It would be really weird if that alien sadness manifested only in a brief period before death, so you're probably back to immortal souls with the "souls" being whatever the aliens extract and take to live in their Good Place because they're sad about people dying at all but don't want to interfere in primitive cultures.
RFK Jr genuinely believes in some insane stuff around mRNA. On seed oils I am pretty sure he is wrong, but at least there is a theory and some (misinterpreted) evidence. On mRNA it is all bizarre online claims.
I would like to see new mRNA therapies used to cure disease. However, I also have serious concerns about how the technology will be used. The government has already set a precedent that it can forced people to get mRNA treatments that they do not want or need, and that haven't been fully tested. If we want medicine to progress there needs to be a focus rebuilding the credibility that was shredded during covid and strengthening individual medical rights so that this kind of research is no longer viewed as a threat.
Then the thing to do is see if there's a way to satisfy both concerns: under-provisioning of new medical tech, and government overreach manifest as therapy mandates.
The obvious solution here appears to be to let mRNA research continue, ideally with completely private funding so that it can't be threatened by a lone government official or a lobbyist with the ear of one, and any products from that research being optional.
What do you think of the large-scale mandatory smallpox vaccination campaigns that eradicated the disease? I'm pretty sure the smallpox vaccine is more dangerous/harder on the patient on average than any of the covid vaccines, but damn, the world sure is better with no circulating smallpox in it!
I think the smallpox vaccination did a lot of good - I agree it's nice to not have to worry about smallpox, given the pictures I'd seen - but I also assumed it was largely voluntary, since I expect a lot of people agreed it'd be nice to not have smallpox and lined up for vaccination. I never looked into how many people refused, or what happened to them.
Meanwhile, I know of certain nationwide mandatory initiatives that carry all sorts of deleterious effects, and from that, I infer that nationwide mandates could be either good or bad.
Furthermore, I know to try to distinguish good or bad mandates by examining the incentives at work. If there's a disease that hits everyone, then everyone has an incentive to seek protection, and if no one's obviously getting rich from selling that protection, to not quibble much with the evidence telling them that it hits everyone. The result might be most people going along with the mandate, and the rest getting by on herd immunity, which means the mandate never had to be a mandate.
If, OTOH, they're hearing that only some people get hit, and that that cohort could be quarantined and treated as with previous contagions, and that the treatment uses a very novel technique, and that that technique might be very dangerous, and that that technique is implemented by only a few very wealth parties, who appear to be the same parties telling everyone it's fine and by the way we're trying to make it mandatory, then I notice that's a critically different set of incentives than what appeared to be at work during the smallpox epidemic.
I just do not understand this perspective at all. Over 1 million Americans died of Covid and a ton of nurses and doctors left the profession because it was so bad. From a policy perspective, some states stayed in quarantine too long sure, and they acknowledge that in hindsight. The vaccine and mRNA research indisputably saved a lot of lives- why are people bitching about vaccines and saying they didn't need it?
I don't understand how the bodily autonomy/ anti-vax people trying to shoot down research that could actually prevent cancer (which 1 in 3 people will get in their lifetime right now) isn't the most "missing the forest for the trees" take going on in our discourse right now.
Minimizing my chances of getting cancer is so much important to me than the state potentially violating your opinion of what bodily autonomy is in what everyone considered at the time to be a national emergency.
When the epidemic was in progress, I remember seeing legitimate concern raised about people being reported dead from Covid when it was actually a combination of things. E.g. someone gets Covid and dies, but was already 80 years old and with a history of other respiratory ailments. Or hospitals reporting deaths as Covid-related because of legislation promising extra financial aid to combat the crisis, leading to overreporting.
Meanwhile, there were other reports of the vaccine making some people less healthy, and even killing them in a few cases. There's even a causal chain describing how it can lead to myocarditis (mRNA leaves the injection site, reaches the heart, instructs heart cells to manufacture the spike protein, immune system kills those cells, heart wall is now weaker and more prone to rupture, especially during strenuous activity). This was combined with the known fact that young people were much less susceptible to Covid. So the argument was that for some people, especially young people (adults and children), the risk from the vaccine was actually greater than the risk of the disease itself.
When such arguments were made, the response was significantly more emotional than could be explained by a national threat backed by evidence, since if the arguments were true, a vaccine mandate was itself a national threat, and therefore worth a sober look. Instead, people were discredited for even making the argument, including medical experts. And then evidence began turning up of vaccine proponents saying things that weren't true, and hiding things that were. All the while, people noticed how much of the reporting in support of mRNA treatments happened to be sponsored by pharmaceutical companies selling those treatments. It's not hard to imagine they might report the upsides of mRNA treatments and suppress reporting of the downsides.
With that background, a lot of people sought a different authority, and there's RFK Jr. with a long reputation of having a different perspective, not obviously driven by profit margins (the hobgoblin of the day). That doesn't make him automatically correct, but the only alternative was the usual pharma-sponsored reporting, so the portion of public opinion that was already antagonized by said reporting ranged from "ehh, may as well try it" to "the enemy of my enemy must be my friend!".
This opinion, in turn, is probably driving opposition to *any* mRNA research, Covid or otherwise. This is likely wrong in the other direction, but there still remains the possibility that mRNA cancer researchers will highlight positive reports and suppress negative. Pharmaceuticals still possess a great deal of money, and command a great deal of loyalty.
If that research were all privately funded, it would at least ensure that anyone doing the work would be putting up their own money for it, rather than using taxpayer money as a lever. And it would be less likely to lead to a mandate.
I think this is quite accurate description of what is going on.
People became panicked that covid is such a danger. Largely correct for elderly but only slight risk increase for young people.
Compare this to riding a motorcycle that increases risk of death from traffic accident about 200 times compared to driving a car.
As for mRNA curing cancer, all researchers promise breakthrough. That's how they get funding. No breakthrough has happened in the last 50 years or so. Maybe mRNA would provide some incremental benefits for certain cancers. Who knows. But moving the funding into something else will not cause catastrophe. Not saying it was the right thing to do. For researchers who now need to look for something else to do, it is a problem. I can understand their frustration.
Nitpick: A ton of breakthroughs have happened, but each one works only on a small subset of cancers. Nobody's got a universal cure for cancer, but people are now surviving cancers that almost nobody survived 20 years ago.
Well, I think a comparison to motorcycle riding confounds the issue. A random person minding their own business could conceivably get Covid by standing next to someone else who has Covid who might not even show symptoms. A random person minding their own business won't die in a traffic accident by standing next to someone who rides motorcycles a lot.
Point being, different causes of death work in different ways, and "contagious disease, therefore vaccine mandate" in particular isn't a slam dunk good or bad argument either way.
Yeah, I think putting RFK in charge at HHS would not have happened in a world where those public health agencies had performed better during covid. But also, RFK is a nut, he has basically no idea what the hell he is doing, and putting him in a position of power over those agencies is pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster.
On the bright side, people might stop relying on politicians and be more active looking for more evidence themselves.
I know that RFK is a nut case but he is a politician, so what do you expect? I feel vindicated now, not because politicians could not be trusted during covid but because people who should have known better (Scott included) trusted them without evidence. Now they all are forced to look for better evidence (or just participate in a shouting match which is awful, I watched some clips from RFK senate hearing).
I'd never heard of RFKJr (I think) until he announced a presidential campaign for 2024. After that, I listened to him actually speak on one or two podcasts, each around three hours. He didn't strike me as a nut, in the manner of, say, someone who rants and raves tirelessly about some key position they hold. He's a lawyer who apparently did well enough to make a living, but didn't come off like a small-time ambulance chaser or an IP vampire.
All the evidence I found suggesting he was a "nut" so far is from people who run big pharmaceutical companies, work for big pharmaceutical companies, get paid by big pharmaceutical companies, spokespeople for the public health agencies that performed so poorly during the covid epidemic, or anonymous people on the internet.
There's also some unorthodox views he appears to have on vaccines for children, supported by evidence he claims he has, and some of which he's shared, which I haven't gotten around to looking at. I do hear it's all bunk... according to the aforesaid sources. They also have documentation - a lot of it - and it's apparently great... according to aforesaid sources.
So to learn more, I'd have to look into RFKJr's evidence, since it's the only evidence on the unorthodox side that doesn't ultimately rely on "because I said so, and my friends all say you can trust me".
I do recall at least one traditional vaccine turns out to have been certified safe based on a clinical trial carried out on four bunnies, three of which died. That could very well be an exaggeration, but it might turn up in a search.
I don't see any way that mRNA based cancer treatments would become mandatory for anyone. We don't do that with any cancer medicine now. The most likely outcome is that we get dozens of mRNA vaccine based drugs in the pipeline, and two or three end up being useful against some specific subtype of cancer, since that's what most cancer drugs end up doing. (If you have the subtype some drug usefully treats, you get to go on living; otherwise....)
More broadly, the reasoning you're giving for skepticism of mRNA vaccine technology may apply to covid vaccines (since those were absolutely rushed into use), but I do not see how it is anything but nuts to go from there to opposing research into other uses of the technology. This is just what you'd see if some other flavor of nut got into RFK's position and their visceral opposition to radioactive materials led them to try to defund research into medical treatments and imaging that use radioactive materials. Or someone who is opposed to GM crops and so demands that nobody use viral vector vaccines because they're also genetically engineered. Guilt by association is bad enough when it's at a person, but it makes even less sense directed at a broad class of technology.
Now, I'll also say that I do not think the covid vaccines used in the US were particularly dangerous. Some people had allergic reactions which absolutely were dangerous. Some had some kind of myocardia, probably because the vaccine was injected into their bloodstream instead of their muscle and some ended up being taken up by their heart muscle. We gave these vaccines to millions and millions of people, and if there were a lot of people dying from them, it would be impossible not to see that.
Nonspecialists getting this wrong is understandable. I very much wish our public health authorities, high-status media outlets, and high-status academic institutions/scientific organizations had not spent the last decade or so lighting their reputations and credibility on fire to stay on the right side of the Twitter consensus every day. Because you're a smart person with, and I do not mean this in a cruel way, a fundamentally broken and confused understanding of issues surrounding how vaccines work and vaccine safety. The median carpenter or preschool teacher is way *less* equipped to untangle this stuff than you are, and I'm guessing a ton of them have even more broken and confused understandings.
"When the epidemic was in progress, I remember seeing legitimate concern raised about people being reported dead from Covid when it was actually a combination of things. E.g. someone gets Covid and dies, but was already 80 years old and with a history of other respiratory ailments"
This sort of claim has been repeated ad nauseam, despite it how completely and immediately it falls apart to even casual attempts to interrogate it. Any time you hear this claim, you ought to immediately downgrade your estimation of the reliability of *anything and everything else* that source says. If you take it seriously yourself, we ought to do the same to you.
Looking at excess mortality figures is one extremely easy way to see how badly wrong this perspective is. If COVID *didn't* kill a million Americans, than the period in which COVID was at its height just *coincidentally* saw a million more deaths than statistical trends from previous years would have predicted. Another easy way is to simply ask "what would the baseline probability of dying from *any* other cause during the course of a two-week illness actually be?" The math can literally be done on the back of an envelope. Any way you slice it, this claim comes out smelling like crap.
The US government at least set a precedent that it can make cowpox infection the default but it has to allow people to opt out for themselves or their children if they feel strongly enough about it (and use the right words).
Eliminating the opt-out clause was an escalation, and one that worries me, but it's one that has been in the works since classical Wakefieldian antivaxism took off and can't be entirely blamed on the COVID Warriors.
Biden tried to impose a covid vaccine mandate via OSHA rules, but you could get the J&J vaccine and remain unsullied by the dangers of mRNA, in favor of having the spike protein encoded in the DNA of a modified adenovirus instead.
Incidentally, I don't get what happened that made some people so afraid of RNA and spike proteins in *vaccine* form, but allowed them to remain totally calm when the RNA and spike proteins came in *virus* form - viruses do a lot more taking over of your cells and making them make spike proteins, *and* other proteins!
I don't think it's rational, I think "mRNA vaccine" got associated with the heavy-handed (and often hamfisted) covid policies in lots of peoples' minds. I think the set of people opposed to mRNA vaccines who could explain how they work is very small.
That doesn't seem like an mRNA specific problem. To the extent that we should be worried about compulsory medical treatment, the actual form of the treatment doesn't seem that important.
And it certainly doesn't seem a good idea to stop working on good medical treatments for the fear that they might become compulsory.
Isn't the entire idea of the American political system that you leave these policies to states, and then it works like experiments, you can see which states do better?
Yes and no. It’s a federal system and some things are left to the states while other things are regulated federally.
If pharmaceutical stuff were regulated by the states, it would likely significantly drive up compliance costs since each state would set its own regulations and requirements.
"is also the best evidence for an immaterial soul "
In my life, I slowly drifted from full atheism (which was the default position of kids born in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic) to uneasy agnosticism with a belief in soul, but in my case, the tipping point was learning just how many young kids make utterances about who they once were.
The spectacular cases are just a tip of the iceberg, as is the Ian Stephenson's collection etc. It happened several times among my own friends. It happens ever and ever again, in a very similar form, only the extent differs.
There is also a commonality: people are REALLY reluctant to admit something like that, and they will only confide in you if they know you won't label them and their children crazy and that you are positively interested in hearing about "weird" things. Plus it often goes against their own long-held beliefs, and things that oppose your beliefs tend to be tucked away in the least accessible corner of your mind, lest they destabilize you. We in the West live in a cultural space between older Christianity and modern atheism, and both are very hostile to the idea of reincarnation.
So there is likely a big "dark number" of such cases and the "violent skeptic types" (met more than a few myself, mostly people who were force-fed religion in their youth) can claim that they have never personally heard of a case, because they really haven't. But the reason for that absence of cases isn't in their non-existence. They are just a bad cultural fit.
Terminal lucidity at least does not collide with our widespread beliefs about (non-)existence of afterlife as much, so people are much more likely to admit they have seen it, and no one will be ostracized because of admitting so. No need to push any Overton window in this case.
Re: terminal lucidity: chapter 6 from Dale Allison's "Encountering Mystery" investigates it as an evidence for non-materialism, and comes away with a conclusion of "HUH". The book hasn't shifted me away from my agnostic-y materialism, but I enjoy it as a prod.
Right - I've long considered Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases to be one of the strongest arguments against an "immortal soul", because we can often watch a "soul" get thoroughly morted in slow motion. But if that process suddenly reverses itself for no materially understandable reason as a person is in the process of dying, the proof of materialism is substantially weakened. So, yeah, HUH.
"But if that process suddenly reverses itself for no materially understandable reason as a person is in the process of dying, the proof of materialism is substantially weakened. So, yeah, HUH."
I agree it weakens the evidence of materialism, but it most definitely isn't strong evidence for a soul. If one is allowed to posit an immaterial soul that's hidden behind a malfunctioning material brain until it somehow "escapes" close to death, why can't we posit a functional material mind that's hidden behind the diseased parts of the brain until it somehow "escapes" close to death? I don't see how positing a soul provides any extra explanatory power.
To use a computer analogy, perhaps the mind is the CPU + RAM + motherboard + hard disk, while the rest of the body is the monitor. If there's a loose connection between the motherboard and the monitor, the monitor starts displaying nonsense, but the computer's memories and reasoning abilities are still intact. If someone whacks the computer hard enough, the VGA cable might connect properly again. (99% of the time, this doesn't happen and the computer is even more broken than before. Just like in humans, because terminal lucidity is rare.) Does this mean the computer has a soul?
Not sure how you mean it. Suppose a hardware glitch makes software in my computer malfunction, still it does prove that the software is somehow entirely the hardware, because the same software can be installed on another computer. Or "into the cloud" - heaven?
This gives us Aristotle's hylomorphic dualism. Aristotle didn't believe in some kind of immaterial supernatural entities, rather he said that form cannot be reduced to matter, and form is information. For example "4" on your screen and "IV" drawn in sand mean the same information, yet materially the are entirely different. Maybe we can say they are the same because they are the same message, same intent, same agreement between two minds. But then what should say about DNA information which is not a message meant for minds? Information is thus something mysterious, something not entirely described by material properties.
In India nobody is thought crazy for believing in soul, rebirth etc but I never heard of anybody personally knowing someone who made utterance about who they were (in a past birth).
This phenomenon is concentrated in the 2-7 age bracket, so the highest likelihood of hearing about it is when you have a lot of young mothers around you, plus when you are willing to extensively talk kid stuff with them.
2-7-year-old children not infrequently say all kinds of clearly-not-true things about the world with great confidence as if they are talking from experience. One such child of my acquaintance would talk at great length about their conversations with "the Queen Fairy", and could give quite a detailed and coherent account of the fairy community she was queen of. Others have more mundane "imaginary friends".
One possible conclusion is that the world is full of people (and other beings) visible only to individual small children. I don't think this is the most probable conclusion. And that is also roughly how I feel about children frequently knowing themselves to be reincarnations.
About a third of the cases collected at University of Virginia are "solved" in the sense that a concrete deceased person whose life fits the utterances of said child was identified. Sometimes in proximity (which weakens the case), sometimes far away.
People presume that everything around such topics is random hearsay, but there actually are researchers trying to collect cases systematically and make some sense of them. The biggest academic workplace doing so is Division of Perceptual Studies at UVa and they have been doing it since the 1960s.
How about religions who believe in reincarnations as animals or plants? "Yeah, that sounds like a very accurate description of what it's like to be an ant. This is clearly evidence that this child was an ant".
I also don't understand your characterization of Westerners. I'd say belief in reincarnation and starseeds and whatnot is among some of the common, accepted beliefs of hippie-dippy westerners. I'd wager there are areas in the Western world where this is more acceptable and normal than being a regularly church going Christian (example: my city, Copenhagen). I can imagine Czechia and the Eastern bloc to be different though, as you never had a proper hippie movement.
Yes. They also sometimes have some unique experiences. For example, the database of cases collected at UVa indicates that there is a correlation with violent deaths of the putative previous personality.
"How about" ... what I am supposed to answer? Even in human-human cases we have only very fragmentary record. IIRC there is one or two cases in that huge heap where animal lives were mentioned, but it seems to be really, really rare.
We haven't had a hippie period during Communism and people who believe in reincarnation are considered odd, to say the least.
Incidentally, none of the gals who told me about their kids babbling about who they used to be was a hippie type or interested in Buddhism, or even somehow spiritual. One is a very hard-nosed, no-nonsense ORL surgeon.
In Copenhagen you have probably heard about Lama Ole Nydahl. Ole like all Buddhists talk about reincarnation without a soul, rather a grandfather's axe type of phenomenon, some stuff survives death, but eventually it is replaced by other stuff. Ole is not much "woo" hippie-like, he is quite pragmatic about Buddhism, seeing meditation etc. as tools for excellent mental health. "You recognize a yogi by his laughter."
OTOH the Eastern Bloc is FULL of "woo", because after 1990 it had hit us like suddenly as an avalanche (I am from Budapest), and we did not have immunity. Immunity means that in the West these things were already often proved to not work or were scams and there were financial scandals etc. Buddhism had been hurt in the US by Chogyam Trungpa Tulku's scandals. So yeah we used to have a huge Uri Geller fan club and trying to bend spoons ourselves :)
Indeed my view of parapsychology is the following. You take a bunch of illiterate people and do a literacy test, recognizing letters etc. of course the results are not different from randomness: people need to LEARN reading first. So why are they testing people for say telepathy who never ever had any kind of a training in even something remotely like that? Naturally, we don't know how to train people, but we should try testing mystics, shamans, Buddhist monks, Hindu yogis and so on first. Or fortune tellers. Fortune tellers basically just have a very good observation, concentration ability, and they read from your body language what do you think is true deep inside you. My mother could do that, she always predicted the outcome of my uni exams correctly by reading how I feel about them deep inside. Such concentration abilities might help with parapsychology tests.
I was certain around that age that I was an alien from an unknown planet and came up with an elaborate (and inane) mythology about how I got to earth (in this story I purported to have been alive long before my birth). I actually remember believing this, it's not just my parents retelling my childish delusions.
My unempirical pet theory is that the idea of coming into existence (not unlike the idea of ceasing to exist) is so intuitively incomprehensible to the human mind that children, who can't yet understand such concepts abstractly even, often feel a strong urge to invent memories before they were born to explain how they currently exist.
> learning just how many young kids make utterances about who they once were.
You would expect young kids, who talk a lot and are still understanding the language, and might sometimes say things just to get a reaction, to say all sorts of stuff.
I mean I'm not convinced of "there is a massive number of cases, but people hide them because skeptics". The "skeptics" are a pretty modern and culturally specific phenomena.
If they are a source of unreasonably accurate info, you have good evidence. Otherwise it's probably some quirk of developmental linguistics.
It's often *claimed* that unreasonably accurate info is indeed forthcoming, but it never seems to be well-documented beforehand—i.e., the most spectacular claims rely upon the honesty & memory of people who really, really want it all to be true.
At least, that's what I found when I tried to look into it; certainly glad to hear any about really convincing evidence I may have missed, though.
What would be your standard for "to be well-documented beforehand"?
This is a very complicated phenomenon to study. Young kids will not cooperate the same way that adults do, much less with strangers. First observers are almost always amateurs from family and can screw up things with seeding the kid's memory by random facts. It may also take months for anyone to take things seriously; the typical kid around 2 years of age can barely talk in sentences.
All those things summed together - it is devilishly hard to develop good, rigorous, convincing framework of study around such spontaneous phenomena. You can't study this in mice, you can't keep any data pristine. These are living people in their familial environment.
It is much more straightforward to study non-living nature or basic biochemistry than this, and we are still fairly ignorant about important topics there.
If you really put your preexisting beliefs aside and ponder the question "how to study such stuff seriously", the immensity of the problem will strike you.
Terminal lucidity is straightforward in comparison. For starters, it fairly reliably occurs in one place (nursing homes) and you can record that person and interact with them to show that they are, indeed, lucid. You also have a long health record proving their earlier dementia problems.
There are studies of things like risk of cancer and heart disease where huge numbers of participants are recruited, with full understanding up front that only a small percentage will end up being relevant. Maybe some parapsychology research group needs to run a ten-year, N = 100,000 survey where they give kids in the relevant age range a dictaphone (with parental consent, of course), then filter resulting conversational transcripts for past-life claims which might be possible to independently confirm or dispute.
I certainly think that the field is worth more attention, but the practical problems seem to be daunting.
We probably don't have dictaphones small enough and with long-enough battery life that toddlers and pre-schoolers could carry them around all day long, not being burdened with them and not break them.
Filtering the resulting heap of utterances would also be a huge task, though AI could perhaps help with that.
As someone with background in data protection, I also would not like the fact that this would somewhat normalize mass surveillance for the families and kids involved, though this may be my peculiar pet peeve. Given what people tell on themselves on Facebook, an average person might not care.
Finally - this is a field where open questions might help with investigation, but that already requires some cooperation and good-faith cooperation from the parents. The relevant cases indicate that kids are sometimes "in the mood" to make such statements and will be willing to provide more details on further prompting, but in that case, everyone has to be really, really careful not to lead them somewhere.
Cancer is easier to detect; for starters, it is not ephemeral, unlike verbal statements. If it is there today, it will likely be there tomorrow.
> We probably don't have dictaphones small enough and with long-enough battery life that toddlers and pre-schoolers could carry them around all day long, not being burdened with them and not break them.
That's just a smart watch, with a particularly low bar for the "smart," or a hearing aid plus a microSD drive. Microphones small enough to conceal date back to at least the cold war, while batteries and digital storage media have wildly improved.
> The relevant cases indicate that kids are sometimes "in the mood" to make such statements and will be willing to provide more details on further prompting, but in that case, everyone has to be really, really careful not to lead them somewhere.
Step one is proving the phenomenon exists at all, to the satisfaction of folks with an intense and well-founded skepticism that such a thing is possible even in principle. Calling the shot with a massive pre-registered study, then being able to say something like:
"Out of ### children, we algorithmically identified XX coherent past-life claims, of which YY were specific and recent enough to be meaningfully tested against the historical record, then ZZ% of those were found to be either substantially accurate, or compatible with contemporary eyewitness accounts, by an independent board of historians and archivists. Here's the whole exabyte of raw audio data if you want to check our work,"
...with no reasonable recourse to prompting or cherry-picking, would either corner skeptics into admitting that something real was happening, or, if it didn't turn up enough solid examples, at least establish some sort of clear statistical upper bound on the phenomenon's observable frequency.
Maybe it'd catch a solid hour of some little weirdo's spontaneous recitation of a substantial portion of the Saga of Burnt Njal, when nobody else in the kid's immediate family speaks any icelandic, or otherwise provide some extraordinary evidence that investigators wouldn't have thought to ask for.
Once there's a baseline of what 'typical' cases look like while they're not being actively meddled with by investigators - a control group - *then* you can start asking questions or doing other such active experiments.
There is an utterly absurd amount of video evidence documenting what kids say as recorded by their parents since the invention of the smartphone. I would argue that a Western mother who came to believe their 5 y/o child was a reincarnation of someone from another culture would have, prior to that time, collected 100 hrs of recordings of the child that still would be accessible on their phone, laptop or cloud storage, from which evidence could be gleaned. We live in an age with more voluminous direct audio-visual evidence of childhood behavior than was previously imaginable. Such evidence would be time-stamped and show age development phases that would not be trivial to fake right now, but may be trivial to fake in a few years, so now would be the time, this is as good as the case could ever possibly get to being made. If they aren't coming up with anything amazing here in 2025, then it probably isn't out there or isn't going to be found before AI video forgery renders all such evidence unreliable.
> All those things summed together - it is devilishly hard to develop good, rigorous, convincing framework of study around such spontaneous phenomena. You can't study this in mice, you can't keep any data pristine.
You have a supposed phenomena that is
1) At best a faint signal.
2) Utterly at odds with known science
3) Very hard to study.
So I'm going in to this with a strong prior of "this doesn't exist", and I'm seeing at best weak evidence.
Now you can make a case that strong priors aren't justified here.
Or you can make a case that you do actually have rigorous evidence.
But the difficulty of gathering evidence can't be used as a substitute for evidence.
Please do not confuse science with materialist philosophy. The normal case should be that science is downstream from philosophy, because the scientific method is defined by philosophers like Popper. Science is specifically defined as the study of material phenomena. Thus it is wrong to construct a philosophy up from science and say that all that exists is what science can find. For example, numbers are in no sense material.
So far our only scientific evidence specifically against - as opposed to unknown, neutral - the soul is that when the brain is damaged, the mind does not work well. But that can be countered by the idea that the soul might be a radio broadcaster, the brain a radio receiver. Clearly, if I take an axe to a radio, it will not play the broadcast correctly, or not at all. This is not evidence against the broadcast.
Certainly, there is no scientific evidence in favour of it either. So it does not contradict science, rather that science is neutral on this.
> Thus it is wrong to construct a philosophy up from science and say that all that exists is what science can find.
There may be things that exist that exist that science can't find. But I have no way of knowing about them. And there are many more things that don't exist than that do exist. So some random thing that science can't detect probably doesn't exist.
> For example, numbers are in no sense material.
Numbers stored in a silicon chip are made of real electrons.
> So far our only scientific evidence specifically against - as opposed to unknown, neutral - the soul is that when the brain is damaged, the mind does not work well. But that can be countered by the idea that the soul might be a radio broadcaster, the brain a radio receiver.
That is far from our only scientific evidence against a soul.
Neurons can be grown in a lab dish, and trained to play simple computer games. So either these neurons in a dish are connecting to a mini computer-game soul, or neurons also do computation.
Human behavior matches up with evolutionary survival + reproduction. Why would a soul care about getting lots of sugar (in a way that correlated with inclusive genetic fitness in the ancestral environment)
And the "radio receiver" analogy doesn't work well either. A somewhat damaged radio reciever, set to a science program, will say the same science, just cracklier. Whereas brain damage makes people stupider, different from a bad signal.
Known science (thermodynamics) says that anything that does irreversible computation must radiate waste heat. No soul-heat has been detected.
The standard model of physics with quarks and electrons etc doesn't have "souls".
I recommend looking into the work of people who studied this phenomenon, like Jim Tucker. The more developed cases have remarkably consistent traits across cultures.
And it is not just because of skeptics. It is also "because they themselves are skeptics". For many Westerners, the idea that your sweet kid may not be completely yours, is deeply disturbing.
"The "skeptics" are a pretty modern and culturally specific phenomena."
Someone else played that role in pre-modern times, for example, priests. Christianity is hostile to the idea of reincarnation and claims like that could get you in trouble.
One of the phenomena that Ian Stevenson regularly encountered during his studies among the Tlingit, who are still half-pagan, is that the more Christian ones were really reluctant to talk about their experiences, while the more pagan ones were fairly open.
