Maybe, but there is no law that universities have to pursue the most meritocratic policy. There is a law that they cannot discriminate based on race. So giving a boost to "diverse" students is illegal, but other dumb stuff that does not discriminate based on race is permissible.
"Section VI discusses intentional discrimination or disparate treatment as one type of Title VI claim. Another type of Title VI violation is based on agency Title VI implementing regulations and is known as the disparate impact or discriminatory effects standard. While a discriminatory impact or effect may also be evidence of intentional discrimination or disparate treatment, this section discusses disparate impact as a cause of action independent of any intent.
"A recipient, in determining....the class of individuals to be afforded an opportunity to participate in any [program accepting federal money], may not, directly or through contractual or other arrangements, utilize criteria or methods of administration which have the effect of subjecting individuals to discrimination because of their race, color, or national origin...."
These are the current guidelines for the DoJ to bring a case against a college based on the "disparate impact"[1] theory, which says racial discrimination exists even in the absence of any intent, or explicit dscrimination, so long as there is a "disparate impact" -- meaning certain racial categories just end up being over- or underrepresented relative to some hypothetical measure of what they should be (e.g. their representation in the general population).
Now there is clearly zero chance the Biden DoJ is going to bring a case against a college with a framework of admissions policies that just happens to discriminate against yellows and admit more blacks, to pick a random hypothetical[2] out of the air, but it's clearly a petard on which the advocates of "equitable outcomes" could be hoist in the future. We could eventually find a weird coalition of lefty universities wanting their diversity programs and righties who hate theories of "unconscious racism" agitating for the Supreme Court to overturn or at least limit Griggs v. Duke Power and other decisions that legitimized the "disparate impact" theory of discrimination.
BOTH are going to reduce admission standards. They have to. Unless there are large numbers of black and asian students, say, that are basically indistinguishable from non-diversity admission standards perspective, then the only reason that the black students would get in when they otherwise wouldn't is if they have lower academic ability/scores...otherwise they just would have gotten in without affirmative action or whatever.
I found his “verbose rubbish” highly entertaining. Here he describes what it’s like to be on Twitter: “You lose hours to—what? An endless slideshow of barely interesting images and actively unpleasant text. Oh, cool—more memes! You know it’s all very boring, brooding nothing, but the internet addicts you to your own boredom.” I especially liked his admonition not to sign up for his substack, which I promptly disobeyed.
It's wrong, though, is the thing. I'm sure it feels very real to Kriss, but I am reminded of that hundred-year-old writer Scott wrote about who had a deep conviction that the world was coming to an end and that culture had maggots in it. Kriss is so obviously feeling the same thing that finding people in previous eras with similar unshakable doomy convictions should make us *greatly* lower our credence in whatever arguments Kriss tries to bring to bear.
(And he doesn't bring many besides rhetorical analogies. The falling interaction numbers for Twitter and Facebook, for example, mean nothing unless we compare them to e.g. how many people started using Discord instead. The current paradigm of the Internet may be dying. *Maybe*. But there's a long inferential distance between that and "people will stop using the Internet much" that he does nothing to cross.)
I find actually scrolling Twitter and Reddit a lot more entertaining than reading him whine about it, and those aren't even the forms of entertainment I prioritize usually.
I'm really curious about these claims that I'm bored by what I'm doing and yet find myself compelled to continue the boring thing anyway. I'm really quite certain that I enjoy the things I am doing on the Internet, except when I'm just procrastinating (but I'm quite capable of procrastinating without internet or even a computer), so I wonder whether I'm (1) more easily engaged than the average person or (2) better than the average person at finding and doing things that I find to be engaging.
Meh. Ironically (or by design ?), his prediction is already old hat. And I found his whining tiresome. And he's confusing the Internet¤ > the Web > social media platforms. Yes, that last subset is quickly going away, and good riddance (though sadly, substack might stick around longer). As a counter-example, consider Wikipedia : it doesn't have most of the problems described in that blogpost, and I predict that it will stick around for *much* longer (especially if you consider wikis as a technic).
¤ Internet is capitalized : it's *the* International network, not some random interconnected network...
“Whatever it is I’m doing here, you should not be part of it. Do not click the button below this paragraph, do not type in your email address to receive new posts straight to your inbox, and for the love of God, if you have any self-respect, do not even think about giving me any money. There is still time for you to do something else. You can still unchain yourself from this world that will soon, very soon, mean absolutely nothing.”
Yeah the magnitude seem suspicious. There are ways of verifying these numbers from outside the reporting nation and I often read analyses which look to "correct" stats like China's GDP numbers. For smaller countries it would be pretty easy for a dictator to lie about it and for people in the west to not care, but it won't have too big an effect on broader stats. And these lies can only last for so long. If you grow GDP at 8% a year or whatever, pretty soon you have to claim that your nation is basically first world, which is easily disproved.
> the democratic world must also be poorer, since it’s all interlinked.
But our wealth is measured on the basis of completed transactions with these countries. They can lie about how many cars they're producing, but if we take delivery of the correct number of cars exported by China, then that's how many cars we imported. If we agree to sell China $X billion worth of stuff, and they send us $X billion, then that's how much money we got, regardless of whether China has less reserves than it claims.
In particular, note that "sellsword" is not from the listed time period at all, but rather was invented by fantasy fiction authors sometime around the 1950s! "Scofflaw" is also not from that time period, being invented in the 1920s.
Interestingly, both "sellsword" and "scofflaw" seem to have something like the "seedy" connotation pointed out in the original twitter thread. (As does Dickens' "sawbones," also mentioned in the reddit thread.) So to the limited extent that this process of compound formation is still productive, it seems it may have retained the generally perjorative character of the older (surviving) batch of compounds formed on this pattern.
But I'm not completely convinced of my own suggestion here. An (admittedly rather niche) exception to this pattern that comes to my mind is "spit-sand," coined by the historian Roel Sterckx as a translation for the legendary Chinese aquatic creature called yù 蜮 (said to be like a turtle and blow poisonous sand in man’s face). Sterckx is not a native speaker of English, but his coinage seems to me a perfectly apt use of the archaic compound pattern, despite lacking any perjorative connotation.
Re verb-noun words, there are a few with a third prefix, such as "ne'er-do-well", meaning someone who is lazy and/or crooked and so will never do well. Admittedly that is a phrase rather than a single word, but the principle is the same.
Another one, in my opinion, is "nincompoop". Google "define" claims this means a foolish or stupid person, and Dr Samuel Johnson (the 18th century dictionary guy) defined it much the same and claimed it was derived from "non compos mentis" ("not of sound mind").
But I think these definitions are wrong. The defining characteristic of a nincompoop is not stupidity or mental deficiency but ineffectualness, which may or may not stem from stupidity.
I believe (albeit without any evidence!) that both words started out as Tudor slang, and nincompoop was specifically naval slang in the time of Queen Elizabeth I (Drake, Raleigh, and that lot), and was short for "ne[v]er come [to a] poop [deck]". I surmise it was used of ineffectual naval officers whose shortcomings meant they would never be promoted to captain and so would never attain a captain's privilege of strutting around on their own poop deck.
"Popinjay" may be another example of Tudor slang along the same lines. But I don't have a theory of how or even whether that is made up from a verb and noun, except the "jay" part presumably derives from the colourful bird.
Isn't popinjay likely related to German "Papagei," a parrot?
There are some actual verb-noun compounds among bird names: turnstone, shearwater. Killdeer is not an example, though it looks like one; it's onomatopoeia.
"But I think these definitions are wrong. The defining characteristic of a nincompoop is not stupidity or mental deficiency but ineffectualness, which may or may not stem from stupidity"
Huh, now I'm curious to know where you're from. Because where I'm from, nincompoop refers unambiguously and directly to stupidity. I'm prepared to be wrong, but I'd honestly be surprised if it were otherwise anywhere in the English speaking world, so I think Johnson's etymology is obviously correct.
I'd say it's pretty common throughout sword and sorcery and related fantasy. It's familiar enough that I was surprised to learn it was a 20th century coinage.
Google Books conflates it with phrases like "sells swords", but searching in quotes has it showing up in the 1980s. The early hits make me suspect that Thieves World (a multiauthor shared world series that began in 1979) was the primary vector that made it popular in the genre, even if it didn't originate the term.
Prince John (later King John) had been nicknamed "Lackland" in the 1170s, because his father Henry II decided his brothers would inherit all his realms leaving John with no land. So this pejorative verb-noun form goes back a way. (As things turned out, John ended up inheriting everything; but that is another story.)
I can think of a few others, which may or may not have been mentioned already in this discussion, such as "killjoy" and "puzzlehead" or "muddlehead. But I don't know when these originated.
Do they have anything to say about verb-preps or verb-adjectives? I shared this thinkpiece with my sister for a lookover, and she said she'd get back to me once her grandson was done with his playdate. She also mumbled something about her husband ranting about gun buybacks being a lot of feel-good makework for know-nothing blowhards.
As fed money makes poor school districts better funded than rich ones, I can easily see this being so via the feds requiring these DIE classes as a condition of funding. So (as a commenter upstream noted) struggling kids who can't read, write, or balance a budget get classes in how to conduct grievance. I am not sure who this is going to help, besides the poor kids older cousins, who can't get a job anywhere but the taxpayer funded DIE industry.
I mean they literally do tend to in terms of explicit/instutional ones. It is just the breaks from genetics/upbringing are so strong they swamp those anyway.
That wasn't my wife's experience as a occasional hire. (She was an entertainer specializing in music/art/science in roughly that order.) In her experience the poorer schools often didn't even supply toilet paper to the restrooms, so the teachers had to buy their own for the students to use.
At least in my state you we see people swear up and down that the suburban schools outspend the "urban/poor" schools per pupil, and that this explains the vast gulf in educaitonal outcomes. Except that hasn't been true in a couple decades with both the state and federal government putting its thumbs on the scales quite heavily, such that the big urban school districts have real top level per pupil numbers, and definitely more on average than the super nice school disctricts in the suburbs.
But of course that money doesn't go as far because the parents are so much less involved and the students so much harder to teach with a much larger percentage with serious devleopmental or other issues. But it is crazy that people have such strong beliefs about the basic facts that are false and very easy to check.
The question-- and it's a real question, so far as I know-- is where the money actually goes. If the poor schools have (as I keep hearing) woefully inadequate resources *for* *the* *students*-- no toilet paper, teachers having to buy basic supplies, very old textbooks, lack of heating and cooling-- then the money might be getting spent, but siphoned off. And maybe not on things conservatives hate, maybe just going to politicians' relatives.
The local city district spends nearly 2x per pupil as the local rural district, while having buildings that had holes in the ceilings and no heat for an entire midwest winter.
I remember looking at the course list for a prestigious high school a friend with kids sent me, and the upper-end courses had options for doing techie stuff or 'emphasis on social justice'. So, Silicon Valley vs New York starts earlier than we thought!
Amusingly, I remember looking at the course list of someone who had gone to school in mainland China, and there were courses on Marxism. I asked them what they had taught them there, and they said "Oh, to be a good person." They seemed vaguely bored. I didn't have the chance to ask further.
So, 'convergence theory' 50 years later? (There was an idea during the Cold War both sides would converge to the same place.)
Yeah, I went to a pretty academically rigorous boarding school about 20 years ago and we had postcolonial history junior year and learned critical literary theory as freshman. I can only imagine what sociological nonsense is being taught as intro level stuff now.
I've wondered how to resurrect the life of the mind, or at least have right-leaning perspectives. The two I can think of would be whatever Christians are doing, and evolutionary psychology-based criticisms (Madame Bovary's ovaries or whatever the name of that book was). Libertarians kind of have economics sewn up.
It's hard to imagine how it will happen outside some sort of decentralized, heterodox intellectual movement that creates a system parallel to mainstream academic institutions. With the way things are going in the academy, right-leaning people will simply be barred from entry, or find the social and cultural milieu of the campus to be so unappealing that they'll find other ways to earn the necessary credentials for knowledge work.
Or they won't! And we'll end up with a massively stratified society where the theoretical "people who could be great poets but have to work at the factory" will all be right-leaning.
The problem isn't the potential poets who end up as factory workers, the problem is the stratum of those who run things ending up even more full of people who are totally divorced from reality, as well as convinced of their divine right to rule over the ignorant plebs who care more about real life than the grand religion of Theory.
So, I find it hard to believe that such a policy would actually be implemented for long, if at all, but I will note that I've taught in inner city school districts where nearly all the students were black, and I do not think I ever spotted such a thing as a racial-equity-related class.
One might guess that the increased amount of seniors in the Congress would be a result of increasingly advanced gerrymandering leading to safer and safer incumbent districts, where popular (or even less popular) incumbents can then keep their seats forever and ever without any real challenge.
Sure but why are these people staying in this job? Why aren't they retiring or losing elections? (cushy job so why retire, gerrymandering keeps you in your district, etc...)
Incumbency is a huge advantage, and also... being a congressman is sort of terrible. The pay is not great compared to what you could earn as a competent worker in the private sector, you have to travel for a huge portion of the year or maintain two residences, and you are scrutinized at a level reserved only for movie stars/actual celebrities, while not getting any of the free gift bags at awards shows because they violate campaign finance laws.
One factor I think is probably relevant is that structurally, politics is a lot about who you know, and so a seniority-based power structure is in some sense self-reinforcing. If you know lots of people in the game, and trade favors back and forth, you can actually be more effective. Additionally you can gatekeep the youngsters from positions of real power, which compounds your stability, probably at the expense of effectiveness. Either way, you keep getting better at the game as you get older.
To be clear I think the things you mention are factors too. A variant on "cushy job so why retire" would be "powerful job so why retire". Humans like power/influence.
I think a big part of it is your effectiveness in tgettign re-elected (which is the real job not being a good legilator) is mostly about networks/seniority. And so the age is going to just drift older and odler as the process gets more "efficient". I do think the US political systme is crazy efficient at what it does. The problem is what it does isn't "govern effectively", but "make sure Republicans and Democrats get elected and keep getting elected".
Same reason actors in their late 50s continue to play heartthrob roles opposite 22-year-old actresses. These people are narcissist to the core, and not being in the public eye is like death. If they cared more about money and power than being on the TV, they would've gone into some other profession.
Is your question: why is the average age of MPs in Finland declining relative to average age of the Finnish population? Which is more common, the U.S. pattern or the Finnish?
I'm not sure whether sharing an age is an all that strong an indicator for a voter finding a candidate in any case. Plenty of cases where an older voter might appreciate a younger candidate for their vigor and vision, or an younger voter an older one for their experience.
Going on the IPU's website, it looks to be in the 40-50 range across Europe: https://data.ipu.org/content/spain?chamber_id=13384 (Spain because this was the last one I was on). In Canada (America's control group) it's 50. By contrast, the average US congressman is 58, and average senator is 64.
However, US congressional districts have much bigger populations and the US political system is radically different to everyone else's when it comes to the the strength of parties over their members (generally an iron grip in Europe, seemingly non-existent in the US) and the selection of candidates (generally largely by the parties' leadership in Europe, by primaries in the US). Finally, in parliamentary systems MPs still have a career progression of junior minster to cabinet minister, and a lot of them aren't terribly interested in sticking around once they've been sacked as as a minister.
I suspect the biggest non-US factor pushing ages down is the parties wanting to seem modern by running younger people for marketing reasons, and the biggest US factor pushing ages up is polarisation/incumbency (if you're a Republican congressman in rural Kansas, you've got a job for life as long as you can bat away a primary challenger).
Though you wouldn’t think it to look at most of modern society, we have a long-standing tendency to respect the wisdom of age. Check the etymology of “senate” and “alderman” for example. So it’s not terrifically surprising to find that elder statesmen are, well, as elderly as a given era’s medicine allows.
That said, I don’t remember a time when the top cohort of elected officials were so uniformly age-impaired.
I don't think it has much to do with life expectancy. Even if the average age of politicians is going up with the life expectancy of the country as a whole, I doubt there is much correlation between the life expectancy of politicians in the past and the average age of them today.
Even 100 years ago politicians had fairly similar life expectancies as average people today. Most gains in the country's life expectancy numbers are due to poorer people living longer.
I feel like what's missing is not electoral defeats or deaths but retirements. In the old days congressmen would reach ~65 and retire like normal people; nowadays they cling on with grim determination through senility to death.
Retirements aren't independent of electoral challenges though. Politicians are a lot more likely to retire if they think they're likely to lose their next election.
Another reading (which i don't really support) is that the districts have elected the "best" person and so they don't need to find anyone new and those people just get older and older. I guess you could test this by looking at the average age of newly elected members of congress or if average terms are getting longer.
Hypothesis: as society as gotten crazier, the most electable people are now those too old & set in their ways to be fully up to terms on the latest craziness.
Hi Scott, I met you at the LA meetup, thoroughly enjoyed your Q and A, thanks again for coming. Just a correction, on #24, I believe the size of Prince Charles Island is 3,600 square miles, rather than 36,000 square miles, which is like half the size of all New England and probably would have been discovered before 1948.
Regarding Georgism in Space, I think we are already at the point where physical space (in certain places) is becoming scarce. These places are geostationary orbit and low Earth orbit.
The space in LEO is mostly limited by the probability of collision between different spacecraft, while the space in the geostationary orbit is limited by the possibility of communicating with a satellite without interfering with its neighbors.
Which brings me to another limited resource that the article omits: the electromagnetic spectrum. Electromagnetic radiation seems like the only viable medium for fast long-distance communications. And with it you only have limited bandwidth in a given place and given direction. In most practical cases we will run out of bandwidth in electromagnetic spectrum far earlier than we run out of energy, matter or space.
I think we already treat the spectrum in a reasonably georgist way. The Glen Weyl types have figured out that the state leasing chunks of the spectrum for a limited time period in an auction works the same as ownership + LVT.
"...This work helped explain why spectrum markets had so stubbornly failed to reallocate spectrum to new uses and why auctions for Internet advertising slots worked so much better. Only a true, continuous auction in uses can solve the monopoly problem and hence produce allocative efficiency.
But continual auctions also may create a problem—for investment efficiency. If possessors know that their possessions can be taken by others at any time and that they will not receive the proceeds of any bid, they will be discouraged from taking care of and improving their property. In this situation, you might well let your house fall into disrepair. Like George’s tax proposal, the Vickrey Commons does not give people good investment incentives..."
George's tax proposal taxes the base value of the land but not any of the improvements on it, so improvements like houses still get sold for their value and there isn't this kind of lack of inventive
For sure, I wasn't making a point, I was just providing the source that was asked for and included a semi-random quote that proved it was relevant to both George+spectrum :)
Even in LEO there's a LOT of space. Like, the surface area of the earth, times however many layers of altitude in whatever thickness, plus the sphere gets bigger as you go farther out. There's plenty of room for many billions to live up there.
The problem isn't collision, or it's not collision like we usually think of it. It's traffic control and and collision mitigation, which are really just technological problems. Some of the problem is also cost: once you get something up into orbit, it's expensive to move it. But if we get the costs of lifting stuff to orbit lower, then maneuvering fuel gets much cheaper. Or we get a different technology that makes maneuver cheaper; laser sails, etc.
As for traffic control, we handle thousands of airplanes, millions of cargo containers, and hundreds of millions of self-navigated vehicles every day. Admittedly, lots of people crash and die in their cars, and I'm sure there will be accidents in orbit too. But I expect it'll be just fine.
For collision mitigation, again it's a mass problem. You can bulk up habitats so an impact with certain objects just isn't a big deal, or you can add detection systems so you can move out of the way, or whatever. It's just a tech and mass problem. Admittedly hard problems, but not unsolvable.
Regarding 21 and racial diversity classes, isn't this just going to play out that richer districts can offer more college focused classes, same as it always does?
While I agree that in practice that's what happens, what makes it harder for poor districts to offer racial diversity classes? It shouldn't be the money, I think when you add federal funding schools in poor areas get the same amount as those in rich ones.
I don't know too much about school funding admittedly, but I was under the impression that in California at least, a large part of the funding was from property taxes, so the richer areas naturally get more. I'm not sure if state or federal funds try to help even that out. There could also be factors like alumni donations and the ever present parent issue.
Private schools also work on a separate system, but still compete with public schools for college admissions.
I don't know. In theory, you could use something like this as a hack to try to increase diversity, but the cynical part of me thinks this looks exactly like what you'd do if you wanted to look like you were promoting diversity but really wanted to continue taking in rich upper class kids.
>>>a large part of the funding was from property taxes, so the richer areas naturally get more. I'm not sure if state or federal funds try to help even that out
Other people have done the data checking and they are sure - poor and racial minority- majority schools get quite a bit *more* per student than do public schools serving rich students.
Having said that, I agree - the essay - which doesn't impress me much as a road map - is not trying to get poor/oppressed people into college, but to get 'right thinking people who will be taught the right shibboliths' into college.
To be fair, this underpants gnome sort of scheme supposes that knowing the right shibboliths is itself a blow against darkness.
Are you accounting for the urban/rural split? I suspect that “poor and racial minority schools” in urban districts are getting a lot of money (although that money goes less far in high cost urban areas) while rural schools without access to a high property tax base are indeed very low-funded.
First, the median income for urban and rural residents is actually quite close. It'd be more accurate to say urban areas have greater inequality. For this reason, I don't expect cost of living to really confound this analysis.
However, even within school districts, poorer schools typically get more money - and that probably covers your cost of living critique?
Not really. It's exceedingly complicated, but generally most money for CA public schools comes from the state, and poor districts get lots more money because they have more ESL learners, students with assorted "special needs" and so forth:
I don't think rich & poor students spend a very different time in classes (once you stop caring about the small part of the poors that just never show up), do they? But if you start dedicating an increasing share of their -I assume fairly static- weekly hours, you have to lower how much is dedicated to other stuff. You know, the peripheric stuff you also happen to learn in school, mathematics, writing, history, physics, biology, philosophy, etc etc.
And while the richer probably don't need these classes too much (is it because they got other resources to learn? Is it because the curriculum is tailored for the 80-IQ which the school system is adamant MUST NOT BE LEFT BEHIND and they only need half the time to learn it, if even that? I don't know, a dozen different convincing reasons can be conjured easily), the end result is the same: every hour you spend teaching the poor students about DEI is an hour during which they'll fall behind their betters, in a discipline that is actually useful.
I grew up in a poor rural school, and my guess is that any such school will really never be able to offer such classes just because of a lack of students that stops a broadening of the curriculum
On a per-pupil basis this may be true in many cases, but far from all.
What's even more relevant is the breakdown of spending per student at smaller schools. Because there are fixed costs like land, buildings, and administration, a larger percentage of the spending goes to things other than classroom time with teachers. For a simple example, a very rural district may spend a significantly larger percentage of the overall budget on transportation to and from school, compared to an urban district where many/all students can walk or take public transportation.
Additionally, simply having more teachers as an absolute total allows for more branching out into different areas. Small schools aren't going to hire specialty teachers, and may or may not get a teacher that has both [core subject] and [niche subject] certifications.
If universities change what gets students admitted, rich fancy schools will faster to meet those new requirements than poor public schools, who have to fight a mountain of bureaucracy to change anything
Plus, you have the issue that public schools in red states won't offer them because the politicians are opposed to it, so the students will have a harder time getting into selective universities through no fault of their own. Private schools, on the other hand, will offer a ton because their whole mission is to get kids into the best college possible.
I suspect the Ethereum roadmap won't happen in quite that way. For a bit of background -- originally (or at least, early on), Ethereum was supposed to have four phases: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity, with Serenity being the transition to proof-of-stake. Things didn't work out that way.
Frontier (the original version) and Homestead both happened, but Metropolis got split into two updates, Byzantium and Constantinople. (I might have the history a bit wrong here, I wasn't paying attention to Ethereum at the time; this is my rough impression of what happened, but someone who followed it closer can correct me.) Meanwhile it turned out that the transition to proof-of-stake was actually quite a hard problem, so Serenity kept getting pushed further and further back. Thing is, there was still a need for more updates despite not having reached the Serenity phase; so updates kept happening, and I guess since it was still Metropolis, these updates mostly got named after cities. (Yes, one of them was Istanbul, but no, it didn't directly follow Constantinople, due to some unusual circumstances intervening.)
Eventually the name "Serenity" went away and people just started talking about "the merge" instead. Also, the convention of naming updates after cities became enshrined, even though the original Frontier-Homestead-Metropolis-Serenity plan was now dead. (E.g., the merge -- which has now happened -- is officially the Paris update, though hardly anyone calls it that. People do typically call the other updates by their city names, though, as most other updates don't have any other name to refer to them by.)
So now Vitalik has his new plan of merge-surge-verge-purge-splurge, of which the merge has already happened. But I suspect this one won't play out as planned either. In fact, I can already point out one way in which it almost certainly won't, in that Vitalik lists Ethereum Object Format as one of the improvements to be included in the far-off Splurge, but it's actually going to happen much *sooner* than that; it's planned for the very next update to come (to be named Shanghai). I don't know why he put it in the Splurge, given that that feature has been planned for Shanghai for quite some time. (Shanghai has been in the planning for much longer than updates usually are, because it was scheduled for after the merge, and the merge was delayed repeatedly, to the point that a number of people kept saying that the transition to proof-of-stake would never actually occur.) Perhaps it logically belongs there, but that's not when it's going to happen.
So, I'd treat the merge-surge-verge-purge-splurge plan as somewhat aspirational; meanwhile updates will continue as usual and will continue to be named after cities. :P I expect each stage beyond the merge to be split up between multiple updates, but also bits and pieces will be pulled forward or pushed back, with things just generally not happening in the order Vitalik has presented; there will probably not be any one update, or even series of updates, that one can truly identify as "the surge" or "the verge" or what have you.
(I do have to wonder whether they'll ever declare an *end* to the updates; they can't *really* claim to be decentralized until they do, after all! But it looks like there's a lot that people want changed before we're anywhere close to such a halt...)
The joke is that the headline is referring to Kim Jong-Un taunting Western countries, but the tweet is deliberately misinterpreting it as being about Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.
I mean I hear enough to recognize their names and that they're some kind of celebrity family (I think there's something about Kim's sex tape, though not sure if that's what made her famous or was big news because she was already famous?) But honestly not too much beyond that. I don't hear too much about them in my normal socialization, and when I do I kinda get bored and change the subject, so not much beyond that.
(Of course in this case I was just genuinely dumb and didn't click the link, I just assumed the title text had some obvious joke I was missing context for).
In unrelated news, when I showed my brother the tweet he went "oh hey I went on a couple of dates with her [the tweeter] when I lived in London".
Same. Knew nothing about this other than recognizing their names.
I watch TV shows and movies, read a lot of news and other material online (research mostly), but am not on social media, so a lot of pop culture flows right past me, for which I am grateful. (I'm sure I'm also missing some good stuff, but I trust my kids/friends to let me know).
I also do it, I recognize Kardashians because who (with the slightest access to television and\or Internet or a newspaper) wouldn't, but I don't know but the haziest detail.
Things about me that I think contributed to that, in perceived order of their contribution :
1- I don't live in the USA
2- I don't follow Instagram
3- I don't watch reality shows or really most TV
4- I'm utterly uninterested in any kind of celebrity shows or news, whether foreign ones or those of my own country. Sometimes I have trouble recalling the names of faces I know well. (though this seems to be a general problem with me because I also do it with new people in real life for a couple of weeks after we meet even though it embarasses me greatly)
5- I made 1 twitter account that lasted a couple of months in the first half of this year, I used it very sparingly (mostly by accident because Twitter sends updates to your mail) and when I was banned I didn't make another.
Many years ago, I saw a tabloid headline titled "Kardashian Family RIPPED APART!" I thus concluded they had all been killed by wild bears, and put them out of my mind forevermore.
I am not on Facebook/twitter and don't watch any TV though I will stream shows if I hear theya re excellent. I also don't consume general purpose news media, mostly specific topics, and nothign that touches on general culture. I also have young kids, don't talk to teens much, and when I do talk about academic things.
IDK I have some vague sense of who they are (reality TV/singer people). But that is about it and I couldn't possibly be happier about it. I do have a pretty robust social life, but this just isn't the sort of thing that comes up.
Here's a link to the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer", that has been updated through the years up until the financial statements of 2020 to 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer. The financial statements themselves are linked at the end of the article, here's the one from 2020/2021: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2020-2021_Audit_Report.pdf. For example, you can see page 3 that the expenses in "Salaries and wages" went from 66 millions of dollars in 2020 to 67 millions of dollars in 2021, or that the "Travel and conferences" expenses went from 2 millions of dollars to 29 thousands dollars in the same period.
[[WP:CANCER]] is definitely the classical article about the grows of WMF funding.
This is especially annoying with regard to the banners asking users to donate which typically appear in December. In the early days (2005 or whatever), donating to Wikipedia may have been worth it from an EA perspective. These days, any donations will mostly increase the administrative overhead, I guess.
Oh yes. I think the original was from a "Gathering for Gardner" conference. (Well that might not be the original, but it's the first one I heard about.)
The reaction seems adequate to me. Scott may be able to appreciate writing skill regardless of the content, but in this case the skill is mostly wasted.
Re #8, I think the overall increasing trend in Congress age is explainable by increases in healthy life expectancy (as opposed to life expectancy in general, which has only increased a little). A typical 75yo now can be physically active and enjoy a thriving career and social life, whereas a typical 75yo a century ago might have been mostly blind or deaf, toothless, and physically infirm.
The more interesting bit is why this otherwise smooth trend underwent a massive drop in the late 20th century (if you connect the earlier data to today's you get a pretty smooth curve).
I could spin a just-so story about how the late 20th century rejected the traditions of respecting the age and accumulated wisdom of your elders and started idealising the energy and passion of youth instead - but I think that hasn't gone away and we still idealise youth, so it wouldn't explain why the graph started shooting back up again.
I also think the drop is too early to be related to the demographic shifts of WW2 and the baby boom.
I had initially assumed this was all the effect of the Baby Boom working it’s way through the system - that when they just barely reached the age of being able to be elected, there would be a drop in age, and then ages would rise as they age. But it actually seems to be driven by the generation just before the baby boom. (The oldest boomers just turned 70 in the Clinton-Trump election year.)
I’ve seen a similar effect in academics. (Here’s a deeper dive on this: http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2011/12/baby-boom-philosophy-bust.html) There was a major expansion in universities to accommodate the baby boom, so people a generation older had a great job market. But once the baby boom had graduated, universities didn’t have to expand, and had just hired a bunch of young faculty, so the baby boom graduated into the worst job market and never really entered the field. As a result, famous philosophers are disproportionately the generation before the baby boom rather than baby boom.
It’s a bit more of a stretch, but we could get the same effect in politics if we assume a candidate is ideally a few years older than the voters they represent - 20-something’s will vote for a 30-something to represent them, and then once they have their people they support, will continue supporting them over someone of their own generation. (Though this model obviously has lots of exceptions - see the Zoomers who support Sanders over Buttigieg.)
I think you would want to look at cross-country comparisons before drawing any strong conclusions about the explanation. Many countries had a baby boom, but not all these countries have such old politicians as the US does.
Re #29: you (Scott) are a nuanced and empathetic thinker who usually reasons along the lines of "I can see good points on both sides and understand where they're each coming from, but on balance and after extensive research I come down on side X." But many people are more polarised: they think their side is right right right and the other side is evil evil evil.
So, in their minds, any concessions along the lines of "You make a valid point, but here's why I think X" are necessarily insincere and deceitful; whereas, from you, it could be a perfectly sincere and accurate reflection of your thought processes in arriving at conclusion X.
"I can see good points" is not what permission structure is doing. Permission structure is falsely claiming to agree with the person before disagreeing with them. It's pure gaslighting, on the premise that your opposition is stupid and actually just want friends.
Better to phrase the thing as a question, if you think your argument will be persuasive. Instead of "I agree you were right before, but this thing changes it". you can just ask "does this thing change it?" You can have an opinion-friendly dialogue without lying to their face first.
How is it gaslighting? Is it something like in 2021 saying "you're an idiot if you don't get the vaccine" and then in 2022 turning around and saying "it made sense in 2021 to be unsure about the vaccine, but now that we have data you should take it"?
"It was understandable to be wary before, but now..." The speaker never thought it was understandable to be wary. They don't believe the situation has changed at all.
"I was really suspicious about vaccines too, but after..." Again, they were never suspicious about vaccines.
"It was unclear before but... ...insights that we just didn't have before." They never questioned the clarity, and now they're using 'we' to insinuate they're expressing my opinion. which they never held.
"Many people experimented... and now that we have the data we can..." Implying that everyone who took that route was doing it as a science experiment, and again that they're telling me my opinion.
"But I've dug into the research and found COVID vaccines are different because..." I believe neither that they have dug into the research, nor that they think COVID vaccines are the least bit different.
"It's great that you're focused on natural supplements..." Is it. Is that what they've been recommending people on their end.
On a final note, they state this was popularized by the Obama Administration. The Obama Administration pissed off the Republican Party so much that they refused to do their Constitutionally obligated duties for a full year, and then elected Donald Trump President. This approach Does Not Work.
Lying is not the same thing as gaslighting. None of those examples involve trying to get the victim to doubt the integrity or validity of their own mind- on the contrary it's explicitly validating that their judgements are valuable. That doesn't make it a good thing but using a specific term like "gaslighting" is at worst actively dishonest and at best recklessly degrading the meaning of words.
I think the battle for the use of the term "gaslighting" to mean anything other than "lying about the past" has been lost.
And that's probably okay, because it was a silly word to begin with, that describes a phenomenon which almost never actually occurs outside that one play.
I agree with you that intentional techniques of persuasion aren't in themselves gaslighting or lying. Depending on how they're used, they may come across as skillful arguing or they may feel repugnant and heavy-handed.
None of us needs to be a victim of that -- we can walk away, we can inquire further into the person's own experience and invite them to disclose more about how they came to their views, we can point out their techniques ("I see what you did there"). It can be friendly sparring or it can be a very short conversation.
Gaslighting seems to have gone from "willfully f*ing with a person's reality over time to make them think they're insane" to "using technique in conversation to try to influence their perspective."
I can imagine situations of very unequal power where a person being subject to potentially-harm-inducing conversational techniques may be victimized (patients with doctors, employees with bosses, teachers with young students, etc). But in a conversation between more or less consenting conversationalists, a person can use specific skills in an entirely good faith way or in a not good faith way, and assessing whether this person is engaging with me in a good faith way in this conversation is always an aspect of talking about more substantial issues than the weather.
In the example sentences above, I can imagine a person saying those in all sincerity and I can imagine a person saying those as empty technique phrases, like how a person can say "No disrespect but..." and then say something disrespectful. I trust pretty well my capacity to tell the difference, and in any case don't feel harmed by anyone's insincerity. It just clarifies whether and how long I'll stay in the conversation. I'm also nudge-y enough that I would ask "do you really feel that way when you stop to think about it or are you just saying that as a rhetorical device?" All of this becomes part of getting a sense of whether the person you're talking to is genuine enough with you that you want to keep talking to them.
I do wonder how much the use of conversational technique feels like a problem now because it's connected to a larger cultural dynamic in which conversations people once had without too much fear now feel like obstacle courses. And maybe as a defense in the face of this, we seem to be communicating with more layers of irony and insincerity as a way to have plausible deniability around saying something "wrong." Or I don't know if all the irony is just a product of more online communication or the larger milieu of "if everything has to matter, then nothing matters." At any rate, that larger dynamic seems to make having real conversations harder.
In ye olden days (I have the impression), the art of social conversation was as structured as a ballroom dance. It was based on a great deal of technique, had to proceed according to certain narrow rules and follow somewhat predictable steps towards greater intimacy or forthrightness. I think it was understood that the form helped create a feeling of safety within which more honest self-disclosure could happen over time. I think this is still the case in some cultures other than the one I live in.
I'm gonna try this out but I think for me the idea that intentional conversational technique is a lie or manipulation is like calling haiku a lie or manipulation. There is a technique, it can be used badly or well, and within it genuine, honest and even gorgeous conversation can happen. "I get why you would feel that way" could be real empathy or total bullsh*t or something in the vast gray area between.
Earnest people don't seek out structures to use. And earnestness doesn't really matter, because it looks the same from the outside; you can check the last Open Thread, where a presumably earnest person talks about curing their chronic pain with the simple trick of writing down the symptoms and destroying the paper, and gets a scathing reaction from a commenter who views it as belittlement. For a technique all about winning friends and influencing people, this kind of result is fatal.
It’s ironic that honest people need to be taught to manipulate so they don’t come across as manipulative. It’s true though: you have to communicate the way your audience understands or they’ll delude themselves into thinking they understand you. Usually in a negative light.
This only applies to strangers and idiots. That’s the usual case by far but the distinction feels important to me because I can’t mask for literally everyone and remain mentally sound.
On the contrary, I would say that Obama was a fairly politically successful President, even if not everything he did was a success. Smart people should look to him for tips rather than dismissing him out of hand. One party getting three presidential terms in a row is unusual.
It's not that they lost the three-term election, it's that they lost it to Donald Trump, who directly ran on a campaign of "Send Hillary Clinton To Prison". Their advice about winning people over to your side led to a victory by what will possibly be the most infamous President in US history, and certainly the most antagonistic in a long while.
I think it’s pretty unlikely that Trump, who failed to get impeached twice, will beat out Nixon, who was successfully forced to resign for most infamous.
Obama's own strategy was successful enough for him to be elected twice. Hillary, a different politician, lost. Donald Trump then got beaten... by Obama's VP. If the Dems had gone with Biden rather than assuming it was Hillary's turn, they could have won that narrow election.
To look at it from another angle: You say "I was really suspicious about vaccines before, but after X..." If someone were to convince you that X was, in fact, wrong, or at least irrelevant. would you say "well, then I guess I should be suspicious of vaccines again"?
Of course you wouldn't. Not only have you lied, but you've lied in a way which kept the other guy from addressing your true beliefs. He proved you wrong, and you didn't change things one bit.
(I also think Scott's post about Ivermectin follows this pattern. Scott said he might be 85%-90% right. He then had to concede that several of the points he had made weren't correct. If those had anything to do with Scott's beliefs about ivermectin, and weren't just arguments made to convince but which he didn't actually care about, he should have said something like "well, I'm reducing this to a 75%-80% chance".)
...huh, looks like you're right. I thought the Senate was obligated to advise on Presidential appointments, but reviewing it, looks like the President is obligated to act with the Senate's advice without them being obligated to offer any.
Why is falsely claiming to agree bad ? Consider how you might refuse food politely "Oh it sounds tasty, but it has a lot of sugar and I'm really trying to get in shape those days". You are already going to refuse the food, so better make it polite.
The vast majority of conversations (especially online) never go anywhere, Permission Structure is a good way to say "Lets Agree To Disagree" in a plausaibly-deniable way. The only problem is that if used too much then it will turn out to be as trite and ineffective as that it's meant to replace.
It's bad because once you've proven you'll lie about your position on a topic as a whole, there's no reason to think you'll be honest with any aspect of it.
The polite way to refuse food is "Nothing for me, thank you," and if they press the subject then give them a real reason. Falsely claiming it sounds tasty but you're trying to get in shape invites attempts on their end to make the thing healthier, which will force new lies, and causes insult when they finally see you in your living room eating Cheetos on the couch. It's the delayed version of telling them they're bad at cooking, with the added insult that you don't think they're smart enough to notice the insult.
Not gaslighting, more allowing them a line of retreat/to save face. It is a small deception, but one made in good faith.
(also gaslighting means to cause a person to question their own sanity. not merely manipulate them through deception, so it's not even correct on the level you want it to be)
I'm seeing 5 through 8 here. The second and third example sentences are the inverse of 2; they're fabricating nonexistent past events to get you to question your current position. I have no doubt they'll implement 1 when it comes to it. The goal of gaining power by distorting reality is the same. I stand by my claim.
> Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which the abuser attempts to sow self-doubt and confusion in their victim’s mind. Typically, gaslighters are seeking to gain power and control over the other person, by distorting reality and forcing them to question their own judgment and intuition.
It's not happening here. Rather, it's allowing their previous position ceremonial credibility (a social rather than epistemological concern) so that their tribal defense mechanisms aren't triggered, and they can make an ideological retreat
Similar to how in conversation when you disagree rather than saying "I hate your preferred option X, this other option Y is better", you might say "Hmm X is one possibility, but have you considered Y for reasons Z"
In my experience, it has less to do with empathy but more with lack of education. The less people know in general, i.e. uneducated people, the more obstinately certain they are of what they think they do know, and the more sceptical and dismissive they are of anything else. I guess it is the same as money - The less you have, the more closely you guard what little is yours!
Yes this seems to make sense but it in fact is not observed in the wild. Educated people are no less obstinate, and perhaps more so, than an uneducated person: that is, someone who knows they don’t know.
I'd concede it does mostly depend on character, regardless of education or acquired knowledge. But notice I did include a get out clause: "what they think they do know". So that doesn't include things they know they don't know. :-)
The real proof would be if there was a counter-situation that would rely on the "agreement" that the one side is expressing that may be false.
For instance, if a pro-vaccine person said something like "I agree that the vaccine in early 2021 was unknown and therefore it may make sense to hold off, we now have data in 2022 that it's perfectly safe so you should take it now." When a new vaccine comes out, are they still broadly supportive immediately and attacking people who want to wait before taking it? False agreement, totally a lie. If they change their mind, or at least dampen their enthusiasm for future vaccines when they first come out, then it seems like genuine agreement.
In order to find common ground, I do try to identify areas where I agree with a person. It may also have the effect of making them more open to my ideas, which I guess is partly my purpose, but it's not false agreement but real agreement, so I think it's fair.
The pattern of the argument can be sincere or not--you can't tell from the outside. For example, consider the person who a year ago told you it wasn't important for random gay men to worry about getting vaccinated against smallpox, but who now says "In light of the current situation, I urge sexually active gay men to get vaccinated against smallpox." This could be entirely sincere--a year ago, monkeypox wasn't circulating,but now it is, so....
From my reading of it, it is being dishonest about your earlier Bayesian evidence in order to appeal to your opponent, then claim that you did a big update based on some recent new evidence.
When using this technique against a flat earth believer
* in 240 BCE, you would talk about the recent discoveries of Eratosthenes
* in 1520, you would talk about Magellan
* in 1957, you would talk about Sputnik
This may work on short term on Simulacrum level 2 (saying stuff to make others do or believe something) but completely fails at describing the world as it is (level 1). It is actively lowering the sanity waterline. No amount of success in converting flat-earthers is going to justify the epistemic damage done by claiming that such beliefs were reasonable before Sputnik.
What Scott did when he wrote an article trying to specifically convince conservatives not to vote for Trump was different. Finding arguments likely to appeal to your opponents value system is fine, especially if you are upfront about not being in their ingroup.
This is completely different.
Or take the view of the victim of this technique. Your opponent is convinced that, say, $MINORITY commonly exhibits $PROPERTY. I for one would very much like them to say so straight instead of claiming the were convinced by $OBSERVATION that ${MINORITY_MEMBER} exhibits $PROPERTY.
In Brazil, there is a distinction between cannibalism and anthropophagy. The former refers to humans eating human meat because they like the taste of it, while the latter refers to a practice among some indigenous tribes of eating the flesh of your enemies in order to gain their features (eg. eating the heart of a brave warrior in order to gain his courage). The video refers to Bolsonaro being offered meat in the context of anthropophagy.
So he wasn't just being like "I wanna see what human meat tastes like", but rather saying that he would eat the flesh of his enemies in order to steal their power. I would say that is pretty on-brand for a mussolinoid like him.
> In Brazil, there is a distinction between cannibalism and anthropophagy. The former refers to humans eating human meat because they like the taste of it, while the latter refers to a practice among some indigenous tribes of eating the flesh of your enemies in order to gain their features (eg. eating the heart of a brave warrior in order to gain his courage).
This seems backwards, didn't "cannibalism" originally refer to the latter...?
Seeing that Hollow Dragon Mask (#36) put me in mind of this optical illusion I discovered earlier this year, the Ames Window. It's really quite startling in a way that I don't find normal concave-face videos are: https://youtu.be/0KrpZMNEDOY
#9: Alright, maybe i haven't watched enough of it, but out of the few I viewed back in the days, presenting Jon Stewart as "No more treating politics like a staged wrestling match" is only right in the sense that a wrestling match includes an opponent, while stewart's concept was simply to have one wrestler on stage shit-talking his would-be opponent. It didn't "solve" the news, it went from 8-graders debates toward 8-graders rants.
Which we should be grateful for, tho, because now we have Tucker giving us 11-grader rants.
#22 is a shame, because the first link supposed to lead to the description of the sadistic conclusion only get me to the profile page of it's creator and not to it's paper.
Jon Stewart had different modes, and they had different levels of impact or arrogance. Irreverent humor about various political situations was probably his best work, and it could be funny without making an overtly political point. When his stuff veered into one-sided anti-Republican rants it wasn't funny (outside of his target audience I guess).
Over time he seemed to go towards the less funny and more political ("arrogant" as you said), and I think that's as much the reason he left the show as any.
While that's certainly part of it, I think there was more to it than that. He had a genuine perspective on how politicians and media personalities should act, so when he played clips making fun of those people it wasn't just random laughs, it was pointed political commentary (that could get a lot of laughs recognizing the absurdity).
His later Daily Show stuff was becoming more partisan and more obviously anti-Republican. His rants about Fox News were often on point, but exaggerated, especially compared to MSNBC or other left-oriented news programs that he didn't attack in the same way. Maybe it was him responding to his audience and it was no longer his choice? By that time, his audience was extremely left-aligned.
Pre-9/11 Jon Stewart on the Daily Show was hilarious. Post 9/11 and the ramp-up for the Iraq War he became much more serious and partisan. He jumped the shark entirely when he debated Tucker on CNN.
I'd like to point readers to the 1976 film "Network", which is exactly about this issue. It laments the slide of the talking heads into punditry and "anti-establishment" attitudes that lead to polarization and misinformation. Aside from being prescient, it's one of my favorite movies of all time.
If somebody said that universities would try to do what affirmative action 2.0 is obviously aimed at doing, it would have been considered a dumb conservative conspiracy theory. Now that this explicitly what is being attempted, anyone opposed to it will be called a dumb racist.
The college system must be destroyed. Oh, and Biden is spending half a trillion on college debt and doing practically nothing to stop more of this debt being accumulated in the first place.
I'm wondering if the internet is enough to render colleges obsolete, since one person can give a lecture and have it reach the entire language-speaking world. It kind of feels like it should happen, but then again, television may have had the same potential and did nothing of the sort, nor radio before it.
As Eliezer Y. and Bryan Caplan point out: Teaching/Learning is not the most important stuff colleges are doing. You want the diploma, sheepskin-effect. To prove to others you got what it takes (brains and diligence and whatever). Not the knowledge.
Unfortunately yes. It’d take a sea change in the culture to change this.
I’m a lawyer, and I’ve done plenty of hiring over the years. The role that which law/undergrad school applicants graduated from plays in the hiring process (both from my personal feelings and the more broad “official” policy) has changed over the last 20 years (everyone is generally less impressed by Ivy League degrees now, for instance, and if you’re hiring someone senior enough the law school doesn’t matter at all).
I can easily imagine starting to hire people who attended Bob’s Freaky Online Academy, if that’s where an untapped source of diligent and hard-working detail oriented aggressive lunatics studied. But they don’t, so that’s that - pointing out to me that you could THEORETICALLY learn everything you need online is pointless if the “best” people aren’t going anywhere near it.
It isn’t about contacts or networking. Those were never as important as people think. Pedigree is less important - and increasingly less important - than it used to be, and isn’t important at all once the attorney is senior enough. It’s just “where do the people who will get the job done go?” And that isn’t online.
Lectures are the least important part of what college does, and most college courses could have their lecture component replaced by video recordings (and, during COVID, did).
The important part, educationally, is the interactive teaching component, where the student tries to apply the knowledge from the lecture (by solving problems, or writing an essay, or analysing a text, or recalling facts, or whatever is sensible for the particular course) and then someone who already has that knowledge (a TA, usually, not the lecturer), checks whether they got it right and assists them to pick up the elements they missed.
If you watch CrashCourse on YouTube, you can watch the entire content of a high school AP course in about 50 10-15 minute episodes, and those episodes contain jokes, setup, advertising, etc - about 10 minutes of content each. That's 500 minutes, or the equivalent of ten 50-minute lectures; a real course would be 5 "hours" a week for a year, which works out as more like 150 50-minute classes.
This is because, if this is entirely new content to you, it's impossible to absorb 100% of a course from just watching the video once, so you will need to rewatch parts several times, work through the examples, and then if you get stuck, you will need someone to show you the content in other ways until you reach a full understanding of it. That is, you need an AP teacher and an AP class, not just the YouTube video.
Obviously, AP isn't college, but it's pretty close to 1000-level college classes, and the same principles apply - indeed, the reason that there isn't something like CrashCourse for the first couple of years of college is mostly that the variation in college syllabi is far greater than AP.
There is also the fact that getting a college degree does two things: first, it shows that you won a competition (admission to a selective college) that against other top academic students of your generation, second it shows that you were capable of working hard (at college) when there are significant social pressures to do otherwise, and when you are not been continuously monitored by a supervisor.
And even before radio, people thought books would have this effect. But the big thing you need is not *access* to the information, so much as a *structure* that makes you read/listen and gives you a peer group to discuss it with before and after class. Education is really enculturation.
People have been trying to do this seriously for ~10-20 years, including people who you'd think would know everything necessary, like MIT and ASU, and so far it hasn't really worked:
There are a million theories on why previous efforts have done poorly, which range from "this just can't be done at all for fundamental reason X" to "it can be done, but not by these people/this approach, because of special reason Y' to "it can and will be done, these are just normal growing pains." (There are also the usual paranoids, who say "it *could* be done except for the interference of Big Education/Big Goverment/the NEA/International Jewry/wreckers and saboteurs.")
Having observed this field pretty closely for a long time, my conclusion is...I don't know. I'm skeptical of most of the simple theories of why it has not done well so far, if for no other reason then that the failures are so broad and involve so many smart and committed people, and no lack of money. If there were a simple reason, someone would have found a way around it and be offering a shining success. (I mean a broad success, by the way, equivalent to what you're supposed to get from a BA or BS; there have been successes in a narrow "trade school" kind of education, DeVry, Embry-Riddle, "coding camps," et cetera, for decades.)
