There needs to be a word for "saying things that are probably true, but saying them with an unjustified degree of confidence". Because this is the current standard mode of communication shoved down our throats by those with the big megaphones regarding things like election fraud and covid and global warming and so forth.
The fact that they say "Noooo, of course there was no fraud, shut up you lunatic" instead of saying "Well yeah, obviously there's always some fraud, but come on, it's unlikely that it's going to amount to a hundred thousand net votes in several different states" makes me very suspicious. But in reality it probably doesn't make them wrong, it just makes them terrible people.
"It never happens, and if it does that's a good thing" attitude.
A couple years back I looked at the Mariposa County results, as that was very disputed, in part because of a long-standing perception that elections there were corrupt and rigged, because previous election - Mariposa and surrounding counties all red. That election - surrounding counties remain red, Mariposa flips blue, this wins the state for Biden. *Looks* suspicious, but is it?
Digging down into the results, Mariposa was red in 2016 by a slim margin, and turned blue in 2020 by a slim margin (I think but can't remember definitely that it was something like 5,000 votes). Now, that *could* be the result of vote fraud, but it could also, perfectly credibly, be wibbly voters who had been swayed to Trump in 2016 being swayed to Biden in 2020. No fraud needed or proven.
But when there was such blanket denial that any fraud could possibly have taken place at all ("most secure election ever!") that was a terrible reaction born of pure defensiveness and didn't help the same way explaining debatable results like Mariposa would have. Different states had different standards, and when I read one (can't remember the particular state) that accepted post-in votes up to a week after the ballot ended, with no postmark being needed - well, can you blame anyone for thinking this was less than secure and could be exploited for fraud?
Strong disagree - when it's software engineers and physicists, but not marketing analysts or schoolteachers, you're selecting for nerdiness (or at least intelligence).
Doctors and lawyers are intelligent too but have high divorce rates.
I think the really important factor here is a lack of women in the workplace. Many marriages are ended by an affair with a colleague, so working in a 90% male office makes that particular failure mode a lot less likely.
Right, there's obviously a class component as well. But within white-collar middle-class professions, the ones with the most extremally low divorce rates are the ones where men rarely interact with women.
The full data is here so we're not stuck staring at the extremes https://flowingdata.com/2017/07/25/divorce-and-occupation/ ... I was wrong, and physicians and surgeons have low divorce rates. Lawyers are high among white collar professions but low compared to blue collar jobs.
As far as divorce rates, they appear to have slightly higher divorce rates than actuaries, physical scientists, and software developers (17%, 19%, and 20% respectively).
*I say relative to members of other professions, since even the high IQ professions listed there, were still below 115. In the past, however, such fields were more elite and had average IQs of over 130: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1652892831332159489
I think even if nerds worked in a place with way more females they still would have a lot fewer office affairs than doctors and lawyers. But I’m not sure the reason they’d have fewer affairs is that they are more loyal to their wives or have more self-control. Initiating an affair when married still calls for social skills, being willing to put yourself out there and seduction skills. Maybe nerds are just worse at getting someone to have an affair with them than non-nerds.
I think that's an obvious idea, I've seen many references to it before. It's just the practical implementation (and the cost of designing, manufacturing and maintaining the system that can do that) is the challenge. I think I'd pay some additional money for a car that can do that, but I have no idea if that would cover the added complexity... I suspect it'd take a while until it becomes a feature of mainstream car models, if at all.
>1. - 3. Temperatures have been completely stable in the USA for nearly two decades when measured from the actual state of the art weather station network the US gov operates, and which climatologists conspicuously refuse to use. Go here, then select "All months" and observe the perfectly flat trend which stretches back to the day the network opened:
>Please try to square that with the statement that records were broken in the USA.
As you wish.
If you download the plotted data and compute the linear trend, you get 0.29 C/decade, which is not perfectly flat. It happens to be a larger trend than the globe as a whole. Hard to see by eye because of the large month-to-month variability, but it's a bit easier to eyeball if you plot the annual averages instead:
Then you get records (which I define as the largest value ever recorded at a given station or over a given area) when some parts of the US are much warmer than the statewide average and some parts are much cooler.
Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if our visual cortex included an integrator with variable, controlled integration periods? I'd love to be able to look at a noisy graph and immediately resolve the underlying trends.
"Consciousness is inherently hard to study," as Scott says. And so is climate, because we only have one Earth to measure, it's an extremely complex system, there's no way to run experiments, and predictions can often only be verified over the course of decades. It's arguably a more *important* field than consciousness, but just because we'd *really like* it to be tractable doesn't make it so.
Most people would have no trouble with the claim that it's possible everything "experts" think about consciousness is wrong. But so many rationalists, including Scott, don't apply this same level of skepticism to claims that we "understand" climate science except for a handful of ignorant deniers.
Yes, that really is the best explanation they could come up with for how 'Defund the Police' could work in reality. In other words, it could never work.
What's the significance of the difference between "law" and "custom" here? It just seems like a tautological terminological dispute with no bearing on the situation. In practice I don't see why a modern society couldn't stick with highly codified, consensus, written rules (as opposed to needing to "drum up a set of social customs for scratch"), whatever you want to call them; and why we couldn't keep formalised institutions whose job is to be very knowledgeable about those and serve as arbiters in disputes relating to them. There are big problems with the "outlaw" system, but this doesn't seem like one of them.
The consequences, in the proposed alternative state, are that if you murder somebody you have to do a whole lot of community service or you have to accept outlawry and with it a substantial reduction in life expectancy. It isn't necessary that vigilantes kill *every* outlaw, or that *no* law-abiding citizen be killed, for outlawry to be worse than non-outlawry. So, negative consequences to going around murdering people.
I prefer the current system, where the negative consequences are implemented by the police. But something like the proposed alternative has worked in the past, and it is erroneous to say that it is fundamentally unworkable and/or that it has no consequences for rulebreaking.
It works in radically smaller societies with much less density and "wilderness" where there is in effect exile. Until we start packing up C-130s and dropping prisoners off in the Congo or Antarctica it really isn't an option.
Either that or just hundreds of thousands (millions?) more murders for a few years. I honestly suspect most western societies would collapse in less than a decade under such a system. The violence spiral would spread quickly.
For point 7, the one on the right seems to have a cat ear right in the center of the picture, not to mention lines that make me see whiskers. It seems pretty obvious to me, so I'm wondering if this is a typical mind thing?
Look in the upper-right corner, there are some obvious tabby-like vertical stripes and some triangular shapes that could read as ears. EDIT: also in the left image, directly above the driver's cab door, there appears to have been what looks a *lot* like a cat's right ear superimposed over the image, possibly continuous with the rest of a cat's face superimposed on the rest of the train (suggestive but difficult to make out). It's a sharp-cornered orange-brown feature rather than a more purely dark foliage shadow.
I appreciate your valiant effort to describe where you see these things. But I fail to perceive them. Too bad we can't post photos in the replies. I'd like to see what you're talking about with some helpful arrows and circles.
Yeah, I wonder what the difference is. I did very well in a semester long color mixing course, so I don't think it's partial color blindness, but I cannot see it at all. My husband can see it a bit, and ones like the New York picture much faster than I can.
What would NPC have to do with not seeing the cat? And I'm not color blind. But my visual perceptions seem to be more along the autistic spectrum than normal people. For instance, I'm able to pick out underlying patterns hidden in a lot of noise quickly because I immediately focus on a detail of the pattern and visually connect my way through a pattern — rather than taking in a gestalt of the picture (not sure I'm explaining this well). So, even though I now see the "cat ear" object in the lefthand image of the train, the train refuses to resolve itself as a cat to me. I was never able to see the images in those magic eye patterns, either. And I've never been able to see the cat in the Georgian cat image (link below). I've given up trying.
The funny thing though, is I've probably got a better ability to distinguish subtle hue differences in colors than most people. And I used to have a photographic memory for maps and diagrams (but that's faded with old age). I could accurately draw a map or diagram from a single viewing—which made me a whiz at geography. Nowhere near as good as Stephen Wiltshire, though (second link below). I could only remember 2-d images. He can do it 3-D!
I don't think anyone claims the train "resolves itself as a cat to the viewer". They're just saying that the left image have certain features which look like cat ears etc. so of course an AI would score that image as more "cat-like" than the right image.
The cat ear is in the dark green foliage above the center of the train. Don't feel bad; I had to turn up my monitor brightness by a lot in order to see it. You might even need to turn off your blue light filter (if you have one).
OK. I can see the cat-ear-shaped object that you're talking about in the foliage. It doesn't help me to resolve the cat face in the train, though. To me the "ear" vaguely resembles a giant manta ray with its tail behind it crashing into the train. Lol! Now that you've pointed out the "ear" I can't unsee the manta ray.
I see it as well. Does someone want to help me out with the text in the skyscrapers, though? The obvious text Scott referred to is nevertheless eluding me.
I've stared at both of these pics for 10 minutes, and I can't perceive any difference between the two pictures except that the chromatic values of the greens in the foliage seem to be different. Not sure if I'm seeing a difference in contrast between the two. I do happen to see two eyes and a smile on the cow-catcher in both the photos, though.
Full disclosure, when I take the pattern detection test for autism, I test as autistic. So, even though I don't consider myself to be autistic, I seem to be quite neurodivergent at least when it comes to visual perception.
Have you ever done those "magic eye" images that were popular in, I think, the late 80s early 90s? The trick is to defocus your eyes slightly, as if you're looking at something behind the picture, or as if you have a 1000-yard stare. Doing that with a pair of side-by-side images, like this pair, can make the differences jump out more clearly.
#7 it literally looks like there is a faint picture of a cat superimposed on the train on the left. I would think the selection would be practically unanimous.
It helps that it's an unusually catlike train to begin with. The driver's windscreen panels and the little red circle already have roughly the right shape and proportions to look like a cat's eyes and mouth.
You wouldn't get this result without an already catlike locomotive (this is a sentence I have never written before).
I don't think that's it. As other commentators are saying, there's a faint picture of a cat superimposed on the adversarial image, that humans can see.
For 6, the giant plane: does anyone know the name of a sci-fi novel featuring huge passenger planes that circle the Earth, never landing, refueling in mi-air? Passengers use small shuttle planes to dis/embark. It was written no later than early-80's.
That sounds like Timothy Zahn's story "Between a Rock and a High Place", published in Analog in 1982. IIRC the large, permanently flying craft was called a Skyport, and the plot involved a feeder plane crashing into it in a way that didn't immediately take it down but made it impossible to evacuate.
Based on my knowledge this is not possible with most fusion designs which don't have the thrust to weight ratio to fly but may be possible with Zap and Helion's reactors. Particularly Helion which wouldn't require a steam generator. They may reach tantalizing levels of performance in the next few years looking to demonstrate step before a full size reactor results
5, flying aircraft carrier: The Soviets actually did make something like this, though not nearly as big. It was done by sticking fighters on existing bombers, and it turns out that while they added weight, they also increased its lift ability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zveno_project
16, defund the police: Doesn't this proposal rely on the fact that societally you have majority support, or at least a very significant minority? Also would those who want Chauvin punished be happy with something like community service? (Also killing someone because they didn't do the right amount of community service seems like it would cause more problems than it solves, especially for those advocating defunding the police...)
Not relevant, but I also like the exchange in the classroom.
Jennings : Don't write this down, but I find Milton probably as boring as you find Milton. Mrs. Milton found him boring too. He's a little bit long-winded, he doesn't translate very well into our generation, and his jokes are terrible.
[Bell rings, students rise to leave]
Jennings : But that doesn't relieve you of your responsibility for this material. Now I'm waiting for reports from some of you... Listen, I'm not joking. This is my job!
It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.
Like, Joe the Random Shoplifter gets sentenced to community service, and he fails to do it. Is anyone sufficiently bloodthirsty to go murder him over it?
What if he's part of a gang, and I'm pretty sure that his gang will murder me if I kill him? And those murderers feel confident that they can murder any further state-sanctioned killers that come their way to murder them?
When this kind of thing was tried in medieval Iceland, did it lead to a just and peaceful society, or did it lead to generations-long blood feuds and shockingly high levels of axe murder?
>It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.
That's not obvious. If it's legal to take an outlaw's stuff (it usually is), well, then, you have to deal with enterprising gentlemen who make "killing outlaws for their stuff" their entirely-legal profession (the most recent case of this I'm aware of is privateers, who typically weren't paid by the state issuing the letter of marque).
The problem of warlords/gangs that can defy such gentlemen, however, is a real one.
The "defying efforts to kill them" issue seems like a serious one even without bringing gangs and warlords into the picture.
If you have a regular person who's already known to have a gun and a propensity for violence who's declared an outlaw, they're probably not going to want to be killed, and will make efforts to defend themself. If someone tries to kill them and take they're stuff, they'll probably try to kill them back. The other person isn't legal to murder, but so what? They're already an outlaw.
If out of every several people condemned to outlawry, at least one ends up killing more people in defense of their life and property, then the system ends up looking a whole lot worse than our current police force.
The English privateers in fact were paid by the state, in theory at least. Every ship they captured was supposed to be brought in to an English port to be condemned as being a valid target. If this happened, the ship and its cargo could then be sold.
If the court ruled against the capture, the captain (the one with the letter) was personally liable for compensation to the owners of ship and cargo - and likely would be bankrupt as a result.
Now there were a lot of ways around this. The courts in the Caribbean were much more lenient (and much faster) than the ones in England, since they were often short on things and ships. A personal relationship between the owner of the letter and the governor could cover many sins. The downside was that they were often also short on cash money.
For that matter, a privateer with a letter for e.g. French ships, could take a Danish ship (or take a ship and then find out it was Danish). They could then take it to e.g. a Portuguese colony for condemnation and sale. The "condemnation" in this case would likely be very informal.
It could be chancy to do this if word got back to England though - the ship owners could end up suing the letter owner in English court, likely years later. It would be an uphill battle, but still expensive.
>The English privateers in fact were paid by the state, in theory at least. Every ship they captured was supposed to be brought in to an English port to be condemned as being a valid target. If this happened, the ship and its cargo could then be sold.
That is not what I'd call "paid by the state". They were taking stuff from merchants, and then selling it to - for the most part - other merchants, with the state's permission; no money was coming out of the state's coffers except if the state happened to be the buyer. The state could be literally bankrupt and the privateers could still sell to someone else. And certainly they're not being paid for the attack *per se*.
You are correct - the state did not pay privateers to attack ships. Sometimes it was the other way around - the privateer would pay for the letter (or at least set up a bond). Though that would have been quite limited in time; privateering was pretty chancy; I doubt you could charge much for a license most years and get any takers.
There were things like "ship money", but that was paid to actual navy crew. The navy could "bring in" a captured ship, but that was more like buying a used car at auction.
Privateers were intended as a less formal expansion of the navy, so to make sense they had to be cheaper for the state than building and crewing more navy ships.
It's also possible that this was intended to (sort of) regulate something that might happen anyway - there was a lot of rationalizing by the English that the Spanish considered all non-Spanish in the New World to be pirates and bandits already...
Aren't bounty hunters a simple and modern example of this? If you skip bail, a bondsman will send some armed thug after you (or a professional, but the point is that they could basically send a thug)
Privateering worked bc ships were filled with valuables, or at the very least the ship itself was valuable. Getting in deadly confrontations to get somebody's clothes and smartphone sounds very stupid unless somebody has ulterior motives.
Plus the problem of de facto death penalty for failing to turn up for your community service! Pretty sure defunding advocates would regard this as a bug rather than a feature (as would I, naturally).
The gang thing gets to the interesting part of this - thinking about why it wouldn't work in, say, modern America even to the extent it worked in Iceland. For it to work, you need a broad majority of people who 1) like the law basically as it is, 2) trust the judgments of the courts at least enough to use them as a focal point and accept them if they disagree and 3) are willing (able?) to use at least enough violence that their numerical preponderance overwhelms any other group of people.
The US is an interesting case, because the Old West (at least in books/films, I know nothing about the real world version) was able to at least use the posse system which is in the same ball park. On the "do I buy it" heuristic, I feel like this would work in rural Wyoming, but not remotely in Chicago (neither of which have I ever been to).
The only thing I know of real posse is what a friend learned about his Grandfather from Ancestory.com of all places. He knew his mother was the child of an older man, but never heard much about his grandfather. Until he got an ancestry.com account. He found a newspaper article about the trial of the posse that murdered his uncle and grandfather—who definitely had it coming. His grandfather and uncle were outlaws in a remote Arizona farming community, I don't know the dates, probably 1920s. On Sundays—when everyone was in Church—they'd steal every tool and implement from a farm. When the posse caught up to them, they were strung up, and shot into two parts. Only there was an observer who was not in the posse who reported this to the state police.
If you steal the farming tools from a subsistence farmer, you're condemning his family to death. So like I said, they had it coming.
> It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.
There's always slavery.
One way or another, someone's going to want to do something with the meat that your mind calls home. Bodies are just made of organs that can be used for something else.
>It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.
Disagree. There are always people who are willing to kill a man just to watch him die, and aren't terribly picky about which man so long as he lives somewhere near Reno (or wherever is convenient to the wannabe killer). Most of these people would prefer not to spend the rest of their lives in Folsom as a consequence. If the State can officially say, "hey, all you people who ever wanted to kill someone just to watch them die, if you kill *this*, then we don't put you in prison and maybe we even call you a hero!", then it will probably inspire action even against an outlaw whose boring tax-law violations would otherwise never get anyone's blood boiling.
Even more so if the killer gets to keep the outlaw's stuff.
So there's plausibly a stable equilibrium in which each community has say a hundred such wannabe killers, and every criminal who gets caught just meekly does their assigned community service or whatever because the first one stupid enough to choose outlawry is going to have a hundred guns after them. Even the protection of a gang might not be enough against those odds.
Of course there's also a stable equilibrium in which nobody does their community service, there are thousands of nominal outlaws walking around, all of them feeling pretty secure because odds are that the one killer who would eventually have chosen them as a target will instead have been killed by one of the ten other outlaws he picked first. And plenty of other reasons not to want to implement this plan, even if we would get some cool new Sagas out of it.
The question really comes down to whether Youtube or Twitch would allow you to monetize the video of you hunting down and killing various criminals across the country. If so then there would definitely be 'content creators' filling that void in the market.
Also relevant is whether 'it's ok to kill this person' means 'it's ok to kill this person and take their stuff' or 'it's ok to threaten to kill this person in order to mug them' or etc. Having an asymetrical right to kill someone gives you a lot of power over them that can be easily exploited to gain things other than the simple joy of murder, if the law allows it.
community service isn't a thing if you haven't someone who actually compels you to do the service.
It's the whole libertarian mantra about how the government threatens to kill you if you don't pay your taxes : yes, ultimately every system of punishment must be able to excalate until obedience is obtained, otherwise the system doesn't work.
I think you've misread or misunderstood something.
The proposal is "community service, or we declare that it's now legal to kill you and take your stuff". That's a threat of force, but it doesn't actually need police to enforce it.
Gangs remain problematic, but as far as killing-for-shoplifting goes, it seems reasonable to extend the idea to different levels of outlaw-ness. Maybe for petty crimes the judge can declare that it’s legal to steal your stuff and call you names, but murder’s still out.
It still means any punishment is limitless. If you get caught stealing a loaf of bread (though without police, who would catch you?), then everything you own is now fair game. People talk about a cycle of poverty, but this seems even worse.
Oh I wouldn't want to live in this society, to be clear. I just think it *could* reach a stable equilibrium (or at any rate, the reasons it couldn't, e.g. gangs, are not the same as the counterargument you were gesturing at).
Yeah I'm sure it could do that, I'm just arguing any implementation would be far worse than today for everything the Defund the Police crowd cares about.
Or you do the community service/pay the fine that the court orders; at the moment if you don't do that you're sent to prison. In any system, option 1 is stealing stuff's illegal, in which case there's either a penalty a thief doesn't have to co-operate with (incarceration/execution/mutilation/outlawry) or a penalty the thief needs to cooperate with (fines/community service) backed up the threat of a non-co-operative penalty if they don't co-operate. Option 2 is no penalty or an unenforceable co-operation-requiring penalty.
Of course, if you had a purely digital currency then fines become a non-co-operative penalty, and similarly things like employment blacklists or social credit systems could work in the same way.
In the given example, you would probably be assigned a relatively small amount of community service or fine for shoplifting. The punishment would only be limitless if you refuse to comply.
(this doesn't mean it's a good idea and I think even the contest winner was more interested in creativity than practicality)
#15 Two points. To your question, my understanding is that the Czech government has been giving very generous subsidies to parents for almost 20 years now (in the range of $10,000 per child per year). Looks like it's having the intended effect. Link below.
That being said, making sense of this graph for other countries is complicated by the changes in the scale of the birth rates. Top birth rate changes from >1.96 to >1.76. Just pointing that out for others to beware.
The trouble with flat-rate subsidies to parents is that you largely wind up incentivising poor people to breed, whereas what you _want_ is to encourage rich people to breed.
My preferred solution is to allow tax thresholds to be shared across a whole family. So if the top tax rate cuts in at $200K for a single and $400K for a couple it should be $600K for a couple with one kid, $800K for a couple with two kids, and so on.
I would expect that subsidies are going to make the biggest difference in a family where it tips the scales towards the wife becoming a stay-at-home mom. Because the decision to become a SAHM is associated with a higher probability of additional children -- the marginal cost of another child is now much lower.
I think this scenario is common enough in the upper middle-class: the husband is a businessman, engineer, lawyer, or doctor; his wife is a teacher, nurse, administrative worker, etc., whose gross salary is around 1/3 to 1/2 of his, less than that on an after-tax basis. She could quit her job, and she's not exactly passionate about her work and probably a little burnt out by the time her 30s arrive, but the pinch from the lower income will be a little painful, particularly in his late 20s or early 30s when his career is still gathering steam but key baby-making years (he might be earning 2x her income at age 30 but 4x at age 50).
I agree. Good childcare is better than extra cash, because cash often can't buy you good childcare. It would probably help if part-time jobs were more available (also for men!); then two partners could each have a job and have enough time left for kids.
Not to tell you about yourself, but that last paragraph is a really big impact. A lot of the problems become easier when you start sooner, but many people wait because they want to get "established" first (whatever that means to them). So extra money isn't to incentivize people of your age, but to instead help them feel safe to start sooner.
I think that's a bit of a red herring. They are not, as they say, printing any more land. So "cheaper housing" either means:
1. More housing in undesirable areas, or
2. Denser housing in desirable areas.
But 1 already exists, there's loads of cheap housing in undesirable areas and people still don't choose to move there. And 2 is probably counterproductive, because you don't want to raise a big family in a goddamned high-rise apartment, you want to raise them in a big house with a proper backyard.
Or, if you are a Georgist, accept that housing in desirable areas costs a lot purely because of supply and demand, but extract as tax the part of the profit that’s due to area being desirable and not due to the landlord building a particularly appealing dwelling.
Then, however, you circle back to the question of what to do with the funds collected this way, and if subsidizing parents is the right thing to do, whether to give more money to specific groups of parents.
This is a Europe vs US thing. In the US, you could literally do a China and just build 20 new megacities* in the Great Plains, give businesses epic tax breaks/subsidies to move there, and use the resulting de-densification to reduce house prices.
In Europe, adopting US-style zoning rules and better infrastructure would probably reduce house prices enough to push commutable family houses into affordability territory, even before any further price effect from bursting housing bubbles.
*Realistically even 5 kilocities would probably be plenty.
If govt gave me $100,000 in cash for each child I would have to have about 4 children before I'd financially ahead rather than if they just gave me cheap housing instead.
PS: My metric for housing affordability is average area income to average housing price ratio.
The idea of raising a family in a house with a big backyard is very American. Lot of people do not see that as a necessary component of raising a family. Hell, you don't even have to leave America. How many people in NYC or Chicago are raising their kids with big back yards? If you live in a desirable area presumably there are other benefits that make up for what you're losing.
That is the system in France, you divide the total salary by (adults + (kids/2)) below 3 kids. Starting from the third kid, they count as 1 each, and not 1/2.
"If your population is crashing hard enough I don't think you care about who is doing the breeding. You just need people."
If the new people are net resource consumers (or even net tax consumers) then more can be bad. For the same reason that you can't make up in volume a loss on each item sold.
>If the new people are net resource consumers (or even net tax consumers) then more can be bad.
That does sound like a good argument against rich people breeding, but I'm afraid the problem is not the number of rich individuals, but the amount of resources they have at their disposal.
If you structure the flat-rate subsidy as a discount from say, income tax, then it wouldn't be as bad. Truly poor people aren't paying any income tax so they get no benefit from having more kids.
I suspect a lot of ills are driven by massive income inequality. If poor people have lots of children, that doesn't help. But if rich people have lots of children, that splits up their fortune among many more people, which probably has a net benefit to the economy by diluting the wealth that a very small group of people control.
You could, perhaps, calculate how many children should people have, given their available resources. If they don't have the right number of children, they should be taxed the equivalent amount it would cost for someone without their resources to have kids - a wealth based quota. The tax money could be used to subsidise poorer families who want to have kids, but maybe comes with some caveats (e.g you must enrol your child in school) as a safeguard against this system driving child neglect. I don't want this system being used by the kind of people who have 10 homeschooled kids who come out the other end believing vaccines cause autism or whatever.
Oh, and children that someone claims are theirs would naturally be entitled to a share of the wealth. The moment this person stops being a legal dependent / heir, the tax obligations apply.
This is unlikely to affect most people, but it'll give the highest net worth individuals incentive to adopt or create new dependents without punishing the poor.
And anyway, this is already happening in lots of places - since I'm childless, I don't get any childcare benefits, but get taxed the same to fund it. I don't mind because children important future taxpayers to later support me. I do think if there's a perceived need to create more people, the kids should have access to the overall resources of the nation rather than just their parents' - having more resources for future taxpayers will keep them healthier (hence cheaper to keep alive) and better educated.
I'm Czech. With a kid. The subsidies are quite high, but not as much as you state - it is currently $13k in total, for most people this is split into three years (so $360 per month). This typically adds around 1/4th of one person's average salary (the woman, sometimes also the man, typically doesn't work until the child is 3 years old or does only part-time). This really leads to speculations that poor people have children just for the sake of this benefit, but of course this is difficult to prove.
The amount was increased substantially from $9500 in 2020, but the increase is gradual so I don't think this is the main reason.
Czech sources mention as the main reason for the increasing numbers were stable economy and the increase of the subsidies (plus some changes in the way they are paid).
By the way, for 2022 the numbers are back to 1.66, reportedly mainly because of covid and they are expected to go down because of the Ukraine war and economy stagnation.
My understanding from a couple of podcasts that interviewed researchers focused on natalist policies is that there's very little evidence that subsidies get anyone to have a kid they didn't want to have -- the policies that work at all are letting people have a kid they wanted, but felt they wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford.
Orban tried this (free money for new parents) in Hungary and it didn't really have an effect. Then he offered young couples an almost rent-free loan of (forgot the exact amount) ~150k, of which 1/3rd would be forgiven for every child the couple had in the next 20 years. Which just before Covid had its first reports and it seemed to work better.
The first gives money to people who already have a baby, the second incentivizes young couples to buy a house, move out, and then have kids. I think this is really interesting (although I'm not a fan of Orban) and am curious which approach works best.
Thanks for linking this. I've always thought the existence of adversarial image misclassifications by CNNs is not especially surprising, and this paper does a nice job of demonstrating that. Still, one of their conclusions seems a bit different than what I would expect:
"Indeed, although adversarial images are often analogized to optical illusions that flummox human vision, we suggest another analogy: Whereas humans have separate concepts for appearing like something vs. appearing to be that thing—as when a cloud looks like a dog without looking like it is a dog, or a snakeskin shoe resembles a snake’s features without appearing to be a snake, or even a rubber duck shares appearances with the real thing without being confusable for a duck—CNNs are not permitted to make this distinction, instead being forced to play the game of picking whichever label in their repertoire best matches an image (as were the humans in our experiments)."
I think they missed a better analogy. A CNN misclassifying an adversarial example is more analogous to a specific human momentarily misidentifying an object. Everyone regularly has experiences where they misidentify objects in a similar manner to how CNNs misclassify adversarial examples. Just this morning I glanced at some soup cans on my shelf and thought I saw a cat. After an extremely brief moment, I realized it was in fact cans without even superficial resemblance to a cat at all. I cannot duplicate the precise combination of sensations that led me to see the cans as a cat, but CNNs are static and give deterministic results to a static input. My moment of misidentification is akin to a static CNN misidentifying a static input.
You're welcome! I guess you could be right about the static/dynamic thing. But let's imagine a recurrent neural network trained on video -> object classification tasks. I would bet that you could still produce adversarial videos. In this case, I think the distinction the authors raise is apt; resemblance is not the same thing as identity. You'd need a completely different ANN paradigm to replicate this.
I agree they have a useful analogy, especially when you have a situation like a cloud that looks like a dog (should the CNN output "cloud" or "dog"). Completely reasonable to be concerned about resemblance vs identity. I think this sort of adversarial image should also be very robust against random perturbations. Maybe it's even the more relevant sort of adversarial image, considering the AI generated images we see in link 8.
In comparison, when you have one of the adversarial images that to a human clearly looks like a panda, but a certain CNN will output "gibbon" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6572), the analogy doesn't work well. As far as I know, these sorts of images are not robust, and adding a small perturbation will restore the CNN output to "panda".
For video, I agree it should be possible to make an adversarial video, and I think you'll be able to create either of the above types of adversarial images; one that has confusion due to resemblance vs. identity, and one that has a sort of fine-tuned state, but I bet the longer the video the more delicate the second kind of adversarial image will be (compression artifacts might destroy the effect!).
Precisely. This can be phrased in a more general (and more concise) way as contemporary ANNs only really being able to perform System 1 tasks. (Which, not really an issue if you treat them as sophisticated tools with known limitations, but a huge, yet completely unsolved issue if you expect automation - and, further down the line, general intelligence - from them.)
#18: I spent a little time in Peru and thought the food was delightful. That's all. Just felt I needed to stand up for Peru.
#27: low divorce rate ≠ good marriage rate? Without more context, it could just be an artifact of a *lower* marriage rate or a *later* time of first marriage leading to fewer opportunities for divorce.
The Catholics allow non-Catholic priests who are already married to retain their spouses if they convert to Catholicism. A man who does that needs to think long & hard about whether he REALLY wants a divorce.
"There are around 125 married Roman Catholic priests like Whitfield, an Episcopal convert, across the U.S., experts say, and perhaps a couple hundred total around the world."
Perhaps more important (since Catholic priests are only about 10% of US clergy) is that divorce is a de facto disqualifier for ministry in most of US conservative Protestantism (Evangelicalism). The exception would be churches that are Prosperity Gospel. For example, Paula White. I'm a conservative Protestant but I don't really understand her world, since Biblically she's disqualified for ministry at least 3 times over.
There's a Peruvian chicken place near where I work that's pretty awesome. Never had the desserts though. I'll have to check them out. Any recommendations?
Agree on Peruvian food. After a quick look at that list, there is a high correlation between how "global" a cuisine is (how many restaurants serve it commonly) and how popular it is. Also, the top cuisines tend to be more recognizable, or at least a single dish is. Do you like Japanese food or do you really just like Sushi or miso soup? Do you like Indian food or do you just like chicken tikka (which isn't Indian).
My take away isnt that people don't like peruvian food, it's that they havent had or don't know what it is. If anything Greek food is the big loser considering how popular/common it is but yet isn't very well liked.
One possibility involving unrepresentative memory and one about unrealistic comparison:
Maybe a lot of people have a memory trying some strange dim sum, like chicken feet, which they specifically associate with Hong Kong cuisine (accurately, or as a representative of Cantonese cuisine), while anything positive about Hong Kong cuisine got assimilated in memory to Chinese cuisine.
Maybe people who visited Hong Kong ate in low-quality restaurants to save money (because it's an expensive city) or out of ignorance, but were already familiar with similarly cheap, high-quality Chinese restaurants in their home country.
I think you're right... and it's partly a product of how the data has been presented?
The poll data has the following options:
• Like A lot
• Like a fair amount,
• Don't like very much
• Don't like at all
• Don't know,
• N/A - I have never eaten this cuisine
The statistic shown is '% of those who have eaten the cuisine that like it', which seems only exclude the N/A option but leaves in the 'Don't know'. I would imagine that the 'don't know' respondents are either people who (a) have tried the food, but not enough to have an opinion, (b) haven't tried the food, and selected 'don't know' when reading down the option list (not waiting to get to the N/A option).
For example, here's the Japan entry for British cuisine:
• 02% Like a lot
• 11% Like a fair amount
• 14% Don't like very much
• 05% Don't like at all
• 28% Don't know
• 40% N/a - I have never eaten this cuisine
If you exclude the Japanese respondents who say that they have never eaten British cuisine, then the '% who liked it' comes to 20%. However, if you only include people who expressed an opinion on British cuisine, then the '% who liked it' rises to 41%
When you include the 'don't know' option in the calculation, then the Japanese respondents are the most negative about foreign food of the bunch. However, this is mostly because of a high 'don't know' rate. When you only look at people who liked or disliked different cuisines, then they're actually middle of the bunch in terms of how much they liked/disliked different cuisines?
So I think that including the 'don't knows' is tipping the results in favour of well-known cuisines that people have had lots of opportunity to try. I copied the data to Excel and had a go at creating an equivalent graphic that only looked at '% of people who liked it out of those that expressed an opinion'.
You can really see this play out toward the bottom of the table, where a lot of the "bad" cuisines are rated higher in countries where those cuisines are more common. The funniest example to me is that Malaysians have an outsized love for Saudi Arabian food. This is totally reasonable considering that Malaysia is a majority-Muslim country that has strong ties to other Muslim countries (I still chuckle at the business advertising locations in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Gaza).
I assume these are the rates at which marriages end in divorces, not the percentage of the group that's divorced, so I don't think lower marriage rate would skew the numbers. (I'd be more surprised if 53% of bartenders had been through a divorce than if 53% of marriages to bartenders ended in divorce)
Miami has many popular Peruvian restaurants. And Nobu worked in Peru while crafting his skillls. Btw, I double-checked that on Wikipedia and it leaves out the part where Nobu casually mentioned he considered suicide after one of his restaurants failed.
Peruvian here. I actually shared the table on Facebook, as Peruvian media tends to inflame Peruvian culinary pride too much and it deserves to be brought down a notch or two. (A prominent Peruvian chef abroad said recently, while interviewed, that he would have liked to have been an engineer, only things didn't work out financially, and that the country needs engineers more than it does chefs [NB: though yet again top engineering graduates in Peru often end up grossly underemployed and underpaid]. I agree.) Nevertheless: the results make no sense, and I'd very much like to see the methodology behind this.
It's not surprising at all that Chinese-Peruvian food is a thing. There was massive, semi-forced migration from China in the second half of the 19th century - coolies were brought over in part to replace formerly enslaved people in agriculture and in part to build railroads. [The word "coolie" is non-offensive in Peru and China - it's the ghosts of those who put people in that situation who should be ashamed.] Many died, but those who survived their period of indentured servitude generally stayed, married into local families (migrants were almost entirely men) and (says the stereotype) opened shops or restaurants, or were employed as cooks by wealthy people.
In the 80s and 90s, in Peru, for the middle class (which in American means: struggling families) "going out to eat" was a rare ocassion that meant almost by definition either Chinese food or rotisserie chicken. We have other things at home!
#13: Describing Grayzone as an anti-war site is misleading. They aren't against Russia invading Ukraine - only against Ukraine defending itself. This is relevant as far as deplatforming goes. Moving from deplatforming anti-woke groups to actual anti-war groups would represent a new step in deplatforming. Moving from deplatforming anti-woke to deplatforming fake news that supports any regime, as long as it's authoritarian and brutal enough (Putin, Assad, etc.) doesn't really break any new ground.
I think every group the US funded in Syria could accurately be described as extremist, but I hope you will agree that an Al Qaeda affiliate counts. Otherwise, you are probably a dangerous extremist yourself.
Of course an Al Qaeda affiliate counts, but your article doesn’t make this accusation, let alone provide evidence for it. It accuses Turkiye and Saudi Arabia of funding a rebel coalition that includes an Al Qaeda affiliate. The United States is not Turkiye or Saudi Arabia.
“[T]wo pieces published in the past month, from the Wall Street Journal and the Independent, reported that Turkey and Saudi Arabia are working together to ship weapons and cash to Jaish al-Fatah, a rebel coalition. Syria's al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, is one of the key partners in the coalition.“
Some C.I.A. weapons ended up with Nusra Front fighters, some of the rebels trained by the CIA joined the group, and groups directly supported by the U.S. often fought alongside Al Nusra. The U.S. knew this was impossible to avoid with the support they were providing.
It's true that at other times the U.S. attacked Al Nusra, but they were more than willing to strategically support them when they could be used against Assad.
This is a huge misunderstanding of the conflict. The United States never strategically supported nor funded Al Nusra. They were always actively working against them, *as were the groups they were actively funding*.
It is true that some of the groups and fighters the US had supported ended up joining the coalition with Al-Nusra, *after* the US backed groups had lost. And the US allied with the Soviet Union during WWII. I oppose these groups doing this, and am glad the US did not continue funding them, but it doesn’t mean the US was funding al-Nusra all along.
I also found this description to be bizarre as well. Granted, Scott's typical position is that cancelling is bad irrespective of one's views so a better description wouldn't change the message, but Grayzone is definitely not best described as an "anti-war" site.
Hasn't "anti-war" always meant "in favour of our side surrendering"?
Being "anti-war" in the sense that "hey, war is a generally bad thing" doesn't distinguish you from "pro-war" people -- even the most pro-war people tend to be in favour of war in order to achieve specific important objectives rather than being in favour of war in general.
And being anti-war in the sense that you think that the _other_ side should surrender also doesn't distinguish you from pro-war people.
I wonder what Tucker Carlson Republicans would say about the Persian Gulf War now?? We sent ground troops to repel an invasion of a super wealthy monarchy…I don’t even know if I would support that one now. I definitely support power projection like enforcing no-fly zones and Navy patrolling the Strait of Hormuz…but ground troops??
Lots of people who are far more spatio-temporo-culturally similar to us have been pro-war, eg. pre-WWI militarists, fascists etc. I can't think of many Anglo-Saxon examples of being generically pro-war other than maybe the imperialists, but anything Westerners argued for in the last hundred years seems close enough that it's relevant to defining people's positions.
The Romans and Mongols were both fine with the other side surrendering before the ram had touched the wall (Romans) or roughly the equivalent (Mongols). After that they were pro-war.
If the US had invaded Russia, committed genocide, and annexed Siberia, maybe the "anti-war" label would still be used for the Russians calling for Russia to negotiate. But it seems extraordinarily silly to do this for international observers; someone in Kenya who is spreading propaganda about how good this invasion is and how the Russians secretly want this is obviously not anti-war, they are pro-war.
I do think "being anti-war in the sense that you think that the _other_ side should surrender also doesn't distinguish you from pro-war people" has a lot of truth to it though, it's just that Grayzone's "side" is not the US, let alone Ukraine. Their side is "authoritarian regimes" ("authoritarian regime tribe" you could say). I am vastly more anti-war than Grayzone, because when my "side" launched an invasion of Iraq, I opposed it, while when their side launched an invasion of Ukraine, they supported it. Always supporting authoritarian regimes is not anti-war.
ISIS is considered a terrorist organization, not a governmental body.
But, yes, it's a simplification. A more accurate, although still simplified way of putting it would be that Grayzone supports countries that are adversaries of the US (particularly Syria, China, and Russia). The article you posted is actually a good example of this; it's a propaganda piece blaming all of Syria's ills on the US and its allies, while insisting that the brutal dictator Assad would bring normalcy. In one wild paragraph, it uses an accusation from the Syrian Foreign Ministry as proof for the ludicrous claim that the US facilitated an ambush by ISIS on Assad's forces.
Agreed. Even modern wars are like this, which I think gave the “anti-war” crowd a lot of cred in the early 2000s. I think a lot of “anti-war” people were always just opposing whichever side of a war the US was on. This made them seem anti-war and prescient when the vast majority of war discussion in the US was on US wars that became a complete mess (Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc.), but broke down when it started to become Russian wars instead (Ukraine, Syria, Ukraine again).
Was the George Bush administration truly "your side"?
If the Grayzone people are somehow part of an "authoriatarian tribe" and therefore on the same side as Putin, then surely you were/are not part of the same "tribe" as the Bush admin. (but instead part of the "anti-middle eastern US intervention" tribe just like Saddam Hussein) And therefore by opposing the Iraq war you weren't going against your side you were going against your opposing side just like the Grayzone people are doing with Ukraine.
Regarding whether Bush is on my side, I think yes. I think the Iraq war was a huge mistake and handled badly, but I still wanted the US to do well in Iraq, I think Bush and the US were a million times better than Hussein, and I support many things the Bush administration did (PEPFAR in particular is likely one of the greatest programs in US history).
> "instead part of the 'anti-middle eastern US intervention' tribe just like Saddam Hussein"
Absolutely not. I support many US interventions in the Middle East. I'm not even opposed to the US joining any wars in the Middle East; I think the US joining the Gulf War after Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was a good idea. I am certainly not entirely anti-war, as I support countries going to war to stop invasions and mass-killings of civilians; I'm just more anti-war than the pro-war website Grayzone.
It wasn't about the oil, it was never about the oil. Contrary to the constant misinformation mantra, the US never took a single drop of Iraqi oil.
The Ministry of Truth has scrubbed from the web, but there was a pretty exhaustive list, with—I think—122 items. 122 reasons we invaded Iraq. Of the things I remember, was:
1. The Big Gun, there's a TV show describing a big cannon, with a 1km long barrel that shot rocket propelled shells which Saddam hired a Canadian named Bull to build. The cannon was immobile and only pointed at Israel. The final stage was sabotaged on the way to delivery, and Bull was assassinated.
2. The Nuclear Mujahedeen, an army of 10k scientists, engineers, and technicians Saddam employed to build nuclear weapons. In the US raids, Iraqi civilians looted their uranium contaminated gear killing themselves and their families. You can only kill yourself with purified uranium, as natural occurring uranium isn't radioactive enough. The victims was a thing during the war. In 1981, Israel—in cahoots with Saudi Arabia—flew a bombing mission into Iraq, and bombed the Iraqi bomb fuel reactor.
3. Uranium from Chad. There was a very big kerfuffle when US Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife, CIA agent Valery Plame went to Chad to investigate the attempted purchase. Plame reported no attempt was made, however a congressional investigation determined she lied about this to shed bad light on President Bush. Gee, like the CIA is trustworthy. Scooter Libby was charged with revealing a CIA agent ... like the wife of a US Ambassador is not an agent of the US government.