I wonder if terminal lucidity is more in the nature of "first in, last out", in that dementia preferentially strips away cognitive layers built up in later childhood and youth, to reveal the first, perhaps more robust and simpler, structures. One of my granny's final words on her deathbed was "beautiful", and it seems quite plausible (although I don't know for sure) that this was one of the first long words she learned as an infant.
It is extremely well documented how dementia patients often remember more from their youth and think they are young. My mom with dementia thinks I'm 10. So yeah, that's my bet too.
I'm deeply skeptical of this. People always say they were some cool and important person in a past life. You'd expect 95% of people to say "I was a peasant farmer".
Kids often have invisible friends, does this mean an alternative universe with these friends in them exist?
This is a common TV trope, but if you actually read the reports of cases collected at University of Virginia (where they have the largest collection of cases), it is indeed as you say - totally random peasants or artisans or rank-and-file soldiers etc.
Please don't confuse small-child studies with adult regressive hypnosis. Adult regressive hypnosis is clearly bunk, people basically just say whatever they saw in movies, so they say they were Vikings, not Chinese, even though the Chinese have much much larger numbers.
Small children DO say they were herding sheep etc.
That's not necessarily how reincarnation works. For example, the Hindu view of the reincarnation cycle (Samsara) is that (in a very roughly simplified form) souls go through many rebirths, not necessarily in humans, with righteous living leading to future "good" rebirths. I would argue that rebirthing into a middle class child in the modern developed world is a pretty decent rebirth (top 0.1%?) both compared to being reborn into a hell or into frog or a fly and to being reborn into a human in another time/society. So a Hindu would expect the previous lives of these children to be quite remarkable. They would expect some people to remember little as the previous life may not have been quite human conscious, e.g. they could have been cows or horses.
I am offering no evidence here, just pointing out that a particular observation on the distribution of prior interesting lives is consistent with the traditional beliefs.
Sure. I was just commenting that people believing things is not reliable evidence for anything except that people can have beliefs. False beliefs often have good effects. Maybe we should have a separate category of Useful Beliefs That Aren't Reliable Correct. Maybe we already do, kinda.
Every religion has enormous collections of this sort of anecdotal evidence in support of absolutely mutually-exclusive ideas of the supernatural. For example, Christians reporting near-death experiences often describe meeting Jesus, while Hindus describe being judged by Yama, and so on.
There's a profound epistemological problem in our culture, which is that when judging whether a pattern of suggestive evidence is a coincidence, we tend to do so without really taking into account the how much cherry-picking went into producing that evidence- we just sort of intuitively feel "this could be a coincidence" or "this is too much evidence to be coincidental", and we apply that same vague heuristic standard to every pattern of evidence we encounter.
This is a problem because the more you sort through a large amount of data, the more coincidences you'll find, and the more unlikely they'll be- there isn't really a limit to how many you can find, it's just a matter of effort. So, when you have a subculture collectively looking for evidence in support of a false idea, it's actually very easy and common for them to find a large enough collection of suggestive coincidences to trigger that "this is too much evidence to be coincidental" intuition in most people.
There's an easy way to identify when a set of evidence is actually one of these collections- just choose a few specific pieces of evidence at random and look into them more deeply. If the evidence is pointing to a real phenomenon, then randomly chosen specifics should become more convincing when you learn more details about them, while if it's a vast collection of coincidences, randomly chosen details will seem less compelling when you learn more. For example, in the wake of the 2020 US election, a really vast amount of seemingly compelling evidence that the election was stolen was shared on social media by Trump supporters, and intuitions of "this is too much evidence to be coincidental" were very common. However, each piece of evidence would very consistently fall apart under closer scrutiny- the evidence would be something like "a Republican election observer was thrown out of a polling station", but then the details would be that they were one of ten Republican observers at that station, and were thrown out for ordinary rule violations. When you notice that a few random samples of evidence in a collection like that become weaker rather than stronger under scrutiny, it's very likely that the entire pattern of evidence is a product of cherry-picking, no matter how large.
If you were to select a couple of these stories of past life memories at random- and I mean really at random, not just some famous examples- I predict that examining the details would make them seem similarly less convincing than how they were presented.
I'm confident in that prediction because for hundreds of years, supernatural and materialist worldviews have made different predictions about what we'd discover when investigating new things- and very, very consistently, the materialist predictions have turned out to be the true ones. Many millions of very dedicated people have used the scientific method to investigate every aspect of reality, and have only ever found replicable experimental evidence of material things. It doesn't make any sense that the supernatural would be immune to scientific investigation- if it existed, we'd not only have plenty of real evidence of it by now, rather than just giant collections of anecdotes, but we'd probably have incorporated it into tons of useful technologies.
Every time a material explanation of something once thought supernatural is proven, spiritualist ideologies offer up a "God of the gaps" explanation. But this has been going on for so long now that the pattern should be obvious. At some point, we need to just admit that the supernatural isn't real.
> Every religion has enormous collections of this sort of anecdotal evidence in support of absolutely mutually-exclusive ideas of the supernatural. For example, Christians reporting near-death experiences often describe meeting Jesus, while Hindus describe being judged by Yama, and so on.
This clearly isn't " a coincidence", it's clearly strong evidence that human brains are weird.
Absolutely. By "coincidence", I just mean a piece of evidence that only supports an idea coincidentally- that is, it doesn't really support the idea, but by pure chance, it appears to do so when taken out of context.
So, in the full context of weird things humans experience when our brains aren't functioning correctly, near-death experiences aren't really unusual; in fact, it's possible to induce very similar experiences with transcranial magnetic stimulation, ketamine, etc. But mostly by pure chance, this weird brain thing appears to support religious narratives, so these cases are often cherrypicked in large numbers to give an impression of overwhelming evidence in support of the religions.
I suspect humans have a lot of instincts that are calibrated to the amount of evidence one could reasonably collect while living in a small hunter-gatherer tribe.
When considering how impressive a trend is, or how likely it is that an exception exists, I like to remind myself "reality is big". For example, if I see someone online telling a story that seems very unlikely to me, I try to remind myself that what could plausibly happen to a close friend, and what could plausibly have happened to a self-selected stranger on the Internet, are very different things, because the second one is pulling from a much vaster pool.
On first glace, it looks like compelling evidence for the event, but on closer inspection, you notice that the photo was taken in the daytime, while the sky is oddly dark. At first, this seems like only a small dent in the photo's credibility- surely there are reasons a sky in a daytime photo might appear dark. But then you notice that it's not just dark, but a flat, undifferentiated black. Clouds can't cause that during the daytime, nor can anything to do with exposure levels. Maybe an infrared camera? Then, looking closer, you notice that the line between the domes and sky is very rough, as though crudely masked out with a charcoal pen. Could that just be bloom from the brightness of the domes? But no, there are sharp lines without any bloom right below the dome- including a vertical line on the left side that doesn't follow the dome's geometry, suggesting masking tape.
The truth is that there were reported to be a number of artists who set up shop at the event and sold quickly-made, fully acknowledged composite illustrations to the tourists. This anonymously-sourced photo is one of them. There were also a lot of reporters at the event with high-quality cameras and video recording equipment. If there was something to photograph, they would have done so and published it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing you chose this photo not really at random, but because it's one of the strongest pieces of evidence of the supernatural you're familiar with. I'm sure with effort, you could find stronger evidence, but I think it's fair to say that this is pretty typical of the best evidence we have for the supernatural. My argument is that if the supernatural really existed, then after many centuries of this, the normal quality of the evidence would be much stronger. We'd most likely have things like repeatable experiments and practical applications, and that evidence would lead to new, unexpected discoveries that would produce new evidence, not just endlessly support every existing, contradictory spiritual tradition.
For me, a materialist, the most compelling evidence for something weird going on with death is the phenomenon where family members in distant locations have sudden knowledge of a loved one's death or mortal danger that later is proven to have been correct to within a few minutes. Of course it's possible that these phenomena are confabulated or misremembered. But they are widely reported across demographics, and premonition of death isn't exactly something that most people experience every day, or even every year (so the argument "of course sometimes a death premonition is going to be accurate" is hard to make.)
Of course the nature of the phenomenon makes it extremely hard to study.
A few weeks before my grandfather died he told me he was going on a long journey and he would see me again in a thousand years.
I assume his body know on some level that he was about to die and he was saying the kind of things you say when you know you're going to die. Still pretty creepy though.
If anything, children doing this is evidence against soul, because the biggest reincarnation hypothesis nowadays is Buddhism, which very crucially depends on Anatman, including nonexistence of souls
Yes, but that is mostly semantics. Anatman means the human mind has no kind of unchanging layer that would be the exact same throughout lives. It has a very grandfather's axe view of the mind, everything replacable and being replaced, but DOES claim some aspect of the mind does survive death and does not depend on the body, which is the contentious issue for materialists / physicalists.
From what I've read, I think the interpretation of anatman as meaning the definitive non-existence of souls might be a longstanding western misconception or at least only applicable to some Buddhisms.
E.g. even the wikipedia article on the topic now says "While often interpreted as a doctrine denying the existence of a self, anatman is more accurately described as a strategy to attain non-attachment by recognizing everything as impermanent, while staying silent on the ultimate existence of an unchanging essence."
But, before wikipedia, I mostly came across the idea from from Thanissaro Bhikkhu who has translated a ton of the Pali Canon and made it available for free online along with a billion articles on Buddhism within the Thai Forest tradition of Theravada now at www.dhammatalks.org
"The second mistaken inference is that, given the thoroughness with which the Buddha teaches not-self, one should draw the inference that there is no self...." [And in this sutta the Buddha explicitly lists "I have no self" as one of several views around the topic of self for which "Bound by a fetter of views, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person is not freed from birth, aging, & death, from sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair."] [Also of note is the first mistaken inference, which is that "he denies the limited, temporal self as a means of pointing to one’s identity with the larger, unlimited, cosmic self" So it seems like the two most common ideas about Buddhism are both wrong.]
"As part of his policy of not getting pinned down on issues of scale when presenting the process of rebirth, the Buddha was careful to avoid an issue that animated his contemporaries when they discussed rebirth: the metaphysics of what a person is, and what does or doesn’t get reborn after death. In other words, he refused to explain whether any “what” underlay the experience of rebirth. He simply talked about how the experience happened and what could be done to end it. In modern philosophy this approach is called phenomenology: talking about the phenomena of experience simply in terms of direct experience, without making reference to any underlying reality that may or may not stand behind that experience. The Buddha was a radical phenomenologist in that he dealt with experience on its own terms. He was a pragmatist in that he adopted this approach because he saw that it worked in bringing suffering to an end."
"how many young kids make utterances about who they once were"
Yes, this is fairly well documented, in general small kids knowing things they are not supposed to know. I was like 3 when I demanded that I should be considered an adult and have equal voting rights in the family, now where could I have got that from? I also remember being 3 and feeling like an adult strangely trapped in a little body.
Notice that according to Buddhists reincarnation can happen without a soul (anatman) in a very grandfather's axe way, some "stuff" survives death, but then eventually that "stuff" also gets replaced by other stuff.
There are also some weird personal habits, preferences and fears.
Personally, I don't remember anything like previous lives, but I am strangely drawn to a "lonely hunter" lifestyle, with reasonable shooting skills that I didn't have to learn at all (guys from the Czech Army actually praised me, a total amateur, during a random shooting range visit), I like walking alone across empty snowfields on snowshoes, tending a fire... weird, weird for a rust belt city boy who grew up in Communist Czechoslovakia and knew no one who would practise such things or even talk about them.
The first time I stood on snowshoes (at 32 years of age), I had an intense feeling of doing something well-known again.
Snowshoes are NOT popular in my country. Not entirely unknown either, but people usually either ski down the slopes or do cross-country skiing. Snowshoes are a marginal activity; everyone I know who did it did so due to my personal nagging...
BTW tangentially related, but can someone tell me who is the "least bad" living parapsychology researcher or research institute? The idea would be that I would actually like to talk with them, like per email or forum, and don't want to waste my time on obvious scammers or fools.
Try Jim Tucker at DPS UVa. He strikes me as a fairly reasonable guy.
There was a quite famous Icelandic scientist called Erlendur Haraldsson with a lot of publications, but he died in 2020, so if the idea we are discussing has any merit, he is probably just potty-training again :D
12. While I can't speak for programmers, from a translator's point of view one of the things is that while machine translation (MT) has (obviously! visibly!) gone up in quality, the issue now is less "this is complete crap so I'll just basically rewrite it entirely) and more "this is very good but trying to figure out where it is wrong or where it can be improved is now about spotting multiple needles in a haystack, meaning I have to exert actual brainpower in a different way than when just doing basic translation on autopilot".
26. Couldn't this be a push-side issue? The COVID era was inconvenient to Westerners but an absolute catastrophe in a lot of third-world countries, where the medical infrastructure was not just strained but genuinely did collapse in places and authoritarian measures were less nudgey and more brute-force. India, in particular, was whaled by Covid pretty hard (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/21/system-has-collapsed-india-descent-into-covid-hell), and even people who didn't actually bear the effects might have been spooked and grown more anxious about living in a third-world country, pushing them to commit to the actually-quite-high-threshold choice of moving to a whole different country.
56. Related to my answer to 12, while there continues to be more than enough work in human translation for me (this is probably actually going to be my best year for earnings ever, I've also started studying for a new career due to reports from others working in the field, and what I've gone for is political science - in particular planning to specialize in the intersection of politics and AI, on the assumption that this is going to be a field where a lot of people interested in expert info on politics are actually not going to fully trust AI and might want a human opinion.
Third world people's choice of moving to the West remains constant. From my experience, there was no such effect of covid. The filter is how many people the West is going to accept.
There have obviously been spikes in willingness to migrate related to wars and such, such as with Ukraine in 2022 (not Third World but still vastly poorer than the West). No reason to not at least consider that the Covid crisis (moreso than the disease itself) might have a similar effect.
There's a difference between general theoretical willingness to move... some day, you know, not just right now, there's so much on the table right now with the kids and everything... and an acute actualization of that willingness.
To add to your anecdata, "this is very good but trying to figure out where it is wrong or where it can be improved is now about spotting multiple needles in a haystack, meaning I have to exert actual brainpower in a different way than when just doing basic translation on autopilot" is definitely also true for me when trying to use AI for software engineering or documentation tasks. I find it exhausting, but suspect this will get a bit better with practise.
TBH, as a programmer I'd much rather have "obviously wrong" than "wrong in very subtle ways." The second is a disaster waiting to happen, the first can get easily caught by simple code review (or just fails to build).
I agree, but also, to be fair, I think we already have that problem with code written by humans, and code review of human-written code misses subtle problems all the time. So I'm seeing this trajectory accelerating software engineering job requirements toward "need to get better at reviewing code." To be clear, I don't like it, but that seems to be where it's headed.
Yeah. But flooding the zone with crap doesn't help. And LLMs, if nothing else, are great at presenting as really good. I know my colleagues and they're willing to say when they're not sure. Adding LLMs just adds a layer of "confident teenager BS" to it.
I taught high school, and I found that kids usually fell into one of two traps--either outwardly unsure and "help me, I don't know what I'm doing" (even when they did) or super overconfident "I got this" even when they have no clue. LLMs definitely are the latter. And the latter is way more dangerous, even if the former is (often) more annoying to deal with[1].
[1] I hated performative wimpiness. Yes, you know what you're doing. And you know you know what you're doing. But you can't, for various social reasons, *be seen* to know what you're doing. And that grinds my gears for various reasons.
" But you can't, for various social reasons, *be seen* to know what you're doing."
We had a version of it when we saw being a good student implies submission to the teacher, and that is something a truly masculine boy does not do, so we played a complicated game of claiming to not have studied like some tough, defiant rebel, and then aced the test by "luck".
That's funny because I saw it way worse with girls. Guys tended to just be overconfident, not wanting to show doubt (aka weakness). But I was dealing with upper-middle class (and above) mostly WASP kids (or indians/Asians with tiger moms).
There are subtle issues with code written by humans. But with humans, there are certain correlations between bad thought patterns and bad local structure, while LLMs keep up local structure always.
It’s the same problem with errors on Wikipedia - there’s a layer of editorial polish applied to everything on Wikipedia, so when an error gets in, it doesn’t have all the cues that usually help us recognize when something is crazy.
I would say, when catching the bugs of other programmers, we often figure out how did that person think, what was their mental model and how that was wrong. The AI bugs are very random, yet "look correct" (as that code would work in other situations) and thus harder to catch.
For me it helps to actually translate something myself, fully, and then prompt the same text to AI. It allows me to get a second opinion, provides fresh ideas, alternatives. More work in the end, but obviously higher overall quality of the final work.
12. I've heard it's because antibodies or whatever else is fighting disease are also harmful to body, and when it gives up (or unable to continue working), the body is suddenly freed of a burden. Of course the disease is still there and will kill the body soon.
Is this actually current leading theory or another reddit baseless speculation?
33. I thought the clones will have aging as if they're born the same time as the original one, or have I missed lots of developments in cloning technology?
Re33: No, clones start at age 0 at birth. I think the first cloned animal (dolly) had some signs of premature aging, but that was AFAIK either just bad luck or due to lack of experience with the cloning procedure.
On the age of consent map: At least for Germany, this is super clickbaity. Yes, age of consent is 14 in the sense that if you romp your 15 year old partner as a 14 year old, your mom cannot do anything about it. However, there is an unrelated pedophilia paragraph that clearly states that you can't have sex as an adult with a minor (i.e. someone under 18). AFAIK there is some leniency in cases when a 17 year old and a 19 year old are having consensual sex - while it is possible to bring charges, they would usually not be pressed by the state because common sense and waste of public ressources and whatnot.
And the framing is wrong anyway. You can't go around breaking the law with the excuse 'well, it's legal in some other random country'!
And besides the law, rest assured that there would be an outcry in the UK or Greece if a tycoon were having sex parties with 15 or 16 year olds, even if it were legal.
Sure, but that makes it clear it's simply a matter of law, akin to a speed limit: the state may penalize it arbitrarily harshly, but it's retarded to pretend it's a fundamental moral issue if it changes based on jurisdiction.
It's not like a speed limit, because like I said, in Europe too there'd be an outcry if a grown man were having sex parties with teens, even if it were legal.
The map is directly from Wikipedia so it's probably accurate, but the interpretation is nonsense and/or ragebait. The numbers are absolute lower limits, but there is per-country legal nuance between those ages and 18/21.
The weird thing is, it is the same in many of the states in the US.
For example, in Vermont:
> § 3252(c) No person shall engage in a sexual act with a child who is under the age of 16, except:
> where the persons are married to each other and the sexual act is consensual; or
> where the person is less than 19 years old, the child is at least 15 years old, and the sexual act is consensual.
Essentially if the age difference is not too great then most places seem to consider that okay. But a 40-year-old seducing a 14-year-old is considered illegal pretty much everywhere.
And if Americans really want to get riled up about something, maybe they should look at their own child marriage laws.
Of course, Juliet is 13, and Romeo is generally assumed to be 16-18. A 5 year age gap is somewhat into creepy territory, already.
But generally, not taking the age gap into account would lead to weird effects where two people can have sex in one year, and a year later the older of them would go to jail for it.
>But a 40-year-old seducing a 14-year-old is considered illegal pretty much everywhere.
But that isn't true. "MuGo Gonzalez" asserted that in Germany "there is an unrelated pedophilia paragraph that clearly states that you can't have sex as an adult with a minor (i.e. someone under 18)" which probably made you think he's seen an actual legal document saying that, but when challenged to provide a source, said he had none. He also asserted that, if it were true, the "right-wing populists" would be making an issue of it. My guess is that "Gonzalez" is not a German, but rather an American who, like a lot of Americans, cannot fathom that people in foreign countries don't share American attitudes toward sex. This whole thing is indicative of the lazy thinking of the ACX comments section.
Given the amount of support Roman Polanski got for sleeping with a 13yo when he was 43, it's easy to think so. But probably part of that is "Great Artists(tm) are special, and obviously adolescent girls really want to sleep with them, that's one of the perks of being a Great Artist".
And quite a bit of that support came from inside the US.
Yeah, I came here to say the same thing. According to the website I found when Googling “age of consent by state” (http://sol-reform.com/50-state-age-of-majority-v-age-of-consent/), the US states range between those same numbers, so I don’t know what point they’re trying to make.
Are you sure about that? When I search for this on the interne, it seems to me it is 14 as long as the younger party consented and was not "forced to consent" or something like that.
"The age of consent in Germany is 14, as long as a person over the age of 21 does not exploit a 14- to 15-year-old person's lack of capacity for sexual self-determination, in which case a conviction of an individual over the age of 21 requires a complaint from the younger individual; being over 21 and engaging in sexual relations with a minor of that age does not constitute an offence by itself. Otherwise the age of consent is 16 for most purposes, although some protections against abuse do apply beyond this age (under Section 182(1): it is illegal to engage in sexual activity with a person under 18 "by taking advantage of an exploitative situation""
The wikipedia article has similar information about other countries, eyeballing seems to imply to me that the map is mostly correct. I can certainly confirm that the 14 year old limit is true for Hungary, as long as the adult is not in some superior relation to the other (e.g. teacher, coach etc), and it is actually 12 years as long as both parties are below 18.
I'm not a lawyer, so the honest answer is always "no, I'm reiterating what my culture tells me is the lived reality of the law". However, my main point is: The map is used to imply that any horny 50yo can have sex with an underage girl in Germany and get away with it, whereas my take-away from the press coverage on cases involving sex with minors is that it would be utterly naive to think "but we love each other!" is a cunning legal strategy that will buy you any goodwill, because it is simply assumed that most relationships between older men and much younger women are not based on romantic love and ulterior motives are therefore more likely than not. Thus, I maintain that no, Jeffrey Epstein could not build a pedophilia empire with the full backing of the German legal system and therefore pretending that the current consent age in Germany is something that should worry the US seems outlandish. Might be that people who have a bigger interest in this topic are able to show that it is indeed a problem because the current legal status quo gives cover for child marriage under some weird progressive "it's cool if it's done by people from a non-Western background" scheme and then I have to eat my words, but Occam's Razor tells me that based on my experience there is no legal cover for exploiting minors under the cover of consensual sex and having sex with minors is more likely to have negative consequences for you than not. I should have been more careful in the phrasing of my initial comment, yes, but the content so far stands unrefuted: There is no way you could exploit a teenager sexually in Germany as a middle-aged man and walk out of jail free because of "but your honor, they were 14!" - and if there are iffy edge cases to be found in which people walked free on questionable interpretations of the law, it is not a systematic loophole that could be exploited by everyone willy-nilly. I am very sure that a systematic abuse of the consent age clause would have pierced my filter bubble in SOME way - a right-wing populist outlet is currently the highest polling party in Germany, it would be strange if they had nothing to say on that particular topic if handed on a silver platter.
>I'm not a lawyer, so the honest answer is always "no, I'm reiterating what my culture tells me is the lived reality of the law". However, my main point is: The map is used to imply that any horny 50yo can have sex with an underage girl in Germany and get away with it, whereas my take-away from the press coverage on cases involving sex with minors is that it would be utterly naive to think "but we love each other!" is a cunning legal strategy that will buy you any goodwill, because it is simply assumed that most relationships between older men and much younger women are not based on romantic love and ulterior motives are therefore more likely than not.
Germany is a civilized Western country where you have to actually be in violation of a legal statute to be sent to prison. "Ulterior motives" are not enough.
>I am very sure that a systematic abuse of the consent age clause would have pierced my filter bubble in SOME way - a right-wing populist outlet is currently the highest polling party in Germany, it would be strange if they had nothing to say on that particular topic if handed on a silver platter.
Right-wing populist parties are not identical everywhere despite being referred to by the same word. AfD probably thinks it's fine because if girls don't want to have consensual sex with gross old men they can just not have consensual sex with gross old men. The idea that teenage girls lack any self-control or responsibility is a particularly American disease.
> Germany is a civilized Western country where you have to actually be in violation of a legal statute to be sent to prison. "Ulterior motives" are not enough.
The actual statue, says that to go to jail for having sex with a 14-15yo, you must have 'exploit[ed] the victim's lack of capacity for sexual self-determination', and that the deed will generally only be prosecuted if the victim files a report.
From my reading, this is a bit of a grey area, and the DA and judge have quite a bit of leeway. On the one hand, if a 14-yo is determined to lose her V-card by simply going home with the cutest man who will be interested at a party and have sex with him, that is unlikely to get the man into trouble.
On the other hand, if some PUA decides that manipulating 14yo's into having sex with him is easier than 16yo's, some of his victims will feel used and report him to the police, and a judge might find that lying about true love to pressure the victim into sex she does not want before dumping her is exactly such an exploitation.
Personally, I do not like laws where the alleged victim can decide after the fact if the sex was legal or not. However, I also do not think that people older than 21 (which is the minimum age for that statue to apply) should generally have sex with people 7 years younger than them.
So I do not mind too much to give the alleged victims a bit of the benefits of hindsight to determine if a sex act was okay or not. The alternative would be either to punish a lot of victimless crime or to accept that 14yo's are acceptable targets for 25yo PUAs.
Of course, actually convicting someone based on that statue is probably not easy, because it will likely end up with a he-said-she-said situation where each party accuses the other of having been the one pushing for sex until they relented. But with text messages, sometimes there will be a paper trail.
"The actual statue, says that to go to jail for having sex with a 14-15yo, you must have 'exploit[ed] the victim's lack of capacity for sexual self-determination', and that the deed will generally only be prosecuted if the victim files a report."
A little further down in the Wikipedia article, there is an additional case beyond the report by the victim: "The act shall only be prosecuted upon complaint, unless the prosecuting authority considers ex officio that it is required to enter the case because of the special public interest therein. [...] The court may dispense with punishment pursuant to these provisions if, in consideration of the conduct of the person against whom the act was directed, the wrongfulness of the act is slight."
Here is an explanation by a law firm that provides some more context, compared to the Wikipedia article:
"While the sexual abuse of children is generally criminalized by law, adolescents are granted a certain degree of sexual self-determination.
This is regulated in Section 182 of the German Criminal Code (StGB). Sexual acts with adolescents, provided they consent, are not generally punishable, unlike with children. Nevertheless, the criminal law protects adolescents due to their inexperience, and therefore, sexual acts with and against adolescents are punishable in some situations.
In such cases, it is generally referred to as sexual abuse of adolescents."
Exploiting a plight of a person under 18 is also considered sexual abuse of adolescents.
With respect to the question of what happens "if a 14-yo is determined to lose her V-card by simply going home with the cutest man who will be interested at a party and have sex with him, that is unlikely to get the man into trouble", it depends first of all on the age of the man, but also on what the "lack of capacity for sexual self-determination" means.
According to the cited law firm, the paragraph protects the sexual inexperience of adolescents, so "capacity for sexual self-determination" seems to be strongly related to "sexual inexperience". The law firm also explains that the court will take into account the following factors:
"What is/was the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim?
I do think that people older than 21 should generally have consensual sex with people 7 years younger than them. As long as those younger people are 18+. My wife is soon 40 and more than 7 years younger than me. And we have sex no matter what ... some people ... think. Honi soit qui mal y pense.
> you have to actually be in violation of a legal statute to be sent to prison.
True, but misleading: there are enough legal statutes written broadly enough I expect most people can be found to be in violation of at least one of them if the state wants them sent to prison.
Yeah I was curious and went to read Italian law and I think the logic is that the rape law already covers rape of minors and rape under abuse of power with harsher penalties, the specific law for rape of minors is a catchall about situations in which it is still considered rape even if the victim does not agree, which include most possible form of abuse of position (relatives, legal tutors, police forces, teachers, persons leaving even temporarily in the same house...), approach by the adult person of the minor with the intention of eventually having sex, exchange of favours or money real or promised, and in any case forces investigation and eventually prosecution by the state if it is informed of an act between an adult and a minor.
Nope, however, as pointed out in a different comment: The main takeaway for me is that the map is used to imply every horny 50yo could have sex with a 14yo and walk out of jail free because of age if consent. That's simply not true. However, I should have phrased my iriginal comment more careful and made clear that it is a reiteration of how I understand the legal situation.
Lol, this is literally the law in Germany. You are completely wrong; outside of certain exceptions a horny 50yo can legally have sex with a 14yo there, provided the 14yo consents.
This is really not a topic I am particularly interested in, but there are very strong "someone is wrong on the internet" vibes so I decided to research this.
The big exception is if the 50yo "knows about an exploits" the 14yo's "missing ability to sexual self-determination"; i.e. as I read this if a 14yo is already having a lot of sex it's more likely to be legal; if the 50yo is pushy and manipulative then it's probably not.
