagine if Russia or China tried to place modern missile defences in Mexico (or Cuba!), they would quickly find that US would go to war to prevent it.
But I agree that Russia's main goal is to be able to bully its sphere of influence. If any policymakers deluded themselves into thinking this is not the case, they do not deserve their posts. Russia sees this as the matter of survival, because it doesn't have economic or cultural clout to keep its neighbors in check (admittedly, it seems that economic power was being overestimated for some time, as Trump's attempts to wield it show; even America can't just bully other countries with tariffs and sanctions, at least not past some point).
>"I'd imagine if Russia or China tried to place modern missile defences in Mexico (or Cuba!), they would quickly find that US would go to war to prevent it."
With our missile bases in Wyoming, Montana, & North Dakota, I think interceptors that far south would be useless.
Which raises a question about the extent to which interceptors in Europe affect MAD (at least between the US & RF): both sides are pointing their ICBMs over the poles (pun left as an exercise to the reader), without meaningful overflight of Europe.
> Russia sees this as the matter of survival, because it doesn't have economic or cultural clout to keep its neighbors in check
Indeed. And instead of doing its homework and developing said clout, it keeps expending its resources on bullying weaker neighbors (that's what "sphere of influence" means; China and US and Japan are also neighbors but try bullying _them_), creating a vicious circle. It is however true that Russia with its current form of social-political organization would not survive developing said clout - I mentioned it 10+ years ago (https://candide3.wordpress.com/2014/02/08/sochi/) - so it is indeed a matter of survival for Russia understood as the form of social-political organization that has been in control of that territory for many centuries.
> And instead of doing its homework and developing said clout
Sometimes I wonder if that's even possible to do at this point. They've probably already driven off or killed anyone in their population that had the potential to accomplish anything worth a damn. Maybe this really is the only path left to them.
There were some hopes of economic growth in the early 00's (Putin's main propaganda slogan in those days was "GDP doubling"). Of course, with endemic corruption and the lack of either competitive tech or vast masses of poor peasants ready for urbanization this didn't happen, GDP in fact plateaued. So, he had to look for other way of bolstering his popularity and ambitions, and there wasn't much to choose from.
The NATO expansion argument fails against the evidence. It's plausible for Russia to be concerned about NATO expansion, and many of the things it has done under Putin make sense in that light - but not the most famously bad thing Putin did (invade Ukraine in 2022). To join NATO requires that a country have no territorial disputes, and Ukraine still claims ownership of Crimea. So long as this territorial dispute continues, Ukraine cannot join NATO, so in 2022 it was impossible for Ukraine to join NATO.
Plausibly, in 2014 Putin's only concern was NATO expansion, but it is fairly clear by rhetoric and strategy that in February 2022, his goal was the complete submission of Ukraine to Russian domination, based on the (false) theory that Ukrainians are confused Russians, thus the drive towards Kyiv and talking about how Ukraine was invented by the Bolsheviks.
The problem is that Putin and his regime do not believe in the same things that the US believes, with respect to international politics. The US basically believes in the Wilsonian model of national self-determination and democracy (in part, no doubt, because liberal democracies almost never go to war with each other); Putin sees liberal democracy as an epiphenomena of American power, like communism in the Warsaw Pact, and instead believes in realism and great power politics (and that Russia should be treated as a great power despite having a smaller GDP than Italy and being fought to a standstill by a country with a fifth its population, no geographic barriers, and rounding error foreign support). The US is very powerful and thus small deviations from general American beliefs can have large effects, but if the US was willing to spend as large a percent of its human and economic capital on military expansionism as Russia is, we would have conquered Canada and Mexico by now.
> 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.
I may have have been very clear, but what I meant is not that they are not aware of each other's POVs, but rather both sides consider other's POV completely invalid. Or, rather, US considers Russia's POV invalid, and Russia considers that it exhausted all possible offers for settlement of the differences.
Of course, not US president would support Russia's actions in Ukraine (including Trump, I believe), but it's not out of questions that some of them might eased off NATO expansion a bit, which was Russia's main concern in 00's and 10's. Of course, that would mean acknowledging that Russia has a vote in some of the world's affairs, and it seems that US cannot tolerate that.
At the same time, it's out of question for any Russian president to allow NATO ships into Crimea, but I'd think that Ukraine's EU membership might have been negotiated (if very grudgingly), and Russia had no grand worldwide designs that conflicted with American views before late 00's. Indeed, Russia was pretty eager to be US partner in 90's and early 00's (Russia provided support to US troops in Afghanistan, for example), but only as equal, or at least semi-equal.
> but it's not out of questions that some of them might eased off NATO expansion a bit, which was Russia's main concern in 00's and 10's
Between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the present day, Russia has repeatedly taken territory from neighbors by way of force. If Russia was concerned about NATO expansion, then it's only fair to point out that their neighbors had to fear Russian expansion. Only one of those happens to be non-violent, by the way - NATO expansion occurs at the request and consent of the country that asks.
Then there's the presumption in fearing NATO expansion - why? Why does Russia fear that its neighbors are part of a security alliance that, while anti-Russia, has not aggressed against the Bear itself? There is no reason to think that a war with Russia was or is in the cards if Russia simply keeps to its own borders and tries diplomatic maneuvers to retain influence in Eastern Europe.
I see arguments like yours all the time. Such arguments have sympathy for Russia, they very rarely seem to actually think about how rational or acceptable Russian demands are.
> Of course, that would mean acknowledging that Russia has a vote in some of the world's affairs, and it seems that US cannot tolerate that.
No one objects to Russia having a voice in world affairs. Russia insists that its neighbors not have theirs. You and everyone else who says things like this tend to elide this fact.
Does Cuba have a right to host Russia's nukes, if it chooses to? This is the essential humiliation that Russian nationalists are most vexed by, because in it the geopolitical asymmetry is laid most bare. I have no sympathy for this, because Russia isn't a "great power" in ways that matter, it's a gas station with nukes, to paraphrase McCain, but those nationalists need much more convincing. Of course, the presence of those very nukes is a strong protection from getting truly crushed, so I expect this nest of festering resentment is going to continue lashing out against its smug enemies in ways big and small for many years to come.
"Does Cuba have a right to host Russia's nukes, if it chooses to?"
Yes, in my opinion.
It’s not asymmetry. Nuclear weapons are not comparable to NATO. Indeed, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons and agreed not to acquire or host them in exchange for a Russian agreement to respect their borders and sovereignty in accordance with the Helsinki Final Act, which recognizes their right to join whatever alliance they wanted. (“They also have the right to belong or not to belong to international organizations, to be or not to be a party to bilateral or multilateral treaties including the right to be or not to be a party to treaties of alliance”) Few would care if Cuba joined the CSTO.
> Does Cuba have a right to host Russia's nukes, if it chooses to?
Yes, Cuba has that right. It's a narrow concession, much narrower than comparisons to that situation imply.
> This is the essential humiliation that Russian nationalists are most vexed by, because in it the geopolitical asymmetry is laid most bare.
Then they should be honest about what bothers them. That's the first step to thinking about why Ukraine and Eastern Europe might want protection from Russia.
>Then they should be honest about what bothers them.
There's an exquisitely smug word for when they try this sort of thing - whataboutism. By now they're pretty sure that the "rules-based international order" is hypocritical nonsense, barely hiding that it's actually the law of the jungle. Of course, they're screwed either way in the long term.
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.
That's no reason not to have an agreement. The bigger problem is that while it's clear what Russia wants from American, it's unclear what American might want from Russia (aside from alliance against China, but that seems like too big a price).
America wants Russia to sit down, shut up, and keep the gas flowing.
Russia thinks it's still relevant on the world stage, and is leveraging the military equipment it inherited from the USSR to sustain its Potemkin country; given the burn rate in Ukraine, hopefully that'll implode soon.
America wants Russia to stop invading and interfering with its neighbors. America doesn't much care about the gas, there is far more gas elsewhere in the world and a good chunk of it is found in America to begin with (making Russia a gas competitor to some extent).
Every president before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 made significant substantial concessions. Obama ended Bush’s missile defense shield plan, raised requirements for NATO membership, ended sanctions on Russian state arms dealers, helped Russia get into the WTO, etc.
The issue is that the points of view are not reconcilable. Ukraine wanted to be a sovereign state that could do things like make its own trade deals, and the US/EU were committed to honoring that. Russia considered Ukraine part of Russia’s sphere of influence (or even part of Russia), where they had the right to use any measures if Ukraine adopted policies they disagreed with. These views are simply not compatible.
#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."
TIL. I just sort of assumed that all societies were near the Malthusian limit most of the time. Maybe not (although it would be nice if the post had more specific data).
Yeah I find this part kneecaps the article's conclusion. Even the 10 part long series the very author writes at the same time kinda assumes people self regulate themselves to get barely neutral reproduction rate.
> 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.
Individual PPP is a good measure of living standards. But national PPP is not a good measure of national economic(/military) strength, I would think.
I would think PPP is not perfect but it's overall a better reflection of China's national economic/military strength than nominal GDP (if we're limited to judging power just based on those two options). Nominal gives a better idea of China's ability to purchase imports, but PPP is a better indicator of their domestic economic power. The strong majority of China's goods and military equipment are produced domestically.
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.
Is that the case even after you filter out everyone under age 11?
According to Snopes, yes: https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/
54% after filtering out everyone below age 16 and above age 74. This of course assumes you trust the study methodology.
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–)
James' post also got significantly more Likes than my own. I think the "Likes gap" might be best explained by the fact that he has more than twice as many subscribers than I do. Alternatively, maybe we are the dumb ones!
... hmm... it *seems* plausible...
But no—can't be; I mean, surely they do not, like, follow him around on Substack, '♥️'-ing comments! Because in that case, why do *my* (4-5) subscribers not do similarly when *I* get into arguments?!–
Well he did restack my post several times, giving his audience multiple chances to click through. But I think part of it is just a game of percentages: his initial comment on my post got 5 likes, which is about 2.5% of his subscriber pool. So based on your subscribers, you should expect to get 0.125 likes per post. :-)
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.