4. Iraq invaded Kuwait. And the US has a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with Kuwait, which basically says, we defend Kuwait, and they don't pursue building or buying nukes. Well Iraq invaded, we were obligated to defend. Fast forward to today, Saudi Arabia is trying to build or buy nukes to defend itself against a nuclear enabled Iran. Wanna see those two scrappy kids get nukes(?) cause I don't.
5. Saddam was funding suicide bombers in Israel, and boasting about paying $10k US to the families of suicide bombers. And there were suicide bombings almost daily for a long while.
6. Assassination attempt against President Carter. Saddam sent an assassination team to the US to attempt the life of former President Carter. Saddam was mad that Carter had built lasting peace between Egypt and Israel. That's reason enough in my book to invade Iraq.
7. General Terrorism. Iraq was the financial source, training grounds, and safe haven for all manner of terrorism around the world. Of course that too is memory holed.
8. Saddam used chemical weapons against his own people. But then again, he didn't have chemical weapons, so that's a Schrodinger Event which either did or did not happen. But a whole lot of civilians got gassed by chemical weapons that some say didn't exist, but when Schrodinger opened his box, a lot of people were dead all the same. There was a huge convoy of trucks which hauled a lot of 'stuff' to Syria right before the invasion; the speculation was this was the chemical weapons. There was an Iraqi base labeled 'The Dragon's Lair' that US troops are not allowed to talk about.
That's only eight, there were another 114 items on the list, but as I said, the Ministry of Truth has found these items untruthful and has scrubbed them from our collective memories.
Oil is a global market—it was for the oil and Bush/Tillerson wanted to make Iraqis wealthy just like Tillerson ended up successfully making Qataris wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. Obviously Iraq has a much bigger population than Qatar but American energy companies have made many foreigners a lot of money.
According to von Clausewitz it's not a war if the defender is not actually fighting. So Grayzone could indeed be considered an anti-war site, in a Clausewitzian sense.
No. Soviet "anti-war" messaging definitely didn't mean USSR surrendering by itself or in any of its proxy wars. It always meant USA surrendering to USSR in its proxy wars, and preferably by itself too. If not, unilateral disarmament, reduction in military spending, repeal of COCOM regulations and the Jackson-Vanik amendment, so that USSR could buy high tech dual use machinery for its MIC with no annoying hurdles, would all be good too.
Yeah if they were actually anti-war you'd think they'd have something to say against the government that started the war, which I haven't seen any sign of.
Presumably the case for calling Grayzone anti-war is that it's an American site, so calling it "anti-war" implicitly means that it opposes the US's participation in war. But this case is not very good. The US is just an arms supplier, not a participant in the Ukraine war and there is no serious movement for the US to enter the war. And also because Scott's summary did not mention that Grayzone was an American site, so this heuristic for what "anti-war" means wasn't available to anyone who doesn't already know what Grayzone is.
I’d be inclined to ask whether Russia has or hasn’t sabotaged „peace negotiations“. I wonder why blame is deflected away from Russia all the time. What have they offered or asked for in return for peace?
"defending itself" by forcing people to fight for it's territorial claims and arresting anyone who criticizes the government's policy of refusing to negotiate continuing this war until the bitter end
Their lean is pro-Russia, yes, but a world where Ukrainian atrocities stop getting whitewashed, and Ukraine is pushed to negotiate seriously (i.e. making concessions instead of fantasizing about reclaiming Crimea) is a world where the war ends faster and fewer people die.
also, re: Assad, you're aware his primary enemies were al-Qaeda and ISIS, and his secondary enemies were groups like Jaish al-Islam or Ahrar al-Sham that took Saudi Arabia as an explicit model? Secularist/democratic rebels were a nonfactor outside Daraa unless one counts the DFNS/Rojava/YPG, who do not aspire to rule the rest of Syria and eventually gave up on fighting Assad themselves.
It's so bizarre that so many people who are not Islamist fanatics, and who would likely find themselves quickly beheaded in contemporary Idlib or ISIS Palmyra, reject the obvious conclusion that Assad was by far the lesser evil in this war. What happened to supporting secularism and freedom of religion? Heck, what happened to the War on Terror, which the US was still allegedly fighting during the 2010s - was the problem with al-Qaeda that it was in Afghanistan and not Syria?
This is an upending of the usual meaning of antiwar in the American conversation. The likes of the people at Antiwar.com have always been against US interventionism. One wouldn't have they weren't antiwar because they weren't railing against Hussein declaring war on Kuwait, or the North Vietnamese on the South Vietnamese.
Point 27: Are these the actual divorce rates? I ask this because reported divorce rates are often gross rates per thousand people. Such published rates are often used to back the claim that divorce rates have dropped significantly in the past few four or five decades, but they are based on divorces per thousand people and not divorces per thousand married people. The marriage rate has also declined, and people have to be married before they can be divorced. So, do nerdy men have a lower divorce rate because they are so uxurious or because they are less likely to marry at all?
Nerdy men don't have a lower divorce rate; "Gaming Managers" and "Gaming Service Workers" are the nerdiest jobs you can have, with the highest divorce rates.
When I am king, the use of the term "gaming" to mean "gambling" shall be outlawed. It was dumb, and misleading when it was adopted, and it's dumber and more misleading now.
I'm not sure about that. In "Pride and Prejudice", when it's revealed that Mr. Wickham has large gambling debts, "Jane heard them with horror. 'A gamester!' she cried."
The Vlogbrothers video I watched about #1 (the sulphur emissions from boats) pointed out that you can get similar cloud-seeding effects by misting seawater into the air, no sulphur required. Mandating that container ships offset their fuel burning by running a cloud-seeding machine seems totally reasonable, though it'd probably make the chemtrails people go even *more* insane.
Don't forget, there's a whole lotta malfeasance in "The Global Temperature." As Anthony Watts discovered.
Might want to investigate this before you get too far ahead of your skis. Perhaps google 'days over 100 in MyTown'. I just did this, and it turns out the maximum year for days over 100 in Sacramento is 1988. And for Sacramento, the number of days over 100 in 2023 is tied with 1888.
The problem with the sulphur wasn't it heating up the atmosphere, it was the acid rain. So even if ending it caused a heat spike doesn't mean it's safe to unban it if the heat spike can be dealt with other ways or is transitory or is less bad than the acid rain.
It's proven it reduces temperature (note, however, that it also increases CO2 via suppressing photosynthesis, so the spike afterward is potentially more than it'd have been if the sulphurous smoke never existed). "Without any other effect" would only be proven if you'd investigated all other effects and found nothing.
We've accidentally proven that that amount of sulphurous smoke won't end the world*, but that doesn't mean that if you 10x it or 100x it as this maniac wants, that also won't end the world.
*I'm not seeing literal X happening from aerosols gone wrong; even total crop failure for half a decade wouldn't kill *everyone* (you'd still have some yields from pastoralism, not to mention all the preppers), and I don't think things will go that wrong. But "crop yields are -20% for a few years" is more plausible and a lot of people would die if that happened.
I think the "remove CO2 from the atmosphere with scrubbers" people are okay. That's quite bounded; unless you somehow wind up removing more CO2 than we ever put in there in the first place - which seems unlikely given you can measure that and stop - you're by definition staying within known territory.
Blocking shortwave is a really dumb idea and retaliation against unilateral action on this is plausibly worthwhile. Catastrophe from somebody doing this and it going horribly wrong is actually on my list of plausible GCRs this century, although it's not really plausible to get X out of it*.
*Aerosols don't last long enough without maintenance, and you're not going to be maintaining shit if you're dead from your own project and/or people killing you for your crimes. Impact winter would require a Chicxulub+-sized asteroid or comet (I don't think another Chicxulub would do it; the preppers are really hard to kill that way) redirected into the planet; that's not subtle due to scale of expense and the ease of tracking spacecraft, is obviously a Bad Idea, and is reversible (if at potentially greater expense), so people would arrest you for terrorism before you could do it and/or redirect the object away from Earth again. Deploying a megametre-scale solar shade at L1 would do it, but this is if anything even less subtle (people will notice if you block out the Sun) and can be reversed quite cheaply and even unilaterally by blowing up the shade with a missile, so while this could plausibly cause GCR (a couple of days with no sun is still utterly terrible) it's very obvious that this wouldn't reach X. On the other side of the coin, releasing sufficient quantities of fluorinated gases could fry everyone and plausibly even hit runaway, but while this isn't necessarily *physically* obvious until too late (if you stockpile them rather than releasing gradually), the expense is so extreme that it'd be unreachable and/or noticed (it's a bit hard to find people willing to spend many trillions of dollars on deliberately killing literally everyone including themselves with no plausible benefit).
There are people doing that, right now, as charities. I'm saying that if more people start doing that voluntarily, we don't have much to worry about - we don't have *anything* to worry about until and unless they exceed the rate of emissions from other sectors of the world economy. And there's a natural taper-off there where people just stop funding it personally once they figure it's low enough. I agree that the demand from certain quarters that world temperatures be yanked back by large amounts rather than merely arrested, at extreme expense, that's probably not +EV.
On the other hand, this dickhead advocating unilateral deliberate global dimming... well, let's just say I wouldn't be shedding too many tears were his whole "international waters" scheme to attract pirates.
We are already doing geo-engineering. Humans life requires geo-engineering. The only question is what types of geo-engineering should we be doing or not doing.
One thing about cooling effects from cloud seeding is that they don’t last very long, while co2-caused heating does last for a long time. So if you try to offset heating with cooling, you have to continue the cooling effect much longer than the heating, or else accidentally get a “termination shock” where the heating is still in place but the cooling has terminated.
Yes, but the issue with geoengineering approaches in general but *especially* ones that require constant upkeep is that they create moral hazard by masking the magnitude of the underlying emissions problems. There's value per se in the cooler temperatures but this is also a prevention >>>> cure situation.
This is less true of certain approaches like iron seeding because those are mediated by reducing CO2 levels directly.
The idea is that this is a temporary buffer rather than actual "fix," which risks taken advantage of in a way that exacerbates rather than reduces the expense of later mitigatory measures.
To quote our host (quoting a proverb in a different context): "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”
In a world where we are *indeed* protected, we should rightfully worry less. But in a world where the protection relies on continued active participation in a expensive process, it's hard to say we are "indeed" protected.
That's not the central meaning of termination shock and understates its effect.
See, unlike outgoing longwave, incoming shortwave at Earth's surface is entangled with something other than temperature - it's used for photosynthesis, which reduces CO2 levels. So solar geoengineering actually increases CO2 levels and partially counteracts itself, and if you stop such a program you will have a transient temperature rise - not just above "don't emit the CO2 in the first place", but above the trajectory if you'd emitted the same amount of CO2 and not attempted to mitigate it!
In my experience, people are way more afraid of geoengineering destroying the world than they are of climate change. Making GE *less* easily controllable will not help its PR problem.
That's true. But this isn't about a PR problem - this is about a *real* problem with trying to use aerosols to mitigate warming. Things like algae seeding that lead to drawdown of CO2 can avoid that problem.
#30: Real median household income is survey-based and if I'm reading it correctly, is based on money income, which specifically excludes health benefits. Since an increasing share of our consumption bundle is health care (I think it's up to 18% of GDP now), a measure that backs out most of health care is always likely to far understate economic growth over time.
Another reason might be the household measure - if households get smaller over time, that will also drag this down.
A quick google indicates that this measure has lagged GDP/capita by quite a bit over time, and has freqently been negative y/y.
Presumably the health care is also improving. So that is a net benefit. OTOH, if it's spent adapting to bacteria/viruses that are adapting to it, it's sort of a red queen's race.
Well also over time numbers of adults and numbers of working adults per household has been falling. Lots more single adult households which hurts household incomes.
The only one I find difficult is Trivandrum to Thiruvananthapuram.
But the story I got for Madras to Chennai made a lot of sense. There was a river, and the town on the north side was Madras and the town on the south side was Chennai. When the British came, they set up on the north side (IIRC, it was more defensible and less populated), so they called the whole thing Madras. Most of the Indian population was on the south side, and most of the growth was on the south side. After the British left, people kept the concept of both sides being the same city, but since most of them lived in the Chennai side, they changed the overall name to that.
I'm still expecting this in the future. It seems the native extension of the whole "indigenous peoples" attitude. (Is 'Nippon' or 'Nihon' more common in use?)
They are ultimately mostly descendants from migrants from Korea, but every human group on Earth is ultimately descended from people who migrated from somewhere else.
Yeah, but given the standard indigenous/colonizer narrative, the Japanese definitely fit better on the colonizer side, especially their settlement of Hokkaido.
You could probably expand that a bit. What about the children of Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis crossbreeding. Would they be the indigenous group for that particular area?
Nihon is more common, but you do hear Nippon used. They're both legitimate readings of the kanji in question.
In my experience, the Japanese have zero issue with their country being referred to as Japan. In fact, they do it themselves in a number of instances. As just one example, the Japanese rail network is called JR, literally "Japan Railway". Maybe that will change in the future, but the Japanese tend to have pretty positive views of the West in general, so I kind of doubt it. They don't have the history of colonialism that India does that would make their name an issue.
Indian Reddit pointed out that the Constitution of India acknowledges the significance of the Hindi endonym in its first (non-preamble) sentence. "(1) India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States..." -- the point being made by the Indian redditors in question (who pretty uniformly viewed this as a symbolic grift meant to distract from more substantive issues) was that "Bharat" was never bereft of official recognition.
"India" isn't even a British word. The name goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, and is ultimately derived from the Sanskrit word from the Indus River ("sindhu").
When I lived there, around 1960, both terms were in use, but in different contexts. I think I saw Nihon more in the name of products for sale, and Nipon more on maps. I was living on Kyushu, so it may be, or have been, regional.
(OTOH, I only spoke English, so my sample size was pretty small.)
Belarus has lobbied french journalists/officials to call it "Bélarus" instead of the former "Biélorussie" since 1991. They were successful in Switzerland and Canada, but not in France itself.
Wrong analogy. You're already referring to the country in question as "日本" by using "Japan". "भारत" is, I'd assume, not etymologically related to "India" in any way.
Yeah, "India is discussing" is highly misleading and assumes a much more even and varied debate than is true. My understanding is that more accurate preface might be "Hindi nationalists have proposed" (most accurate would be "A Hindi nationalist generated controversy by referring to India as Bharat and now people are talking about it")
So many things I'd like to comment on. Thank you for putting this together, always a fun read.
On #27. As a woman married to a woman, whose social circle includes heaps of nerdy men because of my work (including my dear brother, who luckily is married)
I'm only generalizing here because you have as well, which makes it fair...
The reason women don't date geeky men is not because they think they're incels, I seriously don't know a single woman that thinks to that extreme. They don't date "geeks/nerds" what you're calling "nice guys" because they're often introverted and lack social skills. This makes ✨ everything ✨ a lot harder.
The burden of maintain a healthy, genuine, friendship with them is often on my shoulders, as the woman. That gets very tiring over time.
Another reason for women not dating nerdy men is that nerdy social circles (especially in college and recent-graduate age brackets) tend to be on the smaller side, fairly insular (i.e. low churn of newcomers and casual participants, so you're usually just seeing the same faces), and mostly male. If you're a woman in such a circle looking to date men, you've got plenty of choices (combined with the "introverted and lack social skills" issue you brought up, I've heard the situation described as "the odds are good but the goods are odd"). Conversely, if you're a man in such a circle looking to date women and you're mainly looking inside the social circle, there are going to be very few (if any) women in the circle who are single and looking to date men at any given time, and the odds are against you being one of their top choices.
Hehe in an Electrical and Computer Engineering department in the late 90s there was a group of guys who were all close and only one girl in the group who was also the "Alpha" guys younger sister. Made for some interesting dynamics and we all flirted with and chased her a bit, and I think she dated two different guys from the circle eventually.
"nerdy social circles (especially in college and recent-graduate age brackets) tend to be on the smaller side, fairly insular (i.e. low churn of newcomers and casual participants, so you're usually just seeing the same faces)"
Seems like a good indicator for not divorcing easily!
I am willing to except that as an explanation of the phenomenon (in a generalized sense). But why don’t more people communicate it this way? (instead of reaching for calling the geeky men losers or creeps or incels)
Kristian, I literally made it a point to specify that I haven't yet heard a single woman call anyone an incel. Yet you choose to use this language to further this self-pitty narrative and defer responsibility from your ownl growth.
In a beautifully ironic and tragic way - this is exactly why they don't "explain the phenomenon"
I think the implication is "in real life", rather than online where everyone is either [maligned extreme identity A] or [maligned extreme anti-A identity B]
I meant in general discussion and on the internet. And I didn’t mean only women. Surely this whole debate was about calling people incels and analyzing whether the “nice guys” are really creeps and so forth.
You should not make presumptions about “my personal growth” or what I choose to hear, etc. You don’t know me.
If we go back to track the causality, we will notice that the narrative surrounding the "Nice Guys" used to be somewhat neutral to supportive. Yes there were some "nerds are icky" sentiments here an there but media used to feature "nice guy getting the girl" trope a lot, uncritically framing it as a happy ending for both the girl and the guy.
And then the incel cultural identity crystalized, produced pushback, toxoplazma of rage dynamics happened and now this whole memetic battle is cached in our minds and in the realms of internet and the narrative shifted accordingly.
I reckon the 'nice guy gets the girl' trope played a significant causal role here. Lots of young guys took that message to heart, failed to notice that (in the more plausible versions of the story) the 'nice guy' was also very attractive in ways orthogonal to niceness, and were left bewildered and searching for explanations when things didn't work out that way for them.
Hmm. Are you saying that the media was too nice to the nice guys and should've shown them their place in the hierarchy instead? Basically like it's doing now when a phrase "nice guy" became an euphemism of an "manipulative asshole who pretends to be nice" and it's hardly possible to talk about actual nice guys at all? I don't think I can agree with that.
I think that's very true, and I wonder what, if anything, the female equivalent would be. Maybe something about women in their mid-to-late 30s easily having children? Middle-aged divorcees easily finding a new and better husband?
Also worth noting that the nice guy was usually rejected by the girl at first, but kept persevering until the realised how nice he was and fell in love with him. Repeat this message to unattractive, socially-awkward men enough for them to internalise it, and you can easily end up with behaviour that comes across as creepy, entitled, and manipulative.
A lot of truth to this. Not getting any is one thing, but becoming known as the cohort that whinges in an entitled way about not getting any (in addition to other disadvantages) couldn't have helped the nerds in the attractiveness department. Cf stoicism, resilience, masculine virtues.
<i>And then the incel cultural identity crystalized, produced pushback, toxoplazma of rage dynamics happened and now this whole memetic battle is cached in our minds and in the realms of internet and the narrative shifted accordingly.</i>
Maybe I'm just misremembering, but I thought it was the other way round -- incel cultural identity crystalised as a result of constantly being called a bunch of raging misogynists, rather than vice versa.
I think you’ve got the order somewhat backwards. Scott wrote about this phenomenon (online feminists heaping abuse, appearance related insults, and accusations of “sexual entitlement / rape culture enabling” on romantically unsuccessful nerdy guys) in Radicalizing the Romanceless (2014) and Untitled (2015). The term “incel” doesn’t move the needle at all on Google Trends until 2016, and really took of in the 17-19 timeframe.
Incel culture was, temporally, a reaction to online feminists demonizing the “nice guy” rather than a cause of it.
If we are trying to reconstruct the history, there needs to be somewhere a place for pick-up artists. They publicly rejected the "nice guy gets the girl" narrative, and tried to figure out the true mechanism. They believed that *any* guy can become popular, if he changes this *behavior*.
The formerly unsuccessful nerds turned seduction into a (pseudo)science, shared their theories, did field experiments, and compared the results. There was a spirit of: "if *I* could do it, then so can you". Being conventionally unattractive became a costly signal that they figured out something that worked, and it was neither pretty face nor spending money.
And they were publicly attacked, because their theories removed women from the pedestal and turned them into mere human beings. Everyone knows that men's thinking is often guided by their genitals, and that manipulating them is trivial if you know what to do. But it is misogynistic to say that the same is true also about women.
(Then the usual "geeks, mops, sociopaths" evolution happened. Too many stupid guys willing to pay to anyone who promised to help them get laid. Naturally extraverted men with social skills and good looks willing to take their money and tell them some bullshit. Instead of cooperation and free exchange of ideas, the new gurus mostly wrote blogs about how everyone else sucks. Then I stopped paying attention.)
Then there were guys who also rejected the traditional narrative, but found the alternative humiliating, so they decided to "go their own way". To live their lives without trying to "get the girl"; just doing their own hobbies and generally trying to find meaning in something else. The mainstream found this misogynistic, too. You may be a loser, but you are not allowed to opt out of the game.
And I think only afterwards came the incels -- the ones who also rejected the old narrative, but were unable to either adapt and work harder or give up; they just endlessly whined about how a 1 millimeter difference in the bone structure made them forever lonely. (An old-style pick-up artist would just laugh at that and proudly decide to become famous as the guy with the worst bone structure ever who bangs the hottest models. A MGTOW would just shrug, and start reading an interesting book or something.) At least this is how their outgroup describes them; and the question is, how much should I trust the outgroup to be fair.
To summarize this all: If you follow the traditional narrative and lose, you get a lot of hate. If you find your own narrative and win, you get a lot of hate. If you refuse to play the game, you get a lot of hate. And if you complain about how this all is unfair and sucks, you get a lot of hate. I guess the only way to avoid the hate is to win, and then pretend that it happened because you followed the traditional narrative.
Please consider that your experiences may not be universal. You have presumably never been murdered, but do you go around pointing out that fact to minimize the suffering of people who lost loved ones to murder by suggesting that they're "furthering this self-pity narrative and deferring responsibility from their own growth"?
> I am willing to except that as an explanation of the phenomenon (in a generalized sense). But why don’t more people communicate it this way? (instead of reaching for calling the geeky men losers or creeps or incels)
What's the difference supposed to be?
One girl thinks "I would die before dating you because you are a creep".
A second girl thinks "I would die before dating you because you don't have social skills".
There's not even a euphemism going on there. Those two girls are saying the same thing and referring to the same phenomenon. What do you think a creep is?
You appear to be channeling the old Basic Instructions strip that remarked "what other people think of as my personality is often just my vocabulary".
To my ear, 'creep' is moralised, with connotations of dubious-at-best moral character and a real chance that the person is dangerous to be around. 'Person with bad social skills' is not a description anyone wants, but it doesn't imply they're bad in a moral sense. Others feel justified in being nasty to/about 'creeps', rather than just politely avoiding them as they would a 'person with bad social skills'.
A creep is someone whom people avoid because they seem dubious or perverted in some sense (often vague). Most such people also have poor social skills but not necessarily.
There’s a way people attribute good qualities to people they like and bad qualities to people they dislike. But having bad social skills doesn’t make someone bad.
But there are more and less justifiable reasons for thinking someone is a creep.
Being boring can be a manifestation of poor social skills, but it doesn’t make one a creep.
The converse of this is when people say, “oh I can’t believe so and so turned out to be a criminal, he was such pleasant company.”
If someone is obsessively interested in sexually violent serial killers and is known to decorate his home with clownish animatronics and stuffed dead animals, people would think he’s a creep even if he has perfect social skills.
Although, actually I don’t like the term “social skills” that much, because it is vague and too broad.
I think that depends on the social group. Teddy Roosevelt was quite popular. That I don't like his attitudes doesn't make him "a creep", just someone I wouldn't want to associate with. Lots of other people disagreed with me. And I do like that he pushed conservation, event though I'm skeptical about his reasons.
Perhaps "creep" isn't an objective category, but a statement about a relationship judgement from one person/group onto another person/group. (I think that should be "onto" rather than "into".)
I've been in-tribe with both sides of this argument, and I strongly feel that each side is simply using the same words to talk about different people and different situations, while failing to recognize this because they're both referring to the thing that is highly relevant to their personal experiences and therefore must obviously be the thing we're all referring to.
I think the following explains some of what's going on here:
Many young nerdy guys don't really understand what is (generally) attractive to (most) women. (This is partly caused by society pushing messages that it thinks men in general need to hear, but which it does not expect to be taken completely literally -- or at least not as the full story.) They see that some nasty guys are romantically desired/sexually successful in ways they can only dream of, despite the fact that they think of themselves as, and in many cases genuinely are, much nicer people. They complain about this with varying degrees of bitterness; some are quite reasonable about it, some are reasonable modulo a fairly strong dose of adolescent intensity+naivete, and some are raging misogynists.
A simple, honest response to the non-horrible ones would be "yes, romantic/sexual attraction is unfair; women are often attracted to traits that are orthogonal to, or in some cases even anticorrelated with, niceness; before you turn this into a gender war, please think for five seconds about how male->female attraction tends to work; are the most-desired women consistently the nicest and most deserving?"
But some people instead respond by doubling down on the idea that sexual success *is* a measure of your worth as a human, lumping all the frustrated 'nice guys' together as a bunch of potentially predatory misogynists, and telling them that their lack of sexual success is evidence that they are not only pathetic but morally reprehensible (and therefore fair game for bullying). The people doing this might not be a very large group, but they are 'loud' (in terms of how much their message gets amplified and spread, and in terms of how emotionally salient it is) and they sometimes seem to be at least tacitly supported by mainstream feminists (who perhaps have the genuinely nasty 'nice' guys in mind and don't quite realise the extent of the collateral damage). For guys who are already feeling pretty down and vulnerable, this can be genuinely damaging and very alienating.
I'd prefer not to do a rhetorical question-answer thing; can you state your point more directly? e.g. are you suggesting that the most-desired women *are* consistently the nicest, or something less strong than that?
Women compete to be seen as nice the way men compete to be seen as strong. It is readily apparent that there has been a powerful selection effect in the past. The selection effect is still plainly visible right now, though its strength is less obvious: letting the mask of niceness slip in public has very severe consequences to female desirability today.
It doesn't mean anything that the most-desired women aren't consistently the nicest except that desirability is not a one-dimensional phenomenon. The most-desired women are consistently very nice, and when women are seen not to be nice, other people lower their opinion of those women.
Thanks. I don't disagree that 'niceness' is a generally-desired quality in women, but I do disagree that 'the most-desired women are consistently very nice'. And I disagree especially strongly with the version(s) of this claim that I think would be required to undercut my point in the quoted passage, which was merely that niceness is far from sufficient to make a man attractive to women *or* a woman attractive to men.
(There's some ambiguity in the way we're talking about 'desirability' here, and I think that for both genders the balance of desired traits varies depending on whether it's a question of pure sexual attraction or long-term relationship prospects. But to me it seems clear that physical attractiveness is weighted somewhere between quite heavily and overwhelmingly heavily by most straight guys in almost all sexual and romantic contexts. And, just as a big tough hot guy will get lots of credit for showing a hint of kindness, a beautiful woman has to do much less to be considered 'nice' than a woman who isn't beautiful.)
Uh, there is not that much competition among women to see who can be the nicest. The real competition is who can be the most attractive. Some of that is about being "nice," but most of it is about being literally conventionally attractive (healthy hair/skin/body weight/grooming presentation/etc).
Which was the reason for the pointed question about how much straight men actively desire "niceness," which is to say, not nearly as much as they desire physical beauty.
Believe me, if nerdy young men cared about mere niceness enough to avoid holding out for the physical embodiment of their waifus, they'd have way more partners.
FWIW, my major selection fault is that I wanted a truly smart (but not quite brilliant) woman. I.e. what I saw as my intellectual equal. It took me a long time to realize that this was not the correct target. What I needed was someone who could balance my weaknesses. I feel quite foolish that it took me so long. Together we were a lot more effective, because we reinforced each others weaknesses, and lent our strengths to each other.
Because they are terrified by other women ostrasizing them. I know women who have suffered it: it can be terrible. Pretty women have also expressed to me that they need to work hard to avoid this.
Hm. I've of course heard the phrase "toxic masculinity", and have sometimes wondered what the gender-flipped version would be: what is "toxic femininity"? This feels like a good start.
> Women are also more likely to signal that they’re kind, agreeable, and concerned about others. When they gossip, or transmit negative information about each other, they often couch it in terms of concern. For instance, instead of calling Veronica a drunk slut, a woman is more likely to say, “I’m worried Veronica’s alcohol consumption is getting out of control. I’m worried about her sexual health.”
It's amusing that you accuse males of "turning this into a gender war", when many (most?) of feminists are avowed conflict theorists, and much of their dogma is about how males are evil, collectively and individually, to the extent that they don't renounce their "toxic masculinity". That those unfortunate clueless nerds are consistently being bullshitted about what women find attractive isn't a tragic oversight, it's a deliberate campaign of misinformation based on wrong premises in service of incoherent goals.
I feel like you're zeroing in on one phrase and ignoring the rest of what I said. The 'gender war' thing was about how *some* guys jump from the frustration/disappointment of realising that just showing up and being nice isn't enough to make you attractive, and that some transparently awful guys get lots of female attention, straight to something like 'fuck women, they're shallow and hypocritical!', instead of stopping and thinking and realising that we're all shallow in that sense, and most of us are hypocrites if all that takes is failing to be completely open and accurate about what drives our preferences.
You'll see from the final paragraph of my original comment that I'm very critical of some people on the 'feminist' side. 'Feminist' covers a huge swathe of people, though, and I think like most groups they're mostly pretty normal, in good ways and bad. There are certainly more charitable interpretations available than 'deliberate campaign of misinformation'; even if you think it's bad and dumb and hits the wrong targets, it's pretty understandable that they'd want to try to do some social engineering to get men (collectively) to treat women (collectively) better.
I agree that your description of that dynamic is basically correct. My point is that the gender war has been there all along, it negatively impacts both men and women, some of them disproportionately, and some of thus impacted may unproductively lash out in response. But such reactions don't mean that they 'started it'.
I also agree that most people are basically good and have good intentions, including those who identify as feminist. But if they act according to a misguided ideology, they can do much harm, and if they instead believe themselves to be making things better, then so much the worse for everyone!
In general, my perspective on progressive movements is that they correctly determine that there are problems, but their theoretic apparatus is woefully inadequate to even correctly diagnose them, never mind developing solutions. Sadly, there are no competitive alternatives, in no small part because progressives are very good at crushing dissent. And so things are going to get worse, before (if ever?) they'll get better.
100% this, especially the part how attacking nice guys is just doubling down on the just-world fallacy. "A nice guy will get the girl." "If you didn't get the girl, that proves that you were never genuinely nice!"
Rather than: "Being nice is a desirable human quality, but it is different from being attractive. The attractive guy will get the girl, and then another girl, and then another girl. He may or may not be nice. If he is nice, the girls will appreciate it. If he is not nice, the girls will complain about it, but they will fuck him anyway." Obvious in hindsight, but you need to overcome a *lot* of social programming first.
I am no Buddha, so whatever emotion you mention, I probably have some of it. Were you suggesting that it clouds my judgment on this topic?
Do you think that, as a factual statement, attractive guys who are low on niceness (not literal psychopaths, just the ordinary selfish kind) do *not* in fact get laid more than the unattractive nice guys?
Hey, I didn't say you were wrong. Actually, it was much worse (but I don't want to post details publicly). But that's not the part I regret most. Sometimes you lose; that's life.
The thing I am most angry about is all the other opportunity that I missed, because I was distracted by cultural memes that made me stupid. At some moment I was exposed to competing memes and realized my mistakes, but I am never going to get that lost time back.
Now I have a wife and two kids, and we mostly live in harmony, while other people's marriages around us are falling apart. So, all things considered, I am doing much better than I expected.
But when I think about the past, I sometimes feel a desire to punch someone, except there is no one specific to punch. The brainwashing was so decentralized. (To be fair, there were also some clues, but I was too autistic to notice them.)
Also, there is a concern on a meta level -- reasoning by analogy, I wonder what other things am I possibly missing now, that I will similarly regret in ten or twenty years?
Being nice is a part of being attractive. It isn't the only part, or the most important part. Looks, finances, personality, habits, culture, and religion all play a role in attractiveness.
Indeed, when I was young I often tended to conflate "X is not sexually attracted to me" and "X thinks I'm a bad person"... until I noticed that I myself was not sexually attracted to certain people who I still didn't think were bad people.
I hate to say, but some nerds are also not that nice, or want a specific girl but don't notice other ones flirting with them. A poetic illustration of this, overheard in the cafeteria on campus: two guys complaining about how unattractive campus girls were, while being very very nerdy far from paragons of suave masculinity themselves. Like, what? Very out of touch.
I absolutely hate and despise both sides of this "debate" more than I can possibly describe. Beyond all the other vulgar and hedonistic and sexist and "all men/women are identical" collectivistic crap, what tops it all is both groups' absolute refusal to apply their own claimed principles with the tiniest pretence of consistency.
On the one hand you have the "incels" who condemn women for dating despicable men instead of nice ones. Quite apart from the fact that by "women" they mean a particular subset of women (and by referring to women as a whole they not only outrageously insult every woman who doesn't do that and would never want to, but ALSO let the women who do off the hook, letting them pretend this is a feature of women generally instead of a problem with them personally, much like how men who cheat or trawl bars for sex with strangers would love to pretend they're just "being men" rather than being personally disgusting people)...they don't even apply this condemnation to themselves (at least that I've ever seen). They have no shame about being attracted to the very same horrible, shallow and very much not nice women that they complain about. I would LOVE to live in a society where both violent aggressive "players" and selfish vapid "I do whatever the fuck I want" feminists are totally ostracised from the company of all decent people and could never hope to get the attraction of any member of the opposite sex other than their fellow lowlife animals. And the incels could be trying to create such a society by, most importantly, committing to reserving their own sexual interest for the nice, compassionate women who deserve it (regardless of their physical attractiveness). If they would do that, making the effort to get their own lusts under control and choose their partners by moral and intellectual human qualities instead of shallow animalistic ones, they would deserve respect as a movement and have the right to demand women do the same. As it is, by condemning only other people's shallowness while maintaining their own right to be as shallow and hedonistic as they want, they're some of the most despicable people in society.
And then you have the "feminists" who insist on their unconditional "right" to date whoever they want and sleep with whoever they want. Okay, while a person who conciously and shamelessly asserts their right to be completely selfish and not care the slightest bit about other people's feelings is obviously a truly disgusting person, there's certainly a decent argument that society should give people the right to be as disgusting and horrible as they want without violently coercing anyone else. But guess what? No one is in any way infringing your rights. If you are allowed to sleep with whoever you want, then other people are allowed to criticise you for it! And that's what you're complaining about: other people (like the incel movement) exercising THEIR right to disapprove of your behaviour and call you nasty names. That's not an infringement of your rights, that's not coercing you in any way; freedom doesn't mean freedom from criticism. I mean, yes, their condemnations are hypocritical and hateful and sexist and unfair, but so what? You just told me nobody is entitled to anyone else's consideration! That nobody has any obligations to care about others' feelings, and has an unconditional right to be as selfish, as vulgar, and as indifferent to the effects of their behaviour on others as they want. So what can you possibly complain about?
There are two choices. We could have a society where people are expected to balance their own desires with concern for other people's feelings, and avoid behaviour (sexual, verbal or otherwise) that significantly hurts others. Or we could have a society where everyone can do whatever they want (that isn't violent) and no one has any obligation to care about anyone else. I would prefer the first but am open to the necessity of the second. Only one thing is not negotiable: that whatever principles you espouse, you apply them even, and in fact ESPECIALLY, when they don't benefit you personally. To those who don't do that, who proudly assert that they have no obligation to care about others but others do have an obligation to care about them, all I can say is: you are scum. You are filth. And you are literally everything that is wrong with the world.
There can be something more specific than lacking social skills. My own experience when I was in my early 20s is that for years I didn't learn how to show sexual interest to a woman, so instead I'd end up with lots of platonic friendships. Which I did genuinely enjoy, so general social skills were being learned and practiced, just not the romantic ones. There was also a clear element of pride, in the sense of "I'm not going to change myself just for the sake of pursuing romantic interest".
Extroverts frequently fail to model or understand introverts, leading to the mistake being made here. Which is understandable, but leads to a lot of harm done to introverts by well-intentioned extroverts.
Introverts are not hermits. We value social connection, support, and community. We have a need for deep connections (of which "healthy, genuine friendships" are an important type), just like extroverts do.
The thing that sets us apart is that we find casual interactions exhausting rather than energizing. This leads us to take what can be described as a "depth-first" approach to relationship building, focused on developing a few high-quality relationships first, then expanding out. In contrast, many extroverts take a "breadth-first" approach, acquiring a wide variety of basic relationships, then building up a few of them.
Introverts (whether they're nerds/geeks or not) can and do put in great effort to maintain their relationships. In fact, they have a higher risk of over-committing to those relationships (since forming new ones is more expensive for them). The idea that introverts as a group place a disproportionate burden on their partners is both false and harmful.
It is incorrect to conflate nerds and nice guys. Scott should know better.
Nice guy syndrome refers to men who have been over-socialised to try to please everyone around them all the time. There are several risk factors including the usual childhood abuse and prolonged bullying, clingy/dependent mothers and emotionally distant, absent, or demanding fathers. Comedy is a fairly common coping mechanism - the class clown probably had nice guy syndrome. Other nice guys just do what they are told and never develop a personality.
Dial this back a few notches and you have the Hollywood nice guy. "A regular guy, with a regular job, who just wants to provide for his family".
Nerds, on the other hand, are stereotypically on the spectrum and oblivious to others' social demands. Unpredictable, unhygenic, unpleasant, uncomprehending, uncommunicative, not nice.
Regarding Jaynes' book: Your interpretation of his theory, that theory of mind varies broadly between cultures so that some cultures considered supernatural or divine what we think of as just part of the human mind, resembles substantially the thesis of "The Greeks and the Irrational", by classicist Eric Dodds, which makes a similar though less broad (&, I think, better justified) argument focusing specifically on Ancient Greece. (That book can be found at https://archive.org/details/E.R.DoddsTheGreeksAndTheIrrational ; the relevant parts are chapter 1, which argues that the ancient Greeks thought unusual impulses & some strong emotions were sent by the gods; chapter 3, regarding the ancient Greek view of "madness" (μανίᾱ) & its relation to oracles & poetic inspiration; chapter 4, regarding dreams & their interpretation; & appendix 1, which argues that the ancient Dionysiac dancing rituals involved a culture-bound mental illness similar to the medieval dancing mania.) Dodds' book was written about 20 years before Jaynes published his "Origin of Consciousness", & parts of Jaynes' argument, as you summarize it, seem probably to have been based on it.
My impression of the post is more along the lines of:
> Lead is bad. Early studies tried to quantify exactly how bad, and they found a lot of really noisy data about lead versus IQ specifically. (Lead poisoning is still bad for health in a lot of other ways.) Now that lead has been largely removed from our lives, subsequent research into lead vs. IQ has now become hopelessly confounded with other correlates of lower IQ, such as socioeconomic status. It is now trivially easy for a researcher to "show" that a tiny amount of lead is "responsible" for a huge decrease in IQ. Simply study a poor neighborhood that is slightly more polluted than the surrounding area - and blame it all on lead. So we really have no idea exactly how bad lead is for IQ specifically. Some X amount of lead exposure could cause a drop of 10 IQ points - or it could be some tiny amount like 0.5 points. Nobody really knows.
Lead poisoning is very bad, but it's also pretty much been solved everywhere outside of a few specific areas. The "low lead exposure" control groups of the 70s and 80s had an order of magnitude higher lead exposure than the "high lead exposure" experimental groups of today. Continuing lead abatement efforts are still a good thing where we find it - but at some point you need to declare victory and move on to other issues.
Do you mean they are fabricating or altering their data in order to change their results to something favorable to their side?
Or just that they *have* a side, and don't conceal that fact?
Because honestly, I think we're just talking about the latter here, and I think that state of affairs is good actually.
It would be kind of insane to expect that people who publish in political science journals have no personal opinions or affiliations regarding politics. Most people do, and you'd expect teh people who care enough about politics to devote their life to studying it to be even more so.
So given that they're going to be like normal people in terms of having political opinions and affiliations, I'd rather they signal them honestly and openly, than carefully conceal and obfuscate them with fakey language choices and caveats.
As long as they don't make unsupported empirical claims, they're doing science in my book.
I have to disagree with your claim that they're doing science. The loaded language makes it clear that they are activists first, and scientists second.
Is it a trapped prior, or merely not much evidence to cause the existing prior to be reevaluated?
To be fair, sociology is a lot more difficult than quantum theory or thermodynamics, because people will intentionally try to produce results that (in some way) benefit them. So replication is nearly impossible.
43. The post didn't age particularly well. It uncritically repeated the claim that Alexander Acosta claimed he was told to "leave [Epstein] alone." The source of this claim is Vicky Ward, a known liar.* It also repeats uncritically the claim against Alan Dershowitz, who sued his accuser and forced her to say "I now recognize I may have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz."
Ultimately, I see nothing about the Epstein case that needs explanation beyond "rich man paid some teenage girls for sex." That's the simplest explanation and the simplest explanation is probably correct. No Mossad, no CIA, no blackmail scheme necessary.
"Hmm. Ghislane is in jail for sex trafficking and underage sex. And trafficking seems like a fairly big thing for a connected socialite to be involved with."
Sex trafficking is just the current year word for prostitution. It wasn't proven in court that she "trafficked" women for anything other than Epstein and Maxwell.
"Epstein was clearly given a very light sentence in the first trial, the Florida AG at the time says he was told to bring one sample case for reasons of national security"
No, Vicky Ward claimed that someone told her that the Florida AG said that. See the New Yorker link for how much credence you should give to her.
> Trafficking is not prostitution, which can be voluntary. It’s trafficking people who are forced into prostitution.
Note that you are disagreeing with the legal usage, in which trafficking and prostitution are synonymous and the most frequent kind of trafficking prosecution is prosecuting a single woman for trafficking herself.
What’s the UK law regarding something getting decriminalized after the fact? Some places have a law that any actions are to be judged according to the mildest law between the time the action was committed and today, is UK among such countries?
> Ultimately, I see nothing about the Epstein case that needs explanation beyond "rich man paid some teenage girls for sex." That's the simplest explanation and the simplest explanation is probably correct.
That's fine, but how did he get so well-connected? Why were the likes of Bill Clinton flying around on his private plane?
It was my understanding that Epstein was involved with a lot of charities. If that is true, that's a perfectly adequate explanation for how he met Bill Gates.
Still doesn't seem weird? He was a financial advisor for rich people, he wanted to make connections with rich people, probably he also just liked hanging out with cool famous people.
From what I've read, he does not appear to have been a normal "financial advisor for rich people". He was connected first and the mechanism for turning that into cash was by billing himself as a financial advisor, a financial advisor who got absurd sweetheart deals on the finances he managed.
Right. We still don't know this, and I don't understand why some journalist never bothered to figure it out. Were journalists scared away from this story by someone?