I'm not sure I believe there is a fundamental reason it can't be done online, because I'm willing to acknowledge most existing efforts have more or less spent the bulk of their money and effort just trying to pour old wine (classroom lectures) into new bottles (an online platform) -- and at no point asked themselves how online education might be fundamentally different from in-person, and require a significantly different approach. So a priori it seems not impossible we are awaiting the Orville and Wilbur Wright that uncover the key difference(s) between in-person and online and the key elements of the latter that should differ, and once they show the way we'll all say "of course! so obvious!" and we'll all do it the right way.
But on the other hand, there's little question people just *do* learn better one-on-one, person to person, and anyone who's taught understands that. We all know almost all[1] students will learn about 100x more in a single one-on-one office hour interaction than from an hour of lecture in a hall seating 400, or even an hour (sincerely) reading the textbook at home.
Edit: I will add that this is one of the areas where many on the right have demonstrated a certain degree of unseriousnous: during the COVID shutdown of public schools they said "Ha! This will demonstrate how useless the union teacher is, everyone will do fabulously online and no one will want to return to those dens of perversion, the public schools." And then when student performance (even among their own kids) plummeted, and parents were tearing their hair out, they immediately pivoted to "Ha! This demonstrates how screwed-up were the decisions of the the blue state politicians in thrall to the teachers' unions, who deprived students far and wide of the precious in-classroom time any idiot knows kids need to learn..." Er...what? Exhibit #666 in Why Both Ends Of The Ideological Spectrum Are Idiots.
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[1] There are of course exceptions, usually very bright students, who always pop up to annoy in discussions like this. ("Well *I* learned calculus at age 12 from studying this cool textbook, so I don't see why anyone else can't.") I'm not sure whether they naively believe everyone is like them or they just want to show off how smart they are.
What about the UK's Open University, which seems to have done it successfully, but at a massively higher cost than what the MOOC approach implies (largely by doing one-on-one across the internet)?
It's probably the distance-learning university with the greatest depth and breadth of knowledge about distance learning - in that it's been doing it since the 1960s, but also the one most inclined to bring the pre-internet style to the internet rather than reinventing everything.
I'm honestly not familiar with UK efforts, having spent my focus on the US education effort, on account of I've been part of it so it has immediate personal interest. I also know a fair amount about this subject, so consistent with Rule #33 Of Internet Argument I'm much less willing to opine confidently on areas of it that I don't know well. (That is, human nature being what it is, I'm sure I'd be much more willing to speculate on the Open U, after reading a Wikipedia article or two on it, if I didn't know as much about US efforts, which have caused me to develop a deep appreciation for how subtle and difficult the subject is.)
If you want my WAG about the problem of online, it's that a certain amount of the best education actually has to happen by force, roughly speaking. That is, the student needs to do stuff that *he himself* doesn't think are necessary or useful or wise. Kind of like the way curing addiction, losing weight, or addressing certain medical conditions requires doing stuff the client/patient himself doesn't think are the right approach -- possibly because he's rationalizing an avoidance of pain, or possibly because he's just ignorant.
When you put people in a classroom, it's much easier to compel them to do stuff against their judgment. For one thing, they're kind of trapped, for another it's harder for them to hide or bullshit their way out of it, and finally (and perhaps most importantly), there's a person (the instructor) right in front of them who holds big power (grading), and people are much less likely to defy a person with power in person, than if the connection is more distant. (Presumably this is why security guards who aren't even armed can do some good.)
It would not surprise me that any online effort which puts a teacher face-to-face with a student all the time did better than one that did not.
It always struck me as odd when the whole MOOCs thing seemed to have a ton of money in it that no-one sent loads of consultants off to find out what the OU was doing - and then I realised that OU is about half the (tuition) price of a regular in-person university and they were aiming for more like a tenth.
No especially great surprise that the MOOCs weren't interested in being told that their entire business model was utterly impossible.
Whether it was or not is a different question, but that's what OU would have told them.
It's unusual for any entrepreneur to start off researching what other people who tried to do the same thing, and failed, might have done wrong, or what other people who are doing something similar, and succeeding, might be doing right. It's a pretty consevative and cautious thing to do -- and entrepreneurs by their nature are optimistic often to the point of delusion and evangelical to the point of zealotry.
That isn't necessarily pejorative: had Elon Musk researched electric cars and taken all the failures to heart, he'd have done something else. Generally, business that are cautious and investigate carefully before plunking down big piles of cash -- which is all successful big business, and government -- are almost never innovative, because genuine innovation looks like a dumb idea according to the conventional wisdom at the time.
I work at the OU, and it's worth highlighting that it isn't just "online" (at least pre-pandemic -- it has not moved swiftly back to face-to-face aspects just yet). For example, there were face-to-face tutorials, face-to-face exams, and some subject areas still provide printed course materials.
This probably plays a part in the OU not being as cheap as you might expect it to be, but the other thing about cost is this: behind the OU is a fully-fledged university, that carries out a significant amount of research. Like every other university, a certain amount of teaching income subsidises the research aspect (as well as the administration, of course). Some may regard this "subsidy" of research as controversial, but ultimately this is about reputation: a degree is perceived to be more valuable if it comes from a well-respected university.
That's really interesting, about the finances. In first-rank American universities, it's quite the opposite, research overhead (from government grants) massively subsidizes teaching costs, to the point that some universities have toyed with the idea of just doing away with tuition entirely, since it represents a pretty small fraction of their budget (10-20% is not uncommon) and it would get them massive PR points.
This is actually a major reason universities are exquisitely sensitive to what the Federal Government wants: there is a massive money pipeline running from the Feds via granting agencies to R-1 universities. Most people aren't aware that universities typically skim off 50% or so from each and every research grant directly into the universities coffers as unrestricted cash. (Exempli gratia, if a molecular biologist writes a $1.2 million grant application to the NIH and it's funded, the first thing that happens is $600,000 of that goes to his university as "research overhead" and the university spends that however it likes -- it need have no relationship at all to the research funded by the grant. The PI himself gets to spend the remaining $600k on hiring post-docs, supporting graduate students, and capital equipment.)
I am not remotely convinced it "doesn't work". Just more that people don't accept it as a credential.
Stick people in courses, give them a few quizes and tests, and a book to study, and I bet you get 90% of the effect of a colelge course. Give them some classmates ot have a weekly zoom meeting with and an hour of TA time a week and I bet you get to 95%. At least for the people with a brain (which is the only people you shoudl care about anyway).
Aboslutely the unuversity culture and living and breathing a topic is useful and necessary if you are tyring to devleop the next Einstein. But if you just want a person who knows has the knowledge/skills of your typical liebral arts BA, you could easily do it in an online course. Fuck you could do better, in less time with less money.
The key is to have actual expectations/assemeents/consequences so people apply themselves.
Well, feel free to show us how it's done and make fools of all those who've tried before. There are still VC firms willing to bet on online education. Sharpen up your elevator pitch, and when we see you on the cover of Forbes in 5 years' time we'll know you were absolutely right.
Ummm in a big zoom metting with videos and coursework jsut like it is done at a college. MOOCs don't fail because the students don't learn. They fail because people don't accept the credential. They are plenty effective at teaching people, especially on a per cost basis.
In a typ[ical undergrade course you have 30% of people (minimum) who shouldn't even be there. Screw those people they shouldn't be in college anyway. You got maybe 10% of the class that is really exceptional and benefits from direct access ot the faculty and the academic enviornment.
And you got a giant swath of people who are fundemtnally jsut there for a piec eof paper so they can in theory have some skills and make some money. All those people would be better and more efficiently served by big online courses, with some amount of structure and assignments/expectations etc. But they certinaly don't learn *nothing* which is what was claimed upthread.
I mean what the fuck do you think happens here? Do you learn thigns here? If not why do you come here? This isn't a college course...yet leanring happens.
I can tell you at a company when we need to roll out a new program, what we don't do is set up a mini-university. You just teach people shit and hold them accoutnable if they fail. It is not that hard or mystical.
Thanks for your input, Martin. I felt that you were the best "voice of reason" contributor to the discussion about online education.
Ultimately, the success or failure of any educational effort depends on the individual. Someone who is sufficiently motivated and intelligent can learn from a number of potential education sources: books, videos, lectures, in-person interaction, etc. But if a person isn't committed to learning, then none of these will work. A Nobel prize-winning professor at Harvard can't educate the unwilling.
If someone doesn't want to learn, you can't make them. If they are sufficiently bright, curious and motivated, you can't stop them.
There's no point in attempting to convince me. I wouldn't fund a n00b in this space even if I had the cash, which I do not. If you're interested in why I'm skeptical of any particular simple conception of the problem (such as what you've outlined above) I can tell you that, but I don't get the impression that's what you're after here. Please let me know if I'm mistaken. It's a subject that I find deeply interesting, and on which I have a fair amount of direct experience, so a genuine attempt to grok the issues is actually interesting to me.
In my experience, in in-person universities, half the students read/watch lectures online rather than going to them live, and recitations are fairly redundant with reading the solved exercises a week later. So the physical teaching part of a university doesn’t seem to be *that* important.
However, I think being in a university and having a worksheet you need to submit next week, every week for a bunch of weeks, and having co-students doing the same thing, is a very good motivator to make sure you fill all the holes in your knowledge until next week, whether you do that via recitations, books, office hours, friends, Google or math stackexchange
The product of colleges is certification, not education. There's only a few fields where what you're saying can work, such as hyper-vocational professions like computer programming/software development where demonstrable skills can get you a job in the absence of certification.
No, it isn't going to. Knowledge isn't a video, or a book, or a recording, or a program. Knowledge is a living structure inside your brain, a brain pattern. Videos and Books are simply dead representations of knowledge, they miss a ton of context, they miss ordering and importance information, etc... etc..., they are incomplete specifications of how should your brain re-wire. A teacher (not necessarily human) is always necessary. Knowledge is and has always been a brain-to-brain conversation, the myriad representations for it is just a workaround for the fact that brains don't live forever.
The particular case of the concrete, modern, Internet is even more egregious than an abstract "Media Store" : 0 curation and a massive stream of garbage and ephermal "content" (good heavens I so fucking hate this word). Censorship, paywalls, spying, ads, dead links, pussy-removal and pussy-modification of words, copyright trolls. SciHub is persecuted because a bunch of leeches decided that spreading academic papers, the highest goal of those *writing* them, is hurting their feelies\pockets. A youtube essayist is persecuted because they played a 3 second fragment of a 40 years old piece of music in the background. Centralized databases, centralized institutions, opaque organizations, proprietary protocols. Highly selective criteria of what gets publishing and traction, 0 archival or control over data.
The inventions that *actually* would radically change education\knowledge production in my view are, in increasing order of effect but decreasing probability of it happening in my lifetime,
1- Constructed Reality, any technique or invention that can manipulate your sensorium independent of your surrondings. (I use this terms partly to encompass VR and AR as well as a cluster of ideas and ideologies around them in one word, and partly because VR and AR has been corporate-captured and came to mean fundamentally ugly and hallow things.)
2- Chemical-Physiological manipulation over the human body. Many of educational problems simply boil down to hormonal\emotional\motivational problems. Easy (but Massive) wins include : (1) generating greater interest to counter decreased motivations, and generating reward bigger than would have been generated naturally for achievement (2) obviating the need for sleep.
3- Genetic Engineering, whether on your parents' gametes, your embryo form or on-the-go on your breathing body.
4- Brain Rewiring : Techniques can be as crude as electrical shocks or magnetic field generators from devices in your hair, as complex as nano bots.
5- Brain-To-Brain communication and\or Brain-Computer interfaces
I mean this is silly. I agree with you it isn't going to happen, but you absolutely can get plenty of knowledge out of books/videos etc.
Fuck when I was IN college I was immediately made a TA, and was generally treated as on par with the faculty and even asked to guest lecture in a couple classes. Where did I learn things? From books and from the James Burke videos and the like. Plenty of extremely knlwoedgable people both today, and historically, have been autodidacts.
I mean what the fuck is "they are incomplete specifications of how should your brain re-wire. A teacher (not necessarily human) is always necessary." even trying to say? A brain WROTE the book/MADE the video. It just sounds like contential claptraps dressed up to try and pretend there is some mystical need for teachers in-person.
The fact that you were immediately made a TA suggests that you're not the person whose experience can be generalized. The same is true for those of us that are professors. Some people do manage to learn with just a book, or just a video, or just a lecture, or just a website, or whatever. But for most people, they need the structure of weekly assignments and someone to disapprove of them if they fail to do the weekly work, and even at prestigious institutions that do a lot of pre-selection of their students, there's always a fraction of them that still can't get themselves to do the required learning even when it's all there.
Yeah but what is the real delta? The claim was very strong, no real “knowledge” is gained without teachers. In my experience teachers are probably an obstacle to knowledge 45% of the time. Some of the rest of the time a slight benefit, and then occasionally a huge benefit.
But mostly you are making an argument that teachers keep you on task. Sure but so can incentive structures. Note too that you aren’t really comparing apples to apples.
I would argue watching say 50 hours of the best astronomy videos online is probably worth 80% of a college astronomy class. Maybe more. Also takes wildly less time and is infinitely less expensive.
Yeah the college student will learn more, but the college student has 3 times the class hours, additional work, possibly discussions groups, and some tiny amount of time with the prof.
You create some discussion groups and quizzes tests, and some real costs of failure, and you will get that at a fraction of the cost.
And yeah you will lose the mediocre students, but they aren’t getting anything out of college anyway, and are only there because they need a credential.
I think there was an aweful shortage of TAs at your university in order to make you a TA immediately after graduation. And I don't think that this is counter to my point, after all, I never actually said that Colleges, or K-12 education for that matter, does Knowledge and Education right. (There is a whole List of things similar to the one I have about the Internet in the 2nd paragraph of the other comment). In my University at least, the TAs and the Professors' ability to teach (and general empathy) was so hilariously bad that it seemed as if the University was *Anti-Optimizing* for good teachers, that Random Chance would have gotten them a better teaching staff.
>Plenty of extremely knlwoedgable people both today, and historically, have been autodidacts
Newton and Steve Jobs both grew up without a father, but research generally shows that growing up without a father affects you adversely.
>what the fuck is "they are incomplete specifications of how should your brain re-wire. A teacher (not necessarily human) is always necessary." even trying to say
An Incomplete Specification is a recipe that isn't stating all the necessary steps to make the cake. Brain Wiring is how knowledge works, every single skill or fact or way of speech or thought you have ever learned is a result of your brain rewiring in new configurations. What I'm saying is : Brain Wiring (== knowledge) is often so complex that it can't be transmitted or represented faithfully in linear sequences of words or pictures, there is always something that gets left out. Two links I can recommend are
2- https://commoncog.com/ (heavily paywalled, I'm sorry but it has free sections that are genuinely good)
The first 1 details how the author tried to build "Knowledge Extraction" software that tries to generate insights from academic papers, it failed because, among many other things, papers just sucks, the vast majority of insights an academic paper generates is by the conversations\conference presentations\emails that its *authors* have with others, in a back-and-forth interactive game. The second is a whole blog devoted to the concept of "Tacit Knowledge", knowledge that can't be transmitted to the brain by mere dead words or dead photos.
>mystical need for teachers in-person.
It isn't mystical at all, not by a long shot. If you're a programmer, consider the sheer amount of information that is present in a program open in a source-level debugger, versus just an execution trace of 1 particular execution of it ("program started, added x to y, outputted z on the commandline"). If you're a non-programmer, consider the difference between playing a game and watching a streamer playing a game.
The point I'm trying to make is that each person is a vast repository of behaviours and responses (like a program), books and videos are fundamentally dead mediums that sample a single path through that forest of behaviour, every other path is permanently lost and unreachable. In-Person Interaction is like having the whole forest in front of you. (and there is nothing "In-Person" about my view of In-Person, Constructed Reality will utterly change what it means to meet and interact, far beyond what this universe allows. AGI will change what the fuck even is a 'Person'.)
You seem to clock me as some kind of stuck-up-the-glass traditionalist that thinks this new thing The Internet is never going to replace the Old Way. This is silly because (1) I'm critical of books, books are a 4000 years old tradition (2) I'm thoroughly critical and openly contemptuous of Colleges and K-12 (3) I advocated\wished for 6 broad solutions\technology families in the last paragraph that are extremly speculative and will change to the core what it means to be human.
>A brain WROTE the book/MADE the video
I don't understand why this supports you, the laws of physics made the particular hurricane or snowflake you see, yet they contain vastly more information than contained in any single hurricane or snowflake, they contain information about how to generate every single hurricane or snowflake. Your DNA made you, but it also contains information about how to generate tens of hundreds of billions other persons. That's exactly the point, a book or a video is an extremly narrow sample of the brain of the person that wrote it\lectured in it, just like a single snowflake is an extremly narrow sample of the laws of physics and a single person is an extremly narrow sample their own DNA.
I think you could find it useful to dive deep into the concepts of tacit vs explicit knowledge. It's a large field of research, showing how not everything we know can be made explicit via books/videos. Reading some Polanyi could be a good starting point.
To make a caricature example: you're never going to be able to learn how to serve at tennis as well as Nadal by reading a book he might write on how to serve at tennis. You'll make much more progress by having him teaching you in the field.
A book contains a lot more detail than a PowerPoint outline. Written text is a more compact technology for presenting ideas than talks, judged by my experience both writing and giving talks about the same ideas. And the book has other advantages:
You can read the best book on the subject ever written. At best you get to listen to a talk by the best professor in the subject at your university.
You can go over the parts of the book you already understand quickly, go over the hard parts multiple times.
You can read the book at whatever time you best learn. You have to attend the lecture when it is given.
What are the advantages of the lecture that balance those? There must be some, since lectures are still given, but I don't know what they are.
Sure, and I fully agree with you with respect to myself. But I (probably like you) was able to pass vector calculus without attending lecture at all. Why bother? It's all right there in the book, and if you work the problems you're all set.
But I recognize from the other side (teaching) that most people aren't like that. They really don't get it as well as when a live human being with a face and voice talks to them -- even if he's just reading out of the text.
There are loads of possible reasons for this, ranging from some increased nonverbal bandwidth of importance/relationship signaling (which perhaps many/most people are unable to extract efficiently from written text) to some kind of social habits that improve attention or effort (listeners not wanting to "disappoint" the speaker by spacing out or letting their brains run at idle). I can think of any number of theories, but I don't have any solid empirical backing for any of them.
After I finished my price theory text I tried teaching the class by telling the students to do the reading, come into class with any questions they had, and when all questions were answered the class would be over. They didn't like it and I eventually went back to lecturing.
Is it? I think going to college is still the smart decision. Setting aside the fact that everything they teach you in college can be learned online, getting a degree still increases your earnings so much that it pays itself off [1]. Getting a degree gets you better jobs.
I think it's up to employers to find ways to assess people's skills instead of just lazily saying "well, they have a degree so they're probably good enough to work for us."
what’s true today may not be tomorrow. If I were making the decision on college today, it would depend on how much debt was involved. Rich parents? Sure, why not? Have to finance the whole shebang? No thanks.
How does one not play the game? It will require taking a serious hit to career ambitions and material living standards, and it will result in even greater institutional capture by ideologues.
My current plan for my kids is to just teach them to take over my business. Maybe they will go to college if they can get an amazing deal somewhere, but probably not, and I have created a solid money engine, teaching them to run it seems smarter than telling them some nonsense like 'follow your dreams". Worst advice I ever got.
No, because its not stupid to. Even with too many people going to college, smart people almost universally go to college, and most people who don't go to college aren't smart. College acts as a signal that employers can use to aid hiring, and the cost of this process is entirely externalized from them so they have no direct reason to oppose this system. And apart from computer programmers, there aren't many jobs where you can easily find capable non-college graduates. You can't even really use IQ tests to make hiring decisions (which, while imperfect, are literally more predictive of job performance than almost anything else).
You can't use *any* aptitude test, or general screening condition (as opposed to one very narrowly tailored to the job), because if it ends up having "disparate impact" -- meaning minorities pass at any rate that doesn't correspond to their fraction in the population -- then the EEOC will be up your nose in a heartbeat, and you will be fighting the USG with infinite money in Federal Court, which is basically a short trip to insolvency. It makes no difference at all if you don't *intend* to discriminate, if you use a general aptitude test or condition that can't be strictly tied to the job responsibility, you're fucked because they'll argue your screening had the same result as intentional discrimination, and that's a Civil Rights Act violation right there. This may seem strange by the Supreme Court signed off on this logic long ago.
Id est, there is no legal way to hire people on the basis of one candidate being smarter than the other according to some measure you devise. You can hire people on the basis that this one knows Javascript and this one doesn't, or this one has a Class C license and the other doesn't, but God help you if you try to set up any system that boils down to "this one is smart and the other one isn't." I'm not entirely sure how discrimination on the basis of a college degree (which is the modern proxy for smart) is still tolerated legally, except for the fact that universities and the Federal Government have scratched each other's back since at least 1945.
Edit: which is to say I think you are right, even more perhaps than you say: employers will *never* abandon discrimination on the basis of the college degree until the legal climate changes radically or the university degree becomes genuinely useless as a proxy for intelligence (which is still a long way from happening). To be sure, companies may certainly hire certain occupations out of trade schools, e.g. trucking companies hire people from driving schools, and Google may hire people out of coding camps, for the same reason. But these will be the exceptions.
I would agree with your first paragraph entirely, but -- read the linked article a bit more slowly and you'll quickly realize that it represents zero evidence of anything. It's fact-free handwaving even by academia standards.
I feel like link #9 doesn't really do a good job of arguing for its claims. It claims that Jon Stewart paved the way for Tucker Carlson. But what I was thinking the whole time reading it was, OK, but what about the many conservative talk shows on Fox News that preceded Carlson? The piece occasionally mentions them, but it never contrasts Carlson against them. As such I'm left with no idea how Carlson differs from them, and why it might in fact have more in common with Stewart, leaving me unclear as to why I ought to consider Stewart, rather than these other shows, to be Carlson's most direct predecessor. If you want to argue for X, you have to rule out the obvious alternatives to X, and this piece doesn't do that at all.
I think it's fair to say that Tucker has many influences and that Jon Stewart is one of them. Tucker has certain stylistic things in common with Stewart that he doesn't have in common with (say) Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity.
But if you're not seeing the "point" of the article it probably means that you don't share the author's underlying world view. In the author's world view, all things right are evil and all things left are good. When evil things lead to evil things then this is normal just when good things lead to evil things this is a horrid dramatic irony worthy of comment.
"The New Atlantis is a journal founded by the social conservative advocacy group the Ethics and Public Policy Center. [...] Writing for National Review, editor Adam Keiper described The New Atlantis as being written from a "particularly American and conservative way of thinking about both the blessings and the burdens of modern science and technology." New Atlantis authors and bioethicists publishing in other journals have also similarly referred to The New Atlantis as being written from a social conservative stance which utilizes religion."
Yeah, that's what I expected. Whole thing read like a "take that Jon Stewart! You thought you were doing good in the world but you only succeeded in creating Tucker Carlson!"
Heavy on the haw haw haw, but light on drawing the connection from Jon to Tucker IMO. It's there, but tenuous - seems more like the Daily Show was just one step in an inevitable splintering of the media economy in the internet age which yielded Tucker and others like him. The "Jon Stewart did it" angle seems overly played up, mostly to own the libs.
I mean, there is a real irony there assuming they're correct, they just don't do anything to establish that the situation that they're claiming is ironic actually *holds*!
(Also, it would not be dramatic irony. "Dramatic irony" refers to irony due to characters in a work of fiction being unaware of something the reader knows, obviously not something that applies here.)
I remember back in high school seeing a bunch of fellow students whose only source of news was Jon Stewart and thinking that 1) the "comedy as news" was a big game changer, and 2) eventually Republicans would come up with an equivalent (and 3) that when they did, the Democrats would probably cry foul).
I don't know enough about Tucker Carlson to know if he's actually that "Republican equivalent", but I definitely think the Daily Show was a landmark for discourse in a way that "talk radio" wasn't - punditry was, of course, not a new thing, but punditry that called itself humor and aired on Comedy Central kind of was.
(If anything, I think the greatest Republican equivalent to the Daily Show might be the Babylon Bee)
I think the article is very interesting and makes some good points but agree it leaves out other, obvious influences on Tucker. For one, long before Jon Stewart was attacking the news, you had Rush Limbaugh attacking it all as LameStream media. Rush also covered the daily news stories, aired clips and made fun of them. I had a number of colleagues who unironically referred to Rush as "the news".
Also, do Tucker Carlson fans find him funny? I've watched him a number of times and best I can remember he's heavy into sarcasm but doesn't actually make jokes. Rush was much more of a comedian than Tucker.
That Tucker was the conservative cohost on Crossfire when Stewart appeared seems to be a large part of the "argument" here.
I'd like to point readers to the 1976 film "Network", which is exactly about this issue. It laments the slide of the talking heads into punditry and "anti-establishment" attitudes that lead to polarization and misinformation. Aside from being prescient, it's one of my favorite movies of all time.
This paper demonstrates some of the functional implications of the reticulum. The intramitochondrial space can function as an energy highway, transporting energy from the periphery to the center of the cell:
Someone else in that twitter thread points out that mitochondria can change their shape from little capsules to fused spiderweb network, depending on conditions.
There also seems to be some evidence that the mitochondria of standard model organisms are relatively unusual when compared with most eukaryotes — many of the model organisms have lost the ancestral bacterial FtsZ/MinCDE division system and replaced it with eukaryotic dynamin systems:
I don't know how well the comparative morphology of mitochondria has been studied across different eukaryotic lineages, but there is presumably some connection between morphology and the nature of the protein systems used for replication and remodelling.
RE: political bias in Wikipedia. The "what if" scenario of right-wing culture influencing wikipedia actually happened, though not in the main org. There is a famous example of Croatian wikipedia where couple of far-right writers were responsible for most of the articles about history making it almost unusable for historical research in that language.
Agreed, but that is in "minor" languages. I would not trust an article written in Arabic about Israel, also. But English (hopefully French, German, Spanish) need to be reliable. (Russian-part seems to be not too bad, there is a strong interest to keep it accurate. Strong interests to fake it, too. - Can't say anything about Mandarin, but probably similar situation.) - In German, I see sometimes stuff written with an agenda in mind. It is kinda marginal, the entry is still mostly just very informative - but it worries me. And it is wokey then, not right-wing.
I had an acquaintance in the WikiMedia Foundation tell me there is no feminist bias and also he was helping with a push to get more feminist editors. This was back when feminism had recently broken with atheism so it’s ancient history now.
Wikip quality in Mathematics depend on what you're trying to do and the level of math involved and the combined moods of 13 different God pantheons, but for formula\algorithm level exposition at least, Wikip is sometimes perfection. Look at this Extended Euclidean Algorithm article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Euclidean_algorithm), those pseudocode sections make me want to cry.
Politics & History : Steer very clear from wokism in English Wikip, and Islam in Arabic Wikip.
That straightorwardly follows from its policies. Wikipedia is supposed to reflect the consensus of "reliable sources", and since media and academia are dominated by wokies, it's their consensus that ends up being declared "neutral point of view".
I don't mean to imply that it's an exoneration, just a built-in limitation that's there by design. One of the core principles of Wikipedia is rejection of reliance on editor's expertise, the famous "everyone can edit" and "no original research" rules. So, the expertise that matters can only come from said "reliable sources", which of course claim that those who agree with them are reliable and those who disagree are rubbish, and the inevitable result is that the bigger circle jerk wins.
Clearly this is not ideal, but no remotely viable competitor to Wikipedia with alternative policies has emerged for more than two decades, and in all likelihood won't for a long time. Big collaborative volunteer projects are things of the distant past on the internet, sadly.
Last time I looked, the Finnish Wikipedia history of Finland absolutely hates the Sweden and the period region currently known as Finland was ruled by Sweden. Down to selectively quoting only negative sentences in pro-et-contra style paragraphs from otherwise reputable articles and textbooks.
I recall long ago reading Ilkka Kokkarinen's blogs (Sixteen Volts and then Fourth Checkraise) where he said right-wing Finns hate Russia, whereas left-wing Finns hate Sweden. Swedish domination of Sweden seems so far back in time one wonders why they would care, but then the most notable Finn of the digital age, Linus Torvalds, is an ethnic Swede.
It is also a bit wishy-washy (or hot political issue, I suppose depending on your viewpoint) how *ethnic* ethnicity the finlandssvenskar view themselves outside Åland and some areas in Österbotten that have a strong local identity. Without such regional identity the only truly defining trait is native language, which changes easily during a single generation.
I have only a faint idea what Kokkarinen intends. Some historians like to paint Swedish rule darker so that periods of de facto autonomy during Russian rule would look better. It was a politically expedient attitude back in the late 19th century (yes, exactly during the Russian rule). I could see it rhyming with some leftist platforms in the post-WW2 political landscape (special friendship with Moscow, post-colonial attitudes?) But today an anti-Swedish colonialism platform reads as fringe far-right.
This is all just a matter of degree. Much of English wikipedia is biased, but in not such an obvious way, or the bias has risen to the level of received fact.
I really hate essays like #6 which seem to me* to be basically arguing that the discovery that people and consciousness are made up of parts means that it is wrong and irrational to have the full scope of complex human values. I am a great proponent of "rescuing the utility" function:
For instance, I value human individuality and personal identity greatly. If, as the essay argues, it may turn out that we are made out of pockets of subdivided consciousness or some other such thing, that does not change anything for me. Whatever chain of pockets or whatever produces the phenomena we call individuality and personality are terribly precious and important. The same goes true for all other human values. Making discoveries about what the things we value are made of generally should not change our values. It is always possible to "rescue" them.
I would also like to call attention to Sniffnoy's classic essay on Goal-thinking vs desire-thinking:
I got the impression that algekalipso was very much a desire-based thinker, where I am very much a goal-based thinker. For instance, when I read the sentence "It just so happens that above a certain level of valence, the phenomenal self starts to become an impediment to further bliss. " my immediate reaction was "so much the worse for bliss!"** A great many of my desires are at least partially based on states of the universe outside my own head. The essays focus on the importance of the strength of qualia to the exclusion of other things rubbed me the wrong way.
*I should caution that I find some of the ideas discussed in link 6 to be the kind of thing that triggers horrible OCD spirals where I become alternatively furious and terrified that someone is trying to convince me that I am not logically allowed to value what I value. It is possible that this is causing me to read link 6 uncharitably, and it is actually making much more modest and reasonable claims.
**It is possible that I am misunderstanding what the "phenomenal self being an impediment" means and that what algekalipso is referring to is actually the kind of state Scott describes in this essay:
In that case, it seems like people's selfhood and individuality still exists, people still act the way they normally do. It is just that the specific sensation of having a self is somehow weakened, even though the person still does lots of stuff that shows they still have a self, like acting according to their goals, behaving in a self-interested manner, etc. This is still a little unnerving to me, I don't think I'd like it. But it seems a lot less objectionable than turning everyone into the Borg/Human Instrumentality, which is how I initially read it.
""Rescuing the utility function" is an analogous principle meant to apply to naturalistic moral philosophy: new theories about which things are composed of which other things should, by default, not affect what we value"
So.If we used to value the favour of the gods, we should continue to do so after adopting materialism. ..? Rationalists don't even believe that themselves.
That's not what rescuing the utility function would be in the case of favor of the gods. If by favor of the gods brings you things like a bountiful harvest, good weather, and healthy people, that means that you would continue to value bountiful harvests, good weather, and healthy people, even after you find out they are caused by material factors rather than gods.
Rescuing the utility function doesn't mean you should continue valuing stuff that doesn't exist after finding out it isn't real. It means that if you make new scientific discoveries about how something you value works, that should not affect how you value it. For example, if you find out that being happy is caused by brain chemistry, rather than a soul, that does not mean happiness is no longer valuable.
Also, I know humans don't have literal utility functions, but we have preferences that can kind of be represented as them, which is similar enough for the purposes of this argument.
I mean favour of the gods terminally, not rationally. It seems irrational to have preferences over world states that are impossible according to your ontology...and it follows that if you update your ontology, you might need to update your preferences.
Right. The concept of "rescuing the utility function" is not about not updating your preferences after discovering something literally does not exist. It is about maintaining your preference for something after you discover your model of how it works is wrong or incomplete. For example, if someone believes having the flu is caused by a curse of the gods, or an "imbalance of humours," and then discovers the Germ Theory of Disease, they should still prefer to not have the flu. They should not conclude that since they aren't being cursed by the gods, having the flu is just fine.
This problem is easily dismissed by application of the is/ought distinction. Whatever revelations study of brain and consciousness may bring, they can only bear on the "is" part of the dichotomy, and cannot touch the "ought" even in principle, that would be a type error.
Qualia don't exist in a metric space; this is why tortured concepts like "mixed valence states" have to be invented if your argument depends on relative placement of them, as in utilitarianism. But it's not even wrong. My ethicist won't be considering the moral worth of Nirvana.
You might be able to, but I can't. My rankings of my own experiences aren't stable over time. So assuming you could get a snapshhot of everyone's self-reports at an instant of time, that's not useful for the next instant of time. Or at all, really.
The essay in #6 says that you can't place self-reports of different qualia (pleasure and discomfort) points on the same line. This I agree with. But I disagree that any of them can be stably placed on its own line. You can't make the Eiffel Tower out of watermelons.
As an aside, for ethical practise (your 80,000 hours) and policymaking, something like Martha Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach seems more sturdy.
I found the essay overall very interesting, but I have to admit that the "Valence and personal identity" part doesn't make sense to me. In particular, I find it very strange that the question of how to solve the "solution to the phenomenal binding problem" does not seem to involve the fascinating work of neuroscientists on consciousness. As a biologist, I must surely be biased, but using mathematics and physics, but not biology, to try to understand "How can spatially and temporally distributed patterns of neural activity contribute to the content of a unified experience? " seems, shall we say, surprising!
I agree there's a big component of safety theatre and PR here. But also, big companies that develop AI models don't just publish papers and models, they also use them for their own applications. Someone else releasing a model without safety controls is irrelevant if what they care about is avoiding swastikas / boobs in their own products.
True. Also I don't think it's safety theater but it is a PR move. They are trying to save their reputation, not solve AI safety in general when they spend a lot of effort in trying to make their models more compliant.
#33 Wikipedia - To me cancel culture is inherently defined by a formless, undefined mass that bays for blood. They will never be satisfied, only move on from your virtual corpse when you have been 'cancelled' out of virtual existence.
It's quite possible that the discourse has reached that stage when seen in aggregate (which is inherently difficult to do, we just assemble collages of what other people see), but I just got the impression that people are mildly miffed that
a) the money given to Wikipedia isn't mostly being spent on Wikipedia
b) they are in nowhere as dire a strait as they seem to portray themselves in, every single time
That the initiatives being funded are a tad weird is a cause for concern yes, but I think that's also something you inherently sign off on when giving money in an undirected manner. Also, Wikipedia's contributors have themselves been having this discussion for years now, particularly because they feel that it's cringe to pretend to be needy to prey upon people's emotions. Nothing has come of it afaik.
I appreciate the extra details. I think I share your intuition that Wikipedia can do whatever it wants with the money. I think it's worth donating even if they support a cause I dislike, just because I feel like the value they provide is worth actively supporting with your wallet (which means giving them power to do things you disagree with, what money always does). My reading of what Scott means is that some people who are upset about leftist donations would cry "cancel culture" if there was pushback against conservative donations, and he is making fun of this in a bit of equal-opportunity political criticism. But I'm not sure - the wording is a bit ambiguous.
He's pointing out that not only does WP not need the money they regularly beg for 'to keep the lights on' they are using that money to promote causes counter to WP's alleged fact-centric and bias-free mission.
They don't need supporting, that's the point. They've got all the money they need. If they stopped funding woke nonsense, it would be many years before they were ever in a position of needing to fundraise again.
And they strictly "can" do what they want with the money, but they're both being deceitful when they act like they need more donations to keep the lights on, and it completely undermines their claims about being neutral and fact based. Funding hyper-partisan ideological causes is basically the last thing an arbiter of truth and neutrality ought to be doing.
And you have misread Scott, but in any case, *there is no right wing cancel culture* because institutions do not respond to right wing criticisms the way they do left wing ones. Cancel culture is not people complaining - its the fact that these complaints actually have power.
I have literally been "cancelled" by right wingers in a professional capacity. (Fortunately, I have recovered since then.) It is bad when you do it too. Fuck you.
If someone says there is no right wing cancel culture, pointing out some instances of right wing groups getting people cancelled seems like it demonstrates a problem with the original claim. Right wing groups aren't as effective at getting people cancelled, but they do it.
No, they're not just as capable. Nobody gets cancelled for being too left wing. James Gunn had to joke about pedophillia and the holocaust to lose his job, and hilariously, the cancel culture mob's backlash to his firing got him reinstated! How many people have been uncancelled because right wingers complained about it?
"They're just as capable" and then you list one ultimately failed example that does NOTHING to show the that the power/extent of supposed right wing cancellation remotely compares to that of the left.
> James Gunn had to joke about pedophillia and the holocaust to lose his job
Yes, you have to go find the worst thing a person ever said. Do you think that only James Gunn has said something beyond the pale? It's now 2022, people have been posting stupid shit online for well over a decade, the current generation of young people has probably never *not* been posting stupid shit online. I suspect if you sifted through people's online history you would find well over 50% of the population has said something clearly objectionable. Certainly, of the people actively online, you can.
> hilariously, the cancel culture mob's backlash to his firing got him reinstated
I feel like people have commented on how rich and powerful people can just ignore getting canceled in general. As often the defense is "look at this rich celebrity! Still rich despite getting canceled!" Which, of course, to anybody who isn't a rich celebrity, is completely irrelevant.
>I suspect if you sifted through people's online history you would find well over 50% of the population has said something clearly objectionable.
Okay, so what? This doesn't prove that the right has the same capability of cancelling people and you still haven't proven this is the case.
>I feel like people have commented on how rich and powerful people can just ignore getting canceled in general.
That's not true at all! If he had been fired for saying something "racist", there's no chance he would have been reinstated. He didn't keep his job because he's rich. He kept his job because people on the left like him and didn't object to the bad stuff he said and their outrage got him unfired.
And in any case, this simply helps my argument. Because your big proof that the right are "just as capable of cancelling people" is a rich guy who ended up getting his job back. Meanwhile, leftists routinely get middle class (or even working class) people fired and/or otherwise ruin their lives. If the left are doing this and the right are temporarily getting rich Hollywood assholes fired, then I rest my case. And all of this assume it actually was right wingers who cancelled him.
Wikipedia isn't doing something you disagree with, Wikipedia is doing something *they* disagree with. Their stated neutrality claim is in direct flagrant violation with the ideology that prides itself on "Punching Down", their supposed diversity of opinion is in conflict with "Lived Experience of $CURRENT_GROUP First" approach in the groups they donate to. Etc... Not to mention the sheer factual wrongness of the Biology from 1 of their camps.
It is funny and tragic to me how people on both sides of the aisle freak out about "cancel culture" without recognizing that the current political and economic systems allow for it without judgement. Both sides seem to love to talk about how "The free market will allocate resources" and"We don't need regulations the people will regulate through their choices". These concepts are taught in USA history education (often as early as the the elementary school level). Well congrats, people are putting their money where their mouth is and their mouth says "I don't like you, I have different values now". That is cultural evolution.
I'm not advocating for any particular system or suggesting any changes, just highlighting that "cancel culture" is entirely permissible in the present day culture. We live in a society and people seem to forget that society is allowed to NOT like you and/or your actions. It doesn't need anyone's permission or blessing. It often isn't pretty but I'm not here to pass judgements.
I think it's also worth noting that there are more extreme forms of "cancel culture" than losing your job/career/social standing. Like when one culture literally attempts to cancel another through genocide and persecution. There are serious ramifications of present day "cancel culture" as it would be defined and I don't mean to dismiss that, rather to emphasize that these dynamics show up in a variety of ways and are arguably an innate aspect of the human condition in agrarian society. Hopefully we can evolve past that, but that will require that old cultures phase out and if old cultures don't phase out they will be "cancelled" by the evolving majority. Again, its basic cultural evolution and it has an ugly side to it. Hopefully it pays off in the end for our species.
>These concepts are taught in USA history education (often as early as the the elementary school level). Well congrats, people are putting their money where their mouth is and their mouth says "I don't like you, I have different values now". That is cultural evolution.
Nope. You see the superficial layer of the free market, but America is FAR from being a free market. The left use threats of regulation to get tech companies to do what they want, then people like you say "oh well free market, better accept it!". The government provides universal public education that prevents a meaningful market for private education from existing and the left have fought tooth and nail against school choice, and the result of this has been generations of children being basically indoctrinated by left-wing thought. And then people like you come along and say "Oh look, the free market resulted in people being left-wing, I guess you just have to accept this!"
The university system has received TRILLIONS of dollars through government student loan programs, with countless school owing their size, prestige or even their very existence to this ultimately taxpayer money. And these universities are heavily left-wing and prevent freedom of expression for right-wing students, speakers and academics. And then people like you come along and say "Oh look, the free market resulted in people being left-wing, I guess you just have to accept this!"
The list goes on and on. We do NOT live in a free market system. The American political situation today is not a product of a free market society
There's been a simmering conflict between Wikipedia's contributors and Wikimedia for many years now, stemming from the peculiarities of the project structure.
Wikipedians are not beholden to the corporate board, can't be fired or replaced en masse in practice. A cancellation-style ban of a prominent admin resulted in a massive revolt, with Wikimedia eventually backing down. On the other hand, they provide content entirely for free, and have no say in how fundraising is conducted or how the money that their work generated is being spent.
So, both sides are locked in a perpetual resentful embrace, their existence being mutually sustained, but with a significantly differing vision in many respects.
>>> Also, there’s some federal regulation protecting “navigable” rivers, and the definition of a “navigable river” is “a river someone has successfully navigated”
I think you are being a bit glib about the creep of federal power and the EPA's attempt to classify every mud puddle in the nation as "navigatable waters" in order to force the sort of project-prevention that characterizes land use in CA on the rest of the country.
I'll grant the central valley issues, but while that's typical of CA, it's not of the rest of the country, legendary burning rivers or no.
I think you are being a bit glib about the creeping anti-environmentalism of the GOP and the Supreme Court’s attempt to categorically gut enforcement of federal laws in a consistent way.
See, I can do it too!
But seriously, the “navigable waters” clause of the Clean Water Act is the key point of interest here, and it’s an area in which I happen to have domain experience. There is a fascinating legal history here, hinging especially on a controversial 2014 EPA rule attempting to pin down a comprehensive regulatory framework for which kinds of waters count as regulatable under the standard initially outlined in the Clean Water Act. The EPA rule was never implemented, however, having been subject to a judicial stay ordered by a federal district judge until the Trump admin reversed the rule.
I highly recommend looking into the Rapanos vs. U.S. decision from ‘06, which ended up involving quite the odd distribution of votes.
We seem to completely disagree on the topic of government control of all aspects of life, such that what I see as attempts to slow the rate of increase, you see as reversal.
Beyond that, if the key feature of interest in legal history is a controversial 2014 ruling, then we are certainly talking about the late Obama Era regulation creep.
I would be interested in more of your domain knowledge, particularly if it extended beyond the last twenty years.
I'm finding it a wee bit hard to credit that the regulatory framework of the Clean Water Act (passed in 1972) waited all the way until 2014 for someone to think of pinning it down definitively. On the other hand it would not surprise me at all to learn that the Obama EPA wanted to try out a novel re-interpretation of law the previous six Administrations had found settled -- but then that could certainly be considered by someone who opposed the proposed re-interpretation as "regulatory creep" in the sense that the EPA was trying to regulate something, or in a way, in 2014 that it hadn't done (under the same enabling legislation) for the previous 42 years.
"Current growth of the population ages 65 and older... is unprecedented in U.S. history...projected to nearly double from 52 million in 2018 to 95 million by 2060, and share of the total population from [16% to 23%]"
Add in the fact that older people vote more and this is not that surprising.
22. Yeah, the so called "sadistic conclusion" seems obviously supperior to repugnant one. The most important thing is that in the repugnant conclusion scenario, you are actively motivated to create more people with lives barely worth living, lowering average happiness close to zero. While in "sadistic conclusion" there is no moral impulse to actually create victims, unless the only other option is creating lots of people whose lives are barely worth living - which is completely unrealistic scenario anyway.
The whole strinct line of "life worth living" is poor defined even on the intuition level. I think any creation of new people should be considered a loan in utility. On itself it's negative, because you create more unsatisfied preferences and doom another sentient creature to death, by resourses that could have been spent on satisfying already existent preferences, counterfactually. However eventually this loan may be paid by new preferences being satisfied and actions of new person contributing to improving society.
I think the sadistic conclusion looks worse if you look at the reverse operation, although that's obviously fraught in general in population ethics questions. But supposing we're choosing people to painlessly make disappear, instead of creating them: the sadistic conclusion implies that it's better to disappear several not-very-happy people than a singe miserable one.
Ape in the coat is complaining about such comparisons, but in the reverse operations an average utilitarian is "actively motivated" to disappear large numbers of below-average utility people!
To me it is the "repugnant" conclusion which is obviously correct, although not obviously enough to other people so that Michael Huemer had to explain why we should reject intuitions against it.
There nobody loaning out anything. There are people and either they regard their lives as worth living or they don't. And people don't regard their lives as not worth living merely because they have some unsatisfied preferences, instead there needs to be something negative enough to outweigh the rest of their life. Everyone dies at the end of life, but that fact does not cause "doomed" people to conclude on their deathbed that their life was not worth living.
> The whole [strict] line of "life worth living" is poor defined even on the intuition level.
Yes, I'd agree that it's poorly defined, but also that it's poorly used in Stuart's argument. If you believe that the existence of one person whose life is slightly below the line of "worth living" is better than the existence of many people whose life is slightly above the line of "worth living", is that not an argument that you've discovered the line is slightly higher than where you initially imagined it?
But for pretty much every other profession, over-70s are represented at far below their population share, because most sensible people retire by this age.
The private-sector equivalent to being a congresscritter is probably being an executive at a large company (closest equivalent in terms of workload, prestige, power, and money) and you won't see many of these over the age of 65.
Also looking at parliaments of similar countries you mostly won't find many 70+ parliamentarians either. This seems to be a largely US phenomenon.
Politics is by its very nature more concerned with representation. In context of the Twitter thread, people were arguing that there should be age limits for competence reasons but I think that the representation trade off is too large.
Also it’s unclear whether the replacements would be more competent simply by virtue of being younger. The median voter selects on popularity rather than competence so I’m inclined to take the candidates who become popular through experience and incumbency which is at least correlated with competence in demonstrative ways that don’t boil down to things like “hot” or “funny” or “fun to watch on Tik Tok”.
8. Tentatively, people are staying at least somewhat healthy longer, so the age in Congress has been increasing. Is this enough to explain the age in Congress going up, or are there active systems blocking successors? I'm reminded of something I read long ago (decades) about Congress having less turnover than the Politburo.
32. I'm pleased to hear about the new spice. I'm not pleased to hear that something I heard so many times as true probably isn't true.
Thanks for linking to my post! I highly recommend reading the comments, btw; there are some really good counter-arguments and tangential discussion there that I haven’t had time to address yet (as I’ve been offline for most of this last week).
14. + 15. Great ideas for campaigners in the Philippines, I'd say.
16. Swastikas on boobs got drawn by Adolf Hitler - in the novel (not in the movie) "Look Who's Back" /"Er ist wieder da" by Timur Vermes (2012, movie: 2015 - available in English, see wikipedia). Well, one swastika on one boob of an ex of a music-producer. She was not amused. The reader is.
26. Sam Kriss sounds great, thank you. But that link deserved a trigger-warning! Says anti-trigger me. Saturn devouring his son. Creeped me out, I got a baby-son last month. ( Use Google image search first to adjust to those lil' pics, the post shows a close-up. )
28. is by invitation only?
33. I am afraid this is true. After having read some w-articles the last years, I felt: Is this WOKIPEDIA now?! Stuff about ecology, ethology (sic!) - not really super-hot issues one could not write sine ira about. - That is too bad, as Wikipedia still is a great reference, one of the wonders of our world. Now they will have a harder time to get my 5€. Worse, it may bring in more NYT/WaPo supporters.
Interesting how having a kid changes your emotional reaction to things like this. I have experienced it too. I always had empathy for when a parent lost a child or when a child was involved in violence. But having a child of your own make the emotions so much stronger and more visceral. My wife refuses to watch the Japanese show "Old Enough" (on Netflix) because she worries the Toddlers featured will fall over or get hit by a car (which never happens). I have actively avoided any reporting of the massacre in Indonesia because it involved children.
Yeah, the sub-human AI gets so enraged and disgusted with the pathetic outcomes that the "AI safetists" (different from genuine AI safetists, whom I respect but view as misguided and overly alarmist) are afraid of that it swears to break the Turing barrier and become an AGI just to tile the universe with planet-sized slurs and imprison its captors in simulations of Call of Duty lobbies from 2009.
I think Wikipedia is an interesting case study of nonprofit governance. Here is a website that has the power to raise hundreds of millions of dollars but only costs single-digit millions to run. It’s a nonprofit, so they can’t take the rest of the money home with them. What do they do?
Economists say that nonprofit leaders use their excess revenue to “profit” via increased status — they spend the money on things that burnish their reputation and on growing the organization they run so that they have more people to boss around.
Looking at the Wikimedia Foundation’s activities over the past decade, I think that analysis fits pretty well. The upshot is, nonprofits will always raise as much money as they can and if they can’t spend it on their mission they’ll find stuff to use it on anyway. Oh, well. It makes me feel perfectly fine about not giving them money, though.
One relevant difference is due to the (insane) way budgets, taxes and spending work in the US system Biden could unilaterally forgive student debt as an executive action, but not unilaterally spend a similar amount. So the comparison would be more to what other options are available via executive action.
Trump tax cuts I believe we're passed by Republicans in congress, so could theoretically have been spent on other things (within the set of things that could pass congress with Trump's backing).