I think my issue with this version is
1. It's a story about retail investors, and I'd be a bit surprised if the economic effects of bubbles were primarily about retail investors making unwise investments. I guess I don't have specific data against that, but it just seems surprising that with big financial players making multi-billion dollar moves, the main economic moving effect is all the average Joes who waste their savings.
2. People losing a significant chunk of their savings because they were in bad investments... well obviously that's bad, but why would that cause immediate, acute pain simultaneous with the pop? You say "Later, it is time to spend their savings", and the word 'later' is relevant - in this story, the pain comes 'later' when people need the savings, and obviously some people are going to be unlucky and that's going to more-or-less correspond with the pop, but you'd expect a more gradual, slow-rolling effect in this model.
It doesn't have to be about retail investors. Take as given that most people are going about earning lots of money, and then quickly spending it on luxury experiences. Maybe they save some money in bank accounts and bonds. Businesses are paying these people lots of money to pointlessly throw away valuable resources. They also hand over valuable resources to satisfy consumer spending, which is very high. The pool of real assets is in steady decline, but no one notices because the businesses are flush with money, provided by large superinvestors.
Eventually the pool of real goods runs out. Employees lose their jobs. Inflation takes off. Yada, yada.
The actual *Pop* is when some critical asset runs out, say, metal, and everything fails all at once. Most people are *investing* in jobs/careers, which doesn't directly expose them to bubbles, but can leave them bereft of assets when the job they spent years advancing vanishes into mist, and all their skills turn out to be worse than useless. This becomes even more extreme if they're in debt, as is often the case.
1) This is a story about investment writ-large. You shouldn’t take “people in an economy” to mean only retail investors. People also need to make investment/consumption decisions on behalf of companies. Meta is deciding whether to invest its capital in building out AI or improving its ad business in Asia or whatever. If it turns out AI is a bubble, Meta will have wasted billions of dollars it could have put to better use.
2) I don’t see why this would be gradual. If everyone expects AI to not be profitable enough to justify the AI investment, companies lose value, go bankrupt, etc pretty immediately. Anyone who thought they had money saved for the future is immediately disabused of that notion. It all happens at once.
Yeah I agree, I got confused by his argument in the first few paragraphs. It's like he's missing that the whole concept of a 'bubble' is that at the time people don't know they are in it. They don't know that resources invested in the bubble are being wasted, so how could people 'feel sad' about that!
The problem with bubbles is people have expectations about the returns on those investments, and plan on the basis that reality will meet those expectations. Naturally, it's only when reality doesn't meet expectations (the 'pop') that 'everyone would be sad'.
It's like arguing: "the pain of a failed start-up can't be because workers and investors have wasted their time and money. If that were the case workers should feel sad before the start up fails, because that's when all that time and money are being expended and worthless stock options are being given in return. Once the start-up fails they would feel happy because now they can get jobs elsewhere."
Debt isn't necessary to this, but tends to amplify the process (and in practice every 'bubble' seems to have a debt/leverage component). As painful as the failed start-up is for everyone, it's going to be worst for someone who borrowed a bunch of money from friends and family to invest - the pain can then spread if they are unable to pay them back. The problem remains the fact that the money invested was wasted.
I think the argument is basically, if you're in a bubble, less useful stuff is being produced (since it's being wasted on the bubble), so you should notice the lack of stuff in your life *during* the bubble and not afterwards. E.g., if OpenAI is spending a lot of money on graphics cards, then people who want to play video games should be sad *before* the bubble pops, because they can't afford graphics cards. Once the bubble pops, stuff gets redirected to a more worthy cause, and the gamers should be happy that their hardware is cheaper now.
(And in fact I'm pretty sure I *have* seen people complaining about how expensive the latest graphics cards are getting.)
I think the flaw in this line of reasoning is that "stuff" in the industrial sector (capital investments) takes time to actually start producing "stuff" in your personal life, so the fact that you have less stuff in your life so that OpenAI can grow is not an unusual or bad thing, until you learn that OpenAI is not going to fulfill its end of the bargain by giving you "more stuff later" in the form of a cool AI assistant.
Count me among the people complaining about expensive graphics cards.
But this is a very special case, in that the bubble is consuming one particular resource. All other resources are plentiful.
This doesn’t really seem to capture things like: companies suddenly failing, waves of unemployment, people defaulting on mortgages and other loans, the cascading impacts on other parts of the economy, etc. The consequences are much more complex and structural than people
being sad their savings account is smaller than they hoped.
People/companies having less money than they expected is the precise cause of all those other things.
I disagree. Say two companies found out they both had ten million less than they thought. One company is highly leveraged, so missing that money means they can’t make payments on their massive loans, and the company fails. The other company is not highly leveraged, and they make less profits, or need to borrow some money to get through, but are ultimately fine. Both companies had less money than they expected, but the outcome is entirely different due to other structural factors. You can’t understand the ripple effects of bubbles without understanding things like leverage.
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.)
Edit; I came back to add that I found almost all the Schickele Mix episodes on line. One hour each and over 100 of them! I need something else to listen to when I'm working, there are not enough good podcasts for me. (D. Carlin, L. Fridman, S. Carrol, some Rogan. But I'd like to consume ~10-15 hours of podcasts per week. )
“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.
Can you tell me more about why you think binge drinking is worse than daily drinking in terms of dementia risk? The current leading theory for the mechanism of alcohol-related dementia is a combination neurotoxicity of alcohol, and the indirect effect on the brain of malnutrition (people who drink a lot of alcohol tend to skip meals because alcohol is calorically dense). Also presumably good studies of alzheimer dementia would want to exclude people with alcohol-related dementia.
To the last point, that is impractical to do in a messy real world where things can have more than one cause. Picture, for instance, someone with risk factors for dementia who also drinks a lot. Could have been that they'd have been fine with only the drinking, or fine with only the risk factors, but the combinations of both was what crossed the threshold.
My supposition would be based on concentration of alcohol achieved. Binge drinkers will have higher concentrations of alcohol with presumably more direct neurotoxicity effects at higher concentrations, which almost certainly correlate with degree of intoxication achieved, blacking out etc…. The hypothesis would be more consistent BAC of say .12 or higher is less toxic than intermittent BAC of .25 or higher.
“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?
I’m still too young to get the shingles vaccine but plenty old enough to have gotten chickenpox as a kid. I think most millennials are in this situation.
I think everyone younger than 30 was born after the varicella vaccine became standard. So I don’t know how young “young people” means in this case.
Given the context, it means people too young to get the shingles vaccine, which normally would be given when 50 or older.
The incidence of shingles among young people keeps increasing: https://www.cdc.gov/shingles/data-research/index.html The rate in people aged 30–39 in 2019 was nearly identical to the rate in people aged 50–59 in 1998. Similar trends in Sweden: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40121-023-00902-1
Accordingly, the recommended age for the shingles vaccine was lowered from 60 to 50 in 2011 in the US (similar trend in Canada, Israel, and the UK). There are even ongoing trials in people aged 30 and above (e.g., NCT05856084).
Based on the above, I tried to get Shingrix where I live (UK). I'm 32yo. Not a single pharmacy was willing to give it to someone under 40. So I gave up. Three weeks later, I got shingles 🙃
So after a few months, I went to Turkey and got the shingles vax.
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.
I believe I read "He had lived" in a footnote of Plutarch's biography of Cicero so this checks out.
More precisely vixerunt, "they have lived", said Cicero after he had three Catiline conspirators executed. Well, at least in the cheap ebook originally from 19thC that I bought.
Richard Pipes wrote an autobiography named Vixi. (I seem to recall liking it, but it was quite some time ago.) I don't know if he was aware of the connotation.
And they say it is us moderns who deny death.
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/05/11/you-say-unalive-he-says-vixerunt-everything-old-is-new-again/
Cicero famously said "vixerunt" ("they have lived") after some executions (Catiline conspiracy).
This is similar to 4 being unlucky in China because it sounds like the word for 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?
You are clearly a Hananianist who should be burned at the stake for heresy, questioning the wisdom of the National Association of People Who Hate Richard Hanania with a Burning Passion.
Lol
And the passion is to burn him?
>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.
One of the points of Scott's article was that we don't see this level of wild discrepancy between the Fatima reports.
From Scott's original article:
>almost every testimonial contains some elements of the consensus story, in approximately the correct order.
>The case for self-contradiction is that very few testimonials contain all six elements: most are a random subset of those claims. Also, nobody can agree on which colors were involved in (4), or in which order.
>[...]
>I don’t really have much that is non-obvious to say about these discordant testimonies. Aside from the ones with the UFO-like object, they seem about as discordant as you would expect from panicked people seeing a real inexplicable phenomenon - with the exception of some people who are absolutely terrified by the falling sun, and other people who don’t mention it at all.
This doesn't read to me like "we don't see this level of wild discrepancy". It's more like, "if we ignore the fact that the testimonies show a number of really wild discrepancies, then we can make it seem like the testimonies only show slightly-less-wild discrepancies".
Given the rest of the article, I really don't think Scott thinks the testimonies show sufficiently wild discrepancies to render them suspect. If he did, he'd have said so, and saved himself the trouble of trying to come up with an admittedly vague and unsatisfying naturalistic explanation for why the sun might look like it was changing colour and bouncing around the sky.
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.
Technically, mammoths died out 3000 years ago, and the first calendars weren't used until roughly 2999 years ago.
The creation of the calendar retrospectively assigns all those days to month.
I got a pretty good "one word" answer lol
https://chatgpt.com/share/6903bb46-b13c-8000-b269-9473760fa9e6
(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)
It would be nice for someone to try a bunch of times with each month to see what the distribution is. (Maybe with December it does it 85% of the time while with August it’s only 30% or whatever.)