>The thing that needs explaining is where his money came from
Does it? The wikipedia article on it has a whole section on his early career, saying he started out as an options trader and Bear Stearns and quickly moving over to become a financial advisor for their wealthy clients specializing in tax mitigation strategies. Reading between the lines (especially the bit about him being pushed out of Bear Stearns over unspecified SEC rule violations and starting his own form after), I suspect he was doing a bunch of stuff in his financial advisor roles that were legal grey areas at best and may have shaded over into stuff like money laundering and outright tax evasion. It also sounds like he was at least peripherally (and quite possibly centrally) involved in the Towers Financial ponzi scheme, although he managed to escape prosecution or liability for his role in it.
All in all, it sounds like the sort of career path that could plausibly lead to someone becoming very rich and getting a ton of connections with other very-to-extremely rich people.
I was puzzled by the CIA angle, since it seemed to undermine the basic point. Instead of "he used a network of sex slaves to entrap people for his personal benefit, and one of them had him killed", now it's "he used a network of sex slaves to entrap people for the US government's benefit, and the US government definitely wants you to believe that he killed himself". Somehow this theory doesn't strike me as less suspicious.
Epstein had a substantial ahem media library at his NYC home (a seven story townhouse gifted to him by Leslie Wexner, owner of Victoria's Secret). Said library was removed by FBI agents towards the end and has not been seen again.
> 4: How is crypto going for sex workers? Sex workers have limited and erratic access to normal financial infrastructure due to a combination of government harassment and corporate reputation concerns. Crypto seemed like a solution. But the increasing centralization of crypto under eg exchanges has given it limited value; the same parties who strongarmed banks into dropping sex workers can strongarm crypto exchanges, or close offramps. I’m hopeful that in ten years crypto will have gotten its act together enough to be actually decentralized in a way that avoids this failure mode.
The more fundamental issue: Crypto's UX sucks. It's very much a 'get good scrub' culture which in turn makes it hard for the average person to get into. Central exchanges will let you sign up with one click and guide you through the process. But then it's centralized. This is widely acknowledged as a problem in the industry but it doesn't seem to be attracting much funding or excitement. And the big exchanges won't fund it.
As for sex workers specifically: Anyone working on such projects is taking a large reputational hit and are subject to potential legal risk. The traditional way that you make up for this by paying for them more. That's what drugs does. But neither prostitution nor porn is hugely profitable or a large industry. So you have limited revenues and a bunch of people who need high pay to make up for the risks. You have a few companies at this intersection: OnlyFans, Mindgeek, etc. But only a few. And they're constantly tempted to increase revenues by becoming respectable like OF tried.
I recall Robin Hanson saying (in a post I can't find now) that crypto developers are really into technical problems, and disinterested in the practical stuff that gets a business customers/users.
I will point out that, even in the age of instant online communication, if I want to convert my Pounds Sterling into American Dollars, it is vastly easier and more reliable to go to a professional currency exchange rather than to find an American willing to buy my pounds for their dollars. This seems like its always going to be true, and while I could imagine some decentralised solution this seems to be one of the main reasons centralised exchanges exist for crypto.
Definitely - but a big part of why at least some people want crypto is to have a decentralized currency. If it centralizes for the same reasons as other currency exchanges is a negative for them, because then you're dealing with the other problems of crypto and haven't really gotten the primary benefit.
The way you lay it out here implies a business case for bridging the gap between "git gud scrub" and consumers who want decentralized crypto. Back in the 1990s, Phil Zimmerman's PGP kit filled that gap for encrypted email - you still needed to be comfortable around a Unix prompt, but that was all you needed, and it wasn't THAT high of a bar. So the market has a demand for a Phil Zimmerman for currency. Or maybe a Phil+NDgT partnership.
It's worth examining why such a thing hasn't manifested yet (or if it has but hasn't attained mass awareness). Is the market too small even now, for probability to have produced a candidate? Is there too much incentive for a Phil to just make a central exchange and just turn into a Bankman-Fried? Are too few people able to run their own "neighborhood exchange"? Something else?
1. The market was hugely distorted by the amount of money dumped into it over the past few years. Why bother with nitty gritty when you can just fundraise a bazillion dollars?
2. The incentives of developers run towards making new or better currencies and driving adoption or things like exchanges. These are easier to monetize and have bigger transaction volumes due to the way crypto works. This leads to...
3. A wallet-like experience that's not really a wallet subsidized by those other, more profitable businesses.
Now, this is fine in isolation. But it does mean that real peer to peer transactions are not a really common ability despite it being key to crypto's promise. The few areas where large scale adoption has been driven it works pretty well. But these are usually not as fantastically profitable as FTX.
Crypto UX is fine. Social recovery wallets like Loopring and Argent exist, and converting crypto to cash infrastructure exists all over the world and is quite efficient. It's really unfortunate, that you can't e.g. "buy a house" with crypto, (same as with cash), but one would be fine covering their day to day expenses I guess
Hard disagree that it's fine or efficient. The truth is that setting up a bank account or Coinbase account, in terms of UX, is much better than self-serve options right now. As is withdrawing money, spending it, etc. You can see this in the degree to which even people newly entering the financial system prefer traditional methods. Now, some of that is momentum. But if crypto really were the superior experience you'd see more 18 year olds or immigrants and less tech-y types as a proportion.
> 8: Related: AI art has gone from copying humans to inventing entirely new styles.
Is this new? One of the first things I did to toy around with some of the AI image generators was make a utility that generated QR codes in images. You'd have a picture of like a city or a woman with a blotchy dress or something but if you put it in front of a camera it'd detect the QR code. It was just a toy but it seems these are the same thing: the ability to embed coded information into a generated image. In this case a spiral or some text. Which, I'll point out, is not entirely new.
I want to do this with a real building, or a real woman in a real dress. It doesn't look like a QR code but when you take a photo of it then you go straight to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
It wasn’t obvious to me til I saw it, but now it’s so immediately obvious every time I take another look, I can’t believe it didn’t see it at first glance.
> 13: Unfortunately related: Anti-Ukraine-war website Grayzone says that GoFundMe has frozen their account (ie stolen all their money). They’ve been doing this for years for anti-woke sites, but anti-war sites feels like an escalation. I continue to think crypto is an important safety valve against this increasingly-used tool of control.
Not familiar with the specifics of this case. But this kind of thing is one of the reasons I support government bank accounts in addition to things like crypto. Basically something like mobile postal banking. If you have a legal right to a bank account that can transact from the government then that is probably more secure than a private institution that can kick you out for whatever reason it pleases. And if there's explicit state control this often makes it easier to combat. You could, for example, pass a law about the right to transact through these accounts and then there'd be an outcry if you were denied it.
Yes, it's not infinitely secure. But it's part of a wider strategy of introducing more ways to transact: crypto and private banking and your government account and so on. It raises the coordination costs of kicking someone out of the system entirely. And, as an added bonus, would greatly simplify the distribution of things like welfare.
>>> If you have a legal right to a bank account that can transact from the government then that is probably more secure than a private institution that can kick you out for whatever reason it pleases.
In a world where Operation Chokepoint is a real thing, "legal right" is doing a lot of work.
Yes, it is. But what's easier: figuring out a way to completely restrain the bureaucracy under a president who wants to use its power to do something nefarious (left or right) or getting Congress to pass a law and then suing under it?
The government already has the power. If you want to fight to eliminate it or restrain it go ahead. But I like my chances of reviving this kind of banking better than yours of completely dismantling the administrative state. And it doesn't really give the government that much power: the account would exist but you could simply choose not to use it.
I am not arguing for completely disrupting the administrative state, I just see far more historical abuse by government actors than by competing corporations. And no, the government doesn't have the power to shut down private accounts now, but they surely would for the government accounts.
I think the point is it is easier to get the government to change its position than a corporation, which can be both a blessing and a curse, but it is nice to have the option.
> 23: India is discussing changing its name to “Bharat” (the Hindi word for India) on some level. Unconfirmed rumors about Pakistan being interested in claiming the name “India” for itself. No word yet on who would take “Pakistan”, but I hear Macedonia is looking for a new name.
Reminder to the voters of Macedonia that one of their options was literally "Better Greece." Still disappointed they didn't choose that. Macedonia mostly got in because it was a center of Russian aligned hacking, misinformation, and intelligence activity and letting it in let NATO clear them out. So they did almost literally troll their way into NATO. Might as well ride that wave.
I still don't understand why, under the same logic, the Republic of Ireland isn't forced to change its name to Republic of Southern Ireland. Ireland is, after all, an island, which is only partially covered by the Republic of Ireland.
Of course it exists as a country. It's not the country's official name, but so what? Outside of specialised diplomatic and legal contexts, people very rarely use the exact legal name for a country. We say "I'm going to Germany on holiday", not "I'm going to the Bundesrepublik Deutschland."
I'm reasonably sure at least 90% of New Zealanders don't know the official name: the Realm of New Zealand. I've never encountered it anywhere outside of Wikipedia.
Similarly, should the country of Singapore change its name to "Singapore and its minor outlying islands"? E.g. Sentosa isn't on the island of Singapore.
On the one hand, the genetic differences between the southern balkan states and Turkey are so minutely small that this is a fair statement in this narrow domain. But on the other hand there is a real sense in which the genetic changes in Greece led to (or at least accompanied) a dilution of 'Greek' culture to become 'Orthodox Balko-Slavic' culture. Cf. Barbarian Slavs vs Ancient Greeks (genetically and culturally very different, pan-Indo-European pantheons excepting) to Modern southern Slavs and modern Greeks (genetically and culturally pretty similar).
And in general the idea that genetics doesn't matter to culture after a few generations is barmy! See: Jewish diaspora around the Mediterranean/Northern Europe/Middle East, Indian diaspora in Caribbean, South Africa, East Africa etc. Whether you're a believer of HBD/innate traits or whatever or just think genetics is like a ID number, genetics similarity IS correlated with cultural similarity because a genetic gap is a family gap, a kinship gap. Just seemed like an odd statement to throw in!
The Irish nation hereby affirms its inalienable, indefeasible, and sovereign right to choose its own form of Government, to determine its relations with other nations, and to develop its life, political, economic and cultural, in accordance with its own genius and traditions.
ARTICLE 2
It is the entitlement and birthright of every person born in the island of Ireland, which includes its islands and seas, to be part of the Irish Nation. That is also the entitlement of all persons otherwise qualified in accordance with law to be citizens of Ireland. Furthermore, the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage.
ARTICLE 3
1 It is the firm will of the Irish nation, in harmony and friendship, to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions, recognising that a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means with the consent of a majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island. Until then, the laws enacted by the Parliament established by this Constitution shall have the like area and extent of application as the laws enacted by the Parliament that existed immediately before the coming into operation of this Constitution.
2 Institutions with executive powers and functions that are shared between those jurisdictions may be established by their respective responsible authorities for stated purposes and may exercise powers and functions in respect of all or any part of the island."
> 29: Re…lated? Blogger/model Aella is offering aella.ai, an “AI girlfriend” based on her, as the flagship product of a company (?) that will help influencers create AI chatbot girlfriends based on themselves. I haven’t seen a lot of uptake yet - my trollish theory, which I might explain more later, is that the real killer app will be AI boyfriends (horny men want sex, horny women want attention / emotional validation; which of these can chatbots more effectively fake?)
Paid LLM texting? This is like six year old technology. The state of the art includes images, voice, and video. Mostly offered as a combination where there's a real person but, when they're not online, you can get your fix by talking to an interactive double. (There are a few purely fictional ones but they mostly seem to be less successful. Unless they have a human behind them.) Though it's mostly used for more prosaic tasks than blogging/modeling.
LLM texting or messaging is so simple people trade free bots of book characters. I've done it as a hobbyist for things like conversation practice or to work as a note taker.
I'd be interested to know if it does or not. It's not advertised anywhere. (I assumed it doesn't because it's not mentioned anywhere on site or in the TOS.) But if there is something more advanced I'd love to know more about the tech side.
On the whole it does look a bit primitive. You pay through a direct stripe link.
I tried Aella.ai with great interest. At first there was sort of banter and interaction (she's a cat person, I'm a dog person), but pretty soon it degenerated into a spam message asking me to pay $5 for a sexy pic. I mean – that was the only response to anything I typed. It was disappointing actually. I felt dirty and violated, and not in a good way. I think it needs a lot of work not to just be porn spam.
They are the locale you get your money and fame from. (Really. I don't mean to say that they're in the locale. They are the locale. They like you, and that's why you're famous. If you try to sell them something, they will be receptive to that.)
I'm not sure that I'm following what you're trying to say?
But the toy is simply another thing that they pay you money for. I guess your point is that it would be less money than in the counterfactual, but this doesn't seem obvious.
If I ever get rich (ask me in 5 years) there's a ton of social science I want to do. Totally outside of academia or IRB review boards, no interest in formal publishing, just to learn shit with legit sample sizes and post on substack.
Fwiw this is already a thing in china, to the extent there are people who make a living pretending to be the AI boyfriend (although in this case it's less AI and more 'scripted dating game' but the distance isn't far)
On Epstein, I always thought the conspiracy was supposed to be that someone killed him by getting the suicide-watch interrupted and allowing him to commit suicide.
That's pretty close to my pet theory (that the guards and others responsible for stopping him from killing himself weren't very motivated to do a good job of it), but isn't the standard conspiracy theory as I've heard it. The usual theory seems to be that some people who he had criminal dirt on (the Clintons are the suspects I've heard mentioned most often) had him killed to stop him from implicating them and passed it off as a suicide.
For the Clintons in particular, the theories often seem to tie in with the earlier conspiracy theories around the 1993 suicide of long-time Clinton associate Vince Foster, which alleged that he was murdered to prevent him from testifying against the Clintons in the Whitewater investigation.
This seems much harder to defend: the argument for why it's credible he was murdered is "people rarely commit suicide but there were a lot of rich people motivated to kill him". If you assume he wanted to commit suicide, the prior on his success is no longer especially low (I don't expect suicide watch prison guards to be especially competent), so it's now a low-prior theory again.
"During the aggregated period of 2000–19, the average suicide rate in local jails was highest among persons who were white (86 suicides per 100,000 white inmates)"
The base rate for targeted assassinations is much lower. And if you're going to fall back on the obvious motive for assassination, pray consider that there's an obvious motive for suicide at work here as well.
That's high in the sense of being high compared to background rates, but still a low prior. Probably high enough for vanilla suicide to be the likeliest explanation here though.
Certainly possible, but implies that *all* of the people involved were also really bad at their jobs. Cameras not working, no one doing any checks despite that literally being their job, etc.
I guess for a conspiracy you could also combine it with a "paid to look the other way" while someone told Epstein he needed to kill himself or something worse would happen to him. I'm not sure how different that is from the theory that someone literally murdered him.
Presumably their bosses, who in turn would care because of lawsuits and/or some kind of professional backlash (lost job, prestige, whatever).
You're right that there are too many layers between the general public (who were upset at this outcome but by and large were powerless to change it) and those implementing policy for us to count on them all being good at their jobs.
I understand this place had not had a successful suicide in 21 years. Whether attempts were just that rare or they were good at preventing it, no idea. I could definitely see them getting lax in all that time as a plausible alternative to something intentional and nefarious.
"The 123 federal prisons in the United States need roughly $2 billion worth of "maintenance" and most are "aging and deteriorating," according to a DOJ inspector general report.
In three prisons, the conditions are so bad they had to be closed -- including the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan, which held Jeffrey Epstein prior to his death.
"We're seeing crumbling prisons," DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz told Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas. "We're seeing buildings that we go into that have actually holes in the ceilings in multiple places, leading to damages to kitchens, to doctor's offices to gymnasiums. And they're not being fixed.""
You know, I always assumed that the murder theory was just a meme ready version of, "someone came by and let Epstein know that the guards were out to lunch and if he didn't want to face the consequences now was the best chance he was going to get." Murder just seems so redundant for a man in his position, i.e., on suicide watch (!). This theory has the distinct advantage that the available evidence about cameras and guards isn't evidence of a cover-up but direct evidence of the crime.
But I readily admit I'm low-information about the event. It just doesn't seem very relevant to me.
Same. Also, "Don't try to hard to interfere if he looks like a suicide risk" is a message I can totally imagine being transmitted in a law enforcement institution. And if it's initiated by somebody who knew he was depressed, it's pretty effective.
The reason I am (very mildly and with only intellectual interest) in favor of the conspiracy version, is that I find this kind of message to be completely plausible, while having the subject of an extremely famous criminal case without a proper suicide watch quite a bit less plausible.
Plausible, I suppose, but if so he didn't even try to cover his tracks. The simpler explanation is that Epstein's lawyer demanded that he be taken off suicide watch because Epstein asked to be taken off suicide watch.
And for those of you who don't know, "suicide watch" as normally implemented in US prisons is judicially-sanctioned torture by prolonged sleep deprivation. It isn't a matter of the guards being tasked to e.g. watch the prisoner through a low-light closed-circuit TV; it's the guards basically walking up to the cell and saying "hey, wake up, prove to us you aren't dead", every fifteen minutes, 24/7/forever, and every wake-up being logged to make sure the prisoner doesn't manage to sneak in any useful level of sleep. Any decent non-monstrous human being would want approximately every prisoner taken off that sort of suicide watch after no more than a day or two, even if they don't want the prisoners to commit suicide. The people who want prisoners on suicide watch are mostly prison administrators who don't want to deal with the paperwork of a suicide and don't care who gets hurt in the process.
This time, the decent human beings prevailed. And then nobody bothered to give Jeffrey Epstein any good reason to want to remain alive, because duh.
No; your normal bacteria cling to your teeth pretty tightly to prevent competition, so to apply the new bacteria, you have to brush very hard with a special solution to clear a niche for them. If you don't do that, they won't spread.
It's possible that in exactly the right situation, where someone had just taken antibiotics and been to the dentist for a cleaning and *then* got kissed, the bacterium could spread, but it should be pretty rare.
Also, the new bacterium will probably spread mother -> child, since newborns have no competing mouth bacteria.
The Epstein item has three links in it, all identical. I suspect you meant to link to three different postings, since I see it's a sequence (oh, THAT'S where that comes from [j/k]) and he backs off his position in later entries.
To the actual postings: although I'm not inclined to believe Epstein was murdered, I notice that the LW writer puts a lot of weight on "The Attorney General of the US himself inspected the tapes", without noting what anyone who's heard a little bit of conspiracy theorizing about it knows, which is that the AG at the time was Bill Barr, and Bill Barr's father, Donald, has this in his WP entry:
---
He was headmaster of the Dalton School from 1964 to 1974. During his time as Dalton's headmaster, Barr is alleged to have had a role in hiring future financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a math teacher despite the fact that Epstein (who graduated from high school at the age of 16 and secured a full scholarship to Cooper Union) had failed to complete his degree and was only 21 years old at the time. In 1973, Barr published Space Relations, a science fiction novel about a planet ruled by oligarchs who engage in child sex slavery. It has been noted that the plot of the novel anticipates the crimes of Epstein and his convicted and prosecuted accomplice(the list of politicians and celebrities involved in sex crimes remains hidden), Ghislaine Maxwell.
---
Like I say, I'm not inclined to buy the murder thing, but it's a really obvious counterpoint, and yeah, kind of a coincidence.
OK, I read further and he eventually does address this, at least...although he doesn't mention that Bill Barr was the AG whose personal examination of the jailhouse tapes he drew our attention to in his first posting.
The US attorney's office of the SDNY also reviewed the footage and said in an indictment, under oath, that nobody entered the tier where Epstein was. So SDNY would also have to be in on it, and this wouldn't make much sense because they're the ones who brought charges to begin with.
"During his time as Dalton's headmaster, Barr is alleged to have had a role in hiring future financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a math teacher despite the fact that Epstein (who graduated from high school at the age of 16 and secured a full scholarship to Cooper Union) had failed to complete his degree and was only 21 years old at the time."
There used to be a lot less credentialism in the past.
I have to say that I don't know much about academic fraud or the Data Colada guys, but I saw a reference to this today and frankly it, itself, pattern-matches to me to "junk science that might have been right a couple of times but now is just spraying accusations everywhere", like that business with arson investigations that (it is said) are garbage and have convicted people of murder for no good reason, or "bite analysis", or "blood spatter analysis", all of which have good cases against them.
I recommend reading their analysis - it seems pretty damning to me. Harvard also says they've done a separation investigation and decided to suspend Gino.
On the automatic AI video translation thing… question for my fellow commenters and I’ll need one magic wand in the ask.
Let’s say there’s a very simple table somewhere that translates buzz words back into a format you agree with. I’ll use an older example that will hopefully have less emotional. One of the linked pairs in this table is PATRIOT ACT: GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE BILL. You can imagine other examples. Anytime someone has named something for an effect you disagree with just imagine there is an entry in this table that has the “spin machine” name and your more direct, blunt name.
Would you pay for a service that scrubbed the news for you so that as you watched videos they were filtered to replace the “spin machine” name with the “direct/blunt” name. So that when a politician or a news reporter tried to say “Patriot Act” you would instead hear “Government Surveillance” bill.
This hypothetical service would also let you know when this kind of filtering event was occurring but in this way whenever you were browsing random videos the names other than the ones you would prefer, which again are just magically in a table somewhere, are swapped out.
But this can expand your bubble to encompass the whole world! Everything will be safe and non-triggering and validating. Or, if you prefer, you can have some things translated such that the only realistic response would be "DIE NAZI SCUM!!!"...
I would agree if this wasn’t largely happening today in its own. Stick it in a system with rules, give people something to win or lose by being convincing and I think it’s a better system.
This doesn't sound useful at all. Firstly because it's totally dependent on the service's judgement for what counts as "emotive language" or not. Is the Patriot Act a "government surveillance bill" or a "national security bill"? Or perhaps an "anti-terrorism bill"? None of these are emotive per se, but your choice will emphasize one feature of the bill at the cost of another another.
Secondly, if I read about something online I want to know the actual name for it, because if I talk to other people about how the Government Surveillance Act violates our rights they're going to give me a blank stare.
Think of what the default state is. People you don’t know and don’t trust subtly manipulate language to message something you don’t want. Has that been useful to the people who do that?
"Patriot Act" refers to a specific law, though. There are many more bills that could be referred to as Government Surveillance Bill. One of the risks might be to lead the listener to believe, for instance, that the Patriot Act expiring would mean all government surveillance being ended.
Of course Republicans who say the election was stolen believe it. No one has ever taken serious and genuine steps to disabuse them of the claim. It was all a cacophony of "big lie" " most secure election ever" from the beginning. Which are just stupid and obviously not true. There are videos of people dumping ballots into boxes. Those are ILLEGAL votes, even if not FRAUDULENT, and once they were commingled the election should have been invalidated. The Atlanta counting situation is similar. The BOP is on the state to demonstrate its counting procedures are legitimate, not the other way around, you can't just do suspicious things and then shout "no proof" and convince anyone.
One strong reason for continuing that level of mail-in voting is that, if you try to tone it down, it looks like you're admitting the earlier election had problems.
Have we found that mail in voting has a higher percentage of fraud before? Oregon has had universal mail in voting for many years, well before 2020, and absentee voting has been a thing for a very long time. Has anyone demonstrated fraud in mail in voting at higher rates that in person voting prior to 2020? Or, would the argument just be that we didn't have the proper infrastructure in place to deal with the volume of mail-in votes we received at that time?
But we still have voter rolls that make sure a person is only counted once, even with mail in voting. Unless there's some reason to suspect those don't work? I haven't seen any evidence that people are voting multiple times. So then to cheat you have to submit ballots for people on the rolls who aren't going to vote, and you have to know they aren't going to vote, right, or else it would just get thrown out?
I'm not sure how you could cheat in any other way unless there's some reason to suspect that voter rolls don't properly catch double votes.
I don't know. Why couldn't mail in voting be done right?
One thing is that presidential elections in the US are actually a lot of local elections, and these are all operated in some local way, and there is usually some number of counties where they mess up, or have trouble. And when the election is close and that happens in a battleground state, it can very easily seem suspicious, especially if it delays the results.
One weird aspect about American elections seen from abroad is the dispute about voter ID. In other countries that I know about, needing voter ID is taken for granted.
This is more or less my view. Every change that was made to voting rules in 2020, particularly in battleground states, reduced transparency and election security - that is, the ability to successfully detect and document fraud. It is natural that when one side pushes to remove safeguards - opposing voter ID, relaxed signature matching, mailing out millions of blank ballots indiscriminately - that the other side will be suspicious when the outcome favors the safeguard-removers, particularly when the outcome is determined within jurisdictions exclusively controlled by those people. Imagine that we are playing poker, and just before the final card is dealt on a huge hand, I excuse myself to go to the bathroom and take the cards with me. I win the hand on the last card. Can you prove that I cheated? Not definitively. There was always a chance I could win. You don't have video of me cheating. You don't know what the next card was before I left. Yet I maintain you would be justified in being suspicious of the result.
This doesn't even get into the ballot-harvesting issue. By flooding the zone with ballots to low or zero-propensity voters, even without literally picking up discarded ballots (full-on identity fraud, which is also possible) it makes the voting process an exercise in mechanics rather than real voter choice; just go harvest their ballots and you can guarantee 100% turnout for your candidate in places that normally wouldn't have voted.
Add in shady things like administrative coordination and pressure to one-sidedly suppress negative news on media and social media, and it's not a surprise that some don't see a fair contest. And some folks live in jurisdictions where literal, old-school, Tammany Hall style machine politics has been endemic for decades. Those folks aren't going to hit the fainting couch when someone alleges there might have been fraud, even if they can't prove it was outcome determinative. They assume of course outcome-determinative fraud can't be proven; every step taken throughout was designed to make it difficult to document and disseminate such proof.
I would take the "changing the rules is inherently suspicious" argument more seriously if people applied it to, say, Texas (a state that did change its rules due to the pandemic, and which had more electoral votes at stake than any battleground state), and not just to the four states that were closest to voting for Trump.
>This doesn't even get into the ballot-harvesting issue. By flooding the zone with ballots to low or zero-propensity voters, even without literally picking up discarded ballots (full-on identity fraud, which is also possible) it makes the voting process an exercise in mechanics rather than real voter choice; just go harvest their ballots and you can guarantee 100% turnout for your candidate in places that normally wouldn't have voted.
Why is it bad to encourage legal voters to cast votes? Like, what distinguishes "ballot harvesting" from regular get-out-the-vote efforts?
Texas is not a battleground state, nobody expected it to be in play, and its margins of victory are not conducive to gaming anyway. That doesn't make any changes it made good or entirely unproblematic, but it reduces the capacity for mischief.
Ballot harvesting is an entirely different animal from GOTV, both for fraud/procedural abuse reasons and, even in non-fraudulent situations, for effort reasons. On the procedural side, to GOTV in a normal situation, you need to convince a person to actually show up at the polls. You remind, cajole, bus them. But in the end a person still walks in to a polling place with poll watchers. In ballot harvesting, you simply need to get ahold of their ballot. That's it. Something that people getting ballot harvested either consider junk mail, may discard, or may not even know about (e.g. nursing homes). There is no check beyond physical possession of the ballot paper. It is the security difference between an in-person purchase and a bearer bond.
There are certainly situations where ballot harvesting does not result in outright fraud, but even then I consider it a negative in the voting process. Reducing the investment in voting down to "hand this to the guy at the door and sign once" (and remember that's the best-case non-fraud scenario) does not, in my view, lead to a more thoughtful electorate. It doesn't measure public support, it basically measures voter concentration (where it's easy to knock on doors) and party infrastructure (amplified by, e.g., Zuck bucks disproportionately benefiting Democratic bastions). But that's slightly ancillary to the main point about security.
I don't really swim in those circles but I have totally seen several actual surveillance videos of "runners' showing up at ballot collect stations with dozens of ballots and dumping them in. I would presume some of them are people brining in mail in ballots from nursing homes or other places like that, but it does create a giant security hole. And it is certainly done in a suspicious way (they always seemed to be waiting until no one was around or late at night). At the same time I don't have much reason to think this sort of think isn't happening both ways, but the error bars on the election wildly outstrip the actual margin. I would bet huge money on that.
This is obviously a salaciously done video, but the moajor hosting companies seem to have purged/delisted most of the longer raw videos, but it is illustrative of what people would have been exposed to on youtube, twitter, etc right after the election.
Thanks. I didn't see any videos of the same person putting in more than 3-4 ballots at a time, which seems like someone bringing the ballots in for their family (which is legal). It looks like Georgia investigated some of the people filmed in that video and found that was what they were doing (see https://www.factcheck.org/2022/06/evidence-gaps-in-2000-mules/ )
I was going to write about 21 in a original comment, but here might a better place. But as a preamble I have to say that this demand for sources is non-symmetrically difficult to provide for. Attempts to discuss the issue with anything but abject dismissal has made videos purporting to show fraud of any kind extremely difficult to find. For example, claims of voter fraud was banned on Youtube. For years. Specifically for the United States 2020 election. Here's a random article from some place I've never heard of writing about it: https://www.engadget.com/youtube-removes-videos-with-us-election-fraud-claims-154726251.html
It should be noted that most other social media platforms had similar policies. Therefore I can't find videos of anything. They might still be on twitter somewhere, but good luck finding them. I will also state I don't particularly care about the videos personally, nor do I think they represent the substantive issue Clutzy is speaking about.
Now, as "voter fraud" is nebulous, videos of "people dumping ballots into boxes" is pretty vague. There were lots of videos that involved people doing things with ballots and boxes, but what was happening in them (both by those who believe something nefarious was going on, and those who do not) differs.
Videos of this type involved poll watchers being told that voting was done for the night, and then at some point more ballots being pulled out after they poll watchers had left. For those who have some kind of distrust, this sounds suspicious, as most people cannot recall voting stopping in the middle of the night prior to Trump being in office. The assumption is that ballot counters lied to get poll watchers out of the way so as to allow some kind of fraudulent handling.
This "fact check" alleges that actually, the poll workers were intending to leave but later returned to continue counting, and that the storage and retrieval of ballots is normal for such situations. The contention by Republicans that this so happened to mean that the poll watchers had not also returned is dismissed as basically irrelevant and not indicative of problems. I generally agree, but this is also what I would say if I had done something nefarious. Now, this is just one instance of this general type of "ballots and boxes" issue. This happened in multiple places. But they all follow the same general claim and response trend.
The second sort of videos involving people doing things with ballots and boxes probably refers to videos of ballot harvesting. Laws on ballot harvesting differ by state, and generally some Republicans will assume that something legally spurious is happening when one person is dumping multiple ballots into one box. Even with a video though, it's not immediately clear if it is, as the video could be from some time or place where nothing wrong is happening.
Moving past this specific and mostly pointless question, Clutzy's actual point is pretty much true. "Voter fraud" is nebulous. Do I believe voter fraud (illegally cast ballots by individuals) swung the 2020 election? Not really, though this seems to have not been properly appraised in certain states. Do I believe voter fraud (last minute changes to election law, some of which were illegal) swung the 2020 election? Yes. The distinction could be made by passing the word"fraud" through the celebration parallax and arriving at "fortification," as described by the vaunted Time article by Molly Ball, posted I believe on February 4th of 2021.
Unfortunately at this point I don't really have the time to go over all the cases. Because frankly, this whole thing is one big exercise in an isolated demand for rigor. Normal people just call it political bias. Several states were involved, and several issues were brought up in those states. There's a book I have not read about it, Rigged, by Mollie Hemingway. But for the sake of what you would call signal, I'll go through one state in broad strokes.
Pennsylvania passed Act 77, which introduced no-excuse mail-in voting. In addition, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that because of Covid, mail in ballots would be counted up to 3 days past election day, so long as they were postmarked prior to election day or the postmark was illegible.
To the first, Congressman Mike Kelly, among others, filed a case stating that the no-excuse mail-in voting Act 77 was unconstitutional under the state constitution, and required an amendment to the constitution. This is what we call "true." Initially counting was halted, but then the case was dismissed on the grounds that the case was brought in too late, as Act 77 was passed in 2019. It was noted by some that this sounds like a catch 22, as an attempt to sue prior to 2020 could easily be judged to lack standing, as there had yet to be an election to which there was an aggrieved party. As an aside, in March of this year, this exact chain of legal logic played out with Kari Lake's lawsuit in Arizona. That is, there was an attempt to dismiss it on the grounds that it was a question of policy that should have been brought forth earlier, but it was ultimately allowed to go forward because Kari Lake would lack standing prior to the election in question. Anyway, the point is that no decision was ever made in Pennsylvania on the case's merits.
To the second, The Pennsylvania Republican Party challenged the state supreme court's extended deadline for mail-in ballots. The challenge went to the US Supreme Court prior to the election, which deadlocked 4-4 on a stay or emergency injunction, as Amy Barret had not yet been elected to the supreme court. After the Pennsylvania election, the Pennsylvania Republican Party tried again, but the Supreme Court declined to intervene. What this means is that ultimately the Supreme Court changed an election rule, and then when questioned on if it had the legal authority to do so (it didn't), nobody even looked at the question.
As a bonus, the Texas Lawsuit brought by Ken Paxton dealt with Pennsylvania as well as three other states, on this question of the states having made changes that violated the constitution. The US Supreme Court declined to hear the case, bizarrely claiming that Texas lacked standing in other state's elections. Alito and Thomas dissented to this, correctly pointing out that the US Constitution states that the Supreme Court's has among its primary purposes, dealing with cases in which one state sues another.
Ultimately you should see the pattern. There were legal issues with how states conducted their elections. And yet, they were dismissed on grounds that had nothing to do with the substantive claims under discussion. This is to say nothing of the Media's role in this.
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but when one state sues another, “dealing with the case” includes determining if the plaintiff has standing, just like with any lawsuit. The majority did not rule that the Supreme Court couldn’t resolve the case--they were resolving the case. They ruled that the case couldn’t proceed because Texas didn’t have standing.
IANAL, but that fits my understanding of standing. What’s the legal argument that Texas, qua Texas, was harmed by anything Pennsylvania did? Texas’s ability to conduct its elections how it wanted and have its electoral votes counted wasn’t harmed. Paxton’s case was the equivalent of, say, Target suing Wal-Mart for underpaying an employee, on the ground that this underpayment made it easier for Wal-Mart to compete against Target. That isn’t how it works; the one harmed (in my hypothetical, the underpaid employee) has to file the lawsuit if it’s going to be heard.
If I had to guess, I'd say the argument is that any State could sue any other on grounds that any State now has to work under whatever elected official the rest helped get elected, and if other States' election processes are bad enough, it's not fair to the States that are trying to maintain their own processes. At worst, a State ought to be permitted to secede, and a lot of people have made that historically impractical.
Imagine if your HOA splits 49-49 on whether to pay to have a casino at the entrance, and the remaining 2% are so negligent that the 49 you oppose are able to cast their ballots for them. You can't sue the 49 for simply disagreeing with you, but you can sue the 2 for letting the process be subverted.
But in that scenario I am a member of the HOA, so I can imagine a legal argument that my rights to be represented are violated if legal procedures aren’t followed. I can’t sue some other HOA for not following a certain voting procedure, even if it leads to a result I don’t like. Federalism means that, at least when it comes to voting, the 50 states are not in the same HOA, all operating under the same rules.
You can imagine it going the other way. There are plenty of lawsuits from the left about supposed civil rights violations or gerrymandering or whatnot. But to my knowledge none of those lawsuits are filed by blue states, even though the blue states are affected by who runs Congress or who gets electoral votes. Because the blue states don’t have standing; there’s no constitutional principle that one state has a legal interest in another’s voting procedures.
I think that doesn't add up. Suppose you're in an HOA vote that doesn't follow the HOA's bylaws (this sort of came up for me just a few weeks ago), it's a potentially huge deal, esp. if you're now being obligated to pay extra dues, pay out of pocket for miscellaneous problems that arise from whatever that election determined, and so on. It might not convert into a lawsuit against members with lax security on their ballots, but it could certainly lead to an overturn of the vote. (In our case, it led to half the board stepping down.)
Alternately, look at it this way: if you enter a union that says it has elections for important things, you have a expectation that those elections work reasonably fairly. If that union said up front that elections were run by majority of subgroups, and any subgroup could run elections *any* it wanted - including one of the larger ones slanting the rules in favor of a small sub-subgroup of them - you'd probably want to know that before you joined that union. If that union instead said each subgroup ensured a majority vote and so you joined and then that union suddenly changed the rules right before a big election, you'd probably look pretty hard for a breach of contract.
Admittedly, the analogy is imperfect. It's hard to see an HOA election turning on household-level fraud, and Texas wasn't suing to have the election overturned (IIRC). Also, Texas would have to demonstrate real damages. That's impossible to show before the executive has actually executed anything - but if you agree that a given election is generally expected to be good news for some States and bad for others, then this is more an argument that the standing requirement itself is flawed than that Texas didn't have it. Or that the election process is.
So in the most forgiving interpretation, standing is of course an issue. Though certain interpretations of the relevant articles suggest that the Supreme Court doesn't have the ability to simply dismiss a case that falls under the Supreme Court's original jurisdiction. This was stated to be the case by Alito and Thomas, and this is what I was referring to when I vernacularly said "dealing with". Keep in mind, this is all a matter of constitutional law, and both the concept of standing and what to do when states sue each other are defined in the constitution. As are the issues at play, as it is argued that in violating their state constitution, Pennsylvania violated the US Constitution.
As a quick example of how the other side sees this, suppose that Pennsylvania's Supreme Court had ruled that actually, the state shall send twice the number of delegates as apportioned by their population to congress, mandatorily certified by the Governor. This is done, and the Texas AG says, "wait a minute, that is unconstitutional, both violating their state constitution and the US constitution."
You say, now hold on a minute. In what way has Texas's rights been violated? Texas has no standing.
If certain interpretations suggest the Supreme Court doesn't have the ability to dismiss a case for standing reasons, presumably certain other interpretations suggest it does. Do you stand by the claim that it was "bizarre" of the Court to abide by the latter interpretation?
I don't know what part of the US Constitution Pennsylvania is supposed to have violated, but I also don't see what relevance that has. Even a flagrant violation of the Constitution relies on standing: if I'm thrown in jail for giving a speech, and no one reads me my rights, and while I'm in there troops are quartered in my house without my permission…even with all of that, Texas can't sue on my behalf.
If Pennsylvania sent extra congresspeople or a third Senator, I assume the House or Senate would just refuse to seat them, and then it would be on these surplus Pennsylvanians to sue and lose. But if for some reason that didn't happen, I could see an argument why Texas would have standing: it's supposed to have 2/100 Senators, not 2/101, so the extra Pennsylvanian is diluting its voting power. I don't see the relevance to Paxton's suit, though, since Texas had exactly as much influence on the election as the Constitution said it was entitled to.
Yes, their argument was bizarre. The position that the Supreme Court can dismiss cases in which it has original jurisdiction is not that bizarre, but the argument justifying it in this case was bizarre in my view. Obviously a state in the Union should have standing in regards to the Constitution in which it and all other states are under. Why does it matter if I think it is bizarre or not? That's a rhetorical question, I'm pretty sure I can predict your answer.
The relevant part of the US Constitution would be Article II, Section 1.
Now, in your silly contrived situation, Texas probably could sue if you were in Texas at the time or were a citizen of Texas, and depending on circumstances there would be a variety of legal concepts that could be invoked in doing so. Perhaps parens patriae, for example, if you couldn't sue because you were being prevented from doing so, but even if not, the violation of the 3rd might be grounds for Texas to sue for direct harm to the state.
Paxton's suit was about Texas having its voting power diluted. This would fall under the previously mentioned "direct harm to the state" justification. That would be the relevance of my example, a case where it is extremely obvious, even to one such as yourself, that Texas would have standing for having its voting power diluted.
You have been informed of the argument and have been given analogies on the situation by me and elsewhere regarding the Texas Lawsuit and standing which you say you understand. And you understand that it's at least not legally spurious to assume that Texas would by default have its case heard regardless of standing. I believe the Supreme Court interpreted the constitution incorrectly and in a bizarre way. You apparently think otherwise. There doesn't seem to be much more to discuss.
There is a reason almost, if not all, government organizations require their employees to not only refrain from corruption, but also activities giving the appearance of corruption. First, the latter decays faith in the organization, and legitimacy is the government's largest currency; Second, such activities provide an environment for real corruption to thrive. By analogy, the cartels exploit the "refugee" situation at the border to engage in real human trafficking and drug smuggling.
Also, I simply don't think the anti-2020 fraud position is at all principled. If similar rule changes were implemented by Likud, and Bibi won a close election, then a J6 like event happened and he used it to start imprisoning the political opposition, I'd be hard pressed to find a Democrat not openly condemning him. In fact, I suspect we would be inundated with "Reichstag fire" comparisons. After all, who was the major winner from J6? The Democrats and Biden. Who, according to the Capital Chief of Police on J6 was routinely denying requests for overtime and National Guard backup? The Speaker's office (Pelosi). Maybe I am an optimist, but maybe the phrase "cui bono" would re-enter the press's lexicon in such a situation.
It's a general rule that disputes over election procedures should be resolved prior to the election. You can't challenge election procedures in court after the election has occurred unless you can show a valid reason for not challenging the election procedures earlier. This is true in Pennsylvania, and it is true in Arizona, where (I believe, although I can't find the actual ruling) the count in Kari Lake's lawsuit challenging the signature verification procedure was thrown out.
There is no catch 22, as is shown by the fact that Act 77 was challenged in court prior to the 2022 election, and Act 77 was ruled Constitutional. In other words, there was a ruling on the merits as soon as soon as someone asked for relief that the courts could actually provide: changing the election procedures going forward. Changing the procedures used to conduct an election that has already occurred would require a time machine, technology that the court does not have access to.
Your second case was apparently adjudicated on the merits all the way up to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and was even reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to issue an injunction. Lot's of cases don't even make it as far as a state supreme court.
Your bonus case was thrown out because Texas was found to lack standing, but the Trump campaign had standing to raise the exact same issues.
The pattern I see is that the Trump campaign had the opportunity to challenge the conduct of the election in court, and when it did, it lost, with only one exception. Calling this outcome “voter fraud” redefines the term beyond recognition.
I've talked to a few election deniers and I don't think they "believe it" so much as they don't really see politics as having anything to do with factual truth beyond my side/your side.
(Otoh, selection bias - the people who are loud about fringe political beliefs are just generally more likely to be unhinged)
I don’t think so. For instance, if I’m disputing a traffic or parking ticket, the procedures officially state that the police issuing the ticket in the first place is on its own sufficient evidence that the ticket was merited. If I show up without any evidence that in fact it wasn’t merited, I lose by default. The burden is on me to show the state erred in issuing the ticket.
Interesting! So, if you happen to know, let’s say a Texan disputes a speeding ticket and testifies at a hearing that they were only going 60, and the ticketing officer says they were going 80. In the absence of other witnesses or evidence, how is the issue resolved?
That is totally false. If you get a speeding ticket and show up to court, and the police officer is missing, often the ticket just gets thrown out. Sometimes the state is entitled to a continuance to get the officer into court (typically on more serious matters like a DUI). But if you just keep going to court, and the state's witnesses don't show up, eventually you win by default.