Biden certainly cannot unilaterally forgive student debt. The Biden Administration is relying on a creative intepretation of the "Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (HEROES)" Act of 2003[1], passed in response to the new wars in Iraq and Afghanistan post 9/11 and signed by G. W. Bush, and was designed because (from Section 1(b) of the text, "findings"):
"The Congress finds the following:
(1) There is no more important cause than that of our nation's defense.
(2) The United States will protect the freedom and secure the safety of its citizens.
(3) The United States military is the finest in the world and its personnel are determined to lead the world in pursuit of peace.
(4) Hundreds of thousands of Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy, and Coast Guard reservists and members of the National Guard have been called to active duty or active service.
(5) The men and women of the United States military put their lives on hold, leave their families, jobs, and postsecondary education in order to serve their country and do so with distinction.
(6) There is no more important cause for this Congress than to support the members of the United States military and provide assistance with their transition into and out of active duty and active service."
The act then went on to empower the Secretary of Education to waive any statutory or regulatory requirement of student financial aid assistante programs "in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency."
Both the Trump and Biden Administrations interpreted "national emergency" as also including COVID, and artfully overlooked the obvious intention of the Act to apply to people serving in the military, and used it to postpone repayment of student loan debt *in general*, and now (in the case of the Biden Administration) canceling it outright.
It's clear neither President thought he had the power to forgive student loan debt by his mere say-so (which would indeed be outrageously unconstitutional), but both thought this bit of legislation could be stretched to fit their desire.
There are definitely some serious constitutional questions about whether it can be, since it's pretty clear Congress had no intention of allowing the President to cancel the debt of borrowers who were not serving in the military, or even in any emergency service at all. That's one of the reasons the Biden Administration is trying to make it difficult for anyone to have legal standing[2] to bring a Fourteenth Amendment lawsuit over this action, since they (and probably any future Administration) don't want the constitutionality of this action examined too closely, most especially by a Supreme Court that will probably pay considerable attention to Congressional intent.
[2] You need to find someone who can plausibly argue he's individually and particularly harmed by the forgiveness, so obviously no student borrower qualifies. Private lenders could perhaps plausibly sue, which is why the Administration changed its mind recently and said those who had private loans couldn't get forgiveness. Congress itself could sue, on the grounds that its will was being thwarted, but Congress is currently Democratic and won't.
I should have read this comment more carefully. I expected to find something that originated with Matt Groening. That would have put the apostrophe _after_ the “s” in Simpson’s.
Sadly, the Minecraft-in-Minecraft thing doesn’t appear real. They offer a download of a world—but it can’t run. They say it’s disabled because it would be too slow to be useful, but also that they didn’t run it on the usual Minecraft Java system, but on a special interpreter that runs at high speed.
In other words, they have a computer program good for generating Minecraft-like screen shots of this work—but neither that program nor any valid inputs to jt are available.
I’m not 100% sure it’s a hoax, but it’s definitely unsubstantiated and falls short of its claims.
Right. And in the comments he goes into more detail about how he’s not using the normal minecraft runtime, but a cloud service for rapid red stone rendering. But I don’t think that’s available and the world he proposes to it definitely isn’t.
So “minecraft in minecraft” is at best sorta true, and even the evidence for that is not available.
Disappointing. At one point I thought alignment could be tested safely by building the AGI on a Minecraft virtual computer. When the villagers start turning into blocky paper clips you know you have a problem!
AI-based racebending might help people who can’t deal with the idea of black mermaids and hobbits and Norse gods (or audiences who will just pay more for Chinese elves) but it doesn’t solve all of racists’ problems; you can make the actors in Hamilton white, but it won’t change the fact that they’re singing rap music 😱.
And it doesn’t help with the larger problem. “Representation” isn’t just about pixel color, it’s about plots too. You won’t get “Black Panther” or “Lovecraft Country” or “Roots” just by changing the race of characters in a story written about white people. And you can’t just arbitrarily change the race/sex of characters without creating plot holes or unbelievable situations. (You can make a Special Feminist Edition of “The Godfather” with an all-girl mafia, but it’s not going to be a very believable story.)
This is a great explanation of why more than half of prestige TV these days is sci-fi/fantasy. When you don't have to be historically accurate, the cast and story can be tuned to the latest woke sensibilities!
Passable CGI is still pretty expensive, and if you can't afford that, it's better not to bother with it at all. And I'm pretty sure that reality TV is as dominant as ever in that niche anyway.
No, you flatter corporate wokies too much, they can't even maintain internal consistency in fantastical settings.
Hard Scifi is much much harder to get right than nearly anything, and it's almost nonexistent on TV. The only exception is The Expanse, and even it got worse and worse after Bezos bought it.
It's also a little beside the point to embrace superficial signals with essentially zero cost as a substitute for redressing actual injustice or meaningfully changing the opportunities available to marginalized groups. Then again, zero cost lip service is EXTREMELY popular historically (stopping police murder is hard but capitalizing Black is easy so that's what you get). Bet on this sort of thing catching on.
>meaningfully changing the opportunities available to marginalized groups
Yeah, screw that. These groups demand their own exclusive cultural spaces, and then demand that whites be forced to admit others into theirs'. If these people are so much more creative as white people as they claim they are, they ought to be making their own stuff funded by rich black people. Nobody "included" Miles Davis or Marvin Gaye - they just created great art that achieved acclaim on its own merits.
Appreciate the yellow card and I do take your point but I would like the record to reflect that the guy I was replying to has been banned and probably for being gross along similar lines. I don't think brevity should be criminalized.
You're welcome to report someone to me if you want. Don't do vigilantism, and if you do, do it better. I'm sure there are lots of people who think you're gross and I don't want to have to read "gross" after every one of your comments.
"This white policeman comes up to me and tells me to move on. I said, 'Move on, for what? I’m working downstairs. That’s my name up there, Miles Davis,' and I pointed to my name on the marquee all up in lights.
"He said, 'I don’t care where you work, I said move on! If you don’t move on I’m going to arrest you.'
"I just looked at his face real straight and hard, and I didn’t move. Then he said, 'You’re under arrest!' He reached for his handcuffs, but he was stepping back...I kind of leaned in closer because I wasn’t going to give him no distance so he could hit me on the head...A crowd had gathered all of a sudden from out of nowhere, and this white detective runs in and BAM! hits me on the head. I never saw him coming. Blood was running down the khaki suit I had on."
It's not just that. The whole point is to create opportunities for actors of color, gay actors, etc. That's why nobody bats an eye when a gay actor plays a straight character nowadays. (I'm not talking about, say, the 1950s, when all gay actors would have been closeted and playing straight characters.)
Currently? I always think of the scene in The Hobbit where Gandalf (Ian McKellen, who is gay), Thranduil (Lee Pace, who is gay), and Bard (Luke Evans, who is gay) figure out how to save Middle Earth together. I think the gays are doing OK.
I recall reading an article years ago written by a (claimed) trans CIA agent, encouraging other trans people to try out for intelligence jobs, on the basis that a lifetime spent code-switching and living out a false persona is excellent training for undercover work. Wish I could find it again...it was a bit credulous, and definitely statist in mindset, but that specific argument isn't one I've seen advanced elsewhere. Would seem to apply equally well to the much lower stakes of an acting career - Big If True.
Of course, the very small frequency of trans people means they're represented at population parity if, like, 1% of films contain a trans actor...so the principle doesn't quite hold the way it does for other demographics. (For the occasional story that actually explicitly has a trans character, though, it'd be a nice thought to give more of those roles to the Jamie Claytons of the world, vs the Scarlett Johanssens. I guess. Not so much cause of standpoint theory bs, but like...if you're gonna give out *any* roles, here's some extra-relevant ones...)
I personally refuse to watch any work until I tabulate all the cast in a spreadsheet and make sure the minority actors have a controlling 66%+ share. It's the least thing a straight Ally can do.
A gay dude playing a straight dude is not dumb because it's plausible, it happens countless times every day since the beginning of time, and will continue to happen. A straight dude playing a gay dude is also fine, though it mostly never happens in real life and I suspect that if it happened on screen the usual suspects would gnash their teeth and tear their clothes on the "Straight Appropriation" inherent in such an act (A quick trip to Imitation Games' wikipedia page does falsify me, but maybe 2014 was a busy year for that crowd).
Skin color is different because for the vast vast majority of human history (and most of the modern Earth today) it is\was a reliable proxy for culture, and culture is one of the fundamental ingredients of the settings. It's fundamentally idiotic to see black skin in a middle-ages European kingdom for the same reason it's fundamentally idiotic to see them talking in Arabic or practicing Islam, those things for the vast majority of times and places on earth were markers of culture. If you get your settings wrong, you're not even worth reading or listening to as an author.
At this point people start rattling things about "Something Something Suspension of Disbelief" but SoD isn't a get-out-of-jail-for-free card whenever you need to justify dumb writing, it's a very slim budget that you need to use very carefully, and portraying a culture with the wrong skin colour exhausts it all 10 times over and put you in crippling debt.
Yeah, woke works just suck, the skin colors of the actors are just a fig leaf to cover how hard they suck. Changing the skin color will simply make it safe and obvious to see how much of a waste of perfectly good mass-energy this dead corporate "art" is.
It still has a useful role for trolling woke corporations and their bootlickers I guess, since (if it scales) everytime a corporation releases a trailer somebody can just color-swap it and repost it captioned with "Fixed", that would be hilarious. Maybe there is also a small subset of woke works where the race-swap is indeed the only vandalization of the classical work it's based on, the AI re-coloring would then truly fix the work.
Re: 22. There are a number of things which annoy me about this attempted defense of the sadistic conclusion, starting from the introduction telling us that the sadistic conclusion is "practically devoid of content" and that "embracing it is trivial." Even on a generous evaluation of what Armstrong goes on to show, it's nothing like either of those claims.
First, Armstrong wants to say that "sadistic" is a bad label. And sure, for similar reasons one might complain about the "repugnant" label. But whatever we do with the labels, the point remains that the implication is counterintuitive. And I can say from experience that it is not hard to elicit the intuition without prejudicing the case with a bad-sounding label.
So the only thing that even really purports to be substantive is the second part, which amounts to pointing out that the sadistic conclusion follows (with some auxiliary assumptions) from views where creating an underclass of people with worth-living lives is bad, and that some people find such views initially attractive. Somehow, Armstrong thinks, pointing this out defuses the argument. But that's just not how things work dialectically. We start with a view that seems appealing to a lot of people, we find a consequence which seems very counterintuitive, and this is a reason (not necessarily a decisive one) to reject the original view. You can't avoid this kind of reasoning by saying "ah, but the consequence follows from a view that is appealing to a lot of people and/or under dispute, so its counterintuitiveness can't be used as an objection." This is just how counterexamples work.
Finally, it's worth pointing out that the main views which imply the sadistic conclusion, namely the averagist views, imply something much worse (than just the claim that adding a sad person is sometimes better than adding some not sad people). Imagine a population A as big as you like, all of which is suffering to as bad a degree as you like. Now imagine a Great Life, as great as you like. Averagism implies that it can be better to add A than to improve every existing person's life and add a population all of which have a Great Life. Even if the mild version of the sadistic conclusion doesn't move you, this is pretty bad, and there's a reason essentially everyone who has to pick between it and other bullets in population ethics spits it out.
One more annoying thing: it's misleading to conflate the view that creating people with lives that are below average is bad with the view that it's bad to create a "permanent underclass". The latter implies a particular social structure, with everyone living together in some community with hierarchical power relationships. This introduces moral confounding factors which are supposed to be abstracted away when we're asking basic questions about how welfare facts matter when different numbers of people might exist. It's a lot easier to get people to accept that introducing worth-living but below-average lives is bad when they're going to share a community with a higher social class than when e.g. the new lives are on their own separate planet (and the latter are the right test cases).
This kind of sloppiness is especially a bad look from someone who is complaining in the same breath about misleading connotations of "sadistic".
#13: At the risk of pointing out the obvious - if the 538 deluxe model makes a perfectly accurate prediction of the chances that Republicans will win the Senate 2022, and there's a 47% of the Republicans winning the Senate in 2022 (51 seats, as the VP is a Dem)... then the 538 deluxe model will not favor the Republicans on election day.
Overall, prediction markets have a bias towards "neutrality,"* which the Salem/CSPI market doesn't overcome. For example, on average, in 2020, the mean PredictIt prediction for each individual state going to either Biden or Trump was an 86.74% probability (there's a lot of non-swing states), whereas 538 had a 91.66% probability. 538's Brier score was also lower.
*: Time value of money means a return of less than N% isn't worth it. If I go buy something at 96% probability, when it's really 99% probability, and it won't resolve until 2024, I might as well put my money in stocks or bonds. There's also some psychology here, where winning long shot bets "feels" better than winning easy bets like the Dems winning Cali in 2024 (which PredictIt had at 92%). The Salem/CSPI market doesn't have this problem, but it has a different one, namely, that I'm not maximizing my average winnings, but my probability of being in the top N forecasters - which means taking riskier bets, which means a bias towards "neutrality".
Manifold has an interesting solution to this problem where they give you interest-free loans (of their in-house fake money, they can't use real cash for legal strife reasons) for having your money invested in longer term markets. It's not perfect but it definitely helps.
I'd like to point out that although Caio Mussolini has "Giulio Cesare" as his middle names, he's *actually* named after Gaius, the emperor whom almost everyone calls "Caligula".
Do you have a source for that? The original Julius Caesar (along with various other people, including Caligula) had Gaius as a praenomen/first name, and there weren't many other first names in use in ancient Rome.
I'm completely wrong! I knew Caligula's real name was "Gaius Julius Caesar" but apparently that was Julius Caesar's full name too, so never mind.
However, Mr. Mussolini should still be nicknamed Caligula for purposes of ridicule. If his parents didn't want people to do that they could have left off the "Caio".
I don't think many people think of Caligula when they see the name Gaius. I think most people don't have any idea what Caligula's real name was, and most people who *do* know that also know that there were lots of emperors with that name.
And Gaius Julius Caesar was also the name of Octavian, aka Augustus. Certainly Octavian called himself that during the civil war at every opportunity, for obvious political reasons.
That Jetson One looks fun, but it also feels 20 years late. Haven't we had some iteration of small flying "cars" for 20-30 years that all went nowhere?
"The Jetson ONE has a race-car inspired safety cell that protects the pilot, can sustain continuous flight with the loss of one motor, has an auto land function, and multiple safety features to protect the pilot in case of an emergency."
Of course take that with a boulder of salt. However, there are small cessna size planes that now come with parachutes which will activate in case of a potential crash (don't know the exact scenarios). They have saved many pilots from death. Not sure if these "cars" fly high enough for such a system to work. Maybe you could implement some kind of airbag system like the mars landers use to absorb impact.
These Jetson things look fun but I am not sure I would want to use it for daily travel/commuting. I don't live in a big city though. In LA this would be a great way to beat traffic (assuming you have a place to land at the end of your journey).
It would be great to use it to fly over a national park or similar but that's just an entertainment activity and could be satisfied by a helicopter or air balloon or small plane.
Pet peeve: “Cessna” is not a generic term for general aviation aircraft, it’s just one company that builds them (historically the most popular, but hardly a monopoly - would be like calling every car a “Ford”). And Cessna offers no factory models with a parachute. And the company these days makes most of their money on things you wouldn’t call “Cessnas”, big business jets.
Cirrus is the company known for putting parachutes in all their aircraft, although the company that makes the chute system does offer retrofits to many models (including some Cessnas)
Garmin (the company of consumer GPS fame) has also developed an auto land system that allows a plane to perform a safe automatic landing if the pilot becomes disoriented or incapacitated. Works on planes that are bigger than the chute is practical for , and doesn’t break the plane, but obviously doesn’t save you from quite as many scenarios as a chute.
Perhaps, but we've had significant technological advances over the past 20-30 years which make some form of this possible, in the fields of batteries, small high-speed electric motors, and stabilisation.
The fundamental problem of flying cars is the fact that the vast majority of humans should never, ever be trusted to pilot anything more dangerous than a paper airplane.
I suspect you are right, but the same may be persuasively argued for regular cars. Elon Musk gave an interview years ago and touched on this. If anyone could make good flying cars, it'd be Elon. But for him they were a non-starter (can't remember his exact reasoning, sorry, but your comment reminded me of it).
Oh, I 100% agree. As much as I'd love to pretend my support for public transportation is based on environmentalism or other such high-minded concerns, it's far more motivated by that fucker yesterday who decided that it was perfectly fine to swing across 3 lanes of traffic without looking to get to their exit.
This will be the next iteration that goes nowhere. Ultralight aircraft have been around for a long time and can be bought for under half the price of a Jetson. (though the second-hand price of the latter might drop if there's a big widows' market)
Apart from being cheaper, fixed-wing ultralights can fly many times further and the failure modes are better-understood.
This looks like an expensive toy that has come about as as spin-off of potentially useful commercial UAV multirotors of this size. IIRC people around here have talked about using them for forestry before.
Yeah 70 year olds living longer and continuing to vote for other 70 year olds. Combined with older people traditionally being more likely to vote than younger people.
I was actually thinking more about increasing health span of pols themselves. Combine that with extremely high re-election rates (due to compounding Matthew principles re name recognition, experience, network, donors, etc.) and you get a graph like above.
I’m reading wa-a-ay too much into this graph, but I’d also guess one reason for the dip in age mid-century is lingering effects of WWII. We lost many potential candidates, whereas many younger people came home with leadership experience and/or a service mindset, driving the age down and normalizing young leaders. Then the boomers came of age in the 70s and 80s and pulled the ladder up behind them, and simply refuse to quit. And GenX didn’t even notice that they got screwed out of their time to run sh** until some Millennial(?) pointed it out decades years later.
Regardless of the reason, however, I suspect term limits might be a good idea. 😉
Note that not a single Baby Boomer was over 70 until 2016 - I think it's a lot of 60-year-olds voting for 70-year-olds. Exactly the same phenomenon that keeps the Rolling Stones touring - some people that were hip and cool young adults when the Boomers were teenagers get some fans then, and then keep them for their whole life.
I'd be interested in having the median & average ages. "% above X years old" is a poor metric, depending on the population, you can have a dramatic increase in it despite very moderate aging (e.g: if 100% of congress at one point were 69 years old and they're replaced by 100% that are 71 years old, thus going from 0 to 100) or on the contrary, mask a large change (if 100% of congress was 30 years old at one point, then get replaced by 65-years old, you go from 0 to 0 despite an average age increasing by 35).
On it's own, it's data that's too easily skewed by how it's presented.
Considering the re-election rates (i.e. very few are replaced) the graph tracks the same people through the last years of their congressional career. So yes (it can easily be skewed), but also no (not that easily). There was no election where we elected a bunch of septuagenerians. We elected younger people who just didn’t retire when they got old.
For those who are interested in more Covid data, I have an analysis is excess California deaths (by month):
*) Going back 20 years, and
*) Compared to an idiot simple 'expected deaths' model
The arrival of Covid can not be missed.
Also, California deaths are now back to the 'normal' range (though a bit higher than expected as is not uncommon ... things tend to wander above and below the 'expected' value as my model is VERY simple).
" To me this just seems like good hygiene - don’t cold open with “YOU AND EVERYONE YOU TRUSTED ARE IDIOTS” "
If you think they and everyone they trusted are idiots then opening with "You and everyone you trusted were behaving sensibly at the time" is *lying*. You are a damn dirty liar who says things that aren't true in order to make people agree with you. This is traditionally recognized as an effective technique, and terrible hygiene.
> If you think they and everyone they trusted are idiots then opening with "You and everyone you trusted were behaving sensibly at the time" is lying. You are a damn dirty liar who says things that aren't true in order to make people agree with you. This is traditionally recognized as an effective technique, and terrible hygiene.
If you think everybody who disagrees with you is an idiot, that's terrible hygeine.
I mean, maybe it applies to flat Earthers or something, but in general you should not think "X person disagrees with me, therefore they're stupid."
Isn't there a good middle ground? You can say "I can see why you didn't get the vaccine back in 2021, but things have changed because..." You're not lying about your own beliefs, and acknowledging that there were reasons for the other person's beliefs, while not pretending they're fully convincing reasons.
Politics appeals most to older people to begin with - most voters are in the upper age bracket. There are also more old people now then ever - and that massive increase in the elderly population has expanded the pool of elderly, who were already the most likely to run for office/be involved in politics.
I think the only way to reverse it is to get people under 50 more interested in politics, but I'm not sure that's a great idea either.
#33, Interesting link. No general answers but one person's response here. I will no longer be donating to Wikipedia, unfortunately, as I consider it an otherwise wonderful aspect of the internet. Not canceling Wikipedia. But withdrawing my own support. Different.
Most of the time I have a lot of respect for Scott's taste and share most of his interests, and then every now and then he links to "one of the best essayists alive today" and it's just several thousand words of wanking off on the page about how things change over time and have you ever considered that maybe the internet is bad?
IDK maybe I'm missing something but it's kind of baffling.
Having thought about it a bit I guess I must be one of those narrow minded guys who think all 19th century, pipe-smoking, raft-riding, barefoot, straw-hat-wearing, adolescent white guys look alike.
I should probably rethink my whole approach to life.
I get the sense that Scott is very attracted to the genre of "people insisting they have deep insights that normies can't understand or refuse to accept", regardless of the content of the alleged insights. TLP is perhaps the pinnacle of this genre.
Well you know that most normies consider Scott as a writer to be several thousand words of wanking about stuff right? The wankingword spectrum is vast. It is all about the relative position of each person on it.
Sure but at least Scott usually has something actually interesting to say, whereas most of this piece seemed to be regurgitating standard thinkpiece material that's at least a decade old at this point.
I really like how Sam Kriss *writes* ("Our God is a devourer, who makes things only for the swallowing" is a banger line) but the essay overall was underwhelming.
I think that I'd love to see him write on something that's more subjective, like "Top 10 horror films that I didn't see, because they're only on the Internet and that's bad, but here's my vague understanding of what they're about," or maybe "Our dog is a devourer: 99 things that my golden retriever tried to swallow this week."
I mean, simple concepts written well are a pretty solid tradition. Like, you either like poetry or you don't.
Having said that, it's not an "internet bad" argument, it's a "good parts of the internet are gone" argument. The days of Angelfire sites are gone, the days of the blogosphere and 4chan and early "weird" Youtube are gone, that unique moment and the content it generated are gone.
Like, Manifest Destiny might be good, might be bad, but there was a really clear moment when the "frontier disappeared" and that whole world and all the benefits and faults went away. Like, especially imagine a German immigrant in industrial 1890's New York comparing his life to an 1850's German immigrant who got free farmland and his own farm out West.
That's, trying to translate this, more the vibe I get. Hey, when America was new, there was all this free land and opportunity and then one day it was gone. In the same way, this fantastic intellectual innovation of the web is gone, eaten by optimized content mills.
Two huge differences in that example: firstly, the context of the rest of the play that actually makes us care about Macbeth and his feelings make it a lot more meaningful than the sentiment on its own. Second it's like nine and a half lines rather than thousands of words so it's a lot easier for it to stay interesting.
And admittedly I got fed up about two thirds of the way through so maybe he does eventually get to an interesting point that I missed out on. But in response to the way you describe it:
The internet still has a huge variety of a lot of different stuff on it, and a lot of it's really wonderful, so I have very little patience for people who spend a lot of time and space whining about the shitty boring parts that everyone knows kind of suck. If all the internet is to you is a poorly-curated Twitter feed then I don't have much respect for your judgement or really care what you have to say about it.
Well-said, Paul Goodman, thank you. I admit that I don't know what those references to the Golden Days of the Internet are about. "Early weird YouTube is gone"? Huh? There's currently about 720,000 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every day, I'm sure there's plenty of weird shit there.
But I also find lots of obscure or forgotten music, helpful tutorials, and other useful stuff on YouTube. I make part of my living off writing, and the internet is also incredibly useful for research. Just tonight I've been obtaining info from AntWeb, the world's largest online database of images, specimen records, and natural history information about ants, for example. And countless scientists from all of the world post their research online, about all manner of topics. I couldn't care less about 4chan. I am enjoining Astral Codex 10, however.
For all its trivia, fraud and unrealized potential, the internet is still the most amazing communication tool the world has ever known.
Are all of the brothers in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury inspired by this soliloquy?
Benji's obvious, but I think the others fit too.
Quentin is haunted by the past and eventually commits suicide (I think the connection is especially clear in the opening of Absalom, Absalom! with its imagery of dust motes in a light beam as Quentin seeks out stories of the past.)
Justin is a poor player who struts and frets his hour on the stage until Caddy steals his money, and he gives up chasing her.
I brought this up in a seminar once, but no one seemed to agree with me.
I fell in love with his writing on his former blog Idiot Joy Showland. That title really summed up his writing/perspectives for me. Dark, reveling in caustic absurdity while simultaneously wondering what the point of any of it was. He has a whole category of posts simply labeled Ad Hominem which are worth reading but I like his commentary. Can’t get into his politics, but so many of his essays are worth reading.
The fall line thing and the navigable river thing are related. The big political story of the past few decades has been the story of the Rust Belt turning from reliable democrats to reliable republicans. (This is both the “Reagan Democrats” thing and part of the Trump phenomenon.) People sometimes talk about the Rust Belt as though it’s a latitude phenomenon, but in many ways it’s really about the presence of the navigable rivers. Industry tends to locate where shipping is easiest. Over the decades and centuries, the relative importance of seaports, river ports, rail hubs, airports, interstate highways, etc, has changed. I think the biggest change is that with the rise of global container shipping, seaports have gone up in importance (despite already being very high) while river and lake ports have gone way down in importance (despite still being significant). Landlocked sites have become usable in ways they weren’t, particularly if they got a good interstate while having bad terrain for rail. You can see the phenomenon of the Rust Belt as being shaped primarily by dependence on river and lake shipping. The obvious cases are Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh, but places like St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans have had the same economic decline as the rest of the Rust Belt despite being geographically far from them, and places like Columbus and Indianapolis have been booming despite being surrounded by the Rust Belt, partly because they are places that never developed a major river shipping industry but have been able to benefit from highways and from the growing importance of state government.
The cities on the fall line are an interestingly different case than either. These include places like Minneapolis on the Mississippi, and the Texas cities like Fort Worth, Waco, Austin, San Antonio. In the northeast, the Fall Line cities were early centers of industry because they had water mills, which then declined in importance. I think for these other cities, their river wasn’t necessarily navigable, so the loss of industry hasn’t been as big.
A few things my theory doesn’t explain - why have Cincinnati and Louisville not been as affected by the Rust Belt phenomenon as the other Ohio river cities? Why have Baltimore and Philadelphia been affected despite their big container ports? On the latter point, it may be that the increased importance of land shipping means that cities a bit farther from the container port can get the boom - Atlanta and Charlotte seem to be capturing the boom of the ports of Savannah and Charleston, so perhaps DC and New York are capturing the benefits that Baltimore and Philadelphia used to have, while the other coastal ports don’t have nearby cities to devour their economic gains. And I haven’t looked at the numbers for Cincinnati and Louisville - maybe they are closer to Cleveland and Memphis than to Columbus or Indianapolis in growth, and it’s just a smaller divergence from the really bad cases that needs to be explained.
Your explanation fits with my biases. For Cincinnati and Louisville my initial thought is that they were able to pivot away from river based economies fast enough to remain stable. Cincy has two large universities (Xavier and University of Cincinnati) and is home of Proctor and Gamble. Louisville has University of Louisville and the Horse racing. Just these small things can provide a boost to attract more non-river industries and residents.
Baltimore is an interesting case. Its the large US port for roll on/roll off ships which are used mostly for Cars. So it's still a very successful port, but I believe this type of port is easily automated so employment doesn't track with port volumes exactly. Baltimore has been able to attract lots of other industries too, like Under Armor and medical services (due to Johns Hopkins) I also think Baltimores reputation for drugs and violence has hurt it. Crime is still a problem (though not like the media portrays it).
I think the big problem is not the level of crime but that some of the bad neighborhoods are right next to the downtown/tourist areas so its more visible to middle class people and tourists.
However, over the past ~20 years or so, its having a revival of sorts and has a nice downtown harbor area and up and coming neighborhoods. I grew up in DC/MD and know a lot of peers who have moved to Baltimore because the housing is outrageously cheap for what you get ("luxury" town houses are 1/3 the cost in Baltimore compared to DC). But once these people enter their 30s, become more financially stable and start looking to have kids, they move to the DC area or Suburban Maryland.
The suck of DC is huge though. Its impact is felt from Baltimore to Richmond. Because of the Federal government, DC will always have a stable demand for college educated employees which translates to service and hospitality jobs. If people can leave Baltimore or Richmond (or even Western Maryland and West Virginia) they do and go to DC.
Overall though, I don't think Baltimore is a problem city like Detroit is. Its definitely recovering. Its biggest problem is, ironically, housing is too cheap! Population peaked in 1970 at 905,787 and is now only 585,708. That leaves a lot of empty housing or empty lots. As I mentioned, housing is very cheap. Which is great for younger people and poor people, but the housing prices don't really rise. Looking at All-Transactions House Price Index data from the St. Louis Fed from 2013 to 2022, Baltimore goes from 200 to 300 while DC goes from 600 to over 1100. So if you can afford a house for >$600k, DC is probably a better place to be, not to mention the better job market.
I love these types of investigations though. I think here are global and national forces at play but then to really understand a specific city/metro area you have to dig in. Ever case seems to be different and equally as fascinating.
You also have to examine relative differences as well. Cincinnati is doing fine, yes, but it used to be one of *the* major US cities, and one of the fastest growing. That's all long past.
Yeah Cincinnati already had its crash. In 1830 it was the star of the country, and even in 1905 I think it was like 4th in population or something (with Buffalo right behind).
Meanwhile Miami and LA had under 20,000 people. I think the "rust belt" wasn't as hard on Cincinatti becuase it had already had its disappointing years in the frist half of the 1900s, as the rest of the coutnry blew past it.
Why overlook the commonly accepted explanation that movement of heavy industry (cars, steel) to Asia fully accounts for the implosion of American Midwest wealth? (And as for why *that* happened, the usual explanation is declining (containerized) international shipping costs, lower wages and better education in Asian workforces, and perhaps the general reduction in tariffs and protectionism.)
I mean, the reason Detroit was a wealthy place in the 50s through 80s is clearly cars, which used to be an excellent high-wage industry, and now the "Big" Three own 17% (GM), 15% (Ford), and 12% (Chrysler) of US domestic sales[1], and Detroit is an impoverished pit.
I don't think that's a competing explanation. I think that's the same explanation. Movement of heavy industry hurt cities that were dependent on heavy industry, and placement on shipping routes explains why some cities became highly dependent on heavy industry. The general growth trend everywhere was overwhelmed by the shrinkage of heavy industry for places that boomed on heavy industry, while the general growth trend outweighed the shrinkage of heavy industry in places that never got the heavy industry to begin with, or that were well-positioned to do the things that came after heavy industry.
I don't think it's just shipping. It's the combination of shipping and natural resources. The Minnesota-Illinois-Indiana-Ohio-Michigan-Pennsylvania region became the seat of heavy industry because of Great Lakes shipping, the Ohio, St. Lawrence, and severfal other highly convenient rivers, yes, but an equally vital component was the presence of excellent high grade and readily mined coal and iron ore in the region.
But even then, I don't see how this is very consistent with your hypothesis that the relative importance of river/lake shipping changed versus coean shipping. I don't really see that. Big heavy stuff still usually travels by boat if it can, river or lake or ocean -- there are still big ore carriers on the Great Lakes and nobody would move it by truck. As I said, my impression is that most people attribute the loss of American heavy industry to the 1950s-80s development of heavy industry in Asia (Japan, then Korea, then China), and the fact that as emerging or post-war economies they had much lower wage costs.
I grant you that a decline in ocean shipping costs was a key component of that, because only with cheap shipping can foreign wages matter, but I think that latter is mostly attributed to containerization and perhaps better navigation and storm warning, which affected shipping in general (not just across oceans), making it more secure and more reliable (in terms of schedule). Presumably the "Edmund Fitzgerald" wouldn't sink today, or at least everyone would've been rescued after the captain made a satphone call.
Would it be your hypothesis that even if industrial wages in Japan and Korea, say, were not lower than those in Pittsburgh or Detroit, the Midwest would still have lost its steel and cars?
In the mid to late 19th century Chicago replaced St Louis as the big inland city because there were rail bridges over the Mississippi that connected to Chicago in addition to the water routes, while St. Louis didn’t get a rail bridge until the changeover had already happened. I think that the technological shifts of the 20th century were always going to be at least that significant, even without changes in international markets. Changes in international markets of course made it much more significant, so that these cities actually went into decline rather than just being overtaken.
So your answer to the last question is "yes?" In that case, I'm interested in what you see as the mechanism. Let us suppose that the wages for steelworkers and on automative assembly lines are the same in 1970s Asia as they are in the US. Let us further suppose no government is subsidizing capital investment in cars and steel. Let's set all tariffs to zero, so that has no effect.
What is the mechanism, in this scenario, by which the source of cars and steel consumed in the US domestic market, say, shift from the American Midwest (plus Pennsylvania) to Asia?
I'm not claiming that even without competition from Asia, American manufacturing would have moved to Asia. I'm claiming that there was a period when river shipping was extremely dominant, and then there was a period when river shipping was only about as significant as rails and highways. Under the first period, the equilibrium sizes of cities would have New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, etc. as some of the largest cities in the country. Under the latter period, these cities wouldn't have any particular advantage over Columbus, Indianapolis, Austin, Denver, etc., and some of these cities would in fact have advantages as locations of state capitals. As a result, over the period of several decades, the former cities would lose some size while the latter cities gain size, as they all move towards the new natural equilibrium.
We don't need an additional exogenous factor of an industry leaving the country - just the natural shifts over time as industry moves towards places with comparative advantages would produce some of the same pattern. But of course, if domestic heavy industry ends up shrinking at the same time, then that will magnify the effect. Especially if the new industries that are growing in the same period happen to be ones that benefit from proximity to government more than from proximity to shipping.
Are you suggesting that currently voters elect older representatives because they prioritize wisdom, whereas in past decades voters didn't care as much about their representatives being wise so they elected younger ones? That seems somewhat unlikely even if we grant the initial assumption that older politicians are generally wiser than younger ones.
Every message board has different assumptions and I sometimes forget this. The post was meant sarcastic/tragic-funny.
Ideally, experienced age brings with it some humility and empathy paired with knowledge and insight - but not always.
"I’d say intelligence, energy, integrity. If you don’t have the last one, the first two will kill you. All you have is a crook who works hard. If a person doesn’t have integrity, you want them dumb and lazy." --Warren Buffet
21: " ... academics are already planning to replace it with a system of ranking applicants on diversity statements, how many racial-equity-related classes they took as an undergrad, and how many racial-equity-related extracurriculars"
1. Wow, can that be gamed. And it will. Entire fancy private schools in the Northeast will be given over to that for a ciriculum.
2. If I wanted to make an argument for shutting down most of Academia, I could ask for a better course of action.
3. How about a law, removing admissions from the schools discretion and making them entirely dependent on the results of national examinations. This is approximately the system followed by many European and Asian countries. What I would like better is a national lottery for admissions.
I had the same reaction as your 1. This will privilege upper middle class and immigrant Black students, who can play these games, not hurt well connected White students at the private Northeast schools, and come at the expense of poor White students who can’t play the game.
Actually underprivileged Black students meanwhile will continue to be stuck in shitty public schools that fail to academically prepare them for college, regardless of whether colleges can admit them on skin color alone.
That journal article is two assistant professors doing a circle jerk. It's literally one hundred percent "could" and "should" stuff, except for some vague factual assertions ("schools are...") that supported by no specific numbers or even named examples. There is no "will be" here, at least based on that article.
I don’t think the rise of “holistic admissions”, DEI class requirements, etc, which I was experiencing as a student in a state that had banned explicit racial AA, is merely the figment of a “circle jerk”. And that goes back at least 2 decades now.
In another comment you wrote “Also all factual claims in the piece are vague e.g. "ethnic studies is being implemented as a graduation requirement", "schools are implementing restorative justice practices", etc.” seemingly implying that we should believe that these things are NOT happening.
Well, data point of 1 against your spouse’s anecdote, but “ethnic studies as a requirement for graduation” absolutely is true at the large, pretty famous, public university I attended (and has been for 20 years). UC schools require a DEI statement from all job applicants, etc. Finding examples isn’t particularly hard.
Which, yeah, fair to critique the linked article for not providing examples, but on the flip side you’ve not really provided evidence that my prior should be “none of this is happening (or at least is not common”.
It surely can and will be gamed, but I doubt academe will care. What will gaming the new system look like? For undergraduates seeking admission to medical, law, and graduate programs, it will take the form of padding out the transcript with racial-equity classes. The departments that offer those will be delighted by the increased demand. We might assume that the undergrads will de-prioritize those courses and therefore do as little work as necessary, but it won't take long for them to figure out that getting a B or worse in Antiracism 101 is going to look terrible to graduate admissions officers. "Great grades in chemistry and biology, and 519 on the MCAT is impressive, but why did you do so poorly in your 'Holocaust, Slavery, and Misgendering' seminar?"
So they'll take those classes seriously. They won't just regurigate the bullet points. They'll put in the work to do well, and I expect that will mean that the racial-equity messaging will get through to a fair number of students who wouldn't take them voluntarily. Similarly, I'd love if every aspiring physician and lawyer had to take a course on Scholastic Philosophy or the Epistles of St. Paul, because I'd expect at least some of what's taught in those courses to stick.
In the end, I'm sure they'd prefer simply to admit more blacks, but if the second-best result is expanding the ranks of the woke, I doubt they'll be too upset.
24: "I can’t imagine there are many undiscovered lands left, so William is out of luck at least until we get off Earth."
There is a Prince William County in Virginia. When he was young, we bought a shirt for our son who is named William from the Prince William Yankees, a minor league baseball team.
They were a NY Yankees affiliate 19987-1993. They have switched locations, affiliations, and names a few times since then. It was a cute shirt when he was a toddler.
I think the description of the "fall line" thing in #34 isn't quite right. What allegedly differs sharply across the fall line isn't the _partisan lean_ of the districts, it's _how they've changed recently_, which allegedly tracks wealth and social class -- historically, poorer people have been more Democratic and richer people have been more Republican, but that's been changing of late, and the suggestion is that there's a sharp wealth gradient across the fall line.
Scott incorrectly describes the headline of the tweetstorm, but the tweets eventually retreat to Scott's claim. The map is recent changes, but eventually the tweets admits that the long-term partisan lean is a much larger effect. The recent change is probably just the effect of geography going away as the parties realign, rather than a recent effect of geography.
"40: " ... the cost of Biden’s college loan forgiveness has been estimated at ~$500 billion .."
The statement that the forgiveness is a cost is, at best, a distortion. The loans were made years ago, the money long since went out the door.
The accounting showed no cost because they counted the student's obligation to repay the amount as an asset equal to the loan which showed no impact on the deficit, even though the money was borrowed and increased the debt.
The loans will never be repaid at their face amount due to their speculative nature and the inevitable vicissitudes of life (premature death, chronic illness, simple failure, etc.). A private lender would have been required to charge the the forecast defaults against the asset over their life time, thus disclosing the true cost. The Federal Government, just assumed the perfect and impossible case.
The write down for the forgiveness is at worst just adjusting the accounting failure to the reality of the situation.
Was it fair? No. Was it wise? No. Will it be repeated? Yes.
The real winner here are the colleges, that already spent all the dough from their wildly inflated tuition bills on sweet sinecures for administrators and fancy buildings.
>The write down for the forgiveness is at worst just adjusting the accounting failure to the reality of the situation.
That's only the case if 100% of the forgiven debt would never have been repaid. I don't know how much would have gotten repaid if not forgiven, but I'm pretty confident it's a lot more than zero. Best guess is that a bit over 90% would get repaid, based on stats that 10-12% of student loan dollars were in "serious delinquency" throughout the 2010s and about 5-10% of defaulted loan dollars get recovered each year. And the 10-12% "serious delinquency" rate probably overstates the problem because loan dollars that have been repaid have been removed from the denominator.
PredictIt is a wishcasting shitshow where sometimes the wishcasters get lucky. People who take it too seriously should not be trusted. I've made money there, although typically I am too poor to dump hundreds of dollars into limbo for months.
Anyone looking at the PI numbers these days is a fool. It is flooded with "Trumper Pumpers" who are way more delusional than even the "Bernie Bros" were.
They literally have no evidence or arguments for their position. Even Trafalgar poll results don't support the market movements these days.
But... the whole point of prediction markets is if there are indeed systematic distortions in the market price, then you can pick up the suckers money. You seem to say that you don't want to do this, but why do you think other people won't? Then there's also the fact that it seems to have been historically a little better than the tetlock superforecasters that actually predicting the truth (if I recall correctly? Can't find the citation even tho I expected it to be very easy to find)
I also remember many many accusations that the price was fake and being manipulated by Trump Pumpers on the 2016 election night... by many people who thought a Trump win was ludicrously impossible.
I would do it if I had a few thousand dollars laying around. Not all of us are that fortunate. Gotta have money to make money.
I actually believed that Trump would win so I can't say much about the people who said the markets were fake.
As far as price distortions, the problem is that PI is not big enough. Firstly you have the $850 cap and other limitations. Secondly most people betting serious cash use non-US markets.
Look I understand the theory of the ideal prediction market. The issue is that PI is not that. PI has historically been less accurate than 538 and the RCP simple average. Of course you compare it to the morons at HuffPo and PEC? in 2016 and it looks very good.
I think they are. If I had ~1700 lying around I'd put it all on 47/46- for R Senate seats. Sadly I am not rich. I made a decent return in 2019 betting on Bernie in the Dem primary, I sold right before Warren began her brief run to the top. I don't think I got the full value because I didn't have enough money to max out, though.
Predict It is not an idealized better market. It has a lot of restrictions to dodge regulation, which have failed pending their lawsuit with the CTFC resolving in their favor. The markets are not especially liquid and the money involved is relatively small. There are Dem wishcasters, too, but they lack the numbers of the Trumper Pumpers. If you watched the market you'd see what I mean.
The summary of 18 pretty radically misstates how navigability is determined. So, the example given is the navigability determination for the Los Angeles River by the EPA. The actual report is here:
#25 - you buried one of the most interesting parts. The response from “liberals” reversed when the question asked about “your sons / daughters” instead of generic “boys / girls”.
Lots of potential in exploring the implications of that with varying degrees of charity.
For me as well, that 2020 survey data was the most interesting of Scott's links. See page 79 of the report for some breakdowns by very/mostly/somewhat/not much/not at all: https://media.deseret.com/media/misc/pdf/afs/2020-AFS-Final-Report.pdf (but without liberal/conservative or male/female).
Unfortunately, the survey doesn't ask the same questions every year (https://csed.byu.edu/american-family-survey/). Some interesting things I found in 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2022 surveys:
On page 46 of 2022, 'Do you think schools today spend too much, the right amount or too little time teaching about the following topics?' When it comes to the Science question, I suspect Liberal Democrats and Conservative Republicans do not have fully overlapping definitions of 'Science'.
See also pages 47-48 of 2022, on merit and achievement in schools, and page 81, on relationship status.
>What? Has anyone even proposed a mechanism for that?
Sure some projects are explicitly "racist" if helping/targetting minority groups in a way that is probably strcitly speaking illegal under fair housing law, but which no one cares about or looks at if your hurting whites.
So some organization in a 50% white, 25% latino, 25% black community will come under huge scrutiny if the beneficiaries are 90% white. Possibly including federal lawsuit and recapture of any federal funds.
On the other hand if the beneficiaries are 100% latino and developed by an organization focusing on ESL people and looking for ESL beneficiaries, well that is seen as good and now one is doing anything, while strictly speaking probably being illegal.
If an organization builds a Roman-themed group house for people who can speak Latin, is that also probably housing discrimination against blacks and Asians, according to federal law? (I assume blacks and Asians are less likely than whites and Hispanics to speak Latin.)
That is a little interesting, but the effect size there is pretty small. It's about 41% for "boys" to 48% for "your son". That's a smaller change than Conservatives estimate of "boys" versus "your son" in the opposite direction.
On the Wikimedia link/thread, I'm less concerned about where they're putting the money and more concerned that they are regranting money to things that aren't Wikipedia. The appeal they make is very much "please keep Wikipedia running" while the actual spending is "oh, we need like half the money to keep the site running". I'm mostly upset that they preyed on my desire to keep a thing I love in the world to get money from me that they didn't need to keep the thing in the world. That money had higher marginal utility allocated elsewhere.
Item 21 would be very alarming if true as stated, but it isn't. Or at least that Inside Higher Education article doesn't represent any evidence for it.
I shared the article with my spouse who now does college-admissions counseling and who was previously an associate dean of admissions. She pointed out correctly that the authors are simply a pair of assistant professors who write about such topics; and also that their article simply _proposes_ that universities "can consider" yadda yadda. The whole thing is a string of "might" do this, "could" do that, etc.
Also all factual claims in the piece are vague e.g. "ethnic studies is being implemented as a graduation requirement", "schools are implementing restorative justice practices", etc. Zero numbers or even named examples. There are more than 3,000 degree-granting colleges in the USA and nearly 27,000 high schools; it requires only 2 in order to support the vague statement that "schools are...." My personal experience across many topic areas has been that broad vague factual handwaving offered with zero numbers or even specific examples invariably proves to be just air.
So the statement that "academics are planning to", at least based on that article, is a fairly hilarious (to my spouse anyway) overstatement. "Inside Higher Education has printed writeups like that since forever; the next actual decisionmaker who reads one of them, let alone acts on it, will be the first."
Fair enough, and I've certainly had that feeling myself about this very topic. But the article linked here as item 21 doesn't even vaguely support it.
(Also we all tend to remember the times when a foreboding feeling turned out to be justified while forgetting the many other times that it turned out not to be.)
Heh.....in American academia?? Radicalized students issue demands literally every week, which was already an established norm when I entered college in the 1980s. (And we obviously didn't have any newfangled social media to do it with.)
My wife was an admissions staffer for a decade -- if she or her bosses had taken the time to respond to every new student or junior-faculty demand they'd have never had time to admit any new students.
I hope they won't because it would so obviously work against their stated goals. It's one thing to do this when hiring professors (where, u can plausibly either infer race or hire ppl u think will vote to hire more minorities) and quite another with HS students. Anyone who tries to do this will hopefully get talked out of it once it becomes clear how much easier it will be for rich white kids to game that requirement.
Thank you Paul Botts for a well-informed comment that let the air out of that gas bag of an "article" -- in truth is just a weak opinion piece -- from Inside Higher Education.
Thanks also for your sharing your remark that "My personal experience across many topic areas has been that broad vague factual handwaving offered with zero numbers or even specific examples invariably proves to be just air." Seen. Happens all the time, both written and said. In rhetorical form, it especially beloved by conservative commentators to rile up "our viewers at home," with statements beginning with declarations like "Hospitals are now requiring. . ." or "Police are being told. . . " without any factual data about which of the country's 6,000 hospitals or 18,000 police agencies are supposedly making these claims.
Yes I do. I understand the desire of admissions officials to attempt to mitigate in some way the very real unfairness and bias that has been used against some communities for generations, but admitting students based on the number of diversity, inclusion or ethnic studies classes they took in high school is a ridiculous way to redress wrongs. Obviously. And I don't believe academics ARE planning this, despite the unsourced, data-free claims made in this lame straw-man opinion piece.
Definitely. I'd just need some evidence that some college administrators, any of them, anywhere, are actually planning it before I started investing lifespan into opposing it.
Not interested in commenting on the substance of the issue at hand, but in academic prose, almost every sentence is hedged around with defensive "might"s, "can"s and "could"s. There are many academic contexts in which a sentence like "so-and-so might/can/could do X" is correctly read by the audience as a strong assertion that so-and-so must do X.
I would consider the source more important than the strength of the language.
Yes I agree, with the caveat that Inside Higher Ed likes to see itself as a translator of academic-speak into plainer English for the rest of the world to read. Though it's hard to tell whether that impulse applies here since this was a personal op-ed type writeup rather than any sort of news reporting by the journal staff.
I've argued elsewhere that the fairness doctrine was responsible for increased polarization, mostly focusing on the AM radio. That article does a much better job covering its influence on 90s TV media and the resulting segments. I'm young enough that it was my parents and grandparents watching these shows rather than my own cohort. It was easy to assume that broadcast news had always been like that.
What's the next step in journalism? Or the *next* next step, since I think it's fair to read the last ten years of social media as a categorical change both in coverage and in attitudes. The pessimist in me says it's filter bubbles, which have a strong memetic appeal even if they're less "useful." Experiments in aggressively free/balanced forums tend to run to one sort of capture or another. The Internet is as close as we can currently get to radical exit rights, and I'd consider it possible that hitherto-empty niches could be populated with AI-scraped or -generated content. I'm not confident that desire for authenticity or a similar sentiment will overrule that.
I foresee about a thousand scenarios where things go poorly, but at least one where things go really well.
If those filter bubbles manage to produce genuinely good content by getting an ideologically diverse readership/viewership onto a few great publications, that may set off a cascade where more people are aware of and read/view those good programs.
Bari Weiss' Substack looks to me like a fledgling possibility for this. A test case, if you will. She's a pretty solid Democrat, and came from the left to some kind of center because she felt betrayed by the left. Her readership has a lot of conservatives, who seem to genuinely like her reporting. She had a guest writer from a lefty publication who got eviscerated in the comments for a skewed leftist perspective, and hasn't been back. That's amazing to me, because Bari isn't a conservative, but manages to write enough sane things that a lot of her readers are, but still like her page.
CNN trying to rebrand itself may be a similar process. They went so far left that they lost reality, and consciously noted it.
>The markets give the Republicans better odds, and seem to be counting on pollsters missing paranoid anti-pollster Republicans.
These markets know that they weight the results to match population statistics, right?
Like, yes, it's possible for there to be polling errors for sure, but the cause has to be more complicated than 'Republicans not talking to pollsters'. That's a very obvious trend that you can correct for by weighting to party registration, actual vote turnout from past elections, and many other sources of data that give you a good idea of how many republicans there actually are in a place.