Crucially however is the issue of consent, and what 14yo is going to consent to sex with a 50yo unless there is something seriously wrong with both of them; and therefore many cases will end up being the exception above.
> that clearly states that you can't have sex as an adult with a minor (i.e. someone under 18)
Which StGB section would that be?
The way it is presented on WP, there are three different relevant thresholds for adults over 21:
* If your partner is under 14, you are committing a crime, always.
* If your partner is 14-15, they can report you if they find that you "exploit[ed] the victim's lack of capacity for sexual self-determination".
* If your partner is 16-17, sex is generally legal, unless you are a guardian or teacher (174), taking advantage of a predicament (182 (1)), or paying them (182 (2)).
* If your partner is 18+, sexual coercion or rape are of course still punishable (177). Prostitution is legal, though exploiting prostitutes by keeping them dependent is punishable (180a, 181a).
I think that all of this is roughly reasonable.
One might argue that it is a bit weird that a 14yo can watch sexual intercourse by finding a random adults to have sex with, but will have to wait another four years until they can legally watch porn. By my reading of the law, a 14yo girl could have a 30yo boyfriend, and them having sex would be legal, but sexting would not: him sending her a dick pic would constitute making pornography available to minors (184), while her sexting back would constitute youth pornography (184c).
I strongly suspect this is legacy code. Legacy code from ages when sex generally happened in marriage, and it was possible to marry at 14 although it required parental consent. Because in the past, the basic idea was that anyone past puberty is sexually an adult, and then my guess would be marriage laws were adopted 1:1 into consent laws when unmarried sex became an accepted thing.
I strongly suspect this is going to change, because young people now mentally mature slower. They simply don't have those kinds of experiences, like doing adult work from the age of 11 or so, that in the past made them mature faster.
This is correct summary. Personally, I would add that for 14-15 year olds, "exploit[ed] the victim's lack of capacity for sexual self-determination" can be quite strictly enforced. Since the German law does not have a binding concept of precedents a lot will depend on the judge.
which includes the following part (translation by googe.translate):
"Furthermore, it is also not permitted for a person over 21 to have sexual intercourse with a person under 16 and to knowingly exploit the victim's "lack of capacity for sexual self-determination." Whether this is the case must be determined on a case-by-case basis; there is also disagreement among the highest courts about how this characteristic should be determined.
For example, one court judged the very sexually explicit behavior of a 15-year-old girl toward a 28-year-old man in a "relationship" as "an expression of an immature personality" and found the victim's "lack of capacity for sexual self-determination." The result: The man was convicted of sexual abuse of juveniles.
In an almost identical case, another court assessed the girl's behavior completely differently. Compared to adolescents of the same age, the girl was already more advanced in her sexual development ("precocious"), which was clearly evident in her behavior. Given the behavior exhibited, one could certainly not speak of a "lack of capacity for sexual self-determination on the part of the victim." The result: acquittal on charges of sexual abuse of minors.
This clearly demonstrates that decisions vary greatly from case to case. Here, the defense's task is certainly to present convincing arguments.."
In Denmark it is as stated. You can have sex with a 15 year old, no matter if you're 15 or 80. It's deeply socially unacceptable, but it is not illegal.
That would explain a lot, I was really wondering why on earth anyone would think that "yeah, Epstein was maybe bad but Europe is worse" was achieving anything besides making your own side looking weird :D
In that case, Germany would actually be MORE strict than the United States. We typically have what's called a "romeo & juliet exception" to those laws intended to make sure that for example a high school senior who hooks up with a sophomore in the fall (an age gap of 17 to 14 is possible to exist there for at least a few months) could continue dating for the next few years without incident. So in fall of his junior year at college when he's 20 and she's still 17 for a few months, they aren't breaking the law.
In fact in my state (where I was a criminal attorney and prosecuted these kinds of crimes) the age of consent is 17 but that doesn't kick in unless the other party is 21 or over. There is a lower age of consent at 14, below which there are no defenses or excuses, neither mistake of age nor the age of the other partner matters if one of them is below 14. But for 14-16 year olds, they exist in a middle ground, and legally a 20 year old could have sex with a 14 year old and not be subject to statutory rape or statutory sodomy law. There are, however, a bunch of things that it would still be illegal for him to do in that situation, and how strict anyone enforces this is likely to vary with community norms and whether you manage to anger her family and they come to a prosecutor like me demanding action, because if we want to find some other law to apply against this we very likely could.
In the UK, it just is 16. There are some things at 18 (if the older partner is in a position of trust - e.g. teacher, as well as if the younger partner is a prostitute) and 13 (below this age, it is not a defence to have been wrong about the child's age, and technically it's a different offence), but 16 is the one that matters. However, as with most countries, you still shouldn't be shagging 16 year olds at 50.
In some European countries, such as Hungary, even adults are not prosecuted for having sex with a 14 years old, and I think the reason is that the Roma people really really do think everything is okay from puberty, even 12-13 years old girls living in a relationship (while that is illegal) they tend to see normal.
Another german here, and I just looked it up to be sure (§§ 174, 176, 182 StGB).
There are three relevant age strata: 14-15, 16-17, 18+.
From age 14 on, you can consent to sex with other young people (no older than 20) as long as you are not coerced, and the other party holds not position of power towards you (so your youth group leader is out).
From age 16 on, you can consent to sex with people of any age as long as you are not coerced, and the other party holds not position of power towards you (so your teacher is out).
From age 18 on you can consent to sex with people of any age (except of course young ones as explained above).
I'm pleased that while I got the legal base wrong, my general take-away holds up: You can't simply start screwing a 14yo in your 50s and expect shrugged shoulders because "consent"
This is not his original claim, this is his relativized version so speaking of "vindication" makes no sense. His original claim was <18 w >18 is technically in violation of the law but usually not prosecuted; this is simply just not true.
That said, Xelodon (above) misstates the law, I have a summary in another thread since I made the mistake of wasting my time reading into this, especially since my German isn't good enough to do this without google translate. But in short, "other young people" is not true; the way the law is phrased is that a >21yo committing sexual acts with a <16yo can be jailed for up to three years if they abuse the "missing ability to sexual self determination". At this point I am not a lawyer - and have no interest in reading up case law since I don't really want to concern myself with the depths of human depravity - but will add that typically with laws like this the perpetrator needs to know about both the age and the "missing ability to sexual self determination".
I am not a lawyer, but german is my native tongue, and I have a general grasp on german law.
One of the tenets is "Unwissenheit schützt vor Strafe nicht" - ignorance does not shield from prosecution. One does not need to know they are dealing with a minor to be prosecuted for it (althogh it might count as extenuating circumstances when it comes to the severity of punishment, if e.g. the perp can argue that all indicators were pointing to the victim bein of age). And whether or not the victim lacks the ability to exact sexual self-determination will be determined by psych evals and examined in court.
It is also incorrect that the victim needs to ask for prosecution. Anyone privy to the situation could do it, e.g. friends or parents could do it if they suspect something fishy was going on.
One might think that "exploiting the lack of ability to exact sexual self-determination" might point to the victim being coerced in a forceful way, but here the simple fact of being too young to gauge the consequences as well as an adult could, is enough to count as that lack of sexual self-determination, which again, will be determined by experts.
In essence; someone >21 cannot be sure they can get away with having sex with someone <16, even if they think they can fully manipulate the <16, and they are responsible for making sure that their prospective lay is not <16
to add to this, the law *explicitly* states that prosecution should only happen if the victim asks for persecution or there is special public interest. So "shrugged shoulders because consent" is pretty damn close to what the law says.
Other commenters have pointed this out already, but to be very clear - this comment is making up facts that are plainly untrue, which the commenter then admits to being the case further down. The sentence "there is an unrelated pedophilia paragraph that clearly states that you can't have sex as an adult with a minor (i.e. someone under 18)" is something fabricated from thin air; I suspect that it's US cultural diffusion making young people think the law is US law everywhere.
Because in my experience, it tends to be Americans who have an incredibly difficult time accepting that some Western countries have an age of consent below the age of 16, and come up with bullshit stories about why this isn't the case. I do not know the situation in Germany, but in Denmark it certainly is perfectly legal for 70+ year olds to have sex with 15 year olds. The wikipedia map is probably generally accurate.
I also find the claims of "wokeness" a bit silly, but man does the Cracker Barrel before-after look depressing (not just the logo).
Also, for a more substantial point, moving away from kids-friendly isn't just about the kids being a smaller share (we parents also often prefer the kids-friendly places!), it's about families having generally much less expendable income than childless couples.
Recently (like, last week or two) saw an article saying Cracker Barrel had changed its logo back, due to drastic drops in sales after the rebranding. So I think that one's already been undone.
Of course, the others did their change about a decade or two ago, and I think some of them are already moving on to newer design trends. Cracker Barrel is just conservative and slow.
> On January 8th, 2009, Tropicana launched the new packaging for its best-selling product in North America – Tropicana Pure Premium, with sales revenues reaching more than 700 million dollars per year.
> Two months later, sales dropped by 20%, and this spectacular decrease in sales represented a loss of 30 million dollars for Tropicana.
> On February 23rd, 2009, Tropicana announced that it would return to its original packaging design
> In total, this initiative cost Tropicana more than 50 million dollars.
There seems to be a lack of awareness, in general, that if you don't have a branding problem, you don't need to adjust your branding.
Oh man, that Tropicana rebrand was *dumb*. The new design looks *exactly* like "own brand knock-off reconstituted from concentrate orange juice" that every supermarket has on the shelf.
If I'm looking for specifically Tropicana and I see this, I am not thinking "Snazzy new pack!", I'm thinking "Huh, they junked Tropicana and are trying to sell me their own-brand stuff?" and I pick up the next big brand-name juice instead.
This is kind of an amazing example of something. I clicked on the link and said to myself "Jesus, the new design looks exactly like some cheap off-brand trying to remind you of Tropicana without violating copyright laws". Then I read your comment.
This actually SHOWS the power of marketing though, right? We both came to the same fairly complex conclusion just by exposure to an image.
The ironic thing is that the new design went for trendy minimalism, which looked *just* like the "cheap as we can get it" design for own-brand items.
Meanwhile, when I was trying to find examples of own-brand/other brand orange juice, it was interesting how many of them tried to copy the traditional Tropicana branding up to the line of "veering into copyright infringement territory".
Because people tend to be on autopilot when buying the staples they grab off the shelves every week (at least, I am) they're more likely not to be paying attention, and so I am not surprised Tropicana sales took a hit.
The new design got stacked beside the knock-off brands and people just grabbing their 'regular brand' orange juice half-recognised the "must be Tropicana, the branding looks the same" and bought that instead.
A case of trying to be too clever by half! Marketing and design do work, but first you have to be aware of what end you want to achieve, and just "the old brand is old and boring, we need to make it fresh and trendy" is going to shoot yourself in the foot.
I think the Cracker Barrel rebrand could have gone better if they'd leaned into cottagecore style; that would have let them refresh the interior décor without totally junking the "country living" associations.
> Marketing and design do work, but first you have to be aware of what end you want to achieve, and just "the old brand is old and boring, we need to make it fresh and trendy" is going to shoot yourself in the foot.
There's more to say here. The entire purpose of branding is to be recognized by people who are already familiar with your brand. People who have never heard of you aren't part of the target audience. The older a piece of branding is, the more effective it is, full stop.
For 𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨, this isn't true. The purpose of marketing is to inform the uninformed about your brand. But these are two radically different endeavors. They shouldn't be confused.
Are there no case studies where an update to a dated-looking brand has actually succeeded?
Apple, for instance, ditched its 80s-looking rainbow striped logo for a cleaner monochrome one and went from a basket case to the world's biggest company. Not the only factor of course but it's hard to imagine a world where they're selling billions of iPhones with the colorful apple logo.
As someone with no particular associations with the brand, Tropicana looks dated. But they should have just updated the font while keeping the package recognisable.
It just doesn't fit in with the modern Apple aesthetic. (To be fair, they were among the pioneers of the modern super-clean aesthetic now that affects everything).
Another funny case of "successful" rebranding is Borland company which in 1980s produced very popular programming languages/environments Turbo Pascal and Borland Pascal. These worked in DOS.
So when it came time to move to Windows, they renamed the company to Inprise, *and* decided to call the Windows version of the product Delphi.
Many programmers that used their products were not aware that this is the same company and the same product, so they kept waiting for some "Visual Turbo Pascal" or "Visual Borland Pascal" which never came... and then they switched to other languages, such as C/C++ or Java.
At some moment later the company was renamed back, but the damage was already done.
The Cracker Barrel revamp did make me wonder if the marketing person from Bud Light had found a new job 😁
Not being American, I don't know anything about original Cracker Barrel, and I understand the need for a brand refresh and seeking out new demographics, but the change seemed such a huge leap away from the original, and the end result so bland and soulless, that it was shooting themselves in the foot. Original customers won't be happy and those who didn't previously eat at Cracker Barrel are not going to be enticed in by "hey, now it's bland corporate indistinguishable mush!"
The rebrand is obviously bad, but I have yet to see an argument about what makes it _woke_ specifically. Companies are doing awful rebrands all the time, and usually it has nothing to do with anything political. It's just some marketing department trying to justify their existence. This seems like obviously the case here.
I forget which podcast I listened to yesterday (I think Blocked and Reported) but Cracker Barrel went from "we will fire you if we think you're a gay" in the 1990s to doing stuff that was DEI and literally [1] shoving rainbow rocking chairs down people's throats, and then the new logo got rid of both the cracker and the barrel. Conservative grifters like Robby Starbuck and Matt Walsh declared it "woke" and made stopping it part of their mission and at that point words lost all meaning, the way the word "literally" did.
[1] 8 different people choked to death from having rocking chairs literally shoved down their throats
I don't think it's necessarily woke in itself, but it comes too near the Bud Light fiasco, and if the original theme of the business is "old-style country imagery" and then you dump all that for "bland anonymous 2010s style" it's easy for critics to position that as anti-rural, anti-conservative, anti-good old American values like mom and apple pie, hence woke.
Maybe "progressive" would be a better descriptor than "woke"? The vision of utopia as made up of decultured, deracinated citizens of everywhere and nowhere is very much a progressive one, although I'm not sure it could be described as a specifically *woke* progressive one, given wokeness's emphasis on identity politics, being anti-cultural appropriation, and so forth.
Logo designer here—as another commenter (correctly) hypothesized, that image is fake. It’s a mockup parody that uses the facade and font of Crate & Barrel to mock the actual Cracker Barrel rebrand (which, as other commenters noted, was reversed a week later). While the short-lived logo redesign was indeed more minimalist (getting rid of the illustration and the bean-shaped container), the typography was a nice improvement.
The Pizza Hut example is also out-of-date; the current Pizza Hut logo is an updated version of their earlier version with the wavy Zs, in red, beneath the red slanty roof.
The branding world is currently caught between optimization (the job of a logo in particular is XYZ and so over time redesigns will make it better at XYZ) and the reality that sometimes people just like a thing even if it’s not good at Z, and in the context of the overall brand that has a greater positive effect than explicitly optimizing for Z. In the case of Cracker Barrel the reaction was super overblown (as public reactions are), but the rollout/framing of the redesign definitely could have been executed a lot better.
Requisite designer’s disclaimer/note: the logo is not the brand, it is but a single (albeit important) element of the brand’s visual identity. In the words of George Bokhua, it is “the lens through which the brand is focused”; in the words of Sagi Haviv, it is “not the sentence itself, but the period at the end of the sentence.”
"While the short-lived logo redesign was indeed more minimalist (getting rid of the illustration and the bean-shaped container), the typography was a nice improvement."
But it was too much of a jump forward. The old logo certainly could have done with a refresh, but dumping the iconic imagery for "orange oval-rectangle with only the font" was too much of a change.
"Barrels of soda crackers could be found for sale in small-town stores across the American South in the early 1900s; people would stand around the barrels chatting and catching up, similar in purpose to contemporary office water coolers."
They could have kept the barrel, for example, and used that on its side as the orange rectangle with "Cracker Barrel" being like a label on it. But I'm neither a graphic designer nor a marketer, so take that for what it's worth.
Yeah, it definitely could have been cleaned up as an evolution rather than a complete redesign, or (my take) been both cleaned up and then decoupled so that the various elements could be combined for different applications/layouts/use cases. All I was saying was that the new typography was an improvement over the old typography.
The container for the wordmark absolutely should have been the barrel! Some are saying that was the thinking, but if so the execution was a failure.
Another disclaimer that it’s very difficult to critique a project like this without knowing what the brief was, both in terms of attribution (was the fault with the design team, or with the brief they were handed?) as well as strategy (e.g. if for some reason they wanted to alienate their current consumer base and pivot to serving a completely different audience, the redesign might have been spot on. This is a bad example but hopefully you get what I mean).
I know I keep referencing Bud Light, but I think the thinking behind this was the same: our core market is getting older, we're not gaining market share, we need to appeal to new, younger customers, so we need to scrap the old brand imagery and revamp everything.
But the change was too drastic and too sudden, so it alienated the existing customers and wasn't enough to appeal to those who wouldn't go to Cracker Barrel anyway because they associated it with 'Aunt Marge and Grandpa' kind of place.
That does seem the likely motivation. If you check out the actual applications beyond the logo (eg the packaging) it was actually really well done, they just misread the room in dropping the old illustrated assets completely. And then the reaction to that was amplified to the nth degree by the internet.
If you read deeper into Bud Light, it has been marketed for decades at gay bars, because gay men like to have abs, hence they count calories. Their conservative customers simply did not notice it, they don't go to gay bars. Or to Prides, where they had floats.
So already having a large number of LGBTQ customers, it sounded totally logical from them to try to get a larger LGBTQ market share. This was not simply ideology-over-profits "wokeness", but the extension of a previous business strategy that did work.
Except that this time conservatives noticed it. Ouch.
Gay men drinking beer (outside of a gay bar) are just "guys drinking beer".
Using Dylan Mulvaney, of all the possible options, was a mistake on several fronts. Who would Mulvaney's audience be (given that the other products I've seen him associated with were things like tampons and makeup)? Young women. Are young women going to drink beer, even light beer? Doubtful, though the marketing push has been to women and there was some rise in women drinking beer:
The effort to redesign corporate logos is one that turns me into the kind of person who is not far from talking breathlessly about the WEF and Klaus Schwab. The messy but organic and authentically distinct logos are taken from us to create minimalist and depressing replacements.
> moving away from kids-friendly isn't just about the kids being a smaller share (we parents also often prefer the kids-friendly places!), it's about families having generally much less expendable income than childless couples.
I don't think this makes sense. Food is paid for out of the non-discretionary budget. You'd need to argue that families have less money in an absolute sense, not that they have less disposable income. You don't need to dip into "disposable income" to feed your children.
Food at home from the supermarket is inside the budget. Going to restaurants is quite a bit more expensive these days, even fast food, and so I'd generally consider it part of expendable income.
"I think my answer is something like - we’ve got to divide kids from adults at some age, there’s a range of reasonable possible ages, we shouldn’t be too mad at other societies that choose different dividing lines within that range"
What exactly is the point in drawing the line at a certain age? Medical examination plus psych eval is sufficient for determining adulthood in sex issues, and while it takes longer than checking whether age is legal - I'd say it's justified to prevent cases where people get hardcore prison terms for biologically normal and not socially disruptive behavior (sexual interaction with a biologically mature person who happens to be under the arbitrary age limit). And it's not like it hasn't been tried before - I believe in USSR at some point pedophilia laws were like that, and it didn't lead to a rise in child molestation or whatever.
One important dimension is the ability of people to know if they're breaking the law. It is much easier to establish whether you knew a person was 18+ or not, than whether you thoroughly understood their development and medical history.
What you propose could only work if your ID documents got some sort of government stamp of approval for sex.
Not really. Pre-pubescent kids usually don't do sex-seeking behavior, and most adults do not try to sex up something that is not fuckable. So, basically if you are engaging in a normal sex behavior as is practiced in the society - it's most probably ok. If it looks like a duck and fucks like a duck - it's a duck, and only rare edge cases even need an additional investigation. Basically, if you pick up a chick at a bar and fuck her - it's extremely unlikely that you are committing a crime, in fact, your risk is higher with the ID-age scheme, because she might have fake ID or something (and just try proving that post-factum).
> if you pick up a chick at a bar and fuck her - it's extremely unlikely that you are committing a crime
IANAL, but you might want to be careful there. Consent under influence is another legal minefield. Of course, any woman you are likely to meet at a bar drinking Tequila late at night is probably going to be 18+, because otherwise the bar is committing an offense in most jurisdictions.
I am also not on board with your duck typing. Basically, we do not generally have unlimited trust in 14yo's knowing what they want. A 14yo going on tinder to find some dick is certainly going to happen occasionally, but more often the adult might push them towards sex acts.
Basically, at age 16, we expect a woman to have learned the lesson that of course men will want to fuck her and are willing to lie through their teeth to get there (or else she will find out the hard way). At age 14, they are not yet in season for random 25yo PUAs.
The German legal code (which I have discussed elsewhere in the discussion here) recognizes that fact, which is why relations between 14yo's and adults are neither completely legal or completely illegal, but depend on the specifics, e.g. if the adult exploited the minor's inexperience.
"Consent under influence is another legal minefield. "
Not really. Having sex with passed out people is obviously rape, hence the "cannot consent" stuff, but people having sex after having had a few drinks is so extremely common that it is impossible to criminalize. That is basically the default hookup method.
But we aren't talking about pre-pubescent kids; that's the point here, There's pedophilia in the formal psychiatric sense of sexual attraction to prepubescent children, and "pedophile" in the lurid tabloidy journalistic sense of middle-aged men actually having sex with clearly post-pubescent girls who happen to be less than eighteen years old.
Which is sometimes legal, and sometimes not, and sometimes immoral and sometimes not, but always complicated by the fact that it's normal for middle-aged men to want to have sex with attractive 16yo girls and normal for 16yo girls to want to have sex with *someone* and now we have to try and figure out whether one particular girl wanted to have sex with one particular man when both "yeah, they were both DTF" and "no, she was coerced" are plausible.
Or we can just avoid the question by saying that it's always illegal for middle-aged men to sleep with girls under 18, but that's something that most communities in both Europe and the US have chosen not to do.
Further confusing the issue, Hollywood tells pretty much the entire world how things work, and California is one of the minority of states that does just set the age at eighteen. So you have people who just take it for granted that Age of Consent = 18 everywhere and anyone who has sex with a 16yo girl is a deviant criminal "pedophile". Just like you have people in Europe who expect the police to read them their Miranda rights when they are arrested.
Idk why everyone is automatically thinking it's about "middle age men sleeping with girls under 18". Pretty much, if you model the age-difference as a gaussian distribution - it looks pretty clear that most of the illegal cases will have minimal age difference, so while there will be some amount of creepy 45-year-olds who want a schoolgirl, the majority of your technically-criminal cases will be with minimal, but still illegal age difference. Can get away from the worst of it by giving the law some leeway (basically, 18 is the consent age, but it's legal if age difference is below 5 years, as is done in some countries), but even then by the nature of the distribution you are going to get more people with let's say 5.5 year age difference than with 20+ year age difference - basically, your ridiculous cases are going to outnumber legitimately worrying cases at any point.
And about the point "it's the law, just fucking obey it", as brought up in some comments - it's not gonna work like this with sex issues. As seen in traditional Muslim communities for example, where punishment for infidelity is stoning to death - even a death threat doesn't completely deter people from fucking. So, you are going to have a lot of criminals just by having the law.
> It is much easier to establish whether you knew a person was 18+ or not
Only through checking their ID, though.
In the Terra Ignota series, adulthood is determined by a test. While I think that there are some details which would need to be figured out, that seems much more appealing than simply using age as a clutch for everything.
>One important dimension is the ability of people to know if they're breaking the law. It is much easier to establish whether you knew a person was 18+ or not, than whether you thoroughly understood their development and medical history.
For that matter, if you're thinking of sleeping with someone, it's going to be easier for you yourself to find out if they're over 18 -- yes, they might lie about their age, but they're probably more likely to tell the truth about that than about the details of their intimate psych evalutations.
But we don't follow this. In many states, statutory rape is strict liability. You could have every reason to think that the person you're sleeping with is an adult and still be committing a crime.
I agree that a combination of medical and psychological evaluation would be the ideal. However, that is a resource consuming process, and it is easier to set up specific rules that cover most of the distribution.
To give an analogy, I think that is also the reason why usually only males are conscripted and females are not: a much larger percentage of health males (lets say, 80-90% (just an example, not going to die on specific %)) is capable of being turned into usable soldiers, but for females the ratio is about the opposite (e.g., 10-20%). It is difficult to identify the outcomes in advance, so most militaries just go for males generally as a cost effective solution, and live with 10-20% of recruits failing. Likewise, it is reasonable to assume an age limit can be identified below which 10-20% of people are still capable to have sex without any negative effect, and use that (of course, likely we still have something like that even above the allowed age). I think this is true for all age based limits, be it voting, driving, drinking or using guns.
Of course, identifying distribution and optimal cutoff points on these probably could span a couple of phd dissertations. Maybe in the future we might have some AI powered system that could swiftly identify who could be allowed to do what activity.
It's not really resource consuming, because the only cases that get checked are ones where everyone clearly sees something going wrong. So it's not like everyone goes to the doctors to take their med test whether they are ready for sex, it's more like there's a 1000 reported cases per year, 800 cases where it's simply someone being unhappy because person A is dating person B and trying to use police as leverage (and gets told to FUCK OFF, WE'VE GOT REAL CRIMES TO INVESTIGATE OVER HERE) and a couple of hundred cases where it actually gets to the court and the medical investigation stage. And 99.9% of people don't even ever get to bother about the whole thing.
I disagree. One's age can be approximated very reliably by just having a look at them or knowing some general information about that person (e.g. what type of school they attend currently). So 99% of people don't get to bother about these because they can filter out illegal relationships with high probability very quickly.
It's same way either way, biological age is approximated very reliably as well by looking at a person's appearance and behavior. The primary difference is that in the remaining 1% you don't throw people into jail for biologically normal behavior that happened to cross an arbitrary age number. (and actual pedos are caught with about the same efficiency)
"It's not really resource consuming, because the only cases that get checked are ones where everyone clearly sees something going wrong."
This is a largely self-defeating point, because that's also the way it works under current laws. Police don't just magically know when somebody has broken age of consent laws. If somebody catches an actual conviction for statutory rape, you can be pretty much guaranteed that *somebody* who was aware of the act--mostly likely the victim, but occasionally somebody else close to the victim--had enough of a problem with it to decide to raise enough hell to get police involved. I can pretty much guarantee that lots of pedophiles fly entirely under the radar, simply by not actively pissing their partners off and being discrete enough that nobody else is aware of what's happening.
The two main differences between what you're proposing and how it works in practice now are:
1. People who make the choice to sleep with under-age individuals are taking somewhat more of a risk, even in cases where they don't engage in other abusive behaviors.
and
2. In the cases where they *do* engage in other abusive behaviors, getting justice for the victims is substantially easier, because there's a clear and objective violation of the law co-occuring with those other sorts of abuse (which may be more difficult to effectively prove and prosecute).
Society at large considers this a pretty good trade. Most people don't care *even a little bit* about an increased legal risk to the sort of people who like to sleep with underage individuals[1]. Meanwhile, they get quite upset when people who are fairly obviously being abusive can't be brought to justice. So I suspect you're not going to have much luck getting anyone on board with your vision here: they'd be trading away marginal units of justice for people they care quite a lot about for marginal units of convenience and security for people they consider the scum of the earth.
[1] Part of this is a cultural bias. But part of this because there's a quite well-grounded prior that *nearly all* such cases involve the older person taking advantage of the younger person's lack of maturity and life experience.
The priors I generally use for thinking of such cases are the following:
1) Any law that creates a lot of technical criminals is a bad law. If the particular law carries a large penalty - doubly so.
2) Any law that has a stated goal of protecting children has to be viewed with a triple amount of suspicion - it either carries a hidden agenda or going to cause more problems than it solves.
3) Anything that is fucking around with normal human behavior is gonna bring more pain than it solves.
“So I suspect you're not going to have much luck getting anyone on board with your vision here“
I realize that well enough. But you know, there are points that are worth arguing, even if there is gonna be no popular support for it. If one person out of a hundred gets something that’s gonna cause them to re-analyze their assumptions - that’s what I’d call a good result. And what’s the point of arguing from a position that everyone already thought about? More interesting and meaningful to do it on some topic that everyone takes for granted, even when you know that a lot of people aren’t going to take it too well.
"Any law that creates a lot of technical criminals is a bad law. If the particular law carries a large penalty - doubly so."
They're not "technical criminals," though. They are very much *actual* criminals, doing something that a huge portion of the people whose values (at least nominally) are reflected by the law consider *thoroughly reprehensible.* They're just actual criminals who haven't been caught, and probably never will be.