The ballots themselves get checked though, even if you go dump a bunch of fake ballots in, as far as I'm aware we have processes in place to make sure we don't count them.
No. Sometimes ballot jackets get checked. And thus, mass dumping of fraudulent ballots (that is, ballots never issued by the state) is often hard. This doesn't preclude mass dumping of illegal ballots, those cast in a way not in accordance with the law, which many of the mass dumped ballots will have been in many states. Once those are co-mingled, its impossible to know which jacked was illegally cast and which was just dropped off by an old lady on her way to the supermarket that vote just being for herself.
And even the ballot jackets are kind of a joke. That anything less than 90% of absentee ballots aren't rejected for failing the signature match beggars belief. I work in the law, and I see wayyyy too many signatures a day. The idea that any average person's signature is consistent in the year 2020 is absurd. It was absurd in 2000 when I was still in grade school. This is why banks require IDs and pins and notaries.
I saw dozens of extremely detailed videos and articles investigating and debunking every one of these claims and videos and etc. Tons of work went into making media to persuade people that the claims of fraud were themselves fraudulent.
The problem is that those were all made by left-wing outlets, which means right-wing people never saw them. The level of algorithmic recommendations and filters bubbles in modern media consumption is such that you will simply never see something made by someone who disagrees with you unless it is in a takedown video made by someone on your side.
Like, literally I would not know that Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson or Prager U existed if it weren't for seeing them referenced in takedown videos and jokes from my side, they are completely transparent to all of my algos and bookmarks. Same in reverse for the other side.
So I'm actually not sure what 'steps to disabuse them' could have *possibly* led to convincing people on the right that those fraud claims were false, no matter how obviously correct and persuasive they were.
Like, literally, if there were a single 6-sentence paragraph that magically convinced 100% of people who read it that the election was legitimate, and the people on the left who discovered and wrote it tried as hard as they could to make sure every person on the right saw it, I doubt more than 10% of Republican voters would ever actually end up reading it. There's just no channels to get it to them.
For me, the decisive factor is the existence of some Republican politicians who think the election fraud claims are ridiculous. If there really was available but widely suppressed or ignored evidence for fraud, that is one group that I would expect to be overwhelmingly familiar with the existence of that evidence, and to have every incentive to publicise it and no incentive at all to disregard it. Thus the only way to explain anti-fraud Republicans consistently with a fraud theory being true is a level of conspiracy that defies all practical plausibility. If a conspiracy can not only engineer massive election fraud but also buy off not only the government and most of the media but also virtually all judges and election officials who investigate the claims AND a significant number of elected representatives of the party that was defrauded out of power, then that conspiracy can do anything. It proves too much: why not assume that that conspiracy was already in control of the world, that elections were already a sham beforehand, and that Trump and the pro-fraud media are part of the conspiracy as well? It's beyond absurd.
With that said, I have literally zero sympathy for the left and the Democrats having to deal with these false and unfair claims. For two reasons. First, because large parts of the left have denied the legitimacy of ALL THREE of the Republican victories this century. While there was *some* (though still not much) basis for these claims in 2000, there was absolutely none in 2004 and 2016. Those were completely indisputable and fair Republican wins. And yet significant numbers of Democrats delegitimised them, recklessly and arrogantly, for no other reason than that they didn't like the outcome. Wikipedia still has a whole page casting doubt on the 2004 result, with barely a mention of the lack of support for those claims. Hillary Cilnton herself repudiated her concession and declared Trump an "illegitimate president", and somehow was *not* condemned and octracised by the mainstream left. After that, the democrats *forever* lost the right to complain about legitimisation campaigns, false claims, or big lies. It's true that it was much larger from republicans in 2020. But on the other hand, they only did it once; there were no serious fraud claims in 2008 and 2012. Democrats have done it a full three times, *every* time they've lost, all because they just couldn't accept that they had alienated the people with their obnoxious attitudes. They made their bed; now they're lying in it. They're reaping what they sowed, and they deserve every moment of it.
Second, censoring claims of fraud (on social media or elsewhere) is the equivalent of putting up a big poster saying "we are *terrified* of free discussion and scrutiny of this claim". Most people are going to reasonably conclude you have something to hide, when you try to censor arguments. I don't think this is actually the reason for the censorship in this case, although it is in most other cases. I think the left has just become so unbelievably entitled, and so used to thinking that disagreement is an act of oppression, that even when the opposing claim is easily refuted they *still* think they're being oppressed by having to actually put in the time and effort to refute it. (Because it's not like there's *actual* oppression in the world, right?) Thus, all because of an unbelievable intellectual laziness and first-world entitlement, they have given good rational grounds for ordinary people to assume otherwise obviously-false claims are actually based in truth. Let there be no doubt for all progressives, social media employees, and other supporters of censorship: all the permanent damage that is done, now and in the coming years, to democracy and public trust rests ENTIRELY upon your conscience.
If your car can parallel park by driving sideways "crab-style", it can wedge in another car such that the previously present car can't get out unless it also has crab parking.
Wouldn't this only happen if the previously present car was already boxed in on one end, and then the crab car boxes it in on the other end?
And can't this already happen even without crab parking? I assume the same norms would apply. (I.e. if the car behind you has no room in the back, then if you park in front of it, leave it some room in the front. Or more generally: always leave some space both in front of you and behind you)
I think the benefit of crab-style parking is that it makes it easier to park in relatively small spaces, not that it specifically gives you the ability to park in spaces that are exactly equal to the length of your vehicle.
.26. Thanks for this. I hope everyone who is interested in consciousness clicks through and reads it. The distinction between Sentient and Conscious is important, if consciousness is to be a useful term at all.
What do you mean by "sentient" and "conscious"? I am still confused by the whole "consciousness" thing.
From my perspective, it's all about intelligence and knowledge applied to understanding the world. We make mental models of the physical world around us. These models include ourselves, a thing that takes up space. We can compare ourselves with similar entities: "Who has longer reach?" "Who can throw a rock farther?" We can notice that we think and feel and want, and model our own inner experience. We notice that other similar entities appear to have motivations and goals, and create models of their inner experience. When we notice that other similar entities might have an inner experience like ours, that's empathy. When we notice that we can model our inner experience the way we model other similar entities' inner experience, bam: we're on the outside looking in.
As far as I'm aware, that's what everyone seems to be going on about when they talk about "consciousness". But a lot of the more technical discussion feels as pointless as trying to create a mathematical model of the experience of "being one with everything". Regarding that Bronze Age confusion that the book talked about, I can easily believe that a new form of model of other people spread by contact, and once someone introspected enough to apply it to themself, their own inner experience changed irrevocably.
As for "sentience", I tend to use it to mean more-or-less "reacting to stimuli". Moving away from negative stimuli, moving toward positive stimuli, that sort of thing: a quality that even plants have weakly. It's necessary but not sufficient for what Buddhists would call dukkha. Some older sci-fi uses "sentience" to mean what I would call "sapience", but oh well.
Those are pretty close to my own thoughts about it. Sentience and consciousness are discussed in the paper Scott linked to. Some people think that what you and I are referring to as sentience is the same as consciousness.
Re. The Goddess of Everything Else, I really want to love this story, which is so beautiful almost until the end. But then it suddenly about-faces and denies the truth it had taught. The final paragraph says, "Okay, now we're magically freed from evolutionary forces for no reason at all other than that /this is where we are now/, and you can have your utopia." Whereas in fact systems which generate complexity will never be free from evolutionary forces, and pretending that they are, will destroy the work of the Goddess of Everything Else.
Right. What this beautiful story illustrates is how nearly impossible it is for humans to not anthropomorphize the world we experience. Even though we are now factually aware that there is no creator god, we continue to imbue the world with an aura of teleonomy. An example of that is how we talk about Darwinian evolution. In the climax of Scott’s story, we envision “the brain and the body set free from Darwinian bonds and restrictions.” Obviously, this is just a version of creationism, with natural forces acting as creators.
It's also just a story. But, this framing of Darwinism as some sort of discreet creative process is pretty ubiquitous. One phrase that always catches my attention is “evolutionary mismatch.” As if evolution made a mistake in its ultimate goal. Of course, evolutionary mismatch is a useful heuristic in evolutionary sociology, but it often gets forced into labor as an argument that humans must transcend human nature to make progress--- a secular continuation of the atavistic fallen state narrative. Pascal Boyer describes this anthropomorphic view as “the main obstacle to having a proper science of human behavior.”
Bigger picture, perhaps this story is an allegory of emergent complexity. Maybe the Goddess of Everything Else is revealing to us the notion of the ‘evolution of evolution’ (an idea I think I got from Eugene Koonin, The Logic of Chance.) Maybe Scott Alexander is prophesying a future where humans actually do transcend what is simply an artifact of a thermodynamic gradient, the evolution of complexity by natural selection.
Re. "Maybe Scott Alexander is prophesying a future where humans actually do transcend what is simply an artifact of a thermodynamic gradient, the evolution of complexity by natural selection." --
Can and should humans transcend--and I mean do without--continued evolution? This is, I think, the most-important moral question by far--so much that I think of it as simply THE moral question. All else is noise by comparison, including the question of whether AIs replace humans entirely. Yet I've never asked the question in public, because even pointing out the problem goes farther outside the Overton window than eugenics. I don't think I've seen anyone else raise it, even though it seems to be the most-serious existential threat to morality and civilization built into our universe.
The basic problem is that there are very high correlations between
- behavior we call "moral", or at any rate altruistic
- actions that reduce selective pressure in society
- practices that make a society vulnerable to exploitation by non-altruists
This applies theoretically, to all possible lifeforms (including AIs).
Nearly everything we do to try to make the world a better place, undermines the selective pressures that made us evolve the very altruism and love that we're trying to expand the effects of, and/or makes it easier for people lacking that love and altruism to thrive. This is the flip side of the Goddess of Everything Else. For instance, medical technology, including just basic sanitation, has lowered the force of selection before reproduction to almost zero in advanced countries. So when any organism develops the intelligence to change its environment, its genome, including its moral instincts, becomes evolutionary unstable.
The only way I can think of to prevent our moral behavior from destroying our moral instincts is to take responsibility for maintaining the integrity of our own genomes. But there are 2 huge problems with this:
1. Who exactly will have the power to decide what genomes humans will have? This, at least, isn't insoluble. But I think the only workable solution is complete anarchy. Give everyone the information about how to gengineer their kids, and the ability to do it however they choose. Then (A) nobody gets to control the human genome to satisfy their crazy ideology, (B) the human genome doesn't suffer catastrophic loss of diversity, and (C) slightly intelligent guidance plus the resulting high variance in genotypes might increase the "rate of evolution" (not that that can be measured, but it is a not-meaningless hypothetical construct) to at least zero.
2. What about evolution? How can you prevent the devolution of the human genome through well-informed germline engineering, and yet still allow for the random mutations necessary for anything better than our current model of human to evolve? I think there is no answer to this question. You can't do it. If humans are controlling the human genome, they can recognize as improvements only modifications which enhance existing human behaviors and perceptions. But they would never allow the development of any significant new value.
Consider love. Reptiles appear to be neurologically incapable of love. No reptilian committee of the genome would see love, should it appear in their population, as anything other than a perversion to be stamped out. I think we would likewise be unable to recognize any radical improvements on human nature as improvement rather than error.
I don't think we should try to solve to problem #2 today. Find a workable solution to problem #1, and trust that, in the future, people will be smarter, and will be able to deal with problem #2 better than we could today.
In my view, when considering questions of morality it’s helpful to take the evolutionary view that moral sentiments have evolved because they are adaptive for group scale cooperation. Our first thought on cooperation is a group of hunters bringing down a mastodon. But what our large cerebral cortex is really there for is to feel out reliable ingroup coalitions for support in conflicts with other humans. On the larger social scale, we have ancient fallen state narratives, or Buddha asleep under a tree, that function to divide people into the asleep vs the enlightened, the redeemed vs the lost. Questions framed as ‘can we transcend?’ or ‘where do we go from here to “make the world a better place”’ are of this same type.
So, I see your point about reduced selective pressure for reproduction possibly changing the distribution of interacting moral sentiments (and a factor related to survival fitness for reproduction is sexual selection for reproduction). I think this has been happening since the agricultural revolution. But I think we have to pay strong attention to the eugenics episode here. The ostensible question was ‘does our recent learning about evolution mean we can improve the human genome?’, but we can clearly see in retrospect that this question was imbedded in ancient ingroup:outgroup psychology, i.e. racism, ethnocentrism, elitism. So, do you believe the modern human phenotype is in some way degraded, or stultified in reaching some higher potential?
On your point 2. It is indeed an odd situation where we now have technologies where we can realistically contemplate directly changing the human genome--- probably a genuine instance of evolutionary mismatch. What could go wrong?
Re. "do you believe the modern human phenotype is in some way degraded" -- I think we don't have much data, but we do know humans acquire about 30 de novo mutations per generation, and 1/4 to 1/3 of point mutations are synonymous, so 20 to 23 non-synonymous mutations per generation. Somebody should try to do the math to figure out how much selective pressure is needed to counteract that. It's complicated, because accumulated mutations have a normal distribution, and selection acts disproportionately on the low tail of the distribution, but AFAIK we don't know how disproportionately.
On the other hand, if you pick any observable measure of fitness other than reproductive fitness, such as IQ, socioeconomic status, reported happiness, immune function, number of friends, number of incarcerations--acknowledging that they're biased, but we can only use what we can observe--we have negative selective pressure today on at least some of those measures. If this is the case for most measures, then genome is not just degrading, but literally devolving--under selective pressure to evolve to minimize our fitness measures. But we have little idea how quickly. The NIH has effectively banned research into this area with their lockdown of the largest NCBI human genotype/phenotype database, access granted only to researchers whose research is deemed politically correct. I'm not making this up.
Linkage disequilibrium is another matter entirely, potentially far more alarming, which AFAIK no one has investigated beyond investigating pairs of SNIPs. I don't even want to talk about it, other than to note that it is never the case in evolutionary theory that a particular parameter is "good" or "bad". The most you can do is pick a fitness function and try to optimize it; and any attempt always arrives at intermediate values for all parameters.
Re. "we can clearly see in retrospect that this question was imbedded in ancient ingroup:outgroup psychology, i.e. racism, ethnocentrism, elitism":
The question arose in a racist and ethno-centric Europe, so in that context it manifested as racist and ethnocentric. But "eugenics" simply means "good genetics". If you believe in correcting germline mutations that cause terrible diseases, or even in comparing genomes before getting married, as some Ashkenazi Jews do owing to the high rate of recessive diseases in that group, you're pro-eugenics.
Thinking about genetics and ethics today is so screwed up that most bioethicists today (assuming the papers published on the matter are a random sample, which they probably aren't, but what else can you do?) say it's okay for parents to use genetic tech to have a baby born with congenital deafness, but that it's terrible and oppressive to use genetic tech to have a baby born without congenital deafness. We need to throw all that shit out and reboot.
Also, in order to talk seriously about genetics, we need to use the old meaning of "racist", which I would state as "someone is racist to the extent that they only their group priors when dealing with someone of a particular ethnicity". We can't use definitions of "racist" which make anyone with a basic understanding of genetics "racist", so that only people who don't know what they're talking about, are allowed to talk.
(And before we can even attempt that, we need to ditch the metaphysical framework in which "racist" is a Boolean predicate. That shit leads nowhere. You can't reason with people who use words as Boolean predicates; it leads to post-modernism or Buddhism.)
Thanks for the informative response. Of course, I’m entertaining a sort of philosophy of evolutionary sociology, where pondering whether the human genome is degrading, presupposes some sort of independent standard against which to compare, which comparisons are a durable feature of folk psychology. But, on the more realistic level of inherited diseases, including mental health problems, what you say is very interesting.
In terms of racism, a main theme of Sonia Sultan’s Organism and Environment is that you can’t look at DNA sequences to make broad statements about heritable variations in phenotype. I remember thinking as I was reading the book that if the race-is-a-social-construct crowd really understood what she is saying she’d probably get cancelled. Science as subversion!
I think genetic engineering will lead to increased diversity, and I'm not going to say whether it's catastrophic because I don't know.
Even if governments individually have constraints on genetic engineering, they aren't going to agree with each other. *Maybe* there will be agreement on what an improved knee would look like, but I wouldn't count on even that much.
It will be hard to enforce laws on fairly subtle changes.
Genetic engineering won't be done perfectly, so that's a source of variation.
Also, what's the standard? Evolutionary fitness is about fitness for the current environment, not, for example, a paleolithic environment. A honeybee is optimized for living in a hive, not living independently like its ancestors.
I suppose it's possible for a centralized authority to take control of human evolution, but I think it's unlikely. It's plausible that there will be people breeding who don't have access to the Shiny New Technology. The future belongs to the Amish, and they and those who are considerably meeker will inherit the earth if the catastrophe includes the support system for the degenerate majority breaking down.
I'm pretty sure the story is, from the beginning to the end, about evolutionary forces promoting cooperation being, ultimately, stronger than evolutionary forces promoting competition. "Your loyalty unto the Goddess your mother is much to your credit, nor yet shall I break it. Indeed, I fulfill it." "For I say unto you even multiplication itself when pursued with devotion will lead to my service."
It is, but the last paragraph suggests "breaking free" of evolution. As if we'd reached the endpoint, ultimate perfection. I think it is possible for a species to "break free" of evolution if they hold their make-up static, for instance by uploading and forbidding further alterations. But I don't think evolution is something that should be broken free of; it is closer to the thing that continually sets us freer, though "free" isn't quite the right word. And evolution doesn't do any of that if selective pressure is removed.
I guess my point is, the ending does not in fact require "breaking free" from evolution, a removal of selective pressure, an alternative explanation exists in which the (undeniable, ever-existing) selective pressure has just ceased to reward KILLING CONSUMING MULTIPLYING CONQUERING in any shape or form.
Recall that, at each point of the story, the choice to cooperate was a) against the KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER imperative and b) clearly evolutionarily adaptive. That the two are not the same is, I'm convinced, the whole point.
I think even evolutionary biologists who don't believe in group selection would agree that, if group selection /is/ a significant force, the definition of altruism ensures that it can evolve, or be maintained after evolving, only when there's competition between groups. This competition might not technically involve killing, but it must /effectively/ involve killing, defined as reducing the fraction of resources constituting or controlled by competing groups.
This comes up in David Sloan Wilson's book /Does Altruism Exist?/, in which he repeatedly emphasizes that the evolution of altruism requires competition between groups, and then speculates about a future world in which everyone is altruistic and at peace, noticeably NOT pointing out that this contradicts his repeated explicit statements that that is impossible.
But the contrast in the story is not between [cancer] and altruism, it's between [cancer] and (specifically, literally, explicitly) everything else. There's obviously plenty of ways to escape [cancer] that don't rely on altruism at all.
(I think "cancer" is a great tell regarding what Scott was getting at. Cancer is a dead end for a structure that relies on cooperation, including the cancer cells themselves. You don't need altruism to discourage cancer at that point, a selfish desire not to self-destruct perfectly suffices. )
You do need altruism to discourage cancer. The altruism is performed by those cells which don't turn cancerous. This evolves, and is maintained, only by the competition between groups. The groups are multi-cellular individuals.
In the absence of selection, pediatric cancer should increase, very slowly in human time, but very rapidly in evolutionary time., My Fermi estimate (below) is that most people would be born with cancer after 2800 years without selection.
A close upper bound on the fraction of mutations which assist cancer is 0.1, because cancer cells typically have about 100 mutations, about 10 of which contribute to the cancer. This is an over-estimate because these cells are selected for having cancer. Let's say the true fraction is 0.05. (There's probably a better, more-complicated way of estimating it.)
There are on average 30 de novo mutations per generation; 20-23 of which (ave. 21.5) are non-synonymous. It takes on average 10 such mutations to cause cancer.
Suppose these mutations get mixed homogeneously into the population with every generation. (This is false.) Then the number of such mutations found in a newborn after one generation without selection will? be drawn from the binomial distribution with n=21.5, p=0.05. (This is an approximation; n=21.5 is the mean of another binomial distribution.) If this is right, and I'm not confident that it is, the median person might be born with cancer when npg = 21.5*.05*g = 10, which happens after 10/(21.5*.05) = 9.3 generations (about 279 years). However, this assumes that you get cancer whenever you have 10 pro-cancerous mutations, which is obviously false--in most cases, probably the vast majority of cases some of these will be either redundant, damaging the same of the same pathways, or won't have synergy, as they damage pathways which don't collectively add up to cancer. So this estimate is a lower bound on how long it would take for half the population to have cancer at birth. I'll wildly guess that it's an order of magnitude too low, & thus a better estimate would be 2790 years.
We could try to predict the rate of pediatric cancer increase we expect to see in the new study by the CDC (Siegel et al 2023, "Counts, incidence rates, and trends of pediatric cancer in the United States, 2003-2019"), counting pediatric cancer over 16 years (17 data points, 2003-2019), which showed a geometric mean increase of 0.47%. However, I don't have the time to do this properly, and am not sure we have all the data we need to do it.
I'll just check my earlier guestimate by seeing how many years y it would take to reach 50% of the population being born with cancer with a yearly increase of 0.47%. The rates are given per million people, so the point where the median person is born with cancer would be when # cases/million/year = 500,000, & the starting point (2003) is 164.5 per million.
164.5 * r^y = 500,000, r = 1.0047, y log(r) = log(500000/164.5),
y = 1710 years
That's pretty close to "an order of magnitude higher than 279 years". But I don't trust it at all, primarily because the rate of increase per year shouldn't be constant given that it depends on a binomial distribution.
As someone who has been in charge of security cameras for various buildings, you need a LOT of cameras to cover everything and even then they're unlikely to be able to see into spots like behind a parked van or whatever.
I'm guessing that having a security camera follow you around, possibly with a loud voice saying "please leave the premises" is more intimidating than cameras (mostly above line of sight so people don't look at them) that just sit there.
There was a store I visited recently where there was a security camera behind glass right at eye level about 3 feet away as you left the store. Although that was more likely in order to get a good closeup.
Roving cameras still have the problem that you have to program in routes that give you enough coverage though.
So I've only skimmed the critquie of the letter and the defense, but that twitter exchange makes it seem like the entire issue is that this guy (and I guess the 127 other co-signers) think that this theory gets more media attention than it's empirical results warrant, and that equals pseudoscience? That is _bonkers_.
26. On Jaynes - the second part of the critique is much more thorough than the first one. Don't just read the first one and not bother with the rest like I was very tempted to. Revisiting the concept of consciousness as internal narrative and the Bicameral Mind, in a recent Very Bad Wizards podcast (https://verybadwizards.com/episode/episode-267-the-thickness-of-reality) David Pizarro mentioned he doesn't think in language at all, and it takes active effort to convert his thoughts into words - perhaps the Jaynesians should have some conversations with him? He hardly seems to lack "a-consciousness".
When a culture moves from a place where the only way you can learn something is by someone else telling it to you, to a culture where things can be written down and concrete manifestations of the real world can be expressed and manipulated in symbolic forms I think that could have quite a bit of an effect on how people think. Also, it was not everybody by far. Certain cultures, accelerated, and certain cultures cease to exist. We will never really know.
I would submit that learning the calculus changes the way one thinks, for instance.
I don't think in language either. Lots of people don't! I find the Jaynesians' equation of "consciousness" with "thinking in language" somewhere south of hilarious and trending towards offensive. It's such a tremendous lack of imagination for the variance of human experience.
It’s not really what he said. Language is important only that it is a system of symbols in written form. It’s the ability to manipulate internal concepts of things in order to come up with another idea. Mathematics or symbolic logic could be called languages or not. A real world triangle once understood conceptually can be used and manipulated in a lot of ways that don’t involve using the word triangle in your head.
It's a terrible feeling when you're explaining something and you come to some concept in the explanation which seems like it ought to have a word for it, but then you realize that they idea doesn't actually have a word and you have to go into a big digression explaining the concept and totally interrupt your flow. I bet that doesn't happen to people who think with words.
Nah what happens instead is you get stuck in a digression of "I swear there's a word for this, it's on the tip of my tongue... [Bad metaphor] [poor description]" if your counterpart helps you out, then it's fine, otherwise you fumble through then remember the word like 14 hours later and feel like an idiot.
#19 As someone who keeps strictly kosher, with some small exceptions, I'm generally never able to eat at a table with non-kosher food on it. This obviously has serious downsides but not much of the social alienation experienced by the Vegan Liberation Pledge takers.
Main reasons being:
- All of immediate family is also strictly kosher
- Part of community that mostly keeps kosher
How I ensure that I maintain connections with my non-kosher keeping friends? Apart from going out for drinks and movies, we just invite people over a lot and try make the food as awesome as possible.
Over the years I don't really remember anyone remaining strictly kosher for the long term without immediate family who at least keep their home kosher. So the vegan's experiences don't surprise me.
Can you explain more about why this you can't eat with non-kosher people? Is it just that the dishes might not have been washed properly to separate meat and milk, or is there something else?
There isn't a law against eating with non-kosher people. It's just very hard to do while following halacha (jewish law) correctly.
The main reason is because of a concept called Marit Ayin. It has to be very clear that you aren't eating the non-kosher food yourself. Basically so that someone who is unaware but also keeps kosher might not see an obviously religious person eating at a non-kosher restaurant and inadvertently assume the restaurant/food is kosher and partake themselves. This one is usually the hardest one to get around and the law doesn't give much leeway even if you are sure no one will see you (most probably as it's a slippery slope).
Food and dishes also obviously have to be kosher and the levels of strictness once you get into standard orthodoxy are pretty high. In practice, if I get invited to a non-kosher wedding or other catered event and the host is trying to be accommodating, they will usually contact one of the kosher caterers in the city who will deliver a plastic wrapped meal to the venue (like a nice-ish airplane meal). Generally the fact that you are eating such an obviously different meal using disposable plates and cutlery is considered enough of a visual indicator that someone wouldn't assume you are eating the non-kosher food.
Obviously all of the above doesn't happen very often though so in practice it's very rare that I end up eating on tables with non-kosher food.
You're skipping the most important difference! You aren't refusing to eat at a table with non-kosher food as part of an effort to force the world to become orthodox, and you aren't demanding that people keep a kosher table as the price for being your friend. You're placing the demand on yourself, not anyone else.
#18 - this was the only data I could find to support my hypothesis that eggplant use is correlated with cuisine quality (I made it into a silly one-pager at eggplantindex.com).
I am still unclear how crypto is supposed to help the unbanked/debanked/oppressed.
The US government has made fiat to crypto transfers visibly harder without trying very hard; the capability to cut off all manner of alternative and mainstream banking has already been abundantly demonstrated via Canadian bankers.
Seems the problem is really reining in the source of power over money, not the specific form of value.
Non-centralized crypto can be used without any bank or other organization seeing, let alone controlling, that transaction. It's how the Silk Road lasted - the government was extremely aware of the sales going on, but had no means to control the transactions. They were also anonymous, since they were tracked on the blockchain instead of through normal channels.
Centralized crypto, on the other hand, loses those benefits because the organization handling the transactions has to keep records and it becomes a point where government can notice and interject.
Government can't control that particular transaction, but for you to be able to make it, you need access to crypto/fiat exchanges of some kind, and it's easy to make those very onerous/risky outside of a trusted underground network.
Agreed, so long as the government does either of 1) Connects crypto wallets to individual people, or 2) seeks to control all crypto to/from fiat transactions.
I am not sure what's possible with 1, but they definitely would like to control 2.
If the crypto economy grows large enough you will never need crypto to fiat as you can just ignore fiat for your entire life. We're not there yet but that's the goal.
Silk Road lasted only because the tools did not yet exist to easily trace the blockchain.
This situation is no longer true. Even before the advent of tools like Chainanalysis, it was perfectly possible to do tracing but the Feds are simply not as "into" this type of deep grunt work as some in the private sector are.
Silk Road was also a very specific marketplace. You can't buy food on Silk Road. You can't pay rent on Silk Road. You can't get paid legal wages on Silk Road. You can't buy a bus ticket, and airplane ticket, etc etc.
For people in the real world who have to eat, rent, get transport - fiat is the only way to go in the vast, vast majority of cases.
As for your assertion about "decentralized crypto" being in any way more beneficial: even disregarding the fact that the miners are heavily centralized and the exchanges are heavily centralized and that any fiat-crypto transaction MUST be regulate-able by government, the offset of no "centralization" is the utter lack of protection against grift, con, scam and even violent crime.
That's one of the core scams of crypto: the implicit assumption that the stability and protections of the fiat financial environment are replicated in the decentralized one.
No disagreement here. I've been dismissive of crypto for a long time, but at the beginning it was being promoted specifically as anti-centralized. Back then miners were independent and there were no exchanges.
In order to gain legitimacy - and get away from the perception it was all "grift, con, scam, and even violent crime" there were a number of steps taken. Those steps were good for crypto and the early investors who wanted money. It was bad for the decentralization.
> The safety movement is concerned that Amazon might have enough power to steamroll over Anthropic’s safety-conscious culture; this did happen with DeepMind and Google, didn’t with OpenAI and Microsoft, and my guess is Anthropic held out for a good enough deal (and had enough bargaining power) that it won’t happen there either.
The AI safety movement is to computing as bioethicists are to biology and medicine, right down to calling themselves the "safety movement".
The biosafety movement isn't bioethicists. "Biosafety" means the people whose job it is to prevent lab leaks and stuff like that. Honestly I think we could use a couple more of them.
(and yes, most of the AI safety people are also biosafety in this sense, in the sense that the same EA grantmakers fund both).
The fact that some group calls themselves "safety" doesn't mean other groups aren't doing the same thing. What do you think the bioethicists would say they want?
Note: if you find the giant plane in @5 to be exciting, thrilling, scary or upsetting in a way that transcends all rationality, you probably have megalophobia/philia!
In some ways that would not be a concern. Takeoff and landing both involve acceleration, so tend to use a lot of fuel. A larger vehicle may also use less fuel per kilogram of mass due to drag being a function of surface area while mass is a function of volume.
I think it would not be workable using actual jet fuel though. Refueling today involves tricky flying in conditions that are not optimal for less fuel use. So it's only used when you absolutely must keep that specific plane in the air longer and you can't just land and refuel there.
Changing to a power system that doesn't need refueling, e.g. a theoretical nuclear reactor that can get off the ground keeps other problems. The crew can only fly so long and where do they sleep? Docking/undocking to transfer cargo and passengers would be a nightmare. Etc.
There needs to be a word for "saying things that are probably true, but saying them with an unjustified degree of confidence". Because this is the current standard mode of communication shoved down our throats by those with the big megaphones regarding things like election fraud and covid and global warming and so forth.
The fact that they say "Noooo, of course there was no fraud, shut up you lunatic" instead of saying "Well yeah, obviously there's always some fraud, but come on, it's unlikely that it's going to amount to a hundred thousand net votes in several different states" makes me very suspicious. But in reality it probably doesn't make them wrong, it just makes them terrible people.
"It never happens, and if it does that's a good thing" attitude.
A couple years back I looked at the Mariposa County results, as that was very disputed, in part because of a long-standing perception that elections there were corrupt and rigged, because previous election - Mariposa and surrounding counties all red. That election - surrounding counties remain red, Mariposa flips blue, this wins the state for Biden. *Looks* suspicious, but is it?
Digging down into the results, Mariposa was red in 2016 by a slim margin, and turned blue in 2020 by a slim margin (I think but can't remember definitely that it was something like 5,000 votes). Now, that *could* be the result of vote fraud, but it could also, perfectly credibly, be wibbly voters who had been swayed to Trump in 2016 being swayed to Biden in 2020. No fraud needed or proven.
But when there was such blanket denial that any fraud could possibly have taken place at all ("most secure election ever!") that was a terrible reaction born of pure defensiveness and didn't help the same way explaining debatable results like Mariposa would have. Different states had different standards, and when I read one (can't remember the particular state) that accepted post-in votes up to a week after the ballot ended, with no postmark being needed - well, can you blame anyone for thinking this was less than secure and could be exploited for fraud?
I think you're confusing "D's now basically admit" with "I wrongly believe".
Strong disagree - when it's software engineers and physicists, but not marketing analysts or schoolteachers, you're selecting for nerdiness (or at least intelligence).
Doctors and lawyers are intelligent too but have high divorce rates.
I think the really important factor here is a lack of women in the workplace. Many marriages are ended by an affair with a colleague, so working in a 90% male office makes that particular failure mode a lot less likely.
I predict rolling machine setters are also 90% male, but they're in the highest-divorce-rate jobs.
Do you have stats on doctors and lawyers?
Right, there's obviously a class component as well. But within white-collar middle-class professions, the ones with the most extremally low divorce rates are the ones where men rarely interact with women.
The full data is here so we're not stuck staring at the extremes https://flowingdata.com/2017/07/25/divorce-and-occupation/ ... I was wrong, and physicians and surgeons have low divorce rates. Lawyers are high among white collar professions but low compared to blue collar jobs.
As far as intelligence, it is true that lawyers and doctors have high intelligence relative to members of other professions*: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1652215081499860995 citing: https://gwern.net/doc/iq/ses/2023-wolfram.pdf.
As far as divorce rates, they appear to have slightly higher divorce rates than actuaries, physical scientists, and software developers (17%, 19%, and 20% respectively).
Physicians and surgeons have a divorce rate of 22% and the "legal industry" has a divorce rate of 35%: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/divorce/divorce-statistics/.
*I say relative to members of other professions, since even the high IQ professions listed there, were still below 115. In the past, however, such fields were more elite and had average IQs of over 130: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1652892831332159489
I think even if nerds worked in a place with way more females they still would have a lot fewer office affairs than doctors and lawyers. But I’m not sure the reason they’d have fewer affairs is that they are more loyal to their wives or have more self-control. Initiating an affair when married still calls for social skills, being willing to put yourself out there and seduction skills. Maybe nerds are just worse at getting someone to have an affair with them than non-nerds.
Doctors and lawyers are educated and intelligent, but can be much more on the “jock” end of the nerd/jock axis.
I think that's an obvious idea, I've seen many references to it before. It's just the practical implementation (and the cost of designing, manufacturing and maintaining the system that can do that) is the challenge. I think I'd pay some additional money for a car that can do that, but I have no idea if that would cover the added complexity... I suspect it'd take a while until it becomes a feature of mainstream car models, if at all.
>1. - 3. Temperatures have been completely stable in the USA for nearly two decades when measured from the actual state of the art weather station network the US gov operates, and which climatologists conspicuously refuse to use. Go here, then select "All months" and observe the perfectly flat trend which stretches back to the day the network opened:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/national-temperature-index/time-series/anom-tavg/1/0
>Please try to square that with the statement that records were broken in the USA.
As you wish.
If you download the plotted data and compute the linear trend, you get 0.29 C/decade, which is not perfectly flat. It happens to be a larger trend than the globe as a whole. Hard to see by eye because of the large month-to-month variability, but it's a bit easier to eyeball if you plot the annual averages instead:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/national-temperature-index/time-series/anom-tavg/ann/12
Then you get records (which I define as the largest value ever recorded at a given station or over a given area) when some parts of the US are much warmer than the statewide average and some parts are much cooler.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/county/mapping/110/tavg/202308/3/rank
In other words, your initial claim of zero trend was not only factually wrong but meaningless.
If you are going to make arguments that you know are facetious, take them somewhere else and don't waste our time .
Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if our visual cortex included an integrator with variable, controlled integration periods? I'd love to be able to look at a noisy graph and immediately resolve the underlying trends.
"Consciousness is inherently hard to study," as Scott says. And so is climate, because we only have one Earth to measure, it's an extremely complex system, there's no way to run experiments, and predictions can often only be verified over the course of decades. It's arguably a more *important* field than consciousness, but just because we'd *really like* it to be tractable doesn't make it so.
Most people would have no trouble with the claim that it's possible everything "experts" think about consciousness is wrong. But so many rationalists, including Scott, don't apply this same level of skepticism to claims that we "understand" climate science except for a handful of ignorant deniers.
Huh, looking at that data I see an extremely obvious trendline that starts going up around 1990.
Yes, that really is the best explanation they could come up with for how 'Defund the Police' could work in reality. In other words, it could never work.
What's the significance of the difference between "law" and "custom" here? It just seems like a tautological terminological dispute with no bearing on the situation. In practice I don't see why a modern society couldn't stick with highly codified, consensus, written rules (as opposed to needing to "drum up a set of social customs for scratch"), whatever you want to call them; and why we couldn't keep formalised institutions whose job is to be very knowledgeable about those and serve as arbiters in disputes relating to them. There are big problems with the "outlaw" system, but this doesn't seem like one of them.
Because people won't follow rules unless there are consequences. Not enough of them anyway. And those consequences are literally what the police are.
We have already done this bit of exploration of the solution space.
The consequences, in the proposed alternative state, are that if you murder somebody you have to do a whole lot of community service or you have to accept outlawry and with it a substantial reduction in life expectancy. It isn't necessary that vigilantes kill *every* outlaw, or that *no* law-abiding citizen be killed, for outlawry to be worse than non-outlawry. So, negative consequences to going around murdering people.
I prefer the current system, where the negative consequences are implemented by the police. But something like the proposed alternative has worked in the past, and it is erroneous to say that it is fundamentally unworkable and/or that it has no consequences for rulebreaking.
It works in radically smaller societies with much less density and "wilderness" where there is in effect exile. Until we start packing up C-130s and dropping prisoners off in the Congo or Antarctica it really isn't an option.
Either that or just hundreds of thousands (millions?) more murders for a few years. I honestly suspect most western societies would collapse in less than a decade under such a system. The violence spiral would spread quickly.
Ancient Greeks used the same word, νόμος, to refer to both law and custom.
For point 7, the one on the right seems to have a cat ear right in the center of the picture, not to mention lines that make me see whiskers. It seems pretty obvious to me, so I'm wondering if this is a typical mind thing?
I hope you mean the one on the left?
Oops, yes I do, I can't see the pictures when I commented. So yes, the one on the left
I stared at those pictures til my eyes bled and didn’t see no cat.
Look in the upper-right corner, there are some obvious tabby-like vertical stripes and some triangular shapes that could read as ears. EDIT: also in the left image, directly above the driver's cab door, there appears to have been what looks a *lot* like a cat's right ear superimposed over the image, possibly continuous with the rest of a cat's face superimposed on the rest of the train (suggestive but difficult to make out). It's a sharp-cornered orange-brown feature rather than a more purely dark foliage shadow.
I appreciate your valiant effort to describe where you see these things. But I fail to perceive them. Too bad we can't post photos in the replies. I'd like to see what you're talking about with some helpful arrows and circles.
Wow this is really interesting. For me it was like, "of course people say it's more catlike it literally has ghostly cat ears"
Huh? It's so obvious that I thought it was a joke or something. Wild that some people can't see it. Have you considered that you may just be an NPC?
Yeah, I wonder what the difference is. I did very well in a semester long color mixing course, so I don't think it's partial color blindness, but I cannot see it at all. My husband can see it a bit, and ones like the New York picture much faster than I can.
What would NPC have to do with not seeing the cat? And I'm not color blind. But my visual perceptions seem to be more along the autistic spectrum than normal people. For instance, I'm able to pick out underlying patterns hidden in a lot of noise quickly because I immediately focus on a detail of the pattern and visually connect my way through a pattern — rather than taking in a gestalt of the picture (not sure I'm explaining this well). So, even though I now see the "cat ear" object in the lefthand image of the train, the train refuses to resolve itself as a cat to me. I was never able to see the images in those magic eye patterns, either. And I've never been able to see the cat in the Georgian cat image (link below). I've given up trying.
The funny thing though, is I've probably got a better ability to distinguish subtle hue differences in colors than most people. And I used to have a photographic memory for maps and diagrams (but that's faded with old age). I could accurately draw a map or diagram from a single viewing—which made me a whiz at geography. Nowhere near as good as Stephen Wiltshire, though (second link below). I could only remember 2-d images. He can do it 3-D!
https://www.henrygeorge.org/catsup.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire#:~:text=Stephen%20Wiltshire%20MBE%2C%20Hon.,after%20seeing%20it%20just%20once.
I don't think anyone claims the train "resolves itself as a cat to the viewer". They're just saying that the left image have certain features which look like cat ears etc. so of course an AI would score that image as more "cat-like" than the right image.
The cat in the upper right is visible in both pictures, though.
The cat ear is in the dark green foliage above the center of the train. Don't feel bad; I had to turn up my monitor brightness by a lot in order to see it. You might even need to turn off your blue light filter (if you have one).
OK. I can see the cat-ear-shaped object that you're talking about in the foliage. It doesn't help me to resolve the cat face in the train, though. To me the "ear" vaguely resembles a giant manta ray with its tail behind it crashing into the train. Lol! Now that you've pointed out the "ear" I can't unsee the manta ray.
I can see it on the PC but not on my phone. This explains the Google antitrust case.
😆
Wow you are right. I don't know how I missed that
The left picture look like it was Deep Dreamed a bit (though those usually produced dog faces and pagodas).
I see it as well. Does someone want to help me out with the text in the skyscrapers, though? The obvious text Scott referred to is nevertheless eluding me.
New York in the dark space between the skyscrapers
Ahhh....yes, I see it now. Thank you.
Thank you! Cat was fast but could not get that one until I saw your answer here.
Maybe we should get a |Spoiler| tag
I've stared at both of these pics for 10 minutes, and I can't perceive any difference between the two pictures except that the chromatic values of the greens in the foliage seem to be different. Not sure if I'm seeing a difference in contrast between the two. I do happen to see two eyes and a smile on the cow-catcher in both the photos, though.
Full disclosure, when I take the pattern detection test for autism, I test as autistic. So, even though I don't consider myself to be autistic, I seem to be quite neurodivergent at least when it comes to visual perception.
Have you ever done those "magic eye" images that were popular in, I think, the late 80s early 90s? The trick is to defocus your eyes slightly, as if you're looking at something behind the picture, or as if you have a 1000-yard stare. Doing that with a pair of side-by-side images, like this pair, can make the differences jump out more clearly.
This blog has discussed Georgist ideas before, so it isn't too surprising that many here can see the cat.
https://www.henrygeorge.org/catsup.htm
**applause**
This is the most SSC comment ever, and I love it.
Yeah, I saw the cat ear too. Seemed obvious.
#7 it literally looks like there is a faint picture of a cat superimposed on the train on the left. I would think the selection would be practically unanimous.
I saw the cat in the leaves above the train cabin
Same here.
It helps that it's an unusually catlike train to begin with. The driver's windscreen panels and the little red circle already have roughly the right shape and proportions to look like a cat's eyes and mouth.
You wouldn't get this result without an already catlike locomotive (this is a sentence I have never written before).
I don't think that's it. As other commentators are saying, there's a faint picture of a cat superimposed on the adversarial image, that humans can see.
I can barely see the ear above the left train. Maybe this is a visual contrast thing? I’m nearly 50 and have less good contrast than I used to
Yes. Anyone else see a giraffe similarly superimposed on the right image?