>Given that all the “Trust And Safety” stuff seems more about protecting AI companies’ reputations than really preventing boobs or swastikas from being drawn, what are we actually doing here?
Replace 'reputation' with 'brand identity' and yeah, pretty much.
Every major brand spends a lot of money on creating and maintaining its brand identity. Parents won't let their kids use Disney's website if users plaster the forums with porn, Christians won't use Craigslist if it is widely and explicitly used by prostitutes to meet clients, and investors will pull out of OpenAI if it becomes synonymous with deepfake porn and automated Nazi bots. This is just a normal part of running a brand in the modern economy.
Of course, the difference here is that they're trying to smuggle the costs of maintaining their brand under the headline of 'AI Safety' in order to get additional good will for the same price. Definitely this has negative externalities if anyone believes it, and they should be called out until making false claims like this ends up being a net negative for their brand and they stop making them.
>the idea that if you want a movie character to have a different race or gender or just be played by a different actor, you can make it happen
I'm not aware of much work being done on AI for voice generation. Changing gender/race/nationality may not make a very watchable movie without this technology, and it's the part I expect us to be farthest away from.
Aside from, you know, changing scenes and the entire plot in ways that are thematically appropriate for the changes to the character such that the movie retains equal artistic merit, that's probably also an issue for a lot of movies. But by the time we have that we probably won't have humans involved in making moves in the first place.
>but the charities do also fund controversial work like opposing scientific objectivity
If you are going to write articles about how we need to carefully distinguish between 'Trump gets a lot of support from white supremacists' vs 'All white supremacists support Trump, but there aren't enough of them for it to be fairly characterized as "a lot of support,"' then could we please also carefully distinguish between 'Science shouldn't be objective' and 'Human scientists cannot be perfectly objective, so we should interrogate claims of objectivity and investigate the role bias actually plays in the scientific process in reality'?
Because this comes up *a lot*, whenever we talk about any progressive-aligned or post-modern science group, and it's pretty much always the same story. Post-modernism doesn't say we *shouldn't* have good things, it questions the narratives of people who *claim* that we already have perfectly good things and can only maintain those things by keeping those people in unquestioned power.
As always, if a claim of bad actions by people you dislike seems really appealing to you, it deserves more scrutiny, not less.
>Here’s a variant of the Hollow Mask Illusion I hadn’t seen before:
This one's a classic, there's a free diagram that you can cut out and make yourself with some tape, we had a bunch around the office.
Note that at the size shown in the tweet it probably works a lot better with a monocular camera than with human eyes, and there's probably a limited set of distance/height/lighting it works for in person. But the smaller sizes work this well to the naked eye at a large range of view configurations.
> Post-modernism doesn't say we *shouldn't* have good things, it questions the narratives of people who *claim* that we already have perfectly good things and can only maintain those things by keeping those people in unquestioned power.
> As always, if a claim of bad actions by people you dislike seems really appealing to you, it deserves more scrutiny, not less.
Hmmm. You might need to take a little dose of that advice yourself.
To be specific, I'm unaware of anyone who claims we have perfectly good things and can only maintain those things by keeping certain people in unquestioned power.
Even Trumpers and other outgroup.
I do see people claiming that we have flawed, but reasonably good things, and that you should be very careful before tearing it all down, because what replaces it might not be as utopian as you had envisioned or hoped.
I see people claiming that it is an extremely hard problem to get society to a relatively polite state, and that the default is something more like a soul-crushing authoritarian nightmare, and that if you tear down what we have in western civilisation today, you should expect soul-crushing authoritarian nightmares.
I see people claiming history has borne this out thousands of times, and that if you disagree, and feel that THIS TIME when we tear it all down, it'll be replaced by utopia, that you should have some solid evidence to back that up.
And yes, this rhymes with "what we have now is fine, and those who are currently in power are probably not the worst." But this absolutely is not the same as what we have being perfect, and those in power should not be questioned.
>Andd 'Human scientists cannot be perfectly objective, so we should interrogate claims of objectivity and investigate the role bias actually plays in the scientific process in reality'?
Yeah, that's not what this is about. These people are far-left ideologues and they don't like many of the findings of science, and the almost complete lack of black "representation" amongst the top scientists in the world. This isn't a principled look into the the epistemic foundations of science - it's a way of saying that people's "lived experiences" should be given more weight than objective scientific methods.
> questions the narratives of people who *claim* that we already have perfectly good things and can only maintain those things by keeping those people in unquestioned power.
The results of European science speak for themselves. These progressive challengers to science have literally nothing to show for themselves. If their way of doing things is better, they should be able to make more correct predictions about the world. They can't. And if your conception of science doesn't allow you to make correct predictions then it's completely worthless.
Nobody says science is perfect. Literally nobody. Which means you or anyone else portraying people as saying this are obviously detached from reality and so the rest of what you're saying is likely false. People say that science is the best we have, and abandoning the things that allowed rapid gains in scientific and technical knowledge over the past few centuries is probably a recipe for disaster and the people proposing such things are in no way knowledgeable enough to be determining if such abandonments are a good idea or not.
Given the well documented hostility to science generally from these far-left groups when it contradicts their ideological narratives, nobody should be expected to take them seriously.
> Nobody says science is perfect. Literally nobody.
Perhaps the fact that nobody is saying this *now* is because the postmodern ideas have already become a part of the water supply.
Also, science worship is a motte-and-bailey process. On one hand, we rhetorically admit that science is not perfect, and that many scientific findings do not replicate. On the other hand, whenever someone disagrees with some specific scientific statement, we start yelling "it's the science, idiot" at them.
So although the science is not perfect in theory, we still require people to treat it as perfect in practice. (No one would take seriously an antivaxer asking whether the research proving the effectiveness and harmlessness of vaccines was successfully replicated.)
This is toxoplasma. I can tell from how you're talking about it that you haven't actually read what these groups have to say for themselves outside of carefully selected quotes from their enemies, or that you've only investigated a small number of small groups brought to your attention for being extra bad. Everything you're saying is how the opponents of these groups define what they believe, not what they actually believe and say themselves.
It's like if you say 'The term "toxic masculinity" means that all men are bad and evil and everyone should act like women,' then you're not actually familiar with feminist theory and don't have anything useful to say about it. Same thing here.
You have a made up opponent in your head, that your 'team' has fed to you so that you can dismiss any objections to your team's power and methods.
If you don't think that's a very normal thing that happens to everyone, you may not have been paying attention to how politics works. I know that's true, that's why I try to spend more time defending my side and explaining their actual beliefs that I'm familiar with, rather than attacking the other side for my understanding of their beliefs which I'm not actually well versed in outside of takedown videos produced by my side.
If you think that's a normal thing that happens to other people but not you... stop and notice the skulls.
Dude. They literally describe scientific objectivity as COLONIALIST. And those are the people this discussion was about.
>It's like if you say 'The term "toxic masculinity" means that all men are bad and evil and everyone should act like women,' then you're not actually familiar with feminist theory and don't have anything useful to say about it. Same thing here.
I don't need to be familiar with feminist theory. Everyone I've ever seen use that term has apparently used it in the "wrong" way, so even if the "feminist theory" definition is "correct" and somehow less stupid, it's irrelevant because that's what the term means now.
>You have a made up opponent in your head, that your 'team' has fed to you so that you can dismiss any objections to your team's power and methods.
No, I'm literally referring to the people that Scott posted. BECAUSE THATS WHAT WE WERE TALKING ABOUT.
But no, every leftwing critique of science I've ever seen is more or less as stupid as this. "Racist" this, "white supremacist" that.
I'm well versed in epistemology and philosophy of science. I know the real issues around the validity of the scientific method and objectivity. But literally NONE of these leftists understand it or are coming from a position of good faith philosophical argument. It's all ideological.
>If you think that's a normal thing that happens to other people but not you... stop and notice the skulls.
The skulls were made by anti-scientific loonies who are the ideological brethren of people who call science "colonialist".
Bingo. OpenAI are just trying to position themselves as a good, safe vendor for other companies who want to sprinkle AI-sauce on their products. I'm sure they actually *are* trying to make their product safe (for some definition of safe), and not just make it perceived that way. But it's for business reasons, not some humanitarian goal.
Re weighing and polling errors. A typical response rate for a poll these days is somewhere in low one-digit percents. It seems like quite a leap of faith to assume that the minuscule group of responders is very similar to non-responders after you weigh the responses. All we know is that it kind of, sort of worked in the past.
If you know of a good argument for why the 100 responders out of the 10,000 that got the phone call should be similar to the non-responders, please enlighten me - I would very much appreciate it.
Yes, but that's a completely different argument from 'republicans not talking to pollsters', which is exactly what I said.
If you just get a low response rate for Republicans, you can weight them up in the analysis to the population baseline and be fine. To say nothing of just calling more Republicans until you meet your quota, which is the first step most places would actually do.
If the Republicans you *do* get are *unrepresentative* of Republicans as a whole, in ways that are not correlated with any of the other factors you are weighting on or correcting for, *and also* in ways that affect how/whether they will vote on election day, *and also* those same distortions don't affect your sample of democrats in roughly the same way, then that *is* a real problem. You can correct for not getting enough people in a given demographic, but not for the people you get in a demographic being outliers from that demographic.
But that's a much more complicated and nuanced problem than 'low response rate among Republicans', and a less intuitively obvious one.
How would you propose to scale up the few responses you get from registered likely voter Republicans to what all of them would say? I bet polling companies would really like to know how to do that; the big problem being the "likely voter" test, which is ordinarily administered in the process of asking the survey questions. You can certainly scale up to all registered Republicans, but this is worthless, since polls of "registered voters" are basically useless when only half of registered voters actually vote. It's doubly useless if on the other side you're using likely voter Democrats, since you wouldn't be scaling uniformly.
Yes, if the tiny sample of responders was representative of non-responders also, this would be fine. But nobody knows if that's currently the case - and I'm not aware of any good arguments as to why that would currently be the case.
The problem is, with such low response rates, the people who do respond are definitely some kind of an outlier - they did respond when nobody else would, for one thing. They might not be an outlier in any ways that matter for a particular poll, but I wouldn't put any money on that. I would, however, put money on responders having more free time than non-responders, being more likely not to work crazy long hours, being more likely not to have young kids at home, being generally less stressed, having.a more positive view of pollsters and media... I could continue the list. You will notice that this list looks like it does not currently describe the majority of Republicans or possibly even the majority of the population, and you will also notice that the differences might be correlated with what people think and how they vote.
We might still get lucky. Maybe responders and non-responders are similar enough where it matters that it would all average out to something sufficiently similar to reality. But there's really no way to know.
I am talking about the intellectual movement, not some hackneyed conception that says everything 50s is modernism and today isn't.
Derrida/Foccault had a few interesting insights, but jsut a few and they are both way overhyped. Pretty much everything built on top of that is garbage.
The enlightenment was good, things seeking to tear it down are bad.
Regarding the verb-noun word formation, it reminds me of an old B.C. comic strip in which the cavemen are choosing names for animals. Referring to a shaggy creature with a very long snout, a character asks "What does it do?" The reply is "It eats ants." So they promptly decide to call it an eatanter.
“ “[The Salem/CSPI forecasting tournament] thinks there's only a 22% chance that the 538 deluxe model will favor Republicans on election day, [but that] there's a 47% chance Republicans will actually win the Senate.”
This is a somewhat misleading interpretation of the market, as we would expect this sort of outcome (where P(R’s win the Senate) > P(538 thinks R’s win the Senate) even if the markets believed 538’s polling was perfectly accurate. I walk through the math demonstrating this here:
Also, the null hypothesis for the whole “congress is getting older” seems to be that it is a function of A. Seniority based politics, where the person who has been there the longest is in charge, which means that the high status people in politics will proportionately be older and B. A longer lifespan, where more people are able to function further into their 70’s and 80’s than previously. The way these interact is that more people are able to hang on in politics longer, and because they’ve been in so long they are disproportionately at the top.
If you could do self-supervised learning on a dataset that includes nudity and swastikas, but *in a principled way* produce a generative model that reliably will not produce nudity or swastikas even when asked, yet still performs adequately in other situations, that seems like useful progress towards goals quite relevant to AI safety. Likewise getting a model to produce racially diverse images when that doesn't reflect the dataset.
Of course "add a keyword filter + a nudity classifier + randomly add Black to the prompt" is not a good solution, it's kind of depressing. But it seems like "it would be better if we knew how to solve this problem properly" is actually something everyone can agree on: the AI ethics people, the AI safety people, and the upper management at tech companies.
"22: Stuart Armstrong argues that the “Sadistic Conclusion” - one of the potential alternatives to the Repugnant Conclusion usually considered even worse and not worth thinking about - is actually underrated."
> Then, given that this underclass is a bad outcome (and given a few assumptions as to how outcomes are ranked) then we can find other bad outcomes that are not quite as bad as this one. Such as… a single victim, a tiny bit below the line of “worth living”. So the sadistic conclusion is not saying anything about the happiness level of a single created population. It’s simply saying that sometime (A) creating underclasses with slightly worthwhile lives can sometimes be bad, while (B) creating a victim can sometimes be less bad. But the victim isn’t playing a useful role here: they’re just an example of a bad outcome better than (A), only linked to (A) through superficial similarity and rhetoric.
This argument is pretty much what I was thinking. When comparing a very large group of people just above some line, to 1 person just below that line, it seems obvious that the latter situation is better (or, more precisely, it seems obvious that if you can make them arbitrarily close, then you can make the latter situation better). Note that in my intuition, this line doesn't even have to be near the point of "barely worth living." It could be well below that point and you still would want 1 slightly worse off person than many slightly better off people.
I also agree the name is misleading. It's only "sadistic" in the sense that the worst-off person is (very slightly) worse off than the worst-off person in the other scenario.
Honestly I find the whole thought experiment to be a fallacious attempt to explore these ideas. I find it to be overly reductionist... not solely because real life utility/livelihood is more complicated, but because it omits resource constraints and so many other key factors. I understand they are trying to simplify the complexity, but I think they lose purpose/meaning in doing so.
One characteristic of nondemocratic regimes is that leaders cannot be removed from office by legal means: in most authoritarian regimes, no institutional way of dismissing incompetent rulers is available, and overthrowing them is costly. Anticipating this, people who have a say in the selection of the leader are likely to resort to alternative strategies to limit his tenure. In this paper, we examine empirically the “strategic gerontocracy” hypothesis: Because selecting aging leaders is a convenient way of reducing their expected time in office, gerontocracy will become a likely outcome whenever leaders are expected to rule for life. We test this hypothesis using data on political leaders for the period from 1960 to 2008, and find that dictators have shorter life expectancies than democrats at the time they take office. We also observe variations in the life expectancies of dictators: those who are selected by consent are on average closer to death than those who seize power in an irregular manner. This finding suggests that gerontocracy is a consequence of the choice process, since it disappears when dictators self-select into leadership positions.
So if the people who select leaders can't remove them later, they can shorten terms by selecting old leaders. But that doesn't seem relevant to the U.S.; the same voters who put leaders in office could remove them 2 to 6 years later, if they wanted to.
>39: Very large Pew poll of black Americans. Findings include: 60% say racism is an extremely big problem, 15% say they are regularly (64% from-time-to-time, 21% neither of the above) discriminated against
We should all be well aware that this is no way proves the existence of widespread discrimination. Not that respondents are outright lying, just that the perception of discrimination should be expected to be >> actual discrimination. Virtually all racial differences in outcomes are assumed by most leftists to be the result of discrimination, even when there are obvious alternative explanations supported by the data.
An obvious example would be policing. Black people have more police interactions, but they also live in areas with higher crime rates, so this is what we should expect to happen in race-neutral society. But many will perceive this as "discrimination" against blacks, which if we're taking to be correct even in light of what I said above, then this would also mean that the police "discriminate" against men relative to women, and against whites relative to asians.
The problem with asymmetric polls is that you cannot figure out similar things from the data.
A proper poll design would ask people of *all* major ethnic groups. Then you might find out e.g. that among every ethnic group, at least 15% believe their group is discriminated against. So you could assume that this 15% is essentially a noise, and focus on the differences, like if some other group reports 40%, then you need an explanation for the extra 25%.
Controlling for environment might then find out that e.g. in poor areas the "everyone feels discriminated" noise raises from 15% to 30%, or something like that.
If your entire poll design is "let's ask black people whether they feel discriminated against", the result is predictably going to be "a certain number of black people feel discriminated against". (Unless the intention is to obtain exactly this result.)
From this perspective, the useful parts of the poll is comparing different results against each other. Like, some black people may feel discriminated against for wrong reasons, but it is nonetheless interesting that black women are more likely to feel discriminated against than black men. -- I could not have predicted the result of this one. Like, on one hand, men are socialized to feel more responsible for what happens to them. On the other hand, men have more interaction with police than women, and that is one area where racial discrimination is probably felt quite strongly.
Regarding #33, on the Wikimedia Foundation: This is mostly correct, but missing some important context.
The Foundation did make some clear culture war statements during the BLM push in 2020, along with transferring money to culture war causes around the same time, via the "Knowledge Equity Fund" which was explicitly inspired by the George Floyd protests. This received some pretty strong pushback from the volunteer editor community. In the 2021 Wikimedia Foundation Board Elections, candidates were specifically asked by volunteers whether they would support spending on areas not related to the Wikimedia projects, and elected trustees that were largely opposed to such actions. (Quotes from the elected candidates, on the question: "Considering that the money are needed for the development of Wikimedia movement, especially in the Global South, I don’t think WF has any money to spare for any other causes irrespective of their worth. There’s an NGO or 100 for any cause, and WF cause is exclusively Wikimedia movement support.", "The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to support and empower the communities of the Wikimedia projects and the projects themselves. Among the many worthy goals that one can set, we choose to pursue this one. We should devote virtually all the resources of the Wikimedia Foundation to it. [...] The Wikimedia Foundation looks relatively big and well-resourced (in terms of money, people, etc.), and it is tempting to use some of them for other purposes. However, the truth is that the Wikimedia Foundation is not so big, and the resources are very limited. If we scatter them in too many different places, we will end up achieving nothing - and the Wikimedia projects will be the first to pay the price.", "I'd say that, given that our resources are scarce, and given that as I write in my statement, we also want to grow in regions less covered, as well as get ready for new tech and social challenges, we need to be really smart and selective about what purposes outside our immediate focus we choose. At this time, I'd be reluctant to start funding projects entirely unrelated to Wikimedia projects.")
A recent post on the Wikimedia mailing list by Chris Keating, who seems to generally be pretty well-informed, states: "[M]y perception is that the Knowledge Equity Fund was initially a deliberate attempt led by US-based staff to have the WMF 'do something' to align itself with a broader progressive movement in the USA. I believe the main advocates for this have now departed, that it was never a particularly good fit with the WMF's overall approach to grantmaking, that the evolution of the WMF's approach to this fund was positive, but still if the whole thing is now forgotten about that's probably no bad thing." The KEF still exists, and _sorta_ seems to be winding down (it hasn't done any spending since its initial grants in September 2021, but they are still theoretically planning to do another round, which may or may not happen).
On the massive spending increase: Yes, the Foundation increased its spending rapidly for many years, at a rate which is generally agreed to have been unhealthy. The Board recently hired a new CEO (along with a mostly-new executive team), who apparently intends to do things somewhat differently. A recent quote from the Board vice-chair: "I do believe that under previous management, WMF has grown too fast. That said, we have new management, and the focus now is on stopping that growth and stablizing the organization." It is true that most spending is not spent on hosting. It is mostly spent on software development. Much of this is very useful in improving the websites. Some spending is on less-useful things. (Unfortunately, it is much more difficult to get a sense of the specifics, as the Foundation has slipped a lot on spending transparency in recent years, but the Executives have stated that they intend to fix this.)
Are the Wikimedia Foundation's fundraising messages misleading? Yes, they are. The English Wikipedia community recently came to a clear consensus that the fundraising messages are misleading, and asked that the WMF change them. The WMF did not respond, IIRC.
Is donating to the Wikimedia Foundation necessary to keep Wikipedia from disappearing? No. The Endowment recently reached a size such that interest alone is enough to pay for raw hosting costs indefinitely. (This was a major goal for a long time, as hosting itself was considered by many to be the "ultimate" aim which must be protected above all else.)
Is donating to it _worthwhile_? Maybe. A lot of the technology development helps Wikipedia greatly. Some of its inflating budget is, frankly, quite harmful to Wikipedia. Whether the overall balance is such that donating to the WMF does more good than donating elsewhere is a very complicated question, but I don't think the linked tweets do much to enlighten people on that.
"What do you think about the Wikimedia Foundation using funds for purposes not related to Wikimedia projects?"
The four candidates who were elected in 2021, in the order Odd anon quotes them:
Victoria Doronina ("I don’t think WF has any money to spare...There’s an NGO or 100 for any cause, and WF cause is exclusively Wikimedia movement support.")
Lorenzo Losa ("The Wikimedia Foundation looks relatively big and well-resourced (in terms of money, people, etc.), and it is tempting to use some of them for other purposes. However...")
Dariusz Jemielniak (the weasel-worded "smart and selective...*entirely* unrelated" one)
Odd anon did not quote Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, but Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight's quote is by far the best for the case Odd anon is making:
"I would want assurance that there is a financial surplus; that in compliance with the donor policy, that donors are aware of how their donations are used; and that the Wikimedia community participates in the nomination/decision process in order to ensure equity in decision-making. It's a fact that the Knowledge Equity Fund has already been established..."
Notably, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight was the only one to address the elephant in the room. She actually mentioned the Knowledge Equity Fund by name, which even the question itself didn't. I described Dariusz Jemielniak's as weasel-worded, but really, all three of the others rather seemed to be avoiding plain talk about the elephant in the room, as did the question itself.
Also notable is that Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight was the only one to raise the idea that taking people's money under false pretenses might be unethical, something raised by the talk page linked from Chris Keating's post.
Odd anon's description of Chris Keating's post seems misleading. When Chris Keating gave his perception, it was specifically in the context of Chris Keating *asking* whether their perception was accurate; Chris Keating obviously does not agree with the description of Chris Keating as well-informed.
I do not see any basis whatsoever for Odd anon's belief that the KEF "seems to be winding down" or that the second round of grants "may not happen". Or, well, the KEF is/was a grant of fixed size, and its remaining money is therefore always decreasing monotonically, so in that sense it has been "winding down" since its inception. And the second round of grants "may not happen" only in the sense that WMF headquarters "may" be struck by an asteroid first. Otherwise it will definitely happen. For whatever reason, $8.723 million was irrecoverably transferred to Tides Advocacy, and there is no way that the WMF can get it back. Tides Advocacy has not yet re-granted it to individual organizations, but that can't not happen at this point.
The only thing we can say there is that three of the newly-elected trustees (out of eleven total trustees) seem opposed.
Incidentally, the reason I describe Dariusz Jemielniak's statement as weasel-worded is because people (not Dariusz Jemielniak) have been trying to spin Tides Advocacy as sort of kind of not entirely unrelated to Wikipedia, really, if you think about it properly:
Mario Gómez: "Does this mean that funds will be used for work not related to Wikimedia projects?"
Gnangarra: "since our goal is to freely share the sum of all knowledge anything that leads to that goal does benefit the projects...Everything that is freely licensed becomes available to the Movement anyway"
Chris Keating's question about whether the trustees who came up with the idea are among the trustees who departed with the 2021 election, or are still among the eleven trustees, was dodged. This seems in keeping with the overall trend on https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund of evasiveness and secrecy; indeed it seems that evasiveness and secrecy is exactly the main complaint: "According to the auditors, the $8.723M were transferred to Tides Advocacy 'during the year ended June 30, 2020'. In other words, at least five months passed during which no one at the Foundation thought it would be right to publicise the fact that millions of dollars had been diverted to non-WMF ends, without any community consultation whatsoever, bypassing all the established grants processes." It appears the grant was kept a complete secret until literally the last possible moment, when the WMF published its legally-mandated annual accounting. The decision process behind the grant remains a secret to this day. (Though I would presume they are still among the eleven trustees, else why dodge Chris Keating's question?)
Andreas Kolbe provided this summary of the transparency complaints:
---------------------
Yair Rand (quoted below) inquired last December [five months after $8.723 million was irrecoverably transferred to Tides Advocacy, the first time anyone outside the WMF found out they'd done that] about a 2019/2020 WMF
expenditure item, the $8.723M the WMF transferred to a "Wikimedia Knowledge
Equity Fund managed and controlled by Tides Advocacy".
The 2019/2020 financial audit FAQ[1] said, "The Wikimedia Foundation is
still setting up the specifics of the Knowledge Equity Fund and will share
more information *in late 2020*."
Replying to Yair last December, Lisa updated this[2], saying, "We intend to
announce the Knowledge Equity Fund *in early 2021*, once we have a bit more
details and specifics worked out."
Inquiring for this information again *in April*, I was told by Kassia on
Meta[3] that there had been delays, but "We will be able to share more
information *in May* [eleven months after $8.723 million was irrecoverably transferred to Tides Advocacy] about the Equity Fund, its structure and eligibility
for the Fund, and we will also have materials on Meta with more detail."
If any such information was published in May (I may possibly have missed
it), could you please provide a link, and if not, could you please publish
On 20 and 27, I never understood why people trusted any statistics provided by dictatorships.
Why on earth would anyone expect that a government that jails and kills its country's dissidents would be honest when providing numbers that may make it look bad?
OK, some people do use these numbers for their political purposes - Cuba's presumably awesome healthcare was touted as a reason the government in the US should take as much control of healthcare as possible, and thus we ended up with the Obamacare monstrosity. But other than people who need these numbers to be good to help with promoting their agenda, why would anyone think they somehow reflect reality?
Good question. My guess would be that it is very difficult to get the correct numbers otherwise, so at the end, you have people who say "I don't know" and some who use the official numbers. Then the latter are used as a source by someone else (who wouldn't trust the dictator, but trusts someone who trusted the dictator), etc.
There are also people who try to estimate the real numbers from harder to fake data. Warren Nutter did that for the Soviet economy, came up with much lower numbers than the official ones, mostly rejected by others interested in the question. I believe they still turned out to be somewhat higher than the real numbers revealed after the fall of the Soviet Union.
"In the Soviet Union, the government would say “We had a good harvest this year!” and everyone would notice they had said good rather than glorious, and correctly interpret the statement to mean that everyone would starve and the living would envy the dead."
Yes, but a lot of people just take the numbers at face value. If these numbers were by default treated as bogus, as they should be, there would be no point in comparing them to numbers elsewhere and no need for debunking, and nobody would be surprised by the results.
I guess a lot of people are either very naive or just really want to believe that certain kinds of regimes work.
This is just another example of the default human mode of communication in terms of true/false being clearly exposed as much weaker than the language of uncertainty and error bars. A statistic provided by a dictatorship is much less reliable than that of a democracy, and yet neither is the first completely useless, nor the second completely trustworthy. Our methods of communication lack universally recognized ways of concisely relaying this information.
There are of course all sorts of reasons why we ended up with this state of affairs, some of which you mentioned. I'd say that the underlying issue is that in general people care about 'truth' much less than about many other things, like their agendas, tribal affiliation, convenience, etc. etc.
The supposed rediscovery of silphium has happened a few times- a near identical story went around back in 2017. I’ve been interested in silphium since I first heard of it in high school. I’d love it to be true, but even a similar plant with culinary potential would be interesting.
I read an article somewhere that theorized about why silphium couldn’t be cultivated outside Cyrenaica (northern Libya). Silphium might have had some complex ecology or root structure that defied transplantation. It’s also possible that the desirable version was a hybrid and couldn’t be grown from seed. Archaeologists never seem find the seeds amid remains of other foodstuffs.
On that note, I was surprised to find several other people at an ACX meetup a while back who are also into historic cooking. Any other ACX food history nerds here?
Yeah, I was going to say - it's not surprising that something in the same broad genus as fennel and the same narrow one as asafoetida (which is used in almost exactly the same ways as silphium was historically) would do some of the same nice things as asafoetida, whether or not it really is silphium.
Regarding 21. I think there's something worth pointing out. Under the current system it's a one actor system. The university says we want >X% black people, and quietly say and <Y% Asian people. <Z% Jews if you go back to the start of all this.
Under the hypothetical new system where they ask for lots of social justice courses its a two actor system. The university can select which courses give an admissions boost, and the students can change their studies to match. If the university says they want people who study Kendi, suddenly there's going to be a lot of Kendi summer schools catering to ambitious students.
If anything this might backfire and favour Asian students even more because they have the strongest traditions of extra-schooling focused on what universities want. And the more transparent they are about gaming the system against Asian students the higher the risk of a follow up court case.
I don't think its going to be that easily quantifiable. Rather it's just an added metric to muddy the waters enough so that universities can keep on accepting people based on racial quotas but now with the extra element of woke dei courses as the excuse for inevitably accepting who they were going to accept anyway. It's not like Unis have to give concrete reasons every time they accept or reject a candidate.
IMO the only real solution is making acceptance 100% based on transparent objective grades via SAT or any other standardized test. Anything else and we'll just get more of the same.
"IMO the only real solution is making acceptance 100% based on transparent objective grades via SAT or any other standardized test. Anything else and we'll just get more of the same."
I agree, but universities are moving in the exact opposite direction.
I think the criteria will be FAR more opaque than this and will be so vague as to essentially be an almost blank check for the universities to admit who they want. There certainly would not be a system of standardized scores or official items to check off, or really anything objective and optimizable. It will be a hoop to jump through, and then they pick who they want from there. And if after all that too many asians and whites get admitted, they will just change the rules again. They really have no obligation to abide by any standards of fairness or objectivity.
Regarding custom films, this has in principle been possible with CGI animated films for ages, but mostly doesn't happen. But they *do* make some changes! For example there's a Pixar movie where a kid gets broccoli pizza and hates it, in the Japanese version they changed broccoli to green peppers, because that has the right cultural association there. Swapping out a character is more work than that but not enormously more.
#28: well, the map is not the territory, but it's nice to see ACX being more or less at the exact centre of Rationalia. Surely a coincidence! Yggdracxil, the World-Blog.
The old SSC reddit being literally on another continent feels pretty true, too. Strange how far some apples have fallen from the original Tree of Knowledge. Or maybe it's more that the tree uprooted itself and walked away. (I guess one could take that even further back, to the LiveJournal days...)
Also interesting to note the conspicuous absences. Though I suppose anything could happen in The Illegible Isles...and that seemed like Feature Not Bug of certain infamous personalities.
I think these threads would benefit from a standardized syntax for commenters to use in order to reference links. e.g. "#22" or "22:" with "22" being frowned upon
I haven't checked every commment to see if my point has been made, but Scott says "I would still like to see a good analysis of whether the neoliberal wave was inevitable (because the mid-century statist policies which seemed to work so well for so long were unsustainable) or an overreaction to a contingent recession and if we hadn’t done it we could have returned to mid-century-style statist policies and they would have gone back to working well. I suspect inevitable but I haven’t seen any really good treatments of this question." I think he fails to consider that it might not have been inevitable and statist policies not worked well at all, and we would have stayed in an even more suboptimal equilibrium.
"This added an additional level of complication, as there was no way to know what neurons would actually find rewarding."
****
"This is where the research team turned to theoretical neurobiology. One proposal for how sensory networks learn to interpret the world is that they try to minimize the mismatch between what the network thinks is going to happen and the actual state of the world. In this view, learning networks naturally try to minimize the discrepancy between the predicted and actual states.
Put in Pong terms, the sensory portion of the network will take the positional inputs, determine an action (move the paddle up or down), and then generate an expectation for what the next state will be. If it's interpreting the world correctly, that state will be similar to its prediction, and thus the sensory input will be its own reward. If it gets things wrong, then there will be a large mismatch, and the network will revise its connections and try again."
I think Scott (and the rest of the rationalist community for that matter) vaguely opposes *capabilities research*, because that would be the direct precursor to someone accidentally creating a world-ending-ly misaligned AGI. But I think that rationalists *also* oppose more people going into capabilities because that leads to more capabilities research.
Hmm, well, then color me confused. Because the whole community, Scott and gwern included, seem to be enthralled by image generators such as DALL-E and GANs, which are the bleeding-edge of capabilities research.
Image generation is fun and excellent for outreach (people are impressed by photorealistic samples of ordinary objects from a model when they are for some reason much less impressed by more profound outputs from GPT-3 of following instructions or reasoning or few-shot learning or programming, and they are an excellent demonstration of how well scaling works, and people can't dismiss the task as useless), but I would not call it the bleeding-edge of capabilities, because it doesn't lead to much in the way of capability other than generating images.
The most striking result from image+text model scaling research so far is that the image modality doesn't lead to much, and the text part is doing all the thinking and learning. Every model which does something more than just generate images has text lurking in it somewhere: a scaled up text encoder like Parti, text contrastive learning like CLIP, plugging into a text model like Flamingo, robotics like Saycan, multi-task learning like Gato... Even the text embeddings/latent space already seem to be very similar to/aligned with the image models' latents!
Eric Jang has a good essay on this, asking what's so special about text? (My own theory is that text encodes Turing machines and computation in a way that images don't, and that is why they provide a universal prior and elicit capabilities like meta-learning.)
Thanks. I agree text is the tip of the spear. But then isn't fiddling with GPT, like when Scott wrote the post about whether GPT can play chess, helping drive capabilities research forward? I'm having trouble reconciling the implicit technophilia in this community with a "just say no to capabilities research" position. I'm not suggesting you are, since you didn't explicitly say you were against capabilities research. But if someone is against capabilities research, aren't they against everything downstream from that? GPT popularized Transformers which is now used in SOTAs for labeling, which is used for detecting cancers, etc.
Again, I know you don't speak for the community, but to be against capabilities research means to wish GPT had never happened in the first place, which I don't think people actually believe, do they?
>what are we actually doing here? Is it damaging public trust in AI safety? Producing false confidence? Muddying the waters?
It's establishing already existing rules in new realms. We don't want swastikas an porn in public, so we forbid them in public facing AI. You can train your own stable diffusion on all hitlers and swastikas available, but don't expect the public to tolerate or even support this. If you must have that, you can have it, but not with public facing tools.
Local installations of Word or (as described above) Stable Diffusion are not public facing tools. A lot of Stable Diffusion and Dall-E instances are also platforms, and there are established rules for living together that we, as a society, figured out across many generations. You can be as violent or sexy in your private facing tools, but not in public. The theater makes sense, and the point OP makes lacks a basic understanding of sociology.
>So if I'm using Word via Microsoft 365 in a browser, it's a public facing tool now
You don't seem to understand what the word "public" means. Its bad that applications executed in the cloud but that are *used* locally are censored, but running an app in the cloud is not "public facing" in any sense of the word, it means you use the hardware infrastructure of a company remotely. They can do with that hardware what they want, and execute any code they want, including code that doesn't like boobies. Even that's still not "public facing". And if you need to open .docs featuring gorefest fantasies (do they censor stuff like this? i'm not familiar with office products), you can still use open office afaik.
To make this clear: I don't have an oppinion on MS or Stable Diffusion or OpenAI "censoring" their tools, but they are private companies and have any right to do so. Again, if you want your Stable Diffusion to generate Furrie Porn, you're free to do so, and use the already existing Dreambooth-variants. Who cares. But don't expect *public facing tools* like Midjourney or Dall-E or PlaygroundAI to go down that route. They are platforms too and they are, one more time for you, my dude: *public facing tools*.
Nobody has "absolute and unappealable veto power" over what I can do with my computer. (Not yet.) I can watch and generate and paint and draw and write as much porn as I want to, I can write as much violent shit I can imagine and no tool is stopping me. But you internet rando doesn't get to tell a private company that sells access to *public facing tools* what they do and don't allow with their *public facing tool".
(I think part of our dispute stems from a misunderstanding what the term "public facing tool" means: For you it seems any cloud based service [which is too broad in my estimation, this would make any interactive website providing any search or newsletter "public facing services"], for me it's a service that publishes your generations or provides an API that enables tools for publishing, like DallE, GPT3 or Stable Diffusion).
I understand your argument and it has merrits, I'm not denying that. We can discuss how censoring nipples on Instagram may be overreach, but censoring Gore in Dall-E2 may be not.
But you seem to forget that we, as a society, developed rules across generations and that these rules are not nil because of silicon based technologies, regardless of any libertarian fantasies.
If you mean the market will spontaneously react in such a way that the people who sell these tools will themselves restrict them, yep that could happen. If you mean laws will be passed about that -- nope, not in the US at least. First Amendment and all. That would be wildly unconstitutional.
And if you think the vendors will always be sensitive to their public image and be sure all use follows the shibboleths -- let me introduce you to the inventors of the videotape and cheap videocams from the 70s, many of whom were probably horrified[1] that the biggest single beneficiary of their technological wizardy was the pr0n industry, which exploded in the 70s and became hugely profitable.
Betting against human ingenuity and base or tribal urges[2] is something you want to do only if you're not using your own retirement capital.
--------------
[1] Although not enough that they wouldn't take the money.
[2] So if a futurist were to predict that the biggest money-making use of sophisticated AI in the short term were in pr0n, marketing, politics, and financial scams, I'd say that has a better than average chance of being quite correct.
I think "I won't give charity money to people who are going to spend it on things I think are actively bad" is about the most defensible boycott possible.
I enjoyed 18 well enough, but it's an annoying example of a certain style of journalism. As soon as the hashtag was chosen the article's content was a foregone conclusion. All the writer's scripted encounters are with environmental activists of one stripe or another. The people he just runs into are either neutral or hostile toward his thesis, but he sticks doggedly to it anyway. I would've thought Scott, of all people, would be more of a critical reader here.
The Jon Stewart article was kind of interesting, went in a lot of different directions.
I thought they were just going to talk about the shame Tucker felt in the moment, when arguing with Stewart. Starting about here and going for the next 2 minutes:
8: Increasing age of senators. You'll probably also see increasing age of the average research grant recipient. Increasing age of marriage. Increasing dominance of megacorp brands. What all these things have in common is perhaps a general trend of trust building up much more slowly now than it used to. Or maybe this is just the Law of the Instrument on my part because I've been reading Liars and Outliers and Matt Levine's bloomberg issue on crypto.
22. If there's uncertainty about where to draw the "worth living" line, and you value the reduction pain somewhat higher than the increasing of pleasure, then a single barely worth living life has negative expectation. A single barely-not-worth-living life has a somewhat larger negative expectation, but it could still be better to create one of those than two of the former.
Maybe, but there is no law that universities have to pursue the most meritocratic policy. There is a law that they cannot discriminate based on race. So giving a boost to "diverse" students is illegal, but other dumb stuff that does not discriminate based on race is permissible.
I don't think that's entirely correct. See here:
https://www.justice.gov/crt/fcs/T6Manual7
From the Introduction:
"Section VI discusses intentional discrimination or disparate treatment as one type of Title VI claim. Another type of Title VI violation is based on agency Title VI implementing regulations and is known as the disparate impact or discriminatory effects standard. While a discriminatory impact or effect may also be evidence of intentional discrimination or disparate treatment, this section discusses disparate impact as a cause of action independent of any intent.
"A recipient, in determining....the class of individuals to be afforded an opportunity to participate in any [program accepting federal money], may not, directly or through contractual or other arrangements, utilize criteria or methods of administration which have the effect of subjecting individuals to discrimination because of their race, color, or national origin...."
These are the current guidelines for the DoJ to bring a case against a college based on the "disparate impact"[1] theory, which says racial discrimination exists even in the absence of any intent, or explicit dscrimination, so long as there is a "disparate impact" -- meaning certain racial categories just end up being over- or underrepresented relative to some hypothetical measure of what they should be (e.g. their representation in the general population).
Now there is clearly zero chance the Biden DoJ is going to bring a case against a college with a framework of admissions policies that just happens to discriminate against yellows and admit more blacks, to pick a random hypothetical[2] out of the air, but it's clearly a petard on which the advocates of "equitable outcomes" could be hoist in the future. We could eventually find a weird coalition of lefty universities wanting their diversity programs and righties who hate theories of "unconscious racism" agitating for the Supreme Court to overturn or at least limit Griggs v. Duke Power and other decisions that legitimized the "disparate impact" theory of discrimination.
--------------------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v._President_and_Fellows_of_Harvard_College
BOTH are going to reduce admission standards. They have to. Unless there are large numbers of black and asian students, say, that are basically indistinguishable from non-diversity admission standards perspective, then the only reason that the black students would get in when they otherwise wouldn't is if they have lower academic ability/scores...otherwise they just would have gotten in without affirmative action or whatever.
I found his “verbose rubbish” highly entertaining. Here he describes what it’s like to be on Twitter: “You lose hours to—what? An endless slideshow of barely interesting images and actively unpleasant text. Oh, cool—more memes! You know it’s all very boring, brooding nothing, but the internet addicts you to your own boredom.” I especially liked his admonition not to sign up for his substack, which I promptly disobeyed.
It provided value to me: the notion that this current mirage will pass is useful to remember.
It's wrong, though, is the thing. I'm sure it feels very real to Kriss, but I am reminded of that hundred-year-old writer Scott wrote about who had a deep conviction that the world was coming to an end and that culture had maggots in it. Kriss is so obviously feeling the same thing that finding people in previous eras with similar unshakable doomy convictions should make us *greatly* lower our credence in whatever arguments Kriss tries to bring to bear.
(And he doesn't bring many besides rhetorical analogies. The falling interaction numbers for Twitter and Facebook, for example, mean nothing unless we compare them to e.g. how many people started using Discord instead. The current paradigm of the Internet may be dying. *Maybe*. But there's a long inferential distance between that and "people will stop using the Internet much" that he does nothing to cross.)
Spengler?
I find actually scrolling Twitter and Reddit a lot more entertaining than reading him whine about it, and those aren't even the forms of entertainment I prioritize usually.
I'm really curious about these claims that I'm bored by what I'm doing and yet find myself compelled to continue the boring thing anyway. I'm really quite certain that I enjoy the things I am doing on the Internet, except when I'm just procrastinating (but I'm quite capable of procrastinating without internet or even a computer), so I wonder whether I'm (1) more easily engaged than the average person or (2) better than the average person at finding and doing things that I find to be engaging.
Meh. Ironically (or by design ?), his prediction is already old hat. And I found his whining tiresome. And he's confusing the Internet¤ > the Web > social media platforms. Yes, that last subset is quickly going away, and good riddance (though sadly, substack might stick around longer). As a counter-example, consider Wikipedia : it doesn't have most of the problems described in that blogpost, and I predict that it will stick around for *much* longer (especially if you consider wikis as a technic).
¤ Internet is capitalized : it's *the* International network, not some random interconnected network...
I agreed. I read a section or two and then was looking ahead to see if it got clearer or more specific, and then stopped.
My eyes glazed over VERY quickly.
As did I. I did find the first several paragraphs to be amusing, though.
“Whatever it is I’m doing here, you should not be part of it. Do not click the button below this paragraph, do not type in your email address to receive new posts straight to your inbox, and for the love of God, if you have any self-respect, do not even think about giving me any money. There is still time for you to do something else. You can still unchain yourself from this world that will soon, very soon, mean absolutely nothing.”
Roger that. Will comply, Sam.
TLP has a lot to answer for,
That is exactly where my brain went.
Yeah the magnitude seem suspicious. There are ways of verifying these numbers from outside the reporting nation and I often read analyses which look to "correct" stats like China's GDP numbers. For smaller countries it would be pretty easy for a dictator to lie about it and for people in the west to not care, but it won't have too big an effect on broader stats. And these lies can only last for so long. If you grow GDP at 8% a year or whatever, pretty soon you have to claim that your nation is basically first world, which is easily disproved.
> the democratic world must also be poorer, since it’s all interlinked.
But our wealth is measured on the basis of completed transactions with these countries. They can lie about how many cars they're producing, but if we take delivery of the correct number of cars exported by China, then that's how many cars we imported. If we agree to sell China $X billion worth of stuff, and they send us $X billion, then that's how much money we got, regardless of whether China has less reserves than it claims.
I'm saying that even if they're wrong, it doesn't make us poorer because the parts that affect us are all actually accounted for.
OK, I'm going to jump in and point out that the first link (about verbnoun) has a number of inaccuracies. See this thread on /r/AskHistorians: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xd9zu3/what_was_happening_in_the_english_language_that/iob5wk4/
In particular, note that "sellsword" is not from the listed time period at all, but rather was invented by fantasy fiction authors sometime around the 1950s! "Scofflaw" is also not from that time period, being invented in the 1920s.
Thank you, I've edited that link in.
> "sellsword" is not from the listed time period at all, but rather was invented by fantasy fiction authors sometime around the 1950s!
whoa
Interestingly, both "sellsword" and "scofflaw" seem to have something like the "seedy" connotation pointed out in the original twitter thread. (As does Dickens' "sawbones," also mentioned in the reddit thread.) So to the limited extent that this process of compound formation is still productive, it seems it may have retained the generally perjorative character of the older (surviving) batch of compounds formed on this pattern.
But I'm not completely convinced of my own suggestion here. An (admittedly rather niche) exception to this pattern that comes to my mind is "spit-sand," coined by the historian Roel Sterckx as a translation for the legendary Chinese aquatic creature called yù 蜮 (said to be like a turtle and blow poisonous sand in man’s face). Sterckx is not a native speaker of English, but his coinage seems to me a perfectly apt use of the archaic compound pattern, despite lacking any perjorative connotation.
Maybe it’s just me, but the cognitive leap between “pejorative” and “sea monster that blows poison in my face” doesn’t seem insurmountably large
Re verb-noun words, there are a few with a third prefix, such as "ne'er-do-well", meaning someone who is lazy and/or crooked and so will never do well. Admittedly that is a phrase rather than a single word, but the principle is the same.
Another one, in my opinion, is "nincompoop". Google "define" claims this means a foolish or stupid person, and Dr Samuel Johnson (the 18th century dictionary guy) defined it much the same and claimed it was derived from "non compos mentis" ("not of sound mind").
But I think these definitions are wrong. The defining characteristic of a nincompoop is not stupidity or mental deficiency but ineffectualness, which may or may not stem from stupidity.
I believe (albeit without any evidence!) that both words started out as Tudor slang, and nincompoop was specifically naval slang in the time of Queen Elizabeth I (Drake, Raleigh, and that lot), and was short for "ne[v]er come [to a] poop [deck]". I surmise it was used of ineffectual naval officers whose shortcomings meant they would never be promoted to captain and so would never attain a captain's privilege of strutting around on their own poop deck.
"Popinjay" may be another example of Tudor slang along the same lines. But I don't have a theory of how or even whether that is made up from a verb and noun, except the "jay" part presumably derives from the colourful bird.
Isn't popinjay likely related to German "Papagei," a parrot?
There are some actual verb-noun compounds among bird names: turnstone, shearwater. Killdeer is not an example, though it looks like one; it's onomatopoeia.
"But I think these definitions are wrong. The defining characteristic of a nincompoop is not stupidity or mental deficiency but ineffectualness, which may or may not stem from stupidity"
Huh, now I'm curious to know where you're from. Because where I'm from, nincompoop refers unambiguously and directly to stupidity. I'm prepared to be wrong, but I'd honestly be surprised if it were otherwise anywhere in the English speaking world, so I think Johnson's etymology is obviously correct.
Where do people see/hear the word "sellsword" used? Video games? Harry Potter? This is the first time I've ever seen it.
It's in Game of Thrones. (At least in the books, I don't remember if it's in the show.) It means mercenary.
GRRM is fond of such phrases. So "lackwit" and "cutpurse" also get used. "Turncoat" gets turned into "turncloak" though.
I'd say it's pretty common throughout sword and sorcery and related fantasy. It's familiar enough that I was surprised to learn it was a 20th century coinage.
Google Books conflates it with phrases like "sells swords", but searching in quotes has it showing up in the 1980s. The early hits make me suspect that Thieves World (a multiauthor shared world series that began in 1979) was the primary vector that made it popular in the genre, even if it didn't originate the term.
Prince John (later King John) had been nicknamed "Lackland" in the 1170s, because his father Henry II decided his brothers would inherit all his realms leaving John with no land. So this pejorative verb-noun form goes back a way. (As things turned out, John ended up inheriting everything; but that is another story.)
I can think of a few others, which may or may not have been mentioned already in this discussion, such as "killjoy" and "puzzlehead" or "muddlehead. But I don't know when these originated.
Do they have anything to say about verb-preps or verb-adjectives? I shared this thinkpiece with my sister for a lookover, and she said she'd get back to me once her grandson was done with his playdate. She also mumbled something about her husband ranting about gun buybacks being a lot of feel-good makework for know-nothing blowhards.
Underrated comment
I assume dipstick is a more recent coining. And certainly banhammer is quite recent. Probably fuckboy is, too.
None of those are examples of the discussed construction; those are all examples of a much more usual English construction.
On point 21, you mean how many racial-equity-related classes they took as a *high schooler*, right?
Thank you, fixed.
It wouldn't surprise the hell out of me if those classes are more available in better-funded schools.
As fed money makes poor school districts better funded than rich ones, I can easily see this being so via the feds requiring these DIE classes as a condition of funding. So (as a commenter upstream noted) struggling kids who can't read, write, or balance a budget get classes in how to conduct grievance. I am not sure who this is going to help, besides the poor kids older cousins, who can't get a job anywhere but the taxpayer funded DIE industry.
The less fortunate get all the breaks.
I mean they literally do tend to in terms of explicit/instutional ones. It is just the breaks from genetics/upbringing are so strong they swamp those anyway.
I think you might see large poor schools get this, but small (rural) poor schools probably won’t be able to have such classes
That wasn't my wife's experience as a occasional hire. (She was an entertainer specializing in music/art/science in roughly that order.) In her experience the poorer schools often didn't even supply toilet paper to the restrooms, so the teachers had to buy their own for the students to use.
Schools in poorer areas have to devote more money to special education.
At least in my state you we see people swear up and down that the suburban schools outspend the "urban/poor" schools per pupil, and that this explains the vast gulf in educaitonal outcomes. Except that hasn't been true in a couple decades with both the state and federal government putting its thumbs on the scales quite heavily, such that the big urban school districts have real top level per pupil numbers, and definitely more on average than the super nice school disctricts in the suburbs.
But of course that money doesn't go as far because the parents are so much less involved and the students so much harder to teach with a much larger percentage with serious devleopmental or other issues. But it is crazy that people have such strong beliefs about the basic facts that are false and very easy to check.