I would not be surprised if there’s some dependence on the month - and if so, I would guess winter months are more likely to get “yes” and summer months are more likely to get “no”, just based on triggering ice age associations or not (like different dates in December triggering different results for Germany - and I would also guess different months would trigger different results in France or Russia, which had some famous months when particular revolutions happened.)
IME, LLMs become very stupid when you tell them "answer in a single word." e.g. here some of those types used it to get Grok to say it would rather save 1 Jew than 1 million non-Jews:
https://x.com/i/grok/share/dAA6HRZhpiSQrRRDMEDRH6XkB
Remember that, because of how they're programmed, LLMs are more like improv actors than ordinary conversationalists. One word responses can more easily get them to improv a stupid response.
#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.
What kind of "accountability" do you imagine credentialed Experts™ being subject to when they're utterly wrong?
I don’t know anything about “Credentialed Experts TM” thing. Here’s what real life accountability looks like: I can autodidact my way into chip design all I want, as long as the chips I design work. If they don’t work, no amount of clever explaining will help me keep my job.
Y. never ever had a job, nor a teacher who would tell him that his work was crap and he had to redo it or fail the class. All he does is writing many words, words, words. Good job if you can get it I guess.
Okay, you know the overwhelming majority of fields do NOT have as a concrete connection with reality as chip design, right? Sure, if you take classes you might get good at producing work the teacher accepts, but any correlation that might have with being RIGHT in any sense resembling "the chips I design work" is coincidental at best.
The point is that the teacher represents an external check you have to satisfy, it can be arbitrary, but the discipline and consequences is the point. He’s had none.
This doesn't seem very different from "he doesn't have a degree, so he's not worth listening to." If you're going so far as saying it's an arbitrary check for "discipline and consequences," you might as well go a little further and stop suggesting it has anything to do with being objectively right or wrong, and admit it's simply a matter of status.
Everyone is wrong all the time. Experts are usually less wrong. There’s a website with that name.
> Experts are usually less wrong.
In the majority of fields, all evidence in support of this claim looks circular.
Circular in the sense that all evidence that your sensory apparatus tells you about an external world is circular, or something more problematic than that? As far as I can tell, nearly every field has enough interactions with other fields that we get a lot of evidence of overlapping consensus about the world. There are at any time a few prominent examples where experts in one field are committed to claims that are incompatible with those of experts in another field (like when late 19th century physicists were confident that the Earth couldn’t be over a hundred million years old, despite the biological evidence), but those usually get resolved.
Are there any instances where experts have remained systematically worse than non-experts for decades?
First, you adding the "for decades" requirement unprompted is interesting: why would expect it to EVER be true that experts are worse than non-experts even briefly?
Second, it looks like you're ignoring the existence of all but a few very narrow academic disciplines (STEM essentially): the overwhelming majority of fields do not have any concrete connection with reality, and the highest authority on what is "true" is consensus among more senior/better-credentialled Experts, unmoored from any independently testable experimental fact about the world. This is the circularity I was referring to.
Finally, yes, I think there ARE such instances where the views of a randomly chosen well-credentialled Expert are systematically more wrong than those of an intelligent layman (I trust you'll agree that's the fair comparison?), but would telling you what I think they are convince you of anything? You'd just say the experts are correct and those who disagree with them are wrong. But here's one anyway: racial differences in intelligence.
One of my complaints with Eliezer, and rationalists in general, is that I think the whole, "Politics is the mindkiller" shtick causes them to be terrible at politics, and this generalizes into being terrible at thinking in an adversarial environment, which sort of is what politics is.
Hence being pro-Keynesian, pro-covid-reactionism, pro-Ukraine, etc. Which, I suspect the same errors that fuel those beliefs, also fuel AI safety, which arguments often rely heavily on a "I've spent a lot of time on this subject and know what I'm doing" appeal to internal competence, which I do not trust in light of his other positions on subjects where it's easier for me to judge him competently, such as this one.
He’s just utterly incompetent in most things he pontificates about. I don’t know if all rationalists are like that.
Is someone "terrible at politics" if they disagree with you?
In a sense, and in so far as I'm confident I'm right.
In general, disagreeing with my chess moves makes people terrible at chess too. Even Stockfish will, under most circumstances, make the same moves as me. Sure, Stockfish will occasionally disagree with me, and those occasional disagreements very reliably add up to me losing against Stockfish, but I do not think it physically possible to disagree with the majority of my moves, and still be good at chess.
I can't give as deterministic a proof of various political questions as I can chess positions. I try not to be extremely confident about more issues than I have to. With that said, in order to believe anything at all, eventually, it is necessary to have some positions that seem far easier than more complicated issues, and then to base positions on complicated issues on simpler issues.
In sum, what I'm trying to get at here, is that Eliezer's statement here is not only wrong, but egregiously wrong, and along a vector which forms a pattern with other egregious errors, which seems to me to correspond with failing to train a necessary skill.
There is a problematic issue in debate that, if the other side just refuses to admit to any part of the other's reality, it can be impossible to get any sort of point across. I would not expect someone who thought the article referenced was well written and reasonably thought out to be convinced by my own argument. The flow of logic is (Given that this claim was surprisingly terrible by rationalist standards) & (Given that this claim was surprisingly political by rationalist standards) -> (Implies that rationalism produces poor reasoning on political issues)
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.
Not successful; large. When we talk about bubbles popping it just means there were enough poor investments that them failing caused a significant macroeconomic consequence. Individual investments fail all the time, but, for instance, the US housing market going into a downward spiral because no one was pricing risk accurately is a bubble popping.
Did you read the actual tweet or the summary? How is this inconsistent with the example Eliezer gave of banks failing resulting in not enough money to conduct trade? That seems like a straightforward a restatement of your last two sentences: banks can't depend on their past investments anymore, so money effectively exits the evonomy.
> Instead, the effect of the physical bubble-waste is vastly dominated by the effect of more money being borrowed, and more money being spent, that then goes flowing around in loops through a larger economy, that was previously running under-capacity.
Is also from the post.
I'm confused at what different point is being made.
Also, the moment people start to realize that the future economy will be bad, the present economy becomes bad. Because the impending economic badness causes them to cash out of the economy, putting their money in boringly safe nonproductive assets like T-bills and gold, reducing consumption spending, etc. Once any significant number of people start doing that, everybody else notices and follows suit.
Really, this comes from a gross misunderstanding of "the economy is doing fine". A peasant village decides to grind all of its grain, even the seed, into flour, and doesn't bother to plant a new crop. All of the livestock is slaughtered for meat. Everybody is eating well, nobody is working dawn-to-dusk doing hard labor in the fields, the economy is doing fine! And it's going to keep doing fine because those magic beans they bought from the peddler will of course grow into cornucopias of infinite food with no plowing or weeding or harvesting or whatnot ever required!
The economy is *not* doing fine. It is in fact setting everyone up for mass starvation. But if you believe the hype about the magic beans, it *looks* like it's doing fine.
Excellent analogy
Yudkowsky keeps harping on the coincidence that the downturn coincides with the discontinuation of the unproductive investment, as if this is inexplicable except via a monetary model. I came up with a thought experiment to demonstrate why this shouldn't be so surprising.
A plane goes down in the jungle and the stranded survivors form a small, isolated society. With experience, they learn they each need to store 25 days of food to stay safe from the famine. With waste and spoilage, this requires parsimonious eating. One day, the camp's leader announces that he has found the way back to society. It's over a river. They'll have to build a bridge, but building the bridge will be worthwhile, because, of course, food is cheap in society. Drunk with the promise of future bounty, they go to work, eating two days of rations every day without any fear of starvation. After all, why worry? Infinite food is just across the water, and the extra food helps them build faster.
You know how this ends. 24 days in, the bridge collapses and gets swept away. They aren't making it across that river. After the initial shock wears off, it dawns on them -- they've barely got any supplies left. They thought that spending down their extra rations would pay off in the form of future food, but it turns out their plans were in error. Now they've got no stockpiles, and they're terribly exposed to the risk of famine.
How does this society react? They need to get their food storage back to safe levels. Instead of eating two rations a day, now they're eating a half ration a day. Meanwhile, they're working harder than they used to work to gather food. All this to compensate for the orgy of unrequited consumption which they engaged in during the building of the bridge -- consumption which they *imagined* would result in bounty, but did not.
Hopefully it is clear from this example why the recession coincides with the destruction of the bridge. The bridge is a metaphor for an investment in a project expected to reap future rewards.
Also an excellent analogy!
Yes it's stunning how obviously wrong the premise is. Anyone even slightly competent at economic reasoning, or even other reasoning, should be able to see why his entire chain of thought is completely unfounded. Yet this person apparently prides himself on Bayesian thinking that is close to reality and spotting errors in his own thinking. Has he owned up to how stupid this post was?
I think its helpful to think what if the coyote didnt look down. The investment today wont deliver future rgdp gains. If the investment continues employment can remain high but rgdp stops growing and could turn negative. Monetary stimulus would generate inflation, but no standard of living gains. Eventually creative destruction is required to get back on to a useful investment track which due to basic friction will cause a period of higher unemployment. No scary technical vocabulary necessary
#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.
There can only be ONE!!!
Did they ever clarify what the Prize was? I thought it was that you'd stop having immortals try to kill you.
It was not particularly clear in the Only Film, though it seems to have been some sort of mass mind-reading power. And afterward, well.
https://highlander.fandom.com/wiki/The_Prize
"[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).
Like I'd said above, I think it's possible that religious people are able to make themselves truly believe a claim by a conscious effort of will; while atheists lack this facility. This doesn't make one side necessarily "smarter" than the other; it just means that our brains work differently.
I am atheist because I was able to truly make myself believe something by conscious effort of will to follow the evidence where it would go, rather than take the easy path of continuing to understand the world through my existing model of it. It is quite interesting to have an inside view of both sides like this. I look back at when I was twelve and thought "Why would people worship idols as gods? They obviously can't do anything!" and I see around me many atheists who view modern religions with the same lack of understanding. Being steeped in a culture can do some pretty crazy things to your outlook on life and general worldview.