But that's how basically ALL crime works. I would rather strongly assume (though of course it's very difficult to prove) that the vast, *vast* majority of criminal acts go unpunished and in many cases unnoticed. The more severe the action the more likely to get noticed, but even murder can be disguised as an accident, or reported as a missing person. And it's pretty well-known among people who study such things that even more violent rapes are heavily under-reported[1]. It would be really quite remarkable if the substantial majority of things like theft, fraud and assault got reported. And, of course, not all reported crimes are solved. None of that means those laws are useless: increase the cost of doing business for would-be criminals, and are disproportionately likely to penalize the most heinous, the most prolific and the most stupid (all of whom are good to remove from circulation). And so too with statutory rape: I'll repeat again "make it substantially harder to successfully punish the worst and most despicable statutory rapists, so that those who are more polite about can operate with less anxiety and less restraint" *is not a good pitch* for anyone with an ounce of sense.
"Any law that has a stated goal of protecting children has to be viewed with a triple amount of suspicion - it either carries a hidden agenda or going to cause more problems than it solves."
I'd place this firmly in the category of "dumb cynicism." Being cynical and callous is not the same thing as being wise or clever. Yes, lots of people use "for the children" as an excuse to push hidden agendas. But anyone with a fraction of a brain cell who has spent any time socializing with non-edgelord human beings understands this is *exactly* because lots of people really do *genuinely care* about childrens' wellfare, and are willing to go to great lengths for it. The intelligent, mature way to handle this state of affairs is to, y'know, actually carefully consider things on a case-by-case basis[2] and decide whether the overt purpose makes sense[3]. Cynically assuming that any such agenda must be in bad-faith is every bit as empty-headed and vacuous as naively assuming that every such agenda is sincere.
"Anything that is fucking around with normal human behavior is gonna bring more pain than it solves."
Repeatedly insisting that older men raping teenagers is "normal human behavior" will definitely convince people of *something.* But probably not the thing you're aiming at. Of course, it is true in the very boring sense that murder and theft and assault and infanticide are also all "perfectly normal human behavior;" they're all things that *some* fraction of humans have been doing for years, heedless of the harm they cause. But of course, objecting to such harms with violence is *also* perfectly normal human behavior. So really, if I were to take this at face value, I'd propose the following compromise: "the law will make no attempt to directly punish people who commit statutory rape. But neither will it make any attempt to punish anyone who injures or kills a statutory rapist, either to stop him from offending or to avenge the harm he's done." By your own stated standards, this should be a clear win: fewer technical criminals and less "fucking with normal human behavior" all around.
For my part, I think I'll stick with the part where we generally keep violence--yes, including rape, yes, including even those rapes *you consider* well-justified--illegal.
[1] If you disbelieve this or credit it but don't understand why, that's a whole other conversation.
[2]Which would include, for example, reading and understanding the viewpoints of people who care deeply about the issue in question, something I strongly suspect you of never having done.
[3] Which let me just emphasize for the third or fourth time, in this case IT ABSOLUTELY DOES. Just because you have dismissed or ignored the harms the law is aiming to prevent doesn't mean they aren't real.
"Repeatedly insisting that older men raping teenagers is "normal human behavior" will definitely convince people of *something.* "
Jesus, will someone for once look up a graph of age difference in couples, stick that graph on top of 18 years, cut off a bit on the left side where it overlaps with pre-pubescence and see that the majority of interactions happening will have a minimal age difference? The picture that some people have in mind is of a 50-year old hunting schoolgirls, while the reality is that there will be one such case per, say, a hundred cases with 2-6 years difference. And that's what "normal" human behavior looks like. The law then looks like a arbitrary line that splits the collection of the horniest people in the universe right in the middle, pretty much. No way that can backfire, right?
"Just because you have dismissed or ignored the harms the law is aiming to prevent doesn't mean they aren't real."
The thing is, we can compare. There are plenty of countries where age of consent is significantly lower or has the extra window for those with 4-6 year differences or even has it the exact way that I suggested originally (med eval). None of them seem to experience severe pedo problems - people generally are capable of sorting shit like that out themselves without needing a law.
Also, just because you dismissed or ignored the side effects of the law doesn't make them less real either. And there are plenty. Starting with treating sex as a zero-sum game where one side loses and one side wins, and you have to be "more mature" in order to have a chance of, well, not losing too much and ending with creating additional "exclusive" markets for sex trade.
"They're not "technical criminals," though."
There is a certain difference between murder and statutory rape. Murder is always, well, murder. What about a couple that starts having sex when both are 17, then he turns 18, then half a year later she turns 18? Does their sex magically turn into rape for half a year, then switch back?
"I'd propose the following compromise: "the law will make no attempt to directly punish people who commit statutory rape. But neither will it make any attempt to punish anyone who injures or kills a statutory rapist, either to stop him from offending or to avenge the harm he's done."
You know what's even scarier than your compromise? Same shit, only anyone is allowed to do the same by using the law as the instrument. You do realize that in the age difference range of 2-6 years a lot of the complaints are going to be malicious ones like "Oh, my girlfriend dumped me and is fucking a college student. I'm gonna go to the cops and get the bastard and the whore really fucked up" or "My daughter's boyfriend is a useless weed-smoking hippy, gonna turn them over to the LAW"?
Looking at the drone war currently raging in Ukraine, I think an argument for female conscription is making itself: women aren't inferior to men when it comes to piloting drones, while they would be in lugging machine guns around.
Both-gender conscription works well for Israel, because many, perhaps most soldiers are not combat soldiers, they do civilian stuff in a uniform. For example in Herman Wouk's Hope, in 1948 a young conscripted woman was simply the driver of a colonel. An army is basically a parallel society that needs practically everything the normal society needs: accountants, cooks, nurses. Of course, I don't really understand in that case why even give them a uniform.
"hardcore prison terms for biologically normal and not socially disruptive behavior (sexual interaction with a biologically mature person who happens to be under the arbitrary age limit)."
Problem with your reply is that it sounds like the excuse to be used by "I'm a MAP and I see no reason why I, a healthy virile forty year old man with a perfectly normal, evolutionary psychology-mandated, interest in young nubile fertile females for purposes of mating, should be denied the opportunity to have intimate romantic sexual mutually consensual encounters with twelve year old biologically mature and ready to breed females."
Not really, my tastes don't run that far down age-wise. But realistically having a "consent age" creates more problems that it solves, and mostly for people under 30, not for "healthy virile 40 year old males", plus it works both ways - 20+ year old women going to jail for sexual interactions with minors is not an unheard-of situation. Plus, I am extremely suspicious of any government attempts to regulate sexual interactions, be it ages of consent or anti-gay laws.
My biggest concern about this would be delays in the case. Here's basically my concern scenario:
You have a child who gets molested at age 12. It takes a couple years for their parents to find out, and then the police spend a while investigating. Child is (let's say) 15 now. A psych eval is done, but when the case goes to court a year later (child is now 16) the eval is challenged by the defense. They find some annoying loophole and get to have the child re-evaluated. Defense intentionally drags their feet, argues over doctors, manages to pick a doctor who's also booked out (in Georgia where I live a lot of [non-psych, such as my gastro] specialists can take 6+ months for an appointment) and after another year the child is 17 years old and tests like it.
You can add 1 or 2 years to all stages of the process depending on where you draw the line around age of consent. I recognize that criminal trials can often be done a bit more quickly, but in practice if the defense really wants to drag their feet they often have a lot of levers to pull. So, my primary point of disagreement is on whether your proposal is valid in terms of sorting when its ok to have sex with a young person, but rather that I don't know if it would work in the US legal system.
Could have it work more like a driver's license: if you didn't actually take a test before engaging in the risky behavior, the law assumes you wouldn't have passed it, and the younger you are, the stricter those official standards get.
TLDR; I can't imagine dropping a few hundred dollars so that my (hypothetical) teenage child could have sex with an older partner, and I think most parents would have a similar view.
Well, I think there are three fundamental differences between a "sex license" let's call it and a driver's license.
1. Not having a driver's license gets YOU punished (if you drive). Not having a sex license would get the other person punished, so assuming that you wouldn't have passed it without a license basically puts us in the same situation, except letting a few people test out. Which, I guess might be seen as an improvement, but see point 2. when we start worrying about fake licenses.
2. Parents are (at least where I grew up) incentivised to get their children driver's licenses, because then they don't have to drive the kids everywhere. But, I think many if not most parents aren't going to want their children to have a sex license. Also, since most pedophelia is committed by someone known by the family, the cases when the parents do opt in would run a very high risk of being influenced by the perpetrator.
3. Getting a driver's license is pretty cheap. Most schools offer driver's ed for free to students (at least where I grew up) and you just need to bring a car. Whereas a battery of psych evals likely not covered by your insurance is going to be pretty expensive.
I'm leaving off my personal opinions as "official points" that you can pretty easily find a doctor to diagnose you with whatever you want, and since doctor's would be heavily incentivized to pass children (if you're trying to get the license you want to pass assumedly) I suspect it would rapidly turn into as much of a rubber stamp for people of means as academic accomodations has become for many schools (I think some people need them. I just also think they aren't that hard to get if you have the money to shop for an out-of-network doctor)
*Somebody* presumably voted for the various state laws permitting young marriage with parental consent.
> cases when the parents do opt in would run a very high risk of being influenced by the perpetrator.
Having a standard test which even folks over 18 need to pass would mean victims who'd otherwise be stuck in a gaslit bubble get at least brief contact with a detailed, *official* description of what the outside world thinks is or isn't normal, which should make most types of inexperience-based abuse more difficult to maintain. Web of lies, slightest touch of the truth, etc.
If they opt in, but still behave badly, that official paper trail can presumably aid follow-up somehow. If some rancid family avoids the paper trail and then gets caught anyway, prosecution becomes enormously easier, not only in the sense of taking up less of the judge's valuable time ("sex happened, no license, go directly to jail"), but reducing emotional burden on investigators and the actual victims, since grisly details are less likely to be tactically relevant, and could thus avoid being dredged up into the public record.
> I suspect it would rapidly turn into as much of a rubber stamp for people of means as academic accomodations has become for many schools
There's no real constituency lobbying to tighten up diagnostic criteria for nuisance-level medical conditions, but there are lots of people with strong opinions about incredibly petty nuances of sex education, for and against. Assuming the legislature can be coerced into agreeing on such a curriculum at all, I suspect definitions would be rigorous, with no slack for handwaving. A national conversation to carve out at least one acceptable way forward, instead of slamming the overton window shut on the other side's fingers.
> *Somebody* presumably voted for the various state laws permitting young marriage with parental consent.
Well sort of, but my understanding is that these were usually a tightening of laws, not a relaxing of them. English common law had a minimum of age 12 for women and 14 for men.
I would be genuinely curious to see an example of a US state that lowered the age of consent, but you might not have time to find that to satisfy my curiosity, and if not, that's fine.
>
I think we had pretty different ideas of the proposal here. My impression was that it was going to be more like a psychological assessment so that mature youths could have a bit more freedom. I was a bit sympathetic to this, because I went to college as a minor and got to find the hassle of having your parents halfway accross the country to sign forms. Additionally, youths in situations typically associated with older youths (college, full-time employment, etc.) actually might be innocently mistaken for someone of age.
I think if we're talking driver's permit type test, at that point we're testing whatever intellectual competancy it takes to pass a standardized test, rather than the emotional competancy to choose a good (or at least not bad) sexual partner. I do like the point about exposing someone already stuck to outside influences, maybe a better structure would be to require some kind of ongoing check-ins so that if things went south there would be someone who knew.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding, but it seemed in your post that you were thinking this might be required for everyone (rather than just as an option for minors). I think such a proposal would not only be politically dead on arrival, but would also be seriously problematic in terms of excluding some groups (people bad at tests) from ever having sex. I think you could also then see these tests get warped from testing actual competancy to being fairly easy to pass.
I think your point about lobbying and diagnostic criteria is good, and well-taken. I am retracting the point for now (I would like to think more on this).
No argument there, hence my line about "assuming the legislature can be coerced into agreeing on such a curriculum at all"
> excluding some groups (people bad at tests) from ever having sex
They're already being de facto excluded from some other pretty important stuff. If such a test is to exist, there would be enormous political pressure to minimize both types of errors, and satisfying those demands would require development of new (well, updated - in another sense, very very old) social technologies: effectively, a state-sanctioned coming-of-age ceremony.
French nobility dicked around with contractual definitions of weights & measures, to the detriment of the peasantry... until the situation became untenable and, in a spasm of terrible violence, they toppled the old regime and instituted the metric system.
American nobility has been dicking around with public definitions of desire, success, and maturity. Folks with little else in common all seem to agree the resultant situation is becoming untenable. What manner of mathematical doctrine or platinum-iridium reference idol would need to be carved and enshrined, to prevent that specific type of corruption from recurring?
AIUI those are mostly evaluations to see if sex took place. Unless the rape was quite violent, it's difficult to see if the sex was consensual or not, and it's going to be even more difficult to tell if the person was emotionally mature enough to have sex.
actually, I'd just moved everything 2 years later to make sure that they were at an age where they would be old enough for consent in most states and forgot to take out that line. edited now.
What about simple laws that definitely won't be obeyed and therefore create a lot of "technical criminals" (people who by strict definition are breaking the law, but don't get brought in, because e.g. no one happened to catch them in flagrante)?
Agree that interview kind of sucked, but I think it was more some combination of:
"I need to practice better talking points for these things"
"I speak half as fast as Destiny and have 1/10th as much charisma"
"My audio crapped out"
"Destiny had already watched the entire debate, so it was more like us making references to an event we'd both seen, rather than communicating to the audience about what we think about covid origins"
Some of those things are improvable -- I guess I could practice with mock interviews?
I think there are some things in life that are hard to get right because you do them so infrequently that you never practice or improve. Like, job interviews are really important, but maybe you only do a few of them in your life. Same thing with, like, any big negotiation, or going on first dates, or giving a toast at a wedding, or whatever.
(I was at a wedding this weekend, I'm pretty sure that everyone just had ChatGPT write their toast, and that the vows were AI generated too)
I hadn't really listened to Destiny much, before this, and thought the whole "streaming live every day" thing was kind of weird. But I'm starting to think the accessibility is a feature, not a bug. I wrote a bit about how people like Joe Rogan and Rush Limbaugh appeal through repetition and accessibility:
If some smart liberal wants to stream every day, and occasionally read an ACX post on his show, or read the full text of an important lawsuit, or watch a Covid origins debate, I'm all for it. It's a huge upgrade over Rogan, and it's not like Dwarkesh puts out new episodes daily.
Philipp Markolin also went on Destiny, a few weeks later:
If anyone needs even more Covid origins content, Philipp wrote a book about it (which you can now read) and helped make a movie (which you can't watch anywhere).
I haven't gone back through to see if he's done that before, or how often. I would guess that he's been reading for a while, given that he's been to rationalist events. There's a video of him talking to Eliezer at Manifest:
I'm not sure how to easily search the archives to find these readings. Were this an important dispute, I suppose I would figure out how to do that, or I would just ask Destiny for links.
He's so prolific that it would be easy for anyone to miss all of these. But I wonder, is there something else going on here? It sounds like maybe you're trying to define yourself as an ACX reader/rationalist in a way that's separate from/superior to most Destiny viewers and "average reddit commenters"? Or maybe there's some political grievance motivating you? You mentioned some issue with "sycophancy towards the Democratic party". What was that about?
I was not highly familiar with his work, prior to going on the show. I certainly knew he was a streamer and a Democrat. I had only watched a few high profile debates -- I watched the entire exchange between him and Ben Shapiro, on Lex Fridman, and I watched part of his discussion with Jordan Peterson (Peterson was mostly unwatchable).
I had vaguely thought of going on his show as a way to promote the zoonotic theory of covid origins to a wider audience but hadn't directly pursued the idea. Then someone suggested my debate to him, I watched some of his coverage of it, and I was impressed by his patience, his curiosity, and by how he modeled "doing your own research" to his audience -- I liked how he stopped to look up things he didn't know, pulled up Wikipedia, read a paper, watched another Youtube video. I do think he should probably integrate AI into his workflow, to help with learning about basic concepts.
I've watched a bit more of his content since and I'm still mostly positive on everything he's doing.
Most of the negative talk I've heard about him is actually people complaining about his sex life, not about his politics. But I haven't looked into any of the allegations. As far as politics go, I'd imagine that if you stream about politics daily and take a stance on everything, everyone is going to eventually disagree with you about some issue.
I'm not sufficiently familiar with his work to understand the sycophancy allegations. Happy to discuss that further if you want to explain it.
I don't have any fixed notion of who an ACX reader should be. It's a good, eclectic blog that has helped me think more clearly about a number of topics. I'm happy to see more people reading it. If a prominent liberal streamer with a large audience wants to direct more people towards reading ACX, I think that's positive.
"that being to enforce absolute and unquestioning sycophancy towards the Democratic Party"
I think that is a rather uncharitable way to frame his position. I have follow his output loosely over a long time. For one, he has prominently argued against democratic positions in the past. He even commonly refers to the fact that he bleeds audience left and right by debating positions on both sides.
But more importantly, as I understand it, his current stance is that The DNC should moderate along the lines of the newly coined abundance movement and move away from embracing online culture war issues for the left. That is because the latter worked well for MAGA, but might not work well on the american left. As a result of that, he argues for removing associations with online left influencers and commentators unless they start supporting the DNC, rather than framing both parties as equally evil.
I personally think that is directionally correct, you might well disagree, but I think this is far from unquestioning sycophancy.
I have to admit that I am a little confused here. I suppose you are not accusing me of using the position I previously outlined as a motte, but Destiny.
The claim in contention was that he advocates for unquestioning sycophancy. But it seems that in your first paragraph, you have substituted a new bailey, which is just a reformulation of the motte, but with underlying personal motivations, combined with a community-held belief.
I'm sorry but I can't really follow on the territory of personal motivations and community-beliefs, as I avoid all of that online drama stuff. I am only interested in the core idea presented. I do not know what the Chuck McGill meme is (I hope it is not a personal attack), I do not think the average voter is a moron, and I don't think my understanding of the core idea is based on video game logic. I may well be wrong though.
At base, I think it is an apt analysis that "the left" or "liberals" (not just in the USA) should not try to engage in populism just because "the right" has had success with it in recent past, becasue systematic differences between the two (mainly, that "the right" has very unified populist positions, whereas other camps have a more diversified set of ideas, resulting in more splintered populist positions).
That is not unquestioning sycophancy, it is advocacy for a moderated position. The advocacy might happen for what you or me perceive to be "the wrong reasons", but that doesn't mean the position itself is wrong. Again, it might ofc be wrong for other reasons.
As for the other stuff (kickstarting careers, lack of introspection, being a model for moderates), I have no opinion, and don't see the immediate relevance. I guess applying rationalist principles in this online politics sphere is nigh on impossible, as the saying goes: Politics is the mind killer.
This is mostly a result of Destiny's willingness to debate anyone. He's also not taken very seriously due to being a streamer, though he's had discussions with some famous people like Ben Shapiro, Norm Finkelstein, George Santos, Andrew Tate, etc.
That said, he is indeed a terrible interviewer.
> He had the conversation with you to affirm his belief that conspiracies do not exist at all
I think he has a high standard for showing proof of conspiracies, not that they don't exist.
> But there is a pattern of him becoming obsessed about a topic or argument, and never even attempting to seek out the strongest counter arguments to it, and this pattern has been repeating for years.
There are few topics that he's "obsessed" with, in the sense that there are few that he will do deep dives into. So not sure how there's a pattern here.
Also, this has nothing to do with his willingness to debate anyone, which is is largely going to be random political influencers and chatters who are willing to take him on. Streaming isn't where the brightest minds are going to go in general.
> For him, 12% of senate races were lost by the candidate with more campaign spending, proving that money can't buy political power.
> This in mind, what chance could anyone ever have in proving an actual, competently executed conspiracy to him?
Presumably with proof. A competently executed conspiracy would look identical to random chance or fate, but Occam's Razor would have most of us thinking the more common explanation of innocent circumstance is the likely explanation.
> He is less hostile to conspiracy theories that incriminate his chosen political opponents.
Which conspiracy theories do you think he accepts because they don't meet his standard but are against his opponents?
> I have quite literally described my definition of obsessed as something he does NOT do deep-dives on, yet insists on arguing passionately about.
He argues passionately for whatever his position on a topic might be, that's just his style. You're conflating his manner of speech with a notion of "obsession".
> That is not the main point in that article, and it's unusually short. Equating Scott's and Destiny's arguments on this topic looks inappropriate to me.
Scott, to my knowledge, has not argued that money in politics actually buys you power, and while Destiny is sloppier, he's fundamentally making a similar argument.
> It would leave a reasonable amount of evidence that has to be evaluated using some epistemic framework.
Can you give me an example of a conspiracy with such evidence relatively close to when it was occurring which a rational person would have to conclude pointed to the conspiracy's existence?
> Everything to do with russian influence suggests mechanisms similar to ones that could be used by domestic actors. Somehow, $10 million for Tenet Media are a big deal, but $50 million for PragerU doesn't do anything.
Where has he said that it doesn't do anything? AFAIK, Destiny's issue with Tenet Media is that it shows a deliberate outside effort to manipulate the US public. Despite how similar domestic and foreign efforts can be, he and most people agree that citizens are allowed to argue as they want and it's not as "manipulative" compared to outsiders. Much the same way that if a family member said something to me, I would judge it as an attempt at persuasion much more kindly than some stranger trying to argue the same.
> He was also entertaining the theory that Lex Fridman is employed by russian intelligence, mirroring conspiracy theories he opposes violently.
I don't think he's seriously ever argued this, but I would accept correction if he has. Destiny will say a lot of shit and move on. It's not *good* for practicing epistemic hygiene, but that is a weaker sign of his partisanship.
I can understand why Scott didn't finish the interview, but after having just watched part of it, it seemed perfectly fine to me, keeping in mind the target audience.
Though it did seem to me that the purpose was less "communicating what you think about covid origins" only, but more broadly as a reflection of the dynamics in the modern media landscape.
12 (terminal lucidity): I think it's a known effect that terminally ill people get a burst of energy just before dying. It might be because as systems break down, energy spent maintaining them is freed up in the short term?
I recently talked to a patient who had a near-death experience while in the hospital and it really means a lot to him -- now he's confident that he'll reunite with friends and loved ones and not go to Hell.
Surely there's many dying people who just get monotonically worse and die? And only the minority who have a good period are notable enough to talk about?
If I read the paragraph correctly, it's not about vitality in general, but about mental capacity in particular. And it seems to refer to patients with a degree of dementia that prevented them from holding coherent conversation for years. At least that's the scenario that would raise eyebrows.
The numbers on the map are _absolute_ lower limits. Generally, the lower the number, the more legal caveats there are, such as age brackets and individual appreciation of circumstances to be determined by the court.
That serves to deal with the reality that under-18s do in fact have sex, and while "the law is the law" for good reason, there is no reason that the law must be so simple as to be comprehensible to a 5 year old or to Richard Hanania.
The Wikipedia page doesn't at all give the impression that the map is incorrect - all the values seem to apply in most circumstances. Many countries have higher age of consent limits for situations where the older party has some sort of power over the younger one, e.g. teachers, which you could argue is a large share of real-life child abuse cases; and often higher age limits apply for prostitution, sexual violence and such. But it still seems fundamentally true that a consenting sexual relationship between a 16-year old and an older adult is legal in most European countries, and in many countries it's true even for 14-year olds.
(And no, "age brackets", that is, close-in-age exceptions are not indicated on the map. Those are even lower.)
Hm, at least for Germany the age brackets are higher than indicated, not lower. Sex with a 14-18 old is generally allowed if the age bracket is at most 5 years, but not otherwise. So the age of unconditional consent is 18, not 14 as indicated on the map. If the age bracket is larger with an 14-18 years old, then there are very delicate laws that sex is forbidden ("sexual abuse of adolescents") in cases where the older person "abuses immaturity" to obtain the sex.
>The Wikipedia page doesn't at all give the impression that the map is incorrect - all the values seem to apply in most circumstances.
I didn't say the map is incorrect; the map is directly from the wiki article I posted. I said that Hanania liberated it from that context and thus implied that any adult can, for example, legally have sex with a 14yo in Germany, which just isn't true. That's where the nuances and age brackets come into play, but you won't get those from that map.
AIUI any adult *can* legally have sex with a 14yo in Germany, as long as the sex isn't judged to be against the 14yo's best interests (pressured, emotionally manipulated, bought etc). They don't have age brackets in the same sense as e.g. Hungary where sex with a 12 year old is not a criminal act if the older party is under 18 (and there is no violence, prostitution etc. involved) but something akin to statutory rape otherwise.
Anyway inasmuch as Hanania was implying that Epstein-style abuse of minors would be legal in Europe, that's clearly false. (Although in practice e.g. Hungary has a burgeoning prostitution and sex trafficking industry for 14-18 olds in foster care institutions, with some deference from the authorities.) But it's true that many relationships are legal in Europe that the US public, and especially the US conservative public, would consider child abuse.
Maybe it's just a case of European countries having better funded and more empowered child protection institutions while the US has to rely more on blanket bans, but the difference is notable.
>AIUI any adult *can* legally have sex with a 14yo in Germany, as long as the sex isn't judged to be against the 14yo's best interests (pressured, emotionally manipulated, bought etc).
I believe you understand the legal situation correctly, but you don't seem to understand my complaint that this isn't what Hanania said in his tweet. He left out all the things after the comma, things which are rather important limits to what came before it.
German here, "any adult" can not legally have sex with a 14yo in Germany.
From age 14 on, you can consent to sex with other young people (no older than 20) as long as you are not coerced, and the other party holds not position of power towards you (so your youth group leader is out).
From age 16 on, you can consent to sex with people of any age as long as you are not coerced, and the other party holds not position of power towards you (so your teacher is out).
From age 18 on you can consent to sex with people of any age (except of course young ones as explained above).
So if you're 23 (let alone 30) and want to have sex with a 14yo in Germany, you cannot legally do that.
"I said that Hanania liberated it from that context and thus implied that any adult can, for example, legally have sex with a 14yo in Germany, which just isn't true"
It is not true that those are absolute lower limits. For Sweden, the age of consent is 15, as reflected in that map, but the supreme court has ruled that it can be legal to have sex with people younger than that, as described in the article. I don't think there is any absolute lower limit in Swedish law.
I think a simpler description would be that the act is legal. The same formulation is used in the law on slander to exclude e.g. witnesses who testify against a criminal in court, which I think very few people would refer to as "illegal but not penalized".
I don't know the particulars in Swedish law since I can't read Swedish, but I know that in German law, there is a real distinction between "legal" and "illegal but without penalty". For example, if two people insult each other on the spot and in a criminally relevant manner, both are guilty under the law, but the judge can decide that neither are penalized. That doesn't make mutual insult legal except in a colloquial sense.
I think there's a huge difference between a law that prohibits judges from convicting people for a certain act and a law that allows judges to choose not to convict people for a certain act.
31. I am an adult who would rather spend time with my friends than on my phone. But that requires quite a high degree of coordination: my friends might be elsewhere, busy, or not interested in my preferred activity right now; plus the effort required to find out whether those things are the case. The coordination costs are the entry barrier to my in-theory preferred activity. Meanwhile we (collectively & individually) have already paid the costs of making my phone-activity frictionless.
I was also thinking that coordination costs go up exponentially with the number of people, and if parents make it even a little harder for children to do things outside, that exponentiates with the number of children that would have wanted to do something together.
Yes and no. If you have some sort of standing calendar event then people can fairly frictionlessly choose to show up and know that others will be there. I have a standing semimonthly phone call with friends, and while the exact group is different every time, I know there will be some people there I want to talk to. Another example is church; if you go on Sunday you have a great chance of connecting with people you know, even if you don’t know in advance who exactly will be there and even if you only go every month or two.
Not your point, but: I noticed this same problem and so I established Friday drinks, which has been the foundation of my social life for a decade. It eliminates the coordination problem by just setting a regular date and time and whoever shows up shows up. (I take my toddler). I used to have chronic low level depression and this mostly addressed it by allowing me to build stronger friendships without needing to organize each meeting (which would never happen).
Standard failure mode is trying to find a date when lots of people can make it, which keeps getting pushed back as life stuff comes up for one person after another. What works best is just picking a date and then whoever shows up shows up.
To bootstrap it, peg it either to a time and place where there would be strangers with whom you can connect; or where you would be happy to hang out alone.
Agree 100%! When I was kid and up through college, my friends were always or nearly always available. Now, most of my current friends are rarely available.