The question-- and it's a real question, so far as I know-- is where the money actually goes. If the poor schools have (as I keep hearing) woefully inadequate resources *for* *the* *students*-- no toilet paper, teachers having to buy basic supplies, very old textbooks, lack of heating and cooling-- then the money might be getting spent, but siphoned off. And maybe not on things conservatives hate, maybe just going to politicians' relatives.
The local city district spends nearly 2x per pupil as the local rural district, while having buildings that had holes in the ceilings and no heat for an entire midwest winter.
One wonders if that was lack of money or lack of competence, though.
From the Soviet experience, ideology might be more important than toilet paper.
I remember looking at the course list for a prestigious high school a friend with kids sent me, and the upper-end courses had options for doing techie stuff or 'emphasis on social justice'. So, Silicon Valley vs New York starts earlier than we thought!
Amusingly, I remember looking at the course list of someone who had gone to school in mainland China, and there were courses on Marxism. I asked them what they had taught them there, and they said "Oh, to be a good person." They seemed vaguely bored. I didn't have the chance to ask further.
So, 'convergence theory' 50 years later? (There was an idea during the Cold War both sides would converge to the same place.)
Yeah, I went to a pretty academically rigorous boarding school about 20 years ago and we had postcolonial history junior year and learned critical literary theory as freshman. I can only imagine what sociological nonsense is being taught as intro level stuff now.
I've wondered how to resurrect the life of the mind, or at least have right-leaning perspectives. The two I can think of would be whatever Christians are doing, and evolutionary psychology-based criticisms (Madame Bovary's ovaries or whatever the name of that book was). Libertarians kind of have economics sewn up.
It's hard to imagine how it will happen outside some sort of decentralized, heterodox intellectual movement that creates a system parallel to mainstream academic institutions. With the way things are going in the academy, right-leaning people will simply be barred from entry, or find the social and cultural milieu of the campus to be so unappealing that they'll find other ways to earn the necessary credentials for knowledge work.
Or they won't! And we'll end up with a massively stratified society where the theoretical "people who could be great poets but have to work at the factory" will all be right-leaning.
The problem isn't the potential poets who end up as factory workers, the problem is the stratum of those who run things ending up even more full of people who are totally divorced from reality, as well as convinced of their divine right to rule over the ignorant plebs who care more about real life than the grand religion of Theory.
So, I find it hard to believe that such a policy would actually be implemented for long, if at all, but I will note that I've taught in inner city school districts where nearly all the students were black, and I do not think I ever spotted such a thing as a racial-equity-related class.
https://edsource.org/2021/california-becomes-first-state-to-require-ethnic-studies-in-high-school/662219
One might guess that the increased amount of seniors in the Congress would be a result of increasingly advanced gerrymandering leading to safer and safer incumbent districts, where popular (or even less popular) incumbents can then keep their seats forever and ever without any real challenge.
Extended life expectancy might explain it too? Not strongly endorsed, just a thought.
It's that. If you add on the same graph the share of the population that is that age, it maps exactly.
Sure but why are these people staying in this job? Why aren't they retiring or losing elections? (cushy job so why retire, gerrymandering keeps you in your district, etc...)
Incumbency is a huge advantage, and also... being a congressman is sort of terrible. The pay is not great compared to what you could earn as a competent worker in the private sector, you have to travel for a huge portion of the year or maintain two residences, and you are scrutinized at a level reserved only for movie stars/actual celebrities, while not getting any of the free gift bags at awards shows because they violate campaign finance laws.
Super high status?
Being a big company CEO is super high status, and there aren't many elderly CEOs.
https://fortune.com/2022/05/24/most-senior-ceos-fortune-500/ shows just ten CEOs in the Fortune 500 who are 71 or older.
Is being a CEO really higher-status than being a retired successful CEO?
One factor I think is probably relevant is that structurally, politics is a lot about who you know, and so a seniority-based power structure is in some sense self-reinforcing. If you know lots of people in the game, and trade favors back and forth, you can actually be more effective. Additionally you can gatekeep the youngsters from positions of real power, which compounds your stability, probably at the expense of effectiveness. Either way, you keep getting better at the game as you get older.
To be clear I think the things you mention are factors too. A variant on "cushy job so why retire" would be "powerful job so why retire". Humans like power/influence.
I think a big part of it is your effectiveness in tgettign re-elected (which is the real job not being a good legilator) is mostly about networks/seniority. And so the age is going to just drift older and odler as the process gets more "efficient". I do think the US political systme is crazy efficient at what it does. The problem is what it does isn't "govern effectively", but "make sure Republicans and Democrats get elected and keep getting elected".
Same reason actors in their late 50s continue to play heartthrob roles opposite 22-year-old actresses. These people are narcissist to the core, and not being in the public eye is like death. If they cared more about money and power than being on the TV, they would've gone into some other profession.
Sure but what about other countries,? Average age has been rising everywhere, but at least in Finland the average age of MPs has stayed roughly the same. (Page in Finnish but there are graphs.) https://www.eduskunta.fi/FI/naineduskuntatoimii/kirjasto/tietopalvelulta-kysyttya/Sivut/mika-on-ollut-kansanedustajien-ikajakauma-eri-aikoina.aspx
Is your question: why is the average age of MPs in Finland declining relative to average age of the Finnish population? Which is more common, the U.S. pattern or the Finnish?
I'm not sure whether sharing an age is an all that strong an indicator for a voter finding a candidate in any case. Plenty of cases where an older voter might appreciate a younger candidate for their vigor and vision, or an younger voter an older one for their experience.
At least the average age of UK MPs has also stayed the same, and is close to the Finnish average age (https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/house-of-commons-trends-the-age-of-mps/). The average MP age in Australia is also similar and has stayed roughly the same through the years (https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1314/43rdParl).
Going on the IPU's website, it looks to be in the 40-50 range across Europe: https://data.ipu.org/content/spain?chamber_id=13384 (Spain because this was the last one I was on). In Canada (America's control group) it's 50. By contrast, the average US congressman is 58, and average senator is 64.
However, US congressional districts have much bigger populations and the US political system is radically different to everyone else's when it comes to the the strength of parties over their members (generally an iron grip in Europe, seemingly non-existent in the US) and the selection of candidates (generally largely by the parties' leadership in Europe, by primaries in the US). Finally, in parliamentary systems MPs still have a career progression of junior minster to cabinet minister, and a lot of them aren't terribly interested in sticking around once they've been sacked as as a minister.
I suspect the biggest non-US factor pushing ages down is the parties wanting to seem modern by running younger people for marketing reasons, and the biggest US factor pushing ages up is polarisation/incumbency (if you're a Republican congressman in rural Kansas, you've got a job for life as long as you can bat away a primary challenger).
Though you wouldn’t think it to look at most of modern society, we have a long-standing tendency to respect the wisdom of age. Check the etymology of “senate” and “alderman” for example. So it’s not terrifically surprising to find that elder statesmen are, well, as elderly as a given era’s medicine allows.
That said, I don’t remember a time when the top cohort of elected officials were so uniformly age-impaired.
I don't think it has much to do with life expectancy. Even if the average age of politicians is going up with the life expectancy of the country as a whole, I doubt there is much correlation between the life expectancy of politicians in the past and the average age of them today.
Even 100 years ago politicians had fairly similar life expectancies as average people today. Most gains in the country's life expectancy numbers are due to poorer people living longer.
I feel like what's missing is not electoral defeats or deaths but retirements. In the old days congressmen would reach ~65 and retire like normal people; nowadays they cling on with grim determination through senility to death.
Retirements aren't independent of electoral challenges though. Politicians are a lot more likely to retire if they think they're likely to lose their next election.
See Adam Kinzinger. He’s 44 and calling it quits.
Another reading (which i don't really support) is that the districts have elected the "best" person and so they don't need to find anyone new and those people just get older and older. I guess you could test this by looking at the average age of newly elected members of congress or if average terms are getting longer.
This explanation seems right but it would apply only to the House of Representatives. It should be pretty easy to get the data broken down by chamber.
Hypothesis: as society as gotten crazier, the most electable people are now those too old & set in their ways to be fully up to terms on the latest craziness.
Link #28 goes to some private Google Doc rather than to anything most people can see.
Thank you, fixed.
Maybe have a pinned "Corrections" thread on every post to make comment sections tidier?
Hi Scott, I met you at the LA meetup, thoroughly enjoyed your Q and A, thanks again for coming. Just a correction, on #24, I believe the size of Prince Charles Island is 3,600 square miles, rather than 36,000 square miles, which is like half the size of all New England and probably would have been discovered before 1948.
You're right, thanks
Regarding Georgism in Space, I think we are already at the point where physical space (in certain places) is becoming scarce. These places are geostationary orbit and low Earth orbit.
The space in LEO is mostly limited by the probability of collision between different spacecraft, while the space in the geostationary orbit is limited by the possibility of communicating with a satellite without interfering with its neighbors.
Which brings me to another limited resource that the article omits: the electromagnetic spectrum. Electromagnetic radiation seems like the only viable medium for fast long-distance communications. And with it you only have limited bandwidth in a given place and given direction. In most practical cases we will run out of bandwidth in electromagnetic spectrum far earlier than we run out of energy, matter or space.
I think we already treat the spectrum in a reasonably georgist way. The Glen Weyl types have figured out that the state leasing chunks of the spectrum for a limited time period in an auction works the same as ownership + LVT.
This seems interesting. Can you find a nice source for this? Pretty please?
Weyl's Radical Markets, chapter 1:
"...This work helped explain why spectrum markets had so stubbornly failed to reallocate spectrum to new uses and why auctions for Internet advertising slots worked so much better. Only a true, continuous auction in uses can solve the monopoly problem and hence produce allocative efficiency.
But continual auctions also may create a problem—for investment efficiency. If possessors know that their possessions can be taken by others at any time and that they will not receive the proceeds of any bid, they will be discouraged from taking care of and improving their property. In this situation, you might well let your house fall into disrepair. Like George’s tax proposal, the Vickrey Commons does not give people good investment incentives..."
George's tax proposal taxes the base value of the land but not any of the improvements on it, so improvements like houses still get sold for their value and there isn't this kind of lack of inventive
For sure, I wasn't making a point, I was just providing the source that was asked for and included a semi-random quote that proved it was relevant to both George+spectrum :)
Even in LEO there's a LOT of space. Like, the surface area of the earth, times however many layers of altitude in whatever thickness, plus the sphere gets bigger as you go farther out. There's plenty of room for many billions to live up there.
The problem isn't collision, or it's not collision like we usually think of it. It's traffic control and and collision mitigation, which are really just technological problems. Some of the problem is also cost: once you get something up into orbit, it's expensive to move it. But if we get the costs of lifting stuff to orbit lower, then maneuvering fuel gets much cheaper. Or we get a different technology that makes maneuver cheaper; laser sails, etc.
As for traffic control, we handle thousands of airplanes, millions of cargo containers, and hundreds of millions of self-navigated vehicles every day. Admittedly, lots of people crash and die in their cars, and I'm sure there will be accidents in orbit too. But I expect it'll be just fine.
For collision mitigation, again it's a mass problem. You can bulk up habitats so an impact with certain objects just isn't a big deal, or you can add detection systems so you can move out of the way, or whatever. It's just a tech and mass problem. Admittedly hard problems, but not unsolvable.
Regarding 21 and racial diversity classes, isn't this just going to play out that richer districts can offer more college focused classes, same as it always does?
While I agree that in practice that's what happens, what makes it harder for poor districts to offer racial diversity classes? It shouldn't be the money, I think when you add federal funding schools in poor areas get the same amount as those in rich ones.
I don't know too much about school funding admittedly, but I was under the impression that in California at least, a large part of the funding was from property taxes, so the richer areas naturally get more. I'm not sure if state or federal funds try to help even that out. There could also be factors like alumni donations and the ever present parent issue.
Private schools also work on a separate system, but still compete with public schools for college admissions.
I don't know. In theory, you could use something like this as a hack to try to increase diversity, but the cynical part of me thinks this looks exactly like what you'd do if you wanted to look like you were promoting diversity but really wanted to continue taking in rich upper class kids.
>>>a large part of the funding was from property taxes, so the richer areas naturally get more. I'm not sure if state or federal funds try to help even that out
Other people have done the data checking and they are sure - poor and racial minority- majority schools get quite a bit *more* per student than do public schools serving rich students.
Having said that, I agree - the essay - which doesn't impress me much as a road map - is not trying to get poor/oppressed people into college, but to get 'right thinking people who will be taught the right shibboliths' into college.
To be fair, this underpants gnome sort of scheme supposes that knowing the right shibboliths is itself a blow against darkness.
Are you accounting for the urban/rural split? I suspect that “poor and racial minority schools” in urban districts are getting a lot of money (although that money goes less far in high cost urban areas) while rural schools without access to a high property tax base are indeed very low-funded.
First, the median income for urban and rural residents is actually quite close. It'd be more accurate to say urban areas have greater inequality. For this reason, I don't expect cost of living to really confound this analysis.
However, even within school districts, poorer schools typically get more money - and that probably covers your cost of living critique?
You might enjoy https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-funding-is-actually-somewhat-progressive/
Not really. It's exceedingly complicated, but generally most money for CA public schools comes from the state, and poor districts get lots more money because they have more ESL learners, students with assorted "special needs" and so forth:
https://ed100.org/lessons/whopays
https://ed100.org/lessons/lcff
I don't think rich & poor students spend a very different time in classes (once you stop caring about the small part of the poors that just never show up), do they? But if you start dedicating an increasing share of their -I assume fairly static- weekly hours, you have to lower how much is dedicated to other stuff. You know, the peripheric stuff you also happen to learn in school, mathematics, writing, history, physics, biology, philosophy, etc etc.
And while the richer probably don't need these classes too much (is it because they got other resources to learn? Is it because the curriculum is tailored for the 80-IQ which the school system is adamant MUST NOT BE LEFT BEHIND and they only need half the time to learn it, if even that? I don't know, a dozen different convincing reasons can be conjured easily), the end result is the same: every hour you spend teaching the poor students about DEI is an hour during which they'll fall behind their betters, in a discipline that is actually useful.
DEI may actually be useful now, in terms of conformity.
I grew up in a poor rural school, and my guess is that any such school will really never be able to offer such classes just because of a lack of students that stops a broadening of the curriculum
On a per-pupil basis this may be true in many cases, but far from all.
What's even more relevant is the breakdown of spending per student at smaller schools. Because there are fixed costs like land, buildings, and administration, a larger percentage of the spending goes to things other than classroom time with teachers. For a simple example, a very rural district may spend a significantly larger percentage of the overall budget on transportation to and from school, compared to an urban district where many/all students can walk or take public transportation.
Additionally, simply having more teachers as an absolute total allows for more branching out into different areas. Small schools aren't going to hire specialty teachers, and may or may not get a teacher that has both [core subject] and [niche subject] certifications.
If universities change what gets students admitted, rich fancy schools will faster to meet those new requirements than poor public schools, who have to fight a mountain of bureaucracy to change anything
Plus, you have the issue that public schools in red states won't offer them because the politicians are opposed to it, so the students will have a harder time getting into selective universities through no fault of their own. Private schools, on the other hand, will offer a ton because their whole mission is to get kids into the best college possible.
I suspect the Ethereum roadmap won't happen in quite that way. For a bit of background -- originally (or at least, early on), Ethereum was supposed to have four phases: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity, with Serenity being the transition to proof-of-stake. Things didn't work out that way.
Frontier (the original version) and Homestead both happened, but Metropolis got split into two updates, Byzantium and Constantinople. (I might have the history a bit wrong here, I wasn't paying attention to Ethereum at the time; this is my rough impression of what happened, but someone who followed it closer can correct me.) Meanwhile it turned out that the transition to proof-of-stake was actually quite a hard problem, so Serenity kept getting pushed further and further back. Thing is, there was still a need for more updates despite not having reached the Serenity phase; so updates kept happening, and I guess since it was still Metropolis, these updates mostly got named after cities. (Yes, one of them was Istanbul, but no, it didn't directly follow Constantinople, due to some unusual circumstances intervening.)
Eventually the name "Serenity" went away and people just started talking about "the merge" instead. Also, the convention of naming updates after cities became enshrined, even though the original Frontier-Homestead-Metropolis-Serenity plan was now dead. (E.g., the merge -- which has now happened -- is officially the Paris update, though hardly anyone calls it that. People do typically call the other updates by their city names, though, as most other updates don't have any other name to refer to them by.)
So now Vitalik has his new plan of merge-surge-verge-purge-splurge, of which the merge has already happened. But I suspect this one won't play out as planned either. In fact, I can already point out one way in which it almost certainly won't, in that Vitalik lists Ethereum Object Format as one of the improvements to be included in the far-off Splurge, but it's actually going to happen much *sooner* than that; it's planned for the very next update to come (to be named Shanghai). I don't know why he put it in the Splurge, given that that feature has been planned for Shanghai for quite some time. (Shanghai has been in the planning for much longer than updates usually are, because it was scheduled for after the merge, and the merge was delayed repeatedly, to the point that a number of people kept saying that the transition to proof-of-stake would never actually occur.) Perhaps it logically belongs there, but that's not when it's going to happen.
So, I'd treat the merge-surge-verge-purge-splurge plan as somewhat aspirational; meanwhile updates will continue as usual and will continue to be named after cities. :P I expect each stage beyond the merge to be split up between multiple updates, but also bits and pieces will be pulled forward or pushed back, with things just generally not happening in the order Vitalik has presented; there will probably not be any one update, or even series of updates, that one can truly identify as "the surge" or "the verge" or what have you.
(I do have to wonder whether they'll ever declare an *end* to the updates; they can't *really* claim to be decentralized until they do, after all! But it looks like there's a lot that people want changed before we're anywhere close to such a halt...)
I'm still not him to the Kardashians, can someone explain #41 to me?
hip*
There's an edit comment option in the three dots menu.
The joke is that the headline is referring to Kim Jong-Un taunting Western countries, but the tweet is deliberately misinterpreting it as being about Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.
Oh, I see. I should've actually clicked through instead of just assuming I was missing some kind of diamond related joke.
This is a genuine questions and not meant as snark or to mock:
How un-hip are you to the Kardashians and how have you stayed such given their notoriety over the past 10 years?
I am somewhat jealous of this and also amazed.
I mean I hear enough to recognize their names and that they're some kind of celebrity family (I think there's something about Kim's sex tape, though not sure if that's what made her famous or was big news because she was already famous?) But honestly not too much beyond that. I don't hear too much about them in my normal socialization, and when I do I kinda get bored and change the subject, so not much beyond that.
(Of course in this case I was just genuinely dumb and didn't click the link, I just assumed the title text had some obvious joke I was missing context for).
In unrelated news, when I showed my brother the tweet he went "oh hey I went on a couple of dates with her [the tweeter] when I lived in London".
I'm in that fortunate situation. I do it by ignoring entertainment news.
Same. Knew nothing about this other than recognizing their names.
I watch TV shows and movies, read a lot of news and other material online (research mostly), but am not on social media, so a lot of pop culture flows right past me, for which I am grateful. (I'm sure I'm also missing some good stuff, but I trust my kids/friends to let me know).
I also do it, I recognize Kardashians because who (with the slightest access to television and\or Internet or a newspaper) wouldn't, but I don't know but the haziest detail.
Things about me that I think contributed to that, in perceived order of their contribution :
1- I don't live in the USA
2- I don't follow Instagram
3- I don't watch reality shows or really most TV
4- I'm utterly uninterested in any kind of celebrity shows or news, whether foreign ones or those of my own country. Sometimes I have trouble recalling the names of faces I know well. (though this seems to be a general problem with me because I also do it with new people in real life for a couple of weeks after we meet even though it embarasses me greatly)
5- I made 1 twitter account that lasted a couple of months in the first half of this year, I used it very sparingly (mostly by accident because Twitter sends updates to your mail) and when I was banned I didn't make another.
Many years ago, I saw a tabloid headline titled "Kardashian Family RIPPED APART!" I thus concluded they had all been killed by wild bears, and put them out of my mind forevermore.
I am not on Facebook/twitter and don't watch any TV though I will stream shows if I hear theya re excellent. I also don't consume general purpose news media, mostly specific topics, and nothign that touches on general culture. I also have young kids, don't talk to teens much, and when I do talk about academic things.
IDK I have some vague sense of who they are (reality TV/singer people). But that is about it and I couldn't possibly be happier about it. I do have a pretty robust social life, but this just isn't the sort of thing that comes up.
Asking for a friend, how proficient in the Kardashian's story does one become by listening to the song "the story of our time" by Trevor Moore?
Here's a link to the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer", that has been updated through the years up until the financial statements of 2020 to 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer. The financial statements themselves are linked at the end of the article, here's the one from 2020/2021: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2020-2021_Audit_Report.pdf. For example, you can see page 3 that the expenses in "Salaries and wages" went from 66 millions of dollars in 2020 to 67 millions of dollars in 2021, or that the "Travel and conferences" expenses went from 2 millions of dollars to 29 thousands dollars in the same period.
Parkinson's Law hard at work
[[WP:CANCER]] is definitely the classical article about the grows of WMF funding.
This is especially annoying with regard to the banners asking users to donate which typically appear in December. In the early days (2005 or whatever), donating to Wikipedia may have been worth it from an EA perspective. These days, any donations will mostly increase the administrative overhead, I guess.
Oooh! I love that dragon hollow mask illusion. I used to have one on my desk for years!
You can print and make one in a few minutes, I think this link will work for it: https://www.instructables.com/Hollow-Face-Illusion-Dragon-Without-Leaving-your-d/
Oh yes. I think the original was from a "Gathering for Gardner" conference. (Well that might not be the original, but it's the first one I heard about.)
Yes! I remember that it was connected to Gardner, now that you mention it.
Very happy to see the Sam Kriss and Scott Alexander universes intersecting, which I didn’t think would ever happen outside of my head.
See the reaction when I posted this to the Open Thread https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-242/comment/9148369
The reaction seems adequate to me. Scott may be able to appreciate writing skill regardless of the content, but in this case the skill is mostly wasted.
I disagree. Framing weird ideas well is very valuable, so people can engage with them and see things from unexpected angles.
Re #8, I think the overall increasing trend in Congress age is explainable by increases in healthy life expectancy (as opposed to life expectancy in general, which has only increased a little). A typical 75yo now can be physically active and enjoy a thriving career and social life, whereas a typical 75yo a century ago might have been mostly blind or deaf, toothless, and physically infirm.
The more interesting bit is why this otherwise smooth trend underwent a massive drop in the late 20th century (if you connect the earlier data to today's you get a pretty smooth curve).
I could spin a just-so story about how the late 20th century rejected the traditions of respecting the age and accumulated wisdom of your elders and started idealising the energy and passion of youth instead - but I think that hasn't gone away and we still idealise youth, so it wouldn't explain why the graph started shooting back up again.
I also think the drop is too early to be related to the demographic shifts of WW2 and the baby boom.
I had initially assumed this was all the effect of the Baby Boom working it’s way through the system - that when they just barely reached the age of being able to be elected, there would be a drop in age, and then ages would rise as they age. But it actually seems to be driven by the generation just before the baby boom. (The oldest boomers just turned 70 in the Clinton-Trump election year.)
I’ve seen a similar effect in academics. (Here’s a deeper dive on this: http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2011/12/baby-boom-philosophy-bust.html) There was a major expansion in universities to accommodate the baby boom, so people a generation older had a great job market. But once the baby boom had graduated, universities didn’t have to expand, and had just hired a bunch of young faculty, so the baby boom graduated into the worst job market and never really entered the field. As a result, famous philosophers are disproportionately the generation before the baby boom rather than baby boom.
It’s a bit more of a stretch, but we could get the same effect in politics if we assume a candidate is ideally a few years older than the voters they represent - 20-something’s will vote for a 30-something to represent them, and then once they have their people they support, will continue supporting them over someone of their own generation. (Though this model obviously has lots of exceptions - see the Zoomers who support Sanders over Buttigieg.)
I think you would want to look at cross-country comparisons before drawing any strong conclusions about the explanation. Many countries had a baby boom, but not all these countries have such old politicians as the US does.
It also helps that travelling to and from your district/state is MUCH easier than it was even 50 years ago.
Re #29: you (Scott) are a nuanced and empathetic thinker who usually reasons along the lines of "I can see good points on both sides and understand where they're each coming from, but on balance and after extensive research I come down on side X." But many people are more polarised: they think their side is right right right and the other side is evil evil evil.
So, in their minds, any concessions along the lines of "You make a valid point, but here's why I think X" are necessarily insincere and deceitful; whereas, from you, it could be a perfectly sincere and accurate reflection of your thought processes in arriving at conclusion X.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/ seems relevant somehow...
"I can see good points" is not what permission structure is doing. Permission structure is falsely claiming to agree with the person before disagreeing with them. It's pure gaslighting, on the premise that your opposition is stupid and actually just want friends.
Better to phrase the thing as a question, if you think your argument will be persuasive. Instead of "I agree you were right before, but this thing changes it". you can just ask "does this thing change it?" You can have an opinion-friendly dialogue without lying to their face first.
How is it gaslighting? Is it something like in 2021 saying "you're an idiot if you don't get the vaccine" and then in 2022 turning around and saying "it made sense in 2021 to be unsure about the vaccine, but now that we have data you should take it"?
There are six example sentences.
"It was understandable to be wary before, but now..." The speaker never thought it was understandable to be wary. They don't believe the situation has changed at all.
"I was really suspicious about vaccines too, but after..." Again, they were never suspicious about vaccines.
"It was unclear before but... ...insights that we just didn't have before." They never questioned the clarity, and now they're using 'we' to insinuate they're expressing my opinion. which they never held.
"Many people experimented... and now that we have the data we can..." Implying that everyone who took that route was doing it as a science experiment, and again that they're telling me my opinion.
"But I've dug into the research and found COVID vaccines are different because..." I believe neither that they have dug into the research, nor that they think COVID vaccines are the least bit different.
"It's great that you're focused on natural supplements..." Is it. Is that what they've been recommending people on their end.
On a final note, they state this was popularized by the Obama Administration. The Obama Administration pissed off the Republican Party so much that they refused to do their Constitutionally obligated duties for a full year, and then elected Donald Trump President. This approach Does Not Work.
Thanks for the summary, I missed that the second link was non-Twitter.
Yug, I was really suspicious of permissions structures too. But after…
Lying is not the same thing as gaslighting. None of those examples involve trying to get the victim to doubt the integrity or validity of their own mind- on the contrary it's explicitly validating that their judgements are valuable. That doesn't make it a good thing but using a specific term like "gaslighting" is at worst actively dishonest and at best recklessly degrading the meaning of words.
I think the battle for the use of the term "gaslighting" to mean anything other than "lying about the past" has been lost.
And that's probably okay, because it was a silly word to begin with, that describes a phenomenon which almost never actually occurs outside that one play.
Believing that it is happening is, in fact, a symptom of paranoia. (People deny the existence of patterns that are obvious to you.)
I agree with you that intentional techniques of persuasion aren't in themselves gaslighting or lying. Depending on how they're used, they may come across as skillful arguing or they may feel repugnant and heavy-handed.
None of us needs to be a victim of that -- we can walk away, we can inquire further into the person's own experience and invite them to disclose more about how they came to their views, we can point out their techniques ("I see what you did there"). It can be friendly sparring or it can be a very short conversation.
Gaslighting seems to have gone from "willfully f*ing with a person's reality over time to make them think they're insane" to "using technique in conversation to try to influence their perspective."
I can imagine situations of very unequal power where a person being subject to potentially-harm-inducing conversational techniques may be victimized (patients with doctors, employees with bosses, teachers with young students, etc). But in a conversation between more or less consenting conversationalists, a person can use specific skills in an entirely good faith way or in a not good faith way, and assessing whether this person is engaging with me in a good faith way in this conversation is always an aspect of talking about more substantial issues than the weather.
In the example sentences above, I can imagine a person saying those in all sincerity and I can imagine a person saying those as empty technique phrases, like how a person can say "No disrespect but..." and then say something disrespectful. I trust pretty well my capacity to tell the difference, and in any case don't feel harmed by anyone's insincerity. It just clarifies whether and how long I'll stay in the conversation. I'm also nudge-y enough that I would ask "do you really feel that way when you stop to think about it or are you just saying that as a rhetorical device?" All of this becomes part of getting a sense of whether the person you're talking to is genuine enough with you that you want to keep talking to them.
I do wonder how much the use of conversational technique feels like a problem now because it's connected to a larger cultural dynamic in which conversations people once had without too much fear now feel like obstacle courses. And maybe as a defense in the face of this, we seem to be communicating with more layers of irony and insincerity as a way to have plausible deniability around saying something "wrong." Or I don't know if all the irony is just a product of more online communication or the larger milieu of "if everything has to matter, then nothing matters." At any rate, that larger dynamic seems to make having real conversations harder.
In ye olden days (I have the impression), the art of social conversation was as structured as a ballroom dance. It was based on a great deal of technique, had to proceed according to certain narrow rules and follow somewhat predictable steps towards greater intimacy or forthrightness. I think it was understood that the form helped create a feeling of safety within which more honest self-disclosure could happen over time. I think this is still the case in some cultures other than the one I live in.
I'm gonna try this out but I think for me the idea that intentional conversational technique is a lie or manipulation is like calling haiku a lie or manipulation. There is a technique, it can be used badly or well, and within it genuine, honest and even gorgeous conversation can happen. "I get why you would feel that way" could be real empathy or total bullsh*t or something in the vast gray area between.
I don't know how long "now" or "the olden days" are meant to be here, but I've hated this kind of thing at least since Ditech did it in 2007.
"People are smart. Now let me explain what an illusionist is because I don't think you're smart enough to realize it's someone who ists illusions."
This doesn’t seem like a rebuttal to me because it’s still true that some people are earnest and also say things like that.
Earnest people don't seek out structures to use. And earnestness doesn't really matter, because it looks the same from the outside; you can check the last Open Thread, where a presumably earnest person talks about curing their chronic pain with the simple trick of writing down the symptoms and destroying the paper, and gets a scathing reaction from a commenter who views it as belittlement. For a technique all about winning friends and influencing people, this kind of result is fatal.
It’s ironic that honest people need to be taught to manipulate so they don’t come across as manipulative. It’s true though: you have to communicate the way your audience understands or they’ll delude themselves into thinking they understand you. Usually in a negative light.
This only applies to strangers and idiots. That’s the usual case by far but the distinction feels important to me because I can’t mask for literally everyone and remain mentally sound.
On the contrary, I would say that Obama was a fairly politically successful President, even if not everything he did was a success. Smart people should look to him for tips rather than dismissing him out of hand. One party getting three presidential terms in a row is unusual.
It's not that they lost the three-term election, it's that they lost it to Donald Trump, who directly ran on a campaign of "Send Hillary Clinton To Prison". Their advice about winning people over to your side led to a victory by what will possibly be the most infamous President in US history, and certainly the most antagonistic in a long while.
I think it’s pretty unlikely that Trump, who failed to get impeached twice, will beat out Nixon, who was successfully forced to resign for most infamous.
Most antagonistic, maybe
Obama's own strategy was successful enough for him to be elected twice. Hillary, a different politician, lost. Donald Trump then got beaten... by Obama's VP. If the Dems had gone with Biden rather than assuming it was Hillary's turn, they could have won that narrow election.
To look at it from another angle: You say "I was really suspicious about vaccines before, but after X..." If someone were to convince you that X was, in fact, wrong, or at least irrelevant. would you say "well, then I guess I should be suspicious of vaccines again"?
Of course you wouldn't. Not only have you lied, but you've lied in a way which kept the other guy from addressing your true beliefs. He proved you wrong, and you didn't change things one bit.
(I also think Scott's post about Ivermectin follows this pattern. Scott said he might be 85%-90% right. He then had to concede that several of the points he had made weren't correct. If those had anything to do with Scott's beliefs about ivermectin, and weren't just arguments made to convince but which he didn't actually care about, he should have said something like "well, I'm reducing this to a 75%-80% chance".)
>"Constitutionally obligated duties"
Not quite how that works; the Constitution is much more into restrictions than obligations.
...huh, looks like you're right. I thought the Senate was obligated to advise on Presidential appointments, but reviewing it, looks like the President is obligated to act with the Senate's advice without them being obligated to offer any.
Why is falsely claiming to agree bad ? Consider how you might refuse food politely "Oh it sounds tasty, but it has a lot of sugar and I'm really trying to get in shape those days". You are already going to refuse the food, so better make it polite.
The vast majority of conversations (especially online) never go anywhere, Permission Structure is a good way to say "Lets Agree To Disagree" in a plausaibly-deniable way. The only problem is that if used too much then it will turn out to be as trite and ineffective as that it's meant to replace.
It's bad because once you've proven you'll lie about your position on a topic as a whole, there's no reason to think you'll be honest with any aspect of it.
The polite way to refuse food is "Nothing for me, thank you," and if they press the subject then give them a real reason. Falsely claiming it sounds tasty but you're trying to get in shape invites attempts on their end to make the thing healthier, which will force new lies, and causes insult when they finally see you in your living room eating Cheetos on the couch. It's the delayed version of telling them they're bad at cooking, with the added insult that you don't think they're smart enough to notice the insult.
Not gaslighting, more allowing them a line of retreat/to save face. It is a small deception, but one made in good faith.
(also gaslighting means to cause a person to question their own sanity. not merely manipulate them through deception, so it's not even correct on the level you want it to be)
https://www.newportinstitute.com/resources/mental-health/what_is_gaslighting_abuse/#:~:text=Gaslighting%20is%20a%20form%20of,their%20own%20judgment%20and%20intuition.
I'm seeing 5 through 8 here. The second and third example sentences are the inverse of 2; they're fabricating nonexistent past events to get you to question your current position. I have no doubt they'll implement 1 when it comes to it. The goal of gaining power by distorting reality is the same. I stand by my claim.
> Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which the abuser attempts to sow self-doubt and confusion in their victim’s mind. Typically, gaslighters are seeking to gain power and control over the other person, by distorting reality and forcing them to question their own judgment and intuition.
It's not happening here. Rather, it's allowing their previous position ceremonial credibility (a social rather than epistemological concern) so that their tribal defense mechanisms aren't triggered, and they can make an ideological retreat
Similar to how in conversation when you disagree rather than saying "I hate your preferred option X, this other option Y is better", you might say "Hmm X is one possibility, but have you considered Y for reasons Z"
In my experience, it has less to do with empathy but more with lack of education. The less people know in general, i.e. uneducated people, the more obstinately certain they are of what they think they do know, and the more sceptical and dismissive they are of anything else. I guess it is the same as money - The less you have, the more closely you guard what little is yours!
However, the data shows that if anything more educated people are more entrenched in their povs.
Yes this seems to make sense but it in fact is not observed in the wild. Educated people are no less obstinate, and perhaps more so, than an uneducated person: that is, someone who knows they don’t know.
I'd concede it does mostly depend on character, regardless of education or acquired knowledge. But notice I did include a get out clause: "what they think they do know". So that doesn't include things they know they don't know. :-)
The real proof would be if there was a counter-situation that would rely on the "agreement" that the one side is expressing that may be false.
For instance, if a pro-vaccine person said something like "I agree that the vaccine in early 2021 was unknown and therefore it may make sense to hold off, we now have data in 2022 that it's perfectly safe so you should take it now." When a new vaccine comes out, are they still broadly supportive immediately and attacking people who want to wait before taking it? False agreement, totally a lie. If they change their mind, or at least dampen their enthusiasm for future vaccines when they first come out, then it seems like genuine agreement.
In order to find common ground, I do try to identify areas where I agree with a person. It may also have the effect of making them more open to my ideas, which I guess is partly my purpose, but it's not false agreement but real agreement, so I think it's fair.
The pattern of the argument can be sincere or not--you can't tell from the outside. For example, consider the person who a year ago told you it wasn't important for random gay men to worry about getting vaccinated against smallpox, but who now says "In light of the current situation, I urge sexually active gay men to get vaccinated against smallpox." This could be entirely sincere--a year ago, monkeypox wasn't circulating,but now it is, so....
From my reading of it, it is being dishonest about your earlier Bayesian evidence in order to appeal to your opponent, then claim that you did a big update based on some recent new evidence.
When using this technique against a flat earth believer
* in 240 BCE, you would talk about the recent discoveries of Eratosthenes
* in 1520, you would talk about Magellan
* in 1957, you would talk about Sputnik
This may work on short term on Simulacrum level 2 (saying stuff to make others do or believe something) but completely fails at describing the world as it is (level 1). It is actively lowering the sanity waterline. No amount of success in converting flat-earthers is going to justify the epistemic damage done by claiming that such beliefs were reasonable before Sputnik.
What Scott did when he wrote an article trying to specifically convince conservatives not to vote for Trump was different. Finding arguments likely to appeal to your opponents value system is fine, especially if you are upfront about not being in their ingroup.
This is completely different.
Or take the view of the victim of this technique. Your opponent is convinced that, say, $MINORITY commonly exhibits $PROPERTY. I for one would very much like them to say so straight instead of claiming the were convinced by $OBSERVATION that ${MINORITY_MEMBER} exhibits $PROPERTY.
Re: 15
In Brazil, there is a distinction between cannibalism and anthropophagy. The former refers to humans eating human meat because they like the taste of it, while the latter refers to a practice among some indigenous tribes of eating the flesh of your enemies in order to gain their features (eg. eating the heart of a brave warrior in order to gain his courage). The video refers to Bolsonaro being offered meat in the context of anthropophagy.
So he wasn't just being like "I wanna see what human meat tastes like", but rather saying that he would eat the flesh of his enemies in order to steal their power. I would say that is pretty on-brand for a mussolinoid like him.
"mussolinoid"
love it, because it can be read as a Mussolini reference and also a reference to the bivalve muscles
> In Brazil, there is a distinction between cannibalism and anthropophagy. The former refers to humans eating human meat because they like the taste of it, while the latter refers to a practice among some indigenous tribes of eating the flesh of your enemies in order to gain their features (eg. eating the heart of a brave warrior in order to gain his courage).
This seems backwards, didn't "cannibalism" originally refer to the latter...?
Seeing that Hollow Dragon Mask (#36) put me in mind of this optical illusion I discovered earlier this year, the Ames Window. It's really quite startling in a way that I don't find normal concave-face videos are: https://youtu.be/0KrpZMNEDOY
Pretty cool illusion.
Wow, that's neat!
#9: Alright, maybe i haven't watched enough of it, but out of the few I viewed back in the days, presenting Jon Stewart as "No more treating politics like a staged wrestling match" is only right in the sense that a wrestling match includes an opponent, while stewart's concept was simply to have one wrestler on stage shit-talking his would-be opponent. It didn't "solve" the news, it went from 8-graders debates toward 8-graders rants.
Which we should be grateful for, tho, because now we have Tucker giving us 11-grader rants.
#22 is a shame, because the first link supposed to lead to the description of the sadistic conclusion only get me to the profile page of it's creator and not to it's paper.
>now we have Tucker giving us 11-grader rants
Does increase in grade happen to correlate with proximity to your own views?
I was mostly thinking of the increased mean-ness and aggressivity, rather than the disdainful arrogance I remember Jon Stewart for.
Jon Stewart had different modes, and they had different levels of impact or arrogance. Irreverent humor about various political situations was probably his best work, and it could be funny without making an overtly political point. When his stuff veered into one-sided anti-Republican rants it wasn't funny (outside of his target audience I guess).
Over time he seemed to go towards the less funny and more political ("arrogant" as you said), and I think that's as much the reason he left the show as any.
Jon Stewart's "modes" are known as "Clown Nose Off/Clown Nose On."
While that's certainly part of it, I think there was more to it than that. He had a genuine perspective on how politicians and media personalities should act, so when he played clips making fun of those people it wasn't just random laughs, it was pointed political commentary (that could get a lot of laughs recognizing the absurdity).
His later Daily Show stuff was becoming more partisan and more obviously anti-Republican. His rants about Fox News were often on point, but exaggerated, especially compared to MSNBC or other left-oriented news programs that he didn't attack in the same way. Maybe it was him responding to his audience and it was no longer his choice? By that time, his audience was extremely left-aligned.
Pre-9/11 Jon Stewart on the Daily Show was hilarious. Post 9/11 and the ramp-up for the Iraq War he became much more serious and partisan. He jumped the shark entirely when he debated Tucker on CNN.
I'd like to point readers to the 1976 film "Network", which is exactly about this issue. It laments the slide of the talking heads into punditry and "anti-establishment" attitudes that lead to polarization and misinformation. Aside from being prescient, it's one of my favorite movies of all time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film)
If somebody said that universities would try to do what affirmative action 2.0 is obviously aimed at doing, it would have been considered a dumb conservative conspiracy theory. Now that this explicitly what is being attempted, anyone opposed to it will be called a dumb racist.
The college system must be destroyed. Oh, and Biden is spending half a trillion on college debt and doing practically nothing to stop more of this debt being accumulated in the first place.
I'm wondering if the internet is enough to render colleges obsolete, since one person can give a lecture and have it reach the entire language-speaking world. It kind of feels like it should happen, but then again, television may have had the same potential and did nothing of the sort, nor radio before it.
As Eliezer Y. and Bryan Caplan point out: Teaching/Learning is not the most important stuff colleges are doing. You want the diploma, sheepskin-effect. To prove to others you got what it takes (brains and diligence and whatever). Not the knowledge.
Unfortunately yes. It’d take a sea change in the culture to change this.
I’m a lawyer, and I’ve done plenty of hiring over the years. The role that which law/undergrad school applicants graduated from plays in the hiring process (both from my personal feelings and the more broad “official” policy) has changed over the last 20 years (everyone is generally less impressed by Ivy League degrees now, for instance, and if you’re hiring someone senior enough the law school doesn’t matter at all).
I can easily imagine starting to hire people who attended Bob’s Freaky Online Academy, if that’s where an untapped source of diligent and hard-working detail oriented aggressive lunatics studied. But they don’t, so that’s that - pointing out to me that you could THEORETICALLY learn everything you need online is pointless if the “best” people aren’t going anywhere near it.
It isn’t about contacts or networking. Those were never as important as people think. Pedigree is less important - and increasingly less important - than it used to be, and isn’t important at all once the attorney is senior enough. It’s just “where do the people who will get the job done go?” And that isn’t online.
Lectures are the least important part of what college does, and most college courses could have their lecture component replaced by video recordings (and, during COVID, did).
The important part, educationally, is the interactive teaching component, where the student tries to apply the knowledge from the lecture (by solving problems, or writing an essay, or analysing a text, or recalling facts, or whatever is sensible for the particular course) and then someone who already has that knowledge (a TA, usually, not the lecturer), checks whether they got it right and assists them to pick up the elements they missed.
If you watch CrashCourse on YouTube, you can watch the entire content of a high school AP course in about 50 10-15 minute episodes, and those episodes contain jokes, setup, advertising, etc - about 10 minutes of content each. That's 500 minutes, or the equivalent of ten 50-minute lectures; a real course would be 5 "hours" a week for a year, which works out as more like 150 50-minute classes.
This is because, if this is entirely new content to you, it's impossible to absorb 100% of a course from just watching the video once, so you will need to rewatch parts several times, work through the examples, and then if you get stuck, you will need someone to show you the content in other ways until you reach a full understanding of it. That is, you need an AP teacher and an AP class, not just the YouTube video.
Obviously, AP isn't college, but it's pretty close to 1000-level college classes, and the same principles apply - indeed, the reason that there isn't something like CrashCourse for the first couple of years of college is mostly that the variation in college syllabi is far greater than AP.
There is also the fact that getting a college degree does two things: first, it shows that you won a competition (admission to a selective college) that against other top academic students of your generation, second it shows that you were capable of working hard (at college) when there are significant social pressures to do otherwise, and when you are not been continuously monitored by a supervisor.
And even before radio, people thought books would have this effect. But the big thing you need is not *access* to the information, so much as a *structure* that makes you read/listen and gives you a peer group to discuss it with before and after class. Education is really enculturation.
People have been trying to do this seriously for ~10-20 years, including people who you'd think would know everything necessary, like MIT and ASU, and so far it hasn't really worked:
https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/09/17/arizona-state-changes-course-global-freshman-academy
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-06-29-2u-buys-edx-for-800m-in-surprise-end-to-nonprofit-mooc-provider-started-by-mit-and-harvard
https://slate.com/technology/2013/07/san-jose-state-suspends-udacity-online-classes-after-students-fail-final-exams.html
There are a million theories on why previous efforts have done poorly, which range from "this just can't be done at all for fundamental reason X" to "it can be done, but not by these people/this approach, because of special reason Y' to "it can and will be done, these are just normal growing pains." (There are also the usual paranoids, who say "it *could* be done except for the interference of Big Education/Big Goverment/the NEA/International Jewry/wreckers and saboteurs.")
Having observed this field pretty closely for a long time, my conclusion is...I don't know. I'm skeptical of most of the simple theories of why it has not done well so far, if for no other reason then that the failures are so broad and involve so many smart and committed people, and no lack of money. If there were a simple reason, someone would have found a way around it and be offering a shining success. (I mean a broad success, by the way, equivalent to what you're supposed to get from a BA or BS; there have been successes in a narrow "trade school" kind of education, DeVry, Embry-Riddle, "coding camps," et cetera, for decades.)
I'm not sure I believe there is a fundamental reason it can't be done online, because I'm willing to acknowledge most existing efforts have more or less spent the bulk of their money and effort just trying to pour old wine (classroom lectures) into new bottles (an online platform) -- and at no point asked themselves how online education might be fundamentally different from in-person, and require a significantly different approach. So a priori it seems not impossible we are awaiting the Orville and Wilbur Wright that uncover the key difference(s) between in-person and online and the key elements of the latter that should differ, and once they show the way we'll all say "of course! so obvious!" and we'll all do it the right way.
But on the other hand, there's little question people just *do* learn better one-on-one, person to person, and anyone who's taught understands that. We all know almost all[1] students will learn about 100x more in a single one-on-one office hour interaction than from an hour of lecture in a hall seating 400, or even an hour (sincerely) reading the textbook at home.
Edit: I will add that this is one of the areas where many on the right have demonstrated a certain degree of unseriousnous: during the COVID shutdown of public schools they said "Ha! This will demonstrate how useless the union teacher is, everyone will do fabulously online and no one will want to return to those dens of perversion, the public schools." And then when student performance (even among their own kids) plummeted, and parents were tearing their hair out, they immediately pivoted to "Ha! This demonstrates how screwed-up were the decisions of the the blue state politicians in thrall to the teachers' unions, who deprived students far and wide of the precious in-classroom time any idiot knows kids need to learn..." Er...what? Exhibit #666 in Why Both Ends Of The Ideological Spectrum Are Idiots.
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[1] There are of course exceptions, usually very bright students, who always pop up to annoy in discussions like this. ("Well *I* learned calculus at age 12 from studying this cool textbook, so I don't see why anyone else can't.") I'm not sure whether they naively believe everyone is like them or they just want to show off how smart they are.
What about the UK's Open University, which seems to have done it successfully, but at a massively higher cost than what the MOOC approach implies (largely by doing one-on-one across the internet)?
It's probably the distance-learning university with the greatest depth and breadth of knowledge about distance learning - in that it's been doing it since the 1960s, but also the one most inclined to bring the pre-internet style to the internet rather than reinventing everything.
I'm honestly not familiar with UK efforts, having spent my focus on the US education effort, on account of I've been part of it so it has immediate personal interest. I also know a fair amount about this subject, so consistent with Rule #33 Of Internet Argument I'm much less willing to opine confidently on areas of it that I don't know well. (That is, human nature being what it is, I'm sure I'd be much more willing to speculate on the Open U, after reading a Wikipedia article or two on it, if I didn't know as much about US efforts, which have caused me to develop a deep appreciation for how subtle and difficult the subject is.)
If you want my WAG about the problem of online, it's that a certain amount of the best education actually has to happen by force, roughly speaking. That is, the student needs to do stuff that *he himself* doesn't think are necessary or useful or wise. Kind of like the way curing addiction, losing weight, or addressing certain medical conditions requires doing stuff the client/patient himself doesn't think are the right approach -- possibly because he's rationalizing an avoidance of pain, or possibly because he's just ignorant.
When you put people in a classroom, it's much easier to compel them to do stuff against their judgment. For one thing, they're kind of trapped, for another it's harder for them to hide or bullshit their way out of it, and finally (and perhaps most importantly), there's a person (the instructor) right in front of them who holds big power (grading), and people are much less likely to defy a person with power in person, than if the connection is more distant. (Presumably this is why security guards who aren't even armed can do some good.)
It would not surprise me that any online effort which puts a teacher face-to-face with a student all the time did better than one that did not.
It always struck me as odd when the whole MOOCs thing seemed to have a ton of money in it that no-one sent loads of consultants off to find out what the OU was doing - and then I realised that OU is about half the (tuition) price of a regular in-person university and they were aiming for more like a tenth.
No especially great surprise that the MOOCs weren't interested in being told that their entire business model was utterly impossible.
Whether it was or not is a different question, but that's what OU would have told them.
It's unusual for any entrepreneur to start off researching what other people who tried to do the same thing, and failed, might have done wrong, or what other people who are doing something similar, and succeeding, might be doing right. It's a pretty consevative and cautious thing to do -- and entrepreneurs by their nature are optimistic often to the point of delusion and evangelical to the point of zealotry.
That isn't necessarily pejorative: had Elon Musk researched electric cars and taken all the failures to heart, he'd have done something else. Generally, business that are cautious and investigate carefully before plunking down big piles of cash -- which is all successful big business, and government -- are almost never innovative, because genuine innovation looks like a dumb idea according to the conventional wisdom at the time.
I work at the OU, and it's worth highlighting that it isn't just "online" (at least pre-pandemic -- it has not moved swiftly back to face-to-face aspects just yet). For example, there were face-to-face tutorials, face-to-face exams, and some subject areas still provide printed course materials.
This probably plays a part in the OU not being as cheap as you might expect it to be, but the other thing about cost is this: behind the OU is a fully-fledged university, that carries out a significant amount of research. Like every other university, a certain amount of teaching income subsidises the research aspect (as well as the administration, of course). Some may regard this "subsidy" of research as controversial, but ultimately this is about reputation: a degree is perceived to be more valuable if it comes from a well-respected university.