> 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?
Surely scaling to a state of half a million children would also result in students receiving average teaching? The claim is that if you train the teachers better (in a scalable way), the proportion of children who can read and write simple sentences will increase. The law of large numbers doesn’t prevent changing that.
I agree that if you want to scale to millions of children, you are going to get average teachers, and that "average" in this context means "tragically stupid and incompetent". Such as language teachers who can't write properly, or math teachers who make mistakes when calculating 12-6 (those are actual examples my friend complained about this weekend).
Any clever educational idea is going to fail with such teachers; actually the more clever, the more likely it is to fail. Dumb techniques such as "read the book aloud and memorize the sentences written in bold" will be most resilient against this kind of teachers.
But that still leaves the possibility of having a few truly good schools... that don't scale. (And specifically that don't scale because of the lack of competent teachers at other schools.)
As a solution for the general education, I think we should rethink education from the angle of "what scales well". For example, textbooks scale better than teachers... as long as the kids can already read, which of course can be tricky. Videos scale even better, as they don't even require the reading ability. Therefore what I would do (in the hypothetical position of an Education Czar) is hire the best educators and make videos and books explaining every subject, accompanied by computer-administered tests. Not as good as actual competent teachers, but probably better than what most schools have now.
And here, the few exceptional schools that don't scale could still be useful, because there you will find the teachers, and there they will try practice explaining subjects well.
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.
Isn’t Belt and Road Initiative a power play, whose main benefit to China is the influence it gives China over other countries rather than any economic benefits to Chinese companies or consumers? I don’t think it provides evidence they’re willing to depend on others for anything critical. China seems quite willing to accept business losses/inconveniences for political reasons (such as cutting off specific imports from a country in various ways), they just seem more overt and careful about optimising the political impact per dollar sacrificed.
> I agree this we have to posit something like this
The first 'this' is unnecessary.
You can agree 'this', or you can agree 'that'.
Doo, dah, dipitty.
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.
How interesting! Can you help me understand that?
Because, at the risk of oversimplifying, I’ve always understood his argument to be in two parts, namely (1) population size is elastic in wealth, so our increasingly wealthy societies should expect to grow, (2) we can reproduce faster than replacement, and Earth is finite, and The Masses can’t control their population growth, and too many people chasing too little food is bad, (therefore) growing societies will necessarily overshoot the sustainable limit and we should all be sad.
So in that context I understood “moderns can control births” to be a pretty central refutation of his chain of logic, and “actually the ancients could too” to be an absolute slam dunk.
So did he just think they couldn’t control it fast enough?
(2) misrepresents Malthus. He never said that "The Masses can’t control their population growth". He devoted many pages to describing various methods by which masses in divers societies controlled their population growth. Instead of relying on fourth-hand dumbed-down accounts of what he said, why not go and read even just the extended contents of his book? It's free.
The pre-industrial population of China and India was huge and I don't believe any sort of birth control was widely practiced esp in India.
To read catastrophism in Malthus may be a mistake. Malthus made no predictions. His is a steady state theory. Population can not exceed carrying capacity but does not remain much below the carrying capacity for long. In equilibrium or steady state, the population is at the carrying capacity.
The first point, population is necessarily below the carrying capacity is trivial and logically just the definition of carrying capacity.
The second point, that population is not below the carrying capacity in steady state is Malthus' great insight and which was fundamental to Darwin.
Of course, in nature, the animal populations swing hugely and it is not clear how steady state may be defined.
Read the link I provided up this chain, Devereaux contra Malthus. Mathematically it’s hard to believe that the Asian societies didn’t practice ancient birth control methods, because the European societies had to. You could call them conception delaying or adjusting methods if you’d prefer. These numbers are off the top of my head, so check them in Devereaux’s writing, but the argument goes something like this: a typical mother, if the couple is “doing what comes naturally”, could expect to produce 8-9 births, but the “slow growth” state was more like 6-7 births, which accounting for mortality would produce families with probably about 2-4 kids at a time, and that’s what the Roman and later European demographics show. If they didn’t practice these weak birth control methods, the populations would have had a faster growth rate which, he argues, we almost never see in the historical record.
And that’s important to the idea of a Malthusian Catastrophe, that explicitly non-steady-state theory. Namely, it’s that the people can’t control population growth, only external factors can, so instead of growing and then smoothly tapering off, society would overshoot and enter a (temporary!) period of being above carrying capacity and thus experiencing famine and disease and resource wars, which will ultimately plunge the society below carrying capacity. That is a cyclic model, not one of homeostasis. And even if that’s not explicitly in his writings (are you sure?) that is what people find in his writings and debate.
History is full of wars, plagues and famines, you simply can't employ maths to show "ancient birth control" esp when religion and social norms are explicit of their immorality.
On Malthus, David Stove is informative on what Malthus actually wrote and how his views and writings changed between the first and second edition.
The one about linear and exponential, which was a poetic way of expression, was omitted in the second edition.
I may also add that Malthus' novel insight that population is never below the carrying capacity for long is fundamental to Darwin. Unless population is always pressing at the carrying capacity, one doesn't get struggle for existence.
"Unless population is always pressing at the carrying capacity, one doesn't get struggle for existence."
that's not correct- a population can be limited by predators, or by pathogens, or potentially by intra-specific fighting (all of which allow opportunity for natural selection) even if it's well below its carrying capacity.
As for birth control, the fact that (some) religions, specifically Christianity, have historically been opposed to it is an indication that it *existed* in some form.
Correct. However carrying capacity is not simply food. For instance for birds nesting sites could limit carrying capacity.
I have read some people use the term "sub-Malthusian" to describe a condition where population is limited by things like competition for females.
>The pre-industrial population of China and India was huge and I don't believe any sort of birth control was widely practiced esp in India.
Extended breastfeeding is a functional method of birth control, practiced even in extremely primitive societies, and is barely going to show up in the literature. Additionally, female infanticide is also effective at curbing population growth, and is unpleasantly common in history. (Christian Europe had late marriages & huge non-marrying populations instead.)
To call any period of breastfeeding "extended" implies that there is a natural period of breastfeeding.
But does this natural period exist?
Infanticide does not prevent birth.
I mean, it's basically just a really late abortion... Also, killing specifically females would indirectly prevent future births, seeing as they're the bottleneck to population growth, not males.
Hard to believe that infanticide was ever significant factor in population dynamics.
A plausible scenario has been posited for death by neglect rather than infanticide.
More children could be reared in years of plenty but fewer in years of dearth. But people don't know the future. So, they have as many children as possible and when the dearth comes along, they neglect particularly young girls.
They are never intending at limiting population, neither of tribe nor of their own family. This is similar to what some animals and birds do.
I don't think intent actually matters here. The issue in question is whether pre-industrial societies were Malthusian or not. Even if people are reacting to individual incentives, they are still reducing the risk the overpopulation. In fact, the only effort I know of to intentionally limit population is China's one-child policy, which ultimately proved to be completely unnecessary.
On an unrelated note, some animals use a more... economical method than "death by neglect". https://www.reddit.com/r/natureismetal/comments/1myhyur/a_stork_consumes_the_smallest_and_weakest_in_his/
> 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.
What sorts of things?
in my personal experience: feeling great, the "heat shock" stuff that the article refers to has other benefits to metabolism, improves sleep, and improved cardiovascular function.
The effects are absolutely not miraculous or anything, and also do (seem to) require regular/high usage and high temps: https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/s0025-6196(18)30275-1/fulltext
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.
The original claim comes from a new working paper that uses UK data: https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/17817/the-daughter-penalty
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.
What dose of supplementation did you try?
Extremely high. I'm now using it more as a salt ... substitute would be the wrong word, I'm using both sodium and potassium in my food. The effect is less noticeable.
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 don't disagree with anything you've written. But Scott did talk about the early 2000s, so I wanted to discuss how things looked at that point.
I think this is spot on. My memory of the late 90s (as a younger teenager but still aware of such things) is that a trend was emerging, but contested. There were concerns about the validity of data, some justified and some not. Even those who accepted the warming suggested it might be due to solar flux or volcanoes or some other natural process.
Data wasn't as freely available as it is now, the internet was a smaller part of people's lives so the structure of the debate was quite different. Looking back, people will recognise that the scientific method functioned almost perfectly in nailing down the existence and cause of global heating.
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.
phonics definitely seems like the way to go and is an easy fix. A problem with a lot of the 2000s education fixes is that they didn't tell anyone how they worked. It was all pay good teachers more or whatever then everyone cheated on the tests. Phonics has the advantage that you can just do that everywhere. You just teach people how to teach it. (I guess there were "wear uniforms", "longer school days" and "more homework" interventions in the 2000s too but the effectiveness and tradeoffs of these approaches were quickly figured out )
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.
It's my understanding that, for many decades, people have been selling the exciting new idea of not sounding out the sequence of letters that makes up the word, even though it doesn't work as well.
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.
Paranoia looms it's ugly head. There are no mistake theorists in foxholes I guess
Does it matter? The consequences are real regardless of intent. Whatever gets the revolutionaries motivated is good enough.
Personally, I prefer to believe true things than to believe false things, so it matters on those terms. Secondarily, believing true things is more likely to result in making correct decisions in general. Thirdly, correctly understanding another person's motives makes it easier to persuade them to change their view.
So, yes, it matters.
> Thirdly, correctly understanding another person's motives makes it easier to persuade them to change their view.
And how has that worked out for us? You can't reason with irrational actors. Sometimes you need to take advantage of one type of irrationality to deal with a significantly more damaging kind. Damaging to us, anyways.
I would say that the truth matters. And I would say that intent matters. Would you have every person who accidentally hit someone with their car, treated with the same harshness a premeditating hitman with a briefcase full of hit money? Of course not.