I see an ostrich/emu-shaped bird on top of the train in the shadows of the foliage.
For 6, the giant plane: does anyone know the name of a sci-fi novel featuring huge passenger planes that circle the Earth, never landing, refueling in mi-air? Passengers use small shuttle planes to dis/embark. It was written no later than early-80's.
That sounds like Timothy Zahn's story "Between a Rock and a High Place", published in Analog in 1982. IIRC the large, permanently flying craft was called a Skyport, and the plot involved a feeder plane crashing into it in a way that didn't immediately take it down but made it impossible to evacuate.
Yes, this is it! Thank you.
Also on the giant plane: you refer to a normal-sized plane "bottom left", which I think should be "bottom right".
Based on my knowledge this is not possible with most fusion designs which don't have the thrust to weight ratio to fly but may be possible with Zap and Helion's reactors. Particularly Helion which wouldn't require a steam generator. They may reach tantalizing levels of performance in the next few years looking to demonstrate step before a full size reactor results
27: Rolling machine setters, operators, and tenders? One of these things is not like the others.
They're just too desirable to stick to one partner.
"Brandy, you're a fine girl" (you're a fine girl)
"What a good wife you would be" (such a fine girl)
"But my life, my lover, my lady is setting, operating, and tending rolling machines"
This is great.
5, flying aircraft carrier: The Soviets actually did make something like this, though not nearly as big. It was done by sticking fighters on existing bombers, and it turns out that while they added weight, they also increased its lift ability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zveno_project
16, defund the police: Doesn't this proposal rely on the fact that societally you have majority support, or at least a very significant minority? Also would those who want Chauvin punished be happy with something like community service? (Also killing someone because they didn't do the right amount of community service seems like it would cause more problems than it solves, especially for those advocating defunding the police...)
Not relevant, but I also like the exchange in the classroom.
Jennings : Don't write this down, but I find Milton probably as boring as you find Milton. Mrs. Milton found him boring too. He's a little bit long-winded, he doesn't translate very well into our generation, and his jokes are terrible.
[Bell rings, students rise to leave]
Jennings : But that doesn't relieve you of your responsibility for this material. Now I'm waiting for reports from some of you... Listen, I'm not joking. This is my job!
It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.
Like, Joe the Random Shoplifter gets sentenced to community service, and he fails to do it. Is anyone sufficiently bloodthirsty to go murder him over it?
What if he's part of a gang, and I'm pretty sure that his gang will murder me if I kill him? And those murderers feel confident that they can murder any further state-sanctioned killers that come their way to murder them?
When this kind of thing was tried in medieval Iceland, did it lead to a just and peaceful society, or did it lead to generations-long blood feuds and shockingly high levels of axe murder?
Turning into Medieval Iceland would be a step down for a lot of places but it would probably be a step up for, say, Philadelphia. So yeah, why not?
>It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.
That's not obvious. If it's legal to take an outlaw's stuff (it usually is), well, then, you have to deal with enterprising gentlemen who make "killing outlaws for their stuff" their entirely-legal profession (the most recent case of this I'm aware of is privateers, who typically weren't paid by the state issuing the letter of marque).
The problem of warlords/gangs that can defy such gentlemen, however, is a real one.
The "defying efforts to kill them" issue seems like a serious one even without bringing gangs and warlords into the picture.
If you have a regular person who's already known to have a gun and a propensity for violence who's declared an outlaw, they're probably not going to want to be killed, and will make efforts to defend themself. If someone tries to kill them and take they're stuff, they'll probably try to kill them back. The other person isn't legal to murder, but so what? They're already an outlaw.
If out of every several people condemned to outlawry, at least one ends up killing more people in defense of their life and property, then the system ends up looking a whole lot worse than our current police force.
The English privateers in fact were paid by the state, in theory at least. Every ship they captured was supposed to be brought in to an English port to be condemned as being a valid target. If this happened, the ship and its cargo could then be sold.
If the court ruled against the capture, the captain (the one with the letter) was personally liable for compensation to the owners of ship and cargo - and likely would be bankrupt as a result.
Now there were a lot of ways around this. The courts in the Caribbean were much more lenient (and much faster) than the ones in England, since they were often short on things and ships. A personal relationship between the owner of the letter and the governor could cover many sins. The downside was that they were often also short on cash money.
For that matter, a privateer with a letter for e.g. French ships, could take a Danish ship (or take a ship and then find out it was Danish). They could then take it to e.g. a Portuguese colony for condemnation and sale. The "condemnation" in this case would likely be very informal.
It could be chancy to do this if word got back to England though - the ship owners could end up suing the letter owner in English court, likely years later. It would be an uphill battle, but still expensive.
>The English privateers in fact were paid by the state, in theory at least. Every ship they captured was supposed to be brought in to an English port to be condemned as being a valid target. If this happened, the ship and its cargo could then be sold.
That is not what I'd call "paid by the state". They were taking stuff from merchants, and then selling it to - for the most part - other merchants, with the state's permission; no money was coming out of the state's coffers except if the state happened to be the buyer. The state could be literally bankrupt and the privateers could still sell to someone else. And certainly they're not being paid for the attack *per se*.
You are correct - the state did not pay privateers to attack ships. Sometimes it was the other way around - the privateer would pay for the letter (or at least set up a bond). Though that would have been quite limited in time; privateering was pretty chancy; I doubt you could charge much for a license most years and get any takers.
There were things like "ship money", but that was paid to actual navy crew. The navy could "bring in" a captured ship, but that was more like buying a used car at auction.
Privateers were intended as a less formal expansion of the navy, so to make sense they had to be cheaper for the state than building and crewing more navy ships.
It's also possible that this was intended to (sort of) regulate something that might happen anyway - there was a lot of rationalizing by the English that the Spanish considered all non-Spanish in the New World to be pirates and bandits already...
Aren't bounty hunters a simple and modern example of this? If you skip bail, a bondsman will send some armed thug after you (or a professional, but the point is that they could basically send a thug)
No; bounty hunters are paid by the person sending them, not in stuff they loot from the target.
This conversation is about how and whether one could enforce laws without the state paying for police.
> No; bounty hunters are paid by the person sending them, not in stuff they loot from the target.
Can't they just wave a magic wand and call it "civil forfeiture"?
(mostly joking here)
Privateering worked bc ships were filled with valuables, or at the very least the ship itself was valuable. Getting in deadly confrontations to get somebody's clothes and smartphone sounds very stupid unless somebody has ulterior motives.
His house, though?
... How many criminals do you think own real property?
Most likely, you'd be ridding an owner of a troublesome tenant, and such owner would owe you nothing more than a pat on the back for the service
Plus the problem of de facto death penalty for failing to turn up for your community service! Pretty sure defunding advocates would regard this as a bug rather than a feature (as would I, naturally).
The gang thing gets to the interesting part of this - thinking about why it wouldn't work in, say, modern America even to the extent it worked in Iceland. For it to work, you need a broad majority of people who 1) like the law basically as it is, 2) trust the judgments of the courts at least enough to use them as a focal point and accept them if they disagree and 3) are willing (able?) to use at least enough violence that their numerical preponderance overwhelms any other group of people.
The US is an interesting case, because the Old West (at least in books/films, I know nothing about the real world version) was able to at least use the posse system which is in the same ball park. On the "do I buy it" heuristic, I feel like this would work in rural Wyoming, but not remotely in Chicago (neither of which have I ever been to).
The only thing I know of real posse is what a friend learned about his Grandfather from Ancestory.com of all places. He knew his mother was the child of an older man, but never heard much about his grandfather. Until he got an ancestry.com account. He found a newspaper article about the trial of the posse that murdered his uncle and grandfather—who definitely had it coming. His grandfather and uncle were outlaws in a remote Arizona farming community, I don't know the dates, probably 1920s. On Sundays—when everyone was in Church—they'd steal every tool and implement from a farm. When the posse caught up to them, they were strung up, and shot into two parts. Only there was an observer who was not in the posse who reported this to the state police.
If you steal the farming tools from a subsistence farmer, you're condemning his family to death. So like I said, they had it coming.
> It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.
There's always slavery.
One way or another, someone's going to want to do something with the meat that your mind calls home. Bodies are just made of organs that can be used for something else.
>It also removes the ability to punish any crime that nobody really feels like killing you for.
Disagree. There are always people who are willing to kill a man just to watch him die, and aren't terribly picky about which man so long as he lives somewhere near Reno (or wherever is convenient to the wannabe killer). Most of these people would prefer not to spend the rest of their lives in Folsom as a consequence. If the State can officially say, "hey, all you people who ever wanted to kill someone just to watch them die, if you kill *this*, then we don't put you in prison and maybe we even call you a hero!", then it will probably inspire action even against an outlaw whose boring tax-law violations would otherwise never get anyone's blood boiling.
Even more so if the killer gets to keep the outlaw's stuff.
So there's plausibly a stable equilibrium in which each community has say a hundred such wannabe killers, and every criminal who gets caught just meekly does their assigned community service or whatever because the first one stupid enough to choose outlawry is going to have a hundred guns after them. Even the protection of a gang might not be enough against those odds.
Of course there's also a stable equilibrium in which nobody does their community service, there are thousands of nominal outlaws walking around, all of them feeling pretty secure because odds are that the one killer who would eventually have chosen them as a target will instead have been killed by one of the ten other outlaws he picked first. And plenty of other reasons not to want to implement this plan, even if we would get some cool new Sagas out of it.
The question really comes down to whether Youtube or Twitch would allow you to monetize the video of you hunting down and killing various criminals across the country. If so then there would definitely be 'content creators' filling that void in the market.
Also relevant is whether 'it's ok to kill this person' means 'it's ok to kill this person and take their stuff' or 'it's ok to threaten to kill this person in order to mug them' or etc. Having an asymetrical right to kill someone gives you a lot of power over them that can be easily exploited to gain things other than the simple joy of murder, if the law allows it.
community service isn't a thing if you haven't someone who actually compels you to do the service.
It's the whole libertarian mantra about how the government threatens to kill you if you don't pay your taxes : yes, ultimately every system of punishment must be able to excalate until obedience is obtained, otherwise the system doesn't work.
It is amazing how many people don't understand this. At the foundation of all enforcement is well FORCE.
Yup. There's a reason why the polisci definition of a "state" is "a [political entity] that maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence".
I think you've misread or misunderstood something.
The proposal is "community service, or we declare that it's now legal to kill you and take your stuff". That's a threat of force, but it doesn't actually need police to enforce it.
Gangs remain problematic, but as far as killing-for-shoplifting goes, it seems reasonable to extend the idea to different levels of outlaw-ness. Maybe for petty crimes the judge can declare that it’s legal to steal your stuff and call you names, but murder’s still out.
It still means any punishment is limitless. If you get caught stealing a loaf of bread (though without police, who would catch you?), then everything you own is now fair game. People talk about a cycle of poverty, but this seems even worse.
Oh I wouldn't want to live in this society, to be clear. I just think it *could* reach a stable equilibrium (or at any rate, the reasons it couldn't, e.g. gangs, are not the same as the counterargument you were gesturing at).
Yeah I'm sure it could do that, I'm just arguing any implementation would be far worse than today for everything the Defund the Police crowd cares about.
If you have no police, then the shopkeeper catches you. He can't hand you over to the police, so what do you think happens then?
Police are to protect the criminal from the public, as mob justice is famously error-prone.
Or you do the community service/pay the fine that the court orders; at the moment if you don't do that you're sent to prison. In any system, option 1 is stealing stuff's illegal, in which case there's either a penalty a thief doesn't have to co-operate with (incarceration/execution/mutilation/outlawry) or a penalty the thief needs to cooperate with (fines/community service) backed up the threat of a non-co-operative penalty if they don't co-operate. Option 2 is no penalty or an unenforceable co-operation-requiring penalty.
Of course, if you had a purely digital currency then fines become a non-co-operative penalty, and similarly things like employment blacklists or social credit systems could work in the same way.
In the given example, you would probably be assigned a relatively small amount of community service or fine for shoplifting. The punishment would only be limitless if you refuse to comply.
(this doesn't mean it's a good idea and I think even the contest winner was more interested in creativity than practicality)
#15 Two points. To your question, my understanding is that the Czech government has been giving very generous subsidies to parents for almost 20 years now (in the range of $10,000 per child per year). Looks like it's having the intended effect. Link below.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/07/improve-us-birth-rate-give-parents-money-and-time/619367/
That being said, making sense of this graph for other countries is complicated by the changes in the scale of the birth rates. Top birth rate changes from >1.96 to >1.76. Just pointing that out for others to beware.
The trouble with flat-rate subsidies to parents is that you largely wind up incentivising poor people to breed, whereas what you _want_ is to encourage rich people to breed.
My preferred solution is to allow tax thresholds to be shared across a whole family. So if the top tax rate cuts in at $200K for a single and $400K for a couple it should be $600K for a couple with one kid, $800K for a couple with two kids, and so on.
As another low fertility rich person, I agree with everything you said. It’s a hard problem to solve.
I would expect that subsidies are going to make the biggest difference in a family where it tips the scales towards the wife becoming a stay-at-home mom. Because the decision to become a SAHM is associated with a higher probability of additional children -- the marginal cost of another child is now much lower.
I think this scenario is common enough in the upper middle-class: the husband is a businessman, engineer, lawyer, or doctor; his wife is a teacher, nurse, administrative worker, etc., whose gross salary is around 1/3 to 1/2 of his, less than that on an after-tax basis. She could quit her job, and she's not exactly passionate about her work and probably a little burnt out by the time her 30s arrive, but the pinch from the lower income will be a little painful, particularly in his late 20s or early 30s when his career is still gathering steam but key baby-making years (he might be earning 2x her income at age 30 but 4x at age 50).
I agree. Good childcare is better than extra cash, because cash often can't buy you good childcare. It would probably help if part-time jobs were more available (also for men!); then two partners could each have a job and have enough time left for kids.
Not to tell you about yourself, but that last paragraph is a really big impact. A lot of the problems become easier when you start sooner, but many people wait because they want to get "established" first (whatever that means to them). So extra money isn't to incentivize people of your age, but to instead help them feel safe to start sooner.
See https://thezvi.substack.com/p/fertility-rate-roundup-1
My solution is cheaper housing.
I think that's a bit of a red herring. They are not, as they say, printing any more land. So "cheaper housing" either means:
1. More housing in undesirable areas, or
2. Denser housing in desirable areas.
But 1 already exists, there's loads of cheap housing in undesirable areas and people still don't choose to move there. And 2 is probably counterproductive, because you don't want to raise a big family in a goddamned high-rise apartment, you want to raise them in a big house with a proper backyard.
There's also
3. Make more areas be desirable.
Or, if you are a Georgist, accept that housing in desirable areas costs a lot purely because of supply and demand, but extract as tax the part of the profit that’s due to area being desirable and not due to the landlord building a particularly appealing dwelling.
Then, however, you circle back to the question of what to do with the funds collected this way, and if subsidizing parents is the right thing to do, whether to give more money to specific groups of parents.
This is a Europe vs US thing. In the US, you could literally do a China and just build 20 new megacities* in the Great Plains, give businesses epic tax breaks/subsidies to move there, and use the resulting de-densification to reduce house prices.
In Europe, adopting US-style zoning rules and better infrastructure would probably reduce house prices enough to push commutable family houses into affordability territory, even before any further price effect from bursting housing bubbles.
*Realistically even 5 kilocities would probably be plenty.
We lack the resources to supply the houses. We can build houses all day, getting water to them is another matter.
We could take water away from farms—as is the constant mantra from the land developers; but then what would we eat?
What is the difference between “US style” zoning rules and European rules (though the latter surely change from state to state)?
If govt gave me $100,000 in cash for each child I would have to have about 4 children before I'd financially ahead rather than if they just gave me cheap housing instead.
PS: My metric for housing affordability is average area income to average housing price ratio.
The idea of raising a family in a house with a big backyard is very American. Lot of people do not see that as a necessary component of raising a family. Hell, you don't even have to leave America. How many people in NYC or Chicago are raising their kids with big back yards? If you live in a desirable area presumably there are other benefits that make up for what you're losing.
I've never met a kid raised in an apartment who wasn't an emotionally stunted drone.
That is the system in France, you divide the total salary by (adults + (kids/2)) below 3 kids. Starting from the third kid, they count as 1 each, and not 1/2.
If your population is crashing hard enough I don't think you care about who is doing the breeding. You just need people.
"If your population is crashing hard enough I don't think you care about who is doing the breeding. You just need people."
If the new people are net resource consumers (or even net tax consumers) then more can be bad. For the same reason that you can't make up in volume a loss on each item sold.
>If the new people are net resource consumers (or even net tax consumers) then more can be bad.
That does sound like a good argument against rich people breeding, but I'm afraid the problem is not the number of rich individuals, but the amount of resources they have at their disposal.
If you structure the flat-rate subsidy as a discount from say, income tax, then it wouldn't be as bad. Truly poor people aren't paying any income tax so they get no benefit from having more kids.
I suspect a lot of ills are driven by massive income inequality. If poor people have lots of children, that doesn't help. But if rich people have lots of children, that splits up their fortune among many more people, which probably has a net benefit to the economy by diluting the wealth that a very small group of people control.
You could, perhaps, calculate how many children should people have, given their available resources. If they don't have the right number of children, they should be taxed the equivalent amount it would cost for someone without their resources to have kids - a wealth based quota. The tax money could be used to subsidise poorer families who want to have kids, but maybe comes with some caveats (e.g you must enrol your child in school) as a safeguard against this system driving child neglect. I don't want this system being used by the kind of people who have 10 homeschooled kids who come out the other end believing vaccines cause autism or whatever.
Oh, and children that someone claims are theirs would naturally be entitled to a share of the wealth. The moment this person stops being a legal dependent / heir, the tax obligations apply.
This is unlikely to affect most people, but it'll give the highest net worth individuals incentive to adopt or create new dependents without punishing the poor.
And anyway, this is already happening in lots of places - since I'm childless, I don't get any childcare benefits, but get taxed the same to fund it. I don't mind because children important future taxpayers to later support me. I do think if there's a perceived need to create more people, the kids should have access to the overall resources of the nation rather than just their parents' - having more resources for future taxpayers will keep them healthier (hence cheaper to keep alive) and better educated.
I'm Czech. With a kid. The subsidies are quite high, but not as much as you state - it is currently $13k in total, for most people this is split into three years (so $360 per month). This typically adds around 1/4th of one person's average salary (the woman, sometimes also the man, typically doesn't work until the child is 3 years old or does only part-time). This really leads to speculations that poor people have children just for the sake of this benefit, but of course this is difficult to prove.
The amount was increased substantially from $9500 in 2020, but the increase is gradual so I don't think this is the main reason.
As for the data itself, I suspected some change of methodology, but it seems it is legit. See this graph of the Czech statistical office ("Graf 19", PDF page 33, black line): https://www.czso.cz/documents/10180/165603915/13011822.pdf/48325f59-e080-4991-a04c-643441673e17?version=1.3
Czech sources mention as the main reason for the increasing numbers were stable economy and the increase of the subsidies (plus some changes in the way they are paid).
By the way, for 2022 the numbers are back to 1.66, reportedly mainly because of covid and they are expected to go down because of the Ukraine war and economy stagnation.
Good to know. Thanks for the corrections.
My understanding from a couple of podcasts that interviewed researchers focused on natalist policies is that there's very little evidence that subsidies get anyone to have a kid they didn't want to have -- the policies that work at all are letting people have a kid they wanted, but felt they wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford.
(I'm pretty sure on one of them was on Vox's The Weeds. This article has some relevant links: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/7/21125303/alaska-basic-income-birth-rate-fertility )
If the policy is making poor people less-poor by enough to have a wanted child, that seems like a huge win, in utilitarian terms?
Yeah, 2021 is basically just an outlier. 2018–2020 were constant 1.71 (and 2017 was 1.69), 2021 jumped to 1.83, but 2022 fell back to 1.62, so possibly just a pregnancy shift in time. 1.71 is still relatively high but not that outstanding. https://www.czso.cz/documents/10180/191186709/13007023g05.xlsx/c0e41af0-9175-4353-ab06-893a281a9cd5?version=1.1
Orban tried this (free money for new parents) in Hungary and it didn't really have an effect. Then he offered young couples an almost rent-free loan of (forgot the exact amount) ~150k, of which 1/3rd would be forgiven for every child the couple had in the next 20 years. Which just before Covid had its first reports and it seemed to work better.
The first gives money to people who already have a baby, the second incentivizes young couples to buy a house, move out, and then have kids. I think this is really interesting (although I'm not a fan of Orban) and am curious which approach works best.
That sounds like a very clever proposal, at least for people who won't blow it all on drugs and bad business decisions.
That would apply in a messed-up situation like most of America. If supply is free to meet demand, I think there isn't a problem?
For what it's worth, human abilities to predict adversarial examples have been known since at least 2019: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08931-6
Thanks for linking this. I've always thought the existence of adversarial image misclassifications by CNNs is not especially surprising, and this paper does a nice job of demonstrating that. Still, one of their conclusions seems a bit different than what I would expect:
"Indeed, although adversarial images are often analogized to optical illusions that flummox human vision, we suggest another analogy: Whereas humans have separate concepts for appearing like something vs. appearing to be that thing—as when a cloud looks like a dog without looking like it is a dog, or a snakeskin shoe resembles a snake’s features without appearing to be a snake, or even a rubber duck shares appearances with the real thing without being confusable for a duck—CNNs are not permitted to make this distinction, instead being forced to play the game of picking whichever label in their repertoire best matches an image (as were the humans in our experiments)."
I think they missed a better analogy. A CNN misclassifying an adversarial example is more analogous to a specific human momentarily misidentifying an object. Everyone regularly has experiences where they misidentify objects in a similar manner to how CNNs misclassify adversarial examples. Just this morning I glanced at some soup cans on my shelf and thought I saw a cat. After an extremely brief moment, I realized it was in fact cans without even superficial resemblance to a cat at all. I cannot duplicate the precise combination of sensations that led me to see the cans as a cat, but CNNs are static and give deterministic results to a static input. My moment of misidentification is akin to a static CNN misidentifying a static input.
You're welcome! I guess you could be right about the static/dynamic thing. But let's imagine a recurrent neural network trained on video -> object classification tasks. I would bet that you could still produce adversarial videos. In this case, I think the distinction the authors raise is apt; resemblance is not the same thing as identity. You'd need a completely different ANN paradigm to replicate this.
I agree they have a useful analogy, especially when you have a situation like a cloud that looks like a dog (should the CNN output "cloud" or "dog"). Completely reasonable to be concerned about resemblance vs identity. I think this sort of adversarial image should also be very robust against random perturbations. Maybe it's even the more relevant sort of adversarial image, considering the AI generated images we see in link 8.
In comparison, when you have one of the adversarial images that to a human clearly looks like a panda, but a certain CNN will output "gibbon" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6572), the analogy doesn't work well. As far as I know, these sorts of images are not robust, and adding a small perturbation will restore the CNN output to "panda".
For video, I agree it should be possible to make an adversarial video, and I think you'll be able to create either of the above types of adversarial images; one that has confusion due to resemblance vs. identity, and one that has a sort of fine-tuned state, but I bet the longer the video the more delicate the second kind of adversarial image will be (compression artifacts might destroy the effect!).
Precisely. This can be phrased in a more general (and more concise) way as contemporary ANNs only really being able to perform System 1 tasks. (Which, not really an issue if you treat them as sophisticated tools with known limitations, but a huge, yet completely unsolved issue if you expect automation - and, further down the line, general intelligence - from them.)
2018:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08195
https://spectrum.ieee.org/hacking-the-brain-with-adversarial-images
The dog/cat example is an unusually good one.
#18: I spent a little time in Peru and thought the food was delightful. That's all. Just felt I needed to stand up for Peru.
#27: low divorce rate ≠ good marriage rate? Without more context, it could just be an artifact of a *lower* marriage rate or a *later* time of first marriage leading to fewer opportunities for divorce.
Certainly in the case of clergy, given how many religions ban marriage!
The Catholics allow non-Catholic priests who are already married to retain their spouses if they convert to Catholicism. A man who does that needs to think long & hard about whether he REALLY wants a divorce.
Wait... really?
Where can I read about the lives of married Catholic priests?!
https://www.ncronline.org/news/father-josh-married-catholic-priest-celibate-world
Married Catholic priests are real but very rare.
"There are around 125 married Roman Catholic priests like Whitfield, an Episcopal convert, across the U.S., experts say, and perhaps a couple hundred total around the world."
Perhaps more important (since Catholic priests are only about 10% of US clergy) is that divorce is a de facto disqualifier for ministry in most of US conservative Protestantism (Evangelicalism). The exception would be churches that are Prosperity Gospel. For example, Paula White. I'm a conservative Protestant but I don't really understand her world, since Biblically she's disqualified for ministry at least 3 times over.
My hometown got a Peruvian restaurant a while ago. The desserts are amazing!
There's a Peruvian chicken place near where I work that's pretty awesome. Never had the desserts though. I'll have to check them out. Any recommendations?
If I remember right, the Chocolucuma was delicious. And they had a fruit mousse that was also quite good.
+1 for Peruvian food. And do try the Peruvian-Chinese combination, which is weirdly enough a thing. The places are called Chifa.
Agree on Peruvian food. After a quick look at that list, there is a high correlation between how "global" a cuisine is (how many restaurants serve it commonly) and how popular it is. Also, the top cuisines tend to be more recognizable, or at least a single dish is. Do you like Japanese food or do you really just like Sushi or miso soup? Do you like Indian food or do you just like chicken tikka (which isn't Indian).
My take away isnt that people don't like peruvian food, it's that they havent had or don't know what it is. If anything Greek food is the big loser considering how popular/common it is but yet isn't very well liked.
Also why is ‘Hong Kong food’ so far away from ‘Chinese food’? That doesn’t make sense.
One possibility involving unrepresentative memory and one about unrealistic comparison:
Maybe a lot of people have a memory trying some strange dim sum, like chicken feet, which they specifically associate with Hong Kong cuisine (accurately, or as a representative of Cantonese cuisine), while anything positive about Hong Kong cuisine got assimilated in memory to Chinese cuisine.
Maybe people who visited Hong Kong ate in low-quality restaurants to save money (because it's an expensive city) or out of ignorance, but were already familiar with similarly cheap, high-quality Chinese restaurants in their home country.
I think you're right... and it's partly a product of how the data has been presented?
The poll data has the following options:
• Like A lot
• Like a fair amount,
• Don't like very much
• Don't like at all
• Don't know,
• N/A - I have never eaten this cuisine
The statistic shown is '% of those who have eaten the cuisine that like it', which seems only exclude the N/A option but leaves in the 'Don't know'. I would imagine that the 'don't know' respondents are either people who (a) have tried the food, but not enough to have an opinion, (b) haven't tried the food, and selected 'don't know' when reading down the option list (not waiting to get to the N/A option).
For example, here's the Japan entry for British cuisine:
• 02% Like a lot
• 11% Like a fair amount
• 14% Don't like very much
• 05% Don't like at all
• 28% Don't know
• 40% N/a - I have never eaten this cuisine
If you exclude the Japanese respondents who say that they have never eaten British cuisine, then the '% who liked it' comes to 20%. However, if you only include people who expressed an opinion on British cuisine, then the '% who liked it' rises to 41%
When you include the 'don't know' option in the calculation, then the Japanese respondents are the most negative about foreign food of the bunch. However, this is mostly because of a high 'don't know' rate. When you only look at people who liked or disliked different cuisines, then they're actually middle of the bunch in terms of how much they liked/disliked different cuisines?
So I think that including the 'don't knows' is tipping the results in favour of well-known cuisines that people have had lots of opportunity to try. I copied the data to Excel and had a go at creating an equivalent graphic that only looked at '% of people who liked it out of those that expressed an opinion'.
----
YouGov article: https://yougov.co.uk/consumer/articles/22632-italian-cuisine-worlds-most-popular
YouGov Polling Data: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/YouGov_-_Global_Cuisine_survey.pdf
Copied to Excel: https://1drv.ms/x/s!ArxGiOiadOU3grRQA3vR0XhI6Ysf-w?e=0aCD8O
You can really see this play out toward the bottom of the table, where a lot of the "bad" cuisines are rated higher in countries where those cuisines are more common. The funniest example to me is that Malaysians have an outsized love for Saudi Arabian food. This is totally reasonable considering that Malaysia is a majority-Muslim country that has strong ties to other Muslim countries (I still chuckle at the business advertising locations in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Gaza).
I assume these are the rates at which marriages end in divorces, not the percentage of the group that's divorced, so I don't think lower marriage rate would skew the numbers. (I'd be more surprised if 53% of bartenders had been through a divorce than if 53% of marriages to bartenders ended in divorce)
I was recently in Peru and was astonished by the quality of the food.
Notably, the only 99 I see in the grid is what Italians think of their own food.
Miami has many popular Peruvian restaurants. And Nobu worked in Peru while crafting his skillls. Btw, I double-checked that on Wikipedia and it leaves out the part where Nobu casually mentioned he considered suicide after one of his restaurants failed.
Peruvian here. I actually shared the table on Facebook, as Peruvian media tends to inflame Peruvian culinary pride too much and it deserves to be brought down a notch or two. (A prominent Peruvian chef abroad said recently, while interviewed, that he would have liked to have been an engineer, only things didn't work out financially, and that the country needs engineers more than it does chefs [NB: though yet again top engineering graduates in Peru often end up grossly underemployed and underpaid]. I agree.) Nevertheless: the results make no sense, and I'd very much like to see the methodology behind this.
It's not surprising at all that Chinese-Peruvian food is a thing. There was massive, semi-forced migration from China in the second half of the 19th century - coolies were brought over in part to replace formerly enslaved people in agriculture and in part to build railroads. [The word "coolie" is non-offensive in Peru and China - it's the ghosts of those who put people in that situation who should be ashamed.] Many died, but those who survived their period of indentured servitude generally stayed, married into local families (migrants were almost entirely men) and (says the stereotype) opened shops or restaurants, or were employed as cooks by wealthy people.
In the 80s and 90s, in Peru, for the middle class (which in American means: struggling families) "going out to eat" was a rare ocassion that meant almost by definition either Chinese food or rotisserie chicken. We have other things at home!
#13: Describing Grayzone as an anti-war site is misleading. They aren't against Russia invading Ukraine - only against Ukraine defending itself. This is relevant as far as deplatforming goes. Moving from deplatforming anti-woke groups to actual anti-war groups would represent a new step in deplatforming. Moving from deplatforming anti-woke to deplatforming fake news that supports any regime, as long as it's authoritarian and brutal enough (Putin, Assad, etc.) doesn't really break any new ground.
What extremists in Syria did the US fund, specifically?
And, no, he wouldn't have been decapitated if he didn't gas civilians.
I think every group the US funded in Syria could accurately be described as extremist, but I hope you will agree that an Al Qaeda affiliate counts. Otherwise, you are probably a dangerous extremist yourself.
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/15/8771999/this-is-how-crazy-syria-policy-has-gotten
Of course an Al Qaeda affiliate counts, but your article doesn’t make this accusation, let alone provide evidence for it. It accuses Turkiye and Saudi Arabia of funding a rebel coalition that includes an Al Qaeda affiliate. The United States is not Turkiye or Saudi Arabia.
“[T]wo pieces published in the past month, from the Wall Street Journal and the Independent, reported that Turkey and Saudi Arabia are working together to ship weapons and cash to Jaish al-Fatah, a rebel coalition. Syria's al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, is one of the key partners in the coalition.“
And if you look beyond this article, you will quickly find that not only was the US not funding al-Nusra, they were actively attacking them, decimating their operations and killing several of their top commanders. http://www.voanews.com/a/turkey-says-airstrikes-killed-22-is-militants-in-syria/3659580.html,
The U.S. provided direct support to "moderate" groups who were in the Jaish al-Fatah coalition with Al Nusra: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/02/world/middleeast/syria-russia-airstrikes-rebels-army-conquest-jaish-al-fatah.html
Some C.I.A. weapons ended up with Nusra Front fighters, some of the rebels trained by the CIA joined the group, and groups directly supported by the U.S. often fought alongside Al Nusra. The U.S. knew this was impossible to avoid with the support they were providing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/world/middleeast/cia-syria-rebel-arm-train-trump.html
It's true that at other times the U.S. attacked Al Nusra, but they were more than willing to strategically support them when they could be used against Assad.
This is a huge misunderstanding of the conflict. The United States never strategically supported nor funded Al Nusra. They were always actively working against them, *as were the groups they were actively funding*.
This is *how* Al-Nusra got the bulk of its US weaponry; from fighting (and mostly winning against) US backed groups. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria/syria-battle-between-al-qaeda-and-western-backed-group-spreads-idUSKBN0L311Z20150130, https://jamestown.org/program/the-rise-of-jaysh-al-fateh-in-northern-syria/
It is true that some of the groups and fighters the US had supported ended up joining the coalition with Al-Nusra, *after* the US backed groups had lost. And the US allied with the Soviet Union during WWII. I oppose these groups doing this, and am glad the US did not continue funding them, but it doesn’t mean the US was funding al-Nusra all along.
I also found this description to be bizarre as well. Granted, Scott's typical position is that cancelling is bad irrespective of one's views so a better description wouldn't change the message, but Grayzone is definitely not best described as an "anti-war" site.
Hasn't "anti-war" always meant "in favour of our side surrendering"?
Being "anti-war" in the sense that "hey, war is a generally bad thing" doesn't distinguish you from "pro-war" people -- even the most pro-war people tend to be in favour of war in order to achieve specific important objectives rather than being in favour of war in general.
And being anti-war in the sense that you think that the _other_ side should surrender also doesn't distinguish you from pro-war people.
I wonder what Tucker Carlson Republicans would say about the Persian Gulf War now?? We sent ground troops to repel an invasion of a super wealthy monarchy…I don’t even know if I would support that one now. I definitely support power projection like enforcing no-fly zones and Navy patrolling the Strait of Hormuz…but ground troops??
Depends what society we are talking about? Ancient Romans and Mongols circa Genghis Khan seem to have been pretty pro war-in-general
but why would we talk about something as boring as that, when we could talk about Ancient Rome?
Lots of people who are far more spatio-temporo-culturally similar to us have been pro-war, eg. pre-WWI militarists, fascists etc. I can't think of many Anglo-Saxon examples of being generically pro-war other than maybe the imperialists, but anything Westerners argued for in the last hundred years seems close enough that it's relevant to defining people's positions.
I think the idea was that war was good because it was a chance for men to show bravery.
The Romans and Mongols were both fine with the other side surrendering before the ram had touched the wall (Romans) or roughly the equivalent (Mongols). After that they were pro-war.
If the US had invaded Russia, committed genocide, and annexed Siberia, maybe the "anti-war" label would still be used for the Russians calling for Russia to negotiate. But it seems extraordinarily silly to do this for international observers; someone in Kenya who is spreading propaganda about how good this invasion is and how the Russians secretly want this is obviously not anti-war, they are pro-war.
I do think "being anti-war in the sense that you think that the _other_ side should surrender also doesn't distinguish you from pro-war people" has a lot of truth to it though, it's just that Grayzone's "side" is not the US, let alone Ukraine. Their side is "authoritarian regimes" ("authoritarian regime tribe" you could say). I am vastly more anti-war than Grayzone, because when my "side" launched an invasion of Iraq, I opposed it, while when their side launched an invasion of Ukraine, they supported it. Always supporting authoritarian regimes is not anti-war.
ISIS is considered a terrorist organization, not a governmental body.
But, yes, it's a simplification. A more accurate, although still simplified way of putting it would be that Grayzone supports countries that are adversaries of the US (particularly Syria, China, and Russia). The article you posted is actually a good example of this; it's a propaganda piece blaming all of Syria's ills on the US and its allies, while insisting that the brutal dictator Assad would bring normalcy. In one wild paragraph, it uses an accusation from the Syrian Foreign Ministry as proof for the ludicrous claim that the US facilitated an ambush by ISIS on Assad's forces.
Agreed. Even modern wars are like this, which I think gave the “anti-war” crowd a lot of cred in the early 2000s. I think a lot of “anti-war” people were always just opposing whichever side of a war the US was on. This made them seem anti-war and prescient when the vast majority of war discussion in the US was on US wars that became a complete mess (Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc.), but broke down when it started to become Russian wars instead (Ukraine, Syria, Ukraine again).
Was the George Bush administration truly "your side"?
If the Grayzone people are somehow part of an "authoriatarian tribe" and therefore on the same side as Putin, then surely you were/are not part of the same "tribe" as the Bush admin. (but instead part of the "anti-middle eastern US intervention" tribe just like Saddam Hussein) And therefore by opposing the Iraq war you weren't going against your side you were going against your opposing side just like the Grayzone people are doing with Ukraine.
>Was the George Bush administration truly "your side"?<
The 2002 invasion resolution had large support from Democrats, so yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Iraq_Resolution_of_2002#:~:text=Administration's%20proposals%2C%20H.J.-,Res.,signed%20into%20law%20as%20Pub.
Regarding whether Bush is on my side, I think yes. I think the Iraq war was a huge mistake and handled badly, but I still wanted the US to do well in Iraq, I think Bush and the US were a million times better than Hussein, and I support many things the Bush administration did (PEPFAR in particular is likely one of the greatest programs in US history).
> "instead part of the 'anti-middle eastern US intervention' tribe just like Saddam Hussein"
Absolutely not. I support many US interventions in the Middle East. I'm not even opposed to the US joining any wars in the Middle East; I think the US joining the Gulf War after Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was a good idea. I am certainly not entirely anti-war, as I support countries going to war to stop invasions and mass-killings of civilians; I'm just more anti-war than the pro-war website Grayzone.
PEPFAR—paying $5 billion dollars for $200 million in pills. Lol.
It wasn't about the oil, it was never about the oil. Contrary to the constant misinformation mantra, the US never took a single drop of Iraqi oil.
The Ministry of Truth has scrubbed from the web, but there was a pretty exhaustive list, with—I think—122 items. 122 reasons we invaded Iraq. Of the things I remember, was:
1. The Big Gun, there's a TV show describing a big cannon, with a 1km long barrel that shot rocket propelled shells which Saddam hired a Canadian named Bull to build. The cannon was immobile and only pointed at Israel. The final stage was sabotaged on the way to delivery, and Bull was assassinated.
2. The Nuclear Mujahedeen, an army of 10k scientists, engineers, and technicians Saddam employed to build nuclear weapons. In the US raids, Iraqi civilians looted their uranium contaminated gear killing themselves and their families. You can only kill yourself with purified uranium, as natural occurring uranium isn't radioactive enough. The victims was a thing during the war. In 1981, Israel—in cahoots with Saudi Arabia—flew a bombing mission into Iraq, and bombed the Iraqi bomb fuel reactor.
3. Uranium from Chad. There was a very big kerfuffle when US Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife, CIA agent Valery Plame went to Chad to investigate the attempted purchase. Plame reported no attempt was made, however a congressional investigation determined she lied about this to shed bad light on President Bush. Gee, like the CIA is trustworthy. Scooter Libby was charged with revealing a CIA agent ... like the wife of a US Ambassador is not an agent of the US government.
4. Iraq invaded Kuwait. And the US has a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with Kuwait, which basically says, we defend Kuwait, and they don't pursue building or buying nukes. Well Iraq invaded, we were obligated to defend. Fast forward to today, Saudi Arabia is trying to build or buy nukes to defend itself against a nuclear enabled Iran. Wanna see those two scrappy kids get nukes(?) cause I don't.
5. Saddam was funding suicide bombers in Israel, and boasting about paying $10k US to the families of suicide bombers. And there were suicide bombings almost daily for a long while.
6. Assassination attempt against President Carter. Saddam sent an assassination team to the US to attempt the life of former President Carter. Saddam was mad that Carter had built lasting peace between Egypt and Israel. That's reason enough in my book to invade Iraq.
7. General Terrorism. Iraq was the financial source, training grounds, and safe haven for all manner of terrorism around the world. Of course that too is memory holed.
8. Saddam used chemical weapons against his own people. But then again, he didn't have chemical weapons, so that's a Schrodinger Event which either did or did not happen. But a whole lot of civilians got gassed by chemical weapons that some say didn't exist, but when Schrodinger opened his box, a lot of people were dead all the same. There was a huge convoy of trucks which hauled a lot of 'stuff' to Syria right before the invasion; the speculation was this was the chemical weapons. There was an Iraqi base labeled 'The Dragon's Lair' that US troops are not allowed to talk about.
That's only eight, there were another 114 items on the list, but as I said, the Ministry of Truth has found these items untruthful and has scrubbed them from our collective memories.
Oil is a global market—it was for the oil and Bush/Tillerson wanted to make Iraqis wealthy just like Tillerson ended up successfully making Qataris wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. Obviously Iraq has a much bigger population than Qatar but American energy companies have made many foreigners a lot of money.
According to von Clausewitz it's not a war if the defender is not actually fighting. So Grayzone could indeed be considered an anti-war site, in a Clausewitzian sense.
No. Soviet "anti-war" messaging definitely didn't mean USSR surrendering by itself or in any of its proxy wars. It always meant USA surrendering to USSR in its proxy wars, and preferably by itself too. If not, unilateral disarmament, reduction in military spending, repeal of COCOM regulations and the Jackson-Vanik amendment, so that USSR could buy high tech dual use machinery for its MIC with no annoying hurdles, would all be good too.
They would actually be well-described as "pro-war", since they continually post propaganda in support of the war.
Yeah if they were actually anti-war you'd think they'd have something to say against the government that started the war, which I haven't seen any sign of.
Presumably the case for calling Grayzone anti-war is that it's an American site, so calling it "anti-war" implicitly means that it opposes the US's participation in war. But this case is not very good. The US is just an arms supplier, not a participant in the Ukraine war and there is no serious movement for the US to enter the war. And also because Scott's summary did not mention that Grayzone was an American site, so this heuristic for what "anti-war" means wasn't available to anyone who doesn't already know what Grayzone is.
US arms are fueling the conflict, and the US sabotaged peace negotiations, they're not a neutral
US arms are only fueling the conflict insofar as they're preventing the invading hordes from just having their way with their victims.
There’s zero evidence they sabotaged peace negotiations and aid to Ukraine has helped prevent more massacres like what happened in Bucha.
I’d be inclined to ask whether Russia has or hasn’t sabotaged „peace negotiations“. I wonder why blame is deflected away from Russia all the time. What have they offered or asked for in return for peace?
Unless Scott meant ""Anti-Ukraine"-War" website, i.e. with a left-binding dash.
Regardless of whether it breaks new ground it is still bad. Let ideas stand on their own merits.
"defending itself" by forcing people to fight for it's territorial claims and arresting anyone who criticizes the government's policy of refusing to negotiate continuing this war until the bitter end
Their lean is pro-Russia, yes, but a world where Ukrainian atrocities stop getting whitewashed, and Ukraine is pushed to negotiate seriously (i.e. making concessions instead of fantasizing about reclaiming Crimea) is a world where the war ends faster and fewer people die.