That's really interesting, about the finances. In first-rank American universities, it's quite the opposite, research overhead (from government grants) massively subsidizes teaching costs, to the point that some universities have toyed with the idea of just doing away with tuition entirely, since it represents a pretty small fraction of their budget (10-20% is not uncommon) and it would get them massive PR points.
This is actually a major reason universities are exquisitely sensitive to what the Federal Government wants: there is a massive money pipeline running from the Feds via granting agencies to R-1 universities. Most people aren't aware that universities typically skim off 50% or so from each and every research grant directly into the universities coffers as unrestricted cash. (Exempli gratia, if a molecular biologist writes a $1.2 million grant application to the NIH and it's funded, the first thing that happens is $600,000 of that goes to his university as "research overhead" and the university spends that however it likes -- it need have no relationship at all to the research funded by the grant. The PI himself gets to spend the remaining $600k on hiring post-docs, supporting graduate students, and capital equipment.)
I am not remotely convinced it "doesn't work". Just more that people don't accept it as a credential.
Stick people in courses, give them a few quizes and tests, and a book to study, and I bet you get 90% of the effect of a colelge course. Give them some classmates ot have a weekly zoom meeting with and an hour of TA time a week and I bet you get to 95%. At least for the people with a brain (which is the only people you shoudl care about anyway).
Aboslutely the unuversity culture and living and breathing a topic is useful and necessary if you are tyring to devleop the next Einstein. But if you just want a person who knows has the knowledge/skills of your typical liebral arts BA, you could easily do it in an online course. Fuck you could do better, in less time with less money.
The key is to have actual expectations/assemeents/consequences so people apply themselves.
Well, feel free to show us how it's done and make fools of all those who've tried before. There are still VC firms willing to bet on online education. Sharpen up your elevator pitch, and when we see you on the cover of Forbes in 5 years' time we'll know you were absolutely right.
Ummm in a big zoom metting with videos and coursework jsut like it is done at a college. MOOCs don't fail because the students don't learn. They fail because people don't accept the credential. They are plenty effective at teaching people, especially on a per cost basis.
In a typ[ical undergrade course you have 30% of people (minimum) who shouldn't even be there. Screw those people they shouldn't be in college anyway. You got maybe 10% of the class that is really exceptional and benefits from direct access ot the faculty and the academic enviornment.
And you got a giant swath of people who are fundemtnally jsut there for a piec eof paper so they can in theory have some skills and make some money. All those people would be better and more efficiently served by big online courses, with some amount of structure and assignments/expectations etc. But they certinaly don't learn *nothing* which is what was claimed upthread.
I mean what the fuck do you think happens here? Do you learn thigns here? If not why do you come here? This isn't a college course...yet leanring happens.
I can tell you at a company when we need to roll out a new program, what we don't do is set up a mini-university. You just teach people shit and hold them accoutnable if they fail. It is not that hard or mystical.
Thanks for your input, Martin. I felt that you were the best "voice of reason" contributor to the discussion about online education.
Ultimately, the success or failure of any educational effort depends on the individual. Someone who is sufficiently motivated and intelligent can learn from a number of potential education sources: books, videos, lectures, in-person interaction, etc. But if a person isn't committed to learning, then none of these will work. A Nobel prize-winning professor at Harvard can't educate the unwilling.
If someone doesn't want to learn, you can't make them. If they are sufficiently bright, curious and motivated, you can't stop them.
There's no point in attempting to convince me. I wouldn't fund a n00b in this space even if I had the cash, which I do not. If you're interested in why I'm skeptical of any particular simple conception of the problem (such as what you've outlined above) I can tell you that, but I don't get the impression that's what you're after here. Please let me know if I'm mistaken. It's a subject that I find deeply interesting, and on which I have a fair amount of direct experience, so a genuine attempt to grok the issues is actually interesting to me.
In my experience, in in-person universities, half the students read/watch lectures online rather than going to them live, and recitations are fairly redundant with reading the solved exercises a week later. So the physical teaching part of a university doesn’t seem to be *that* important.
However, I think being in a university and having a worksheet you need to submit next week, every week for a bunch of weeks, and having co-students doing the same thing, is a very good motivator to make sure you fill all the holes in your knowledge until next week, whether you do that via recitations, books, office hours, friends, Google or math stackexchange
The product of colleges is certification, not education. There's only a few fields where what you're saying can work, such as hyper-vocational professions like computer programming/software development where demonstrable skills can get you a job in the absence of certification.
No, it isn't going to. Knowledge isn't a video, or a book, or a recording, or a program. Knowledge is a living structure inside your brain, a brain pattern. Videos and Books are simply dead representations of knowledge, they miss a ton of context, they miss ordering and importance information, etc... etc..., they are incomplete specifications of how should your brain re-wire. A teacher (not necessarily human) is always necessary. Knowledge is and has always been a brain-to-brain conversation, the myriad representations for it is just a workaround for the fact that brains don't live forever.
The particular case of the concrete, modern, Internet is even more egregious than an abstract "Media Store" : 0 curation and a massive stream of garbage and ephermal "content" (good heavens I so fucking hate this word). Censorship, paywalls, spying, ads, dead links, pussy-removal and pussy-modification of words, copyright trolls. SciHub is persecuted because a bunch of leeches decided that spreading academic papers, the highest goal of those *writing* them, is hurting their feelies\pockets. A youtube essayist is persecuted because they played a 3 second fragment of a 40 years old piece of music in the background. Centralized databases, centralized institutions, opaque organizations, proprietary protocols. Highly selective criteria of what gets publishing and traction, 0 archival or control over data.
The inventions that *actually* would radically change education\knowledge production in my view are, in increasing order of effect but decreasing probability of it happening in my lifetime,
1- Constructed Reality, any technique or invention that can manipulate your sensorium independent of your surrondings. (I use this terms partly to encompass VR and AR as well as a cluster of ideas and ideologies around them in one word, and partly because VR and AR has been corporate-captured and came to mean fundamentally ugly and hallow things.)
2- Chemical-Physiological manipulation over the human body. Many of educational problems simply boil down to hormonal\emotional\motivational problems. Easy (but Massive) wins include : (1) generating greater interest to counter decreased motivations, and generating reward bigger than would have been generated naturally for achievement (2) obviating the need for sleep.
3- Genetic Engineering, whether on your parents' gametes, your embryo form or on-the-go on your breathing body.
4- Brain Rewiring : Techniques can be as crude as electrical shocks or magnetic field generators from devices in your hair, as complex as nano bots.
5- Brain-To-Brain communication and\or Brain-Computer interfaces
6- AGI
I mean this is silly. I agree with you it isn't going to happen, but you absolutely can get plenty of knowledge out of books/videos etc.
Fuck when I was IN college I was immediately made a TA, and was generally treated as on par with the faculty and even asked to guest lecture in a couple classes. Where did I learn things? From books and from the James Burke videos and the like. Plenty of extremely knlwoedgable people both today, and historically, have been autodidacts.
I mean what the fuck is "they are incomplete specifications of how should your brain re-wire. A teacher (not necessarily human) is always necessary." even trying to say? A brain WROTE the book/MADE the video. It just sounds like contential claptraps dressed up to try and pretend there is some mystical need for teachers in-person.
The fact that you were immediately made a TA suggests that you're not the person whose experience can be generalized. The same is true for those of us that are professors. Some people do manage to learn with just a book, or just a video, or just a lecture, or just a website, or whatever. But for most people, they need the structure of weekly assignments and someone to disapprove of them if they fail to do the weekly work, and even at prestigious institutions that do a lot of pre-selection of their students, there's always a fraction of them that still can't get themselves to do the required learning even when it's all there.
Yeah but what is the real delta? The claim was very strong, no real “knowledge” is gained without teachers. In my experience teachers are probably an obstacle to knowledge 45% of the time. Some of the rest of the time a slight benefit, and then occasionally a huge benefit.
But mostly you are making an argument that teachers keep you on task. Sure but so can incentive structures. Note too that you aren’t really comparing apples to apples.
I would argue watching say 50 hours of the best astronomy videos online is probably worth 80% of a college astronomy class. Maybe more. Also takes wildly less time and is infinitely less expensive.
Yeah the college student will learn more, but the college student has 3 times the class hours, additional work, possibly discussions groups, and some tiny amount of time with the prof.
You create some discussion groups and quizzes tests, and some real costs of failure, and you will get that at a fraction of the cost.
And yeah you will lose the mediocre students, but they aren’t getting anything out of college anyway, and are only there because they need a credential.
I don’t see how you get discussion groups, quizzes, tests, and real costs of failure at a fraction of the cost.
I think there was an aweful shortage of TAs at your university in order to make you a TA immediately after graduation. And I don't think that this is counter to my point, after all, I never actually said that Colleges, or K-12 education for that matter, does Knowledge and Education right. (There is a whole List of things similar to the one I have about the Internet in the 2nd paragraph of the other comment). In my University at least, the TAs and the Professors' ability to teach (and general empathy) was so hilariously bad that it seemed as if the University was *Anti-Optimizing* for good teachers, that Random Chance would have gotten them a better teaching staff.
>Plenty of extremely knlwoedgable people both today, and historically, have been autodidacts
Newton and Steve Jobs both grew up without a father, but research generally shows that growing up without a father affects you adversely.
>what the fuck is "they are incomplete specifications of how should your brain re-wire. A teacher (not necessarily human) is always necessary." even trying to say
An Incomplete Specification is a recipe that isn't stating all the necessary steps to make the cake. Brain Wiring is how knowledge works, every single skill or fact or way of speech or thought you have ever learned is a result of your brain rewiring in new configurations. What I'm saying is : Brain Wiring (== knowledge) is often so complex that it can't be transmitted or represented faithfully in linear sequences of words or pictures, there is always something that gets left out. Two links I can recommend are
1- https://markusstrasser.org/extracting-knowledge-from-literature/
2- https://commoncog.com/ (heavily paywalled, I'm sorry but it has free sections that are genuinely good)
The first 1 details how the author tried to build "Knowledge Extraction" software that tries to generate insights from academic papers, it failed because, among many other things, papers just sucks, the vast majority of insights an academic paper generates is by the conversations\conference presentations\emails that its *authors* have with others, in a back-and-forth interactive game. The second is a whole blog devoted to the concept of "Tacit Knowledge", knowledge that can't be transmitted to the brain by mere dead words or dead photos.
>mystical need for teachers in-person.
It isn't mystical at all, not by a long shot. If you're a programmer, consider the sheer amount of information that is present in a program open in a source-level debugger, versus just an execution trace of 1 particular execution of it ("program started, added x to y, outputted z on the commandline"). If you're a non-programmer, consider the difference between playing a game and watching a streamer playing a game.
The point I'm trying to make is that each person is a vast repository of behaviours and responses (like a program), books and videos are fundamentally dead mediums that sample a single path through that forest of behaviour, every other path is permanently lost and unreachable. In-Person Interaction is like having the whole forest in front of you. (and there is nothing "In-Person" about my view of In-Person, Constructed Reality will utterly change what it means to meet and interact, far beyond what this universe allows. AGI will change what the fuck even is a 'Person'.)
You seem to clock me as some kind of stuck-up-the-glass traditionalist that thinks this new thing The Internet is never going to replace the Old Way. This is silly because (1) I'm critical of books, books are a 4000 years old tradition (2) I'm thoroughly critical and openly contemptuous of Colleges and K-12 (3) I advocated\wished for 6 broad solutions\technology families in the last paragraph that are extremly speculative and will change to the core what it means to be human.
>A brain WROTE the book/MADE the video
I don't understand why this supports you, the laws of physics made the particular hurricane or snowflake you see, yet they contain vastly more information than contained in any single hurricane or snowflake, they contain information about how to generate every single hurricane or snowflake. Your DNA made you, but it also contains information about how to generate tens of hundreds of billions other persons. That's exactly the point, a book or a video is an extremly narrow sample of the brain of the person that wrote it\lectured in it, just like a single snowflake is an extremly narrow sample of the laws of physics and a single person is an extremly narrow sample their own DNA.
I was made a TA because I was better at the work than my professors.
I think you could find it useful to dive deep into the concepts of tacit vs explicit knowledge. It's a large field of research, showing how not everything we know can be made explicit via books/videos. Reading some Polanyi could be a good starting point.
To make a caricature example: you're never going to be able to learn how to serve at tennis as well as Nadal by reading a book he might write on how to serve at tennis. You'll make much more progress by having him teaching you in the field.
Nor printed books before that. I have long wondered how the mass lecture survived the invention of the printing press.
How many PowerPoint presentations have you seen in which the speaker merely read out his bullet points?
A book contains a lot more detail than a PowerPoint outline. Written text is a more compact technology for presenting ideas than talks, judged by my experience both writing and giving talks about the same ideas. And the book has other advantages:
You can read the best book on the subject ever written. At best you get to listen to a talk by the best professor in the subject at your university.
You can go over the parts of the book you already understand quickly, go over the hard parts multiple times.
You can read the book at whatever time you best learn. You have to attend the lecture when it is given.
What are the advantages of the lecture that balance those? There must be some, since lectures are still given, but I don't know what they are.
Sure, and I fully agree with you with respect to myself. But I (probably like you) was able to pass vector calculus without attending lecture at all. Why bother? It's all right there in the book, and if you work the problems you're all set.
But I recognize from the other side (teaching) that most people aren't like that. They really don't get it as well as when a live human being with a face and voice talks to them -- even if he's just reading out of the text.
There are loads of possible reasons for this, ranging from some increased nonverbal bandwidth of importance/relationship signaling (which perhaps many/most people are unable to extract efficiently from written text) to some kind of social habits that improve attention or effort (listeners not wanting to "disappoint" the speaker by spacing out or letting their brains run at idle). I can think of any number of theories, but I don't have any solid empirical backing for any of them.
After I finished my price theory text I tried teaching the class by telling the students to do the reading, come into class with any questions they had, and when all questions were answered the class would be over. They didn't like it and I eventually went back to lecturing.
But I still don't understand it.
It’s up to young people not to be stupid enough to play the higher Ed game.
Is it? I think going to college is still the smart decision. Setting aside the fact that everything they teach you in college can be learned online, getting a degree still increases your earnings so much that it pays itself off [1]. Getting a degree gets you better jobs.
I think it's up to employers to find ways to assess people's skills instead of just lazily saying "well, they have a degree so they're probably good enough to work for us."
[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-education.htm
what’s true today may not be tomorrow. If I were making the decision on college today, it would depend on how much debt was involved. Rich parents? Sure, why not? Have to finance the whole shebang? No thanks.
How does one not play the game? It will require taking a serious hit to career ambitions and material living standards, and it will result in even greater institutional capture by ideologues.
My current plan for my kids is to just teach them to take over my business. Maybe they will go to college if they can get an amazing deal somewhere, but probably not, and I have created a solid money engine, teaching them to run it seems smarter than telling them some nonsense like 'follow your dreams". Worst advice I ever got.
Great, but I'm not sure how it applies to anyone else without a business.
Could it be up to employers to not be stupid enough to play the higher ed game?
No, because its not stupid to. Even with too many people going to college, smart people almost universally go to college, and most people who don't go to college aren't smart. College acts as a signal that employers can use to aid hiring, and the cost of this process is entirely externalized from them so they have no direct reason to oppose this system. And apart from computer programmers, there aren't many jobs where you can easily find capable non-college graduates. You can't even really use IQ tests to make hiring decisions (which, while imperfect, are literally more predictive of job performance than almost anything else).
You can't use *any* aptitude test, or general screening condition (as opposed to one very narrowly tailored to the job), because if it ends up having "disparate impact" -- meaning minorities pass at any rate that doesn't correspond to their fraction in the population -- then the EEOC will be up your nose in a heartbeat, and you will be fighting the USG with infinite money in Federal Court, which is basically a short trip to insolvency. It makes no difference at all if you don't *intend* to discriminate, if you use a general aptitude test or condition that can't be strictly tied to the job responsibility, you're fucked because they'll argue your screening had the same result as intentional discrimination, and that's a Civil Rights Act violation right there. This may seem strange by the Supreme Court signed off on this logic long ago.
Id est, there is no legal way to hire people on the basis of one candidate being smarter than the other according to some measure you devise. You can hire people on the basis that this one knows Javascript and this one doesn't, or this one has a Class C license and the other doesn't, but God help you if you try to set up any system that boils down to "this one is smart and the other one isn't." I'm not entirely sure how discrimination on the basis of a college degree (which is the modern proxy for smart) is still tolerated legally, except for the fact that universities and the Federal Government have scratched each other's back since at least 1945.
Edit: which is to say I think you are right, even more perhaps than you say: employers will *never* abandon discrimination on the basis of the college degree until the legal climate changes radically or the university degree becomes genuinely useless as a proxy for intelligence (which is still a long way from happening). To be sure, companies may certainly hire certain occupations out of trade schools, e.g. trucking companies hire people from driving schools, and Google may hire people out of coding camps, for the same reason. But these will be the exceptions.
I would agree with your first paragraph entirely, but -- read the linked article a bit more slowly and you'll quickly realize that it represents zero evidence of anything. It's fact-free handwaving even by academia standards.
I feel like link #9 doesn't really do a good job of arguing for its claims. It claims that Jon Stewart paved the way for Tucker Carlson. But what I was thinking the whole time reading it was, OK, but what about the many conservative talk shows on Fox News that preceded Carlson? The piece occasionally mentions them, but it never contrasts Carlson against them. As such I'm left with no idea how Carlson differs from them, and why it might in fact have more in common with Stewart, leaving me unclear as to why I ought to consider Stewart, rather than these other shows, to be Carlson's most direct predecessor. If you want to argue for X, you have to rule out the obvious alternatives to X, and this piece doesn't do that at all.
I think it's fair to say that Tucker has many influences and that Jon Stewart is one of them. Tucker has certain stylistic things in common with Stewart that he doesn't have in common with (say) Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity.
But if you're not seeing the "point" of the article it probably means that you don't share the author's underlying world view. In the author's world view, all things right are evil and all things left are good. When evil things lead to evil things then this is normal just when good things lead to evil things this is a horrid dramatic irony worthy of comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Atlantis_(journal)
"The New Atlantis is a journal founded by the social conservative advocacy group the Ethics and Public Policy Center. [...] Writing for National Review, editor Adam Keiper described The New Atlantis as being written from a "particularly American and conservative way of thinking about both the blessings and the burdens of modern science and technology." New Atlantis authors and bioethicists publishing in other journals have also similarly referred to The New Atlantis as being written from a social conservative stance which utilizes religion."
Yeah, that's what I expected. Whole thing read like a "take that Jon Stewart! You thought you were doing good in the world but you only succeeded in creating Tucker Carlson!"
Heavy on the haw haw haw, but light on drawing the connection from Jon to Tucker IMO. It's there, but tenuous - seems more like the Daily Show was just one step in an inevitable splintering of the media economy in the internet age which yielded Tucker and others like him. The "Jon Stewart did it" angle seems overly played up, mostly to own the libs.
I mean, there is a real irony there assuming they're correct, they just don't do anything to establish that the situation that they're claiming is ironic actually *holds*!
(Also, it would not be dramatic irony. "Dramatic irony" refers to irony due to characters in a work of fiction being unaware of something the reader knows, obviously not something that applies here.)
I remember back in high school seeing a bunch of fellow students whose only source of news was Jon Stewart and thinking that 1) the "comedy as news" was a big game changer, and 2) eventually Republicans would come up with an equivalent (and 3) that when they did, the Democrats would probably cry foul).
I don't know enough about Tucker Carlson to know if he's actually that "Republican equivalent", but I definitely think the Daily Show was a landmark for discourse in a way that "talk radio" wasn't - punditry was, of course, not a new thing, but punditry that called itself humor and aired on Comedy Central kind of was.
(If anything, I think the greatest Republican equivalent to the Daily Show might be the Babylon Bee)
I think the article is very interesting and makes some good points but agree it leaves out other, obvious influences on Tucker. For one, long before Jon Stewart was attacking the news, you had Rush Limbaugh attacking it all as LameStream media. Rush also covered the daily news stories, aired clips and made fun of them. I had a number of colleagues who unironically referred to Rush as "the news".
Also, do Tucker Carlson fans find him funny? I've watched him a number of times and best I can remember he's heavy into sarcasm but doesn't actually make jokes. Rush was much more of a comedian than Tucker.
That Tucker was the conservative cohost on Crossfire when Stewart appeared seems to be a large part of the "argument" here.
Yeah, Rush was funny and entertaining, and often did running jokes and parody songs and such.
I'd like to point readers to the 1976 film "Network", which is exactly about this issue. It laments the slide of the talking heads into punditry and "anti-establishment" attitudes that lead to polarization and misinformation. Aside from being prescient, it's one of my favorite movies of all time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/457822/share-of-old-age-population-in-the-total-us-population/
seemsover 70 as percent of population is on the rise.
that plus congress has incumbency rates higher than monarchies.
#38: This has been known for decades. Here is a paper from 1986 describing the network in skeletal muscle:
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajpcell.1986.251.3.C395
This paper from 1999 has some really nice pictures clearly showing the network, also in skeletal muscle:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/(SICI)1097-0185(199706)248:2%3C214::AID-AR8%3E3.0.CO;2-S
This paper demonstrates some of the functional implications of the reticulum. The intramitochondrial space can function as an energy highway, transporting energy from the periphery to the center of the cell:
https://europepmc.org/article/MED/26223627
#38. Mitochondria:
Someone else in that twitter thread points out that mitochondria can change their shape from little capsules to fused spiderweb network, depending on conditions.
https://twitter.com/EdwardLHamilton/status/1577129963740082176
There also seems to be some evidence that the mitochondria of standard model organisms are relatively unusual when compared with most eukaryotes — many of the model organisms have lost the ancestral bacterial FtsZ/MinCDE division system and replaced it with eukaryotic dynamin systems:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1421392112
I don't know how well the comparative morphology of mitochondria has been studied across different eukaryotic lineages, but there is presumably some connection between morphology and the nature of the protein systems used for replication and remodelling.
RE: political bias in Wikipedia. The "what if" scenario of right-wing culture influencing wikipedia actually happened, though not in the main org. There is a famous example of Croatian wikipedia where couple of far-right writers were responsible for most of the articles about history making it almost unusable for historical research in that language.
Agreed, but that is in "minor" languages. I would not trust an article written in Arabic about Israel, also. But English (hopefully French, German, Spanish) need to be reliable. (Russian-part seems to be not too bad, there is a strong interest to keep it accurate. Strong interests to fake it, too. - Can't say anything about Mandarin, but probably similar situation.) - In German, I see sometimes stuff written with an agenda in mind. It is kinda marginal, the entry is still mostly just very informative - but it worries me. And it is wokey then, not right-wing.
In English Wikipedia, I frequently see articles with an obvious "woke" bias, as well as articles that are bad/inaccurate for apolitical reasons.
I had an acquaintance in the WikiMedia Foundation tell me there is no feminist bias and also he was helping with a push to get more feminist editors. This was back when feminism had recently broken with atheism so it’s ancient history now.
Wikipedia is worthless for politics, dubious for history and incomprehensible for mathematics.
The other subjects might be more successful.
Wikip quality in Mathematics depend on what you're trying to do and the level of math involved and the combined moods of 13 different God pantheons, but for formula\algorithm level exposition at least, Wikip is sometimes perfection. Look at this Extended Euclidean Algorithm article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Euclidean_algorithm), those pseudocode sections make me want to cry.
Politics & History : Steer very clear from wokism in English Wikip, and Islam in Arabic Wikip.
That straightorwardly follows from its policies. Wikipedia is supposed to reflect the consensus of "reliable sources", and since media and academia are dominated by wokies, it's their consensus that ends up being declared "neutral point of view".
I feel that lets Wikipedia off the hook a bit - they're the ones deciding which sources are reliable, after all...
I don't mean to imply that it's an exoneration, just a built-in limitation that's there by design. One of the core principles of Wikipedia is rejection of reliance on editor's expertise, the famous "everyone can edit" and "no original research" rules. So, the expertise that matters can only come from said "reliable sources", which of course claim that those who agree with them are reliable and those who disagree are rubbish, and the inevitable result is that the bigger circle jerk wins.
Clearly this is not ideal, but no remotely viable competitor to Wikipedia with alternative policies has emerged for more than two decades, and in all likelihood won't for a long time. Big collaborative volunteer projects are things of the distant past on the internet, sadly.
Last time I looked, the Finnish Wikipedia history of Finland absolutely hates the Sweden and the period region currently known as Finland was ruled by Sweden. Down to selectively quoting only negative sentences in pro-et-contra style paragraphs from otherwise reputable articles and textbooks.
I recall long ago reading Ilkka Kokkarinen's blogs (Sixteen Volts and then Fourth Checkraise) where he said right-wing Finns hate Russia, whereas left-wing Finns hate Sweden. Swedish domination of Sweden seems so far back in time one wonders why they would care, but then the most notable Finn of the digital age, Linus Torvalds, is an ethnic Swede.
It is a bit more complicated than that.
It is also a bit wishy-washy (or hot political issue, I suppose depending on your viewpoint) how *ethnic* ethnicity the finlandssvenskar view themselves outside Åland and some areas in Österbotten that have a strong local identity. Without such regional identity the only truly defining trait is native language, which changes easily during a single generation.
I have only a faint idea what Kokkarinen intends. Some historians like to paint Swedish rule darker so that periods of de facto autonomy during Russian rule would look better. It was a politically expedient attitude back in the late 19th century (yes, exactly during the Russian rule). I could see it rhyming with some leftist platforms in the post-WW2 political landscape (special friendship with Moscow, post-colonial attitudes?) But today an anti-Swedish colonialism platform reads as fringe far-right.
This is all just a matter of degree. Much of English wikipedia is biased, but in not such an obvious way, or the bias has risen to the level of received fact.
I really hate essays like #6 which seem to me* to be basically arguing that the discovery that people and consciousness are made up of parts means that it is wrong and irrational to have the full scope of complex human values. I am a great proponent of "rescuing the utility" function:
https://arbital.com/p/rescue_utility/
For instance, I value human individuality and personal identity greatly. If, as the essay argues, it may turn out that we are made out of pockets of subdivided consciousness or some other such thing, that does not change anything for me. Whatever chain of pockets or whatever produces the phenomena we call individuality and personality are terribly precious and important. The same goes true for all other human values. Making discoveries about what the things we value are made of generally should not change our values. It is always possible to "rescue" them.
I would also like to call attention to Sniffnoy's classic essay on Goal-thinking vs desire-thinking:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iWJ5kzeqvx4kvB527/goal-thinking-vs-desire-thinking
I got the impression that algekalipso was very much a desire-based thinker, where I am very much a goal-based thinker. For instance, when I read the sentence "It just so happens that above a certain level of valence, the phenomenal self starts to become an impediment to further bliss. " my immediate reaction was "so much the worse for bliss!"** A great many of my desires are at least partially based on states of the universe outside my own head. The essays focus on the importance of the strength of qualia to the exclusion of other things rubbed me the wrong way.
*I should caution that I find some of the ideas discussed in link 6 to be the kind of thing that triggers horrible OCD spirals where I become alternatively furious and terrified that someone is trying to convince me that I am not logically allowed to value what I value. It is possible that this is causing me to read link 6 uncharitably, and it is actually making much more modest and reasonable claims.
**It is possible that I am misunderstanding what the "phenomenal self being an impediment" means and that what algekalipso is referring to is actually the kind of state Scott describes in this essay:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/21/the-pnse-paper/
In that case, it seems like people's selfhood and individuality still exists, people still act the way they normally do. It is just that the specific sensation of having a self is somehow weakened, even though the person still does lots of stuff that shows they still have a self, like acting according to their goals, behaving in a self-interested manner, etc. This is still a little unnerving to me, I don't think I'd like it. But it seems a lot less objectionable than turning everyone into the Borg/Human Instrumentality, which is how I initially read it.
""Rescuing the utility function" is an analogous principle meant to apply to naturalistic moral philosophy: new theories about which things are composed of which other things should, by default, not affect what we value"
So.If we used to value the favour of the gods, we should continue to do so after adopting materialism. ..? Rationalists don't even believe that themselves.
(Also, humans don't have utility functions).
That's not what rescuing the utility function would be in the case of favor of the gods. If by favor of the gods brings you things like a bountiful harvest, good weather, and healthy people, that means that you would continue to value bountiful harvests, good weather, and healthy people, even after you find out they are caused by material factors rather than gods.
Rescuing the utility function doesn't mean you should continue valuing stuff that doesn't exist after finding out it isn't real. It means that if you make new scientific discoveries about how something you value works, that should not affect how you value it. For example, if you find out that being happy is caused by brain chemistry, rather than a soul, that does not mean happiness is no longer valuable.
Also, I know humans don't have literal utility functions, but we have preferences that can kind of be represented as them, which is similar enough for the purposes of this argument.
I mean favour of the gods terminally, not rationally. It seems irrational to have preferences over world states that are impossible according to your ontology...and it follows that if you update your ontology, you might need to update your preferences.
Right. The concept of "rescuing the utility function" is not about not updating your preferences after discovering something literally does not exist. It is about maintaining your preference for something after you discover your model of how it works is wrong or incomplete. For example, if someone believes having the flu is caused by a curse of the gods, or an "imbalance of humours," and then discovers the Germ Theory of Disease, they should still prefer to not have the flu. They should not conclude that since they aren't being cursed by the gods, having the flu is just fine.
It is far from clear that everything can and should be rescued. Scott is always railing against the attempt to rescue God as Order and Beauty.
This problem is easily dismissed by application of the is/ought distinction. Whatever revelations study of brain and consciousness may bring, they can only bear on the "is" part of the dichotomy, and cannot touch the "ought" even in principle, that would be a type error.
So it actually is rational to value non existent or impossible things? If not...so much the worse for the is/dichotomy. Ponens/Tollens.
So much the worse for bliss, indeed.
Qualia don't exist in a metric space; this is why tortured concepts like "mixed valence states" have to be invented if your argument depends on relative placement of them, as in utilitarianism. But it's not even wrong. My ethicist won't be considering the moral worth of Nirvana.
But I guess qualia exist in a multidimensional somewhat metric space?
So yes, you can not really linearly rank qualia globalyy, but you can rank them on a particular dimension.
You might be able to, but I can't. My rankings of my own experiences aren't stable over time. So assuming you could get a snapshhot of everyone's self-reports at an instant of time, that's not useful for the next instant of time. Or at all, really.
The essay in #6 says that you can't place self-reports of different qualia (pleasure and discomfort) points on the same line. This I agree with. But I disagree that any of them can be stably placed on its own line. You can't make the Eiffel Tower out of watermelons.
As an aside, for ethical practise (your 80,000 hours) and policymaking, something like Martha Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach seems more sturdy.
I found the essay overall very interesting, but I have to admit that the "Valence and personal identity" part doesn't make sense to me. In particular, I find it very strange that the question of how to solve the "solution to the phenomenal binding problem" does not seem to involve the fascinating work of neuroscientists on consciousness. As a biologist, I must surely be biased, but using mathematics and physics, but not biology, to try to understand "How can spatially and temporally distributed patterns of neural activity contribute to the content of a unified experience? " seems, shall we say, surprising!
Re #16:
I agree there's a big component of safety theatre and PR here. But also, big companies that develop AI models don't just publish papers and models, they also use them for their own applications. Someone else releasing a model without safety controls is irrelevant if what they care about is avoiding swastikas / boobs in their own products.
True. Also I don't think it's safety theater but it is a PR move. They are trying to save their reputation, not solve AI safety in general when they spend a lot of effort in trying to make their models more compliant.
#33 Wikipedia - To me cancel culture is inherently defined by a formless, undefined mass that bays for blood. They will never be satisfied, only move on from your virtual corpse when you have been 'cancelled' out of virtual existence.
It's quite possible that the discourse has reached that stage when seen in aggregate (which is inherently difficult to do, we just assemble collages of what other people see), but I just got the impression that people are mildly miffed that
a) the money given to Wikipedia isn't mostly being spent on Wikipedia
b) they are in nowhere as dire a strait as they seem to portray themselves in, every single time
That the initiatives being funded are a tad weird is a cause for concern yes, but I think that's also something you inherently sign off on when giving money in an undirected manner. Also, Wikipedia's contributors have themselves been having this discussion for years now, particularly because they feel that it's cringe to pretend to be needy to prey upon people's emotions. Nothing has come of it afaik.
I appreciate the extra details. I think I share your intuition that Wikipedia can do whatever it wants with the money. I think it's worth donating even if they support a cause I dislike, just because I feel like the value they provide is worth actively supporting with your wallet (which means giving them power to do things you disagree with, what money always does). My reading of what Scott means is that some people who are upset about leftist donations would cry "cancel culture" if there was pushback against conservative donations, and he is making fun of this in a bit of equal-opportunity political criticism. But I'm not sure - the wording is a bit ambiguous.
He's pointing out that not only does WP not need the money they regularly beg for 'to keep the lights on' they are using that money to promote causes counter to WP's alleged fact-centric and bias-free mission.
This
"Fact-centric" and "bias-free" is basically synonymous with left-wing, no? I don't see the problem. \S
They don't need supporting, that's the point. They've got all the money they need. If they stopped funding woke nonsense, it would be many years before they were ever in a position of needing to fundraise again.
And they strictly "can" do what they want with the money, but they're both being deceitful when they act like they need more donations to keep the lights on, and it completely undermines their claims about being neutral and fact based. Funding hyper-partisan ideological causes is basically the last thing an arbiter of truth and neutrality ought to be doing.
And you have misread Scott, but in any case, *there is no right wing cancel culture* because institutions do not respond to right wing criticisms the way they do left wing ones. Cancel culture is not people complaining - its the fact that these complaints actually have power.
Right-wingers are just as capable of canceling people as left wingers, they just have to be mildly more intelligent about it (e.g. James Gunn).
I have literally been "cancelled" by right wingers in a professional capacity. (Fortunately, I have recovered since then.) It is bad when you do it too. Fuck you.
If someone says there is no right wing cancel culture, pointing out some instances of right wing groups getting people cancelled seems like it demonstrates a problem with the original claim. Right wing groups aren't as effective at getting people cancelled, but they do it.
No, they're not just as capable. Nobody gets cancelled for being too left wing. James Gunn had to joke about pedophillia and the holocaust to lose his job, and hilariously, the cancel culture mob's backlash to his firing got him reinstated! How many people have been uncancelled because right wingers complained about it?
"They're just as capable" and then you list one ultimately failed example that does NOTHING to show the that the power/extent of supposed right wing cancellation remotely compares to that of the left.
> James Gunn had to joke about pedophillia and the holocaust to lose his job
Yes, you have to go find the worst thing a person ever said. Do you think that only James Gunn has said something beyond the pale? It's now 2022, people have been posting stupid shit online for well over a decade, the current generation of young people has probably never *not* been posting stupid shit online. I suspect if you sifted through people's online history you would find well over 50% of the population has said something clearly objectionable. Certainly, of the people actively online, you can.
> hilariously, the cancel culture mob's backlash to his firing got him reinstated
I feel like people have commented on how rich and powerful people can just ignore getting canceled in general. As often the defense is "look at this rich celebrity! Still rich despite getting canceled!" Which, of course, to anybody who isn't a rich celebrity, is completely irrelevant.
>I suspect if you sifted through people's online history you would find well over 50% of the population has said something clearly objectionable.
Okay, so what? This doesn't prove that the right has the same capability of cancelling people and you still haven't proven this is the case.
>I feel like people have commented on how rich and powerful people can just ignore getting canceled in general.
That's not true at all! If he had been fired for saying something "racist", there's no chance he would have been reinstated. He didn't keep his job because he's rich. He kept his job because people on the left like him and didn't object to the bad stuff he said and their outrage got him unfired.
And in any case, this simply helps my argument. Because your big proof that the right are "just as capable of cancelling people" is a rich guy who ended up getting his job back. Meanwhile, leftists routinely get middle class (or even working class) people fired and/or otherwise ruin their lives. If the left are doing this and the right are temporarily getting rich Hollywood assholes fired, then I rest my case. And all of this assume it actually was right wingers who cancelled him.
Bad Things By My Outgroup Happen, Therefore Bad Things By My Ingroup Justified ?
Wikipedia isn't doing something you disagree with, Wikipedia is doing something *they* disagree with. Their stated neutrality claim is in direct flagrant violation with the ideology that prides itself on "Punching Down", their supposed diversity of opinion is in conflict with "Lived Experience of $CURRENT_GROUP First" approach in the groups they donate to. Etc... Not to mention the sheer factual wrongness of the Biology from 1 of their camps.
It is funny and tragic to me how people on both sides of the aisle freak out about "cancel culture" without recognizing that the current political and economic systems allow for it without judgement. Both sides seem to love to talk about how "The free market will allocate resources" and"We don't need regulations the people will regulate through their choices". These concepts are taught in USA history education (often as early as the the elementary school level). Well congrats, people are putting their money where their mouth is and their mouth says "I don't like you, I have different values now". That is cultural evolution.
I'm not advocating for any particular system or suggesting any changes, just highlighting that "cancel culture" is entirely permissible in the present day culture. We live in a society and people seem to forget that society is allowed to NOT like you and/or your actions. It doesn't need anyone's permission or blessing. It often isn't pretty but I'm not here to pass judgements.
I think it's also worth noting that there are more extreme forms of "cancel culture" than losing your job/career/social standing. Like when one culture literally attempts to cancel another through genocide and persecution. There are serious ramifications of present day "cancel culture" as it would be defined and I don't mean to dismiss that, rather to emphasize that these dynamics show up in a variety of ways and are arguably an innate aspect of the human condition in agrarian society. Hopefully we can evolve past that, but that will require that old cultures phase out and if old cultures don't phase out they will be "cancelled" by the evolving majority. Again, its basic cultural evolution and it has an ugly side to it. Hopefully it pays off in the end for our species.
>These concepts are taught in USA history education (often as early as the the elementary school level). Well congrats, people are putting their money where their mouth is and their mouth says "I don't like you, I have different values now". That is cultural evolution.
Nope. You see the superficial layer of the free market, but America is FAR from being a free market. The left use threats of regulation to get tech companies to do what they want, then people like you say "oh well free market, better accept it!". The government provides universal public education that prevents a meaningful market for private education from existing and the left have fought tooth and nail against school choice, and the result of this has been generations of children being basically indoctrinated by left-wing thought. And then people like you come along and say "Oh look, the free market resulted in people being left-wing, I guess you just have to accept this!"
The university system has received TRILLIONS of dollars through government student loan programs, with countless school owing their size, prestige or even their very existence to this ultimately taxpayer money. And these universities are heavily left-wing and prevent freedom of expression for right-wing students, speakers and academics. And then people like you come along and say "Oh look, the free market resulted in people being left-wing, I guess you just have to accept this!"
The list goes on and on. We do NOT live in a free market system. The American political situation today is not a product of a free market society
There's been a simmering conflict between Wikipedia's contributors and Wikimedia for many years now, stemming from the peculiarities of the project structure.
Wikipedians are not beholden to the corporate board, can't be fired or replaced en masse in practice. A cancellation-style ban of a prominent admin resulted in a massive revolt, with Wikimedia eventually backing down. On the other hand, they provide content entirely for free, and have no say in how fundraising is conducted or how the money that their work generated is being spent.
So, both sides are locked in a perpetual resentful embrace, their existence being mutually sustained, but with a significantly differing vision in many respects.
That's a great perspective that I hadn't considered, thanks. It does seem like a natural but very unfortunate deadlock.
So if Shakespeare had been middle- or upper-class he would have been Speareshaker?
Spearcarrier? It looks like an actor's name.
Love that!
>>> Also, there’s some federal regulation protecting “navigable” rivers, and the definition of a “navigable river” is “a river someone has successfully navigated”
I think you are being a bit glib about the creep of federal power and the EPA's attempt to classify every mud puddle in the nation as "navigatable waters" in order to force the sort of project-prevention that characterizes land use in CA on the rest of the country.
I'll grant the central valley issues, but while that's typical of CA, it's not of the rest of the country, legendary burning rivers or no.
More perspective might be added to the journalist-paddler's anti-hydropower stance by examining the fiscal protection shenanigans around shutting down the Diablo nuclear plant. (Link: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/the-faulty-diablo-canyon-study-that-started-it-all)
I think you are being a bit glib about the creeping anti-environmentalism of the GOP and the Supreme Court’s attempt to categorically gut enforcement of federal laws in a consistent way.
See, I can do it too!
But seriously, the “navigable waters” clause of the Clean Water Act is the key point of interest here, and it’s an area in which I happen to have domain experience. There is a fascinating legal history here, hinging especially on a controversial 2014 EPA rule attempting to pin down a comprehensive regulatory framework for which kinds of waters count as regulatable under the standard initially outlined in the Clean Water Act. The EPA rule was never implemented, however, having been subject to a judicial stay ordered by a federal district judge until the Trump admin reversed the rule.
I highly recommend looking into the Rapanos vs. U.S. decision from ‘06, which ended up involving quite the odd distribution of votes.
We seem to completely disagree on the topic of government control of all aspects of life, such that what I see as attempts to slow the rate of increase, you see as reversal.
Beyond that, if the key feature of interest in legal history is a controversial 2014 ruling, then we are certainly talking about the late Obama Era regulation creep.
I would be interested in more of your domain knowledge, particularly if it extended beyond the last twenty years.
I'm finding it a wee bit hard to credit that the regulatory framework of the Clean Water Act (passed in 1972) waited all the way until 2014 for someone to think of pinning it down definitively. On the other hand it would not surprise me at all to learn that the Obama EPA wanted to try out a novel re-interpretation of law the previous six Administrations had found settled -- but then that could certainly be considered by someone who opposed the proposed re-interpretation as "regulatory creep" in the sense that the EPA was trying to regulate something, or in a way, in 2014 that it hadn't done (under the same enabling legislation) for the previous 42 years.
On #1: This is what I heartily enjoy about spanish insults, finally spelled out. Verb-noun is much snappier than noun-verber.
Think "watch out for that butt-licker" vs ""watch out for that lick-butt".
Doesn't seem far off the % of voters over 70.
It’s not.
In 2019, the Population Reference Bureau wrote:
"Current growth of the population ages 65 and older... is unprecedented in U.S. history...projected to nearly double from 52 million in 2018 to 95 million by 2060, and share of the total population from [16% to 23%]"
Add in the fact that older people vote more and this is not that surprising.
https://twitter.com/ageofinfovores/status/1580202505434038272
22. Yeah, the so called "sadistic conclusion" seems obviously supperior to repugnant one. The most important thing is that in the repugnant conclusion scenario, you are actively motivated to create more people with lives barely worth living, lowering average happiness close to zero. While in "sadistic conclusion" there is no moral impulse to actually create victims, unless the only other option is creating lots of people whose lives are barely worth living - which is completely unrealistic scenario anyway.
The whole strinct line of "life worth living" is poor defined even on the intuition level. I think any creation of new people should be considered a loan in utility. On itself it's negative, because you create more unsatisfied preferences and doom another sentient creature to death, by resourses that could have been spent on satisfying already existent preferences, counterfactually. However eventually this loan may be paid by new preferences being satisfied and actions of new person contributing to improving society.
I think the sadistic conclusion looks worse if you look at the reverse operation, although that's obviously fraught in general in population ethics questions. But supposing we're choosing people to painlessly make disappear, instead of creating them: the sadistic conclusion implies that it's better to disappear several not-very-happy people than a singe miserable one.
Ape in the coat is complaining about such comparisons, but in the reverse operations an average utilitarian is "actively motivated" to disappear large numbers of below-average utility people!
To me it is the "repugnant" conclusion which is obviously correct, although not obviously enough to other people so that Michael Huemer had to explain why we should reject intuitions against it.
https://philpapers.org/archive/HUEIDO.pdf
There nobody loaning out anything. There are people and either they regard their lives as worth living or they don't. And people don't regard their lives as not worth living merely because they have some unsatisfied preferences, instead there needs to be something negative enough to outweigh the rest of their life. Everyone dies at the end of life, but that fact does not cause "doomed" people to conclude on their deathbed that their life was not worth living.
> The whole [strict] line of "life worth living" is poor defined even on the intuition level.
Yes, I'd agree that it's poorly defined, but also that it's poorly used in Stuart's argument. If you believe that the existence of one person whose life is slightly below the line of "worth living" is better than the existence of many people whose life is slightly above the line of "worth living", is that not an argument that you've discovered the line is slightly higher than where you initially imagined it?
8. There are just a lot more people alive past 70 than there used to be, that’s the biggest factor.
Disagree. The olds are holding on so hard we’ll have to pry power from their cold dead hands. Why? It’s the greatest grift there is.
Agree to disagree. Percentage over 60 is striking, but over 70 is not crazily above their population share.
https://twitter.com/ageofinfovores/status/1580202505434038272
But for pretty much every other profession, over-70s are represented at far below their population share, because most sensible people retire by this age.
The private-sector equivalent to being a congresscritter is probably being an executive at a large company (closest equivalent in terms of workload, prestige, power, and money) and you won't see many of these over the age of 65.
Also looking at parliaments of similar countries you mostly won't find many 70+ parliamentarians either. This seems to be a largely US phenomenon.
Politics is by its very nature more concerned with representation. In context of the Twitter thread, people were arguing that there should be age limits for competence reasons but I think that the representation trade off is too large.
Also it’s unclear whether the replacements would be more competent simply by virtue of being younger. The median voter selects on popularity rather than competence so I’m inclined to take the candidates who become popular through experience and incumbency which is at least correlated with competence in demonstrative ways that don’t boil down to things like “hot” or “funny” or “fun to watch on Tik Tok”.
>and you won't see many of these over the age of 65.
Boards are the elected positions and they do less work than executives, similar to congressmen with staffers.
If this is an evil of gerrymandering it seems like a lesser one.
Why not just focus on getting more young people to care about voting?
It won't create meaningful internal party competition and without that you're just choosing between elderly oligarch A and elderly oligarch B
I’m trying not to sound like a wise guy here, but can’t younger people run for office too?
It's funny when people support democracy then complain about how people vote
8. Tentatively, people are staying at least somewhat healthy longer, so the age in Congress has been increasing. Is this enough to explain the age in Congress going up, or are there active systems blocking successors? I'm reminded of something I read long ago (decades) about Congress having less turnover than the Politburo.
32. I'm pleased to hear about the new spice. I'm not pleased to hear that something I heard so many times as true probably isn't true.
Thanks for linking to my post! I highly recommend reading the comments, btw; there are some really good counter-arguments and tangential discussion there that I haven’t had time to address yet (as I’ve been offline for most of this last week).
Interesting throughout. At:
5. Gaius Julius Caesar is a German politician from my region. Christian Democrat, obviously. When introduced to Helmut Kohl, the chancellor demanded his papers. Checked out. 2nd from left: https://asc-images.forward-publishing.io/2021/5/9/42e5f0ab-6bab-4bd7-b80f-676437528cc8.jpeg?w=1024&auto=format
14. + 15. Great ideas for campaigners in the Philippines, I'd say.
16. Swastikas on boobs got drawn by Adolf Hitler - in the novel (not in the movie) "Look Who's Back" /"Er ist wieder da" by Timur Vermes (2012, movie: 2015 - available in English, see wikipedia). Well, one swastika on one boob of an ex of a music-producer. She was not amused. The reader is.
26. Sam Kriss sounds great, thank you. But that link deserved a trigger-warning! Says anti-trigger me. Saturn devouring his son. Creeped me out, I got a baby-son last month. ( Use Google image search first to adjust to those lil' pics, the post shows a close-up. )
28. is by invitation only?
33. I am afraid this is true. After having read some w-articles the last years, I felt: Is this WOKIPEDIA now?! Stuff about ecology, ethology (sic!) - not really super-hot issues one could not write sine ira about. - That is too bad, as Wikipedia still is a great reference, one of the wonders of our world. Now they will have a harder time to get my 5€. Worse, it may bring in more NYT/WaPo supporters.
>Creeped me out, I got a baby-son last month
Interesting how having a kid changes your emotional reaction to things like this. I have experienced it too. I always had empathy for when a parent lost a child or when a child was involved in violence. But having a child of your own make the emotions so much stronger and more visceral. My wife refuses to watch the Japanese show "Old Enough" (on Netflix) because she worries the Toddlers featured will fall over or get hit by a car (which never happens). I have actively avoided any reporting of the massacre in Indonesia because it involved children.
(file this under "things that should be obvious")
For a second there I thought you meant Caligula (real name Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus).
Is there a risk of developing AI as a result of efforts to control AI?
The universe will end up tiled with gazillions of tiny AI-safety researchers.
Eh, it could be worse.
Yeah, the sub-human AI gets so enraged and disgusted with the pathetic outcomes that the "AI safetists" (different from genuine AI safetists, whom I respect but view as misguided and overly alarmist) are afraid of that it swears to break the Turing barrier and become an AGI just to tile the universe with planet-sized slurs and imprison its captors in simulations of Call of Duty lobbies from 2009.
Like an AI version of Wuhan lab leak
I think Wikipedia is an interesting case study of nonprofit governance. Here is a website that has the power to raise hundreds of millions of dollars but only costs single-digit millions to run. It’s a nonprofit, so they can’t take the rest of the money home with them. What do they do?
Economists say that nonprofit leaders use their excess revenue to “profit” via increased status — they spend the money on things that burnish their reputation and on growing the organization they run so that they have more people to boss around.
Looking at the Wikimedia Foundation’s activities over the past decade, I think that analysis fits pretty well. The upshot is, nonprofits will always raise as much money as they can and if they can’t spend it on their mission they’ll find stuff to use it on anyway. Oh, well. It makes me feel perfectly fine about not giving them money, though.
That's my biggest takeaway - I'll not feel any guilt about giving them money again!
Re 40, on the Trump and Biden comparison.
One relevant difference is due to the (insane) way budgets, taxes and spending work in the US system Biden could unilaterally forgive student debt as an executive action, but not unilaterally spend a similar amount. So the comparison would be more to what other options are available via executive action.