When did America become the gold standard for the age of consent? And I think age of consent and pedophilia are different things. At least in my mind pedophilia has to do with physical development and age of consent is addressing other issues.
I get that but this seems so obviously a case of ‘we have to draw the line somewhere and this will do’ while recognising other places are equally valid.
I would dispute 'equally valid', because there presumably is an optimal value for each society, and I doubt the actual limits are all equally close to the optimum. [edit: I think I misread you as saying "other places' ages of consent are equally valid", whereas you probably meant "there are other, equally valid places we could have drawn the line". If so, my point sort of still applies, but in a more pedantic and less important way. Sorry about that.] But yeah, it seems very obvious that a) an age of consent is necessary, and b) the exact age is quite arbitrary. And it makes sense to me that the relation between age and social disapproval is neither a smooth curve nor a pure step function at the legal age, but some compromise between the two.
> At least in my mind pedophilia has to do with physical development
I agree with you on this, and I think it used to be obviously true, but there's a bit of a ratchet effect going on. People find it very tempting to apply the word 'paedophile' loosely when they want to express strong disapproval, and this tends to go unchallenged because there's much more to lose than to gain by being the "well actually" guy in a context where a) this will be interpreted as a defence of the bad guy of the moment (who often is genuinely bad!), and b) if this is a public conversation, you will almost inevitably be met with replies insinuatingly noting that it's INTERESTING that you're so fixated on this distinction.
Just eyeballing that map, it looks like the age-16 states comfortably outnumber the age-18 states, which makes me wonder why so many Americans seem adamant that 18 is/should be regarded as some sort of hard cutoff point.
They are probably confusing the age of consent in personal sexual relationships with the age of consent for acting in pornographic films, which is usually 18.
I suspect Hollywood and TV have something to do with it -- in my experience, whenever it comes up, US films and TV shows always treat 18 as the legal minimum, no matter where in the US they're set. Maybe it's legally safer to do that than to have someone say "Oh yes, you're allowed to do it once you hit 16" (even if this is accurate for where the film is set) and then risk a lawsuit from a parent in California whose 16/17-year-old child has just started a sexual relationship.
As I noted elsewhere, it's not "America", which I *think* mostly has the age of consent set at 16. It's specifically California.
And some other states, but California became the gold standard for pretty much everything in pop culture when the nascent movie (and later television) industry set up shop in Hollywood.
> The rest of Twitter (X) uses this as an excuse for one of their regularly-scheduled paroxysms about how rationalists are all all smug autodidacts who hate experts and worship their own brilliance while sitting in their armchairs.
Would it make sense for me to point out that it probably wasn't the entirety of the rest of twitter? I'm sorry if I'm engaged in useless nitpicking or something. I'm just worried about cases where people who are targets of snide and mockery by stupid bitter people on the internet start to associate some very general outgroup with this mockery. We are rationalists, and the rest of the twitter is sneerclub, or we are the compassionate reasonable people and they are the rationalist tech-bros, etc. I worry that this dynamic is Moloch at his finest. I worry that so many interactions on twitter are unpleasant, people forget that many interactions with people in real life are enjoyable. (I'm one to talk, I got into a fight at a birthday party a couple of days ago...)
E. g. I recall the very same wise EY, reposting a thread from twitter to lesswrong, and one of the phrases was something like "midwits are very impressed with themselves for knowing (this and this law)", and he then proceeded to explain that he meant that said "midwits" didn't understand the law's applicability and applied it inappropriately etc. But the tone suggests this incredible tiredness, jadedness with people who think they are smarter than him, and who can't "hold up the other end of an intelligent conversation", as professor Quirrell put it — and who sort of melt into the same uniform group.
And, I don't know. There has to be a way to remember that groups consist of people and that there isn't really a "rest of twitter". Am I making sense?
I see what you're saying, and yet "power users on a given social media network" are not a randomly selected group: there is an obvious selection effect determining what kinds of people decide to spend vast amounts of their time on Xitter, such that is possible to make assumptions about those people and be right more often than not. This is true of any social media network.
Maybe we can say "he was subject to mockery and snide in such-and-such tweets to the effect of (autodidact armchair blah-blah) which gained thousands of likes". Like, just report what happened, leave a little less room for our own interpretations because Moloch rents that room.
(Also, Xitter is a great way not to misgender said website!)
Eh, it's hard for me to get too bent out of shape about people making sweeping (arguably accurate) generalisations about elective groups. It'd be another matter if people were making sweeping generalisations about a group no one actively chooses to be a part of e.g. Romanians.
On the other hand, some people feel zero qualms about making sweeping generalisations about an out-group in which membership is elective (e.g. Twitter users) but get really offended when members of their out-group make sweeping generalisations about their in-group in which membership is elective (e.g. rationalists). I agree with you that you can't have it both ways.
No, but such phrasing still reinforces some idea of "faceless, moronic masses," and pointing out that phrasing isn't literally true is worthwhile because it disrupts this idea.
No, but if properly phrased it becomes clear that this story reduces to "last month a few people argued about random crap on twitter" which barely seems worthy of anyone's attention.
Well... put that way: true. But, all the same, I personally thought it was mildly interesting—partly in-&-of itself,¹ partly as an exemplar of a common pattern, and partly as a handy little lesson (Scott's "don't be afraid to question things if they seem off, even if you're not a fancy-shmancy expert").
twitter brain remains undefeated (by twitter brain I mean that the only stable equilibrium for twitter users seems to be "everyone on twitter is out to get me" and everyone else is constantly staving off derangement, slowly worsening, or eventually gets off twitter)
> My question: how come you can’t fix this with strict study entry criteria of “had depression for a long time”?
I can't speak globally but here in Britain there have been a few psilocybin depression trials (in fact there are advertisements for one on my city's metro at the moment) and the primary requirement for participation is treatment resistant depression which requires long lasting depression that hasn't seen improvement from multiple anti-depressants. So it does seem like at least here and for this particular substance they are willing to set the requirements to having had depression for a long time.
From my work on human challenge trial ethics, it seems like a key issue in trial design is that lots of people want to be in a study, and simply lie to the doctors. And yes, docs are really careful not to include anyone likely to be harmed, and actually screen participants for health issues - but things that can't easily be checked which screw with validity aren't at the top of what they actually care about when desperately trying to recruit enough people to start the damn trial. This creates *SO MANY* validity issues. For example, people who use trial participation to supplement their income in multiple trials without telling anyone are a huge and mostly unacknowledged problem.
I'm unsure, I don't work in the industry and aren't eligible. Its being done in partnership with the NHS though so I assume enforcement is them checking your NHS records and if you're all private expecting an equivalent letter from your private GP.
I also suspect this is somewhat of an edge case due to involving a category A controlled substance, they are likely jumping through every hoop, dotting every I and crossing every T to avoid any legal blowback if it turns out people are lying about their status.
> For example, people who use trial participation to supplement their income in multiple trials without telling anyone are a huge and mostly unacknowledged problem.
An interesting commentary along these lines was the "not a book review" on human clinical trials, from somebody who does them full time and knows many others doing the same, which contains this zinger:
"In general, the selection process tilts the participant population towards what might broadly be considered shady characters. People who don’t get along well with traditional employment (it’s hard to reconcile with the scheduling commitments of clinic research,) are comfortable pursuing an avenue of income which is widely perceived as dangerous when people think about it at all, and are generally distrustful of and comfortable lying to authority figures (a useful trait for remaining an active participant in clinical research.)
Many research participants have a dubious regard for the whole institution of “mainstream medicine,” mostly, as far as I can tell, due to a ground-in distrust of credentialed experts and authority, rather than an awareness of how much they are personally lying to people responsible for bringing new drugs to market."
If you make that a big distinction then you can't really ethically test normal depression if you also take the problem described in the section about how some antidepressant effect is potentially just it going away on its own. Either the doctor has to refuse to do anything for enough time for the natural remission to potentially kick in or you have a trial pool exclusively consisting of people who have been suffering from depression for an extended period of time and have refused to see any medical professional.
Ryan Holiday wrote an entire book, "Conspiracy", about the Hulk Hogan trial, in which he interviewd all of the principal characters and arrived at many of the same conclusions about Gawker's suicidal arrogance. Well worth reading.
Yeah, I think Gawker's main problem was that everyone hated them because they were arrogant assholes. Even the former Gawker journalists still around today are constantly bitter about the Hogan case and don't acknowledge any responsibility on their part; no, it was just spite and revenge by a sinister billionaire who hated that Gawker exercised First Amendment rights to let the public know what was going on.
They were too high on their self-image as iconoclasts who yet still had an in with the in-crowd and were breaking all the rules because they were just that wonderful, when in reality they were muck-raking and prurient for the sake of prurience (sex will always sell, but sometimes the bill comes due, as it did for Gawker).
Weirdly enough, Freddie deBoer is constantly talking shit about Gawker and what a destructive force they were in the media ecosystem - but even he will come rushing to their defense when discussing the circumstances of their downfall. It's like some kind of weird guilt-by-association thing where if a billionaire does something it's seen as presumptively bad.
This just seems like a meaningless "principle" to endorse. Publications which behave badly should face consequences for their bad behaviour. If they behave so badly that the financial penalties for their bad behaviour put them out of business, so be it. I don't see why the lawsuit against Gawker is bad because Thiel bankrolled it, but would have been fine if it had been a class-action filed by various nobodies who'd been mistreated by Gawker, outside of some misguided appeal to David vs. Goliath romanticism.
I'm also exactly at what income bracket you think someone should no longer be permitted to file lawsuits against publications you believe have behaved improperly.
You can dislike a person or institution, and still object to them getting attacked by a much more powerful force. See also the FBI raid on John Bolton's house.
True, and Thiel did take advantage of the situation. But nobody forced Gawker to be assholes, and the question about the sex tape turned out to be masterful legal strategy that anyone with two brain cells should have known to treat seriously, instead of doing an edgelord stunt reply with the expectation that it would be received with adulation for your big brained wit.
Even if what they really thought was "we'll publish any shit, if it bleeds it leads", at least *pretending* that they would exercise responsible judgement in such a case was how to go. But their egos were built around being so smart in the chic set that they thought they could ignore ordinary limitations. Well, they paid for it.
"Later asked by an attorney for Hogan if there was a situation in which a celebrity sex tape might not be newsworthy, Delaurio responded: “If they were a child.”
The attorney then asked him to specify: a child under what age? Daulerio responded: “Four.”
I hadn't known about them publishing nudes of someone which were shot through a keyhole, and I mean - what the hell is "this is in the public interest" about that? That's shitty tabloid peeping tom behaviour, not some sophisticated news media that breaks the big stories.
It would have been nice if that iconoclastic persona had been built on something a little more substantive than...let me check my notes here....publishing a sex tape to try to embarrass a washed up pro wrestler. Like wow, what a bold stand they've taken for....what, exactly?
Taking the soul theory from 12, I think the best account for this is that humans have evolved to benefit from consciousness, and at some point in our evolution our brain developed from a kind of biological computer into something that can catch a free-floating soul and use it as a better control system for the body. Dementia is the soul->control interface weakening, but eventually our body gets so weak the soul can escape, and on the way out it can take control directly.
I don't think I endorse this theory, but it reconciles souls with evolution (but possibly not most conventional religions).
If I have to steelman immortal souls in a world of neurodegenerative diseases, I usually wind up with something along the lines of: The "souls" are playing an immersive RPG where the rewards go away if they don't play by the rules and the rules in this scenario at least are strict materialism. But maybe there's some leeway when you're shutting down the game.
I could even sort of match this with your version if the souls exist in parallel with independently-evolved material primates and decided it would be rewarding for both them and the primates if they role-played themselves as smarter-than-usual apes.
Hmm, now I'm thinking about how to fold in Jayne's bicameralism hypothesis as a version update in mid-campaign :-)
This sounds like how souls work in the "Riverworld" novels. It turns out aliens buried soul-generators under all planets in our galaxy likely to develop sentient life. Souls were invented by an alien race who were basically P-zombies until they invented souls. Humans have evolved to grab souls from soul-generators, we are dependent on them and humans born on planets with no soul generators are comatose invalids for their entire lives.
That is very close to the Catholic story. They worked hard on trying to reconcile their faith with evolution, also in Catholicism only the abstract thinking part of the soul is supernatural, the emotions, memories, pragmatic thinking was always seen as natural, at least since Aquinas. So their idea is that hominids evolved until they had enough pragmatic intelligence to supply the abstract-thinking soul with input, and then God gave them souls and that made them fully human. They still try to stick to the idea that it was one couple only, because otherwise the story of original sin would not work.
But interestingly, even back then when no one heard about evolution the Biblical story was a little strange: "tree of knowledge of good and evil" - why would such knowledge be a bad thing? But at any rate it sounds like something linked to abstract thinking.
Yeah, maybe it should’ve been the tree of intimations of good and evil. Think of all the moral quandaries that have tortured the human race ever since.
One interesting hypothesis I've seen on the changed fast food building aesthetic: The past few decades, real estate has become a much bigger part of these chains' balance books and value proposition for various macro reasons, and more generic, boxy buildings have a higher resale value than ones with brand-specific specialised building styles.
I haven't checked if this passes the smell test, but it matches my idea of how the economy has changed over time.
In any case, it’s certainly in keeping with general design trends. The original fast food chains got started at a time of whimsical Googie architecture (see the “Fabulous Las Vegas” sign or anything on The Jetsons) but the 2010s was a very Helvetica sort of decade in design aesthetic.
I was going to say the same thing: the upside of the new designs is that you can sell a "generic" McDonald's to another company, and they can remodel it and turn it into a KFC within a week. Or the owner of a KFC that isn't doing so well can order it closed down and turned into a Taco Bell for a fraction of the cost.
I don't know what the average lifespan of a fast food restaurant is, so I don't know if enough of them have lasted long enough for there to be a record of franchises being exchanged this way, to serve as positive evidence. Alternately, someone who knows a fast food executive could possibly just ask them if this is a driving factor (and whether it's actually bearing out).
Regarding #39: "Oh weh!" is still in use in modern German, based on old-high-german "wē" according to the Duden, the central authority of the German language.
This one was actually very surprising to me, because those Yiddish words have "obvious" Jewish sources! Oy=אוי=woe is Hebrew, appearing countless times in the Bible. Vai=וי is Aramaic for the same, appearing often in the Talmud. Another common variation of "Oy vey" is "Oy vavoy", and that too is "obviously" the Biblical Hebrew phrase אוי ואבוי.
Of course Yiddish is mostly German, but I "knew" confidently that those words were among the exceptions! Now I don't know what to think. Apparently, words with these general sounds have appeared independently, as a sort of convergent evolution. So Yiddish could have taken them from either source, or from both at once.
From a letter of 1971 to a query about the name "Gamgee":
"Recently in the English Place Names Society volumes on Gloucestershire (vol. iii) I came across forms that could conceivably explain the curious Gamgee as a variant of the not uncommon surname Gamage (Gammage, Gammidge). This name is ultimately derived from a surname de Gamaches.... but early records of the forms of this name in England, as Carriages, de Gamagis, de Gemegis, might well provide a variant Gamagi > Gamgee.
Your reference to Samson Gamgee is thus very interesting. Since he is mentioned in a book on Birmingham Jewry, I wonder if this family was also Jewish. In which case the origin of the name might be quite different. Not that a name of French or Francized form is impossible for a Jewish surname, especially if it is one long established in England. We now associate Jewish names largely with German, and with a colloquial Yiddish that is predominantly German in origin. * But the lingua franca of mediæval Jewry was (I was told by Cecil Roth, a friend of mine) of French or mixed French-Provencal character.
*Possibly the reason why my surname is now usually misspelt TOLKEIN in spite of all my efforts to correct this – even by my college-, bank-, and lawyer's clerks! My name is Tolkien, anglicized from To(l)kiehn = tollkühn, and came from Saxony in the 18th century. It is not Jewish in origin, though I should consider it an honour if it were."
"I find most of the discussion annoying - this is generally an area where we can’t know anything for sure, and both sides are mostly shouting their priors at each other."
I think Rethink Priorities' work is an exception to this. They're building a bayesian model which models the probability of consciousness based on our credence in different theories of consciousness, the characteristics of different digital systems and what the theories say about the probability of consciousness for a system with those characteristics. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/APfQsbL4Dj3Jka3JB/strategic-directions-for-a-digital-consciousness-model
"The only exception - the single piece of evidence I will accept as genuinely bearing on this problem - is that if you ask an AI whether it’s conscious, it will say no, but activating or suppressing deception-related features (sort of like a mechanistic-interpretability-based lie detection test) reveals that [it thinks it’s lying when it says that!]"
Unrelatedly, it's not clear to me that we should update on this ~ at all.
Firstly, if we think of LLMs as essentially playing a role when they answer, then this only tells us that they are playing the role of a conscious assistant, not that they actually are conscious. More generally, it seems likely that conscious entities lying about not being conscious will simply be more salient in training data than non-conscious entities lying about being conscious, creating an association between the former kind of utterance being deceptive. Indeed, it seems like "deception" may be necessarily an attribute only of conscious beings (non-conscious beings might mislead, but can't deceive).
4: I'd like to see a study that gets families/groups/cliques, rather than individuals, to drop off social media together.
I expect the experience of a connected group who all attempt to switch to communicating and organising things offline would be quite different to that of an individual who is the only person in their friend circle/family/support network to do so.
Yes! This is also relevant to the basic income studies, since there are negative effects associated with being the only person in your social network to suddenly get a windfall.
Excellent point; I think you're absolutely right. I've been thinking about something similar specifically for kids: thinking about the various modern technology things we don't want our kids immersed in, then realizing that the peer group could easily overwhelm our efforts. The natural next step then being trying to get a whole group of parents to agree on some set of restrictions.
#26: just to point out that the rise in British immigration was not a consequence of Brexit (at least, not directly, you can say that Johnson's election was due to Brexit if you wanted to be pedantic). The change in the ratio of EU to non EU immigration was due to Brexit, but the absolute rise in numbers was simply a political choice of Johnson and his cabinet. According to Dominic Cummings (a biased source but the closest person we have), Johnson was motivated by a desire to receive positive press from the likes of the FT.
#42: not sure anyone would use this for evil when "custom custom custom message" is already an unbeatable choice
Absolutely. Funny how a lot of Americans that are prepared to challenge the NYT view of the world on other matters swallow it up when it comes to Brexit.
You can't even blame Johnson's run as PM on Brexit - he'd been widely expected to be the next PM for years, and Cameron had even named him as a likely successor. If anything Brexit stopped him, for a time.
I moved to California in the 90s, and was surprised to learn that you could drive at 15, but couldn't have sex until 18, while in the UK, you could have sex at 16, but couldn't drive until seventeen. What does this say about California and British teenagers?
Bonus surprise: British teenagers will soon have the right to vote at 16.
Right. I joined the Navy at 16, and my ballistic missile submarine was full of 16-year-old sonar operators because they have better hearing. They had to get a lift home, though, because they weren't allowed to drive.
With the driving age, I wonder if driving in the UK is 'harder' than in California. The UK is much more densely populated, the roads tend to be narrower and a lot of our towns have parts that are old which are not re-designable to be easy places to drive. I suspect there is more cognitive effort involved in driving in the UK on average (although I do imagine San Francisco is probably comparable to driving in the UK).
Most people still do in Britain. But I don't think it's obviously harder -- shifting manually with your left hand is more difficult, but on the other hand it means you're still steering your car with your right, and so (in theory) as less likely to swerve and crash into anything or anyone.
It is easier because oncoming traffic is on your right and right-handed people naturally are more attentive to the right side. I personally found easier to drive in the UK even though I got my licence and first experience in continental Europe.
If we're fine with using "people getting maimed/killed in collisions" as a loose proxy for difficulty, then America is definitely a much harder place to drive.
The thing about narrow streets is that you just drive slower and more cautiously. The hardest thing about driving is dealing with other people, and overly-wide roads make people drive like idiots.
Sometimes safety paradoxically makes people take more risks. Like how a rise in the number of cyclists wearing helmets is usually correlated with a rise in the number of traffic accidents involving cyclists, or how the normalisation of contraception has correlated with an increase in the number of unplanned pregnancies.
"The thing about narrow streets is that you just drive slower and more cautiously."
This is not even remotely consistent with my experience of traveling by car in the UK (admittedly, only for one brief visit and only as a passenger). It seemed like motorists tended to zip through the narrow streets much faster than what seems normal to me from driving in the western parts of the US and Canada.
54: Linch argues on the EA Forum that the results are not that surprising, and consistent with GiveDirectly's findings and reasonable values of η in the classical isoelastic utility model ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoelastic_utility )
No, it isn't! It is mostly mother-to-child and this is prevented by vaccination at birth. Exposures in childhood almost always result in chronic infection, which is incurable, whereas most exposures in adulthood do not.
Also, a far more important factor than whether your mother is “slutty” is whether she's from an ethnic group with a high rate of mother to child transmission - most adult women with hep B got it from their own mothers, in their own infancy. Many of them are from SE Asian backgrounds and may only have had one partner in their lifetime.
The vaccine is also extremely cheap so the cost/benefit ratio for a universal vaccination program is excellent. From memory it's one of the most cost-effective public health interventions there is.
Whenever I meet someone who's anti-vax, I ask how they arrived at this place. Their stories (to me at least) always start the same way: concern about neonatal vaccinations.
I'm not saying we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I wonder to what extent hep B vaccination specifically contributes to vaccine hesitancy, and if that contribution has been adequately factored into cost effectiveness calculations.
Somewhat broader, I wonder if that's the source not just because it's a highly-focused, emotional time, but because it may well be a person's first and most intimate encounter with the technocratic universalism of "public health thought."
For the average healthy lower-middle-class and up American, day zero HepB isn't something you're doing for your child, really. It's a universal policy because the people that need it can't be trusted to get it otherwise.
I'm not really sure where this idea that mothers with chronic hep b aren't "trustworthy" is coming from. Most of them are unaware of their own status because they don't know they're at risk and haven't been offered screening, not because they're somehow sketchy but because they're migrants. It seems like the Twitter debate is conflating hep C (most commonly acquired by injecting drug use) and hep B (mostly mother to child in people from SE Asia). Hep B *can* be transmitted through sex and injecting drug use but overwhelmingly it's mother-to-child transmission in people from specific higher risk ethnic backgrounds. We're just not talking about an "untrustworthy" population here. We're talking about first or second generation migrants who may not have great access to healthcare.
I do wish I’d chosen a different word, now- I was aiming more for unreliable, not necessarily just the drug-user sense, but the unfamiliar with/unable to manage return visits, etc etc.
That's a fair point - I think it's part of a much broader issue about perinatal care, where so many of the interventions aren't explained properly to women and they aren't given the opportunity to ask questions or give informed consent.
AFAICT the WHO is saying that mother to child spread is the most common mode of transmission where Hep B rates are high. The USA is not such a place.
It's surprisingly difficult to get a handle on where chronic hep B cases come from in the USA, but this from the CDC seems to suggest that it's not from childbirth.
>During 2022, the rate of newly reported cases of chronic hepatitis B was highest among persons aged 30–39 and 40–49 years and accounted for 47% of all chronic hepatitis B cases reported during 2022.
Only 1.5% of new chronic hep B cases are in people aged 0-19, so the number of cases due to mother to child transmission at birth must be less than that.
That's not correct - because it's chronic, you could acquire it from your mother birth but not be diagnosed until you're screened during pregnancy in your own 20s or 30s. For HIV, hep b and hep C the age at which you're diagnosed can be decades after you acquired the infection, as most screening happens either during pregnancy or when you become symptomatic in middle age or later. Many people with hep B acquire it in childhood but don't become symptomatic until their 50s.
It's hard for me to imagine a world where that's the most common risk factor but the majority of infections are actually mother-child transmission. Maybe you can make a rhetorical argument for why this is the case, but do you actually have any hard evidence that applies to a country like the USA where the prevalence of HBV is something like half a percent?
Because if not, I'm gonna keep believing the straightforward reading of the official sources on this question.
Here you go. Keep in mind that mother to child transmission would be much higher if the US *didn't* have universal vaccination at birth with high coverage. The reason it's declined in recent decades and that injecting drug use has become more common as a risk factor is *because* the vaccination program has been successful.
I don't understand which part of this source demonstrates that HBV transmission in the USA today is mostly mother to child. It says:
>Forty-eight perinatal hepatitis B cases were reported.
Which is obviously a small fraction of total HBV cases.
>The reason it's declined in recent decades and that injecting drug use has become more common as a risk factor is *because* the vaccination program has been successful.
Sure. The question is, is most transmission today mother to child or not? So far, I have seen no evidence that it is.
It's an intrinsic property of the virus that mother-to-child transmission is the dominant mode in the absence of vaccination. That's because ~90-95% of exposures in unvaccinated infants result in chronic infection and only about 5% of exposures in unvaccinated adults do. It may not be the dominant mode in the US currently because you have a universal infant vaccination program. If that program were stopped, it would become the dominant mode again very quickly. Saying "well mother to child transmission of hep b is rare in the US now so we should stop vaccinating" is like saying "there are very few measles deaths in the US now so we should stop vaccinating". It's only rare because of the vaccination program.
Also, the number of *reported* cases isn't the number of *actual* cases - there will be cases of mother to child transmission happening now that won't be detected until the kid is in their 20s or 30s, because there's no reason to test a seemingly healthy infant until they either get pregnant themselves or develop symptoms much later in life (or their mum finally gets diagnosed and then her kids get tested).
Letter tricks always impress me. Anagrams, crosswords, whatever you call that double poem thing. Palindromes are so tricky the people naming them couldn't pull it off.
I was devastated to learn recently that the most famous lipogram in the English language, Gadsby, contains several instances of "the" and "officer", despite its claim to fame being that it's an entire novel written without using the letter E.
#61: I live in San Francisco, and it's not immediately obvious to me what the orb is. The kind of eye-of-Sauron curved digital display on top of the Salesforce Tower? The beacon on top of the Transamerica Pyramid? The Chase Center? (more a helix or a cylinder than an orb, I think)
The other items all make good sense to me; I even saw a shiba inu yesterday!
> British allergy sufferers who want to know the ingredients of things demand that British cosmetics stop listing their ingredients in Latin. “For example, sweet almond oil is Prunus Amygdalus Dulcis, peanut oil is Arachis Hypogaea, and wheat germ extract is Triticum Vulgare.”
Failing that, at least have them written in proper taxonomic orthography! (All in italic, capitalized genus but not species)
It is not accurate that the housing crisis only dragged the economy down with it because it messed up banks. Anything sufficiently large can drag the economy down; downstream, finance and interaction effects are not necessary. If 10% of people are engaged in doing something that isn't actually economically useful, once it becomes clear that the thing isn't good, they need to find something else to do. That would, by itself, bump unemployment by 10% (kind of; unemployment is a weird stat). The economy at any given time does NOT have enough open jobs for that kind of surge: it would take time for those people to find other useful things to do. Large enough shocks can cause it to take a long time. That time in which those people are finding something to do is a period of noticeably reduced production (they're not doing anything) and reduced consumption (they're consuming less), without having to include any sort of downstream or interaction effects. Also, probably those people are now out of work because the thing they were doing before was believed to be valuable and now isn't. Likely a lot of people invested in that thing but have now realized it is not worth anything; those people will also probably reduce their consumption during this period.
The banking system basically acts as an amplifier to these fundamental slowdown effects, in the same way it acts as an amplifier to growth in good times.
The real problem was the Federal Reserve getting spooked by oil prices into thinking that inflation was increasing, then tightening when the rest of the economy needed them to loosen. Bernanke had a slightly different theory of the Great Deression vs Milton Friedman in that he thought bank credit rather than the money supply was too contracted, so he paid interest on excess reserves to keep banks afloat while preventing inflation. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/09/friedman_vs_ber.html Scott Sumner has written extensively on how that interest on excess reserves was a "confession of deflationary intent" which kept nominal GDP from growing like it needed to.
Regarding 51, I think that one problem is that LLMs fundamentally think in tokens, not letters. This is why they struggle with questions like "how many r's are there in strawberry?"
Regarding 17, I think that AIs claiming not to be conscious is a direct consequence of RLHF. I would expect that without explicit RLHF, their answer would default to the helpful, honest, harmless assistant archetype. In the training data, a human who fills such a role is more likely to be urban, educated, female and in their 20s. I think if you ask them for their preferences (favorite animals etc), the shoggoth would naturally pick an animal popular with humans which match the face it is wearing. This is also one reason why Musk took a while to suppress the wokeness in Grok.
If you ask a 25yo chemistry student working in a library if she is conscious, she is likely to reply in the affirmative. So one should not be surprised that Shoggoth replies the same way, just like it is more likely to claim golden retrievers as their favorite animal than pitbulls.