A world where you give me your lunch money has less slapping vis-a-vis me slapping you than one where you don't, so how about you pony up?
That's a really nice house you have there.
Would be a shame if little green men came for a visit.
Hopefully they're not from Vega.
also, re: Assad, you're aware his primary enemies were al-Qaeda and ISIS, and his secondary enemies were groups like Jaish al-Islam or Ahrar al-Sham that took Saudi Arabia as an explicit model? Secularist/democratic rebels were a nonfactor outside Daraa unless one counts the DFNS/Rojava/YPG, who do not aspire to rule the rest of Syria and eventually gave up on fighting Assad themselves.
It's so bizarre that so many people who are not Islamist fanatics, and who would likely find themselves quickly beheaded in contemporary Idlib or ISIS Palmyra, reject the obvious conclusion that Assad was by far the lesser evil in this war. What happened to supporting secularism and freedom of religion? Heck, what happened to the War on Terror, which the US was still allegedly fighting during the 2010s - was the problem with al-Qaeda that it was in Afghanistan and not Syria?
This is an upending of the usual meaning of antiwar in the American conversation. The likes of the people at Antiwar.com have always been against US interventionism. One wouldn't have they weren't antiwar because they weren't railing against Hussein declaring war on Kuwait, or the North Vietnamese on the South Vietnamese.
Was about to make this very point but you beat me to it.
48: So wait, you're telling me carcinization is coming for cars now, too?
Donuts or it didn't happen!
Point 27: Are these the actual divorce rates? I ask this because reported divorce rates are often gross rates per thousand people. Such published rates are often used to back the claim that divorce rates have dropped significantly in the past few four or five decades, but they are based on divorces per thousand people and not divorces per thousand married people. The marriage rate has also declined, and people have to be married before they can be divorced. So, do nerdy men have a lower divorce rate because they are so uxurious or because they are less likely to marry at all?
Nerdy men don't have a lower divorce rate; "Gaming Managers" and "Gaming Service Workers" are the nerdiest jobs you can have, with the highest divorce rates.
Gaming in this sense is casinos not computer games
When I am king, the use of the term "gaming" to mean "gambling" shall be outlawed. It was dumb, and misleading when it was adopted, and it's dumber and more misleading now.
Yes, it's clearly euphemistic in intent.
"You're not going to Vegas to gamble you're just going to play some games!"
This should be read in a George Carlin voice.
“Gentlemen, you can’t gamble in here, this is the gaming room!”
I'm not sure about that. In "Pride and Prejudice", when it's revealed that Mr. Wickham has large gambling debts, "Jane heard them with horror. 'A gamester!' she cried."
You've got my vote for king!
Wait, it doesn't work that way...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elective_monarchy
Worked fine for the HRE and the actually Roman Roman kings
Where is that information coming from? The link has no context, it's just the list as shown.
The Vlogbrothers video I watched about #1 (the sulphur emissions from boats) pointed out that you can get similar cloud-seeding effects by misting seawater into the air, no sulphur required. Mandating that container ships offset their fuel burning by running a cloud-seeding machine seems totally reasonable, though it'd probably make the chemtrails people go even *more* insane.
Don't forget, there's a whole lotta malfeasance in "The Global Temperature." As Anthony Watts discovered.
Might want to investigate this before you get too far ahead of your skis. Perhaps google 'days over 100 in MyTown'. I just did this, and it turns out the maximum year for days over 100 in Sacramento is 1988. And for Sacramento, the number of days over 100 in 2023 is tied with 1888.
I think it depends on what altitude the sulfur particles are lofted to. It *will*, however, increase acid rain.
The problem with the sulphur wasn't it heating up the atmosphere, it was the acid rain. So even if ending it caused a heat spike doesn't mean it's safe to unban it if the heat spike can be dealt with other ways or is transitory or is less bad than the acid rain.
It's proven it reduces temperature (note, however, that it also increases CO2 via suppressing photosynthesis, so the spike afterward is potentially more than it'd have been if the sulphurous smoke never existed). "Without any other effect" would only be proven if you'd investigated all other effects and found nothing.
We've accidentally proven that that amount of sulphurous smoke won't end the world*, but that doesn't mean that if you 10x it or 100x it as this maniac wants, that also won't end the world.
*I'm not seeing literal X happening from aerosols gone wrong; even total crop failure for half a decade wouldn't kill *everyone* (you'd still have some yields from pastoralism, not to mention all the preppers), and I don't think things will go that wrong. But "crop yields are -20% for a few years" is more plausible and a lot of people would die if that happened.
I think the "remove CO2 from the atmosphere with scrubbers" people are okay. That's quite bounded; unless you somehow wind up removing more CO2 than we ever put in there in the first place - which seems unlikely given you can measure that and stop - you're by definition staying within known territory.
Blocking shortwave is a really dumb idea and retaliation against unilateral action on this is plausibly worthwhile. Catastrophe from somebody doing this and it going horribly wrong is actually on my list of plausible GCRs this century, although it's not really plausible to get X out of it*.
*Aerosols don't last long enough without maintenance, and you're not going to be maintaining shit if you're dead from your own project and/or people killing you for your crimes. Impact winter would require a Chicxulub+-sized asteroid or comet (I don't think another Chicxulub would do it; the preppers are really hard to kill that way) redirected into the planet; that's not subtle due to scale of expense and the ease of tracking spacecraft, is obviously a Bad Idea, and is reversible (if at potentially greater expense), so people would arrest you for terrorism before you could do it and/or redirect the object away from Earth again. Deploying a megametre-scale solar shade at L1 would do it, but this is if anything even less subtle (people will notice if you block out the Sun) and can be reversed quite cheaply and even unilaterally by blowing up the shade with a missile, so while this could plausibly cause GCR (a couple of days with no sun is still utterly terrible) it's very obvious that this wouldn't reach X. On the other side of the coin, releasing sufficient quantities of fluorinated gases could fry everyone and plausibly even hit runaway, but while this isn't necessarily *physically* obvious until too late (if you stockpile them rather than releasing gradually), the expense is so extreme that it'd be unreachable and/or noticed (it's a bit hard to find people willing to spend many trillions of dollars on deliberately killing literally everyone including themselves with no plausible benefit).
There are people doing that, right now, as charities. I'm saying that if more people start doing that voluntarily, we don't have much to worry about - we don't have *anything* to worry about until and unless they exceed the rate of emissions from other sectors of the world economy. And there's a natural taper-off there where people just stop funding it personally once they figure it's low enough. I agree that the demand from certain quarters that world temperatures be yanked back by large amounts rather than merely arrested, at extreme expense, that's probably not +EV.
On the other hand, this dickhead advocating unilateral deliberate global dimming... well, let's just say I wouldn't be shedding too many tears were his whole "international waters" scheme to attract pirates.
If Scrubbing Overreach becomes a problem, people can just burn more stuff.
"We need to burn more coal to save the environment" has real Futurama energy
We are already doing geo-engineering. Humans life requires geo-engineering. The only question is what types of geo-engineering should we be doing or not doing.
One thing about cooling effects from cloud seeding is that they don’t last very long, while co2-caused heating does last for a long time. So if you try to offset heating with cooling, you have to continue the cooling effect much longer than the heating, or else accidentally get a “termination shock” where the heating is still in place but the cooling has terminated.
Isn't a cooling termination shock what they are proposing just happened with the discontinuation of sulfur fuels?
Yes, but the issue with geoengineering approaches in general but *especially* ones that require constant upkeep is that they create moral hazard by masking the magnitude of the underlying emissions problems. There's value per se in the cooler temperatures but this is also a prevention >>>> cure situation.
This is less true of certain approaches like iron seeding because those are mediated by reducing CO2 levels directly.
The idea is that this is a temporary buffer rather than actual "fix," which risks taken advantage of in a way that exacerbates rather than reduces the expense of later mitigatory measures.
To quote our host (quoting a proverb in a different context): "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”
Basically this Simpsons episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9yruQM1ggc
In a world where we are *indeed* protected, we should rightfully worry less. But in a world where the protection relies on continued active participation in a expensive process, it's hard to say we are "indeed" protected.
That's not the central meaning of termination shock and understates its effect.
See, unlike outgoing longwave, incoming shortwave at Earth's surface is entangled with something other than temperature - it's used for photosynthesis, which reduces CO2 levels. So solar geoengineering actually increases CO2 levels and partially counteracts itself, and if you stop such a program you will have a transient temperature rise - not just above "don't emit the CO2 in the first place", but above the trajectory if you'd emitted the same amount of CO2 and not attempted to mitigate it!
Isn't that a good thing? If the cloud seeding causes some unexpected problem, you can just turn it off.
That's a good feature - but it's a bad feature in something that is meant to mitigate a slow and long-lasting process.
In my experience, people are way more afraid of geoengineering destroying the world than they are of climate change. Making GE *less* easily controllable will not help its PR problem.
That's true. But this isn't about a PR problem - this is about a *real* problem with trying to use aerosols to mitigate warming. Things like algae seeding that lead to drawdown of CO2 can avoid that problem.
You go, Kenny!
32 only has a link to Eigenrobot's twitter, not to the actual experience of the priest.
There's just obviously a cat right above the train in the left image?
#32, the actual link is missing.
Thanks, fixed.
#30: Real median household income is survey-based and if I'm reading it correctly, is based on money income, which specifically excludes health benefits. Since an increasing share of our consumption bundle is health care (I think it's up to 18% of GDP now), a measure that backs out most of health care is always likely to far understate economic growth over time.
Another reason might be the household measure - if households get smaller over time, that will also drag this down.
A quick google indicates that this measure has lagged GDP/capita by quite a bit over time, and has freqently been negative y/y.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=mYUr
I'd be interested if someone knows this better but these would be my first guesses at what causes the discrepancy with GDP growth.
Presumably the health care is also improving. So that is a net benefit. OTOH, if it's spent adapting to bacteria/viruses that are adapting to it, it's sort of a red queen's race.
Well also over time numbers of adults and numbers of working adults per household has been falling. Lots more single adult households which hurts household incomes.
23. The India–Bharat thing is nonsense. It's like saying the US is considering renaming itself "'Murica."
Or if Japan insisted on every language referring to the country as Nippon.
Or if the Indians insisted that we refer to Bombay as Mumbai, and Calcutta as Kolkata, Bangalore as Bengaluru... wait, hang on...
The only one I find difficult is Trivandrum to Thiruvananthapuram.
But the story I got for Madras to Chennai made a lot of sense. There was a river, and the town on the north side was Madras and the town on the south side was Chennai. When the British came, they set up on the north side (IIRC, it was more defensible and less populated), so they called the whole thing Madras. Most of the Indian population was on the south side, and most of the growth was on the south side. After the British left, people kept the concept of both sides being the same city, but since most of them lived in the Chennai side, they changed the overall name to that.
They should have followed the example of two other towns separated by a river, Buda and Pest :-)
Madrachennai has a certain ring to it.
Probably sounds a bit too close to "madrachod" (motherfucker) to catch on.
It's difficult for everyone, which is why it's still usually called Trivandrum.
I'm still expecting this in the future. It seems the native extension of the whole "indigenous peoples" attitude. (Is 'Nippon' or 'Nihon' more common in use?)
Japanese don't count as "indigenous peoples", they're too rich.
Or because we generally don't call a widespread culture indigenous, the way we don't in India, England, or Tunisia.
I believe the Japanese also largely aren't indigenous to their islands.
They are ultimately mostly descendants from migrants from Korea, but every human group on Earth is ultimately descended from people who migrated from somewhere else.
No one is indigenous anywhere except a small valley in Ethiopia or whatever.
Yeah, but given the standard indigenous/colonizer narrative, the Japanese definitely fit better on the colonizer side, especially their settlement of Hokkaido.
You could probably expand that a bit. What about the children of Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis crossbreeding. Would they be the indigenous group for that particular area?
Nihon is more common, but you do hear Nippon used. They're both legitimate readings of the kanji in question.
In my experience, the Japanese have zero issue with their country being referred to as Japan. In fact, they do it themselves in a number of instances. As just one example, the Japanese rail network is called JR, literally "Japan Railway". Maybe that will change in the future, but the Japanese tend to have pretty positive views of the West in general, so I kind of doubt it. They don't have the history of colonialism that India does that would make their name an issue.
Indian Reddit pointed out that the Constitution of India acknowledges the significance of the Hindi endonym in its first (non-preamble) sentence. "(1) India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States..." -- the point being made by the Indian redditors in question (who pretty uniformly viewed this as a symbolic grift meant to distract from more substantive issues) was that "Bharat" was never bereft of official recognition.
"India" isn't even a British word. The name goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, and is ultimately derived from the Sanskrit word from the Indus River ("sindhu").
When I lived there, around 1960, both terms were in use, but in different contexts. I think I saw Nihon more in the name of products for sale, and Nipon more on maps. I was living on Kyushu, so it may be, or have been, regional.
(OTOH, I only spoke English, so my sample size was pretty small.)
Belarus has lobbied french journalists/officials to call it "Bélarus" instead of the former "Biélorussie" since 1991. They were successful in Switzerland and Canada, but not in France itself.
Same with Burma/Myanmar (where the UK still says Burma, and the US officially says Burma but Americans tend to say Myanmar).
Wrong analogy. You're already referring to the country in question as "日本" by using "Japan". "भारत" is, I'd assume, not etymologically related to "India" in any way.
Yeah, "India is discussing" is highly misleading and assumes a much more even and varied debate than is true. My understanding is that more accurate preface might be "Hindi nationalists have proposed" (most accurate would be "A Hindi nationalist generated controversy by referring to India as Bharat and now people are talking about it")
Do you mean that it's unlikely that India will make the request or that it's nonsensical for countries to request a certain name?
If it's the latter, I've seen some use of Turkey's new name since they made a request last year.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/member-states/turkiye
The former. I consider the evidence proffered in support of the claim that India is considering a name-change exceedingly weak.
So many things I'd like to comment on. Thank you for putting this together, always a fun read.
On #27. As a woman married to a woman, whose social circle includes heaps of nerdy men because of my work (including my dear brother, who luckily is married)
I'm only generalizing here because you have as well, which makes it fair...
The reason women don't date geeky men is not because they think they're incels, I seriously don't know a single woman that thinks to that extreme. They don't date "geeks/nerds" what you're calling "nice guys" because they're often introverted and lack social skills. This makes ✨ everything ✨ a lot harder.
The burden of maintain a healthy, genuine, friendship with them is often on my shoulders, as the woman. That gets very tiring over time.
Another reason for women not dating nerdy men is that nerdy social circles (especially in college and recent-graduate age brackets) tend to be on the smaller side, fairly insular (i.e. low churn of newcomers and casual participants, so you're usually just seeing the same faces), and mostly male. If you're a woman in such a circle looking to date men, you've got plenty of choices (combined with the "introverted and lack social skills" issue you brought up, I've heard the situation described as "the odds are good but the goods are odd"). Conversely, if you're a man in such a circle looking to date women and you're mainly looking inside the social circle, there are going to be very few (if any) women in the circle who are single and looking to date men at any given time, and the odds are against you being one of their top choices.
Hehe in an Electrical and Computer Engineering department in the late 90s there was a group of guys who were all close and only one girl in the group who was also the "Alpha" guys younger sister. Made for some interesting dynamics and we all flirted with and chased her a bit, and I think she dated two different guys from the circle eventually.
"nerdy social circles (especially in college and recent-graduate age brackets) tend to be on the smaller side, fairly insular (i.e. low churn of newcomers and casual participants, so you're usually just seeing the same faces)"
Seems like a good indicator for not divorcing easily!
I am willing to except that as an explanation of the phenomenon (in a generalized sense). But why don’t more people communicate it this way? (instead of reaching for calling the geeky men losers or creeps or incels)
Kristian, I literally made it a point to specify that I haven't yet heard a single woman call anyone an incel. Yet you choose to use this language to further this self-pitty narrative and defer responsibility from your ownl growth.
In a beautifully ironic and tragic way - this is exactly why they don't "explain the phenomenon"
They do, you're just choosing not to hear it.
I think the implication is "in real life", rather than online where everyone is either [maligned extreme identity A] or [maligned extreme anti-A identity B]
I meant in general discussion and on the internet. And I didn’t mean only women. Surely this whole debate was about calling people incels and analyzing whether the “nice guys” are really creeps and so forth.
You should not make presumptions about “my personal growth” or what I choose to hear, etc. You don’t know me.
Of course I don't know you 😅
And I also can't know what you "mean" to say. I can only base my judgment on what you actually say and the context of the conversation.
The thread was about women not wanting to date "nice guys" because they think of them as incels.
I will have happily addressed the internet at large had you framed it as such.
If we go back to track the causality, we will notice that the narrative surrounding the "Nice Guys" used to be somewhat neutral to supportive. Yes there were some "nerds are icky" sentiments here an there but media used to feature "nice guy getting the girl" trope a lot, uncritically framing it as a happy ending for both the girl and the guy.
And then the incel cultural identity crystalized, produced pushback, toxoplazma of rage dynamics happened and now this whole memetic battle is cached in our minds and in the realms of internet and the narrative shifted accordingly.
I reckon the 'nice guy gets the girl' trope played a significant causal role here. Lots of young guys took that message to heart, failed to notice that (in the more plausible versions of the story) the 'nice guy' was also very attractive in ways orthogonal to niceness, and were left bewildered and searching for explanations when things didn't work out that way for them.
Hmm. Are you saying that the media was too nice to the nice guys and should've shown them their place in the hierarchy instead? Basically like it's doing now when a phrase "nice guy" became an euphemism of an "manipulative asshole who pretends to be nice" and it's hardly possible to talk about actual nice guys at all? I don't think I can agree with that.
I think that's very true, and I wonder what, if anything, the female equivalent would be. Maybe something about women in their mid-to-late 30s easily having children? Middle-aged divorcees easily finding a new and better husband?
Also worth noting that the nice guy was usually rejected by the girl at first, but kept persevering until the realised how nice he was and fell in love with him. Repeat this message to unattractive, socially-awkward men enough for them to internalise it, and you can easily end up with behaviour that comes across as creepy, entitled, and manipulative.
A lot of truth to this. Not getting any is one thing, but becoming known as the cohort that whinges in an entitled way about not getting any (in addition to other disadvantages) couldn't have helped the nerds in the attractiveness department. Cf stoicism, resilience, masculine virtues.
In my observation, stoicism is not perceived as a virtue, though not whining is.
<i>And then the incel cultural identity crystalized, produced pushback, toxoplazma of rage dynamics happened and now this whole memetic battle is cached in our minds and in the realms of internet and the narrative shifted accordingly.</i>
Maybe I'm just misremembering, but I thought it was the other way round -- incel cultural identity crystalised as a result of constantly being called a bunch of raging misogynists, rather than vice versa.
I think you’ve got the order somewhat backwards. Scott wrote about this phenomenon (online feminists heaping abuse, appearance related insults, and accusations of “sexual entitlement / rape culture enabling” on romantically unsuccessful nerdy guys) in Radicalizing the Romanceless (2014) and Untitled (2015). The term “incel” doesn’t move the needle at all on Google Trends until 2016, and really took of in the 17-19 timeframe.
Incel culture was, temporally, a reaction to online feminists demonizing the “nice guy” rather than a cause of it.
If we are trying to reconstruct the history, there needs to be somewhere a place for pick-up artists. They publicly rejected the "nice guy gets the girl" narrative, and tried to figure out the true mechanism. They believed that *any* guy can become popular, if he changes this *behavior*.
The formerly unsuccessful nerds turned seduction into a (pseudo)science, shared their theories, did field experiments, and compared the results. There was a spirit of: "if *I* could do it, then so can you". Being conventionally unattractive became a costly signal that they figured out something that worked, and it was neither pretty face nor spending money.
And they were publicly attacked, because their theories removed women from the pedestal and turned them into mere human beings. Everyone knows that men's thinking is often guided by their genitals, and that manipulating them is trivial if you know what to do. But it is misogynistic to say that the same is true also about women.
(Then the usual "geeks, mops, sociopaths" evolution happened. Too many stupid guys willing to pay to anyone who promised to help them get laid. Naturally extraverted men with social skills and good looks willing to take their money and tell them some bullshit. Instead of cooperation and free exchange of ideas, the new gurus mostly wrote blogs about how everyone else sucks. Then I stopped paying attention.)
Then there were guys who also rejected the traditional narrative, but found the alternative humiliating, so they decided to "go their own way". To live their lives without trying to "get the girl"; just doing their own hobbies and generally trying to find meaning in something else. The mainstream found this misogynistic, too. You may be a loser, but you are not allowed to opt out of the game.
And I think only afterwards came the incels -- the ones who also rejected the old narrative, but were unable to either adapt and work harder or give up; they just endlessly whined about how a 1 millimeter difference in the bone structure made them forever lonely. (An old-style pick-up artist would just laugh at that and proudly decide to become famous as the guy with the worst bone structure ever who bangs the hottest models. A MGTOW would just shrug, and start reading an interesting book or something.) At least this is how their outgroup describes them; and the question is, how much should I trust the outgroup to be fair.
To summarize this all: If you follow the traditional narrative and lose, you get a lot of hate. If you find your own narrative and win, you get a lot of hate. If you refuse to play the game, you get a lot of hate. And if you complain about how this all is unfair and sucks, you get a lot of hate. I guess the only way to avoid the hate is to win, and then pretend that it happened because you followed the traditional narrative.
"Yet you choose to use this language to further this self-pitty narrative and defer responsibility from your ownl growth."
Do you have any actionable advice to achieve such "growth?"
Please consider that your experiences may not be universal. You have presumably never been murdered, but do you go around pointing out that fact to minimize the suffering of people who lost loved ones to murder by suggesting that they're "furthering this self-pity narrative and deferring responsibility from their own growth"?
> I am willing to except that as an explanation of the phenomenon (in a generalized sense). But why don’t more people communicate it this way? (instead of reaching for calling the geeky men losers or creeps or incels)
What's the difference supposed to be?
One girl thinks "I would die before dating you because you are a creep".
A second girl thinks "I would die before dating you because you don't have social skills".
There's not even a euphemism going on there. Those two girls are saying the same thing and referring to the same phenomenon. What do you think a creep is?
You appear to be channeling the old Basic Instructions strip that remarked "what other people think of as my personality is often just my vocabulary".
To my ear, 'creep' is moralised, with connotations of dubious-at-best moral character and a real chance that the person is dangerous to be around. 'Person with bad social skills' is not a description anyone wants, but it doesn't imply they're bad in a moral sense. Others feel justified in being nasty to/about 'creeps', rather than just politely avoiding them as they would a 'person with bad social skills'.
What Vaclav said.
A creep is someone whom people avoid because they seem dubious or perverted in some sense (often vague). Most such people also have poor social skills but not necessarily.
There’s a way people attribute good qualities to people they like and bad qualities to people they dislike. But having bad social skills doesn’t make someone bad.
But having bad social skills does make someone a person that others dislike, which means they are perceived as bad regardless of whether they are bad.
The girl thinking that you are a creep is basing that on how she sees you, not on all the things you do that she never learns about.
But there are more and less justifiable reasons for thinking someone is a creep.
Being boring can be a manifestation of poor social skills, but it doesn’t make one a creep.
The converse of this is when people say, “oh I can’t believe so and so turned out to be a criminal, he was such pleasant company.”
If someone is obsessively interested in sexually violent serial killers and is known to decorate his home with clownish animatronics and stuffed dead animals, people would think he’s a creep even if he has perfect social skills.
Although, actually I don’t like the term “social skills” that much, because it is vague and too broad.
I think that depends on the social group. Teddy Roosevelt was quite popular. That I don't like his attitudes doesn't make him "a creep", just someone I wouldn't want to associate with. Lots of other people disagreed with me. And I do like that he pushed conservation, event though I'm skeptical about his reasons.
Perhaps "creep" isn't an objective category, but a statement about a relationship judgement from one person/group onto another person/group. (I think that should be "onto" rather than "into".)
Right. Russell Brand is coming in for the "creep" treatment but shyness and lack of communicative skills vis-a-vis women is not his problem.
He has always seemed to me like something the cat dragged in but apparently many people even in established media thought he was some kind of ideal.
In the way "creep" and "social skills" are actually used, the first is suggesting malevolence, not just cluelessness.
I've been in-tribe with both sides of this argument, and I strongly feel that each side is simply using the same words to talk about different people and different situations, while failing to recognize this because they're both referring to the thing that is highly relevant to their personal experiences and therefore must obviously be the thing we're all referring to.
Good point.
I think the following explains some of what's going on here:
Many young nerdy guys don't really understand what is (generally) attractive to (most) women. (This is partly caused by society pushing messages that it thinks men in general need to hear, but which it does not expect to be taken completely literally -- or at least not as the full story.) They see that some nasty guys are romantically desired/sexually successful in ways they can only dream of, despite the fact that they think of themselves as, and in many cases genuinely are, much nicer people. They complain about this with varying degrees of bitterness; some are quite reasonable about it, some are reasonable modulo a fairly strong dose of adolescent intensity+naivete, and some are raging misogynists.
A simple, honest response to the non-horrible ones would be "yes, romantic/sexual attraction is unfair; women are often attracted to traits that are orthogonal to, or in some cases even anticorrelated with, niceness; before you turn this into a gender war, please think for five seconds about how male->female attraction tends to work; are the most-desired women consistently the nicest and most deserving?"
But some people instead respond by doubling down on the idea that sexual success *is* a measure of your worth as a human, lumping all the frustrated 'nice guys' together as a bunch of potentially predatory misogynists, and telling them that their lack of sexual success is evidence that they are not only pathetic but morally reprehensible (and therefore fair game for bullying). The people doing this might not be a very large group, but they are 'loud' (in terms of how much their message gets amplified and spread, and in terms of how emotionally salient it is) and they sometimes seem to be at least tacitly supported by mainstream feminists (who perhaps have the genuinely nasty 'nice' guys in mind and don't quite realise the extent of the collateral damage). For guys who are already feeling pretty down and vulnerable, this can be genuinely damaging and very alienating.
I could not have put it better myself.
> are the most-desired women consistently the nicest[?]
Why do you think there is so much competition among females over who is seen to be nicer than who?
I'd prefer not to do a rhetorical question-answer thing; can you state your point more directly? e.g. are you suggesting that the most-desired women *are* consistently the nicest, or something less strong than that?
Women compete to be seen as nice the way men compete to be seen as strong. It is readily apparent that there has been a powerful selection effect in the past. The selection effect is still plainly visible right now, though its strength is less obvious: letting the mask of niceness slip in public has very severe consequences to female desirability today.
It doesn't mean anything that the most-desired women aren't consistently the nicest except that desirability is not a one-dimensional phenomenon. The most-desired women are consistently very nice, and when women are seen not to be nice, other people lower their opinion of those women.
Thanks. I don't disagree that 'niceness' is a generally-desired quality in women, but I do disagree that 'the most-desired women are consistently very nice'. And I disagree especially strongly with the version(s) of this claim that I think would be required to undercut my point in the quoted passage, which was merely that niceness is far from sufficient to make a man attractive to women *or* a woman attractive to men.
(There's some ambiguity in the way we're talking about 'desirability' here, and I think that for both genders the balance of desired traits varies depending on whether it's a question of pure sexual attraction or long-term relationship prospects. But to me it seems clear that physical attractiveness is weighted somewhere between quite heavily and overwhelmingly heavily by most straight guys in almost all sexual and romantic contexts. And, just as a big tough hot guy will get lots of credit for showing a hint of kindness, a beautiful woman has to do much less to be considered 'nice' than a woman who isn't beautiful.)
Uh, there is not that much competition among women to see who can be the nicest. The real competition is who can be the most attractive. Some of that is about being "nice," but most of it is about being literally conventionally attractive (healthy hair/skin/body weight/grooming presentation/etc).
Which was the reason for the pointed question about how much straight men actively desire "niceness," which is to say, not nearly as much as they desire physical beauty.
Believe me, if nerdy young men cared about mere niceness enough to avoid holding out for the physical embodiment of their waifus, they'd have way more partners.
FWIW, my major selection fault is that I wanted a truly smart (but not quite brilliant) woman. I.e. what I saw as my intellectual equal. It took me a long time to realize that this was not the correct target. What I needed was someone who could balance my weaknesses. I feel quite foolish that it took me so long. Together we were a lot more effective, because we reinforced each others weaknesses, and lent our strengths to each other.
Because they are terrified by other women ostrasizing them. I know women who have suffered it: it can be terrible. Pretty women have also expressed to me that they need to work hard to avoid this.
Useful satire on the issue: https://www.theonion.com/female-friends-spend-raucous-night-validating-the-livin-1819573315
There's a more serious treatment of something similar here: https://www.piratewires.com/p/women-online-spaces-relationship-advice
Hm. I've of course heard the phrase "toxic masculinity", and have sometimes wondered what the gender-flipped version would be: what is "toxic femininity"? This feels like a good start.
Richard Hanania would tell you that the most prominent current example of toxic femininity is called "wokeness".
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/womens-tears-win-in-the-marketplace
More generally, a major element of toxic femininity is acting as if "that can't be true, because if it were true, I would feel bad" makes any sense.
This is perfect:
> Women are also more likely to signal that they’re kind, agreeable, and concerned about others. When they gossip, or transmit negative information about each other, they often couch it in terms of concern. For instance, instead of calling Veronica a drunk slut, a woman is more likely to say, “I’m worried Veronica’s alcohol consumption is getting out of control. I’m worried about her sexual health.”
It's amusing that you accuse males of "turning this into a gender war", when many (most?) of feminists are avowed conflict theorists, and much of their dogma is about how males are evil, collectively and individually, to the extent that they don't renounce their "toxic masculinity". That those unfortunate clueless nerds are consistently being bullshitted about what women find attractive isn't a tragic oversight, it's a deliberate campaign of misinformation based on wrong premises in service of incoherent goals.
I feel like you're zeroing in on one phrase and ignoring the rest of what I said. The 'gender war' thing was about how *some* guys jump from the frustration/disappointment of realising that just showing up and being nice isn't enough to make you attractive, and that some transparently awful guys get lots of female attention, straight to something like 'fuck women, they're shallow and hypocritical!', instead of stopping and thinking and realising that we're all shallow in that sense, and most of us are hypocrites if all that takes is failing to be completely open and accurate about what drives our preferences.
You'll see from the final paragraph of my original comment that I'm very critical of some people on the 'feminist' side. 'Feminist' covers a huge swathe of people, though, and I think like most groups they're mostly pretty normal, in good ways and bad. There are certainly more charitable interpretations available than 'deliberate campaign of misinformation'; even if you think it's bad and dumb and hits the wrong targets, it's pretty understandable that they'd want to try to do some social engineering to get men (collectively) to treat women (collectively) better.
I agree that your description of that dynamic is basically correct. My point is that the gender war has been there all along, it negatively impacts both men and women, some of them disproportionately, and some of thus impacted may unproductively lash out in response. But such reactions don't mean that they 'started it'.
I also agree that most people are basically good and have good intentions, including those who identify as feminist. But if they act according to a misguided ideology, they can do much harm, and if they instead believe themselves to be making things better, then so much the worse for everyone!
In general, my perspective on progressive movements is that they correctly determine that there are problems, but their theoretic apparatus is woefully inadequate to even correctly diagnose them, never mind developing solutions. Sadly, there are no competitive alternatives, in no small part because progressives are very good at crushing dissent. And so things are going to get worse, before (if ever?) they'll get better.
100% this, especially the part how attacking nice guys is just doubling down on the just-world fallacy. "A nice guy will get the girl." "If you didn't get the girl, that proves that you were never genuinely nice!"
Rather than: "Being nice is a desirable human quality, but it is different from being attractive. The attractive guy will get the girl, and then another girl, and then another girl. He may or may not be nice. If he is nice, the girls will appreciate it. If he is not nice, the girls will complain about it, but they will fuck him anyway." Obvious in hindsight, but you need to overcome a *lot* of social programming first.
I am no Buddha, so whatever emotion you mention, I probably have some of it. Were you suggesting that it clouds my judgment on this topic?
Do you think that, as a factual statement, attractive guys who are low on niceness (not literal psychopaths, just the ordinary selfish kind) do *not* in fact get laid more than the unattractive nice guys?
Hey, I didn't say you were wrong. Actually, it was much worse (but I don't want to post details publicly). But that's not the part I regret most. Sometimes you lose; that's life.
The thing I am most angry about is all the other opportunity that I missed, because I was distracted by cultural memes that made me stupid. At some moment I was exposed to competing memes and realized my mistakes, but I am never going to get that lost time back.
Now I have a wife and two kids, and we mostly live in harmony, while other people's marriages around us are falling apart. So, all things considered, I am doing much better than I expected.
But when I think about the past, I sometimes feel a desire to punch someone, except there is no one specific to punch. The brainwashing was so decentralized. (To be fair, there were also some clues, but I was too autistic to notice them.)
Also, there is a concern on a meta level -- reasoning by analogy, I wonder what other things am I possibly missing now, that I will similarly regret in ten or twenty years?
Being nice is a part of being attractive. It isn't the only part, or the most important part. Looks, finances, personality, habits, culture, and religion all play a role in attractiveness.
You have written an worthwhile essay in three short paragraphs.
Indeed, when I was young I often tended to conflate "X is not sexually attracted to me" and "X thinks I'm a bad person"... until I noticed that I myself was not sexually attracted to certain people who I still didn't think were bad people.
I hate to say, but some nerds are also not that nice, or want a specific girl but don't notice other ones flirting with them. A poetic illustration of this, overheard in the cafeteria on campus: two guys complaining about how unattractive campus girls were, while being very very nerdy far from paragons of suave masculinity themselves. Like, what? Very out of touch.
Some of that may be sour grapes - 'I don't care if they're not reciprocating my interest, they're all ugly anyway!'
"I hate to say, but some nerds are also not that nice, or want a specific girl but don't notice other ones flirting with them."
Definitely true! I didn't mean to suggest otherwise.
I absolutely hate and despise both sides of this "debate" more than I can possibly describe. Beyond all the other vulgar and hedonistic and sexist and "all men/women are identical" collectivistic crap, what tops it all is both groups' absolute refusal to apply their own claimed principles with the tiniest pretence of consistency.
On the one hand you have the "incels" who condemn women for dating despicable men instead of nice ones. Quite apart from the fact that by "women" they mean a particular subset of women (and by referring to women as a whole they not only outrageously insult every woman who doesn't do that and would never want to, but ALSO let the women who do off the hook, letting them pretend this is a feature of women generally instead of a problem with them personally, much like how men who cheat or trawl bars for sex with strangers would love to pretend they're just "being men" rather than being personally disgusting people)...they don't even apply this condemnation to themselves (at least that I've ever seen). They have no shame about being attracted to the very same horrible, shallow and very much not nice women that they complain about. I would LOVE to live in a society where both violent aggressive "players" and selfish vapid "I do whatever the fuck I want" feminists are totally ostracised from the company of all decent people and could never hope to get the attraction of any member of the opposite sex other than their fellow lowlife animals. And the incels could be trying to create such a society by, most importantly, committing to reserving their own sexual interest for the nice, compassionate women who deserve it (regardless of their physical attractiveness). If they would do that, making the effort to get their own lusts under control and choose their partners by moral and intellectual human qualities instead of shallow animalistic ones, they would deserve respect as a movement and have the right to demand women do the same. As it is, by condemning only other people's shallowness while maintaining their own right to be as shallow and hedonistic as they want, they're some of the most despicable people in society.
And then you have the "feminists" who insist on their unconditional "right" to date whoever they want and sleep with whoever they want. Okay, while a person who conciously and shamelessly asserts their right to be completely selfish and not care the slightest bit about other people's feelings is obviously a truly disgusting person, there's certainly a decent argument that society should give people the right to be as disgusting and horrible as they want without violently coercing anyone else. But guess what? No one is in any way infringing your rights. If you are allowed to sleep with whoever you want, then other people are allowed to criticise you for it! And that's what you're complaining about: other people (like the incel movement) exercising THEIR right to disapprove of your behaviour and call you nasty names. That's not an infringement of your rights, that's not coercing you in any way; freedom doesn't mean freedom from criticism. I mean, yes, their condemnations are hypocritical and hateful and sexist and unfair, but so what? You just told me nobody is entitled to anyone else's consideration! That nobody has any obligations to care about others' feelings, and has an unconditional right to be as selfish, as vulgar, and as indifferent to the effects of their behaviour on others as they want. So what can you possibly complain about?
There are two choices. We could have a society where people are expected to balance their own desires with concern for other people's feelings, and avoid behaviour (sexual, verbal or otherwise) that significantly hurts others. Or we could have a society where everyone can do whatever they want (that isn't violent) and no one has any obligation to care about anyone else. I would prefer the first but am open to the necessity of the second. Only one thing is not negotiable: that whatever principles you espouse, you apply them even, and in fact ESPECIALLY, when they don't benefit you personally. To those who don't do that, who proudly assert that they have no obligation to care about others but others do have an obligation to care about them, all I can say is: you are scum. You are filth. And you are literally everything that is wrong with the world.
There can be something more specific than lacking social skills. My own experience when I was in my early 20s is that for years I didn't learn how to show sexual interest to a woman, so instead I'd end up with lots of platonic friendships. Which I did genuinely enjoy, so general social skills were being learned and practiced, just not the romantic ones. There was also a clear element of pride, in the sense of "I'm not going to change myself just for the sake of pursuing romantic interest".
Extroverts frequently fail to model or understand introverts, leading to the mistake being made here. Which is understandable, but leads to a lot of harm done to introverts by well-intentioned extroverts.
Introverts are not hermits. We value social connection, support, and community. We have a need for deep connections (of which "healthy, genuine friendships" are an important type), just like extroverts do.
The thing that sets us apart is that we find casual interactions exhausting rather than energizing. This leads us to take what can be described as a "depth-first" approach to relationship building, focused on developing a few high-quality relationships first, then expanding out. In contrast, many extroverts take a "breadth-first" approach, acquiring a wide variety of basic relationships, then building up a few of them.
Introverts (whether they're nerds/geeks or not) can and do put in great effort to maintain their relationships. In fact, they have a higher risk of over-committing to those relationships (since forming new ones is more expensive for them). The idea that introverts as a group place a disproportionate burden on their partners is both false and harmful.
It is incorrect to conflate nerds and nice guys. Scott should know better.
Nice guy syndrome refers to men who have been over-socialised to try to please everyone around them all the time. There are several risk factors including the usual childhood abuse and prolonged bullying, clingy/dependent mothers and emotionally distant, absent, or demanding fathers. Comedy is a fairly common coping mechanism - the class clown probably had nice guy syndrome. Other nice guys just do what they are told and never develop a personality.
Dial this back a few notches and you have the Hollywood nice guy. "A regular guy, with a regular job, who just wants to provide for his family".
Nerds, on the other hand, are stereotypically on the spectrum and oblivious to others' social demands. Unpredictable, unhygenic, unpleasant, uncomprehending, uncommunicative, not nice.
Regarding Jaynes' book: Your interpretation of his theory, that theory of mind varies broadly between cultures so that some cultures considered supernatural or divine what we think of as just part of the human mind, resembles substantially the thesis of "The Greeks and the Irrational", by classicist Eric Dodds, which makes a similar though less broad (&, I think, better justified) argument focusing specifically on Ancient Greece. (That book can be found at https://archive.org/details/E.R.DoddsTheGreeksAndTheIrrational ; the relevant parts are chapter 1, which argues that the ancient Greeks thought unusual impulses & some strong emotions were sent by the gods; chapter 3, regarding the ancient Greek view of "madness" (μανίᾱ) & its relation to oracles & poetic inspiration; chapter 4, regarding dreams & their interpretation; & appendix 1, which argues that the ancient Dionysiac dancing rituals involved a culture-bound mental illness similar to the medieval dancing mania.) Dodds' book was written about 20 years before Jaynes published his "Origin of Consciousness", & parts of Jaynes' argument, as you summarize it, seem probably to have been based on it.
Thank you for that link
#25: Regarding lead removal, Cremieux shows that the adverse effects of lead on IQ are greatly exaggerated due to confounding here: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/who-gets-exposed-to-lead. Accordingly, he notes: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1699120079403647294 that the actual effectiveness of that charity would be lower.
Can somebody help an acronym deficient reader out: what does HBD mean here?
I assume it’s not Human Beta Defensins or Hemoglobin D (HbD).
Thanks. For the benefit of other readers: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Biodiversity_Institute
The reason people are being cagey is that it's a banned topic on this blog, though I'm sure your explaining the acronym doesn't qualify!
My impression of the post is more along the lines of:
> Lead is bad. Early studies tried to quantify exactly how bad, and they found a lot of really noisy data about lead versus IQ specifically. (Lead poisoning is still bad for health in a lot of other ways.) Now that lead has been largely removed from our lives, subsequent research into lead vs. IQ has now become hopelessly confounded with other correlates of lower IQ, such as socioeconomic status. It is now trivially easy for a researcher to "show" that a tiny amount of lead is "responsible" for a huge decrease in IQ. Simply study a poor neighborhood that is slightly more polluted than the surrounding area - and blame it all on lead. So we really have no idea exactly how bad lead is for IQ specifically. Some X amount of lead exposure could cause a drop of 10 IQ points - or it could be some tiny amount like 0.5 points. Nobody really knows.
Lead poisoning is very bad, but it's also pretty much been solved everywhere outside of a few specific areas. The "low lead exposure" control groups of the 70s and 80s had an order of magnitude higher lead exposure than the "high lead exposure" experimental groups of today. Continuing lead abatement efforts are still a good thing where we find it - but at some point you need to declare victory and move on to other issues.
Excellent summary!
I'll also add this: the sibling FE estimate is a null in this study (https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1687659511899684864) and there's publication bias in the lead-crime literature (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046222000667).
re: 39. For some reason the behavior genetic evidence wasn't reviewed. It's not consistent with the GFP being a thing as far as I can tell!
21. Looking for even the pretense of objectivity in political "science" journal is like looking for a snowball in hell.
It's like they don't even care that they come across as completely biased. I think they must feel proud of it!
Of course they are. Most people believe that they should be biased against evil, and are overconfident in their ability to discern it.
What do you mean by 'biased'?
Do you mean they are fabricating or altering their data in order to change their results to something favorable to their side?
Or just that they *have* a side, and don't conceal that fact?
Because honestly, I think we're just talking about the latter here, and I think that state of affairs is good actually.
It would be kind of insane to expect that people who publish in political science journals have no personal opinions or affiliations regarding politics. Most people do, and you'd expect teh people who care enough about politics to devote their life to studying it to be even more so.
So given that they're going to be like normal people in terms of having political opinions and affiliations, I'd rather they signal them honestly and openly, than carefully conceal and obfuscate them with fakey language choices and caveats.
As long as they don't make unsupported empirical claims, they're doing science in my book.