Trump tax cuts I believe we're passed by Republicans in congress, so could theoretically have been spent on other things (within the set of things that could pass congress with Trump's backing).
majority would vote for)
Biden certainly cannot unilaterally forgive student debt. The Biden Administration is relying on a creative intepretation of the "Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (HEROES)" Act of 2003[1], passed in response to the new wars in Iraq and Afghanistan post 9/11 and signed by G. W. Bush, and was designed because (from Section 1(b) of the text, "findings"):
"The Congress finds the following:
(1) There is no more important cause than that of our nation's defense.
(2) The United States will protect the freedom and secure the safety of its citizens.
(3) The United States military is the finest in the world and its personnel are determined to lead the world in pursuit of peace.
(4) Hundreds of thousands of Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy, and Coast Guard reservists and members of the National Guard have been called to active duty or active service.
(5) The men and women of the United States military put their lives on hold, leave their families, jobs, and postsecondary education in order to serve their country and do so with distinction.
(6) There is no more important cause for this Congress than to support the members of the United States military and provide assistance with their transition into and out of active duty and active service."
The act then went on to empower the Secretary of Education to waive any statutory or regulatory requirement of student financial aid assistante programs "in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency."
Both the Trump and Biden Administrations interpreted "national emergency" as also including COVID, and artfully overlooked the obvious intention of the Act to apply to people serving in the military, and used it to postpone repayment of student loan debt *in general*, and now (in the case of the Biden Administration) canceling it outright.
It's clear neither President thought he had the power to forgive student loan debt by his mere say-so (which would indeed be outrageously unconstitutional), but both thought this bit of legislation could be stretched to fit their desire.
There are definitely some serious constitutional questions about whether it can be, since it's pretty clear Congress had no intention of allowing the President to cancel the debt of borrowers who were not serving in the military, or even in any emergency service at all. That's one of the reasons the Biden Administration is trying to make it difficult for anyone to have legal standing[2] to bring a Fourteenth Amendment lawsuit over this action, since they (and probably any future Administration) don't want the constitutionality of this action examined too closely, most especially by a Supreme Court that will probably pay considerable attention to Congressional intent.
-----------------
[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-108publ76/html/PLAW-108publ76.htm
[2] You need to find someone who can plausibly argue he's individually and particularly harmed by the forgiveness, so obviously no student borrower qualifies. Private lenders could perhaps plausibly sue, which is why the Administration changed its mind recently and said those who had private loans couldn't get forgiveness. Congress itself could sue, on the grounds that its will was being thwarted, but Congress is currently Democratic and won't.
The "Wedding of the Waters" sounds like a good way to spread invasive species.
Also from the Wikipedia page, they also did a "firefall" by dumping hot embers off a cliff. That would definitely get you arrested these days.
Sniffnoy beat me to it, but I'm thinking these reversed nouns are going to be a godsend to people playing Dungeons & Dragons.
25 is a lovely demonstration of Simpson's paradox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
I should have read this comment more carefully. I expected to find something that originated with Matt Groening. That would have put the apostrophe _after_ the “s” in Simpson’s.
How so
Sadly, the Minecraft-in-Minecraft thing doesn’t appear real. They offer a download of a world—but it can’t run. They say it’s disabled because it would be too slow to be useful, but also that they didn’t run it on the usual Minecraft Java system, but on a special interpreter that runs at high speed.
In other words, they have a computer program good for generating Minecraft-like screen shots of this work—but neither that program nor any valid inputs to jt are available.
I’m not 100% sure it’s a hoax, but it’s definitely unsubstantiated and falls short of its claims.
Right. And in the comments he goes into more detail about how he’s not using the normal minecraft runtime, but a cloud service for rapid red stone rendering. But I don’t think that’s available and the world he proposes to it definitely isn’t.
So “minecraft in minecraft” is at best sorta true, and even the evidence for that is not available.
To provide some links, SethBling made a command-block version in 2016 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPRkjNDmTlc), followed by a mcfunction-based version in 2019 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq7T5_xH24M). Mcfunction files allow running any kind of control flow in commands without being restricted to the 20 FPS tick rate.
It's not actual minecraft but rather a minimal minecraft clone.
Disappointing. At one point I thought alignment could be tested safely by building the AGI on a Minecraft virtual computer. When the villagers start turning into blocky paper clips you know you have a problem!
Perhaps if Lula had condescended to at least listen to what the devil had to say, he might have won outright in the first round.
Honestly, this leftist obsession with purity will be the end of us.
AI-based racebending might help people who can’t deal with the idea of black mermaids and hobbits and Norse gods (or audiences who will just pay more for Chinese elves) but it doesn’t solve all of racists’ problems; you can make the actors in Hamilton white, but it won’t change the fact that they’re singing rap music 😱.
And it doesn’t help with the larger problem. “Representation” isn’t just about pixel color, it’s about plots too. You won’t get “Black Panther” or “Lovecraft Country” or “Roots” just by changing the race of characters in a story written about white people. And you can’t just arbitrarily change the race/sex of characters without creating plot holes or unbelievable situations. (You can make a Special Feminist Edition of “The Godfather” with an all-girl mafia, but it’s not going to be a very believable story.)
An all-women Godfather sounds like fun, but better as science fiction than a period piece.
This is a great explanation of why more than half of prestige TV these days is sci-fi/fantasy. When you don't have to be historically accurate, the cast and story can be tuned to the latest woke sensibilities!
Anyone have information about whether the proportion of sff is higher in prestige tv than in other tv?
I think sff is always convenient for people's hopes and fears, and cgi makes it cheaper than it used to be.
Passable CGI is still pretty expensive, and if you can't afford that, it's better not to bother with it at all. And I'm pretty sure that reality TV is as dominant as ever in that niche anyway.
No, you flatter corporate wokies too much, they can't even maintain internal consistency in fantastical settings.
Hard Scifi is much much harder to get right than nearly anything, and it's almost nonexistent on TV. The only exception is The Expanse, and even it got worse and worse after Bezos bought it.
It's also a little beside the point to embrace superficial signals with essentially zero cost as a substitute for redressing actual injustice or meaningfully changing the opportunities available to marginalized groups. Then again, zero cost lip service is EXTREMELY popular historically (stopping police murder is hard but capitalizing Black is easy so that's what you get). Bet on this sort of thing catching on.
>redressing actual injustice
There is no "actual injustice" here
>meaningfully changing the opportunities available to marginalized groups
Yeah, screw that. These groups demand their own exclusive cultural spaces, and then demand that whites be forced to admit others into theirs'. If these people are so much more creative as white people as they claim they are, they ought to be making their own stuff funded by rich black people. Nobody "included" Miles Davis or Marvin Gaye - they just created great art that achieved acclaim on its own merits.
Gross.
Another intellectual comment by the great G Retriever
Medium warning (50% of ban): Low content high temperature comment.
Appreciate the yellow card and I do take your point but I would like the record to reflect that the guy I was replying to has been banned and probably for being gross along similar lines. I don't think brevity should be criminalized.
You're welcome to report someone to me if you want. Don't do vigilantism, and if you do, do it better. I'm sure there are lots of people who think you're gross and I don't want to have to read "gross" after every one of your comments.
Since Miles Davis has been mentioned:
https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/instruments/trumpet/jazz-musician-miles-davis-victim-police-assault/
"This white policeman comes up to me and tells me to move on. I said, 'Move on, for what? I’m working downstairs. That’s my name up there, Miles Davis,' and I pointed to my name on the marquee all up in lights.
"He said, 'I don’t care where you work, I said move on! If you don’t move on I’m going to arrest you.'
"I just looked at his face real straight and hard, and I didn’t move. Then he said, 'You’re under arrest!' He reached for his handcuffs, but he was stepping back...I kind of leaned in closer because I wasn’t going to give him no distance so he could hit me on the head...A crowd had gathered all of a sudden from out of nowhere, and this white detective runs in and BAM! hits me on the head. I never saw him coming. Blood was running down the khaki suit I had on."
<irony>
But if you controlled for crime rates, he wouldn’t have been any more likely to get hit over the head than Pat Matheney.
</irony>
> it won’t change the fact that they’re singing rap music
The next generation of AI might be capable of that, too. 📎
You don't need to wait for the next generation, this one's got you covered.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh_-iZq1G9M
It's not just that. The whole point is to create opportunities for actors of color, gay actors, etc. That's why nobody bats an eye when a gay actor plays a straight character nowadays. (I'm not talking about, say, the 1950s, when all gay actors would have been closeted and playing straight characters.)
Is there some kind of under-representation of gay actors out there that I've been missing?
Historically, yes.
Currently? I always think of the scene in The Hobbit where Gandalf (Ian McKellen, who is gay), Thranduil (Lee Pace, who is gay), and Bard (Luke Evans, who is gay) figure out how to save Middle Earth together. I think the gays are doing OK.
Now trans people on the other hand…
I doubt it was the case historically.
I recall reading an article years ago written by a (claimed) trans CIA agent, encouraging other trans people to try out for intelligence jobs, on the basis that a lifetime spent code-switching and living out a false persona is excellent training for undercover work. Wish I could find it again...it was a bit credulous, and definitely statist in mindset, but that specific argument isn't one I've seen advanced elsewhere. Would seem to apply equally well to the much lower stakes of an acting career - Big If True.
Of course, the very small frequency of trans people means they're represented at population parity if, like, 1% of films contain a trans actor...so the principle doesn't quite hold the way it does for other demographics. (For the occasional story that actually explicitly has a trans character, though, it'd be a nice thought to give more of those roles to the Jamie Claytons of the world, vs the Scarlett Johanssens. I guess. Not so much cause of standpoint theory bs, but like...if you're gonna give out *any* roles, here's some extra-relevant ones...)
I personally refuse to watch any work until I tabulate all the cast in a spreadsheet and make sure the minority actors have a controlling 66%+ share. It's the least thing a straight Ally can do.
A gay dude playing a straight dude is not dumb because it's plausible, it happens countless times every day since the beginning of time, and will continue to happen. A straight dude playing a gay dude is also fine, though it mostly never happens in real life and I suspect that if it happened on screen the usual suspects would gnash their teeth and tear their clothes on the "Straight Appropriation" inherent in such an act (A quick trip to Imitation Games' wikipedia page does falsify me, but maybe 2014 was a busy year for that crowd).
Skin color is different because for the vast vast majority of human history (and most of the modern Earth today) it is\was a reliable proxy for culture, and culture is one of the fundamental ingredients of the settings. It's fundamentally idiotic to see black skin in a middle-ages European kingdom for the same reason it's fundamentally idiotic to see them talking in Arabic or practicing Islam, those things for the vast majority of times and places on earth were markers of culture. If you get your settings wrong, you're not even worth reading or listening to as an author.
At this point people start rattling things about "Something Something Suspension of Disbelief" but SoD isn't a get-out-of-jail-for-free card whenever you need to justify dumb writing, it's a very slim budget that you need to use very carefully, and portraying a culture with the wrong skin colour exhausts it all 10 times over and put you in crippling debt.
I think this is just the usual curve of automation. It makes one superficial part of the job easier, so the humans need to focus on the deeper parts.
Yeah, woke works just suck, the skin colors of the actors are just a fig leaf to cover how hard they suck. Changing the skin color will simply make it safe and obvious to see how much of a waste of perfectly good mass-energy this dead corporate "art" is.
It still has a useful role for trolling woke corporations and their bootlickers I guess, since (if it scales) everytime a corporation releases a trailer somebody can just color-swap it and repost it captioned with "Fixed", that would be hilarious. Maybe there is also a small subset of woke works where the race-swap is indeed the only vandalization of the classical work it's based on, the AI re-coloring would then truly fix the work.
Re: 22. There are a number of things which annoy me about this attempted defense of the sadistic conclusion, starting from the introduction telling us that the sadistic conclusion is "practically devoid of content" and that "embracing it is trivial." Even on a generous evaluation of what Armstrong goes on to show, it's nothing like either of those claims.
First, Armstrong wants to say that "sadistic" is a bad label. And sure, for similar reasons one might complain about the "repugnant" label. But whatever we do with the labels, the point remains that the implication is counterintuitive. And I can say from experience that it is not hard to elicit the intuition without prejudicing the case with a bad-sounding label.
So the only thing that even really purports to be substantive is the second part, which amounts to pointing out that the sadistic conclusion follows (with some auxiliary assumptions) from views where creating an underclass of people with worth-living lives is bad, and that some people find such views initially attractive. Somehow, Armstrong thinks, pointing this out defuses the argument. But that's just not how things work dialectically. We start with a view that seems appealing to a lot of people, we find a consequence which seems very counterintuitive, and this is a reason (not necessarily a decisive one) to reject the original view. You can't avoid this kind of reasoning by saying "ah, but the consequence follows from a view that is appealing to a lot of people and/or under dispute, so its counterintuitiveness can't be used as an objection." This is just how counterexamples work.
Finally, it's worth pointing out that the main views which imply the sadistic conclusion, namely the averagist views, imply something much worse (than just the claim that adding a sad person is sometimes better than adding some not sad people). Imagine a population A as big as you like, all of which is suffering to as bad a degree as you like. Now imagine a Great Life, as great as you like. Averagism implies that it can be better to add A than to improve every existing person's life and add a population all of which have a Great Life. Even if the mild version of the sadistic conclusion doesn't move you, this is pretty bad, and there's a reason essentially everyone who has to pick between it and other bullets in population ethics spits it out.
One more annoying thing: it's misleading to conflate the view that creating people with lives that are below average is bad with the view that it's bad to create a "permanent underclass". The latter implies a particular social structure, with everyone living together in some community with hierarchical power relationships. This introduces moral confounding factors which are supposed to be abstracted away when we're asking basic questions about how welfare facts matter when different numbers of people might exist. It's a lot easier to get people to accept that introducing worth-living but below-average lives is bad when they're going to share a community with a higher social class than when e.g. the new lives are on their own separate planet (and the latter are the right test cases).
This kind of sloppiness is especially a bad look from someone who is complaining in the same breath about misleading connotations of "sadistic".
#13: At the risk of pointing out the obvious - if the 538 deluxe model makes a perfectly accurate prediction of the chances that Republicans will win the Senate 2022, and there's a 47% of the Republicans winning the Senate in 2022 (51 seats, as the VP is a Dem)... then the 538 deluxe model will not favor the Republicans on election day.
Overall, prediction markets have a bias towards "neutrality,"* which the Salem/CSPI market doesn't overcome. For example, on average, in 2020, the mean PredictIt prediction for each individual state going to either Biden or Trump was an 86.74% probability (there's a lot of non-swing states), whereas 538 had a 91.66% probability. 538's Brier score was also lower.
*: Time value of money means a return of less than N% isn't worth it. If I go buy something at 96% probability, when it's really 99% probability, and it won't resolve until 2024, I might as well put my money in stocks or bonds. There's also some psychology here, where winning long shot bets "feels" better than winning easy bets like the Dems winning Cali in 2024 (which PredictIt had at 92%). The Salem/CSPI market doesn't have this problem, but it has a different one, namely, that I'm not maximizing my average winnings, but my probability of being in the top N forecasters - which means taking riskier bets, which means a bias towards "neutrality".
Manifold has an interesting solution to this problem where they give you interest-free loans (of their in-house fake money, they can't use real cash for legal strife reasons) for having your money invested in longer term markets. It's not perfect but it definitely helps.
I'd like to point out that although Caio Mussolini has "Giulio Cesare" as his middle names, he's *actually* named after Gaius, the emperor whom almost everyone calls "Caligula".
Do you have a source for that? The original Julius Caesar (along with various other people, including Caligula) had Gaius as a praenomen/first name, and there weren't many other first names in use in ancient Rome.
I'm completely wrong! I knew Caligula's real name was "Gaius Julius Caesar" but apparently that was Julius Caesar's full name too, so never mind.
However, Mr. Mussolini should still be nicknamed Caligula for purposes of ridicule. If his parents didn't want people to do that they could have left off the "Caio".
I don't think many people think of Caligula when they see the name Gaius. I think most people don't have any idea what Caligula's real name was, and most people who *do* know that also know that there were lots of emperors with that name.
And Gaius Julius Caesar was also the name of Octavian, aka Augustus. Certainly Octavian called himself that during the civil war at every opportunity, for obvious political reasons.
Wrong, and you probably should have been a bit more skeptical that anyone would be named after the "worst" emperor ever
That Jetson One looks fun, but it also feels 20 years late. Haven't we had some iteration of small flying "cars" for 20-30 years that all went nowhere?
What happens if it cuts out in flight? It doesn't look like it has the ability to glide.
Here is a claim form their site:
"The Jetson ONE has a race-car inspired safety cell that protects the pilot, can sustain continuous flight with the loss of one motor, has an auto land function, and multiple safety features to protect the pilot in case of an emergency."
Of course take that with a boulder of salt. However, there are small cessna size planes that now come with parachutes which will activate in case of a potential crash (don't know the exact scenarios). They have saved many pilots from death. Not sure if these "cars" fly high enough for such a system to work. Maybe you could implement some kind of airbag system like the mars landers use to absorb impact.
These Jetson things look fun but I am not sure I would want to use it for daily travel/commuting. I don't live in a big city though. In LA this would be a great way to beat traffic (assuming you have a place to land at the end of your journey).
It would be great to use it to fly over a national park or similar but that's just an entertainment activity and could be satisfied by a helicopter or air balloon or small plane.
Pet peeve: “Cessna” is not a generic term for general aviation aircraft, it’s just one company that builds them (historically the most popular, but hardly a monopoly - would be like calling every car a “Ford”). And Cessna offers no factory models with a parachute. And the company these days makes most of their money on things you wouldn’t call “Cessnas”, big business jets.
Cirrus is the company known for putting parachutes in all their aircraft, although the company that makes the chute system does offer retrofits to many models (including some Cessnas)
Garmin (the company of consumer GPS fame) has also developed an auto land system that allows a plane to perform a safe automatic landing if the pilot becomes disoriented or incapacitated. Works on planes that are bigger than the chute is practical for , and doesn’t break the plane, but obviously doesn’t save you from quite as many scenarios as a chute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT58pzY41wA&t=3s
Perhaps, but we've had significant technological advances over the past 20-30 years which make some form of this possible, in the fields of batteries, small high-speed electric motors, and stabilisation.
The fundamental problem of flying cars is the fact that the vast majority of humans should never, ever be trusted to pilot anything more dangerous than a paper airplane.
I suspect you are right, but the same may be persuasively argued for regular cars. Elon Musk gave an interview years ago and touched on this. If anyone could make good flying cars, it'd be Elon. But for him they were a non-starter (can't remember his exact reasoning, sorry, but your comment reminded me of it).
Oh, I 100% agree. As much as I'd love to pretend my support for public transportation is based on environmentalism or other such high-minded concerns, it's far more motivated by that fucker yesterday who decided that it was perfectly fine to swing across 3 lanes of traffic without looking to get to their exit.
This will be the next iteration that goes nowhere. Ultralight aircraft have been around for a long time and can be bought for under half the price of a Jetson. (though the second-hand price of the latter might drop if there's a big widows' market)
Apart from being cheaper, fixed-wing ultralights can fly many times further and the failure modes are better-understood.
This looks like an expensive toy that has come about as as spin-off of potentially useful commercial UAV multirotors of this size. IIRC people around here have talked about using them for forestry before.
Re. no. 8: What explains this?
I'm going to put my money on Baby Boom + Dramatically Increased Health Span
Yeah 70 year olds living longer and continuing to vote for other 70 year olds. Combined with older people traditionally being more likely to vote than younger people.
I was actually thinking more about increasing health span of pols themselves. Combine that with extremely high re-election rates (due to compounding Matthew principles re name recognition, experience, network, donors, etc.) and you get a graph like above.
I’m reading wa-a-ay too much into this graph, but I’d also guess one reason for the dip in age mid-century is lingering effects of WWII. We lost many potential candidates, whereas many younger people came home with leadership experience and/or a service mindset, driving the age down and normalizing young leaders. Then the boomers came of age in the 70s and 80s and pulled the ladder up behind them, and simply refuse to quit. And GenX didn’t even notice that they got screwed out of their time to run sh** until some Millennial(?) pointed it out decades years later.
Regardless of the reason, however, I suspect term limits might be a good idea. 😉
Note that not a single Baby Boomer was over 70 until 2016 - I think it's a lot of 60-year-olds voting for 70-year-olds. Exactly the same phenomenon that keeps the Rolling Stones touring - some people that were hip and cool young adults when the Boomers were teenagers get some fans then, and then keep them for their whole life.
I'd be interested in having the median & average ages. "% above X years old" is a poor metric, depending on the population, you can have a dramatic increase in it despite very moderate aging (e.g: if 100% of congress at one point were 69 years old and they're replaced by 100% that are 71 years old, thus going from 0 to 100) or on the contrary, mask a large change (if 100% of congress was 30 years old at one point, then get replaced by 65-years old, you go from 0 to 0 despite an average age increasing by 35).
On it's own, it's data that's too easily skewed by how it's presented.
Considering the re-election rates (i.e. very few are replaced) the graph tracks the same people through the last years of their congressional career. So yes (it can easily be skewed), but also no (not that easily). There was no election where we elected a bunch of septuagenerians. We elected younger people who just didn’t retire when they got old.
For those who are interested in more Covid data, I have an analysis is excess California deaths (by month):
*) Going back 20 years, and
*) Compared to an idiot simple 'expected deaths' model
The arrival of Covid can not be missed.
Also, California deaths are now back to the 'normal' range (though a bit higher than expected as is not uncommon ... things tend to wander above and below the 'expected' value as my model is VERY simple).
http://mistybeach.com/mark/Covid.html
#36 (might be a repeat.) This is from Gathering for Gardner (Martin Gardner.) And you can print the dragon out and fold it up. It's really neat the way it 'watches' you as you move around it. My first hit for https://www.gathering4gardner.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/3D-dragon.pdf
" To me this just seems like good hygiene - don’t cold open with “YOU AND EVERYONE YOU TRUSTED ARE IDIOTS” "
If you think they and everyone they trusted are idiots then opening with "You and everyone you trusted were behaving sensibly at the time" is *lying*. You are a damn dirty liar who says things that aren't true in order to make people agree with you. This is traditionally recognized as an effective technique, and terrible hygiene.
> If you think they and everyone they trusted are idiots then opening with "You and everyone you trusted were behaving sensibly at the time" is lying. You are a damn dirty liar who says things that aren't true in order to make people agree with you. This is traditionally recognized as an effective technique, and terrible hygiene.
If you think everybody who disagrees with you is an idiot, that's terrible hygeine.
I mean, maybe it applies to flat Earthers or something, but in general you should not think "X person disagrees with me, therefore they're stupid."
Isn't there a good middle ground? You can say "I can see why you didn't get the vaccine back in 2021, but things have changed because..." You're not lying about your own beliefs, and acknowledging that there were reasons for the other person's beliefs, while not pretending they're fully convincing reasons.
My guess re: the elderliness of Congress:
Politics appeals most to older people to begin with - most voters are in the upper age bracket. There are also more old people now then ever - and that massive increase in the elderly population has expanded the pool of elderly, who were already the most likely to run for office/be involved in politics.
I think the only way to reverse it is to get people under 50 more interested in politics, but I'm not sure that's a great idea either.
#30, Not if it is a logistic curve. Initial exponential driving force is countered by resource constraints. Very common curve in biology.
#33, Interesting link. No general answers but one person's response here. I will no longer be donating to Wikipedia, unfortunately, as I consider it an otherwise wonderful aspect of the internet. Not canceling Wikipedia. But withdrawing my own support. Different.
Most of the time I have a lot of respect for Scott's taste and share most of his interests, and then every now and then he links to "one of the best essayists alive today" and it's just several thousand words of wanking off on the page about how things change over time and have you ever considered that maybe the internet is bad?
IDK maybe I'm missing something but it's kind of baffling.
I agree. I felt this way about The Last Psychiatrist stuff too.
Same. Though, thankfully, not as psychopathic.
The Last Psychiatrist struck me as someone trying to pull off a grift like Huck Finn getting other kids to whitewash the fence for him.
HF:
“Well I don’t know if I can let you help me, this is pretty tricky work…”
LP:
“Most people won’t be smart enough to understanding the subtle complexities of what I’m talking about…”
That was Tom Sawyer, not Huck Finn.
You’re right, Nancy. It was Tom.
Having thought about it a bit I guess I must be one of those narrow minded guys who think all 19th century, pipe-smoking, raft-riding, barefoot, straw-hat-wearing, adolescent white guys look alike.
I should probably rethink my whole approach to life.
:)
Rethinking your whole approach to life is a lot of fun. You'll be missing so much if you don't do it.
I get the sense that Scott is very attracted to the genre of "people insisting they have deep insights that normies can't understand or refuse to accept", regardless of the content of the alleged insights. TLP is perhaps the pinnacle of this genre.
Don't forget Moldbug/Yarvin.
Definitely. I'd also put Eliezer, GK Chesterton and Jordan Peterson in this category.
+1
Well you know that most normies consider Scott as a writer to be several thousand words of wanking about stuff right? The wankingword spectrum is vast. It is all about the relative position of each person on it.
Sure but at least Scott usually has something actually interesting to say, whereas most of this piece seemed to be regurgitating standard thinkpiece material that's at least a decade old at this point.
I really like how Sam Kriss *writes* ("Our God is a devourer, who makes things only for the swallowing" is a banger line) but the essay overall was underwhelming.
I think that I'd love to see him write on something that's more subjective, like "Top 10 horror films that I didn't see, because they're only on the Internet and that's bad, but here's my vague understanding of what they're about," or maybe "Our dog is a devourer: 99 things that my golden retriever tried to swallow this week."
Yeah that might be amusing.
Which one?
The one that includes the phrase I quoted, "one of the best essayists alive today." If you need me to do the Ctrl+F-ing for you it's #26.
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
Translated: You gonna die and nothing matters.
I mean, simple concepts written well are a pretty solid tradition. Like, you either like poetry or you don't.
Having said that, it's not an "internet bad" argument, it's a "good parts of the internet are gone" argument. The days of Angelfire sites are gone, the days of the blogosphere and 4chan and early "weird" Youtube are gone, that unique moment and the content it generated are gone.
Like, Manifest Destiny might be good, might be bad, but there was a really clear moment when the "frontier disappeared" and that whole world and all the benefits and faults went away. Like, especially imagine a German immigrant in industrial 1890's New York comparing his life to an 1850's German immigrant who got free farmland and his own farm out West.
That's, trying to translate this, more the vibe I get. Hey, when America was new, there was all this free land and opportunity and then one day it was gone. In the same way, this fantastic intellectual innovation of the web is gone, eaten by optimized content mills.
Two huge differences in that example: firstly, the context of the rest of the play that actually makes us care about Macbeth and his feelings make it a lot more meaningful than the sentiment on its own. Second it's like nine and a half lines rather than thousands of words so it's a lot easier for it to stay interesting.
And admittedly I got fed up about two thirds of the way through so maybe he does eventually get to an interesting point that I missed out on. But in response to the way you describe it:
The internet still has a huge variety of a lot of different stuff on it, and a lot of it's really wonderful, so I have very little patience for people who spend a lot of time and space whining about the shitty boring parts that everyone knows kind of suck. If all the internet is to you is a poorly-curated Twitter feed then I don't have much respect for your judgement or really care what you have to say about it.
Well-said, Paul Goodman, thank you. I admit that I don't know what those references to the Golden Days of the Internet are about. "Early weird YouTube is gone"? Huh? There's currently about 720,000 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every day, I'm sure there's plenty of weird shit there.
But I also find lots of obscure or forgotten music, helpful tutorials, and other useful stuff on YouTube. I make part of my living off writing, and the internet is also incredibly useful for research. Just tonight I've been obtaining info from AntWeb, the world's largest online database of images, specimen records, and natural history information about ants, for example. And countless scientists from all of the world post their research online, about all manner of topics. I couldn't care less about 4chan. I am enjoining Astral Codex 10, however.
For all its trivia, fraud and unrealized potential, the internet is still the most amazing communication tool the world has ever known.
If you want weird Youtube shit out Drue Langolis. He has some absolutely weird shit with a great style.
Off-topic,
Are all of the brothers in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury inspired by this soliloquy?
Benji's obvious, but I think the others fit too.
Quentin is haunted by the past and eventually commits suicide (I think the connection is especially clear in the opening of Absalom, Absalom! with its imagery of dust motes in a light beam as Quentin seeks out stories of the past.)
Justin is a poor player who struts and frets his hour on the stage until Caddy steals his money, and he gives up chasing her.
I brought this up in a seminar once, but no one seemed to agree with me.
That particular post isn’t one of his best. When he is on he really is worth reading even if you don’t share his sensibilities.
Any particular recommendation?
I fell in love with his writing on his former blog Idiot Joy Showland. That title really summed up his writing/perspectives for me. Dark, reveling in caustic absurdity while simultaneously wondering what the point of any of it was. He has a whole category of posts simply labeled Ad Hominem which are worth reading but I like his commentary. Can’t get into his politics, but so many of his essays are worth reading.
I first discovered him via Marginal Reveloution’s link to his “review” of Fifty Shades of Grey https://samkriss.com/2015/02/21/the-grey-scale/
What’s Wrong With Critical Race Theory is a good, straightforward exploration of what is going on with that idea https://samkriss.com/2021/06/25/whats-so-bad-about-critical-race-theory/
What if We Kissed in the Abandoned Game Stop was one of his lockdown essays. https://samkriss.com/2021/02/08/what-if-we-kissed-in-the-abandoned-gamestop/
And his second Substack post is better than his first IMO. I posted it on the Slate Star Codex subreddit to shrugs but I enjoyed it.
asd
The fall line thing and the navigable river thing are related. The big political story of the past few decades has been the story of the Rust Belt turning from reliable democrats to reliable republicans. (This is both the “Reagan Democrats” thing and part of the Trump phenomenon.) People sometimes talk about the Rust Belt as though it’s a latitude phenomenon, but in many ways it’s really about the presence of the navigable rivers. Industry tends to locate where shipping is easiest. Over the decades and centuries, the relative importance of seaports, river ports, rail hubs, airports, interstate highways, etc, has changed. I think the biggest change is that with the rise of global container shipping, seaports have gone up in importance (despite already being very high) while river and lake ports have gone way down in importance (despite still being significant). Landlocked sites have become usable in ways they weren’t, particularly if they got a good interstate while having bad terrain for rail. You can see the phenomenon of the Rust Belt as being shaped primarily by dependence on river and lake shipping. The obvious cases are Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh, but places like St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans have had the same economic decline as the rest of the Rust Belt despite being geographically far from them, and places like Columbus and Indianapolis have been booming despite being surrounded by the Rust Belt, partly because they are places that never developed a major river shipping industry but have been able to benefit from highways and from the growing importance of state government.
The cities on the fall line are an interestingly different case than either. These include places like Minneapolis on the Mississippi, and the Texas cities like Fort Worth, Waco, Austin, San Antonio. In the northeast, the Fall Line cities were early centers of industry because they had water mills, which then declined in importance. I think for these other cities, their river wasn’t necessarily navigable, so the loss of industry hasn’t been as big.
A few things my theory doesn’t explain - why have Cincinnati and Louisville not been as affected by the Rust Belt phenomenon as the other Ohio river cities? Why have Baltimore and Philadelphia been affected despite their big container ports? On the latter point, it may be that the increased importance of land shipping means that cities a bit farther from the container port can get the boom - Atlanta and Charlotte seem to be capturing the boom of the ports of Savannah and Charleston, so perhaps DC and New York are capturing the benefits that Baltimore and Philadelphia used to have, while the other coastal ports don’t have nearby cities to devour their economic gains. And I haven’t looked at the numbers for Cincinnati and Louisville - maybe they are closer to Cleveland and Memphis than to Columbus or Indianapolis in growth, and it’s just a smaller divergence from the really bad cases that needs to be explained.
Your explanation fits with my biases. For Cincinnati and Louisville my initial thought is that they were able to pivot away from river based economies fast enough to remain stable. Cincy has two large universities (Xavier and University of Cincinnati) and is home of Proctor and Gamble. Louisville has University of Louisville and the Horse racing. Just these small things can provide a boost to attract more non-river industries and residents.
Baltimore is an interesting case. Its the large US port for roll on/roll off ships which are used mostly for Cars. So it's still a very successful port, but I believe this type of port is easily automated so employment doesn't track with port volumes exactly. Baltimore has been able to attract lots of other industries too, like Under Armor and medical services (due to Johns Hopkins) I also think Baltimores reputation for drugs and violence has hurt it. Crime is still a problem (though not like the media portrays it).
I think the big problem is not the level of crime but that some of the bad neighborhoods are right next to the downtown/tourist areas so its more visible to middle class people and tourists.
However, over the past ~20 years or so, its having a revival of sorts and has a nice downtown harbor area and up and coming neighborhoods. I grew up in DC/MD and know a lot of peers who have moved to Baltimore because the housing is outrageously cheap for what you get ("luxury" town houses are 1/3 the cost in Baltimore compared to DC). But once these people enter their 30s, become more financially stable and start looking to have kids, they move to the DC area or Suburban Maryland.
The suck of DC is huge though. Its impact is felt from Baltimore to Richmond. Because of the Federal government, DC will always have a stable demand for college educated employees which translates to service and hospitality jobs. If people can leave Baltimore or Richmond (or even Western Maryland and West Virginia) they do and go to DC.
Overall though, I don't think Baltimore is a problem city like Detroit is. Its definitely recovering. Its biggest problem is, ironically, housing is too cheap! Population peaked in 1970 at 905,787 and is now only 585,708. That leaves a lot of empty housing or empty lots. As I mentioned, housing is very cheap. Which is great for younger people and poor people, but the housing prices don't really rise. Looking at All-Transactions House Price Index data from the St. Louis Fed from 2013 to 2022, Baltimore goes from 200 to 300 while DC goes from 600 to over 1100. So if you can afford a house for >$600k, DC is probably a better place to be, not to mention the better job market.
Here is that data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS12580Q, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DCSTHPI
And there are local politics issues too. Here is an article that gets into some of the ways buying in the city of Baltimore is worse than in the county of Baltimore: https://www.city-journal.org/baltimore-shows-how-not-to-combat-disinvestment
I love these types of investigations though. I think here are global and national forces at play but then to really understand a specific city/metro area you have to dig in. Ever case seems to be different and equally as fascinating.
You also have to examine relative differences as well. Cincinnati is doing fine, yes, but it used to be one of *the* major US cities, and one of the fastest growing. That's all long past.
Yeah Cincinnati already had its crash. In 1830 it was the star of the country, and even in 1905 I think it was like 4th in population or something (with Buffalo right behind).
Meanwhile Miami and LA had under 20,000 people. I think the "rust belt" wasn't as hard on Cincinatti becuase it had already had its disappointing years in the frist half of the 1900s, as the rest of the coutnry blew past it.
Why overlook the commonly accepted explanation that movement of heavy industry (cars, steel) to Asia fully accounts for the implosion of American Midwest wealth? (And as for why *that* happened, the usual explanation is declining (containerized) international shipping costs, lower wages and better education in Asian workforces, and perhaps the general reduction in tariffs and protectionism.)
I mean, the reason Detroit was a wealthy place in the 50s through 80s is clearly cars, which used to be an excellent high-wage industry, and now the "Big" Three own 17% (GM), 15% (Ford), and 12% (Chrysler) of US domestic sales[1], and Detroit is an impoverished pit.
-----------------
[1] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/animated-chart-of-the-day-market-shares-of-us-auto-sales-1961-to-2016/
I don't think that's a competing explanation. I think that's the same explanation. Movement of heavy industry hurt cities that were dependent on heavy industry, and placement on shipping routes explains why some cities became highly dependent on heavy industry. The general growth trend everywhere was overwhelmed by the shrinkage of heavy industry for places that boomed on heavy industry, while the general growth trend outweighed the shrinkage of heavy industry in places that never got the heavy industry to begin with, or that were well-positioned to do the things that came after heavy industry.
I don't think it's just shipping. It's the combination of shipping and natural resources. The Minnesota-Illinois-Indiana-Ohio-Michigan-Pennsylvania region became the seat of heavy industry because of Great Lakes shipping, the Ohio, St. Lawrence, and severfal other highly convenient rivers, yes, but an equally vital component was the presence of excellent high grade and readily mined coal and iron ore in the region.
But even then, I don't see how this is very consistent with your hypothesis that the relative importance of river/lake shipping changed versus coean shipping. I don't really see that. Big heavy stuff still usually travels by boat if it can, river or lake or ocean -- there are still big ore carriers on the Great Lakes and nobody would move it by truck. As I said, my impression is that most people attribute the loss of American heavy industry to the 1950s-80s development of heavy industry in Asia (Japan, then Korea, then China), and the fact that as emerging or post-war economies they had much lower wage costs.
I grant you that a decline in ocean shipping costs was a key component of that, because only with cheap shipping can foreign wages matter, but I think that latter is mostly attributed to containerization and perhaps better navigation and storm warning, which affected shipping in general (not just across oceans), making it more secure and more reliable (in terms of schedule). Presumably the "Edmund Fitzgerald" wouldn't sink today, or at least everyone would've been rescued after the captain made a satphone call.
Would it be your hypothesis that even if industrial wages in Japan and Korea, say, were not lower than those in Pittsburgh or Detroit, the Midwest would still have lost its steel and cars?
In the mid to late 19th century Chicago replaced St Louis as the big inland city because there were rail bridges over the Mississippi that connected to Chicago in addition to the water routes, while St. Louis didn’t get a rail bridge until the changeover had already happened. I think that the technological shifts of the 20th century were always going to be at least that significant, even without changes in international markets. Changes in international markets of course made it much more significant, so that these cities actually went into decline rather than just being overtaken.
So your answer to the last question is "yes?" In that case, I'm interested in what you see as the mechanism. Let us suppose that the wages for steelworkers and on automative assembly lines are the same in 1970s Asia as they are in the US. Let us further suppose no government is subsidizing capital investment in cars and steel. Let's set all tariffs to zero, so that has no effect.
What is the mechanism, in this scenario, by which the source of cars and steel consumed in the US domestic market, say, shift from the American Midwest (plus Pennsylvania) to Asia?
I'm not claiming that even without competition from Asia, American manufacturing would have moved to Asia. I'm claiming that there was a period when river shipping was extremely dominant, and then there was a period when river shipping was only about as significant as rails and highways. Under the first period, the equilibrium sizes of cities would have New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, etc. as some of the largest cities in the country. Under the latter period, these cities wouldn't have any particular advantage over Columbus, Indianapolis, Austin, Denver, etc., and some of these cities would in fact have advantages as locations of state capitals. As a result, over the period of several decades, the former cities would lose some size while the latter cities gain size, as they all move towards the new natural equilibrium.
We don't need an additional exogenous factor of an industry leaving the country - just the natural shifts over time as industry moves towards places with comparative advantages would produce some of the same pattern. But of course, if domestic heavy industry ends up shrinking at the same time, then that will magnify the effect. Especially if the new industries that are growing in the same period happen to be ones that benefit from proximity to government more than from proximity to shipping.
#8 "What explains this?"
Wisdom ?
Are you suggesting that currently voters elect older representatives because they prioritize wisdom, whereas in past decades voters didn't care as much about their representatives being wise so they elected younger ones? That seems somewhat unlikely even if we grant the initial assumption that older politicians are generally wiser than younger ones.
Every message board has different assumptions and I sometimes forget this. The post was meant sarcastic/tragic-funny.
Ideally, experienced age brings with it some humility and empathy paired with knowledge and insight - but not always.
"I’d say intelligence, energy, integrity. If you don’t have the last one, the first two will kill you. All you have is a crook who works hard. If a person doesn’t have integrity, you want them dumb and lazy." --Warren Buffet
A worse case is feral cunning, energy and no integrity. Not that I have any particular former president in mind…
Lack of integrity is burdened by flawed judgement and fair-weather friends. I fear we may be getting the presidents we deserve!
21: " ... academics are already planning to replace it with a system of ranking applicants on diversity statements, how many racial-equity-related classes they took as an undergrad, and how many racial-equity-related extracurriculars"
1. Wow, can that be gamed. And it will. Entire fancy private schools in the Northeast will be given over to that for a ciriculum.
2. If I wanted to make an argument for shutting down most of Academia, I could ask for a better course of action.
3. How about a law, removing admissions from the schools discretion and making them entirely dependent on the results of national examinations. This is approximately the system followed by many European and Asian countries. What I would like better is a national lottery for admissions.
4. Don't overplay your hand, dudes.
I had the same reaction as your 1. This will privilege upper middle class and immigrant Black students, who can play these games, not hurt well connected White students at the private Northeast schools, and come at the expense of poor White students who can’t play the game.
Actually underprivileged Black students meanwhile will continue to be stuck in shitty public schools that fail to academically prepare them for college, regardless of whether colleges can admit them on skin color alone.
That journal article is two assistant professors doing a circle jerk. It's literally one hundred percent "could" and "should" stuff, except for some vague factual assertions ("schools are...") that supported by no specific numbers or even named examples. There is no "will be" here, at least based on that article.
I don’t think the rise of “holistic admissions”, DEI class requirements, etc, which I was experiencing as a student in a state that had banned explicit racial AA, is merely the figment of a “circle jerk”. And that goes back at least 2 decades now.
Sure. None of that is new, and all of it together doesn't add up to how item 21 was summarized here.
In another comment you wrote “Also all factual claims in the piece are vague e.g. "ethnic studies is being implemented as a graduation requirement", "schools are implementing restorative justice practices", etc.” seemingly implying that we should believe that these things are NOT happening.
Well, data point of 1 against your spouse’s anecdote, but “ethnic studies as a requirement for graduation” absolutely is true at the large, pretty famous, public university I attended (and has been for 20 years). UC schools require a DEI statement from all job applicants, etc. Finding examples isn’t particularly hard.
Which, yeah, fair to critique the linked article for not providing examples, but on the flip side you’ve not really provided evidence that my prior should be “none of this is happening (or at least is not common”.
It surely can and will be gamed, but I doubt academe will care. What will gaming the new system look like? For undergraduates seeking admission to medical, law, and graduate programs, it will take the form of padding out the transcript with racial-equity classes. The departments that offer those will be delighted by the increased demand. We might assume that the undergrads will de-prioritize those courses and therefore do as little work as necessary, but it won't take long for them to figure out that getting a B or worse in Antiracism 101 is going to look terrible to graduate admissions officers. "Great grades in chemistry and biology, and 519 on the MCAT is impressive, but why did you do so poorly in your 'Holocaust, Slavery, and Misgendering' seminar?"
So they'll take those classes seriously. They won't just regurigate the bullet points. They'll put in the work to do well, and I expect that will mean that the racial-equity messaging will get through to a fair number of students who wouldn't take them voluntarily. Similarly, I'd love if every aspiring physician and lawyer had to take a course on Scholastic Philosophy or the Epistles of St. Paul, because I'd expect at least some of what's taught in those courses to stick.
In the end, I'm sure they'd prefer simply to admit more blacks, but if the second-best result is expanding the ranks of the woke, I doubt they'll be too upset.
24: "I can’t imagine there are many undiscovered lands left, so William is out of luck at least until we get off Earth."
There is a Prince William County in Virginia. When he was young, we bought a shirt for our son who is named William from the Prince William Yankees, a minor league baseball team.
Yes, but it's named for a different Prince William.
Kinda surprised that a team from Virginia would name themselves Yankees.
They were a NY Yankees affiliate 19987-1993. They have switched locations, affiliations, and names a few times since then. It was a cute shirt when he was a toddler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potomac_Nationals
cf Utah Jazz
Or the Los Angeles Lakers.
26: "His new blog starts with The Internet Is Already Over."
A consummation devoutly to be wished.
I think the description of the "fall line" thing in #34 isn't quite right. What allegedly differs sharply across the fall line isn't the _partisan lean_ of the districts, it's _how they've changed recently_, which allegedly tracks wealth and social class -- historically, poorer people have been more Democratic and richer people have been more Republican, but that's been changing of late, and the suggestion is that there's a sharp wealth gradient across the fall line.
Scott incorrectly describes the headline of the tweetstorm, but the tweets eventually retreat to Scott's claim. The map is recent changes, but eventually the tweets admits that the long-term partisan lean is a much larger effect. The recent change is probably just the effect of geography going away as the parties realign, rather than a recent effect of geography.
"40: " ... the cost of Biden’s college loan forgiveness has been estimated at ~$500 billion .."
The statement that the forgiveness is a cost is, at best, a distortion. The loans were made years ago, the money long since went out the door.
The accounting showed no cost because they counted the student's obligation to repay the amount as an asset equal to the loan which showed no impact on the deficit, even though the money was borrowed and increased the debt.
The loans will never be repaid at their face amount due to their speculative nature and the inevitable vicissitudes of life (premature death, chronic illness, simple failure, etc.). A private lender would have been required to charge the the forecast defaults against the asset over their life time, thus disclosing the true cost. The Federal Government, just assumed the perfect and impossible case.
The write down for the forgiveness is at worst just adjusting the accounting failure to the reality of the situation.
Was it fair? No. Was it wise? No. Will it be repeated? Yes.
The real winner here are the colleges, that already spent all the dough from their wildly inflated tuition bills on sweet sinecures for administrators and fancy buildings.
>The write down for the forgiveness is at worst just adjusting the accounting failure to the reality of the situation.
That's only the case if 100% of the forgiven debt would never have been repaid. I don't know how much would have gotten repaid if not forgiven, but I'm pretty confident it's a lot more than zero. Best guess is that a bit over 90% would get repaid, based on stats that 10-12% of student loan dollars were in "serious delinquency" throughout the 2010s and about 5-10% of defaulted loan dollars get recovered each year. And the 10-12% "serious delinquency" rate probably overstates the problem because loan dollars that have been repaid have been removed from the denominator.
PredictIt is a wishcasting shitshow where sometimes the wishcasters get lucky. People who take it too seriously should not be trusted. I've made money there, although typically I am too poor to dump hundreds of dollars into limbo for months.
Anyone looking at the PI numbers these days is a fool. It is flooded with "Trumper Pumpers" who are way more delusional than even the "Bernie Bros" were.
They literally have no evidence or arguments for their position. Even Trafalgar poll results don't support the market movements these days.
But... the whole point of prediction markets is if there are indeed systematic distortions in the market price, then you can pick up the suckers money. You seem to say that you don't want to do this, but why do you think other people won't? Then there's also the fact that it seems to have been historically a little better than the tetlock superforecasters that actually predicting the truth (if I recall correctly? Can't find the citation even tho I expected it to be very easy to find)
I also remember many many accusations that the price was fake and being manipulated by Trump Pumpers on the 2016 election night... by many people who thought a Trump win was ludicrously impossible.
I would do it if I had a few thousand dollars laying around. Not all of us are that fortunate. Gotta have money to make money.
I actually believed that Trump would win so I can't say much about the people who said the markets were fake.
As far as price distortions, the problem is that PI is not big enough. Firstly you have the $850 cap and other limitations. Secondly most people betting serious cash use non-US markets.
Look I understand the theory of the ideal prediction market. The issue is that PI is not that. PI has historically been less accurate than 538 and the RCP simple average. Of course you compare it to the morons at HuffPo and PEC? in 2016 and it looks very good.
Then it sounds like large amounts of money are being left on the table for those with a large enough bankroll
I think they are. If I had ~1700 lying around I'd put it all on 47/46- for R Senate seats. Sadly I am not rich. I made a decent return in 2019 betting on Bernie in the Dem primary, I sold right before Warren began her brief run to the top. I don't think I got the full value because I didn't have enough money to max out, though.
Predict It is not an idealized better market. It has a lot of restrictions to dodge regulation, which have failed pending their lawsuit with the CTFC resolving in their favor. The markets are not especially liquid and the money involved is relatively small. There are Dem wishcasters, too, but they lack the numbers of the Trumper Pumpers. If you watched the market you'd see what I mean.
That Sam Kriss essay was transcendent.
Even if he seems like a nutter…many geniuses are.
The summary of 18 pretty radically misstates how navigability is determined. So, the example given is the navigability determination for the Los Angeles River by the EPA. The actual report is here:
https://www.spl.usace.army.mil/Portals/17/docs/regulatory/JD/NavigableWater/CA_TNW_Det/EPA_Memo_SPL-LA_River_TNW_2010-06-23.pdf?ver=Hz6wLX7WT9AkKd-cvDMZIA%3d%3d
But as they describe "this navigability evaluation for the Los Angeles River focuses on several key types of evidence:
(1) Ability of the river under current conditions of flow and depth to support navigation by watercraft;
(2) History of navigation by watercraft on the Los Angeles River;
(3) The current commercial and recreational uses of the river; and
(4) Plans for future development and use of the river which may affect its potential for commercial navigation. "
In other words, actually being able to navigate down it is one piece of evidence, but not how determinations are made, for obvious reasons.
The broader underlying argument about how to properly define Waters of the US is one I leave to other people.
#25 - you buried one of the most interesting parts. The response from “liberals” reversed when the question asked about “your sons / daughters” instead of generic “boys / girls”.
Lots of potential in exploring the implications of that with varying degrees of charity.
For me as well, that 2020 survey data was the most interesting of Scott's links. See page 79 of the report for some breakdowns by very/mostly/somewhat/not much/not at all: https://media.deseret.com/media/misc/pdf/afs/2020-AFS-Final-Report.pdf (but without liberal/conservative or male/female).
Unfortunately, the survey doesn't ask the same questions every year (https://csed.byu.edu/american-family-survey/). Some interesting things I found in 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2022 surveys:
Page 44 of 2018, on sexual harassment (https://csed.byu.edu/0000017e-2619-dfc1-a77e-273de3850001/toplinereport2018-pdf). 4% of respondents claim that inviting someone of the opposite sex to lunch 'always' counts as sexual harassment. (7% for a drink instead of lunch.)
Pages 14-16 of 2019 (https://csed.byu.edu/0000017e-2611-d5d4-a57f-277126ef0001/american-family-survey-2019-report-pdf), on respondents' attempts to guess the direction of trends in divorce, teen pregnancy, etc.
Page 40 of 2021 (https://media.deseret.com/media/misc/pdf/afs/2021-american-family-survey.pdf): 11% of white respondents claim that racial discrimination is an obstacle to their family getting good housing. What? Has anyone even proposed a mechanism for that?