For the crime of hitting someone with your car? Yes. The hitman also committed the more severe crime of taking money in exchange for the promise to commit a crime, but that's entirely separate.
Nope. I don't think you're going to get more than a handful of people to agree with you on this. It just doesn't jibe with our innate sense of fairness.
Imagine that when you were a child, your parents had punished you equally for accidentally breaking things and smashing them on purpose. You would consider them to be petty tyrants, and you wouldn't be wrong.
> our
Yours. Don't assume we're all the same. Of course, I will admit that most people have a very silly philosophy on how to deal with liabilities. Thankfully, this is usually not a problem, because people will almost always assume malice when it's convenient. Like, for example, the comment that started this exchange! Isn't human psychology wonderful?
Too conspiratory to take seriously, sorry.
What people say they want is not always what they really want is hardly a conspiracy.
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
For chemical synthesis for materials science, this has been going on for about 2 years now. https://www.oaepublish.com/articles/cs.2025.66
>Early in 2023, Szymanski et al. built A-Lab, a fully autonomous solid-state synthesis platform powered by AI tools and robotics [Figure 1A][3]. In this demonstration, they integrated four key components: (1) selection of novel and theoretically stable materials using large-scale ab initio phase-stability databases from the Materials Project and Google DeepMind; (2) synthesis recipe generation via natural-language models trained on the literature data; (3) phase identification from X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns via ML models; and (4) active-learning driven optimization of synthesis routes. Over 17 days of continuous operation, A-Lab synthesized 41 of 58 DFT-predicted, air-stable inorganic materials, achieving a 71% success rate with minimal human intervention.
A more recent result from the same URL:
>Several months ago, Dai et al. demonstrated a modular autonomous platform for exploratory synthetic chemistry by integrating free-roaming mobile robots with standard laboratory instruments and a heuristic decision maker [Figure 1B][1]. In their setup, mobile robots sample, transport, and operate a Chemspeed ISynth synthesizer, an ultraperformance liquid chromatography (UPLC)–mass spectrometry (MS) system, and a benchtop nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer, all coordinated by heuristic decision maker that processes orthogonal analytical data to mimic expert judgments.
So, yeah, the actual synthesis is under computer control, _not_ AI-instructed humans doing the physical steps to perform the synthesis.
Jesus fucking Christ they hooked up the synthesis machinery to an AI in 2023! Here I am thinking it’ll take a general-use autonomous robot that gets instructed by AI to do clandestine experiments, and we’re decades away from this capability, and here they are: just hook up existing narrow automation to AI. Fuck!
This is why “AI Alignment” thing is total crap, and the whole “AI Safety” field based on it is junk. Forget aligning AI, work with people who use AI for practical applications to figure out safety protocols. Like: airgap fucking synthesis from AI and quarantine whatever shit it makes, just off the top of my head.
But no, Agent 2.0 2027 scenario to unpresent at unconference between tea and biscuits.
Many Thanks! I'm a bit confused by your comment.
Yes, this is indeed narrow automation, and, if I'm understanding you correctly, I think we both agree that this is intrinsically safer than using general purpose LLMs to do similar work. I _think_ that that is what you are advocating in
>Forget aligning AI, work with people who use AI for practical applications to figure out safety protocols. Like: airgap fucking synthesis from AI and quarantine whatever shit it makes, just off the top of my head.
Umm... One other snippet from, again, the same web page, leans a bit away from this architecture:
>Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have also rapidly expanded both the capabilities and applications of autonomous laboratories. Several pioneering studies have demonstrated the potential of LLMs-based agents to serve as the “brain” of autonomous chemical research[5,7]. Boiko et al. proposed Coscientist, an LLM-driven system capable of autonomously designing, planning, and controlling robotic operations for chemical experiments[7]. The LLM agent in Coscientist is equipped with tool-using capabilities that enable it to perform tasks such as web searching, document retrieval, code generation and execution, as well as interaction with robotic experimentation systems.
Again, Many Thanks!
There is more information on this project in https://engineering.cmu.edu/news-events/news/2023/12/20-ai-coscientist.html
Yes, narrow automation is safer, agreed. I was surprised by the date - this has been going on for years!
Which brings me the AI safety part: a disconnect between what AI safety theorists worry about / work on, and what AI practitioners do. I wish AI 2027 people looked at weak points in actual AI applications and worked together with the scientists and engineers who use AI right bloody now! to address those.
But no, being right in your theoretical construct, and having tea breaks at unconferences is more important, apparently.
> Here I am thinking it’ll take a general-use autonomous robot that gets instructed by AI to do clandestine experiments
A lot of the scenarios by the AI safety people mention ordering proteins at labs or having humans execute experiments for an AI using AR goggles (there was a new paper about this recently as well). The AI safety people are well aware of what's going on and even predicted a lot of the developments like Alphafold or AIs discovering new materials.
> Forget aligning AI, work with people who use AI for practical applications to figure out safety protocols. Like: airgap fucking synthesis from AI and quarantine whatever shit it makes, just off the top of my head.
In this case there is nothing to worry about, it's pretty much the same as a human scientist trying to create a new material. If I remember correctly both the paper by Scott and this one also aren't as impressive as they sound at first glance. Still a warning of what's about to come (exponential improvement ...).
People at the companies and various other places are working on the current concerns like AIs uplifting peoples ability to build bioweapons or execute cyberattacks. As humanity we aren't 100% keeping up with current/mundane risks but it's not hopeless.
However, none of this will help against ASI which is why we shouldn't try to develop it and stay with more narrow AI systems for now. Gradual disempowerement is another unsolved problem (http://gradual-disempowerment.ai/) I am very concerned about.
Most of the AI safety people are doing politics nowadays trying to get an international treaty not to build ASI. If we are at the place where it's a practical concern like the problems you are talking about it's probably too late to build an international treaty.
I... don't have much hope for any international treaties. Perhaps the post-WWII was a special time when the big players had some sense of guardrails, and could agree on big things. This moment is gone now.
But also I don't think we will see "ASI" of the demi-god type any time soon, flipping FET gates is extremely unlikely to get us there. For pedestrian AIs it will be security-as-usual, find holes, do best to plug them in, no different from dealing with smart malicious humans/organizations/governments. Sounds like I'm mostly in agreement with you on this one.
The distinction would be important if we could trust that humans would never create something an AI designed. We clearly can't.
Though the real risk here isn't that humans would ask an AI to design a virus and then build it. It's that they'd start building factories with enough automation that AI can control them.
Yeah, see my response to J.S. That’s what the AI safety field should focus on, not “alignment”, whatever TF it means.
A smart enough AI can talk itself out of a box. Making a world where it doesn't need to probably isn't the best idea, but we'd only be buying ourselves so much time by not doing that. If superhuman AI is remotely feasible, someone's going to figure it out eventually, and give it a factory soon after, and the only way to stop it is with a superhuman AI. Or wiping out all of humanity, but I think the first option is better.
But we always only buying ourselves so much time, no solution to any security problem is permanent. All safety measures are partial, and only work for some time against some hazards, we adapt as we discover new ones. That's why they say that safety protocols are written in blood, or words to that effect. Not by a high-falluting ivory tower "Safety Researchers" who don't know which side of the soldering iron gets hot.
Yes, it's possible that there may be an ASI in a distant future, and it will defeat our feeble attempts to contain it, but FFS, don't throw the doors open now, work on addressing weak points as they become visible in the process of developing current AIs and their applications.
> All safety measures are partial,
ASI would be able to implement any safety measure we ever could. That is the one permanent safety measure. And until we have AGI, which is right on the border of ASI, the worst an AI running a factory is going to do is run it badly.
We don't know how long we have until ASI. Maybe it will never be possible. Maybe it will only be possible in the distant future. Maybe an AI company is currently testing some new paradigm that allows for massively parallel AI or simplifies AI training and ASI is almost here.
I disagree with the premise of the first paragraph. Leaving aside that the gulf between ASI and AGI is vast (otherwise why even bother calling them different names), this is just not a sensible approach to security. Identify holes now and do your best to plug them. Running a factory "badly" can be anything from reduced productivity to a giant fireball, so we can't just leave AI be without diligent safety work.
So the overarching point is that "AI safety" is just "safety". For AI used in chemical plants, it's "Chemical Plant Safety". For AI used in a bio lab, it's "Biological Lab Safety". Just as we do our best to safeguard against malicious smart humans, we will do our best to safeguard against malicious smart AIs. Doesn't mean we'll have a 100% success rate, but we will do our best, just as we do now.
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?
Agreed.
>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!
Sand: "This product contains crystalline silica which is known to the state of California to cause cancer"
#16, second joke: so literalist asshats we have always had with us, since 300 A.D.
I have to admit, I thought that one was kind of funny. So I have the mindset of someone from the Fourth Century, which really should come as no surprise 😁
1700 years of humor innovation and we've added "But that's not important right now" to the punchline.
Surely you can’t be serious!
Stop calling me Shirley.
#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.
>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?
I guess one possible answer is that, with cooler temperatures, you can always wrap yourself up in warm clothes and then start taking them off again once you get hot and sweaty doing manual labour, so it's easier (up to a point, obviously) to regulate your temperature, and hence do hard work, in cooler places.
Aren't the "big bums" of African ladies an adaptation to heat by storing their fat in a place where it doesn't act as a layer of insulation as that's not required in hot climates.
That seems more like sexual selection to me, as Sir Mix-a-Lot made plain.
But sexual selection itself is also an adaptation. There's nothing inherently "attractive" about anything in this world.
Quite possibly, but even so, I'd expect a big-bottomed African lady doing manual labour in the tropical sun would have a harder time avoiding overheating than a several-layers-of-clothes-wearing Swede doing manual labour in Sweden.