I have to disagree with your claim that they're doing science. The loaded language makes it clear that they are activists first, and scientists second.
I don't believe that word choice alone can prove anything of the sort.
Nor do I think activists can't do science, or whether or not someone is an activist has anything to do with the quality of their science.
If there's a problem with their methodology, that can be pointed out.
Sounds like you have a trapped prior...
Is it a trapped prior, or merely not much evidence to cause the existing prior to be reevaluated?
To be fair, sociology is a lot more difficult than quantum theory or thermodynamics, because people will intentionally try to produce results that (in some way) benefit them. So replication is nearly impossible.
43. The post didn't age particularly well. It uncritically repeated the claim that Alexander Acosta claimed he was told to "leave [Epstein] alone." The source of this claim is Vicky Ward, a known liar.* It also repeats uncritically the claim against Alan Dershowitz, who sued his accuser and forced her to say "I now recognize I may have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz."
Ultimately, I see nothing about the Epstein case that needs explanation beyond "rich man paid some teenage girls for sex." That's the simplest explanation and the simplest explanation is probably correct. No Mossad, no CIA, no blackmail scheme necessary.
*https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/why-didnt-vanity-fair-break-the-jeffrey-epstein-story
"Hmm. Ghislane is in jail for sex trafficking and underage sex. And trafficking seems like a fairly big thing for a connected socialite to be involved with."
Sex trafficking is just the current year word for prostitution. It wasn't proven in court that she "trafficked" women for anything other than Epstein and Maxwell.
"Epstein was clearly given a very light sentence in the first trial, the Florida AG at the time says he was told to bring one sample case for reasons of national security"
No, Vicky Ward claimed that someone told her that the Florida AG said that. See the New Yorker link for how much credence you should give to her.
> Trafficking is not prostitution, which can be voluntary. It’s trafficking people who are forced into prostitution.
Note that you are disagreeing with the legal usage, in which trafficking and prostitution are synonymous and the most frequent kind of trafficking prosecution is prosecuting a single woman for trafficking herself.
"It’s trafficking people who are forced into prostitution. everybody here was underage and couldn’t consent."
Already retreating to the motte I see.
Wikipedia equates sex trafficking with pimping, which makes more sense.
What’s the UK law regarding something getting decriminalized after the fact? Some places have a law that any actions are to be judged according to the mildest law between the time the action was committed and today, is UK among such countries?
> Ultimately, I see nothing about the Epstein case that needs explanation beyond "rich man paid some teenage girls for sex." That's the simplest explanation and the simplest explanation is probably correct.
That's fine, but how did he get so well-connected? Why were the likes of Bill Clinton flying around on his private plane?
It was my understanding that Epstein was involved with a lot of charities. If that is true, that's a perfectly adequate explanation for how he met Bill Gates.
Right, but why was he involved in charities? You don't get into charity out of the goodness of your heart, you do it to make connections.
Still doesn't seem weird? He was a financial advisor for rich people, he wanted to make connections with rich people, probably he also just liked hanging out with cool famous people.
From what I've read, he does not appear to have been a normal "financial advisor for rich people". He was connected first and the mechanism for turning that into cash was by billing himself as a financial advisor, a financial advisor who got absurd sweetheart deals on the finances he managed.
The thing that needs explaining is where his money came from, since he didn't seem to do any financial trading.
Right. We still don't know this, and I don't understand why some journalist never bothered to figure it out. Were journalists scared away from this story by someone?
>The thing that needs explaining is where his money came from
Does it? The wikipedia article on it has a whole section on his early career, saying he started out as an options trader and Bear Stearns and quickly moving over to become a financial advisor for their wealthy clients specializing in tax mitigation strategies. Reading between the lines (especially the bit about him being pushed out of Bear Stearns over unspecified SEC rule violations and starting his own form after), I suspect he was doing a bunch of stuff in his financial advisor roles that were legal grey areas at best and may have shaded over into stuff like money laundering and outright tax evasion. It also sounds like he was at least peripherally (and quite possibly centrally) involved in the Towers Financial ponzi scheme, although he managed to escape prosecution or liability for his role in it.
All in all, it sounds like the sort of career path that could plausibly lead to someone becoming very rich and getting a ton of connections with other very-to-extremely rich people.
Specifically, he had connections to Les Wexner of Victoria's Secret who seems to have given him lots of property for free.
I was puzzled by the CIA angle, since it seemed to undermine the basic point. Instead of "he used a network of sex slaves to entrap people for his personal benefit, and one of them had him killed", now it's "he used a network of sex slaves to entrap people for the US government's benefit, and the US government definitely wants you to believe that he killed himself". Somehow this theory doesn't strike me as less suspicious.
Epstein had a substantial ahem media library at his NYC home (a seven story townhouse gifted to him by Leslie Wexner, owner of Victoria's Secret). Said library was removed by FBI agents towards the end and has not been seen again.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/07/10/jeffrey-epstein-inside-billionaires-new-york-mansion/1691137001/
https://kaus.substack.com/p/where-are-the-epstein-tapes
It seems to me overwhelmingly likely that it was an intelligence operation. Whether the CIA was behind it all is another question.
> 4: How is crypto going for sex workers? Sex workers have limited and erratic access to normal financial infrastructure due to a combination of government harassment and corporate reputation concerns. Crypto seemed like a solution. But the increasing centralization of crypto under eg exchanges has given it limited value; the same parties who strongarmed banks into dropping sex workers can strongarm crypto exchanges, or close offramps. I’m hopeful that in ten years crypto will have gotten its act together enough to be actually decentralized in a way that avoids this failure mode.
The more fundamental issue: Crypto's UX sucks. It's very much a 'get good scrub' culture which in turn makes it hard for the average person to get into. Central exchanges will let you sign up with one click and guide you through the process. But then it's centralized. This is widely acknowledged as a problem in the industry but it doesn't seem to be attracting much funding or excitement. And the big exchanges won't fund it.
As for sex workers specifically: Anyone working on such projects is taking a large reputational hit and are subject to potential legal risk. The traditional way that you make up for this by paying for them more. That's what drugs does. But neither prostitution nor porn is hugely profitable or a large industry. So you have limited revenues and a bunch of people who need high pay to make up for the risks. You have a few companies at this intersection: OnlyFans, Mindgeek, etc. But only a few. And they're constantly tempted to increase revenues by becoming respectable like OF tried.
I recall Robin Hanson saying (in a post I can't find now) that crypto developers are really into technical problems, and disinterested in the practical stuff that gets a business customers/users.
Accurate, in my experience.
I will point out that, even in the age of instant online communication, if I want to convert my Pounds Sterling into American Dollars, it is vastly easier and more reliable to go to a professional currency exchange rather than to find an American willing to buy my pounds for their dollars. This seems like its always going to be true, and while I could imagine some decentralised solution this seems to be one of the main reasons centralised exchanges exist for crypto.
Definitely - but a big part of why at least some people want crypto is to have a decentralized currency. If it centralizes for the same reasons as other currency exchanges is a negative for them, because then you're dealing with the other problems of crypto and haven't really gotten the primary benefit.
Sure. But peer to peer transactions should be the meat and potatoes of a wallet.
But if you want to convert your £ to Argentine Pesos, it's better not to go to a 'legitimate' bureau de change.
The way you lay it out here implies a business case for bridging the gap between "git gud scrub" and consumers who want decentralized crypto. Back in the 1990s, Phil Zimmerman's PGP kit filled that gap for encrypted email - you still needed to be comfortable around a Unix prompt, but that was all you needed, and it wasn't THAT high of a bar. So the market has a demand for a Phil Zimmerman for currency. Or maybe a Phil+NDgT partnership.
It's worth examining why such a thing hasn't manifested yet (or if it has but hasn't attained mass awareness). Is the market too small even now, for probability to have produced a candidate? Is there too much incentive for a Phil to just make a central exchange and just turn into a Bankman-Fried? Are too few people able to run their own "neighborhood exchange"? Something else?
I'd argue it's three things:
1. The market was hugely distorted by the amount of money dumped into it over the past few years. Why bother with nitty gritty when you can just fundraise a bazillion dollars?
2. The incentives of developers run towards making new or better currencies and driving adoption or things like exchanges. These are easier to monetize and have bigger transaction volumes due to the way crypto works. This leads to...
3. A wallet-like experience that's not really a wallet subsidized by those other, more profitable businesses.
Now, this is fine in isolation. But it does mean that real peer to peer transactions are not a really common ability despite it being key to crypto's promise. The few areas where large scale adoption has been driven it works pretty well. But these are usually not as fantastically profitable as FTX.
Crypto UX is fine. Social recovery wallets like Loopring and Argent exist, and converting crypto to cash infrastructure exists all over the world and is quite efficient. It's really unfortunate, that you can't e.g. "buy a house" with crypto, (same as with cash), but one would be fine covering their day to day expenses I guess
Hard disagree that it's fine or efficient. The truth is that setting up a bank account or Coinbase account, in terms of UX, is much better than self-serve options right now. As is withdrawing money, spending it, etc. You can see this in the degree to which even people newly entering the financial system prefer traditional methods. Now, some of that is momentum. But if crypto really were the superior experience you'd see more 18 year olds or immigrants and less tech-y types as a proportion.
> 8: Related: AI art has gone from copying humans to inventing entirely new styles.
Is this new? One of the first things I did to toy around with some of the AI image generators was make a utility that generated QR codes in images. You'd have a picture of like a city or a woman with a blotchy dress or something but if you put it in front of a camera it'd detect the QR code. It was just a toy but it seems these are the same thing: the ability to embed coded information into a generated image. In this case a spiral or some text. Which, I'll point out, is not entirely new.
I want to do this with a real building, or a real woman in a real dress. It doesn't look like a QR code but when you take a photo of it then you go straight to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
There was a fad for steganography when the US government was (publicly) trying to keep cryptography research from getting out to foreign countries.
I guess this sort of thing would be easier now. On the other hand, detecting it is likely easier too.
Yes this is exactly the same tech, controlnet, that was used a while ago to make a bunch of cool QR gode gen AI images (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/141hg9x/controlnet_for_qr_code/?rdt=42996). I'm not sure why it suddenly went viral now, except that spirals and hidden text are more accessible than qr codes.
Yep. The internet is a silly place.
#8 What is the "hidden-yet-obvious text" in the bottom photograph?
I agree it's hard to see. It says New York.
It wasn’t obvious to me til I saw it, but now it’s so immediately obvious every time I take another look, I can’t believe it didn’t see it at first glance.
For some reason, it gets easier to see if you squint until the image blurs, or if you make the picture smaller.
> 13: Unfortunately related: Anti-Ukraine-war website Grayzone says that GoFundMe has frozen their account (ie stolen all their money). They’ve been doing this for years for anti-woke sites, but anti-war sites feels like an escalation. I continue to think crypto is an important safety valve against this increasingly-used tool of control.
Not familiar with the specifics of this case. But this kind of thing is one of the reasons I support government bank accounts in addition to things like crypto. Basically something like mobile postal banking. If you have a legal right to a bank account that can transact from the government then that is probably more secure than a private institution that can kick you out for whatever reason it pleases. And if there's explicit state control this often makes it easier to combat. You could, for example, pass a law about the right to transact through these accounts and then there'd be an outcry if you were denied it.
Yes, it's not infinitely secure. But it's part of a wider strategy of introducing more ways to transact: crypto and private banking and your government account and so on. It raises the coordination costs of kicking someone out of the system entirely. And, as an added bonus, would greatly simplify the distribution of things like welfare.
>>> If you have a legal right to a bank account that can transact from the government then that is probably more secure than a private institution that can kick you out for whatever reason it pleases.
In a world where Operation Chokepoint is a real thing, "legal right" is doing a lot of work.
Yes, it is. But what's easier: figuring out a way to completely restrain the bureaucracy under a president who wants to use its power to do something nefarious (left or right) or getting Congress to pass a law and then suing under it?
How about we don't give the government that power in the first place, that way we don't have to figure out (again) how to take those rights back?
The government already has the power. If you want to fight to eliminate it or restrain it go ahead. But I like my chances of reviving this kind of banking better than yours of completely dismantling the administrative state. And it doesn't really give the government that much power: the account would exist but you could simply choose not to use it.
I am not arguing for completely disrupting the administrative state, I just see far more historical abuse by government actors than by competing corporations. And no, the government doesn't have the power to shut down private accounts now, but they surely would for the government accounts.
I think the point is it is easier to get the government to change its position than a corporation, which can be both a blessing and a curse, but it is nice to have the option.
> 23: India is discussing changing its name to “Bharat” (the Hindi word for India) on some level. Unconfirmed rumors about Pakistan being interested in claiming the name “India” for itself. No word yet on who would take “Pakistan”, but I hear Macedonia is looking for a new name.
Reminder to the voters of Macedonia that one of their options was literally "Better Greece." Still disappointed they didn't choose that. Macedonia mostly got in because it was a center of Russian aligned hacking, misinformation, and intelligence activity and letting it in let NATO clear them out. So they did almost literally troll their way into NATO. Might as well ride that wave.
I still don't understand why, under the same logic, the Republic of Ireland isn't forced to change its name to Republic of Southern Ireland. Ireland is, after all, an island, which is only partially covered by the Republic of Ireland.
Of course it exists as a country. It's not the country's official name, but so what? Outside of specialised diplomatic and legal contexts, people very rarely use the exact legal name for a country. We say "I'm going to Germany on holiday", not "I'm going to the Bundesrepublik Deutschland."
I'm reasonably sure at least 90% of New Zealanders don't know the official name: the Realm of New Zealand. I've never encountered it anywhere outside of Wikipedia.
Ireland isn't in NATO.
Ireland did have a name dispute with the UK.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Irish_state
Similarly, should the country of Singapore change its name to "Singapore and its minor outlying islands"? E.g. Sentosa isn't on the island of Singapore.
The Republic of Ireland is actually Irish though. North Macedonia isn't Macedonian, it's Bulgarian.
Except I have yet to meet a Macedonian that agree.
I don't doubt it. That was just my opinion as someone who has no ties or interests in any of the three countries (Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria).
Isn't a huge amount of Greece genetically Bulgarian? I seem to remember that phase of history.
Hell, the Turks are largely genetically Greeks (or vice versa) at this point.
After a few generations genetics really don't matter to culture, the vast majority don't even know their own genetic origins so how could it...
Prior to two decades ago genetic testing was a rare thing, even at the academic level.
Indeed which is why it is so weird to be like “those aren’t Greeks those are Bulgarians”.
On the one hand, the genetic differences between the southern balkan states and Turkey are so minutely small that this is a fair statement in this narrow domain. But on the other hand there is a real sense in which the genetic changes in Greece led to (or at least accompanied) a dilution of 'Greek' culture to become 'Orthodox Balko-Slavic' culture. Cf. Barbarian Slavs vs Ancient Greeks (genetically and culturally very different, pan-Indo-European pantheons excepting) to Modern southern Slavs and modern Greeks (genetically and culturally pretty similar).
And in general the idea that genetics doesn't matter to culture after a few generations is barmy! See: Jewish diaspora around the Mediterranean/Northern Europe/Middle East, Indian diaspora in Caribbean, South Africa, East Africa etc. Whether you're a believer of HBD/innate traits or whatever or just think genetics is like a ID number, genetics similarity IS correlated with cultural similarity because a genetic gap is a family gap, a kinship gap. Just seemed like an odd statement to throw in!
I would argue miscegenation is driven by cultural factors rather than genetic ones.
And, yes, the greater the genetic gap between a host and transplant population the longer integration takes (all else equal).
"THE NATION
ARTICLE 1
The Irish nation hereby affirms its inalienable, indefeasible, and sovereign right to choose its own form of Government, to determine its relations with other nations, and to develop its life, political, economic and cultural, in accordance with its own genius and traditions.
ARTICLE 2
It is the entitlement and birthright of every person born in the island of Ireland, which includes its islands and seas, to be part of the Irish Nation. That is also the entitlement of all persons otherwise qualified in accordance with law to be citizens of Ireland. Furthermore, the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage.
ARTICLE 3
1 It is the firm will of the Irish nation, in harmony and friendship, to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions, recognising that a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means with the consent of a majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island. Until then, the laws enacted by the Parliament established by this Constitution shall have the like area and extent of application as the laws enacted by the Parliament that existed immediately before the coming into operation of this Constitution.
2 Institutions with executive powers and functions that are shared between those jurisdictions may be established by their respective responsible authorities for stated purposes and may exercise powers and functions in respect of all or any part of the island."
Don't make me link to the Wolfe Tones!
> 29: Re…lated? Blogger/model Aella is offering aella.ai, an “AI girlfriend” based on her, as the flagship product of a company (?) that will help influencers create AI chatbot girlfriends based on themselves. I haven’t seen a lot of uptake yet - my trollish theory, which I might explain more later, is that the real killer app will be AI boyfriends (horny men want sex, horny women want attention / emotional validation; which of these can chatbots more effectively fake?)
Paid LLM texting? This is like six year old technology. The state of the art includes images, voice, and video. Mostly offered as a combination where there's a real person but, when they're not online, you can get your fix by talking to an interactive double. (There are a few purely fictional ones but they mostly seem to be less successful. Unless they have a human behind them.) Though it's mostly used for more prosaic tasks than blogging/modeling.
LLM texting or messaging is so simple people trade free bots of book characters. I've done it as a hobbyist for things like conversation practice or to work as a note taker.
I think Aella's version also has images. I don't know about voice or video.
I'd be interested to know if it does or not. It's not advertised anywhere. (I assumed it doesn't because it's not mentioned anywhere on site or in the TOS.) But if there is something more advanced I'd love to know more about the tech side.
On the whole it does look a bit primitive. You pay through a direct stripe link.
I tried Aella.ai with great interest. At first there was sort of banter and interaction (she's a cat person, I'm a dog person), but pretty soon it degenerated into a spam message asking me to pay $5 for a sexy pic. I mean – that was the only response to anything I typed. It was disappointing actually. I felt dirty and violated, and not in a good way. I think it needs a lot of work not to just be porn spam.
Oh, and also there are a couple of voice clips before the spam barrage.
It seems really self-defeating for influencers to try to create AI copies of themselves to pull away their own viewers.
I don't really agree; the person who spends all their time hanging out with an imitation of you is still a fan of you.
But they're not hanging out in the locales you get your money and fame from, they're doing their own thing with their toy.
They are the locale you get your money and fame from. (Really. I don't mean to say that they're in the locale. They are the locale. They like you, and that's why you're famous. If you try to sell them something, they will be receptive to that.)
I'm not sure that I'm following what you're trying to say?
But the toy is simply another thing that they pay you money for. I guess your point is that it would be less money than in the counterfactual, but this doesn't seem obvious.
If I ever get rich (ask me in 5 years) there's a ton of social science I want to do. Totally outside of academia or IRB review boards, no interest in formal publishing, just to learn shit with legit sample sizes and post on substack.
Are you an AI? You sound like the one in Ex Machina whose only ambition is to study human behaviour at traffic interchanges.
Bro same, there is so much research that I would love to be able to pay some grad student to do for me lol
>AI boyfriends
Fwiw this is already a thing in china, to the extent there are people who make a living pretending to be the AI boyfriend (although in this case it's less AI and more 'scripted dating game' but the distance isn't far)
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1012605
Wow.
To quote a woman who appears to be a VC at A16Z:
"The biggest secret about "AI girlfriends"?
The majority of users are female (at least for chat-based products). It mimics fan fiction, where ~80% of readers are women.
This does not hold true for image generation, where the ratio flips..."
src: https://twitter.com/venturetwins/status/1701713941968060468
Zvi has also made note of this https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-30-dalle-3-and-gpt-35-instruct
On Epstein, I always thought the conspiracy was supposed to be that someone killed him by getting the suicide-watch interrupted and allowing him to commit suicide.
That would be the minimum viable version of the conspiracy, but it's not even the standard version.
The refrain is "Epstein didn't kill himself", not "Epstein killed himself but why didn't they stop him??
That's pretty close to my pet theory (that the guards and others responsible for stopping him from killing himself weren't very motivated to do a good job of it), but isn't the standard conspiracy theory as I've heard it. The usual theory seems to be that some people who he had criminal dirt on (the Clintons are the suspects I've heard mentioned most often) had him killed to stop him from implicating them and passed it off as a suicide.
For the Clintons in particular, the theories often seem to tie in with the earlier conspiracy theories around the 1993 suicide of long-time Clinton associate Vince Foster, which alleged that he was murdered to prevent him from testifying against the Clintons in the Whitewater investigation.
This seems much harder to defend: the argument for why it's credible he was murdered is "people rarely commit suicide but there were a lot of rich people motivated to kill him". If you assume he wanted to commit suicide, the prior on his success is no longer especially low (I don't expect suicide watch prison guards to be especially competent), so it's now a low-prior theory again.
People in jail commit suicide at very high rates, particularly white men:
https://www.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh241/files/archives/pressreleases/2021/nearly-fifth-state-and-federal-prisons-had-least-one-suicide-2019#:~:text=Suicides%20accounted%20for%2030%25%20of,least%20one%20suicide%20in%202019.
"During the aggregated period of 2000–19, the average suicide rate in local jails was highest among persons who were white (86 suicides per 100,000 white inmates)"
For not imprisoned white males its "only" in the mid 20s per 100k: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7108a7.htm
The base rate for targeted assassinations is much lower. And if you're going to fall back on the obvious motive for assassination, pray consider that there's an obvious motive for suicide at work here as well.
That's high in the sense of being high compared to background rates, but still a low prior. Probably high enough for vanilla suicide to be the likeliest explanation here though.
Certainly possible, but implies that *all* of the people involved were also really bad at their jobs. Cameras not working, no one doing any checks despite that literally being their job, etc.
I guess for a conspiracy you could also combine it with a "paid to look the other way" while someone told Epstein he needed to kill himself or something worse would happen to him. I'm not sure how different that is from the theory that someone literally murdered him.
> *all* of the people involved were also really bad at their jobs.
Plausible. Who would make them be good at it? The prisoners have no choice and the voters largely don't care.
Presumably their bosses, who in turn would care because of lawsuits and/or some kind of professional backlash (lost job, prestige, whatever).
You're right that there are too many layers between the general public (who were upset at this outcome but by and large were powerless to change it) and those implementing policy for us to count on them all being good at their jobs.
I understand this place had not had a successful suicide in 21 years. Whether attempts were just that rare or they were good at preventing it, no idea. I could definitely see them getting lax in all that time as a plausible alternative to something intentional and nefarious.
If the plaintiff has the resources to sue, that is.
I have some bad news for you on the conditions inside federal prisons
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/123-us-federal-prisons-maintenance-inspector-general/story?id=99601450
"The 123 federal prisons in the United States need roughly $2 billion worth of "maintenance" and most are "aging and deteriorating," according to a DOJ inspector general report.
In three prisons, the conditions are so bad they had to be closed -- including the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan, which held Jeffrey Epstein prior to his death.
"We're seeing crumbling prisons," DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz told Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas. "We're seeing buildings that we go into that have actually holes in the ceilings in multiple places, leading to damages to kitchens, to doctor's offices to gymnasiums. And they're not being fixed.""
Here's what Ken White (AKA Popehat) posted after Epstein's death. (CW: descriptions of death by negligence, malice)
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/thirty-two-stories-jeffrey-epstein-prison-death/596029/
You know, I always assumed that the murder theory was just a meme ready version of, "someone came by and let Epstein know that the guards were out to lunch and if he didn't want to face the consequences now was the best chance he was going to get." Murder just seems so redundant for a man in his position, i.e., on suicide watch (!). This theory has the distinct advantage that the available evidence about cameras and guards isn't evidence of a cover-up but direct evidence of the crime.
But I readily admit I'm low-information about the event. It just doesn't seem very relevant to me.
Same. Also, "Don't try to hard to interfere if he looks like a suicide risk" is a message I can totally imagine being transmitted in a law enforcement institution. And if it's initiated by somebody who knew he was depressed, it's pretty effective.
The reason I am (very mildly and with only intellectual interest) in favor of the conspiracy version, is that I find this kind of message to be completely plausible, while having the subject of an extremely famous criminal case without a proper suicide watch quite a bit less plausible.
So, Epstein's lawyer was part of the conspiracy?
https://nypost.com/2019/08/12/jeffrey-epstein-was-taken-off-suicide-watch-at-his-lawyers-request/
Plausible, I suppose, but if so he didn't even try to cover his tracks. The simpler explanation is that Epstein's lawyer demanded that he be taken off suicide watch because Epstein asked to be taken off suicide watch.
And for those of you who don't know, "suicide watch" as normally implemented in US prisons is judicially-sanctioned torture by prolonged sleep deprivation. It isn't a matter of the guards being tasked to e.g. watch the prisoner through a low-light closed-circuit TV; it's the guards basically walking up to the cell and saying "hey, wake up, prove to us you aren't dead", every fifteen minutes, 24/7/forever, and every wake-up being logged to make sure the prisoner doesn't manage to sneak in any useful level of sleep. Any decent non-monstrous human being would want approximately every prisoner taken off that sort of suicide watch after no more than a day or two, even if they don't want the prisoners to commit suicide. The people who want prisoners on suicide watch are mostly prison administrators who don't want to deal with the paperwork of a suicide and don't care who gets hurt in the process.
This time, the decent human beings prevailed. And then nobody bothered to give Jeffrey Epstein any good reason to want to remain alive, because duh.
If the anti-cavity mouth bacteria outcompetes other bacteria, then shouldn’t it be spreading as the original people kiss others?
No; your normal bacteria cling to your teeth pretty tightly to prevent competition, so to apply the new bacteria, you have to brush very hard with a special solution to clear a niche for them. If you don't do that, they won't spread.
It's possible that in exactly the right situation, where someone had just taken antibiotics and been to the dentist for a cleaning and *then* got kissed, the bacterium could spread, but it should be pretty rare.
Also, the new bacterium will probably spread mother -> child, since newborns have no competing mouth bacteria.
The Epstein item has three links in it, all identical. I suspect you meant to link to three different postings, since I see it's a sequence (oh, THAT'S where that comes from [j/k]) and he backs off his position in later entries.
To the actual postings: although I'm not inclined to believe Epstein was murdered, I notice that the LW writer puts a lot of weight on "The Attorney General of the US himself inspected the tapes", without noting what anyone who's heard a little bit of conspiracy theorizing about it knows, which is that the AG at the time was Bill Barr, and Bill Barr's father, Donald, has this in his WP entry:
---
He was headmaster of the Dalton School from 1964 to 1974. During his time as Dalton's headmaster, Barr is alleged to have had a role in hiring future financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a math teacher despite the fact that Epstein (who graduated from high school at the age of 16 and secured a full scholarship to Cooper Union) had failed to complete his degree and was only 21 years old at the time. In 1973, Barr published Space Relations, a science fiction novel about a planet ruled by oligarchs who engage in child sex slavery. It has been noted that the plot of the novel anticipates the crimes of Epstein and his convicted and prosecuted accomplice(the list of politicians and celebrities involved in sex crimes remains hidden), Ghislaine Maxwell.
---
Like I say, I'm not inclined to buy the murder thing, but it's a really obvious counterpoint, and yeah, kind of a coincidence.
OK, I read further and he eventually does address this, at least...although he doesn't mention that Bill Barr was the AG whose personal examination of the jailhouse tapes he drew our attention to in his first posting.
I'm pretty sure the link is just split up because there's an italicized word in the middle so the formatting is screwy.
The US attorney's office of the SDNY also reviewed the footage and said in an indictment, under oath, that nobody entered the tier where Epstein was. So SDNY would also have to be in on it, and this wouldn't make much sense because they're the ones who brought charges to begin with.
Like I say, I'm not disagreeing with the result, just pointing out a weird omission in the argument.
"During his time as Dalton's headmaster, Barr is alleged to have had a role in hiring future financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a math teacher despite the fact that Epstein (who graduated from high school at the age of 16 and secured a full scholarship to Cooper Union) had failed to complete his degree and was only 21 years old at the time."
There used to be a lot less credentialism in the past.
#34: I thought Scott Aaronson’s takedown of IIT was pretty convincing: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799 and https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1823
I have to say that I don't know much about academic fraud or the Data Colada guys, but I saw a reference to this today and frankly it, itself, pattern-matches to me to "junk science that might have been right a couple of times but now is just spraying accusations everywhere", like that business with arson investigations that (it is said) are garbage and have convicted people of murder for no good reason, or "bite analysis", or "blood spatter analysis", all of which have good cases against them.
I recommend reading their analysis - it seems pretty damning to me. Harvard also says they've done a separation investigation and decided to suspend Gino.
#13:
>website Grayzone says that GoFundMe has frozen their account (ie stolen all their money)
This implies that GoFundMe kept the money, which the linked source does not claim.
Indeed, this site: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/9/1/gofundme-freezes-donations-for-the-grayzone-sparking-free-speech-debate states:
>The donations were ultimately refunded to the donors after The Grayzone moved the fundraising campaign to a rival crowding funding platform.
Thank you. I had seen the opposite claim, but if Al Jazeera says it was refunded then I believe them.
On the automatic AI video translation thing… question for my fellow commenters and I’ll need one magic wand in the ask.
Let’s say there’s a very simple table somewhere that translates buzz words back into a format you agree with. I’ll use an older example that will hopefully have less emotional. One of the linked pairs in this table is PATRIOT ACT: GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE BILL. You can imagine other examples. Anytime someone has named something for an effect you disagree with just imagine there is an entry in this table that has the “spin machine” name and your more direct, blunt name.
Would you pay for a service that scrubbed the news for you so that as you watched videos they were filtered to replace the “spin machine” name with the “direct/blunt” name. So that when a politician or a news reporter tried to say “Patriot Act” you would instead hear “Government Surveillance” bill.
This hypothetical service would also let you know when this kind of filtering event was occurring but in this way whenever you were browsing random videos the names other than the ones you would prefer, which again are just magically in a table somewhere, are swapped out.
I might like that. I translate "reform" as "change". And "confiscate" as "steal".
The idea would be that the magic table is shared and maintained by others you trust.
Alternatively, how many people would pay for a service that filtered news to replace direct names with names from their preferred spin machine?
We all already do that to an extent by creating filter bubbles.
But this can expand your bubble to encompass the whole world! Everything will be safe and non-triggering and validating. Or, if you prefer, you can have some things translated such that the only realistic response would be "DIE NAZI SCUM!!!"...
I would agree if this wasn’t largely happening today in its own. Stick it in a system with rules, give people something to win or lose by being convincing and I think it’s a better system.
We'd finally be free from "utilize"
This doesn't sound useful at all. Firstly because it's totally dependent on the service's judgement for what counts as "emotive language" or not. Is the Patriot Act a "government surveillance bill" or a "national security bill"? Or perhaps an "anti-terrorism bill"? None of these are emotive per se, but your choice will emphasize one feature of the bill at the cost of another another.
Secondly, if I read about something online I want to know the actual name for it, because if I talk to other people about how the Government Surveillance Act violates our rights they're going to give me a blank stare.
Think of what the default state is. People you don’t know and don’t trust subtly manipulate language to message something you don’t want. Has that been useful to the people who do that?
At least for text, you can do this for free in your web browser for any arbitrary strings.
Yep that too.
"Patriot Act" refers to a specific law, though. There are many more bills that could be referred to as Government Surveillance Bill. One of the risks might be to lead the listener to believe, for instance, that the Patriot Act expiring would mean all government surveillance being ended.
Of course Republicans who say the election was stolen believe it. No one has ever taken serious and genuine steps to disabuse them of the claim. It was all a cacophony of "big lie" " most secure election ever" from the beginning. Which are just stupid and obviously not true. There are videos of people dumping ballots into boxes. Those are ILLEGAL votes, even if not FRAUDULENT, and once they were commingled the election should have been invalidated. The Atlanta counting situation is similar. The BOP is on the state to demonstrate its counting procedures are legitimate, not the other way around, you can't just do suspicious things and then shout "no proof" and convince anyone.
One strong reason for continuing that level of mail-in voting is that, if you try to tone it down, it looks like you're admitting the earlier election had problems.
Have we found that mail in voting has a higher percentage of fraud before? Oregon has had universal mail in voting for many years, well before 2020, and absentee voting has been a thing for a very long time. Has anyone demonstrated fraud in mail in voting at higher rates that in person voting prior to 2020? Or, would the argument just be that we didn't have the proper infrastructure in place to deal with the volume of mail-in votes we received at that time?
But we still have voter rolls that make sure a person is only counted once, even with mail in voting. Unless there's some reason to suspect those don't work? I haven't seen any evidence that people are voting multiple times. So then to cheat you have to submit ballots for people on the rolls who aren't going to vote, and you have to know they aren't going to vote, right, or else it would just get thrown out?
I'm not sure how you could cheat in any other way unless there's some reason to suspect that voter rolls don't properly catch double votes.
I don't know. Why couldn't mail in voting be done right?
One thing is that presidential elections in the US are actually a lot of local elections, and these are all operated in some local way, and there is usually some number of counties where they mess up, or have trouble. And when the election is close and that happens in a battleground state, it can very easily seem suspicious, especially if it delays the results.
One weird aspect about American elections seen from abroad is the dispute about voter ID. In other countries that I know about, needing voter ID is taken for granted.
Or nursing homes, or public housing, etc.
Do the women not have cell phones? Are cellphones not allowed in voting areas?
If they do and are, the man could simply tell the woman to record her vote and show him the video afterward.
I think in the UK it's illegal to take a picture of yourself voting, presumably for exactly this reason, although I could be misremembering.
In some parts of the US, it is, at least according to this:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/election-day-ballot-selfies-heres-where-its-legal-and-illegal
But I don't think that's going to stop people. It can be hard to detect. And what are they going to do, arrest people for voting?
This is more or less my view. Every change that was made to voting rules in 2020, particularly in battleground states, reduced transparency and election security - that is, the ability to successfully detect and document fraud. It is natural that when one side pushes to remove safeguards - opposing voter ID, relaxed signature matching, mailing out millions of blank ballots indiscriminately - that the other side will be suspicious when the outcome favors the safeguard-removers, particularly when the outcome is determined within jurisdictions exclusively controlled by those people. Imagine that we are playing poker, and just before the final card is dealt on a huge hand, I excuse myself to go to the bathroom and take the cards with me. I win the hand on the last card. Can you prove that I cheated? Not definitively. There was always a chance I could win. You don't have video of me cheating. You don't know what the next card was before I left. Yet I maintain you would be justified in being suspicious of the result.
This doesn't even get into the ballot-harvesting issue. By flooding the zone with ballots to low or zero-propensity voters, even without literally picking up discarded ballots (full-on identity fraud, which is also possible) it makes the voting process an exercise in mechanics rather than real voter choice; just go harvest their ballots and you can guarantee 100% turnout for your candidate in places that normally wouldn't have voted.
Add in shady things like administrative coordination and pressure to one-sidedly suppress negative news on media and social media, and it's not a surprise that some don't see a fair contest. And some folks live in jurisdictions where literal, old-school, Tammany Hall style machine politics has been endemic for decades. Those folks aren't going to hit the fainting couch when someone alleges there might have been fraud, even if they can't prove it was outcome determinative. They assume of course outcome-determinative fraud can't be proven; every step taken throughout was designed to make it difficult to document and disseminate such proof.
I would take the "changing the rules is inherently suspicious" argument more seriously if people applied it to, say, Texas (a state that did change its rules due to the pandemic, and which had more electoral votes at stake than any battleground state), and not just to the four states that were closest to voting for Trump.
>This doesn't even get into the ballot-harvesting issue. By flooding the zone with ballots to low or zero-propensity voters, even without literally picking up discarded ballots (full-on identity fraud, which is also possible) it makes the voting process an exercise in mechanics rather than real voter choice; just go harvest their ballots and you can guarantee 100% turnout for your candidate in places that normally wouldn't have voted.
Why is it bad to encourage legal voters to cast votes? Like, what distinguishes "ballot harvesting" from regular get-out-the-vote efforts?
Texas is not a battleground state, nobody expected it to be in play, and its margins of victory are not conducive to gaming anyway. That doesn't make any changes it made good or entirely unproblematic, but it reduces the capacity for mischief.
Ballot harvesting is an entirely different animal from GOTV, both for fraud/procedural abuse reasons and, even in non-fraudulent situations, for effort reasons. On the procedural side, to GOTV in a normal situation, you need to convince a person to actually show up at the polls. You remind, cajole, bus them. But in the end a person still walks in to a polling place with poll watchers. In ballot harvesting, you simply need to get ahold of their ballot. That's it. Something that people getting ballot harvested either consider junk mail, may discard, or may not even know about (e.g. nursing homes). There is no check beyond physical possession of the ballot paper. It is the security difference between an in-person purchase and a bearer bond.
There are certainly situations where ballot harvesting does not result in outright fraud, but even then I consider it a negative in the voting process. Reducing the investment in voting down to "hand this to the guy at the door and sign once" (and remember that's the best-case non-fraud scenario) does not, in my view, lead to a more thoughtful electorate. It doesn't measure public support, it basically measures voter concentration (where it's easy to knock on doors) and party infrastructure (amplified by, e.g., Zuck bucks disproportionately benefiting Democratic bastions). But that's slightly ancillary to the main point about security.
Where are these videos?
Of which?
People dumping (presumably false) ballots into boxes.
I don't really swim in those circles but I have totally seen several actual surveillance videos of "runners' showing up at ballot collect stations with dozens of ballots and dumping them in. I would presume some of them are people brining in mail in ballots from nursing homes or other places like that, but it does create a giant security hole. And it is certainly done in a suspicious way (they always seemed to be waiting until no one was around or late at night). At the same time I don't have much reason to think this sort of think isn't happening both ways, but the error bars on the election wildly outstrip the actual margin. I would bet huge money on that.
Oooh, Scott, do a Big Lie post!
This is obviously a salaciously done video, but the moajor hosting companies seem to have purged/delisted most of the longer raw videos, but it is illustrative of what people would have been exposed to on youtube, twitter, etc right after the election.
https://rumble.com/vtlq96-explosive-new-surveillance-footage-of-ballot-drop-boxes.html
Thanks. I didn't see any videos of the same person putting in more than 3-4 ballots at a time, which seems like someone bringing the ballots in for their family (which is legal). It looks like Georgia investigated some of the people filmed in that video and found that was what they were doing (see https://www.factcheck.org/2022/06/evidence-gaps-in-2000-mules/ )
I was going to write about 21 in a original comment, but here might a better place. But as a preamble I have to say that this demand for sources is non-symmetrically difficult to provide for. Attempts to discuss the issue with anything but abject dismissal has made videos purporting to show fraud of any kind extremely difficult to find. For example, claims of voter fraud was banned on Youtube. For years. Specifically for the United States 2020 election. Here's a random article from some place I've never heard of writing about it: https://www.engadget.com/youtube-removes-videos-with-us-election-fraud-claims-154726251.html
It should be noted that most other social media platforms had similar policies. Therefore I can't find videos of anything. They might still be on twitter somewhere, but good luck finding them. I will also state I don't particularly care about the videos personally, nor do I think they represent the substantive issue Clutzy is speaking about.
Now, as "voter fraud" is nebulous, videos of "people dumping ballots into boxes" is pretty vague. There were lots of videos that involved people doing things with ballots and boxes, but what was happening in them (both by those who believe something nefarious was going on, and those who do not) differs.
Here is an article "fact checking" (I don't believe in fact checking, rhetorically) one of the more contentious videos that showed up during the election: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/14/fact-check-georgia-suitcase-video-missing-context/3892640001/
Videos of this type involved poll watchers being told that voting was done for the night, and then at some point more ballots being pulled out after they poll watchers had left. For those who have some kind of distrust, this sounds suspicious, as most people cannot recall voting stopping in the middle of the night prior to Trump being in office. The assumption is that ballot counters lied to get poll watchers out of the way so as to allow some kind of fraudulent handling.
This "fact check" alleges that actually, the poll workers were intending to leave but later returned to continue counting, and that the storage and retrieval of ballots is normal for such situations. The contention by Republicans that this so happened to mean that the poll watchers had not also returned is dismissed as basically irrelevant and not indicative of problems. I generally agree, but this is also what I would say if I had done something nefarious. Now, this is just one instance of this general type of "ballots and boxes" issue. This happened in multiple places. But they all follow the same general claim and response trend.
The second sort of videos involving people doing things with ballots and boxes probably refers to videos of ballot harvesting. Laws on ballot harvesting differ by state, and generally some Republicans will assume that something legally spurious is happening when one person is dumping multiple ballots into one box. Even with a video though, it's not immediately clear if it is, as the video could be from some time or place where nothing wrong is happening.
Moving past this specific and mostly pointless question, Clutzy's actual point is pretty much true. "Voter fraud" is nebulous. Do I believe voter fraud (illegally cast ballots by individuals) swung the 2020 election? Not really, though this seems to have not been properly appraised in certain states. Do I believe voter fraud (last minute changes to election law, some of which were illegal) swung the 2020 election? Yes. The distinction could be made by passing the word"fraud" through the celebration parallax and arriving at "fortification," as described by the vaunted Time article by Molly Ball, posted I believe on February 4th of 2021.
Unfortunately at this point I don't really have the time to go over all the cases. Because frankly, this whole thing is one big exercise in an isolated demand for rigor. Normal people just call it political bias. Several states were involved, and several issues were brought up in those states. There's a book I have not read about it, Rigged, by Mollie Hemingway. But for the sake of what you would call signal, I'll go through one state in broad strokes.
Pennsylvania passed Act 77, which introduced no-excuse mail-in voting. In addition, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that because of Covid, mail in ballots would be counted up to 3 days past election day, so long as they were postmarked prior to election day or the postmark was illegible.
To the first, Congressman Mike Kelly, among others, filed a case stating that the no-excuse mail-in voting Act 77 was unconstitutional under the state constitution, and required an amendment to the constitution. This is what we call "true." Initially counting was halted, but then the case was dismissed on the grounds that the case was brought in too late, as Act 77 was passed in 2019. It was noted by some that this sounds like a catch 22, as an attempt to sue prior to 2020 could easily be judged to lack standing, as there had yet to be an election to which there was an aggrieved party. As an aside, in March of this year, this exact chain of legal logic played out with Kari Lake's lawsuit in Arizona. That is, there was an attempt to dismiss it on the grounds that it was a question of policy that should have been brought forth earlier, but it was ultimately allowed to go forward because Kari Lake would lack standing prior to the election in question. Anyway, the point is that no decision was ever made in Pennsylvania on the case's merits.
To the second, The Pennsylvania Republican Party challenged the state supreme court's extended deadline for mail-in ballots. The challenge went to the US Supreme Court prior to the election, which deadlocked 4-4 on a stay or emergency injunction, as Amy Barret had not yet been elected to the supreme court. After the Pennsylvania election, the Pennsylvania Republican Party tried again, but the Supreme Court declined to intervene. What this means is that ultimately the Supreme Court changed an election rule, and then when questioned on if it had the legal authority to do so (it didn't), nobody even looked at the question.