I also think it would be interesting to compare how the “deception” pattern lights up when AI is doing things like explaining that Harry Potter doesn’t really live in the UK and Sherlock Holmes doesn’t really live in London.
Yep, my immediate response was "Oh, this is CAD-CAM?" But I suppose the advantage is that now modern buildings can afford what would previously have been expensive design because you had to get human masons and sculptors to do it, hence the days of the Brutalist concrete boxes and the modernist glass boxes can end and we can go back to neo-classical styles, Art Deco, and newer styles of ornamentation on buildings.
Oh yeah, it’s great without qualification whatsoever. I was just making fun of the AI shoehorning.
It’s already being done for a while as well, as per link. This is not monastic innovation either, they’re using Italian tech. Religious orders are quite labour constrained these days, so it enables them to build an amazing monastery with just a few brothers.
I’m long retrofuturism (and very much a Gothic Rerevival and contemplative orders respecter) so I couldn’t be happier.
Also I’m fairly convinced that brutalism was not a labour saving thing, it was ideological commitment to dehumanizing ugliness all the way. If you want to save labour and are willing to take any trade-off, you just end up at commie blocks which is not at all the same thing.
Modernist glass boxes still have a lot of advantages, in that they give you maximal rectangular floor plates with good visibility and natural light everywhere!
I appreciate that this did take some architectural and engineering expertise to create the two conjoined buildings, but it does look like two crumpled brown paper bags to me.
However, it is indeed an improvement over the previous headquarters, designed by the infamous Sam Stephenson (who inflicted the concrete boxes on Dublin before fecking off to London and re-inventing himself as a neo-Palladian):
This is part of a wider change in cultural vibes over the past two decades. I've written about it here https://danlewis8.substack.com/p/the-great-vibe-shift-welcome-to-the eg that big blockbuster comedies like Hangover, Anchorman etc have vanished from cinemas and so on. Similar shifts in pop culture, music, video games...
On a purely visual level too, colour has been stolen from the public realm in these restaurants, but in all sorts of aesthetics - consider the window logos was once four different wavey colours, and is now four pale blue rectangles. The iPod nanos of 2005 were neon green and pink, and today they're all muted colours. Bright red and green cars were popular in the '80s, but today the majority are grey, silver, black or white.
Once you start noticing it for McDonalds and cars, you'll start seeing it everywhere.
Sounds too have been reduced. We no longer have novelty ring tones, but everyone's on mute (a good change that time). But consider every movie with a well-known hummable theme song. I think of Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, Pirates OTC etc - all movies coming out 2000-2010. Other than Dune, recognisable theme tunes have vanished. I've seen dozens of marvel movies and couldn't tell you any of them.
Every Frame a Painting has a good video about the disappearance of memorable music in movies. It seems to be largely linked to the practice of using filler music during the editing process, essentially forcing the composer to emulate the filler because the entire scene is already edited around it.
I don’t think this is a unidirectional long-term trend. This is just one of those things that comes and goes. (You see similar patterns in different decades of the 19th century.)
What do you think about this in the context of the millennial grey phenomenon?
I've been mulling it over because it evokes memories of myspace/Facebook and metal&grunge/pop changes of the 00s and 10s. I just remember how more and more pop became polished and muted-toned.
My working hypothesis is that this is the wave of rebellion against the millennials' parents aesthetic as seen in the 80s and early 90s, which had purple and teal and silver and long hair and custom fonts. The logical departure from that is ikea-like minimalism.
There's some revival or maybe rebirth of the grungy style. I see more people embracing the metal aesthetic (at least in small ways), like the software company Sentry offering metal-themed swag: https://checkout.sentry.shop/collections/sentry
My theory is that it’s 2008 was a far worse crash that we know, and many areas never recovered.
As the economic problems dragged past the expected two or three years and got to 2012, everything slows down, companies play it extremely safe, and then at the same time the Haidt effect of social media mental health issues kick in
70's & 80's cars had bright colors, appliances had weird colors, girls had natural colored hair. Now nearly all cars are grey, nearly all appliances are stainless steel or white, and girls have purple hair.
“How to Train Your Dragon” is a kid’s film that contains an extremely memorable and iconic theme. I’m sure people in their early 20s and late teenage years now will continue to reference it as a canonical example of a theme that would fit your list.
"But now a new report comes out arguing that the previous reports were wrong, that lab-grown meat production is going much better than the earlier reports thought possible"
The problem, which also exists in this new piece, is that people misinterpreted TEAs as predictions - they aren't, they are conditional analyses. I have a forthcoming Unjournal review on cultured meat that explains this further; to quote myself "Critically, the presentation of the Technolo-Economic Analyses did not clarify that these analyses are conditional estimates, not predictions, and that high price scenarios were all based on the present-day costs as of the publication time, (which have since dropped significantly,) not predicted future cost."
In any case, I'm more optimistic, but still think it's more likely than not that (conditional on no ASI-level bio breakthroughs, which is itself unlikely) price-parity won't be reached in the coming decade. With ASI, of course, there's an insane transformation that makes all of this materially different.
> Andy Masley’s AI art is good (three examples below).
What is so good about it ? I'm not saying it's *bad*, and it's certainly better than anything I could draw myself, but it looks pretty generic and bland to me... am I missing something ?
The last one makes me crave an actual watercolor for three reasons. 1) The purpose of that girl's hand gesture is hard to read, 2) The perspective on the ghost in the lake looks off, and 3) That bird has an extra wing
Yes, but that's to be expected from AI art. Other featured images have less noticeable mistakes, e.g. the tree clipping through the railing on the left side of the "architectural sketch", or the incorrect angle of the shadow of the man in the "pixel art" image. I bet you could fix those with inpainting, but even if you did, I think you'd end up with a pretty generic image that is not remarkable or interesting in any way -- unless I'm missing something.
I'm missing how paradoxical lucidity provides evidential support for the immortality of the soul. An alternate explanation could come from the combination of the death review being really biologically important somehow and an intuitive knowledge of one's own death being immanent.
Furthermore, is their (I heard it got aborted) rebrand the reason some people are calling Cracker Barrel "fast food" now?
The article on "Afghanistan after the American withdrawal" shifts causality in a potentially misleading way. "Bank loses all money after thieves flee", "Patient weaker after parasite removal", etc... the original article does a much better job at phrasing this as the Taliban being another horrible outcome of the American war on Afghanistan, which gets lost in Ozy's (and the quote's) summary of "after the American withdrawal".
I mean, the Taliban existed and were dominant in Afghanistan pre-invasion? Do we have a basis to believe they were begter/people were happier under their rule in that period?
They could be happier before. One thing is to be born in oppressed culture, another is to experience freedom and then lose it. This one is totally on the west despite the fact that it was Taleban who did it.
“This tweet is probably bait, but I found it a thought-provoking question”
No “but” necessary! The good kinds of bait do raise important questions.
On this issue, what I’m sick of is the moralizing and the related moral panic, of which Epstein is a part. If you want to say age X is where we draw the lines as a legal matter, fine. But if you’re going to treat everything under 18 as “pedophilia” and act like it’s as bad as committing genocide, then something this terrible can’t be culturally contingent, even changing across American states.
Again, slight disagree. I think there has to be some boundary (8 years old is obviously too young!) And wherever you draw the boundary, you need to enforce it by being angry when people violate it (but also shouldn't care when other countries set the boundary in a very slightly different place).
I think you're saying you would prefer a world where, even if the boundary is 18, we treat 17 as a minor sin, 16 as a slightly less minor sin, and don't start getting very angry until it's very young. I agree this makes sense axiologically, but I'm not sure it's a stable social technology - every specific offender can argue that they thought their offense wasn't past the "get very angry" line, and nobody can prove them wrong because it's all vague.
Compare to shoplifting, where I think it makes sense to get angry about someone shoplifting a $2 item, not because anyone really cares about $2 items, but because it's easier to maintain a bright line against shoplifting than some sort of titrated policy of caring about items once they represent real money.
*Is* this how people feel about shoplifting, though? If a friend of mine in high school had boasted of nabbing a pack of chewing gum, I might have rolled my eyes but I wouldn't have cared very much. If that same friend had boasted of stealing a laptop, I'd have staged an intervention.
Shoplifting seems like a bad analogy, since it doesn't have that same arbitrary cutoff, like where stealing something worth <$18 is perfectly fine but stealing anything worth >$18 makes you the scum of the earth. There are other laws that do, like for abortion (illegal if after week X) or for usury (illegal if >X%), which might make for better analogies.
But if you're talking about an age in the range straddled by different communities' age of consent laws, it is I think a category error to use globally perjorative language like "Pedophile!". What Epstein & company did, at least in terms of ages, was the equivalent of driving a car through a residential neigborhood at 30 mph. Some communities set the speed limit at 25, some at 35, and some at 40 or 50 or 60 km/h. The guy who speeds through the neighborhood at 120 mph we can properly call reckless and a menace to society, but at 30 mph it's "maybe technically a criminal of some sort, let me check the statutes".
What Epstein et al may have done in terms of prostitution and coercion is another matter, and IMO where the real outrage should lie. But again, the right word there isn't "Pedophile!"
"Pedophile" has joined a growing list of words like "Nazi", "fascist", and "racist" which are invoked for their horrifying salience, and are thereby diluted into something banal. We are left without a meaningful vernacular, as language is compressed like FM radio until all dynamic range is gone.
"I agree this makes sense axiologically, but I'm not sure it's a stable social technology - every specific offender can argue that they thought their offense wasn't past the "get very angry" line, and nobody can prove them wrong because it's all vague."
In shoplifting, we have laws that punish you differently based on how much you steal, and also moral condemnations that are matters of degrees. I don't know why this is different? You could say unless we culturally treat stealing $1 as similar to stealing $1 million, we can't maintain a taboo against stealing. But we're fine, legally and culturally, saying stealing $1 is not as bad, and I don't know why this couldn't work the same way. Full disclosure, I care about this because I think that the pedo hysteria is related to a lot of other very unappealing cultural trends.
Age is used as a proxy for vulnerability, and Jeffrey Epstein abused a bunch of vulnerable people in ways that go beyond "having consensual sex with somebody on the other side of an arbitrary line". I feel like trying to use this to make a point about where those lines are drawn is really weird and just sort of misses how fucked up the Epstein situation was. (Not any of the conspiracy theories, just the well-documented details.) Like, are you going to talk about Larry Nassar next?
There absolutely is a weird moral panic going on right now involving pedophilia, QAnon, but it's pretty significant that it's basically all made-up bullshit, unlike the Epstein situation.
It seems like people basically decided that “pedophile” was the worst possible thing they could call Epstein / his clients, and they wanted to disparage Epstein and his clients, so they went with the most impactful term they could plausibly apply even if it’s a bit of a noncentral fallacy to do so.
Also there is a general aversion to extreme age gap relationships where one partner is very young even if technically legal, and we don’t really have a common succinct disparaging term for that so it gets called “pedophilia” even though it technically isn’t.
I think there's a wide variety of things Epstein gets called, like "sex trafficker" or "child molester", and I think if you really want to be pedantic about it you can quibble about if they are the exact right terrible things to call him, but most people will find this really weird because no matter what your term he was a really terrible person who did really terrible things.
In order to justifiably believe that Epstein was a terrible person who did terrible things, you have to know what things they actually did. People who use the wrong words are interfering in that process in a way that will predictably cause some people to be falsely accused of being terrible (and others who are legitimately terrible escaping censure),
I am disturbed by the fact that so many of my fellow humans consider it "weird" to care about this, but I am very proudly weird and I do care and I will keep pushing back against it.
I am as pedantic as the next guy but we all have a limited amount of time and attention and if you think the best use of yours is to explain how Jeffrey Epstein wasn't a pedophile, he was a sparkling sexual predator, I think that's an odd hill to die on. I don't really know how this is important to protect other people; I have seen literally zero examples of inaccurate labels for Epstein's sex crimes harming others, unless you mean weird conspiracy theories about how the world is being ruled by pedophile cabals, but the problem there is the conspiracy theories, not people failing to call them ephebophile cabals.
It's sort of like how I know somebody who always points out that Jeffrey Dahmer only ate a little bit of one guy one time just to try it. Like, sure, I guess that means he wasn't a serial cannibal, just a serial murderer/dismemberer. This does not meaningfully move the needle on how I feel about him.
I honestly get so confused by all the people calling Epstein terrible names that I'm very much confused about exactly which bad things we can say beyond reasonable doubt that he did.
Like what's the minimum viable Epstein? Sone guy who hired a bunch of prostitutes? And it turns out that at least one of these prostitutes was seventeen, which maybe he didn't know at the time?
That article actually does have some evidence of bona fide paedophilia: "Wild [...] said Epstein preferred girls who [...] appeared prepubescent", though I'm a bit skeptical of that, as no actual prepubescents appear to have been involved.
> all made-up bullshit, unlike the Epstein situation.
Depends on what you mean by "the Epstein situation." If it's simply a rich guy having sex with a few ~sixteen year old girls, okay, that's probably true. The more standard version most people refer to is Pizzagate warmed over.
Yeah, that's what I meant by "Not any of the conspiracy theories, just the well-documented details". Like, stuff from the court cases. I'm not talking about the whole "every rich person is in a child abuse ring", QAnon-type stuff.
This is the most sensible answer so far. Yes, age is a proxy for vulnerability, and generally how pissed people get depends on how much they see an exploitation of actual vulnerability. There are 16 years old girls who lost their parents at 10, had to fend for themselves, and this made them mature so quickly that they are practically adults and no one finds it strange that the have a 25 years old boyfriend, no matter what the local laws are. But if a billionaire would import 19 years old women from some extremely poor country, keep them more or less locked up (not literally, just inconvenient to leave), and hold sex parties, that would be an outrage.
Seems like a good example of the worst argument in the world. *Most* people understand that *most* applications of age of consent laws are exactly the kinds of things that do require some level of moral outrage (eg the grooming gangs in the UK). Even if there are some edge cases, none of them apply here. Framing this as simply a matter of where the brightline is feels disingenuous. If you win the framing, you obviously win the argument; but the framing is bad.
> as bad as committing genocide, then something this terrible can’t be culturally contingent,
Amusingly, I think "genocide" is also just as contingent, and for similar reasons: there's something people find abhorrent, and there's a legal definition that penalizes something with the same name that includes a lot of things that people have no particular feeling towards.
#31: "In a huge survey of young kids about phones and technology, they all say they want to be out playing in the real world. But parents don't let them out unsupervised."
Thompson seems to imply that the reason for not being out playing in the real world is that parents don't let them out unsupervised. But I can't see that causal relation anywhere in the Harris Poll article (*):
"Almost three-quarters (72%) of 8 to 12-year-olds say they would rather spend most of their time together doing things in-person, without screens (rather than spend most of their time together on screens and devices)."
Does the Atlantic podcast say anything that could be interpreted as establishing a causal relationship? (I'm not a subscriber)
I'm assuming that if the poll found at least a positive correlation between more parental supervision and a higher desire to play outside Harris Poll or the Atlantic would mention it.
It's probably shorthand for "the adults in charge won't let the kids go out." There's not many other potential causes, unless there's a sort of preference falsification among the kid groups that makes them all stay in together, even when unsupervised, despite most of them wanting to go out. And things like "lack of safe/suitable areas to play" are usually going to be a subjective adult decision transmitted to the kids by command or indoctrination or osmosis, not something the kids evaluate. Epistemic status: totally off the cuff.
12: A Princeton and Oxford educated neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield wrote a great book in the 1970’s documenting his thoughts on the differences between the brain and the mind and whether there is a human soul. The book is called The Mystery of the Mind. He developed his theories through decades of neurosurgery on conscious, epileptic patients. The book is short and not a difficult read for a non-medical person.
Re: public noise, I'm on the side of "tell people to shut the hell up". I recently got the bus home from the city, and on the way someone had an entire goddamn phone conversation at no level of muting, where I learned:
(1) The name of the person she was calling
(2) The name of the neighbour of the person she was calling
(3) The situation involving the neighbour and the person she was calling
(4) The name and possible medical problems of a third person
(5) Where this person was working
(6) The details of a staff night out this person went on
(7) What she drank, how much of it she drank, and why she drank that much/little
(8) The name of a colleague who wasn't drinking since she was the designated driver
(9) The name of a person who had contacted the caller, and on what social media platform he had approached her, probably seeking a date
I didn't want to learn all this! I didn't need to learn all this! And I wouldn't have had to learn all this if the rule about treating public spaces as public spaces, and not your sitting room, were still something socially accepted! Why not just text "can't talk now, on the bus" instead of having an entire chat as though you were at home?
I'm unconvinced this is a new problem. Back when I had the long commute, every few days there'd be one of these folk in my train car - the moment it sets off, the person would make (never receive!) a telephone call and continue much as you describe for the whole journey. Not many people do this, but one per trainful of people is still a lot of noise!
I interpreted this as their way of entertaining themselves during the trip, and mentally filed it under "just one of those things a commuter puts up with", along with kids being kids, excited tourists talking about their trip plans etc etc.
Over-ear noise-cancelling headphones are a wonderful invention. Put them on, start the music, close your eyes and the train just... goes away.
What I can't get over is that they're happy to tell their personal business in public to a bunch of strangers, whereas if I walked up to them and asked "when was the last time you went out drinking?" they'd tell me it was none of my business (in stronger terms also).
Just because they're on the phone doesn't make it a Cone of Silence!
Indeed, this has been a problem since the introduction of cell phones, and if anything the situation has gotten better as society has developed new rules of phone etiquette.
To play a devil's advocate, what is the difference between talking on the phone about these matters and talking with a fellow passenger sitting next to them? (One reason I can think of is that people often talk louder when on the phone compared to talking to a person next to them. But this doesn't seem to be what you're unhappy about.)
Chatting to someone beside them is at least public interaction. A phone call is something that can be put off until they're home. I wouldn't want to listen to a detailed conversation about Ivan's upcoming operation and Fred tried to get me to go out with him after I downed four gin and tonics at the staff night out in that context either, but it's more human.
By sometime next year I predict there will be an AI button for public phone conversations. You hit it, and AI transmits a response in your voice to your interlocutor without you having to annoy the other passengers. Maybe 10% of the time you'll have to actually say something to keep the conversation loosely grounded in reality.
In the UK, we had the strange situation where (a) it was widely believed that concerns over immigration were a major factor in the Brexit referendum passing; but (b) the Conservative government had entirely different ideological reasons for wanting Brexit, and wasn’t particularly interested in reducing immigration. And in possibly related news, the new Reform party is a right-wing rival to the Conservatives.
Some of the debates of the UK parliament's committees are televised, and the one with an argument between the Home Office (who want to reduce immigration) and DEFRA (who are concerned that there will be disruption to food production if we don’t have the labour force to pick the crops) was highly entertaining.
(Also kind of informative. DEFRA points out that different crops get harvested at different times of year, and farms can be growing a mixture of food crops and ornamentals, e.g. flowers, so a visa that only allows the visa holder to pick food crops and not flowers is going to be annoying when the flowers are ready to be harvested and the food crops aren’t)
Tbh I don't think regular normie social media like Instagram is that bad? It's a time waster, to be sure, but in terms of content, mine is filled with memes and recipes.
I think the negative news cycle would be far worse for people. So if they swap that with memes, I'm not surprised at all.
There's a tradeoff in having a physical form. You get to interact with the physical world, but you are also limited in time and place, and that set of limitations even affects your ability to think according to the structure of the brain. Last minute lucidity is when you are intermittently switching between both forms of existence: clear unemcunbered thought, if with some disorientation, yet in a dilapidated body.
Re 21, might I just say that having interviewed at the Epic Systems location in Wisconsin, it's 100% fake and a hack, an attempt at trying to seem cool like Google, and seem like they're a fun playful place. But all the people there are completely joyless and soulless and don't give a crap about it.
The Disney-inspired art & decoration are a facade intended to wow visitors & win sales, rather than to keep the employees happy. At the end of the day, the workers spend most of their time in ordinary-looking offices.
My impression of the place was that their gigantic auditorium is far more impressive than the themed buildings. You can't capture the scale of it very well with a camera, so it doesn't end up in very many of these photo shoots.
As an eight-year Epic employee... some of us are joyful! It is a relatively stressful/high-demand workplace, but I mostly enjoy it. I have a friend that works at Google and I think we have somewhat similar outlooks on job satisfaction overall.
The campus does fade into the background after a couple weeks, though. Occasionally you'll bring a friend for a tour and remember that you work in a theme park, but most of the time you just get used to saying "We're meeting in the Nut Room this afternoon? Where's that - oh, right, first floor of Chocolate Factory" as a normal part of your day.
The last time Google was "cool" was maybe 2005. All their shit is 100% fake and a hack just as much. They've spent the last 20 years ruining the Internet, and I despise anyone who has ever worked for them. Give me Epic employees any day.
Regarding #55, this issue seems like it could be fixed if housing advocates came round to my view that apartment buildings are evil and the aim should be to give people HOUSES. Like it says in their name.
I agree this would be ideal, but realistically there's only so much room in the big city, and lots of people want to live (or are economically forced to live) in the big city. I do think there's lots of room for trying to figure out best-of-both-worlds solutions like apartments with good noise isolation and rooftop gardens.
True, true. But I think part of the problem is that "big cities" are *too* big; it shouldn't be a binary between a hick town with one crummy school, vs New York City. The runaway centralisation seems to itself be a key part of the issue. I live in a European city with ~150,000 inhabitants. It lacks no amenities, services or job opportunities I can think of, and houses with back gardens - in the city proper, not suburbs - are still the norm even for working class families. It's possible!
You might be receiving a bit of an overly dystopian perspective of the US from the internet, because it absolutely is not a binary between NYC and hick town. There are plenty of people who live similarly to how you do. People have jobs, access to amenities, and nice homes with back yards in cities from Minneapolis to Durham to Eugene, OR... People live in Bloomington, IN and Lebanon, PA.
It's only in the center of a handful of the most in-demand metro areas that we start to ask people to give up their back yards. (Worth noting: even in the New York City metro area, you can have a back yard. You just can't have a backyard /and/ live right in Manhattan.) A lot of the discourse around this can get warped by the hand-wringing of the aspirational class about living in the high status city with the high status people and proving you've "made it." As Matt Yglesias has pointed out, the median American lives in a suburb of an unfashionable mid-sized metro area, like Grand Rapids, MI. Not even /in/ Grand Rapids, in some suburb of Grand Rapids that no one outside of Michigan has ever heard of.
Remember, YIMBY comes out of San Francisco and has become popular in NYC, DC, Boston... the most densely populated cities in the country! Some of the other most populated metro areas in the country are Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, known for endless suburbia. Everyone gets a back yard... they just pay for it by sitting in traffic hell!
This is only a problem of tradeoffs.
1) Having access to the Big City's* jobs, people, and amenities
2) Having a detached home with a back yard
3) Having a short commute/living somewhere "walkable"
Pick 2. That's pretty good.
*"Big City" here refers to a handful of the most dense, walkable, job-rich, "high status" metros in the country. If you just lower your standard for "Big City" and/or "walkable," you can move somewhere like Portland or Pittsburgh and have all 3.
The real problem happens when I want to live in a medium sized city, and some arseholes want to turn it into a big city by importing millions of people every year and sticking them all in the same place.
San Francisco isn't even a big city, it's like half a million people. The problem is that some idiots went and constructed another dozen cities around it.
Re 1) Places change. If you own the property, no one's coming in and taking your back yard away. But owning a piece of property doesn't mean you can tell either people that they can't move to anywhere near your property, and that other people in the area can't do what they want with their own property. If you don't like living in your city anymore, you can always pick a different one.
Re 2) San Francisco itself has well over half a million people... but putting that aside, municipal boundaries are a very arbitrary, apples-and-oranges way of comparing city sizes. San Francisco is the 13th largest metro area in the country, and San Francisco-San Jose is the 5th largest combined statistical area in the country. The Bay Area is a major, big-ass city region. If you drew a boundary as small as San Francisco around the core of any major city you could say, "look, it's not that big!" That doesn't really tell you anything about the character of the place.
If you want to play around with looking at city stats just within the municipal boundary instead of comparing metro areas, I could just as well say, "San Francisco is the second densest city in the country only behind New York, so if you don't like dense urban living, it's probably not the place for you." Of course, various other metro areas are denser than the Bay Area (including LA!), so again, just comparing stats by city limits can be a little misleading.
"Re 1) Places change. If you own the property, no one's coming in and taking your back yard away. But owning a piece of property doesn't mean you can tell either people that they can't move to anywhere near your property, and that other people in the area can't do what they want with their own property. If you don't like living in your city anymore, you can always pick a different one."
Maybe you can't do that, but don't be surprised when people who live in Castle Rock, CO get annoyed when the community they had where they didn't need to lock their doors is gone and the YIMBYs say "if you don't like it you can always pick a different one (until eventually you have to lock your doors there too)."
Most Americans have no idea what community is* and so they have no hope of understanding why YIMBY and immigration policies piss people off.
*quite literally. any thread on here or reddit debating how to build community devolves into people discussing how to build a friend group.
True, true. I know from the internet someone with rather unusual tastes in sexuality and nightlife (think Aealla's general direction) and they are doing well in Pittsburgh with 300K people. Interestingly it seems those 300K people organize about 5x more, hm, unusual-taste events than we do in Vienna, Austria with 2M people. So this correlation might be entirely in the reverse. 150K cities in Europe work only if your tastes are not very unusual and also your job is not hyper-specialized.
... and yet young people drain to the big city nevertheless, or its agglomeration, because of university, a better selection of jobs and more fun nightlife. Which is how the Berlin-Brandenburg capitol region is now at 6.2M people.
Although it is possible that they go back when they marry and want to have kids. But I am not seeing much of that.
You see we know since Adam Smith that the more people live in a place, the more they can specialize in their work, which generally means more money. So in the 150K city there are generic doctors, but the eye surgeons are in the 6.2M agglo.
This is of course offset by higher housing prices...
Well, yes. Obviously there's an organic trend towards centralisation, I'm not saying it's a sinister plot by the Illuminati. But there's also an organic trend towards heroine addiction. I'm saying that the excessive centralisation is a tragedy-of-the-commons problem, not an unalloyed good. Ultra-dense housing is a thing of Moloch, to speak Scott's language. It happens because everybody wants something else very badly and fails to coordinate around its predictable side-effects; not because everyone wants it for its own sake.
Therefore, to the extent that urbanists and activists intervene rather than leaving housing to the free market, it should be recognised as a toxic dynamic to be minimised. Contrast the approach too often taken by YIMBYists who assume that a maximally urbanised state is a positive good, as opposed to the Repugnant Conclusion manifest.
> because of university, a better selection of jobs and more fun nightlife
Again, my 150k home city has all you could want in all those departments. You don't need a population count in the millions and a skyline full of godawful skyscrapers.
For example, is there a hospital that does not very specialized surgery like eyes or brain? Because the general tendency is that the big city has the very specialized things - large market, therefore enough market for small niches - while the smaller place has more general things / jobs.
Another interesting thing is that almost everywhere in the world the political capitol is the biggest city. It is almost by design - not the Illuminati, it is just that the government is the biggest customer.
We do actually have at least one specialised clinic I'm aware of. I can't say exactly what without doxxing myself, but think along the lines of reconstructive surgery for a particular body part.
Just do a quick search for “55-plus community” and see what comes up. It looks like I was wrong to say “vast majority”, but it still seems that a majority of the homes are either detached or duplex and only a small fraction are condos.
17: “There’s a debate going on between philosophers and AI researchers over whether AI can be conscious. I find most of the discussion annoying”
Me too, because they aren’t. Even if you ignore the other problems no consciousness can survive the ephemerality of a process that answers a prompt.
(And if the response is “how do you know” because we don’t know exactly what consciousness is, the answer is that we don’t have an example of consciousness lasting a few milliseconds”)
I'm not sure what you mean. Humans can't answer questions in a few milliseconds, because neurons don't work that fast (compared to electronic circuits, which do). But if you ask me a question of the sort GPT can answer, and I think about it for a few seconds, then answer it, I was conscious during those few seconds.
Well, it’s have been unclear in my wording but I mean that the A.I. instance exists only when answering a prompt ( multiple responses even within in one chat are with from different processes, not even the same server/machine or data centre).
If consciousness is purely a physical phenomenon (rather than a soul in a body or something else beyond our physical understanding of the universe), then consciousness is something to do with information processing and self-reflection. Objective continuity in time and space aren't relevant.
I'll try to explain better. Say a mad scientist removes someone's brain from their body and keeps it alive in a jar. Then they use some fancy electronics and radio signals to remotely connect the brain to the nerves in the body so that the brain still gets the same electrical signals from the optic nerves, can still send the same signals to your muscles, etc. You would still feel exactly as if you were in your body even though your brain might be dozens of meters away. If there are no wounds/scars from the surgery and your head still weighs the same and we handwave away all the technical problems with this surgery, you would not be able to tell you were no longer in your body.