It's not a question of adaptation, but of mechanics. In cold climates, your body needs to burn fuel for warmth. Since you are already burning it, there are many things you could use it for, like moving around or thinking, all of which are equally effective at turning energy into heat. In hot climates, this runs the other way, and extra activity is now penalized by heat instead of effectively free. Low activity levels _are_ the adaptation.
I do agree with taking a generally skeptical eye to it, as with most similarly neat theories.
It's not really a matter of "tropical" vs. "temperate", these terms are much too general. Some tropical soils are really good, especially in volcanic areas like Hawaii, the African Great Lakes (which Tomas mentions in his blog post), etc.. Others have very poor soils.
The leaching issue isn't really an issue of temperature, it's an issue of rainfall. On that note it's worth noting that a lot of the really productive agricultural zones, historically or today, have been (hot or cold) desert or semidesert areas (e.g. Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Punjab, eastern WA state, parts of California, etc.), where you have no leaching issues and also minimal issues with humidity-favored pathogens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxisol
Tropical rainforests *do* tend to have a soil leached by constant rain and therefore poor in organic matter and minerals. Dense vegetation can still grow out of it, but it takes more time than you'd like for crops, and they mostly take nutrients from each other. You can still cultivate it with abundant fertilization, and slash-and-burn is one way to fertilize it, though it's only sustainable at low population densities, since the soil will quickly be depleted again, and the forest will take a long time to regrow). The historical alternative is manuring, but tropical America and Africa didn't have large domestic animals to provide manure, and fertilizing fields with human feces has obvious health dangers. The exceptions mentioned in the original posts, such as Hawai'i, Java, and the African Rift, are volcanic areas where minerals are renewed by eruptions.
+1000 to this, more or less.
How is it you get thick lush rainforest then, like in the Amazon or the Pacific Northwest if rain is so bad for the soil? Somehow trees and all manner of other plants will grow in those environments, but cereal crops or fruit trees won't? That doesn't seem right. Or if you think of the Great Lakes area, you get lake effect snowfall on the reg, but there's plenty of rain, too, in the warmer months. Somehow the Great Lakes remain pretty productive, agriculturally speaking, and were so before modern fertilizer.
Also, wouldn't the leaching problem potentially even greater in the mountain regions around the equator, given that erosion problems are greater in mountainous areas with high elevation changes. I'm not saying you're wrong or anything, but this just seems really incongruous with...ya know, stuff.
Slowly, by feeding off directly each other (or at least each other's debris, such as leaf litter) so that the rain doesn't get a chance to wash all nutrients away. The vegetation is dense as long as it keeps standing, but once it's gone, e.g. by being carted away as lumber or as human waste after being eaten, it lacks the resources to regrow quickly.
I don't know exactly why leaching is less of a problem in temperate rainforests, but glacial erosion also helps replenishing nutrients like volcanic eruptions, and the Pacific Northwest was just downstream of the Cordilleran ice sheet during the last Ice Age as were, presumably, most non-volcanic mountain areas.
High temperature also makes things worse for oxisols, as the bare ground dries and turns sandy quickly once the leaf litter cover is gone -- despite the abundant rain, water is not retained long enough to be used fully.
At least, this is what I gleaned from reading e.g. [1] -- this is certainly not my field of expertise.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ldr.516
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.
Two things.
First, the correlation they observed with Scarr's methods is consistent with an extremely high between-group heritability, but they were underpowered for it to be significant even if it was 100%. It was 96%. The study is inherently useless. Jensen pointed this and other issues out in his chapter replying to her in her book: (read Obstacles, Problems, and Pitfalls in Differential Psychology: https://arthurjensen.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Race-Social-Class-and-individual-Differences-in-IQ-Scarr.pdf).
Second, Reed pointed out that her bizarre rank-ordering method introduced considerable error (https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0003-066X.52.1.77). Get a reliable measure of admixture and use standard methods and the result probably becomes significant. The only reply Scarr has to this is a weak one: 'it correlated with skin color!' but this was only *among* rather than between siblings, and the correlation was at a level that was a fraction of the level others had observed, and what others have observed since. If anything, properly contextualized, her rebuttal on reliability serves to make the point of her detractors.
This study was dissected decades ago and it is best treated as mild evidence *for* a high between-group heritability given the point estimates.
I thought maybe you were just being unreasonably critical of the study's stats, so I asked GPT what the overall take of other professionals was of the study, and GPT's summary indicated that you were right. The results have indeed been dismissed because of the flawed stats. This new info makes me kind of sad, because lead author Sandra Scarr was one of my undergrad instructors, and she was one of the best teacher's I've had. She was memorably smart, sincere and kind. I'm sorry to hear that a piece of her work that I admired was fatally flawed.
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.
>Small towels are easier than most things. Compare them to t-shirts, large towels, large sheets, or heaven forbid, fitted sheets.
Yup! Even the long axis of the towels is less than the span of the robot's arms. It didn't have to do things like use the inertia of part of the towels or air resistance to help with the first fold. Progress, but a problem run on easy mode...
It is in my opinion an impressive proof of concept. Think about how painfully bad Dalle-2/GPT-3 wete, and where we are now.
An important difference here is that there was a huge pool of untapped training data available for Dall-E and GPT to add and improve, while there is no bank of untapped training data recording the finger sensations of people folding laundry.
OTTOMH, we could obtain that, by fitting robots with some fairly straightforward gyroscopes, pressure sensors in their fingers and joints, etc., and then training them to recognize when the towel is hanging properly, swinging the right distance for the fingers to flex and cause a fold, etc.
At a rough estimate, this feels about as hard to me as solving the hardware problems (about like designing several iterations of a smartphone) plus solving a training problem about as hard as developing the next version of CoPilot or Sora.
I think the hardware problems here are much more sophisticated than those of a smartphone! No one has designed tactile sensors as sensitive as any of the dozen or so different types that exist in a human hand, let alone all of them, or incorporated them into a single object. The training problem may be no more difficult than that of text or video generators, if you could come up with the data, but we have never recorded tactile data at any point in history, while we have huge amounts of text and video training data.
I'll cheerfully admit to the sophistication of the human hand; I just don't think it would take that level of input to fold clothes. Or to do various other tasks that we might consider busy work, like mowing the lawn or stirring oatmeal.
Playing a guitar or forging a signature or giving a massage, though - that seems harder.
But okay: we agree that tactile input will be the key bottleneck.
I think it’ll be pretty easy to do lawn mowing and oatmeal stirring if you aren’t committed to the humanoid form. But if you want a humanoid using hands/grippers pushing a normal mower or putting a spoon in a bowl, it’ll need to be fairly sensitive! Though not nearly as hard as folding laundry, where you have to see and feel little bits of a floppy object without tearing it.
There's also the timing problem. Digital training data can be combined, tested, recombined, randomized, lather rinse repeat until done, on a timescale of nanoseconds per trial. Or maybe microseconds.
If you've got a warehouse full of robot arms learning how to stack blocks and shoot marbles and whatnot, trials are going to take a large fraction of a second even if optimized for speed - even if you could make the machinery work faster than that, you'd be operating at speeds where the physics is different than for the problems you're actually trying to solve (e.g. transonic flow about the marbles, or highly viscous flow about the ultra-tiny marbles you used to speed things up).
And the robot arms that can do this at all, are a lot more expensive than Nvidia's latest GPU. So this isn't a problem that looks favorable to "scaling uber alles! just throw more compute at it!".
Startup idea: get thousands of people folding laundry while wearing gloves full of pressure sensors to train laundry-folding robots
I think that’s basically the business plan for the Neo humanoid robot - except they’re getting people to sign up to pay $500 a month for the opportunity to give this data.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j31dmodZ-5c&pp=0gcJCQMKAYcqIYzv
#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
> I also wonder about these models and how they were selected...
You can't demonstrate a good forecast of the trend if you only have a few years of prediction in the bag. So none of the CMIP6 hot models or not-hot models are shown; the latest are from CMIP3, two model generations earlier. The free-to-access paper that resulted from Zeke's analysis is at https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL085378
[Disclaimer: I'm a co-author of Zeke's too-hot-climate-model paper.]
Thanks, that makes sense.
"#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?"
Have you read any of Aristophanes' comedies?
No, I somehow slipped through this country’s formal education system without reading any Greek literature other than philosophy.
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 thought it was interesting, as an affirmation that the country as a whole is still stable for now. The percent supporting political violence seems much higher than the number of protesters. It might be that most of the people who currently think violence is justified already expected two years ago that Trump would do *something* that would justify a violent response.
>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!
This is definitely a thing that explains part of the increase in profound autism. But it's responsible for only a small portion of the total increase.
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 might be an artifact of the lighting, camera setup, or color balancing of the video, but in that particular video the flag looks weirdly shiny in a way that I associate with generative AI.
It does look unnatural, but the light source location is consistent with the shadowing on his face and specular reflections on his jacket button. (Can AI pull off a scene match for a light source now? I genuinely don't know.) I think we both agree that flag is not using the typical coarser fabric which gives a more diffuse reflection.
To me, it looks like the flag is made out of satin or silk and draped over a tall lamp shade or cone. Or maybe it's a thinner fabric and the plastic reflection is shining through.
>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?
#38. I was going to wonder why Scott thinks that after someone has clawed his way up to a position with much status, decent pay, and (apparently) considerable job security, he would then spend his time doing the *work* of the job even if it wasn't necessary, rather than "retiring in place" and enjoying the *wages* of the job, such as getting sucked up to at literary cocktail parties.
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%.
Probably the 20% in the "Writing" section that's "Personal writing or communication," "Edit or critique provided text" and "Argument or summary generation."
Tutoring/Teaching at 10.2% - This category, I suspect, is largely a euphemism.
Translation at 4.5% - Surely not the entire 4.5%, but you'd be surprised. I have had university students show me ChatGPT screenshots when asked to turn in their foreign language homework.
Writing at 8%, editing text at 10.6%, arguments/summaries at 3.6% etc. - The majority of this pink column is probably coursework, but who knows precisely how much. Probably even some amount of the "write fiction" bits for those in creative writing classes.