As a bonus, the Texas Lawsuit brought by Ken Paxton dealt with Pennsylvania as well as three other states, on this question of the states having made changes that violated the constitution. The US Supreme Court declined to hear the case, bizarrely claiming that Texas lacked standing in other state's elections. Alito and Thomas dissented to this, correctly pointing out that the US Constitution states that the Supreme Court's has among its primary purposes, dealing with cases in which one state sues another.
Ultimately you should see the pattern. There were legal issues with how states conducted their elections. And yet, they were dismissed on grounds that had nothing to do with the substantive claims under discussion. This is to say nothing of the Media's role in this.
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but when one state sues another, “dealing with the case” includes determining if the plaintiff has standing, just like with any lawsuit. The majority did not rule that the Supreme Court couldn’t resolve the case--they were resolving the case. They ruled that the case couldn’t proceed because Texas didn’t have standing.
IANAL, but that fits my understanding of standing. What’s the legal argument that Texas, qua Texas, was harmed by anything Pennsylvania did? Texas’s ability to conduct its elections how it wanted and have its electoral votes counted wasn’t harmed. Paxton’s case was the equivalent of, say, Target suing Wal-Mart for underpaying an employee, on the ground that this underpayment made it easier for Wal-Mart to compete against Target. That isn’t how it works; the one harmed (in my hypothetical, the underpaid employee) has to file the lawsuit if it’s going to be heard.
If I had to guess, I'd say the argument is that any State could sue any other on grounds that any State now has to work under whatever elected official the rest helped get elected, and if other States' election processes are bad enough, it's not fair to the States that are trying to maintain their own processes. At worst, a State ought to be permitted to secede, and a lot of people have made that historically impractical.
Imagine if your HOA splits 49-49 on whether to pay to have a casino at the entrance, and the remaining 2% are so negligent that the 49 you oppose are able to cast their ballots for them. You can't sue the 49 for simply disagreeing with you, but you can sue the 2 for letting the process be subverted.
So the story goes.
But in that scenario I am a member of the HOA, so I can imagine a legal argument that my rights to be represented are violated if legal procedures aren’t followed. I can’t sue some other HOA for not following a certain voting procedure, even if it leads to a result I don’t like. Federalism means that, at least when it comes to voting, the 50 states are not in the same HOA, all operating under the same rules.
You can imagine it going the other way. There are plenty of lawsuits from the left about supposed civil rights violations or gerrymandering or whatnot. But to my knowledge none of those lawsuits are filed by blue states, even though the blue states are affected by who runs Congress or who gets electoral votes. Because the blue states don’t have standing; there’s no constitutional principle that one state has a legal interest in another’s voting procedures.
I think that doesn't add up. Suppose you're in an HOA vote that doesn't follow the HOA's bylaws (this sort of came up for me just a few weeks ago), it's a potentially huge deal, esp. if you're now being obligated to pay extra dues, pay out of pocket for miscellaneous problems that arise from whatever that election determined, and so on. It might not convert into a lawsuit against members with lax security on their ballots, but it could certainly lead to an overturn of the vote. (In our case, it led to half the board stepping down.)
Alternately, look at it this way: if you enter a union that says it has elections for important things, you have a expectation that those elections work reasonably fairly. If that union said up front that elections were run by majority of subgroups, and any subgroup could run elections *any* it wanted - including one of the larger ones slanting the rules in favor of a small sub-subgroup of them - you'd probably want to know that before you joined that union. If that union instead said each subgroup ensured a majority vote and so you joined and then that union suddenly changed the rules right before a big election, you'd probably look pretty hard for a breach of contract.
Admittedly, the analogy is imperfect. It's hard to see an HOA election turning on household-level fraud, and Texas wasn't suing to have the election overturned (IIRC). Also, Texas would have to demonstrate real damages. That's impossible to show before the executive has actually executed anything - but if you agree that a given election is generally expected to be good news for some States and bad for others, then this is more an argument that the standing requirement itself is flawed than that Texas didn't have it. Or that the election process is.
So in the most forgiving interpretation, standing is of course an issue. Though certain interpretations of the relevant articles suggest that the Supreme Court doesn't have the ability to simply dismiss a case that falls under the Supreme Court's original jurisdiction. This was stated to be the case by Alito and Thomas, and this is what I was referring to when I vernacularly said "dealing with". Keep in mind, this is all a matter of constitutional law, and both the concept of standing and what to do when states sue each other are defined in the constitution. As are the issues at play, as it is argued that in violating their state constitution, Pennsylvania violated the US Constitution.
As a quick example of how the other side sees this, suppose that Pennsylvania's Supreme Court had ruled that actually, the state shall send twice the number of delegates as apportioned by their population to congress, mandatorily certified by the Governor. This is done, and the Texas AG says, "wait a minute, that is unconstitutional, both violating their state constitution and the US constitution."
You say, now hold on a minute. In what way has Texas's rights been violated? Texas has no standing.
And then the Supreme Court doesn't say anything.
If certain interpretations suggest the Supreme Court doesn't have the ability to dismiss a case for standing reasons, presumably certain other interpretations suggest it does. Do you stand by the claim that it was "bizarre" of the Court to abide by the latter interpretation?
I don't know what part of the US Constitution Pennsylvania is supposed to have violated, but I also don't see what relevance that has. Even a flagrant violation of the Constitution relies on standing: if I'm thrown in jail for giving a speech, and no one reads me my rights, and while I'm in there troops are quartered in my house without my permission…even with all of that, Texas can't sue on my behalf.
If Pennsylvania sent extra congresspeople or a third Senator, I assume the House or Senate would just refuse to seat them, and then it would be on these surplus Pennsylvanians to sue and lose. But if for some reason that didn't happen, I could see an argument why Texas would have standing: it's supposed to have 2/100 Senators, not 2/101, so the extra Pennsylvanian is diluting its voting power. I don't see the relevance to Paxton's suit, though, since Texas had exactly as much influence on the election as the Constitution said it was entitled to.
Yes, their argument was bizarre. The position that the Supreme Court can dismiss cases in which it has original jurisdiction is not that bizarre, but the argument justifying it in this case was bizarre in my view. Obviously a state in the Union should have standing in regards to the Constitution in which it and all other states are under. Why does it matter if I think it is bizarre or not? That's a rhetorical question, I'm pretty sure I can predict your answer.
The relevant part of the US Constitution would be Article II, Section 1.
Now, in your silly contrived situation, Texas probably could sue if you were in Texas at the time or were a citizen of Texas, and depending on circumstances there would be a variety of legal concepts that could be invoked in doing so. Perhaps parens patriae, for example, if you couldn't sue because you were being prevented from doing so, but even if not, the violation of the 3rd might be grounds for Texas to sue for direct harm to the state.
Paxton's suit was about Texas having its voting power diluted. This would fall under the previously mentioned "direct harm to the state" justification. That would be the relevance of my example, a case where it is extremely obvious, even to one such as yourself, that Texas would have standing for having its voting power diluted.
You have been informed of the argument and have been given analogies on the situation by me and elsewhere regarding the Texas Lawsuit and standing which you say you understand. And you understand that it's at least not legally spurious to assume that Texas would by default have its case heard regardless of standing. I believe the Supreme Court interpreted the constitution incorrectly and in a bizarre way. You apparently think otherwise. There doesn't seem to be much more to discuss.
There is a reason almost, if not all, government organizations require their employees to not only refrain from corruption, but also activities giving the appearance of corruption. First, the latter decays faith in the organization, and legitimacy is the government's largest currency; Second, such activities provide an environment for real corruption to thrive. By analogy, the cartels exploit the "refugee" situation at the border to engage in real human trafficking and drug smuggling.
Also, I simply don't think the anti-2020 fraud position is at all principled. If similar rule changes were implemented by Likud, and Bibi won a close election, then a J6 like event happened and he used it to start imprisoning the political opposition, I'd be hard pressed to find a Democrat not openly condemning him. In fact, I suspect we would be inundated with "Reichstag fire" comparisons. After all, who was the major winner from J6? The Democrats and Biden. Who, according to the Capital Chief of Police on J6 was routinely denying requests for overtime and National Guard backup? The Speaker's office (Pelosi). Maybe I am an optimist, but maybe the phrase "cui bono" would re-enter the press's lexicon in such a situation.
It's a general rule that disputes over election procedures should be resolved prior to the election. You can't challenge election procedures in court after the election has occurred unless you can show a valid reason for not challenging the election procedures earlier. This is true in Pennsylvania, and it is true in Arizona, where (I believe, although I can't find the actual ruling) the count in Kari Lake's lawsuit challenging the signature verification procedure was thrown out.
There is no catch 22, as is shown by the fact that Act 77 was challenged in court prior to the 2022 election, and Act 77 was ruled Constitutional. In other words, there was a ruling on the merits as soon as soon as someone asked for relief that the courts could actually provide: changing the election procedures going forward. Changing the procedures used to conduct an election that has already occurred would require a time machine, technology that the court does not have access to.
Your second case was apparently adjudicated on the merits all the way up to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and was even reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to issue an injunction. Lot's of cases don't even make it as far as a state supreme court.
Your bonus case was thrown out because Texas was found to lack standing, but the Trump campaign had standing to raise the exact same issues.
The pattern I see is that the Trump campaign had the opportunity to challenge the conduct of the election in court, and when it did, it lost, with only one exception. Calling this outcome “voter fraud” redefines the term beyond recognition.
Not videos, but a relevant recent expose:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/09/exposed-whistleblower-steps-forward-reveals-private-facebook-group/
There's a ton of such stuff floating around. I stopped paying attention long ago, because it's clear that nobody cares.
I've talked to a few election deniers and I don't think they "believe it" so much as they don't really see politics as having anything to do with factual truth beyond my side/your side.
(Otoh, selection bias - the people who are loud about fringe political beliefs are just generally more likely to be unhinged)
I don't understand why the burden of the proof would be on the state to show a lack of wrongdoing. That isn't how we handle almost anything.
That's absolutely how we handle the state.
I don’t think so. For instance, if I’m disputing a traffic or parking ticket, the procedures officially state that the police issuing the ticket in the first place is on its own sufficient evidence that the ticket was merited. If I show up without any evidence that in fact it wasn’t merited, I lose by default. The burden is on me to show the state erred in issuing the ticket.
Interesting! So, if you happen to know, let’s say a Texan disputes a speeding ticket and testifies at a hearing that they were only going 60, and the ticketing officer says they were going 80. In the absence of other witnesses or evidence, how is the issue resolved?
That is totally false. If you get a speeding ticket and show up to court, and the police officer is missing, often the ticket just gets thrown out. Sometimes the state is entitled to a continuance to get the officer into court (typically on more serious matters like a DUI). But if you just keep going to court, and the state's witnesses don't show up, eventually you win by default.
The ballots themselves get checked though, even if you go dump a bunch of fake ballots in, as far as I'm aware we have processes in place to make sure we don't count them.
No. Sometimes ballot jackets get checked. And thus, mass dumping of fraudulent ballots (that is, ballots never issued by the state) is often hard. This doesn't preclude mass dumping of illegal ballots, those cast in a way not in accordance with the law, which many of the mass dumped ballots will have been in many states. Once those are co-mingled, its impossible to know which jacked was illegally cast and which was just dropped off by an old lady on her way to the supermarket that vote just being for herself.
And even the ballot jackets are kind of a joke. That anything less than 90% of absentee ballots aren't rejected for failing the signature match beggars belief. I work in the law, and I see wayyyy too many signatures a day. The idea that any average person's signature is consistent in the year 2020 is absurd. It was absurd in 2000 when I was still in grade school. This is why banks require IDs and pins and notaries.
I saw dozens of extremely detailed videos and articles investigating and debunking every one of these claims and videos and etc. Tons of work went into making media to persuade people that the claims of fraud were themselves fraudulent.
The problem is that those were all made by left-wing outlets, which means right-wing people never saw them. The level of algorithmic recommendations and filters bubbles in modern media consumption is such that you will simply never see something made by someone who disagrees with you unless it is in a takedown video made by someone on your side.
Like, literally I would not know that Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson or Prager U existed if it weren't for seeing them referenced in takedown videos and jokes from my side, they are completely transparent to all of my algos and bookmarks. Same in reverse for the other side.
So I'm actually not sure what 'steps to disabuse them' could have *possibly* led to convincing people on the right that those fraud claims were false, no matter how obviously correct and persuasive they were.
Like, literally, if there were a single 6-sentence paragraph that magically convinced 100% of people who read it that the election was legitimate, and the people on the left who discovered and wrote it tried as hard as they could to make sure every person on the right saw it, I doubt more than 10% of Republican voters would ever actually end up reading it. There's just no channels to get it to them.
For me, the decisive factor is the existence of some Republican politicians who think the election fraud claims are ridiculous. If there really was available but widely suppressed or ignored evidence for fraud, that is one group that I would expect to be overwhelmingly familiar with the existence of that evidence, and to have every incentive to publicise it and no incentive at all to disregard it. Thus the only way to explain anti-fraud Republicans consistently with a fraud theory being true is a level of conspiracy that defies all practical plausibility. If a conspiracy can not only engineer massive election fraud but also buy off not only the government and most of the media but also virtually all judges and election officials who investigate the claims AND a significant number of elected representatives of the party that was defrauded out of power, then that conspiracy can do anything. It proves too much: why not assume that that conspiracy was already in control of the world, that elections were already a sham beforehand, and that Trump and the pro-fraud media are part of the conspiracy as well? It's beyond absurd.
With that said, I have literally zero sympathy for the left and the Democrats having to deal with these false and unfair claims. For two reasons. First, because large parts of the left have denied the legitimacy of ALL THREE of the Republican victories this century. While there was *some* (though still not much) basis for these claims in 2000, there was absolutely none in 2004 and 2016. Those were completely indisputable and fair Republican wins. And yet significant numbers of Democrats delegitimised them, recklessly and arrogantly, for no other reason than that they didn't like the outcome. Wikipedia still has a whole page casting doubt on the 2004 result, with barely a mention of the lack of support for those claims. Hillary Cilnton herself repudiated her concession and declared Trump an "illegitimate president", and somehow was *not* condemned and octracised by the mainstream left. After that, the democrats *forever* lost the right to complain about legitimisation campaigns, false claims, or big lies. It's true that it was much larger from republicans in 2020. But on the other hand, they only did it once; there were no serious fraud claims in 2008 and 2012. Democrats have done it a full three times, *every* time they've lost, all because they just couldn't accept that they had alienated the people with their obnoxious attitudes. They made their bed; now they're lying in it. They're reaping what they sowed, and they deserve every moment of it.
Second, censoring claims of fraud (on social media or elsewhere) is the equivalent of putting up a big poster saying "we are *terrified* of free discussion and scrutiny of this claim". Most people are going to reasonably conclude you have something to hide, when you try to censor arguments. I don't think this is actually the reason for the censorship in this case, although it is in most other cases. I think the left has just become so unbelievably entitled, and so used to thinking that disagreement is an act of oppression, that even when the opposing claim is easily refuted they *still* think they're being oppressed by having to actually put in the time and effort to refute it. (Because it's not like there's *actual* oppression in the world, right?) Thus, all because of an unbelievable intellectual laziness and first-world entitlement, they have given good rational grounds for ordinary people to assume otherwise obviously-false claims are actually based in truth. Let there be no doubt for all progressives, social media employees, and other supporters of censorship: all the permanent damage that is done, now and in the coming years, to democracy and public trust rests ENTIRELY upon your conscience.
If your car can parallel park by driving sideways "crab-style", it can wedge in another car such that the previously present car can't get out unless it also has crab parking.
Wouldn't this only happen if the previously present car was already boxed in on one end, and then the crab car boxes it in on the other end?
And can't this already happen even without crab parking? I assume the same norms would apply. (I.e. if the car behind you has no room in the back, then if you park in front of it, leave it some room in the front. Or more generally: always leave some space both in front of you and behind you)
I think the benefit of crab-style parking is that it makes it easier to park in relatively small spaces, not that it specifically gives you the ability to park in spaces that are exactly equal to the length of your vehicle.
Edit: You really only need a little bit of space to not be boxed in, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN6MqsBombA&t=88s (unparking from that spot should be easier than parking into that spot)
This can happen even without crab parking. Heck I don't even see that crab parking makes it significantly more likely to happen.
We've discovered the real reason crabs permeate so much convergent evolution!
We should do it to creationists.
.26. Thanks for this. I hope everyone who is interested in consciousness clicks through and reads it. The distinction between Sentient and Conscious is important, if consciousness is to be a useful term at all.
What do you mean by "sentient" and "conscious"? I am still confused by the whole "consciousness" thing.
From my perspective, it's all about intelligence and knowledge applied to understanding the world. We make mental models of the physical world around us. These models include ourselves, a thing that takes up space. We can compare ourselves with similar entities: "Who has longer reach?" "Who can throw a rock farther?" We can notice that we think and feel and want, and model our own inner experience. We notice that other similar entities appear to have motivations and goals, and create models of their inner experience. When we notice that other similar entities might have an inner experience like ours, that's empathy. When we notice that we can model our inner experience the way we model other similar entities' inner experience, bam: we're on the outside looking in.
As far as I'm aware, that's what everyone seems to be going on about when they talk about "consciousness". But a lot of the more technical discussion feels as pointless as trying to create a mathematical model of the experience of "being one with everything". Regarding that Bronze Age confusion that the book talked about, I can easily believe that a new form of model of other people spread by contact, and once someone introspected enough to apply it to themself, their own inner experience changed irrevocably.
As for "sentience", I tend to use it to mean more-or-less "reacting to stimuli". Moving away from negative stimuli, moving toward positive stimuli, that sort of thing: a quality that even plants have weakly. It's necessary but not sufficient for what Buddhists would call dukkha. Some older sci-fi uses "sentience" to mean what I would call "sapience", but oh well.
Those are pretty close to my own thoughts about it. Sentience and consciousness are discussed in the paper Scott linked to. Some people think that what you and I are referring to as sentience is the same as consciousness.
.10. The old saying “build a better mousetrap” has reason to it.
I have read that variations on mousetraps are the most patented devices in the USA.
Re. The Goddess of Everything Else, I really want to love this story, which is so beautiful almost until the end. But then it suddenly about-faces and denies the truth it had taught. The final paragraph says, "Okay, now we're magically freed from evolutionary forces for no reason at all other than that /this is where we are now/, and you can have your utopia." Whereas in fact systems which generate complexity will never be free from evolutionary forces, and pretending that they are, will destroy the work of the Goddess of Everything Else.
Right. What this beautiful story illustrates is how nearly impossible it is for humans to not anthropomorphize the world we experience. Even though we are now factually aware that there is no creator god, we continue to imbue the world with an aura of teleonomy. An example of that is how we talk about Darwinian evolution. In the climax of Scott’s story, we envision “the brain and the body set free from Darwinian bonds and restrictions.” Obviously, this is just a version of creationism, with natural forces acting as creators.
It's also just a story. But, this framing of Darwinism as some sort of discreet creative process is pretty ubiquitous. One phrase that always catches my attention is “evolutionary mismatch.” As if evolution made a mistake in its ultimate goal. Of course, evolutionary mismatch is a useful heuristic in evolutionary sociology, but it often gets forced into labor as an argument that humans must transcend human nature to make progress--- a secular continuation of the atavistic fallen state narrative. Pascal Boyer describes this anthropomorphic view as “the main obstacle to having a proper science of human behavior.”
Bigger picture, perhaps this story is an allegory of emergent complexity. Maybe the Goddess of Everything Else is revealing to us the notion of the ‘evolution of evolution’ (an idea I think I got from Eugene Koonin, The Logic of Chance.) Maybe Scott Alexander is prophesying a future where humans actually do transcend what is simply an artifact of a thermodynamic gradient, the evolution of complexity by natural selection.
> Even though we are now factually aware that there is no creator god
Oh really? I feel like this should’ve been bigger news...
Re. "Maybe Scott Alexander is prophesying a future where humans actually do transcend what is simply an artifact of a thermodynamic gradient, the evolution of complexity by natural selection." --
Can and should humans transcend--and I mean do without--continued evolution? This is, I think, the most-important moral question by far--so much that I think of it as simply THE moral question. All else is noise by comparison, including the question of whether AIs replace humans entirely. Yet I've never asked the question in public, because even pointing out the problem goes farther outside the Overton window than eugenics. I don't think I've seen anyone else raise it, even though it seems to be the most-serious existential threat to morality and civilization built into our universe.
The basic problem is that there are very high correlations between
- behavior we call "moral", or at any rate altruistic
- actions that reduce selective pressure in society
- practices that make a society vulnerable to exploitation by non-altruists
This applies theoretically, to all possible lifeforms (including AIs).
Nearly everything we do to try to make the world a better place, undermines the selective pressures that made us evolve the very altruism and love that we're trying to expand the effects of, and/or makes it easier for people lacking that love and altruism to thrive. This is the flip side of the Goddess of Everything Else. For instance, medical technology, including just basic sanitation, has lowered the force of selection before reproduction to almost zero in advanced countries. So when any organism develops the intelligence to change its environment, its genome, including its moral instincts, becomes evolutionary unstable.
The only way I can think of to prevent our moral behavior from destroying our moral instincts is to take responsibility for maintaining the integrity of our own genomes. But there are 2 huge problems with this:
1. Who exactly will have the power to decide what genomes humans will have? This, at least, isn't insoluble. But I think the only workable solution is complete anarchy. Give everyone the information about how to gengineer their kids, and the ability to do it however they choose. Then (A) nobody gets to control the human genome to satisfy their crazy ideology, (B) the human genome doesn't suffer catastrophic loss of diversity, and (C) slightly intelligent guidance plus the resulting high variance in genotypes might increase the "rate of evolution" (not that that can be measured, but it is a not-meaningless hypothetical construct) to at least zero.
2. What about evolution? How can you prevent the devolution of the human genome through well-informed germline engineering, and yet still allow for the random mutations necessary for anything better than our current model of human to evolve? I think there is no answer to this question. You can't do it. If humans are controlling the human genome, they can recognize as improvements only modifications which enhance existing human behaviors and perceptions. But they would never allow the development of any significant new value.
Consider love. Reptiles appear to be neurologically incapable of love. No reptilian committee of the genome would see love, should it appear in their population, as anything other than a perversion to be stamped out. I think we would likewise be unable to recognize any radical improvements on human nature as improvement rather than error.
I don't think we should try to solve to problem #2 today. Find a workable solution to problem #1, and trust that, in the future, people will be smarter, and will be able to deal with problem #2 better than we could today.
In my view, when considering questions of morality it’s helpful to take the evolutionary view that moral sentiments have evolved because they are adaptive for group scale cooperation. Our first thought on cooperation is a group of hunters bringing down a mastodon. But what our large cerebral cortex is really there for is to feel out reliable ingroup coalitions for support in conflicts with other humans. On the larger social scale, we have ancient fallen state narratives, or Buddha asleep under a tree, that function to divide people into the asleep vs the enlightened, the redeemed vs the lost. Questions framed as ‘can we transcend?’ or ‘where do we go from here to “make the world a better place”’ are of this same type.
So, I see your point about reduced selective pressure for reproduction possibly changing the distribution of interacting moral sentiments (and a factor related to survival fitness for reproduction is sexual selection for reproduction). I think this has been happening since the agricultural revolution. But I think we have to pay strong attention to the eugenics episode here. The ostensible question was ‘does our recent learning about evolution mean we can improve the human genome?’, but we can clearly see in retrospect that this question was imbedded in ancient ingroup:outgroup psychology, i.e. racism, ethnocentrism, elitism. So, do you believe the modern human phenotype is in some way degraded, or stultified in reaching some higher potential?
On your point 2. It is indeed an odd situation where we now have technologies where we can realistically contemplate directly changing the human genome--- probably a genuine instance of evolutionary mismatch. What could go wrong?
Re. "do you believe the modern human phenotype is in some way degraded" -- I think we don't have much data, but we do know humans acquire about 30 de novo mutations per generation, and 1/4 to 1/3 of point mutations are synonymous, so 20 to 23 non-synonymous mutations per generation. Somebody should try to do the math to figure out how much selective pressure is needed to counteract that. It's complicated, because accumulated mutations have a normal distribution, and selection acts disproportionately on the low tail of the distribution, but AFAIK we don't know how disproportionately.
On the other hand, if you pick any observable measure of fitness other than reproductive fitness, such as IQ, socioeconomic status, reported happiness, immune function, number of friends, number of incarcerations--acknowledging that they're biased, but we can only use what we can observe--we have negative selective pressure today on at least some of those measures. If this is the case for most measures, then genome is not just degrading, but literally devolving--under selective pressure to evolve to minimize our fitness measures. But we have little idea how quickly. The NIH has effectively banned research into this area with their lockdown of the largest NCBI human genotype/phenotype database, access granted only to researchers whose research is deemed politically correct. I'm not making this up.
Linkage disequilibrium is another matter entirely, potentially far more alarming, which AFAIK no one has investigated beyond investigating pairs of SNIPs. I don't even want to talk about it, other than to note that it is never the case in evolutionary theory that a particular parameter is "good" or "bad". The most you can do is pick a fitness function and try to optimize it; and any attempt always arrives at intermediate values for all parameters.
Re. "we can clearly see in retrospect that this question was imbedded in ancient ingroup:outgroup psychology, i.e. racism, ethnocentrism, elitism":
The question arose in a racist and ethno-centric Europe, so in that context it manifested as racist and ethnocentric. But "eugenics" simply means "good genetics". If you believe in correcting germline mutations that cause terrible diseases, or even in comparing genomes before getting married, as some Ashkenazi Jews do owing to the high rate of recessive diseases in that group, you're pro-eugenics.
Thinking about genetics and ethics today is so screwed up that most bioethicists today (assuming the papers published on the matter are a random sample, which they probably aren't, but what else can you do?) say it's okay for parents to use genetic tech to have a baby born with congenital deafness, but that it's terrible and oppressive to use genetic tech to have a baby born without congenital deafness. We need to throw all that shit out and reboot.
Also, in order to talk seriously about genetics, we need to use the old meaning of "racist", which I would state as "someone is racist to the extent that they only their group priors when dealing with someone of a particular ethnicity". We can't use definitions of "racist" which make anyone with a basic understanding of genetics "racist", so that only people who don't know what they're talking about, are allowed to talk.
(And before we can even attempt that, we need to ditch the metaphysical framework in which "racist" is a Boolean predicate. That shit leads nowhere. You can't reason with people who use words as Boolean predicates; it leads to post-modernism or Buddhism.)
Thanks for the informative response. Of course, I’m entertaining a sort of philosophy of evolutionary sociology, where pondering whether the human genome is degrading, presupposes some sort of independent standard against which to compare, which comparisons are a durable feature of folk psychology. But, on the more realistic level of inherited diseases, including mental health problems, what you say is very interesting.
In terms of racism, a main theme of Sonia Sultan’s Organism and Environment is that you can’t look at DNA sequences to make broad statements about heritable variations in phenotype. I remember thinking as I was reading the book that if the race-is-a-social-construct crowd really understood what she is saying she’d probably get cancelled. Science as subversion!
I think genetic engineering will lead to increased diversity, and I'm not going to say whether it's catastrophic because I don't know.
Even if governments individually have constraints on genetic engineering, they aren't going to agree with each other. *Maybe* there will be agreement on what an improved knee would look like, but I wouldn't count on even that much.
It will be hard to enforce laws on fairly subtle changes.
Genetic engineering won't be done perfectly, so that's a source of variation.
Also, what's the standard? Evolutionary fitness is about fitness for the current environment, not, for example, a paleolithic environment. A honeybee is optimized for living in a hive, not living independently like its ancestors.
What catastrophe are you hypothesizing?
I'm not hypothesizing any catastrophe, other than the catastrophe of stopping evolution, or of a centralized authority directing it.
I suppose it's possible for a centralized authority to take control of human evolution, but I think it's unlikely. It's plausible that there will be people breeding who don't have access to the Shiny New Technology. The future belongs to the Amish, and they and those who are considerably meeker will inherit the earth if the catastrophe includes the support system for the degenerate majority breaking down.
Meanwhile; have an essential earworm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZnt-0fEiT0&ab_channel=Hairsprayhome
The Turnblatts won't win. They aren't going away, either.
I'm pretty sure the story is, from the beginning to the end, about evolutionary forces promoting cooperation being, ultimately, stronger than evolutionary forces promoting competition. "Your loyalty unto the Goddess your mother is much to your credit, nor yet shall I break it. Indeed, I fulfill it." "For I say unto you even multiplication itself when pursued with devotion will lead to my service."
It is, but the last paragraph suggests "breaking free" of evolution. As if we'd reached the endpoint, ultimate perfection. I think it is possible for a species to "break free" of evolution if they hold their make-up static, for instance by uploading and forbidding further alterations. But I don't think evolution is something that should be broken free of; it is closer to the thing that continually sets us freer, though "free" isn't quite the right word. And evolution doesn't do any of that if selective pressure is removed.
I guess my point is, the ending does not in fact require "breaking free" from evolution, a removal of selective pressure, an alternative explanation exists in which the (undeniable, ever-existing) selective pressure has just ceased to reward KILLING CONSUMING MULTIPLYING CONQUERING in any shape or form.
Recall that, at each point of the story, the choice to cooperate was a) against the KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER imperative and b) clearly evolutionarily adaptive. That the two are not the same is, I'm convinced, the whole point.
I think even evolutionary biologists who don't believe in group selection would agree that, if group selection /is/ a significant force, the definition of altruism ensures that it can evolve, or be maintained after evolving, only when there's competition between groups. This competition might not technically involve killing, but it must /effectively/ involve killing, defined as reducing the fraction of resources constituting or controlled by competing groups.
This comes up in David Sloan Wilson's book /Does Altruism Exist?/, in which he repeatedly emphasizes that the evolution of altruism requires competition between groups, and then speculates about a future world in which everyone is altruistic and at peace, noticeably NOT pointing out that this contradicts his repeated explicit statements that that is impossible.
But the contrast in the story is not between [cancer] and altruism, it's between [cancer] and (specifically, literally, explicitly) everything else. There's obviously plenty of ways to escape [cancer] that don't rely on altruism at all.
(I think "cancer" is a great tell regarding what Scott was getting at. Cancer is a dead end for a structure that relies on cooperation, including the cancer cells themselves. You don't need altruism to discourage cancer at that point, a selfish desire not to self-destruct perfectly suffices. )
You do need altruism to discourage cancer. The altruism is performed by those cells which don't turn cancerous. This evolves, and is maintained, only by the competition between groups. The groups are multi-cellular individuals.
In the absence of selection, pediatric cancer should increase, very slowly in human time, but very rapidly in evolutionary time., My Fermi estimate (below) is that most people would be born with cancer after 2800 years without selection.
A close upper bound on the fraction of mutations which assist cancer is 0.1, because cancer cells typically have about 100 mutations, about 10 of which contribute to the cancer. This is an over-estimate because these cells are selected for having cancer. Let's say the true fraction is 0.05. (There's probably a better, more-complicated way of estimating it.)
There are on average 30 de novo mutations per generation; 20-23 of which (ave. 21.5) are non-synonymous. It takes on average 10 such mutations to cause cancer.
Suppose these mutations get mixed homogeneously into the population with every generation. (This is false.) Then the number of such mutations found in a newborn after one generation without selection will? be drawn from the binomial distribution with n=21.5, p=0.05. (This is an approximation; n=21.5 is the mean of another binomial distribution.) If this is right, and I'm not confident that it is, the median person might be born with cancer when npg = 21.5*.05*g = 10, which happens after 10/(21.5*.05) = 9.3 generations (about 279 years). However, this assumes that you get cancer whenever you have 10 pro-cancerous mutations, which is obviously false--in most cases, probably the vast majority of cases some of these will be either redundant, damaging the same of the same pathways, or won't have synergy, as they damage pathways which don't collectively add up to cancer. So this estimate is a lower bound on how long it would take for half the population to have cancer at birth. I'll wildly guess that it's an order of magnitude too low, & thus a better estimate would be 2790 years.
We could try to predict the rate of pediatric cancer increase we expect to see in the new study by the CDC (Siegel et al 2023, "Counts, incidence rates, and trends of pediatric cancer in the United States, 2003-2019"), counting pediatric cancer over 16 years (17 data points, 2003-2019), which showed a geometric mean increase of 0.47%. However, I don't have the time to do this properly, and am not sure we have all the data we need to do it.
I'll just check my earlier guestimate by seeing how many years y it would take to reach 50% of the population being born with cancer with a yearly increase of 0.47%. The rates are given per million people, so the point where the median person is born with cancer would be when # cases/million/year = 500,000, & the starting point (2003) is 164.5 per million.
164.5 * r^y = 500,000, r = 1.0047, y log(r) = log(500000/164.5),
y = 1710 years
That's pretty close to "an order of magnitude higher than 279 years". But I don't trust it at all, primarily because the rate of increase per year shouldn't be constant given that it depends on a binomial distribution.
As someone who has been in charge of security cameras for various buildings, you need a LOT of cameras to cover everything and even then they're unlikely to be able to see into spots like behind a parked van or whatever.
I'm guessing that having a security camera follow you around, possibly with a loud voice saying "please leave the premises" is more intimidating than cameras (mostly above line of sight so people don't look at them) that just sit there.
There was a store I visited recently where there was a security camera behind glass right at eye level about 3 feet away as you left the store. Although that was more likely in order to get a good closeup.
Roving cameras still have the problem that you have to program in routes that give you enough coverage though.
The main author of the IIT open letter offers a defense of his actions: https://psyarxiv.com/28z3y/
Thanks, added.
And here's further discussion of Erik with the author:
https://twitter.com/erikphoel/status/1703481848813203749
It's amusing to see a literal admission of an isolated demand for rigor.
So I've only skimmed the critquie of the letter and the defense, but that twitter exchange makes it seem like the entire issue is that this guy (and I guess the 127 other co-signers) think that this theory gets more media attention than it's empirical results warrant, and that equals pseudoscience? That is _bonkers_.
26. On Jaynes - the second part of the critique is much more thorough than the first one. Don't just read the first one and not bother with the rest like I was very tempted to. Revisiting the concept of consciousness as internal narrative and the Bicameral Mind, in a recent Very Bad Wizards podcast (https://verybadwizards.com/episode/episode-267-the-thickness-of-reality) David Pizarro mentioned he doesn't think in language at all, and it takes active effort to convert his thoughts into words - perhaps the Jaynesians should have some conversations with him? He hardly seems to lack "a-consciousness".
Edit: maybe it was episode 266?
When a culture moves from a place where the only way you can learn something is by someone else telling it to you, to a culture where things can be written down and concrete manifestations of the real world can be expressed and manipulated in symbolic forms I think that could have quite a bit of an effect on how people think. Also, it was not everybody by far. Certain cultures, accelerated, and certain cultures cease to exist. We will never really know.
I would submit that learning the calculus changes the way one thinks, for instance.
Maybe they should talk to me; I have the same issue. Or so I say…
Same here. :-)
I don't think in language either. Lots of people don't! I find the Jaynesians' equation of "consciousness" with "thinking in language" somewhere south of hilarious and trending towards offensive. It's such a tremendous lack of imagination for the variance of human experience.
It’s not really what he said. Language is important only that it is a system of symbols in written form. It’s the ability to manipulate internal concepts of things in order to come up with another idea. Mathematics or symbolic logic could be called languages or not. A real world triangle once understood conceptually can be used and manipulated in a lot of ways that don’t involve using the word triangle in your head.
It's a terrible feeling when you're explaining something and you come to some concept in the explanation which seems like it ought to have a word for it, but then you realize that they idea doesn't actually have a word and you have to go into a big digression explaining the concept and totally interrupt your flow. I bet that doesn't happen to people who think with words.
Nah what happens instead is you get stuck in a digression of "I swear there's a word for this, it's on the tip of my tongue... [Bad metaphor] [poor description]" if your counterpart helps you out, then it's fine, otherwise you fumble through then remember the word like 14 hours later and feel like an idiot.
I think in words, but sometimes there's a concept where there really isn't a word for it.
#19 As someone who keeps strictly kosher, with some small exceptions, I'm generally never able to eat at a table with non-kosher food on it. This obviously has serious downsides but not much of the social alienation experienced by the Vegan Liberation Pledge takers.
Main reasons being:
- All of immediate family is also strictly kosher
- Part of community that mostly keeps kosher
How I ensure that I maintain connections with my non-kosher keeping friends? Apart from going out for drinks and movies, we just invite people over a lot and try make the food as awesome as possible.
Over the years I don't really remember anyone remaining strictly kosher for the long term without immediate family who at least keep their home kosher. So the vegan's experiences don't surprise me.
Can you explain more about why this you can't eat with non-kosher people? Is it just that the dishes might not have been washed properly to separate meat and milk, or is there something else?
There isn't a law against eating with non-kosher people. It's just very hard to do while following halacha (jewish law) correctly.
The main reason is because of a concept called Marit Ayin. It has to be very clear that you aren't eating the non-kosher food yourself. Basically so that someone who is unaware but also keeps kosher might not see an obviously religious person eating at a non-kosher restaurant and inadvertently assume the restaurant/food is kosher and partake themselves. This one is usually the hardest one to get around and the law doesn't give much leeway even if you are sure no one will see you (most probably as it's a slippery slope).
Food and dishes also obviously have to be kosher and the levels of strictness once you get into standard orthodoxy are pretty high. In practice, if I get invited to a non-kosher wedding or other catered event and the host is trying to be accommodating, they will usually contact one of the kosher caterers in the city who will deliver a plastic wrapped meal to the venue (like a nice-ish airplane meal). Generally the fact that you are eating such an obviously different meal using disposable plates and cutlery is considered enough of a visual indicator that someone wouldn't assume you are eating the non-kosher food.
Obviously all of the above doesn't happen very often though so in practice it's very rare that I end up eating on tables with non-kosher food.
Thanks!
I've also heard there's a rule against drinking wine that was served by a non-Jew. Is this true?
Thanks.
You're skipping the most important difference! You aren't refusing to eat at a table with non-kosher food as part of an effort to force the world to become orthodox, and you aren't demanding that people keep a kosher table as the price for being your friend. You're placing the demand on yourself, not anyone else.
#18 - this was the only data I could find to support my hypothesis that eggplant use is correlated with cuisine quality (I made it into a silly one-pager at eggplantindex.com).
I am still unclear how crypto is supposed to help the unbanked/debanked/oppressed.
The US government has made fiat to crypto transfers visibly harder without trying very hard; the capability to cut off all manner of alternative and mainstream banking has already been abundantly demonstrated via Canadian bankers.
Seems the problem is really reining in the source of power over money, not the specific form of value.
Non-centralized crypto can be used without any bank or other organization seeing, let alone controlling, that transaction. It's how the Silk Road lasted - the government was extremely aware of the sales going on, but had no means to control the transactions. They were also anonymous, since they were tracked on the blockchain instead of through normal channels.
Centralized crypto, on the other hand, loses those benefits because the organization handling the transactions has to keep records and it becomes a point where government can notice and interject.
Government can't control that particular transaction, but for you to be able to make it, you need access to crypto/fiat exchanges of some kind, and it's easy to make those very onerous/risky outside of a trusted underground network.
Agreed, so long as the government does either of 1) Connects crypto wallets to individual people, or 2) seeks to control all crypto to/from fiat transactions.
I am not sure what's possible with 1, but they definitely would like to control 2.
Crypto makes 2) *more* possible, not less.
Cash is king.
If the crypto economy grows large enough you will never need crypto to fiat as you can just ignore fiat for your entire life. We're not there yet but that's the goal.
Silk Road lasted only because the tools did not yet exist to easily trace the blockchain.
This situation is no longer true. Even before the advent of tools like Chainanalysis, it was perfectly possible to do tracing but the Feds are simply not as "into" this type of deep grunt work as some in the private sector are.
Silk Road was also a very specific marketplace. You can't buy food on Silk Road. You can't pay rent on Silk Road. You can't get paid legal wages on Silk Road. You can't buy a bus ticket, and airplane ticket, etc etc.
For people in the real world who have to eat, rent, get transport - fiat is the only way to go in the vast, vast majority of cases.
As for your assertion about "decentralized crypto" being in any way more beneficial: even disregarding the fact that the miners are heavily centralized and the exchanges are heavily centralized and that any fiat-crypto transaction MUST be regulate-able by government, the offset of no "centralization" is the utter lack of protection against grift, con, scam and even violent crime.
That's one of the core scams of crypto: the implicit assumption that the stability and protections of the fiat financial environment are replicated in the decentralized one.
No disagreement here. I've been dismissive of crypto for a long time, but at the beginning it was being promoted specifically as anti-centralized. Back then miners were independent and there were no exchanges.
In order to gain legitimacy - and get away from the perception it was all "grift, con, scam, and even violent crime" there were a number of steps taken. Those steps were good for crypto and the early investors who wanted money. It was bad for the decentralization.
#13. Russia presumably continues to fund them, what’s the issue?
> The safety movement is concerned that Amazon might have enough power to steamroll over Anthropic’s safety-conscious culture; this did happen with DeepMind and Google, didn’t with OpenAI and Microsoft, and my guess is Anthropic held out for a good enough deal (and had enough bargaining power) that it won’t happen there either.
The AI safety movement is to computing as bioethicists are to biology and medicine, right down to calling themselves the "safety movement".
...care to explain, or are you just here to call people names?
You say that like you think bioethicists are a bad thing.
doesn't everyone?
No, if everyone thought that, bioethicists wouldn't be able to win grants, draw salaries, or publish articles.
The biosafety movement isn't bioethicists. "Biosafety" means the people whose job it is to prevent lab leaks and stuff like that. Honestly I think we could use a couple more of them.
(and yes, most of the AI safety people are also biosafety in this sense, in the sense that the same EA grantmakers fund both).
The fact that some group calls themselves "safety" doesn't mean other groups aren't doing the same thing. What do you think the bioethicists would say they want?
Note: if you find the giant plane in @5 to be exciting, thrilling, scary or upsetting in a way that transcends all rationality, you probably have megalophobia/philia!
https://www.reddit.com/r/megalophobia/
What if the main thought it inspires in me is "it's going to burn *all* of the jet fuel"?
In some ways that would not be a concern. Takeoff and landing both involve acceleration, so tend to use a lot of fuel. A larger vehicle may also use less fuel per kilogram of mass due to drag being a function of surface area while mass is a function of volume.
I think it would not be workable using actual jet fuel though. Refueling today involves tricky flying in conditions that are not optimal for less fuel use. So it's only used when you absolutely must keep that specific plane in the air longer and you can't just land and refuel there.
Changing to a power system that doesn't need refueling, e.g. a theoretical nuclear reactor that can get off the ground keeps other problems. The crew can only fly so long and where do they sleep? Docking/undocking to transfer cargo and passengers would be a nightmare. Etc.
Don't worry, it's nuclear-powered!