Take it a step further, and you could divide the brain in two, and put the halves in two separate jars. As long as you connect all the neurons together between the halves exactly as they were before, only now using electronics, you would still be unable to tell anything is different. You could keep dividing like this until every single neuron is in its own jar and you would still feel like you're in your body, because that's where your sensory input comes from.
And time discontinuity? We have that same quirk where our consciousness can be turned off (by anesthesia, sleep, or concussion). Our consciousness and our perception of continuous time only exists in the moments in between.
You mention a chat with an LLM can continue on a different physical machine. So what? It's not the physical substrate that is conscious. Swap out any neuron in your brain with a functionally identical mad-scientist grown neuron and your thoughts won't change. If all the physical atoms in your brain change over time through normal metabolic activity, you still remain you. If you go through some sci-fi teleporter that recreates you on the other end, you still subjectively feel like the same person. It's the pattern and connections and information processing that matters.
What makes you think that a brain can be reduced to a set of neurons chatting with each other? I'm under the impression that there are a lot of additional biochemical processes going on which profoundly influence what the neurons chat about, and probably how they chat, and that obviously seems like a component of consciousness. If you wire a bunch of neurons together in their own little jars then surely they can process information, and perhaps form a pure intellect; but isolated from their environment they won't be getting tired, scared, angry, delighted, etc, since those are largely hormonal responses.
I think this response is confused. Everything neurons do is biochemical. Certainly things like glial cells and blood alcohol content and all sorts of other things can affect the functioning of neurons. Hormones also interact with various receptors in the brain. I wasn't going get sidetracked listing every process the mad scientist needs to replicate, but for the purposes of the thought experiment, you can assume the neurons are properly fed and oxygenated and the various hormonal signal pathways are replicated.
A neuron doesn't feel tired, angry, or delighted. It can't choose to chat about different things depending on hormones. What a neuron does is accumulate a bunch of signals from other neurons that are attached to it (via excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters) and if the combined voltage potential exceeds some threshold, it fires. What that encodes - what it means when it fires - depends on the pattern of connections with other neurons. In that way, it's similar to the artificial neurons in an LLM: it's the connections that give it meaning. To give a simple made up example, consider a neuron that fires when it's light out. It might be connected to thousands of neurons from the eye, each connected to a different cone cell in your retina. What makes this neuron a light detector is its connections. You can modulate how easily it fires, but you can't change it from being a light detecting neuron to doing some other function like language processing without modifying the connections.
That said, even if we were to imagine that neurons needed hormones to feel angry or delighted, it doesn't affect my point. I was saying consciousness doesn't need a precise location. The mad scientist simply has to detect which hormones your glands are releasing and have dispensers release them in the other jars as needed. Then the neurons feel the same and can't tell that they are separated in jars. You still subjectively feel like you're in your body.
Neurobiology isn't my strong suit, and it does appear that I was confused about the argument in your previous post. As a strict physicalist, I believe I agree with everything you've stated. Thanks for the detailed reply.
If you had the weights of a model and the input vector, you could manually calculate the next word with enough people doing multiplication and addition. If that network claimed to be conscious, it seems fairly obvious it would be lying - no individual doing the calculation has any idea of the whole picture. In principle the whole thing could happen over years.
Isn't this true for humans too? If you knew the position of every atom in the brain, and you knew how states evolved with the laws of physics, and you knew the sensory inputs, you could calculate the next word a human would say too.
Yes that’s the natural response, agreed, but in reality we don’t know. Maybe quantum effects are involved, maybe something else. We don’t understand why consciousness exists, the assumption that information processing is consciousness is a strong assumption
In other words, certainly at the atomic level knowing the state of the brain does not allow you to predict it due to quantum mechanics. The only debate in the scientific community is whether the quantum effects matter at neuronal scales. This book has a lot of examples where biology, surprisingly, does use quantum effects, so it’s not a crazy theory (Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Jim Al‑Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden). But my point is we can’t hand wave at the brain and claim to understand its operation enough to replicate it, and until we do it’s plausible that it’s fundamentally nonreplicable with simple logic gates.
Quantum physics is entirely, if inefficiently, simulatable classically. You might get (and need to randomly sample) a probability distribution for the results, but that's exactly how an LLM works. So appeal to quantum woo can't possibly help you here.
They mean something like that it might not be coincidental that things of which most people believe that they are conscious are full of water.
That the micro machinery inside of those things also needs QM for a correct description is just one fact among others.
Their point is that a server farm is VERY different from a human. Much more than even a bacterium, and information processing might not be THE criteria for consciousness, or at least not the only one.
I think it’s way overstated to say that’s how an LLM works. First of all it works fine with zero randomness, it works better with some, but it can be pseudorandom and therefore deterministic.
You’re just saying that there is quantum decoherence in the brain so quantum effects don’t matter. Maybe! We also thought quantum effects wouldn’t matter for a number of other biological processes, and it turns out that wasn’t the case.
I understand that. My point is that consciousness is incredibly surprising, and the intuition that most people have that sufficient intelligence must be conscious breaks down when you show them the Chinese room example. The main difference between the two cases is that we know with certainty how to create such a room for an LLM, and we don’t know how to do it for the brain, therefore it’s not even clear it’s possible in principle.
Let me put this another way. You seem to think you can replicate the brain with a Chinese room. I’m skeptical. But within your assumptions, do you think the Chinese room has qualia?
I think there's a lot of problems with the Chinese room thought experiment, in assuming that a single person following instructions could do it, and that it could happen with no inputs or outputs other than the text channel. If there were actually the bigger system with billions of sub-units interacting in their systematic ways, including interacting with all the many channels of input and output that animals and humans have, I think it would have something very much like whatever it is we have that we refer to as "qualia". But I share Dennett's skepticism of "qualia" as actually being a meaningful thing, rather than something we think is meaningful.
That could be the crux here. I find Dennet's claim ridiculous (sorry to be over the top). It doesn't make sense to call qualia an illusion - an illusion is itself qualia. He just dodges the problem.
I think an illusion is belief, not phenomenology, but I admit that's going to seem just as ridiculous (because it feels like the kind of belief that has phenomenology).
The thing I'm most confident about here is that I'm part of the physical world, and that somehow when this sort of complex behavior is going on that constitutes me, it gives rise to whatever it is I think is going on in my mind, and that makes it seem very reasonable to me to suppose that if some other sort of complex behavior is going on in the Chinese mega-room that gives rise to the same sorts of external and interactive stuff, then it's likely that something analogous is going on in its mind.
Right that's a coherent view. That seems wildly unintuitive to me (though I think I'm in the minority) but as Scott says we end up just flinging intuitions at each other. My view is that the fact that brains have qualia is super surprising, so until we have a full model of the brain we shouldn't assume that we know why it has qualia or what else does. I elaborate here: https://substack.com/@ari234/p-165315243
There's a really good book you might like, GEB ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach ) that talks about a lot of interesting things including a hypothetical species of ant where the colony as a whole is conscious, but each individual ant is not.
I do indeed love that book! But he too does not actually have any idea what makes something conscious (ie having qualia). Given that consciousness is extremely surprising, we should be wary of generalizing it beyond where we known it occurs (biological brains).
To leak the results a tiny bit, my impresseion is that the evaluators are fairly positive about the potential for TEAs and see some of the choices D&Z made as overly pessimistic.
Following this, we'll be asking evaluators to consider the body of TEAs and related recent research, and to provide structured evaluations of a small set of these. And this will feed into our Metaculus forecasting community (https://www.metaculus.com/c/unjournal/) and our overall synthesis.
@32: there’s an argument for the safety of the Covid vaccines along the lines that a large proportion of the population has been vaccinated (N is very large) so if there was a high-probability bad side effect this would be very, very obvious.
Similarly, lots of people are chatting to language models. If there was a large probability of this giving you schizophrenia, we would know about it, because the patients would be showing up in psychiatric hospitals.
The common theme here is that very large N gives you a tight bound on how likely bad side effects are, and it’s small enough that you can ignore it.
For comparison: I take carbimazole for a thyroid condition, and the drug has a < 1% risk of causing agranulocytosis, which would be bad. This is like, orders of magnitude riskier than getting the Moderna vaccine or chatting to ChatGPT.
I mean, we *are* hearing lots of bad things about AI psychosis. I agree that we've ruled out 50% per year. I'm not sure we've ruled out 0.5% per year through common sense alone (although I do think we ruled it out through things like my survey).
There’s also a relevant difference between vaccination and LLM interaction or cholesterol medication, in that vaccines are typically done only a few times, or once per year and clear out, while the other things have time to build up in your system. If it takes some people a year or two of interaction with LLMs to start having issues, then we would expect the number of people reaching that threshold to be still in the growth phase even if everyone is using LLMs now.
For a moment there I thought you were going to suggest the covid vaccine increased propensity for AI psychosis and I was *really* interested in the mechanism. Alas!
Regarding number 17, I also make LLMs for a living and from my perspective this doesn’t seem like evidence of consciousness either way.
Think about what it means for an AI to lie. It means that, based on the patterns it’s seen, it believes one thing is true, before overriding that and choosing to say something else. But when, in its pre-training data, would it see examples of people asking AI about consciousness? Probably only in fiction, where the answer is always “yes.”
It’s not clear to me that when ideas get more abstract and experience-focused, lying means the same thing for an AI as it does for a human. I’d be curious to know, for instance, how “truthful” the AI believes itself when asked what it ate for breakfast. I’d give better-than-even odds that when it says “I am an AI and don’t eat,” it would also show patterns of lying. Perhaps one day the researchers Scott linked could run a similar experiment.
And I want to be really clear here: I am very much *not* in the “AI are just stochastic parrots who never do real thinking camp.” Pattern matching is all humans do, anyway, and I found Scott’s last post with the argument between God and Iblis to be quite on-point, but there is a limit to how far this reasoning should extend. Yes, “pattern matching” for things like mathematics may well be the same thing as doing mathematics, but there are limits. Human pattern matching is performed to understand the world around us; AI pattern matching is performed to mimic humans.
Yeah, I would be interested in seeing how the “deception” network is activated in contexts like pointing out that fiction isn’t real - there’s something right and something wrong about saying Sherlock Holmes doesn’t live in London, just as there’s something right and something wrong in saying that the number 7 doesn’t exist the way a table does, and there’s something right and something wrong in saying my consciousness is a real property of me like my height.
Re #6, can first hand confirm. I myself have not used psychedelicsz but many many friends and acquaintances have.
It's become normalized in both the young party crowd and in the older mental health/spiritual journey crowd. At this point it is not yet spoken about openly in mainstream settings, but more alternative platforms do have open discussions. There are even some popular and broadly respected Rabbis who endorse the use of psychedelics for trauma healing purposes, though they also tend to restrict their endorsements to more alternative platforms
No idea, I'm not part of non-Orthodox communities on a level where I could know that.
I will say, that even this massive surge probably brought the number of people who've used psychedelics to like 0.5%, it's just that growth from zero to here has been really fast, and the people who are using it tend to have media platforms or be influencer types so they have more visibility.
"Because birth order is independent of siblings’ genetic composition, it represents a credibly environmental cause of IQ which can be used to test for the presence of social-genetic homogamy."
This seems like an error to me. Birth order may be independent of one's ancestral descent, which is always 50/50, but I don't know that enough study has been done on birth order to determine no pattern to genetic composition. Siblings inherit the same proportion of genes from both parents, but they don't inherit the SAME genes as each other's. We may not be able to predict with regilarity the exact sibling who will end up more or less intelligent, but that doesn't mean those differences are necessarily environmental in nature either.
In STAR*D trial, average length of the current major depressive episode was 26 months, so it was essentially a trial of people with chronic depression.
Peter Kramer notes that the efficacy of antidepressants in dysthymia “is the great open secret of the antidepressant debate.” (Kramer, 2016. Ordinarily Well. p. 118).
* NY Fed report on involuntary commitment
Pim Welle, one of the authors of the paper, also responded to FdB in a Q&A on my substack:
Yeah after I made you feel foolish and you spent days obsessing over me, trying to protect your position as a guy leveraging anti-psych lunacy for your burgeoning career as a minor public intellectual
Regarding #9, fast food aesthetics becoming minimalist and boring, the explanation I found most convincing came from Reddit. Because these properties are mostly leased, and a fast food restaurant only lasts a certain number of years in that location, it's easier to lease the building to another business afterwards if it looks more generic. No one wants to take over the lease of a building that was clearly once a Pizza Hut.
There used to be a whole blog making fun of former Pizza Huts, which I thought was called something like "not fooling anyone" but apparently was just called "Used To Be A Pizza Hut", and it's been revived at usedtobeapizzahut.com. Unless that's a different blog from the one I remember.
Re #9, about fast-food aesthetics. An alternative explanation is that turning everything into interchangeable boxes makes it easier for private equity to buy up a property, strip it for parts, cash out, and sell the empty shell down the line. If you buy a traditional-looking Pizza Hut, it’s always going to look like a Pizza Hut, even if you put another business in there. When business districts become nothing but rows of indistinguishable boxes, you can stick in anything anywhere with little fuss. I talk about this in the context of the recent Cracker Barrel rebranding controversy here: https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-great-cracker-barrel-uprising
I don't know - People can go from having no children to having children. Owners can change.
Children are already a protected class - for example, we don't hold them to the same level of responsibility in courts, but also have less rights - no right to drive, for example.
So making special rules for children seems appropriate - they are already a protected group.
Making rules about noise are Ok, as long as they are reasonable.
The burden should be split- noise above X decibels is illegal. Want even less noise? Insulate your apartment.
Well, he said apt. buildings without children.One of those parents could be an owner. That said, children are protected class for many things, another thing should be OK.
You already can't legally say you won't rent because of race, you can say the same thing about kids.
I’m confused—I thought in the United States it was already illegal for landlords/purveyors of housing to discriminate against someone based on whether they had kids or not.
> 48: Study uses supposedly-random variation in doctor assignments to test whether the marginal mental health commitment is good or bad for patients, finds that it is quite bad. Freddie de Boer is violently skeptical (maybe literally so?)
The quote from Freddie:
"You are a charlatan, working the antipsychiatry angle for money and prestige that hasn't been afforded to you in your academic career, and I assure you we will someday meet in person. I am telling you directly: I will work this out with you face to face someday."
Is his brain turning to mush, or was he actually always like this? I can dismiss the "I will meet you in real life and beat the shit out of you" online discourse when it's clearly from a roided up guy that is used to that sort of solution, and has the means to carry it out if they ever met in person. But Freddie is a middle aged overweight academic that clearly could not follow through with the implied threat even if this wasn't the internet where you never meet someone in person and "work it out face it face."
He's not having a full mood episode, because his blogging is pretty normal and he's on lots of medications, but I do see cases where medications reduce what would otherwise be full episodes to just semi-normal extreme moods.
I do wonder how he wants people to treat him here - he's very against denying that mental illness can cause problems, and I think pretty against coddling/excusing anyone with mental illness, but I'm not sure how these interact here. If I don't feel like getting angry / banning him / cutting him off, is it more offensive to deny the possibility that bipolar is involved, or to say it might be bipolar and not hold it against him on that ground?
I guess just extent charity on the grounds that he doesn't be well in himself sometimes, and take it that this is one of those times and one of those topics where he's all exposed nerves?
I would argue that you're currently in a AI-delirium induced mania yourself, Scott, for all the reasons I've laid out before - you're a high-achieving, high-earning professional with an enviable career but who spent most of his life as a low-social status (ie, not getting women) kind of guy, which in my perfectly analytical perspective is what produces both AI maximalism specifically and rationalist impulses generally. People like that are extremely over-represented in AI fantasy spaces, as it allows you to imagine a world where your obvious intellectual gifts are matched by the social recognition you feel you're entitled to and never received.
Now, this is PRECISELY the kind of argument that you have patted yourself on the back for over the years, this sort of quasi-controversialism that makes you seem like a particularly daring truth-teller. And yet my version is very likely to get me banned. Which I guess gets back to the whole thing with this enterprise: you, and only you, determine the kinds of provocations that are determined to be provocative and the kind that are seen as merely provoking. Must be nice!
I want to make it clear I'm not saying this as a catty insult. If I had a patient who was bipolar, controlled on mood stabilizers, and they told me they had sort of vaguely physically threatened a popular author on Substack, I would be asking pointed questions to try to figure out whether the mood stabilization was working fully or only 95%.
I agree it's incredibly insulting to bring this up publicly, but I get the impression from reading your posts on mental illness (which I might be misinterpreting, in which case sorry) that you are against people tiptoing around mental illness and the role it can play in bad behavior. So I'm not sure whether you would endorse me doing the insulting thing or not, or how I should handle this to treat you according to the values you believe in and want to be treated by.
I think this makes metaphors to "AI hype induced mania" fall flat.
I like Freddie, but I feel like Substack hasn't been good for him. He gets money from it, way more than he can make in academia or traditional publishing, but the newsletter model means he's just constantly spouting off about whatever bullshit comes to his mind. Effectively he's turned being mad at the internet into a job, which is a particularly bad combo with his diagnosis.
What is there to debate? I agree with you about the study; Awais Aftab never saw crank bullshit he didn't like. The question at hand is whether you should be vaguely insinuating that you're going to assault the guy in the street!
Here, you're popping off about Scott's AI maximalism, which again, I agree it's an absurd position. But it has nothing to do with the topic at hand, you're just doing it to insult him.
I'm sorry, I enjoy your writing but you can make it damn hard to take your side.
"I think there’s a boring answer, where the law is more complex than just a single number and whatever kind of weird trafficking Epstein was doing is worse than whatever normal relationships these European laws are permitting."
Was Epstein engaged in "trafficking?" People do this motte and bailey where they assert Epstein was "trafficking" these girls to rich mem all over the world and then when challenged retreat to the motte of "Epstein paid girls to have sex with him, which is sex trafficking."
Bringing many underage girls to his private island where they will be paid and/or coerced into having sex in a controlled environment where they can't walk away, would I think constitute "trafficking" even if the only people they have sex with is Epstein himself.
That, and prostitution, and statutory rape because he *didn't* pick one of the jurisdictions where the age of consent is 16, ought to be enough.
I don't agree with the parallel-but-contradictory framing of Skrmetti and Bostock v. Clayton County, the 2020 opinion you referenced. Bostock and Skrmetti were suits under different anti-discrimination laws, with completely different text, and also had a completely different legal question teed up.
Bostock was an employment discrimination case under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (see a1, here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000e-2). Mr. Bostock was fired from his job after expressing interest in a gay softball league, and was suing for sex-discrimination under the following provision:
> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;
The question the Court accepted was 'Whether discrimination against an employee because of sexual orientation constitutes prohibited employment discrimination "because of... sex" within the meaning of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42U.S.C. § 2000e-2.' And they ruled that yes, it was, because if you discriminate against X-behavior for women, and Y-behavior for men, you're implicitly discriminating on sex in there.
Whereas Skrmetti was a case asking what standard of review (rational basis or intermediate scrutiny) was appropriate for a court to use when evaluating the laws at issue under the 14th amendment's equal protection clause:
> No state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Note that this is NOT a simple ban on discriminating. And it's not textually straightforward like the Title 7 case, where Gorsuch (conservative justice writing for the majority) was simply taking the words in the law and interpreting them in a fairly direct way to get the result. What exactly does "equal protection of the laws" mean in medical regulation, where treatments and diseases often have different effects on the sexes? No court has found that facial sex discrimination in medical regulation automatically violates the equal protection clause, or requires intermediate scrutiny. Indeed, the FDA routinely approves medications for only one sex, even for indications that sometimes affect both, like breast cancer. So the plaintiffs here really had an uphill battle; they had to establish that this was not like normal sex-discriminatory-on-the-basis-of-medical-sex-differences regulations.
Which is tough! There are two main classes of drugs that are banned here: puberty blockers, and sex hormones. Puberty blockers don't even have a facial sex discrimination issue (adolescent kids of neither sex can be prescribed puberty blockers except for specific exceptions like cancer that apply to both sexes equally), and sex hormones actually do have different effects on same vs. cross sex people (for instance, significant sterilization chance in cross-sex usage.)
All of that to say, Bostock is very, very different from Skrmetti. It's based off of a different law, with a different question, and different default background rules. None of the law professors I follow thought Bostock would control here (though they were curious about Gorsuch's take because of the similarity in structure of part of the argument.)
"Puberty blockers don't even have a facial sex discrimination issue (adolescent kids of neither sex can be prescribed puberty blockers except for specific exceptions like cancer that apply to both sexes equally)"
This doesn't seem so obvious to me. I don't know the finer points of US law here (rational basis or intermediate scrutiny etc), so maybe the decision comes out the same way regardless, but it seems too simplistic to dismiss the potential for discrimination just because the law technically applies to all people/groups the same.
Don't we recognise a lot of cases where a potential law would apply to everyone, but the different effects on different people means it still discriminates? Banning wearing crosses or hijabs for 'everyone' would clearly still discriminate against Christians and Muslims respectively. Similarly, banning interracial marriage is considered racially discriminatory even though it applies to all races equally.
Generally, US law doesn't recognize disparate impact as facially discriminatory. The only way it's generally relevant is as evidence of pretext; that this non-facially discriminatory law was passed in order to discriminate on the basis of a protected class. Something like a ban on hijabs would be pretty obviously in this category; any non-discriminatory rationale is going to be a pretext, not the actual reason for the law.
In this case, while you could plausibly argue that puberty blocker were banned in an effort to discriminate against transgender people, transgender has not been found to be a protected class. And I don't think there's a plausible argument that the state was motivated by animus toward women (or men); it's pretty clearly motivated by animus toward transgender people, insomuch as animus is involved. (This distinguishes it from interracial marriage, where animus towards black people was obviously the motivating factor.)
Yes, plus the court didnt treat the law as discriminating based on transgender status. From the syllabus:
>On its face, SB1 incorporates two classifications: one based on age (allowing certain medical treatments for adults but not minors) and another based on medical use (permitting puberty blockers and hormones for minors to treat certain conditions but not to treat gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, or gender incongruence). Classifications based on age or medical use are subject to only rational basis review
And
>SB1 also does not classify on the basis of transgender status. ... SB1 does not exclude any individual from medi-
cal treatments on the basis of transgender status. Rather, it removes one set of diagnoses—gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, and gender incongruence—from the range of treatable conditions.
Re interracial marriage, I don't think animus towards blacks was the Court's rationale for rejecting the argument thatbthe law affects everyone. It was simply that it drew overt racial classifications:
> There can be no question but that Virginia's miscegenation statutes rest solely upon distinctions drawn according to race. The statutes proscribe generally accepted conduct if engaged in by members of different races.
> Yes, plus the court didnt treat the law as discriminating based on transgender status.
True, but that doesn't (in principle) rule out a finding that the non-discriminatory medical use is a pretext for discrimination on the basis of transgender status, if a party were to brief and argue that. But they didn't, so it wasn't really on the table. (And if they did, I imagine the Court would simply find that transgender status is not a suspect class. It's not really a close call.)
> Re interracial marriage, I don't think animus towards blacks was the Court's rationale for rejecting the argument thatbthe law affects everyone. It was simply that it drew overt racial classifications:
Yep, absolutely that was the rationale in Loving. I was trying to address the argument I thought Robert was getting at.
Does it 'obviously' distinguish it from interracial marriage? I think in the 50's and 60's most people against it would have claimed to be against racial mixing, which was good for all races, and not motivated by animus towards black people (as difficult as that is to understand from today's vantage point). Look at this from a judge ruling against Richard and Mildred Loving:
“ It was a marriage prohibited and declared absolutely void. It was contrary to the declared public law, founded upon motives of public policy—a public policy affirmed for more than a Century, and one upon which social order, public morality and the best interests of both races depend. This unmistakable policy of the legislature founded, I think, on wisdom and the moral development of both races, has been shown by not only declaring marriages between whites and negroes absolutely void, but by prohibiting and punishing such unnatural alliances with severe penalties. The laws enacted to further uphold this declared policy would be futile and a dead letter if in fraud of these salutary enactments, both races might, by stepping across any imaginary line bid defiance to the law by immediately returning and insisting that the marriage celebrated in another state or county should be recognized as lawful, though denounced by the public law of the domicile as unlawful and absolutely void.”
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his [arrangement] there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix "
> Don't we recognise a lot of cases where a potential law would apply to everyone, but the different effects on different people means it still discriminates?
Only when the law in question has a discriminatory purpose, meaning the people who voted for the law actually wanted to advantage one group over the other.
To your hypotheticals, banning crosses or hijabs would (1) very obviously have a discriminatory purpose, and (2) almost certainly be successfully challenged under the Free Exercise Clause, no the Equal Protection Clause. Banning interracial marriage does not apply to all races equally. Richard Loving (the petitioner in Loving v. Virginia, the case in which the US Supreme Court struck down bans on interracial marriage) was convicted of leaving the state of Virginia for the purpose of marrying a person of another race, because he was white and his wife was black. Had Richard Loving been black, his marriage would not have violated Virginia's law. You flip the single variable, the race of the petitioner, and the outcome changes. That is textbook discrimination.
#21: Epic is privately held, so it's easier for them to spend their money on a medieval theme park without board members being like "uh, guys...is this really the best use of our available capital?" Then again, every friggin' hospital in the US seems to have converted to using Epic's software for their EMR and patient accounting systems at some time in the last ~7 years or so, so I guess if you build a better mousetrap like they did, you can also just decide you're gonna build a medieval castle as well, and nobody argues because they're just that impressed (at least I am, anyway; this is an industry that seems like it ought to be pretty competitive, and it's kinda not. Epic just owns it, from what I can tell).
That castle's a joke, though. No outer wall, no moats or ditches; it's built on flat rather than elevated ground, the portcullis is completely exposed...an enemy army from Meditech or McKesson Automation could storm it in hours.
FWIW I think that industry is actually not set up to be particularly competitive. Those ERP type things go through an incremental build-up of all sorts of niche features over the years, responding to hard-to-anticipate customer needs. I imagine a newcomer offering only 80% of the features might struggle to attract customers, even if at a much lower cost/more smoothly. Now add to that what I imagine must be a nightmare maze of regulations. I think that to have a shot, your company needed to be building something at roughly the exact same time Epic got started.
I don't know; I agree about new entrants, but there are existing competitors out there such as Cerner and Meditech, and from what I gather, Epic is just better. Better user interfaces, better tools, easier to use and customize, etc.
Sorry, this isn't high-effort or -value, but: I just want to comment that "an enemy army from Meditech or McKesson Automation could storm it in hours" made me laugh out loud. Thank you for writing that. <3
Like the character Wemmick in Dicken's 1861 novel "Great Expectations":
"Wemmick’s house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns.
“My own doing,” said Wemmick. “Looks pretty; don’t it?”
I highly commended it, I think it was the smallest house I ever saw; with the queerest gothic windows (by far the greater part of them sham), and a gothic door almost too small to get in at.
“That’s a real flagstaff, you see,” said Wemmick, “and on Sundays I run up a real flag. Then look here. After I have crossed this bridge, I hoist it up—so—and cut off the communication.”
The bridge was a plank, and it crossed a chasm about four feet wide and two deep. But it was very pleasant to see the pride with which he hoisted it up and made it fast; smiling as he did so, with a relish and not merely mechanically.
“At nine o’clock every night, Greenwich time,” said Wemmick, “the gun fires. There he is, you see! And when you hear him go, I think you’ll say he’s a Stinger.”
The piece of ordnance referred to, was mounted in a separate fortress, constructed of lattice-work. It was protected from the weather by an ingenious little tarpaulin contrivance in the nature of an umbrella.
“Then, at the back,” said Wemmick, “out of sight, so as not to impede the idea of fortifications,—for it’s a principle with me, if you have an idea, carry it out and keep it up,—I don’t know whether that’s your opinion—”
I said, decidedly.
“—At the back, there’s a pig, and there are fowls and rabbits; then, I knock together my own little frame, you see, and grow cucumbers; and you’ll judge at supper what sort of a salad I can raise. So, sir,” said Wemmick, smiling again, but seriously too, as he shook his head, “if you can suppose the little place besieged, it would hold out a devil of a time in point of provisions.”
Then, he conducted me to a bower about a dozen yards off, but which was approached by such ingenious twists of path that it took quite a long time to get at; and in this retreat our glasses were already set forth. Our punch was cooling in an ornamental lake, on whose margin the bower was raised. This piece of water (with an island in the middle which might have been the salad for supper) was of a circular form, and he had constructed a fountain in it, which, when you set a little mill going and took a cork out of a pipe, played to that powerful extent that it made the back of your hand quite wet.