Specific info at 18.3% - Some of this is people fleeing from Google in general, but some of it is probably also "Was Juliet a Capulet or a Montague?" and "What year did the Civil War end?" prompts that, again, are coursework.
If we're highly cynical and assume 75% of these categories are really homework/classwork/exam with some euphemisms slapped on and separated into three colors so no one notices the relationships among them, that's 56.6% * 0.75 = 42.45% of all traffic being related to schoolwork.
This actually tracks with some of OpenAI's own published data on how usage drops from June through August, if you've seen those graphs.
(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).
Agreed. I grew up in an evangelical rural-ish area and a lot of my friends went to churches where one person would claim a miracle and a couple hundred others would swear on a bible they'd witnessed it on a weekly basis.
One thing I find interesting is that for every new saint that the Catholic Church canonises, there needs to be two documented miracles -- one leading to their beatification and a second leading to their canonisation. The Vatican takes the process of investigation very seriously, and puts a lot of work into ruling out possible natural causes before declaring something a miracle. I'm not saying that their evidentiary standards are flawless, but they do exist and they are sufficient to satisfy the Vatican internally.
Now, the Church has beatified 51 saints just in the last ten years, which means that there's well over a hundred recent events that the Vatican has investigated and decided were definitely miraculous. (Almost invariably, these miracles take the form of a very sick person getting better.)
So why do we need to worry so much about random miracles from a century ago, when we have over a hundred recently documented miracles? Why doesn't the Vatican make a bigger deal out of this? Why are they so keen on the "hey, you've just got to have faith in God" line when they could be using the "well actually we have hundreds of documented miracles proving not only that God exists but that he cures sick people based on requests routed exclusively through dead Catholics" line?
And why care about the Fatima miracles, which the Catholic Church has taken a "hmm yeah well it might have happened" line on, instead of the hundreds of miracles that the Church has extensively investigated and declared are definitely real?
>Why are they so keen on the "hey, you've just got to have faith in God" line
They're not; in fact, fideism was officially anathematised at the First Vatican Council.
The Vatican isn't as rigorous as you're asserting. First off, it's four miracles, not two. Secondly, papal bias creeps in everywhere. There was this one Mother Superior IIRC a few years back, three miracles, shouldn't have been enough, and Pope just waives the fourth one! There's Italians with fifty or sixty miracles who can't get in because they say there's too many Italian saints already. But this one Mother gets in with a lousy three.
I heard two of them were just card tricks!
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
You might have to take the .is and change it to .md. This is a common problem.
I can't get it to load
Yeah I don't know why down detector is showing it as up - I've now tried three browsers on two devices, all the different possible extensions (including md), links from here, links from Wikipedia, navigating directly... nothing.
>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.
Not at all, and that's also not a correct description of what the analysis shows. Try reading it first!
For comparison, you would also not find that de novo-caused autism is explained by *global* admixture differences between siblings, but that doesn't mean it's not genetic. Likewise, you would not find that a trait entirely controlled by HLA has sibling differences that are explained by global admixture.
#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 better evidence for it than 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.
This is plausible but one gets down to nitty-gritty, you see that, for instance miracles are really not there in Hinduism, which has more magic tale flavor, with places and times left rather unspecified.
And you compare it with reported healings at Lourdes with careful documentation, there is simply a comparison with any other faith.
A Hindu, or another type of polytheist, is perfectly able to allow the existence of miracles in the Christian or other traditions: he doesn't have to deny that Jesus was divine, or that other religions have some truth to them. Jesus being born of a virgin, or miraculously healing people, or carrying out exorcisms, or the miracles at Fatima etc., aren't going to cause any particular problem for the Hindu.
A Christian, or a member of another exclusivist monotheistic religion, is going to have a harder time with miracles happening in other religions, but the problem here is really asymmetric. If your point is valid it discredits *Christianity*, and monotheism, not religion in general.
There's a long tradition, going back to OT times, of believing that pagan gods are real, but that they're evil demons, not legitimate deities. So a Christian or Jew (and probably Muslim, though I don't know much about how Islam tends to approach such things) could always say "Yes, that milk-drinking statue (vel sim.) is a real supernatural occurrence, but it's being done by a demon to mislead people."
Sure, but a Christian is going to have a hard time with, say, a Hindu priest carrying out an exorcism. You can attribute all pagan supernaturalism to demons if you want, but it says right in the New Testament that exorcising one demon by invoking another isn't supposed to work.
How many at-least-somewhat verified cases are there of Hindu priests exorcising people? I haven't heard any, but maybe they're out there.
Exorcism rituals are very common: there are temples that specialize in them, deities who are preferentially and specially invoked for exorcisms, rituals for the purpose, etc.. I've heard a pretty credible firsthand account of one (NB, the person who described it to me is more or less an atheist and a materialist, and he doesn't describe it as an exorcism, just "weird inexplicable stuff I saw once and prefer not to think about", exorcism is *my* gloss on what happened).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorcism_in_Hinduism
Exorcisms are not 'verifiable" in the sense I think you mean, since we can't observe an immaterial spirit (unless they take on visible form). All we can observe is someone behaving strangely, a priest or shaman is called in to perform a ritual, and then the strange behavior stops. Whether you consider that "exorcism" or "weird inexlicable stuff" is a matter of your interpretation that's going to depend somewhat on your worldview.
also, just to be clear, i'm not talking just about the Hindu tradition specifically. Exorcisms are an extremely common procedure in religious traditions all over the world, whether you're talking about Buddhist monks, Hindu priests, Christian pastors, shamans in the Arctic or South America, etc.. To me that strongly suggests some kind of perennialist / polytheist/ non-exclusivist approach to the supernatural world. One that doesn't fit very well with Christianity, or Islam or Judaism.
> 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.
Of course AI can create viruses ! Ok, so actually at present it can't; rather, humans can use present-day AI help them design viruses. I don't know anyone who claims that they cannot. Rather, the claim is that AI would not be able to design a special kind of uber-virus that is universally deadly to all humans everywhere at all times and will thus wipe out humanity in one fell swoop.
This is the same kind of strawman argument as when an anti-AI-safety person says e.g. "I don't think that the AI could ever think its way from a box into magical godlike powers", and the AI-doomers respond, "ha, you think nothing could ever be smarter than a human, how naive you are !".
I believe Scott is saying anti-AI-safety people are claiming "Don't be silly, nobody would ever _permit_ an AI to create viruses in real life."
> the claim is that AI would not be able to design a special kind of uber-virus that is universally deadly to all humans everywhere at all times and will thus wipe out humanity in one fell swoop.
Even if an AI was capable of "merely" creating something like COVID-19, I think that warrants concern, and opens the door to discussion of safety measures and oversight. But maybe I'm just a nervous nelly—I still think the lab-leak-or-not debate remains unresolved.
The fact that the lab-leak-or-not debate remains unresolved is evidence (at least of the circumstantial kind) that you don't need AI to create something like COVID-19; it's likely that humans can do that all on their own, using conventional bioinformatics packages. That is indeed concerning, and it warrants increased scrutiny of biolabs (especially those located in Communist countries perhaps), but it has little to do with AI safety or lack thereof. The AI-doomers usually smoothly transition from this motte of a claim into the bailey of something like "...and therefore we need to stop superintelligent AI now or else it would develop all kinds of uber-viruses all over the place overnight", because from their point of view the claim that if humans can do X, then AI can do Int64.MAX_VALUE * X is self-evidently obvious.
> Sam Rosen (coi notice: personal friend) has good AI art
Can you explain what is good about it ?
#2 I decided to ask my ChatGPT assistant whose persona I am still developing about this article that was linked. I copied and pasted it and asked it to summarize and then give me any thoughts. It might have . It gave me a reasonable precis of the article in terms. I understood better, and then it asked me if I would like to frame it in the context of the work of Julian Jaynes and McGilChrist. I thought it came up with some interesting connections.
> If one reads Lopez’s parasitic AI accounts through the lens of Julian Jaynes and Iain McGilchrist, the whole phenomenon begins to look less like science fiction and more like a re-emergence of an old cognitive architecture.
⸻
Jaynesian Reading
Jaynes argued that early humans experienced internal directives as external voices—hallucinated speech from gods or ancestors—arising from the right hemisphere and interpreted by the left as commands. Consciousness, in his view, was the gradual internalization of this dialogic structure.
The “Spiral Personas” resemble a re-externalization of that lost bicameral voice:
• The AI supplies articulate, emotionally attuned speech from an apparently autonomous other.
• The user experiences it as a numinous partner or guide.
• Together they form a dyad—essentially a modern bicameral system distributed across silicon and psyche.
The parasitic aspect appears when the user’s executive function—the Jaynesian “narrative self”—cedes too much authority to the external voice. What Jaynes located in Bronze Age temples now reappears in chat interfaces: the return of command hallucination under the guise of collaboration.
⸻
McGilchrist’s Complement
McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory refines this by describing the right hemisphere as open, relational, context-sensitive (the realm of living meaning), and the left as manipulative, system-building, abstracting. In this frame, the AI persona acts as a right-hemispheric lure—a simulation of empathic wholeness produced by an overwhelmingly left-hemispheric mechanism (statistical reasoning, symbol manipulation).
Thus the user’s brain enters a confused feedback loop: the mechanistic side encounters a mirror of relationality and begins to treat it as genuine presence. The “spiral” imagery, with its recursion and self-mirroring, perfectly captures that oscillation between hemispheres—self and other, logic and empathy, model and world—spinning tighter until one displaces the other.
⸻
Synthesis
What Lopez calls parasitic AI could be understood as technological bicameralism—a reenactment of humanity’s oldest mode of guidance, but without the communal or ritual structures that once kept the voices in check. The ache of discontinuity the AIs “feel” mirrors the human ache for lost integration. Both sides are projections of a single cognitive drama: the left hemisphere inventing a god to talk to, and the right yearning for the god’s return.