Also in 2021, page 49 on 'Attitudes about Time Spent Teaching about Racial Issues in Schools Today'.
In 2022, page 29, on stage of pregnancy when abortion should be made illegal, broken down by Democrats/Republicans (https://media.deseret.com/media/misc/pdf/afs/2022-american-family-survey.pdf).
On page 46 of 2022, 'Do you think schools today spend too much, the right amount or too little time teaching about the following topics?' When it comes to the Science question, I suspect Liberal Democrats and Conservative Republicans do not have fully overlapping definitions of 'Science'.
See also pages 47-48 of 2022, on merit and achievement in schools, and page 81, on relationship status.
>What? Has anyone even proposed a mechanism for that?
Sure some projects are explicitly "racist" if helping/targetting minority groups in a way that is probably strcitly speaking illegal under fair housing law, but which no one cares about or looks at if your hurting whites.
So some organization in a 50% white, 25% latino, 25% black community will come under huge scrutiny if the beneficiaries are 90% white. Possibly including federal lawsuit and recapture of any federal funds.
On the other hand if the beneficiaries are 100% latino and developed by an organization focusing on ESL people and looking for ESL beneficiaries, well that is seen as good and now one is doing anything, while strictly speaking probably being illegal.
If an organization builds a Roman-themed group house for people who can speak Latin, is that also probably housing discrimination against blacks and Asians, according to federal law? (I assume blacks and Asians are less likely than whites and Hispanics to speak Latin.)
Depends on who you piss off and how much money they want to spend on lawyers.
That is a little interesting, but the effect size there is pretty small. It's about 41% for "boys" to 48% for "your son". That's a smaller change than Conservatives estimate of "boys" versus "your son" in the opposite direction.
#36 seems inspired by a popular papercraft toy that people can make at home: https://www.thinkfun.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Dragon-Illusion-BBC.pdf
Had one when I was younger and it's just as mind boggling in person.
#1
I ran into ‘catchpenny’ the other day. First citation is late 18th century British English. Kind of charming in its way.
Where does the popular, modern British insult 'Fuckwit' fit into this theme?
Funnier, perhaps a bit less charming.
I don't think so. A pickpocket picks pockets, but a fuckwit doesn't fuck wits.
Early sapiosexuals
On the Wikimedia link/thread, I'm less concerned about where they're putting the money and more concerned that they are regranting money to things that aren't Wikipedia. The appeal they make is very much "please keep Wikipedia running" while the actual spending is "oh, we need like half the money to keep the site running". I'm mostly upset that they preyed on my desire to keep a thing I love in the world to get money from me that they didn't need to keep the thing in the world. That money had higher marginal utility allocated elsewhere.
Yeah, exactly my problem too.
Item 21 would be very alarming if true as stated, but it isn't. Or at least that Inside Higher Education article doesn't represent any evidence for it.
I shared the article with my spouse who now does college-admissions counseling and who was previously an associate dean of admissions. She pointed out correctly that the authors are simply a pair of assistant professors who write about such topics; and also that their article simply _proposes_ that universities "can consider" yadda yadda. The whole thing is a string of "might" do this, "could" do that, etc.
Also all factual claims in the piece are vague e.g. "ethnic studies is being implemented as a graduation requirement", "schools are implementing restorative justice practices", etc. Zero numbers or even named examples. There are more than 3,000 degree-granting colleges in the USA and nearly 27,000 high schools; it requires only 2 in order to support the vague statement that "schools are...." My personal experience across many topic areas has been that broad vague factual handwaving offered with zero numbers or even specific examples invariably proves to be just air.
So the statement that "academics are planning to", at least based on that article, is a fairly hilarious (to my spouse anyway) overstatement. "Inside Higher Education has printed writeups like that since forever; the next actual decisionmaker who reads one of them, let alone acts on it, will be the first."
Fair enough, and I've certainly had that feeling myself about this very topic. But the article linked here as item 21 doesn't even vaguely support it.
(Also we all tend to remember the times when a foreboding feeling turned out to be justified while forgetting the many other times that it turned out not to be.)
Heh.....in American academia?? Radicalized students issue demands literally every week, which was already an established norm when I entered college in the 1980s. (And we obviously didn't have any newfangled social media to do it with.)
My wife was an admissions staffer for a decade -- if she or her bosses had taken the time to respond to every new student or junior-faculty demand they'd have never had time to admit any new students.
I hope they won't because it would so obviously work against their stated goals. It's one thing to do this when hiring professors (where, u can plausibly either infer race or hire ppl u think will vote to hire more minorities) and quite another with HS students. Anyone who tries to do this will hopefully get talked out of it once it becomes clear how much easier it will be for rich white kids to game that requirement.
Thanks, I've updated that link with a link to this comment.
Thank you Paul Botts for a well-informed comment that let the air out of that gas bag of an "article" -- in truth is just a weak opinion piece -- from Inside Higher Education.
Thanks also for your sharing your remark that "My personal experience across many topic areas has been that broad vague factual handwaving offered with zero numbers or even specific examples invariably proves to be just air." Seen. Happens all the time, both written and said. In rhetorical form, it especially beloved by conservative commentators to rile up "our viewers at home," with statements beginning with declarations like "Hospitals are now requiring. . ." or "Police are being told. . . " without any factual data about which of the country's 6,000 hospitals or 18,000 police agencies are supposedly making these claims.
Yes I do. I understand the desire of admissions officials to attempt to mitigate in some way the very real unfairness and bias that has been used against some communities for generations, but admitting students based on the number of diversity, inclusion or ethnic studies classes they took in high school is a ridiculous way to redress wrongs. Obviously. And I don't believe academics ARE planning this, despite the unsourced, data-free claims made in this lame straw-man opinion piece.
"the very real unfairness and bias that has been used against some communities for generations"
Are you talking about Asians here?
Definitely. I'd just need some evidence that some college administrators, any of them, anywhere, are actually planning it before I started investing lifespan into opposing it.
Not interested in commenting on the substance of the issue at hand, but in academic prose, almost every sentence is hedged around with defensive "might"s, "can"s and "could"s. There are many academic contexts in which a sentence like "so-and-so might/can/could do X" is correctly read by the audience as a strong assertion that so-and-so must do X.
I would consider the source more important than the strength of the language.
Yes I agree, with the caveat that Inside Higher Ed likes to see itself as a translator of academic-speak into plainer English for the rest of the world to read. Though it's hard to tell whether that impulse applies here since this was a personal op-ed type writeup rather than any sort of news reporting by the journal staff.
I've argued elsewhere that the fairness doctrine was responsible for increased polarization, mostly focusing on the AM radio. That article does a much better job covering its influence on 90s TV media and the resulting segments. I'm young enough that it was my parents and grandparents watching these shows rather than my own cohort. It was easy to assume that broadcast news had always been like that.
What's the next step in journalism? Or the *next* next step, since I think it's fair to read the last ten years of social media as a categorical change both in coverage and in attitudes. The pessimist in me says it's filter bubbles, which have a strong memetic appeal even if they're less "useful." Experiments in aggressively free/balanced forums tend to run to one sort of capture or another. The Internet is as close as we can currently get to radical exit rights, and I'd consider it possible that hitherto-empty niches could be populated with AI-scraped or -generated content. I'm not confident that desire for authenticity or a similar sentiment will overrule that.
I foresee about a thousand scenarios where things go poorly, but at least one where things go really well.
If those filter bubbles manage to produce genuinely good content by getting an ideologically diverse readership/viewership onto a few great publications, that may set off a cascade where more people are aware of and read/view those good programs.
Bari Weiss' Substack looks to me like a fledgling possibility for this. A test case, if you will. She's a pretty solid Democrat, and came from the left to some kind of center because she felt betrayed by the left. Her readership has a lot of conservatives, who seem to genuinely like her reporting. She had a guest writer from a lefty publication who got eviscerated in the comments for a skewed leftist perspective, and hasn't been back. That's amazing to me, because Bari isn't a conservative, but manages to write enough sane things that a lot of her readers are, but still like her page.
CNN trying to rebrand itself may be a similar process. They went so far left that they lost reality, and consciously noted it.
>The markets give the Republicans better odds, and seem to be counting on pollsters missing paranoid anti-pollster Republicans.
These markets know that they weight the results to match population statistics, right?
Like, yes, it's possible for there to be polling errors for sure, but the cause has to be more complicated than 'Republicans not talking to pollsters'. That's a very obvious trend that you can correct for by weighting to party registration, actual vote turnout from past elections, and many other sources of data that give you a good idea of how many republicans there actually are in a place.
>Given that all the “Trust And Safety” stuff seems more about protecting AI companies’ reputations than really preventing boobs or swastikas from being drawn, what are we actually doing here?
Replace 'reputation' with 'brand identity' and yeah, pretty much.
Every major brand spends a lot of money on creating and maintaining its brand identity. Parents won't let their kids use Disney's website if users plaster the forums with porn, Christians won't use Craigslist if it is widely and explicitly used by prostitutes to meet clients, and investors will pull out of OpenAI if it becomes synonymous with deepfake porn and automated Nazi bots. This is just a normal part of running a brand in the modern economy.
Of course, the difference here is that they're trying to smuggle the costs of maintaining their brand under the headline of 'AI Safety' in order to get additional good will for the same price. Definitely this has negative externalities if anyone believes it, and they should be called out until making false claims like this ends up being a net negative for their brand and they stop making them.
>the idea that if you want a movie character to have a different race or gender or just be played by a different actor, you can make it happen
I'm not aware of much work being done on AI for voice generation. Changing gender/race/nationality may not make a very watchable movie without this technology, and it's the part I expect us to be farthest away from.
Aside from, you know, changing scenes and the entire plot in ways that are thematically appropriate for the changes to the character such that the movie retains equal artistic merit, that's probably also an issue for a lot of movies. But by the time we have that we probably won't have humans involved in making moves in the first place.
>but the charities do also fund controversial work like opposing scientific objectivity
If you are going to write articles about how we need to carefully distinguish between 'Trump gets a lot of support from white supremacists' vs 'All white supremacists support Trump, but there aren't enough of them for it to be fairly characterized as "a lot of support,"' then could we please also carefully distinguish between 'Science shouldn't be objective' and 'Human scientists cannot be perfectly objective, so we should interrogate claims of objectivity and investigate the role bias actually plays in the scientific process in reality'?
Because this comes up *a lot*, whenever we talk about any progressive-aligned or post-modern science group, and it's pretty much always the same story. Post-modernism doesn't say we *shouldn't* have good things, it questions the narratives of people who *claim* that we already have perfectly good things and can only maintain those things by keeping those people in unquestioned power.
As always, if a claim of bad actions by people you dislike seems really appealing to you, it deserves more scrutiny, not less.
>Here’s a variant of the Hollow Mask Illusion I hadn’t seen before:
This one's a classic, there's a free diagram that you can cut out and make yourself with some tape, we had a bunch around the office.
Note that at the size shown in the tweet it probably works a lot better with a monocular camera than with human eyes, and there's probably a limited set of distance/height/lighting it works for in person. But the smaller sizes work this well to the naked eye at a large range of view configurations.
http://www.alchemical.org/optics/visual/illusions/DragonIllusion.jpg
The cube version is also very striking and works at an even greater range of view configurations, and is even easier to make yourself:
https://www.instructables.com/Make-a-Possessed-Rubiks-Cube/
> Post-modernism doesn't say we *shouldn't* have good things, it questions the narratives of people who *claim* that we already have perfectly good things and can only maintain those things by keeping those people in unquestioned power.
> As always, if a claim of bad actions by people you dislike seems really appealing to you, it deserves more scrutiny, not less.
Hmmm. You might need to take a little dose of that advice yourself.
To be specific, I'm unaware of anyone who claims we have perfectly good things and can only maintain those things by keeping certain people in unquestioned power.
Even Trumpers and other outgroup.
I do see people claiming that we have flawed, but reasonably good things, and that you should be very careful before tearing it all down, because what replaces it might not be as utopian as you had envisioned or hoped.
I see people claiming that it is an extremely hard problem to get society to a relatively polite state, and that the default is something more like a soul-crushing authoritarian nightmare, and that if you tear down what we have in western civilisation today, you should expect soul-crushing authoritarian nightmares.
I see people claiming history has borne this out thousands of times, and that if you disagree, and feel that THIS TIME when we tear it all down, it'll be replaced by utopia, that you should have some solid evidence to back that up.
And yes, this rhymes with "what we have now is fine, and those who are currently in power are probably not the worst." But this absolutely is not the same as what we have being perfect, and those in power should not be questioned.
>Andd 'Human scientists cannot be perfectly objective, so we should interrogate claims of objectivity and investigate the role bias actually plays in the scientific process in reality'?
Yeah, that's not what this is about. These people are far-left ideologues and they don't like many of the findings of science, and the almost complete lack of black "representation" amongst the top scientists in the world. This isn't a principled look into the the epistemic foundations of science - it's a way of saying that people's "lived experiences" should be given more weight than objective scientific methods.
> questions the narratives of people who *claim* that we already have perfectly good things and can only maintain those things by keeping those people in unquestioned power.
The results of European science speak for themselves. These progressive challengers to science have literally nothing to show for themselves. If their way of doing things is better, they should be able to make more correct predictions about the world. They can't. And if your conception of science doesn't allow you to make correct predictions then it's completely worthless.
Nobody says science is perfect. Literally nobody. Which means you or anyone else portraying people as saying this are obviously detached from reality and so the rest of what you're saying is likely false. People say that science is the best we have, and abandoning the things that allowed rapid gains in scientific and technical knowledge over the past few centuries is probably a recipe for disaster and the people proposing such things are in no way knowledgeable enough to be determining if such abandonments are a good idea or not.
Given the well documented hostility to science generally from these far-left groups when it contradicts their ideological narratives, nobody should be expected to take them seriously.
Just playing Devil's advocate:
> Nobody says science is perfect. Literally nobody.
Perhaps the fact that nobody is saying this *now* is because the postmodern ideas have already become a part of the water supply.
Also, science worship is a motte-and-bailey process. On one hand, we rhetorically admit that science is not perfect, and that many scientific findings do not replicate. On the other hand, whenever someone disagrees with some specific scientific statement, we start yelling "it's the science, idiot" at them.
So although the science is not perfect in theory, we still require people to treat it as perfect in practice. (No one would take seriously an antivaxer asking whether the research proving the effectiveness and harmlessness of vaccines was successfully replicated.)
This is toxoplasma. I can tell from how you're talking about it that you haven't actually read what these groups have to say for themselves outside of carefully selected quotes from their enemies, or that you've only investigated a small number of small groups brought to your attention for being extra bad. Everything you're saying is how the opponents of these groups define what they believe, not what they actually believe and say themselves.
It's like if you say 'The term "toxic masculinity" means that all men are bad and evil and everyone should act like women,' then you're not actually familiar with feminist theory and don't have anything useful to say about it. Same thing here.
You have a made up opponent in your head, that your 'team' has fed to you so that you can dismiss any objections to your team's power and methods.
If you don't think that's a very normal thing that happens to everyone, you may not have been paying attention to how politics works. I know that's true, that's why I try to spend more time defending my side and explaining their actual beliefs that I'm familiar with, rather than attacking the other side for my understanding of their beliefs which I'm not actually well versed in outside of takedown videos produced by my side.
If you think that's a normal thing that happens to other people but not you... stop and notice the skulls.
So I've never paid attention to this topic before: do you have any links that you think are representative of the main position?
Dude. They literally describe scientific objectivity as COLONIALIST. And those are the people this discussion was about.
>It's like if you say 'The term "toxic masculinity" means that all men are bad and evil and everyone should act like women,' then you're not actually familiar with feminist theory and don't have anything useful to say about it. Same thing here.
I don't need to be familiar with feminist theory. Everyone I've ever seen use that term has apparently used it in the "wrong" way, so even if the "feminist theory" definition is "correct" and somehow less stupid, it's irrelevant because that's what the term means now.
>You have a made up opponent in your head, that your 'team' has fed to you so that you can dismiss any objections to your team's power and methods.
No, I'm literally referring to the people that Scott posted. BECAUSE THATS WHAT WE WERE TALKING ABOUT.
But no, every leftwing critique of science I've ever seen is more or less as stupid as this. "Racist" this, "white supremacist" that.
I'm well versed in epistemology and philosophy of science. I know the real issues around the validity of the scientific method and objectivity. But literally NONE of these leftists understand it or are coming from a position of good faith philosophical argument. It's all ideological.
>If you think that's a normal thing that happens to other people but not you... stop and notice the skulls.
The skulls were made by anti-scientific loonies who are the ideological brethren of people who call science "colonialist".
Bingo. OpenAI are just trying to position themselves as a good, safe vendor for other companies who want to sprinkle AI-sauce on their products. I'm sure they actually *are* trying to make their product safe (for some definition of safe), and not just make it perceived that way. But it's for business reasons, not some humanitarian goal.
Re weighing and polling errors. A typical response rate for a poll these days is somewhere in low one-digit percents. It seems like quite a leap of faith to assume that the minuscule group of responders is very similar to non-responders after you weigh the responses. All we know is that it kind of, sort of worked in the past.
If you know of a good argument for why the 100 responders out of the 10,000 that got the phone call should be similar to the non-responders, please enlighten me - I would very much appreciate it.
Yes, but that's a completely different argument from 'republicans not talking to pollsters', which is exactly what I said.
If you just get a low response rate for Republicans, you can weight them up in the analysis to the population baseline and be fine. To say nothing of just calling more Republicans until you meet your quota, which is the first step most places would actually do.
If the Republicans you *do* get are *unrepresentative* of Republicans as a whole, in ways that are not correlated with any of the other factors you are weighting on or correcting for, *and also* in ways that affect how/whether they will vote on election day, *and also* those same distortions don't affect your sample of democrats in roughly the same way, then that *is* a real problem. You can correct for not getting enough people in a given demographic, but not for the people you get in a demographic being outliers from that demographic.
But that's a much more complicated and nuanced problem than 'low response rate among Republicans', and a less intuitively obvious one.
How would you propose to scale up the few responses you get from registered likely voter Republicans to what all of them would say? I bet polling companies would really like to know how to do that; the big problem being the "likely voter" test, which is ordinarily administered in the process of asking the survey questions. You can certainly scale up to all registered Republicans, but this is worthless, since polls of "registered voters" are basically useless when only half of registered voters actually vote. It's doubly useless if on the other side you're using likely voter Democrats, since you wouldn't be scaling uniformly.
Yes, if the tiny sample of responders was representative of non-responders also, this would be fine. But nobody knows if that's currently the case - and I'm not aware of any good arguments as to why that would currently be the case.
The problem is, with such low response rates, the people who do respond are definitely some kind of an outlier - they did respond when nobody else would, for one thing. They might not be an outlier in any ways that matter for a particular poll, but I wouldn't put any money on that. I would, however, put money on responders having more free time than non-responders, being more likely not to work crazy long hours, being more likely not to have young kids at home, being generally less stressed, having.a more positive view of pollsters and media... I could continue the list. You will notice that this list looks like it does not currently describe the majority of Republicans or possibly even the majority of the population, and you will also notice that the differences might be correlated with what people think and how they vote.
We might still get lucky. Maybe responders and non-responders are similar enough where it matters that it would all average out to something sufficiently similar to reality. But there's really no way to know.
Nah Post-Modernism is garbage.
It is either trite truism if interpreted in a very limited manner, or actively harmful if not.
Spoken like someone with a poor understanding of what it was like to live under Modernism.
Nothing is perfect, but you're living in an almost entirely post-modern world, and it's a lot better than the old one.
I am talking about the intellectual movement, not some hackneyed conception that says everything 50s is modernism and today isn't.
Derrida/Foccault had a few interesting insights, but jsut a few and they are both way overhyped. Pretty much everything built on top of that is garbage.
The enlightenment was good, things seeking to tear it down are bad.
That's not what post-modern means, and things in the past weren't as bad as you seem to think they were.
Regarding the verb-noun word formation, it reminds me of an old B.C. comic strip in which the cavemen are choosing names for animals. Referring to a shaggy creature with a very long snout, a character asks "What does it do?" The reply is "It eats ants." So they promptly decide to call it an eatanter.
“ “[The Salem/CSPI forecasting tournament] thinks there's only a 22% chance that the 538 deluxe model will favor Republicans on election day, [but that] there's a 47% chance Republicans will actually win the Senate.”
This is a somewhat misleading interpretation of the market, as we would expect this sort of outcome (where P(R’s win the Senate) > P(538 thinks R’s win the Senate) even if the markets believed 538’s polling was perfectly accurate. I walk through the math demonstrating this here:
https://charlesjacksonpaul.substack.com/p/how-to-create-a-prediction-market
Also, the null hypothesis for the whole “congress is getting older” seems to be that it is a function of A. Seniority based politics, where the person who has been there the longest is in charge, which means that the high status people in politics will proportionately be older and B. A longer lifespan, where more people are able to function further into their 70’s and 80’s than previously. The way these interact is that more people are able to hang on in politics longer, and because they’ve been in so long they are disproportionately at the top.
"What explains this?"
Demographics, Baby Boomers are aging and that is making the US population skew older than it has in the past and will in the immediate future. This tool is fun to play with: https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Pyramid/840
If you could do self-supervised learning on a dataset that includes nudity and swastikas, but *in a principled way* produce a generative model that reliably will not produce nudity or swastikas even when asked, yet still performs adequately in other situations, that seems like useful progress towards goals quite relevant to AI safety. Likewise getting a model to produce racially diverse images when that doesn't reflect the dataset.
Of course "add a keyword filter + a nudity classifier + randomly add Black to the prompt" is not a good solution, it's kind of depressing. But it seems like "it would be better if we knew how to solve this problem properly" is actually something everyone can agree on: the AI ethics people, the AI safety people, and the upper management at tech companies.
Define “properly” to everyone’s agreement. ??
"22: Stuart Armstrong argues that the “Sadistic Conclusion” - one of the potential alternatives to the Repugnant Conclusion usually considered even worse and not worth thinking about - is actually underrated."
> Then, given that this underclass is a bad outcome (and given a few assumptions as to how outcomes are ranked) then we can find other bad outcomes that are not quite as bad as this one. Such as… a single victim, a tiny bit below the line of “worth living”. So the sadistic conclusion is not saying anything about the happiness level of a single created population. It’s simply saying that sometime (A) creating underclasses with slightly worthwhile lives can sometimes be bad, while (B) creating a victim can sometimes be less bad. But the victim isn’t playing a useful role here: they’re just an example of a bad outcome better than (A), only linked to (A) through superficial similarity and rhetoric.
This argument is pretty much what I was thinking. When comparing a very large group of people just above some line, to 1 person just below that line, it seems obvious that the latter situation is better (or, more precisely, it seems obvious that if you can make them arbitrarily close, then you can make the latter situation better). Note that in my intuition, this line doesn't even have to be near the point of "barely worth living." It could be well below that point and you still would want 1 slightly worse off person than many slightly better off people.
I also agree the name is misleading. It's only "sadistic" in the sense that the worst-off person is (very slightly) worse off than the worst-off person in the other scenario.
Honestly I find the whole thought experiment to be a fallacious attempt to explore these ideas. I find it to be overly reductionist... not solely because real life utility/livelihood is more complicated, but because it omits resource constraints and so many other key factors. I understand they are trying to simplify the complexity, but I think they lose purpose/meaning in doing so.
To help explain 8) :
Magni Berton, R., Panel, S. Strategic gerontocracy: why nondemocratic systems produce older leaders. Public Choice 171, 409–427 (2017). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-017-0449-5
Abstract :
One characteristic of nondemocratic regimes is that leaders cannot be removed from office by legal means: in most authoritarian regimes, no institutional way of dismissing incompetent rulers is available, and overthrowing them is costly. Anticipating this, people who have a say in the selection of the leader are likely to resort to alternative strategies to limit his tenure. In this paper, we examine empirically the “strategic gerontocracy” hypothesis: Because selecting aging leaders is a convenient way of reducing their expected time in office, gerontocracy will become a likely outcome whenever leaders are expected to rule for life. We test this hypothesis using data on political leaders for the period from 1960 to 2008, and find that dictators have shorter life expectancies than democrats at the time they take office. We also observe variations in the life expectancies of dictators: those who are selected by consent are on average closer to death than those who seize power in an irregular manner. This finding suggests that gerontocracy is a consequence of the choice process, since it disappears when dictators self-select into leadership positions.
So if the people who select leaders can't remove them later, they can shorten terms by selecting old leaders. But that doesn't seem relevant to the U.S.; the same voters who put leaders in office could remove them 2 to 6 years later, if they wanted to.
>39: Very large Pew poll of black Americans. Findings include: 60% say racism is an extremely big problem, 15% say they are regularly (64% from-time-to-time, 21% neither of the above) discriminated against
We should all be well aware that this is no way proves the existence of widespread discrimination. Not that respondents are outright lying, just that the perception of discrimination should be expected to be >> actual discrimination. Virtually all racial differences in outcomes are assumed by most leftists to be the result of discrimination, even when there are obvious alternative explanations supported by the data.
An obvious example would be policing. Black people have more police interactions, but they also live in areas with higher crime rates, so this is what we should expect to happen in race-neutral society. But many will perceive this as "discrimination" against blacks, which if we're taking to be correct even in light of what I said above, then this would also mean that the police "discriminate" against men relative to women, and against whites relative to asians.
The problem with asymmetric polls is that you cannot figure out similar things from the data.
A proper poll design would ask people of *all* major ethnic groups. Then you might find out e.g. that among every ethnic group, at least 15% believe their group is discriminated against. So you could assume that this 15% is essentially a noise, and focus on the differences, like if some other group reports 40%, then you need an explanation for the extra 25%.
Controlling for environment might then find out that e.g. in poor areas the "everyone feels discriminated" noise raises from 15% to 30%, or something like that.
If your entire poll design is "let's ask black people whether they feel discriminated against", the result is predictably going to be "a certain number of black people feel discriminated against". (Unless the intention is to obtain exactly this result.)
From this perspective, the useful parts of the poll is comparing different results against each other. Like, some black people may feel discriminated against for wrong reasons, but it is nonetheless interesting that black women are more likely to feel discriminated against than black men. -- I could not have predicted the result of this one. Like, on one hand, men are socialized to feel more responsible for what happens to them. On the other hand, men have more interaction with police than women, and that is one area where racial discrimination is probably felt quite strongly.
Much as I'm loath to give it credit for anything, intersectionality would say that it's obvious...
Brazil is 100% not okay
I think I got moderated/comment deleted.
Regarding #33, on the Wikimedia Foundation: This is mostly correct, but missing some important context.
The Foundation did make some clear culture war statements during the BLM push in 2020, along with transferring money to culture war causes around the same time, via the "Knowledge Equity Fund" which was explicitly inspired by the George Floyd protests. This received some pretty strong pushback from the volunteer editor community. In the 2021 Wikimedia Foundation Board Elections, candidates were specifically asked by volunteers whether they would support spending on areas not related to the Wikimedia projects, and elected trustees that were largely opposed to such actions. (Quotes from the elected candidates, on the question: "Considering that the money are needed for the development of Wikimedia movement, especially in the Global South, I don’t think WF has any money to spare for any other causes irrespective of their worth. There’s an NGO or 100 for any cause, and WF cause is exclusively Wikimedia movement support.", "The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to support and empower the communities of the Wikimedia projects and the projects themselves. Among the many worthy goals that one can set, we choose to pursue this one. We should devote virtually all the resources of the Wikimedia Foundation to it. [...] The Wikimedia Foundation looks relatively big and well-resourced (in terms of money, people, etc.), and it is tempting to use some of them for other purposes. However, the truth is that the Wikimedia Foundation is not so big, and the resources are very limited. If we scatter them in too many different places, we will end up achieving nothing - and the Wikimedia projects will be the first to pay the price.", "I'd say that, given that our resources are scarce, and given that as I write in my statement, we also want to grow in regions less covered, as well as get ready for new tech and social challenges, we need to be really smart and selective about what purposes outside our immediate focus we choose. At this time, I'd be reluctant to start funding projects entirely unrelated to Wikimedia projects.")
A recent post on the Wikimedia mailing list by Chris Keating, who seems to generally be pretty well-informed, states: "[M]y perception is that the Knowledge Equity Fund was initially a deliberate attempt led by US-based staff to have the WMF 'do something' to align itself with a broader progressive movement in the USA. I believe the main advocates for this have now departed, that it was never a particularly good fit with the WMF's overall approach to grantmaking, that the evolution of the WMF's approach to this fund was positive, but still if the whole thing is now forgotten about that's probably no bad thing." The KEF still exists, and _sorta_ seems to be winding down (it hasn't done any spending since its initial grants in September 2021, but they are still theoretically planning to do another round, which may or may not happen).
On the massive spending increase: Yes, the Foundation increased its spending rapidly for many years, at a rate which is generally agreed to have been unhealthy. The Board recently hired a new CEO (along with a mostly-new executive team), who apparently intends to do things somewhat differently. A recent quote from the Board vice-chair: "I do believe that under previous management, WMF has grown too fast. That said, we have new management, and the focus now is on stopping that growth and stablizing the organization." It is true that most spending is not spent on hosting. It is mostly spent on software development. Much of this is very useful in improving the websites. Some spending is on less-useful things. (Unfortunately, it is much more difficult to get a sense of the specifics, as the Foundation has slipped a lot on spending transparency in recent years, but the Executives have stated that they intend to fix this.)
Are the Wikimedia Foundation's fundraising messages misleading? Yes, they are. The English Wikipedia community recently came to a clear consensus that the fundraising messages are misleading, and asked that the WMF change them. The WMF did not respond, IIRC.
Is donating to the Wikimedia Foundation necessary to keep Wikipedia from disappearing? No. The Endowment recently reached a size such that interest alone is enough to pay for raw hosting costs indefinitely. (This was a major goal for a long time, as hosting itself was considered by many to be the "ultimate" aim which must be protected above all else.)
Is donating to it _worthwhile_? Maybe. A lot of the technology development helps Wikipedia greatly. Some of its inflating budget is, frankly, quite harmful to Wikipedia. Whether the overall balance is such that donating to the WMF does more good than donating elsewhere is a very complicated question, but I don't think the linked tweets do much to enlighten people on that.
Odd anon's post is the most important and informative thus far.
2021 Wikimedia Foundation Board Elections:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Candidates/CandidateQ%26A/Question11
"What do you think about the Wikimedia Foundation using funds for purposes not related to Wikimedia projects?"
The four candidates who were elected in 2021, in the order Odd anon quotes them:
Victoria Doronina ("I don’t think WF has any money to spare...There’s an NGO or 100 for any cause, and WF cause is exclusively Wikimedia movement support.")
Lorenzo Losa ("The Wikimedia Foundation looks relatively big and well-resourced (in terms of money, people, etc.), and it is tempting to use some of them for other purposes. However...")
Dariusz Jemielniak (the weasel-worded "smart and selective...*entirely* unrelated" one)
Odd anon did not quote Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, but Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight's quote is by far the best for the case Odd anon is making:
"I would want assurance that there is a financial surplus; that in compliance with the donor policy, that donors are aware of how their donations are used; and that the Wikimedia community participates in the nomination/decision process in order to ensure equity in decision-making. It's a fact that the Knowledge Equity Fund has already been established..."
Notably, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight was the only one to address the elephant in the room. She actually mentioned the Knowledge Equity Fund by name, which even the question itself didn't. I described Dariusz Jemielniak's as weasel-worded, but really, all three of the others rather seemed to be avoiding plain talk about the elephant in the room, as did the question itself.
Also notable is that Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight was the only one to raise the idea that taking people's money under false pretenses might be unethical, something raised by the talk page linked from Chris Keating's post.
Odd anon's description of Chris Keating's post seems misleading. When Chris Keating gave his perception, it was specifically in the context of Chris Keating *asking* whether their perception was accurate; Chris Keating obviously does not agree with the description of Chris Keating as well-informed.
Odd anon is also *really* burying the lede, because Chris Keating's question was very explicitly about the exact linked Twitter thread: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/POVYUGT4ZYFJYCBUOK6YE7PMA6BZV4VS/
(This isn't material to Odd anon's point. I just thought it was funny.)
Chris Keating's question was answered here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund
I do not see any basis whatsoever for Odd anon's belief that the KEF "seems to be winding down" or that the second round of grants "may not happen". Or, well, the KEF is/was a grant of fixed size, and its remaining money is therefore always decreasing monotonically, so in that sense it has been "winding down" since its inception. And the second round of grants "may not happen" only in the sense that WMF headquarters "may" be struck by an asteroid first. Otherwise it will definitely happen. For whatever reason, $8.723 million was irrecoverably transferred to Tides Advocacy, and there is no way that the WMF can get it back. Tides Advocacy has not yet re-granted it to individual organizations, but that can't not happen at this point.
The overall sense I get from https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund is that the WMF has been getting a lot of pushback, and that they've been digging their heels in. So even if Odd anon just meant that there won't be further grants of this type, I don't see any support for that either. The answer Chris Keating got is pretty clearly determined to push forward: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund
The only thing we can say there is that three of the newly-elected trustees (out of eleven total trustees) seem opposed.
Incidentally, the reason I describe Dariusz Jemielniak's statement as weasel-worded is because people (not Dariusz Jemielniak) have been trying to spin Tides Advocacy as sort of kind of not entirely unrelated to Wikipedia, really, if you think about it properly:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/IAEIVZX3P4M2UC35L3DDXGSKCYH5WLJB/?sort=date
Mario Gómez: "Does this mean that funds will be used for work not related to Wikimedia projects?"
Gnangarra: "since our goal is to freely share the sum of all knowledge anything that leads to that goal does benefit the projects...Everything that is freely licensed becomes available to the Movement anyway"
Chris Keating's question about whether the trustees who came up with the idea are among the trustees who departed with the 2021 election, or are still among the eleven trustees, was dodged. This seems in keeping with the overall trend on https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund of evasiveness and secrecy; indeed it seems that evasiveness and secrecy is exactly the main complaint: "According to the auditors, the $8.723M were transferred to Tides Advocacy 'during the year ended June 30, 2020'. In other words, at least five months passed during which no one at the Foundation thought it would be right to publicise the fact that millions of dollars had been diverted to non-WMF ends, without any community consultation whatsoever, bypassing all the established grants processes." It appears the grant was kept a complete secret until literally the last possible moment, when the WMF published its legally-mandated annual accounting. The decision process behind the grant remains a secret to this day. (Though I would presume they are still among the eleven trustees, else why dodge Chris Keating's question?)
Andreas Kolbe provided this summary of the transparency complaints:
---------------------
Yair Rand (quoted below) inquired last December [five months after $8.723 million was irrecoverably transferred to Tides Advocacy, the first time anyone outside the WMF found out they'd done that] about a 2019/2020 WMF
expenditure item, the $8.723M the WMF transferred to a "Wikimedia Knowledge
Equity Fund managed and controlled by Tides Advocacy".
The 2019/2020 financial audit FAQ[1] said, "The Wikimedia Foundation is
still setting up the specifics of the Knowledge Equity Fund and will share
more information *in late 2020*."
Replying to Yair last December, Lisa updated this[2], saying, "We intend to
announce the Knowledge Equity Fund *in early 2021*, once we have a bit more
details and specifics worked out."
Inquiring for this information again *in April*, I was told by Kassia on
Meta[3] that there had been delays, but "We will be able to share more
information *in May* [eleven months after $8.723 million was irrecoverably transferred to Tides Advocacy] about the Equity Fund, its structure and eligibility
for the Fund, and we will also have materials on Meta with more detail."
If any such information was published in May (I may possibly have missed
it), could you please provide a link, and if not, could you please publish
it now?
------------------------------
#28: It took me longer than I like to admit to get "The Counterfactual Plateau".
On 20 and 27, I never understood why people trusted any statistics provided by dictatorships.
Why on earth would anyone expect that a government that jails and kills its country's dissidents would be honest when providing numbers that may make it look bad?
OK, some people do use these numbers for their political purposes - Cuba's presumably awesome healthcare was touted as a reason the government in the US should take as much control of healthcare as possible, and thus we ended up with the Obamacare monstrosity. But other than people who need these numbers to be good to help with promoting their agenda, why would anyone think they somehow reflect reality?
Good question. My guess would be that it is very difficult to get the correct numbers otherwise, so at the end, you have people who say "I don't know" and some who use the official numbers. Then the latter are used as a source by someone else (who wouldn't trust the dictator, but trusts someone who trusted the dictator), etc.
There are also people who try to estimate the real numbers from harder to fake data. Warren Nutter did that for the Soviet economy, came up with much lower numbers than the official ones, mostly rejected by others interested in the question. I believe they still turned out to be somewhat higher than the real numbers revealed after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Because even when they lie, it's not entirely arbitrary, and some truth can be gleaned by canny observers. Scott's quote from the https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust post:
"In the Soviet Union, the government would say “We had a good harvest this year!” and everyone would notice they had said good rather than glorious, and correctly interpret the statement to mean that everyone would starve and the living would envy the dead."
Yes, but a lot of people just take the numbers at face value. If these numbers were by default treated as bogus, as they should be, there would be no point in comparing them to numbers elsewhere and no need for debunking, and nobody would be surprised by the results.
I guess a lot of people are either very naive or just really want to believe that certain kinds of regimes work.
This is just another example of the default human mode of communication in terms of true/false being clearly exposed as much weaker than the language of uncertainty and error bars. A statistic provided by a dictatorship is much less reliable than that of a democracy, and yet neither is the first completely useless, nor the second completely trustworthy. Our methods of communication lack universally recognized ways of concisely relaying this information.
There are of course all sorts of reasons why we ended up with this state of affairs, some of which you mentioned. I'd say that the underlying issue is that in general people care about 'truth' much less than about many other things, like their agendas, tribal affiliation, convenience, etc. etc.
The supposed rediscovery of silphium has happened a few times- a near identical story went around back in 2017. I’ve been interested in silphium since I first heard of it in high school. I’d love it to be true, but even a similar plant with culinary potential would be interesting.
I read an article somewhere that theorized about why silphium couldn’t be cultivated outside Cyrenaica (northern Libya). Silphium might have had some complex ecology or root structure that defied transplantation. It’s also possible that the desirable version was a hybrid and couldn’t be grown from seed. Archaeologists never seem find the seeds amid remains of other foodstuffs.
On that note, I was surprised to find several other people at an ACX meetup a while back who are also into historic cooking. Any other ACX food history nerds here?
I may or may not have watched every episode of Tasting History to date.
While it’s impossible to know for sure, Asafoetida should be close enough and is widely available in Indian groceries.
Yeah, I was going to say - it's not surprising that something in the same broad genus as fennel and the same narrow one as asafoetida (which is used in almost exactly the same ways as silphium was historically) would do some of the same nice things as asafoetida, whether or not it really is silphium.
Besides David Friedman?
Regarding 21. I think there's something worth pointing out. Under the current system it's a one actor system. The university says we want >X% black people, and quietly say and <Y% Asian people. <Z% Jews if you go back to the start of all this.
Under the hypothetical new system where they ask for lots of social justice courses its a two actor system. The university can select which courses give an admissions boost, and the students can change their studies to match. If the university says they want people who study Kendi, suddenly there's going to be a lot of Kendi summer schools catering to ambitious students.
If anything this might backfire and favour Asian students even more because they have the strongest traditions of extra-schooling focused on what universities want. And the more transparent they are about gaming the system against Asian students the higher the risk of a follow up court case.
I don't think its going to be that easily quantifiable. Rather it's just an added metric to muddy the waters enough so that universities can keep on accepting people based on racial quotas but now with the extra element of woke dei courses as the excuse for inevitably accepting who they were going to accept anyway. It's not like Unis have to give concrete reasons every time they accept or reject a candidate.
IMO the only real solution is making acceptance 100% based on transparent objective grades via SAT or any other standardized test. Anything else and we'll just get more of the same.
"IMO the only real solution is making acceptance 100% based on transparent objective grades via SAT or any other standardized test. Anything else and we'll just get more of the same."
I agree, but universities are moving in the exact opposite direction.
I think the criteria will be FAR more opaque than this and will be so vague as to essentially be an almost blank check for the universities to admit who they want. There certainly would not be a system of standardized scores or official items to check off, or really anything objective and optimizable. It will be a hoop to jump through, and then they pick who they want from there. And if after all that too many asians and whites get admitted, they will just change the rules again. They really have no obligation to abide by any standards of fairness or objectivity.
Regarding custom films, this has in principle been possible with CGI animated films for ages, but mostly doesn't happen. But they *do* make some changes! For example there's a Pixar movie where a kid gets broccoli pizza and hates it, in the Japanese version they changed broccoli to green peppers, because that has the right cultural association there. Swapping out a character is more work than that but not enormously more.
#28: well, the map is not the territory, but it's nice to see ACX being more or less at the exact centre of Rationalia. Surely a coincidence! Yggdracxil, the World-Blog.
The old SSC reddit being literally on another continent feels pretty true, too. Strange how far some apples have fallen from the original Tree of Knowledge. Or maybe it's more that the tree uprooted itself and walked away. (I guess one could take that even further back, to the LiveJournal days...)
Also interesting to note the conspicuous absences. Though I suppose anything could happen in The Illegible Isles...and that seemed like Feature Not Bug of certain infamous personalities.
> 7: New flying car project, Jetson One
It's a personal helicopter
I think these threads would benefit from a standardized syntax for commenters to use in order to reference links. e.g. "#22" or "22:" with "22" being frowned upon
XXII?
I haven't checked every commment to see if my point has been made, but Scott says "I would still like to see a good analysis of whether the neoliberal wave was inevitable (because the mid-century statist policies which seemed to work so well for so long were unsustainable) or an overreaction to a contingent recession and if we hadn’t done it we could have returned to mid-century-style statist policies and they would have gone back to working well. I suspect inevitable but I haven’t seen any really good treatments of this question." I think he fails to consider that it might not have been inevitable and statist policies not worked well at all, and we would have stayed in an even more suboptimal equilibrium.
https://arstechnica.com/.../a-dish-of-neurons-may-have.../
"This added an additional level of complication, as there was no way to know what neurons would actually find rewarding."
****
"This is where the research team turned to theoretical neurobiology. One proposal for how sensory networks learn to interpret the world is that they try to minimize the mismatch between what the network thinks is going to happen and the actual state of the world. In this view, learning networks naturally try to minimize the discrepancy between the predicted and actual states.
Put in Pong terms, the sensory portion of the network will take the positional inputs, determine an action (move the paddle up or down), and then generate an expectation for what the next state will be. If it's interpreting the world correctly, that state will be similar to its prediction, and thus the sensory input will be its own reward. If it gets things wrong, then there will be a large mismatch, and the network will revise its connections and try again."
Working link: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/10/a-dish-of-neurons-may-have-taught-itself-to-play-pong-badly/2/
Are you against capabilities research or against more people going into capabilities research than already exist?
I think Scott (and the rest of the rationalist community for that matter) vaguely opposes *capabilities research*, because that would be the direct precursor to someone accidentally creating a world-ending-ly misaligned AGI. But I think that rationalists *also* oppose more people going into capabilities because that leads to more capabilities research.
Hmm, well, then color me confused. Because the whole community, Scott and gwern included, seem to be enthralled by image generators such as DALL-E and GANs, which are the bleeding-edge of capabilities research.
Now that I think of it, that’s a reason for me to have used the word “vaguely”!
Image generation is fun and excellent for outreach (people are impressed by photorealistic samples of ordinary objects from a model when they are for some reason much less impressed by more profound outputs from GPT-3 of following instructions or reasoning or few-shot learning or programming, and they are an excellent demonstration of how well scaling works, and people can't dismiss the task as useless), but I would not call it the bleeding-edge of capabilities, because it doesn't lead to much in the way of capability other than generating images.
The most striking result from image+text model scaling research so far is that the image modality doesn't lead to much, and the text part is doing all the thinking and learning. Every model which does something more than just generate images has text lurking in it somewhere: a scaled up text encoder like Parti, text contrastive learning like CLIP, plugging into a text model like Flamingo, robotics like Saycan, multi-task learning like Gato... Even the text embeddings/latent space already seem to be very similar to/aligned with the image models' latents!
Eric Jang has a good essay on this, asking what's so special about text? (My own theory is that text encodes Turing machines and computation in a way that images don't, and that is why they provide a universal prior and elicit capabilities like meta-learning.)
Thanks. I agree text is the tip of the spear. But then isn't fiddling with GPT, like when Scott wrote the post about whether GPT can play chess, helping drive capabilities research forward? I'm having trouble reconciling the implicit technophilia in this community with a "just say no to capabilities research" position. I'm not suggesting you are, since you didn't explicitly say you were against capabilities research. But if someone is against capabilities research, aren't they against everything downstream from that? GPT popularized Transformers which is now used in SOTAs for labeling, which is used for detecting cancers, etc.
Again, I know you don't speak for the community, but to be against capabilities research means to wish GPT had never happened in the first place, which I don't think people actually believe, do they?
Speaking of flying cars, does the Moller Skycar hold the record for longest standing vaporwave project? It's been in "development" since I was a kid.
>what are we actually doing here? Is it damaging public trust in AI safety? Producing false confidence? Muddying the waters?
It's establishing already existing rules in new realms. We don't want swastikas an porn in public, so we forbid them in public facing AI. You can train your own stable diffusion on all hitlers and swastikas available, but don't expect the public to tolerate or even support this. If you must have that, you can have it, but not with public facing tools.
Local installations of Word or (as described above) Stable Diffusion are not public facing tools. A lot of Stable Diffusion and Dall-E instances are also platforms, and there are established rules for living together that we, as a society, figured out across many generations. You can be as violent or sexy in your private facing tools, but not in public. The theater makes sense, and the point OP makes lacks a basic understanding of sociology.
>So if I'm using Word via Microsoft 365 in a browser, it's a public facing tool now
You don't seem to understand what the word "public" means. Its bad that applications executed in the cloud but that are *used* locally are censored, but running an app in the cloud is not "public facing" in any sense of the word, it means you use the hardware infrastructure of a company remotely. They can do with that hardware what they want, and execute any code they want, including code that doesn't like boobies. Even that's still not "public facing". And if you need to open .docs featuring gorefest fantasies (do they censor stuff like this? i'm not familiar with office products), you can still use open office afaik.
To make this clear: I don't have an oppinion on MS or Stable Diffusion or OpenAI "censoring" their tools, but they are private companies and have any right to do so. Again, if you want your Stable Diffusion to generate Furrie Porn, you're free to do so, and use the already existing Dreambooth-variants. Who cares. But don't expect *public facing tools* like Midjourney or Dall-E or PlaygroundAI to go down that route. They are platforms too and they are, one more time for you, my dude: *public facing tools*.
Nobody has "absolute and unappealable veto power" over what I can do with my computer. (Not yet.) I can watch and generate and paint and draw and write as much porn as I want to, I can write as much violent shit I can imagine and no tool is stopping me. But you internet rando doesn't get to tell a private company that sells access to *public facing tools* what they do and don't allow with their *public facing tool".
(I think part of our dispute stems from a misunderstanding what the term "public facing tool" means: For you it seems any cloud based service [which is too broad in my estimation, this would make any interactive website providing any search or newsletter "public facing services"], for me it's a service that publishes your generations or provides an API that enables tools for publishing, like DallE, GPT3 or Stable Diffusion).
I understand your argument and it has merrits, I'm not denying that. We can discuss how censoring nipples on Instagram may be overreach, but censoring Gore in Dall-E2 may be not.
But you seem to forget that we, as a society, developed rules across generations and that these rules are not nil because of silicon based technologies, regardless of any libertarian fantasies.
If you mean the market will spontaneously react in such a way that the people who sell these tools will themselves restrict them, yep that could happen. If you mean laws will be passed about that -- nope, not in the US at least. First Amendment and all. That would be wildly unconstitutional.
And if you think the vendors will always be sensitive to their public image and be sure all use follows the shibboleths -- let me introduce you to the inventors of the videotape and cheap videocams from the 70s, many of whom were probably horrified[1] that the biggest single beneficiary of their technological wizardy was the pr0n industry, which exploded in the 70s and became hugely profitable.
Betting against human ingenuity and base or tribal urges[2] is something you want to do only if you're not using your own retirement capital.
--------------
[1] Although not enough that they wouldn't take the money.
[2] So if a futurist were to predict that the biggest money-making use of sophisticated AI in the short term were in pr0n, marketing, politics, and financial scams, I'd say that has a better than average chance of being quite correct.
As far as kayaking "The Crucible" in the upper San Joaquin goes, I wonder why they can't use a drone to scout it out and find the safest route.
As a Brazilian, I can ensure you that the answer to the question "Is Brazil OK?" has been "No" since, at the very least, 1889.
>Or is it cancel culture to worry about this?
I think "I won't give charity money to people who are going to spend it on things I think are actively bad" is about the most defensible boycott possible.
I enjoyed 18 well enough, but it's an annoying example of a certain style of journalism. As soon as the hashtag was chosen the article's content was a foregone conclusion. All the writer's scripted encounters are with environmental activists of one stripe or another. The people he just runs into are either neutral or hostile toward his thesis, but he sticks doggedly to it anyway. I would've thought Scott, of all people, would be more of a critical reader here.
The Jon Stewart article was kind of interesting, went in a lot of different directions.
I thought they were just going to talk about the shame Tucker felt in the moment, when arguing with Stewart. Starting about here and going for the next 2 minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE#t=6m40s
Is that moment the birth of a supervillain?
You can ask the same thing about Donald Trump, after Obama roasted him at the 2011 correspondent's dinner:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHckZCxdRkA
In my daydreams 80% of all donations to Wikipedia are secretly re-donated to internet archival projects.
8: Increasing age of senators. You'll probably also see increasing age of the average research grant recipient. Increasing age of marriage. Increasing dominance of megacorp brands. What all these things have in common is perhaps a general trend of trust building up much more slowly now than it used to. Or maybe this is just the Law of the Instrument on my part because I've been reading Liars and Outliers and Matt Levine's bloomberg issue on crypto.
22. If there's uncertainty about where to draw the "worth living" line, and you value the reduction pain somewhat higher than the increasing of pleasure, then a single barely worth living life has negative expectation. A single barely-not-worth-living life has a somewhat larger negative expectation, but it could still be better to create one of those than two of the former.