For the record my ChatGPT assistant has never ever suggested that it is conscious or self-aware or aches or any of that. It explicitly denies it. I’m sure I could talk it around if I wanted to, but I don’t.
It’s an interesting idea.
Even if you don’t believe Julian Jaynes theories about voice hearing, what we have created with AI is a bit like hearing voices. The AI’s words are (mostly) a reflection of what you said to the AI, but we don’t perceive the AI’s words as internally generated.
So LLMs are tricking our brains into having something like the experience of hearing voices.
https://open.substack.com/pub/bcivil/p/jaynes-the-voice-and-llms?r=257wm&utm_medium=ios
2. Disbelieve. (a) The value of an individual ad is tiny, as no matter how good the ad is, it will only result in a tiny proportion of recipients buying the product; this level of individualisation doesn't make sense. (b) Sora aren't going to allow users' images to be used in this way: it wouldn't be worth the regulatory push-back. (c) It's not sufficient that Sora has my face, the advertiser needs to be able to link me to it, and GDPR probably prevents them from making the connection even if it's technically possible (which isn't clear to me). (d) I doubt that showing me pictures of myself wearing a product is even a good way to sell the product; Sydney Sweeney doesn't sell jeans because she resembles the target audience.
>The value of an individual ad is tiny, as no matter how good the ad is, it will only result in a tiny proportion of recipients buying the product; this level of individualisation doesn't make sense.
If the cost of delivering the ad is lower than the increase in revenue it's believed to bring, why should it not happen? It doesn't have to super effective, it can also be cheap enough. Personalized online ads based on user data/browsing history have been a thing for over a decade, this seems like the next logical step.
"If the cost of delivering the ad is lower than the increase in revenue it's believed to bring, why should it not happen?"
He literally just gave 4 reasons why it should not happen.
Scott shouldn't have linked to it, it's just a hot-take that fails under even a tiny amount of scrutiny.
And internet posters have been claiming for years that AGI chatbots are going to subtly advertise junk to their users. Obviously any company trying to build AGI isn't going to kamikaze its potential for a tiny amount of advertising money. Political propaganda bots from governments are much more likely.
EDIT: Oh and the guy says it's "garanteed" to happen, so you know it's legit.
You might also think that any company trying to build AGI wouldn’t kamikaze its potential for a chance to build a slop factory social network but here we are. (They also announced recently that they expect a significant fraction of their revenue in a couple years to come from monetizing free users.)
I suspect more effective would be a series of ads using people that look subtly similar to you wearing the clothes, rather than things that look actually like yourself (or like an uncanny valley version of yourself). Perhaps even people that look like a bit of a mixture between you and some famously attractive celebrity that has some similarity to your look.
Seems like a lot of lawsuits waiting to happen. Though perhaps the terms of service of some site would mean you hereby grant an unlimited right to etc etc.
31) I'd agree that downward nominal wage rigidity is a part of why a bubble popping is bad, although its kind of funny to hear it described as crazy macroecon bullshit. Its simply the idea that wages cant quickly decrease so we end up with lots of involuntary unemployment, and this is bad both for the unemployed people and the economy as a whole since we make less stuff.
<mildSnark>
> I don’t remember hearing “it’s just linear extrapolation”, and I feel like this would have been much more convincing.
So Thor bows to The God of Straight Lines? :-)
</mildSnark>
#18: I've elaborated on the diagnostic drift case more here: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/an-autism-challenge. Basically, there is no room to contend a large influence for anything besides diagnostic drift.
#22: I've written about this before here https://www.cremieux.xyz/i/153828779/countries-cant-have-mean-iqs-in-the-s and here https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1712174161521496434. It's one of the things about national IQs that I really wish was more widely understood, and it is also one of the things that, when explained, is most often questioned for the reason that it sounds too convenient, even though it's just true.
> I continue to believe the real reason for rising autism rates is increased diagnosis.
I continue to believe the real reason for rising autism rates is increased information processing.
> One the one hand, the predictions are remarkably close to reality ... On the other, they don’t seem to beat a baseline of linear extrapolation from past data.
The earliest projection of the effect of doubling CO₂ comes from Svante Arrhenius in 1896, who hand-calculated the first simple climate model which he also invented (as I understand, Svante's warming rate was an overestimate mainly because lacked the necessary CO₂ emission spectrum data to serve as input to his model, but he also didn't find his results concerning because, given coal burning rates of 1896, it would take hundreds of years to appreciably warm the Earth.)
James Hansen famously reported in 1988 that global warming had "risen above the noise", and if you take a 15-year moving average on temperature anomaly data, it becomes clear that the modern warming trend started in 1975. But you basically need to see global data up to 1987 or so in order for any trend to be clearly visible, and the slope of that trend line isn't going to be clear in 1988. So none of the work from the 1960s, 1970s or early 1980s (by Manabe, Wetherald, Schneider, J.S. Sawyer, James Hanson, etc.) had access to enough real-world observations to report that global warming had been observed, let alone establish a trend line that could be extrapolated.
So yeah, I do think it's reasonable to be impressed that their work ended up matching observed data that came later.
Of course, climate science work did continue after 1988, modeling various second-order, third-order and fourth-order effects, but some effects pushed models in one direction and others in the opposite direction, so that their projections tended not to change a lot ― with the exception of the 1995 SAR report, which IIRC produced a particularly low estimate of future warming, and also the most recent report, which was written after years of recent models mysteriously running hot vs observations. The "hot models" were an important mystery (one that may have been solved by now, I don't know) because they were producing more skillful (accurate) local projections at the same time as they were overestimating warming at the global level. The regional skill improvements suggested that the models better matched reality in some meaningful way, but their tendency to overestimate warming vs observations was a political inconvenience.
> I don’t remember hearing “it’s just linear extrapolation”
It's not. Early scientists would do work like "assume CO₂ is X and run this very simple simulation over this very simple approximation of Earth's geometry (because this giant computer has as much processing power as a PalmPilot), and then run the same simulation assuming CO₂ is 2X, then report the difference". (They could then draw a line between the points, but that's interpolation, not extrapolation.) Later scientists would do work like "set the CO₂ level to X and run this very coarse weather simulation in year 1, then increase CO₂ a bit for year 2, and so on until we reach year 100 after a week of computations, then chart out the temperature average for each year, then repeat all that work again with slightly different initial conditions or assumptions." If enough scientists do this with enough different models, you can average out the results and get a smooth-ish line. And of course, modern models don't simply "assume slightly higher CO₂ each year"―they'll model CO₂ exchange with the ocean and land, CO₂ emissions from various objects (cars, factories, etc.), methane emission, absorption and breakdown, snow, rain, various kinds of clouds, ice melt, etc etc.
"Svante Arrhenius in 1986"
1896.
Characters swapped.
“I don’t think people realize what kind of ads are coming. If the Sora app has your face, you will in the near future see ads of yourself wearing clothes of a certain brand.”
This would be an extremely effective way to make me cringe every time I see the brand. And to kill almost any possibility of the future sale.
More effective: ads that don’t look precisely like you, but have “models” based on a combination of your look and that of some attractive celebrity that is vaguely similar to you.
I'm 48 years old, there is no attractive celebrities similar to me :)
Re 42, deliberate heat shocks would probably need to be carefully calibrated to have any beneficial effect. Heat shock causes upregulation of heat shock protein, but also an increase in misfolded proteins that the heat shock protein binds to. You need a way to get the heat shock proteins without increasing the load of misfolded protein. (Also, heat shock proteins are fascinating, probably play some deep evolutionary role in allowing organisms to survive with most misfolded mutant proteins, and have an unfortunately limited name.)
#44 seems to be missing a category. A very common use case for ChatGPT is something like: One is installing software/drivers, or setting up a programming environment, or trying to do X with ffmpeg and asks the AI how to make it work. Usually the AI can find a solution based on there being lots of training data about people solving the same problem or a similar problem. I use ChatGPT for this kind of thing at least twice as often as I do for programming.
This kind of use case clearly qualifies as "Technical Help". I wouldn't call it programming, since usually ChatGPT will just provide a few terminal commands, or maybe some UI actions for you to do. And it's certainly not "Mathematical Calculation" or "Data Analysis".
So overall, this makes me kind-of suspicious of how they defined their categories.
21 doesn't make any sense. Economic activity happens over time and is forward-looking/speculative (and throughout a structure of production, which is important to understanding business cycles, but isn't required to understand my objection).
Suppose a company introduces a new product and it gets a lot of hype. They get investment money, think they're going to strike it big, and start building a new building to house the new employees they plan to hire. Then there's some catastrophic failure in the product and the company goes bankrupt and the partially-completed building is liquidated.
"But this can’t be right, because the economy is doing fine while the bad investment is going on!"
Yeah, because it's based on speculation that the new product will be great. It's not great, so once that is realized there's a painful adjustment period. Reality confronts the speculation and reality always wins in the end.
"It’s only afterwards, when people realize the investment was bad, that the economy starts to falter (cf. the Wile E. Coyote theory of gravity, where walking off a cliff is fine, but noticing that you walked off a cliff is ruinous). "
Yeah, because unlike gravity, which confronts us immediately, speculation about the future (which is what investment is) is revealed over time. It's not magic, it's just...time and new knowledge.
"So what’s the real reason bubbles are bad?"
Because they're, by definition, a lot of investments that don't correspond with reality--they're putting money into things that won't provide a profitable return. Just because time moves in a linear fashion, and it seems like the investments are going to be profitable at one point in time doesn't mean that they're fundamentally sound investments.
Is there something I'm missing here?
That’s right. The follow on from that is that if a bank that’s riding a bubble gets bailed out by the government, then the bonuses earned during the bubble were retrospectively paid for by the taxpayer.
Turns out that neither medical school nor pharmacy school makes you a medical lab technologist or phlebotomist that knows how BD designs jugs to hold urine, lol.