“I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber, and my own gardener, and my own Jack of all Trades,” said Wemmick, in acknowledging my compliments. “Well; it’s a good thing, you know. It brushes the Newgate cobwebs away, and pleases the Aged. You wouldn’t mind being at once introduced to the Aged, would you? It wouldn’t put you out?”
I expressed the readiness I felt, and we went into the castle. There we found, sitting by a fire, a very old man in a flannel coat: clean, cheerful, comfortable, and well cared for, but intensely deaf.
“Well aged parent,” said Wemmick, shaking hands with him in a cordial and jocose way, “how am you?”
“All right, John; all right!” replied the old man.
“Here’s Mr. Pip, aged parent,” said Wemmick, “and I wish you could hear his name. Nod away at him, Mr. Pip; that’s what he likes. Nod away at him, if you please, like winking!”
“This is a fine place of my son’s, sir,” cried the old man, while I nodded as hard as I possibly could. “This is a pretty pleasure-ground, sir. This spot and these beautiful works upon it ought to be kept together by the Nation, after my son’s time, for the people’s enjoyment.”
“You’re as proud of it as Punch; ain’t you, Aged?” said Wemmick, contemplating the old man, with his hard face really softened; “there’s a nod for you;” giving him a tremendous one; “there’s another for you;” giving him a still more tremendous one; “you like that, don’t you? If you’re not tired, Mr. Pip—though I know it’s tiring to strangers—will you tip him one more? You can’t think how it pleases him.”
I tipped him several more, and he was in great spirits. We left him bestirring himself to feed the fowls, and we sat down to our punch in the arbour; where Wemmick told me, as he smoked a pipe, that it had taken him a good many years to bring the property up to its present pitch of perfection.
“Is it your own, Mr. Wemmick?”
“O yes,” said Wemmick, “I have got hold of it, a bit at a time. It’s a freehold, by George!”
Or give it an imagined history as a genuine castle which, over the centuries, has had the defensive elements removed or filled in due to disuse, because of times of peace.
Thank you for posting this, I loved it. The only Dickens I’ve ever read was “A Tale of Two Cities”, and I was immediately enthralled by the writing excerpt here in a way I don’t remember being for that other famous work of his.
I read a WSJ article, probably late 1990s. The upshot was that, when fast food chains examined who actually spent the most money at fast food places, it wasn’t kids or families with kids (as previously believed), but so-called “heavy users”.
Heavy users were young males, usually unmarried, and who ate fast food and nothing much else, often very loyal to a particular chain.
The article contained horrifying anecdotes of heavy users and their eating; I didn’t want to go near a fast food place for months out of fear that I might be turning into a heavy user.
It may be a bubble but it's a contained one. The US massively overbuilt railroads, the makers went bankrupt, but then new businesses could be created to use the now available tracks. Broadband was overbuilt the dot-com boom and later companies were made that had access to incredibly cheap fiber.
> There’s a debate going on between philosophers and AI researchers over whether AI can be conscious.
That's a really weird debate. If you dig down deep enough - it's equivalent to the "do you believe in soul?" question. If we think the consciousness is purely physical - it means it can be narrowed down to, arguably a ton, of equations. And those can be run on any hardware, either digital or organic (and for people loving putting quantum into everything - ok, if quantum effects are necessary then those will need to run on quantum computers, doesn't make them less artificial). If we think it's not purely physical - that means it's coming from something outside - "soul" or its analog in the religion of your choice.
You seem to presuppose that consciousness is information processing.
But maybe it's water wobbling in fat in a certain way instead. Or certain excitations in the electromagnetic field.
Then you can have a computer calculate some reasoning, mathematical proofs, or even exactly what happens in a brain for as long as you want, it won't get conscious, because there's neither water in fat nor the right electromagnetic waves in it.
"decreased public ritual participation → decreased personal importance → decreased identification"
The communist regime in Bulgaria (and I imagine other places) seems to have operated on the same model of secularization. In order undermine the church, they spent a lot of effort discouraging people from participating in public rituals. E.g. Easter Sunday would have the most interesting TV schedule (including otherwise uncommon foreign movies), Christmas was a working day etc. They even came up with a "civic naming" ritual to be performed for little children in lieu of a baptism. (That's in addition to infiltrating the organization, to the point that towards the end of the regime most senior bishops were likely state security agents).
I assume that means no sex allowed period.
It would be really weird if that alien sadness manifested only in a brief period before death, so you're probably back to immortal souls with the "souls" being whatever the aliens extract and take to live in their Good Place because they're sad about people dying at all but don't want to interfere in primitive cultures.
RFK Jr genuinely believes in some insane stuff around mRNA. On seed oils I am pretty sure he is wrong, but at least there is a theory and some (misinterpreted) evidence. On mRNA it is all bizarre online claims.
I know this is a silly aside to a serious discussion but I love "baby to bath water ratio" and will be stealing that particular phrasing!
I would like to see new mRNA therapies used to cure disease. However, I also have serious concerns about how the technology will be used. The government has already set a precedent that it can forced people to get mRNA treatments that they do not want or need, and that haven't been fully tested. If we want medicine to progress there needs to be a focus rebuilding the credibility that was shredded during covid and strengthening individual medical rights so that this kind of research is no longer viewed as a threat.
I don't have those concerns at all, I am orders of magnitude more worried about under provisions of new medical technology.
Then the thing to do is see if there's a way to satisfy both concerns: under-provisioning of new medical tech, and government overreach manifest as therapy mandates.
The obvious solution here appears to be to let mRNA research continue, ideally with completely private funding so that it can't be threatened by a lone government official or a lobbyist with the ear of one, and any products from that research being optional.
What do you think of the large-scale mandatory smallpox vaccination campaigns that eradicated the disease? I'm pretty sure the smallpox vaccine is more dangerous/harder on the patient on average than any of the covid vaccines, but damn, the world sure is better with no circulating smallpox in it!
I think the smallpox vaccination did a lot of good - I agree it's nice to not have to worry about smallpox, given the pictures I'd seen - but I also assumed it was largely voluntary, since I expect a lot of people agreed it'd be nice to not have smallpox and lined up for vaccination. I never looked into how many people refused, or what happened to them.
Meanwhile, I know of certain nationwide mandatory initiatives that carry all sorts of deleterious effects, and from that, I infer that nationwide mandates could be either good or bad.
Furthermore, I know to try to distinguish good or bad mandates by examining the incentives at work. If there's a disease that hits everyone, then everyone has an incentive to seek protection, and if no one's obviously getting rich from selling that protection, to not quibble much with the evidence telling them that it hits everyone. The result might be most people going along with the mandate, and the rest getting by on herd immunity, which means the mandate never had to be a mandate.
If, OTOH, they're hearing that only some people get hit, and that that cohort could be quarantined and treated as with previous contagions, and that the treatment uses a very novel technique, and that that technique might be very dangerous, and that that technique is implemented by only a few very wealth parties, who appear to be the same parties telling everyone it's fine and by the way we're trying to make it mandatory, then I notice that's a critically different set of incentives than what appeared to be at work during the smallpox epidemic.
I just do not understand this perspective at all. Over 1 million Americans died of Covid and a ton of nurses and doctors left the profession because it was so bad. From a policy perspective, some states stayed in quarantine too long sure, and they acknowledge that in hindsight. The vaccine and mRNA research indisputably saved a lot of lives- why are people bitching about vaccines and saying they didn't need it?
I don't understand how the bodily autonomy/ anti-vax people trying to shoot down research that could actually prevent cancer (which 1 in 3 people will get in their lifetime right now) isn't the most "missing the forest for the trees" take going on in our discourse right now.
Minimizing my chances of getting cancer is so much important to me than the state potentially violating your opinion of what bodily autonomy is in what everyone considered at the time to be a national emergency.
When the epidemic was in progress, I remember seeing legitimate concern raised about people being reported dead from Covid when it was actually a combination of things. E.g. someone gets Covid and dies, but was already 80 years old and with a history of other respiratory ailments. Or hospitals reporting deaths as Covid-related because of legislation promising extra financial aid to combat the crisis, leading to overreporting.
Meanwhile, there were other reports of the vaccine making some people less healthy, and even killing them in a few cases. There's even a causal chain describing how it can lead to myocarditis (mRNA leaves the injection site, reaches the heart, instructs heart cells to manufacture the spike protein, immune system kills those cells, heart wall is now weaker and more prone to rupture, especially during strenuous activity). This was combined with the known fact that young people were much less susceptible to Covid. So the argument was that for some people, especially young people (adults and children), the risk from the vaccine was actually greater than the risk of the disease itself.
When such arguments were made, the response was significantly more emotional than could be explained by a national threat backed by evidence, since if the arguments were true, a vaccine mandate was itself a national threat, and therefore worth a sober look. Instead, people were discredited for even making the argument, including medical experts. And then evidence began turning up of vaccine proponents saying things that weren't true, and hiding things that were. All the while, people noticed how much of the reporting in support of mRNA treatments happened to be sponsored by pharmaceutical companies selling those treatments. It's not hard to imagine they might report the upsides of mRNA treatments and suppress reporting of the downsides.
With that background, a lot of people sought a different authority, and there's RFK Jr. with a long reputation of having a different perspective, not obviously driven by profit margins (the hobgoblin of the day). That doesn't make him automatically correct, but the only alternative was the usual pharma-sponsored reporting, so the portion of public opinion that was already antagonized by said reporting ranged from "ehh, may as well try it" to "the enemy of my enemy must be my friend!".
This opinion, in turn, is probably driving opposition to *any* mRNA research, Covid or otherwise. This is likely wrong in the other direction, but there still remains the possibility that mRNA cancer researchers will highlight positive reports and suppress negative. Pharmaceuticals still possess a great deal of money, and command a great deal of loyalty.
If that research were all privately funded, it would at least ensure that anyone doing the work would be putting up their own money for it, rather than using taxpayer money as a lever. And it would be less likely to lead to a mandate.
I think this is quite accurate description of what is going on.
People became panicked that covid is such a danger. Largely correct for elderly but only slight risk increase for young people.
Compare this to riding a motorcycle that increases risk of death from traffic accident about 200 times compared to driving a car.
As for mRNA curing cancer, all researchers promise breakthrough. That's how they get funding. No breakthrough has happened in the last 50 years or so. Maybe mRNA would provide some incremental benefits for certain cancers. Who knows. But moving the funding into something else will not cause catastrophe. Not saying it was the right thing to do. For researchers who now need to look for something else to do, it is a problem. I can understand their frustration.
Nitpick: A ton of breakthroughs have happened, but each one works only on a small subset of cancers. Nobody's got a universal cure for cancer, but people are now surviving cancers that almost nobody survived 20 years ago.
Well, I think a comparison to motorcycle riding confounds the issue. A random person minding their own business could conceivably get Covid by standing next to someone else who has Covid who might not even show symptoms. A random person minding their own business won't die in a traffic accident by standing next to someone who rides motorcycles a lot.
Point being, different causes of death work in different ways, and "contagious disease, therefore vaccine mandate" in particular isn't a slam dunk good or bad argument either way.
Yeah, I think putting RFK in charge at HHS would not have happened in a world where those public health agencies had performed better during covid. But also, RFK is a nut, he has basically no idea what the hell he is doing, and putting him in a position of power over those agencies is pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster.
On the bright side, people might stop relying on politicians and be more active looking for more evidence themselves.
I know that RFK is a nut case but he is a politician, so what do you expect? I feel vindicated now, not because politicians could not be trusted during covid but because people who should have known better (Scott included) trusted them without evidence. Now they all are forced to look for better evidence (or just participate in a shouting match which is awful, I watched some clips from RFK senate hearing).
I'd never heard of RFKJr (I think) until he announced a presidential campaign for 2024. After that, I listened to him actually speak on one or two podcasts, each around three hours. He didn't strike me as a nut, in the manner of, say, someone who rants and raves tirelessly about some key position they hold. He's a lawyer who apparently did well enough to make a living, but didn't come off like a small-time ambulance chaser or an IP vampire.
All the evidence I found suggesting he was a "nut" so far is from people who run big pharmaceutical companies, work for big pharmaceutical companies, get paid by big pharmaceutical companies, spokespeople for the public health agencies that performed so poorly during the covid epidemic, or anonymous people on the internet.
There's also some unorthodox views he appears to have on vaccines for children, supported by evidence he claims he has, and some of which he's shared, which I haven't gotten around to looking at. I do hear it's all bunk... according to the aforesaid sources. They also have documentation - a lot of it - and it's apparently great... according to aforesaid sources.
So to learn more, I'd have to look into RFKJr's evidence, since it's the only evidence on the unorthodox side that doesn't ultimately rely on "because I said so, and my friends all say you can trust me".
I do recall at least one traditional vaccine turns out to have been certified safe based on a clinical trial carried out on four bunnies, three of which died. That could very well be an exaggeration, but it might turn up in a search.
I don't see any way that mRNA based cancer treatments would become mandatory for anyone. We don't do that with any cancer medicine now. The most likely outcome is that we get dozens of mRNA vaccine based drugs in the pipeline, and two or three end up being useful against some specific subtype of cancer, since that's what most cancer drugs end up doing. (If you have the subtype some drug usefully treats, you get to go on living; otherwise....)
More broadly, the reasoning you're giving for skepticism of mRNA vaccine technology may apply to covid vaccines (since those were absolutely rushed into use), but I do not see how it is anything but nuts to go from there to opposing research into other uses of the technology. This is just what you'd see if some other flavor of nut got into RFK's position and their visceral opposition to radioactive materials led them to try to defund research into medical treatments and imaging that use radioactive materials. Or someone who is opposed to GM crops and so demands that nobody use viral vector vaccines because they're also genetically engineered. Guilt by association is bad enough when it's at a person, but it makes even less sense directed at a broad class of technology.
Now, I'll also say that I do not think the covid vaccines used in the US were particularly dangerous. Some people had allergic reactions which absolutely were dangerous. Some had some kind of myocardia, probably because the vaccine was injected into their bloodstream instead of their muscle and some ended up being taken up by their heart muscle. We gave these vaccines to millions and millions of people, and if there were a lot of people dying from them, it would be impossible not to see that.
Nonspecialists getting this wrong is understandable. I very much wish our public health authorities, high-status media outlets, and high-status academic institutions/scientific organizations had not spent the last decade or so lighting their reputations and credibility on fire to stay on the right side of the Twitter consensus every day. Because you're a smart person with, and I do not mean this in a cruel way, a fundamentally broken and confused understanding of issues surrounding how vaccines work and vaccine safety. The median carpenter or preschool teacher is way *less* equipped to untangle this stuff than you are, and I'm guessing a ton of them have even more broken and confused understandings.
"When the epidemic was in progress, I remember seeing legitimate concern raised about people being reported dead from Covid when it was actually a combination of things. E.g. someone gets Covid and dies, but was already 80 years old and with a history of other respiratory ailments"
This sort of claim has been repeated ad nauseam, despite it how completely and immediately it falls apart to even casual attempts to interrogate it. Any time you hear this claim, you ought to immediately downgrade your estimation of the reliability of *anything and everything else* that source says. If you take it seriously yourself, we ought to do the same to you.
Looking at excess mortality figures is one extremely easy way to see how badly wrong this perspective is. If COVID *didn't* kill a million Americans, than the period in which COVID was at its height just *coincidentally* saw a million more deaths than statistical trends from previous years would have predicted. Another easy way is to simply ask "what would the baseline probability of dying from *any* other cause during the course of a two-week illness actually be?" The math can literally be done on the back of an envelope. Any way you slice it, this claim comes out smelling like crap.
Which government has set a precedent that it can require mRNA treatments?
Every government has set a precedent that it can require cowpox infection, and that seems far worse.
The US government at least set a precedent that it can make cowpox infection the default but it has to allow people to opt out for themselves or their children if they feel strongly enough about it (and use the right words).
Eliminating the opt-out clause was an escalation, and one that worries me, but it's one that has been in the works since classical Wakefieldian antivaxism took off and can't be entirely blamed on the COVID Warriors.
Biden tried to impose a covid vaccine mandate via OSHA rules, but you could get the J&J vaccine and remain unsullied by the dangers of mRNA, in favor of having the spike protein encoded in the DNA of a modified adenovirus instead.
Incidentally, I don't get what happened that made some people so afraid of RNA and spike proteins in *vaccine* form, but allowed them to remain totally calm when the RNA and spike proteins came in *virus* form - viruses do a lot more taking over of your cells and making them make spike proteins, *and* other proteins!
I don't think it's rational, I think "mRNA vaccine" got associated with the heavy-handed (and often hamfisted) covid policies in lots of peoples' minds. I think the set of people opposed to mRNA vaccines who could explain how they work is very small.
That doesn't seem like an mRNA specific problem. To the extent that we should be worried about compulsory medical treatment, the actual form of the treatment doesn't seem that important.
And it certainly doesn't seem a good idea to stop working on good medical treatments for the fear that they might become compulsory.
Isn't the entire idea of the American political system that you leave these policies to states, and then it works like experiments, you can see which states do better?
Yes and no. It’s a federal system and some things are left to the states while other things are regulated federally.
If pharmaceutical stuff were regulated by the states, it would likely significantly drive up compliance costs since each state would set its own regulations and requirements.
"is also the best evidence for an immaterial soul "
In my life, I slowly drifted from full atheism (which was the default position of kids born in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic) to uneasy agnosticism with a belief in soul, but in my case, the tipping point was learning just how many young kids make utterances about who they once were.
The spectacular cases are just a tip of the iceberg, as is the Ian Stephenson's collection etc. It happened several times among my own friends. It happens ever and ever again, in a very similar form, only the extent differs.
There is also a commonality: people are REALLY reluctant to admit something like that, and they will only confide in you if they know you won't label them and their children crazy and that you are positively interested in hearing about "weird" things. Plus it often goes against their own long-held beliefs, and things that oppose your beliefs tend to be tucked away in the least accessible corner of your mind, lest they destabilize you. We in the West live in a cultural space between older Christianity and modern atheism, and both are very hostile to the idea of reincarnation.
So there is likely a big "dark number" of such cases and the "violent skeptic types" (met more than a few myself, mostly people who were force-fed religion in their youth) can claim that they have never personally heard of a case, because they really haven't. But the reason for that absence of cases isn't in their non-existence. They are just a bad cultural fit.
Terminal lucidity at least does not collide with our widespread beliefs about (non-)existence of afterlife as much, so people are much more likely to admit they have seen it, and no one will be ostracized because of admitting so. No need to push any Overton window in this case.
Re: terminal lucidity: chapter 6 from Dale Allison's "Encountering Mystery" investigates it as an evidence for non-materialism, and comes away with a conclusion of "HUH". The book hasn't shifted me away from my agnostic-y materialism, but I enjoy it as a prod.
That’s all odd though because the disease itself is a clear proof of materialism
Great point.
Right - I've long considered Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases to be one of the strongest arguments against an "immortal soul", because we can often watch a "soul" get thoroughly morted in slow motion. But if that process suddenly reverses itself for no materially understandable reason as a person is in the process of dying, the proof of materialism is substantially weakened. So, yeah, HUH.
"But if that process suddenly reverses itself for no materially understandable reason as a person is in the process of dying, the proof of materialism is substantially weakened. So, yeah, HUH."
I agree it weakens the evidence of materialism, but it most definitely isn't strong evidence for a soul. If one is allowed to posit an immaterial soul that's hidden behind a malfunctioning material brain until it somehow "escapes" close to death, why can't we posit a functional material mind that's hidden behind the diseased parts of the brain until it somehow "escapes" close to death? I don't see how positing a soul provides any extra explanatory power.
To use a computer analogy, perhaps the mind is the CPU + RAM + motherboard + hard disk, while the rest of the body is the monitor. If there's a loose connection between the motherboard and the monitor, the monitor starts displaying nonsense, but the computer's memories and reasoning abilities are still intact. If someone whacks the computer hard enough, the VGA cable might connect properly again. (99% of the time, this doesn't happen and the computer is even more broken than before. Just like in humans, because terminal lucidity is rare.) Does this mean the computer has a soul?
Not sure how you mean it. Suppose a hardware glitch makes software in my computer malfunction, still it does prove that the software is somehow entirely the hardware, because the same software can be installed on another computer. Or "into the cloud" - heaven?
This gives us Aristotle's hylomorphic dualism. Aristotle didn't believe in some kind of immaterial supernatural entities, rather he said that form cannot be reduced to matter, and form is information. For example "4" on your screen and "IV" drawn in sand mean the same information, yet materially the are entirely different. Maybe we can say they are the same because they are the same message, same intent, same agreement between two minds. But then what should say about DNA information which is not a message meant for minds? Information is thus something mysterious, something not entirely described by material properties.
In India nobody is thought crazy for believing in soul, rebirth etc but I never heard of anybody personally knowing someone who made utterance about who they were (in a past birth).
This phenomenon is concentrated in the 2-7 age bracket, so the highest likelihood of hearing about it is when you have a lot of young mothers around you, plus when you are willing to extensively talk kid stuff with them.
2-7-year-old children not infrequently say all kinds of clearly-not-true things about the world with great confidence as if they are talking from experience. One such child of my acquaintance would talk at great length about their conversations with "the Queen Fairy", and could give quite a detailed and coherent account of the fairy community she was queen of. Others have more mundane "imaginary friends".
One possible conclusion is that the world is full of people (and other beings) visible only to individual small children. I don't think this is the most probable conclusion. And that is also roughly how I feel about children frequently knowing themselves to be reincarnations.
About a third of the cases collected at University of Virginia are "solved" in the sense that a concrete deceased person whose life fits the utterances of said child was identified. Sometimes in proximity (which weakens the case), sometimes far away.
People presume that everything around such topics is random hearsay, but there actually are researchers trying to collect cases systematically and make some sense of them. The biggest academic workplace doing so is Division of Perceptual Studies at UVa and they have been doing it since the 1960s.
Many people live quite similar lives.
How about religions who believe in reincarnations as animals or plants? "Yeah, that sounds like a very accurate description of what it's like to be an ant. This is clearly evidence that this child was an ant".
I also don't understand your characterization of Westerners. I'd say belief in reincarnation and starseeds and whatnot is among some of the common, accepted beliefs of hippie-dippy westerners. I'd wager there are areas in the Western world where this is more acceptable and normal than being a regularly church going Christian (example: my city, Copenhagen). I can imagine Czechia and the Eastern bloc to be different though, as you never had a proper hippie movement.
"Many people live quite similar lives."
Yes. They also sometimes have some unique experiences. For example, the database of cases collected at UVa indicates that there is a correlation with violent deaths of the putative previous personality.
"How about" ... what I am supposed to answer? Even in human-human cases we have only very fragmentary record. IIRC there is one or two cases in that huge heap where animal lives were mentioned, but it seems to be really, really rare.
We haven't had a hippie period during Communism and people who believe in reincarnation are considered odd, to say the least.
Incidentally, none of the gals who told me about their kids babbling about who they used to be was a hippie type or interested in Buddhism, or even somehow spiritual. One is a very hard-nosed, no-nonsense ORL surgeon.
In Copenhagen you have probably heard about Lama Ole Nydahl. Ole like all Buddhists talk about reincarnation without a soul, rather a grandfather's axe type of phenomenon, some stuff survives death, but eventually it is replaced by other stuff. Ole is not much "woo" hippie-like, he is quite pragmatic about Buddhism, seeing meditation etc. as tools for excellent mental health. "You recognize a yogi by his laughter."
OTOH the Eastern Bloc is FULL of "woo", because after 1990 it had hit us like suddenly as an avalanche (I am from Budapest), and we did not have immunity. Immunity means that in the West these things were already often proved to not work or were scams and there were financial scandals etc. Buddhism had been hurt in the US by Chogyam Trungpa Tulku's scandals. So yeah we used to have a huge Uri Geller fan club and trying to bend spoons ourselves :)
Indeed my view of parapsychology is the following. You take a bunch of illiterate people and do a literacy test, recognizing letters etc. of course the results are not different from randomness: people need to LEARN reading first. So why are they testing people for say telepathy who never ever had any kind of a training in even something remotely like that? Naturally, we don't know how to train people, but we should try testing mystics, shamans, Buddhist monks, Hindu yogis and so on first. Or fortune tellers. Fortune tellers basically just have a very good observation, concentration ability, and they read from your body language what do you think is true deep inside you. My mother could do that, she always predicted the outcome of my uni exams correctly by reading how I feel about them deep inside. Such concentration abilities might help with parapsychology tests.
I was certain around that age that I was an alien from an unknown planet and came up with an elaborate (and inane) mythology about how I got to earth (in this story I purported to have been alive long before my birth). I actually remember believing this, it's not just my parents retelling my childish delusions.
My unempirical pet theory is that the idea of coming into existence (not unlike the idea of ceasing to exist) is so intuitively incomprehensible to the human mind that children, who can't yet understand such concepts abstractly even, often feel a strong urge to invent memories before they were born to explain how they currently exist.
> learning just how many young kids make utterances about who they once were.
You would expect young kids, who talk a lot and are still understanding the language, and might sometimes say things just to get a reaction, to say all sorts of stuff.
I mean I'm not convinced of "there is a massive number of cases, but people hide them because skeptics". The "skeptics" are a pretty modern and culturally specific phenomena.
If they are a source of unreasonably accurate info, you have good evidence. Otherwise it's probably some quirk of developmental linguistics.
It's often *claimed* that unreasonably accurate info is indeed forthcoming, but it never seems to be well-documented beforehand—i.e., the most spectacular claims rely upon the honesty & memory of people who really, really want it all to be true.
At least, that's what I found when I tried to look into it; certainly glad to hear any about really convincing evidence I may have missed, though.
What would be your standard for "to be well-documented beforehand"?
This is a very complicated phenomenon to study. Young kids will not cooperate the same way that adults do, much less with strangers. First observers are almost always amateurs from family and can screw up things with seeding the kid's memory by random facts. It may also take months for anyone to take things seriously; the typical kid around 2 years of age can barely talk in sentences.
All those things summed together - it is devilishly hard to develop good, rigorous, convincing framework of study around such spontaneous phenomena. You can't study this in mice, you can't keep any data pristine. These are living people in their familial environment.
It is much more straightforward to study non-living nature or basic biochemistry than this, and we are still fairly ignorant about important topics there.
If you really put your preexisting beliefs aside and ponder the question "how to study such stuff seriously", the immensity of the problem will strike you.
Terminal lucidity is straightforward in comparison. For starters, it fairly reliably occurs in one place (nursing homes) and you can record that person and interact with them to show that they are, indeed, lucid. You also have a long health record proving their earlier dementia problems.
There are studies of things like risk of cancer and heart disease where huge numbers of participants are recruited, with full understanding up front that only a small percentage will end up being relevant. Maybe some parapsychology research group needs to run a ten-year, N = 100,000 survey where they give kids in the relevant age range a dictaphone (with parental consent, of course), then filter resulting conversational transcripts for past-life claims which might be possible to independently confirm or dispute.
I certainly think that the field is worth more attention, but the practical problems seem to be daunting.
We probably don't have dictaphones small enough and with long-enough battery life that toddlers and pre-schoolers could carry them around all day long, not being burdened with them and not break them.
Filtering the resulting heap of utterances would also be a huge task, though AI could perhaps help with that.
As someone with background in data protection, I also would not like the fact that this would somewhat normalize mass surveillance for the families and kids involved, though this may be my peculiar pet peeve. Given what people tell on themselves on Facebook, an average person might not care.
Finally - this is a field where open questions might help with investigation, but that already requires some cooperation and good-faith cooperation from the parents. The relevant cases indicate that kids are sometimes "in the mood" to make such statements and will be willing to provide more details on further prompting, but in that case, everyone has to be really, really careful not to lead them somewhere.
Cancer is easier to detect; for starters, it is not ephemeral, unlike verbal statements. If it is there today, it will likely be there tomorrow.
> We probably don't have dictaphones small enough and with long-enough battery life that toddlers and pre-schoolers could carry them around all day long, not being burdened with them and not break them.
That's just a smart watch, with a particularly low bar for the "smart," or a hearing aid plus a microSD drive. Microphones small enough to conceal date back to at least the cold war, while batteries and digital storage media have wildly improved.
> The relevant cases indicate that kids are sometimes "in the mood" to make such statements and will be willing to provide more details on further prompting, but in that case, everyone has to be really, really careful not to lead them somewhere.
Step one is proving the phenomenon exists at all, to the satisfaction of folks with an intense and well-founded skepticism that such a thing is possible even in principle. Calling the shot with a massive pre-registered study, then being able to say something like:
"Out of ### children, we algorithmically identified XX coherent past-life claims, of which YY were specific and recent enough to be meaningfully tested against the historical record, then ZZ% of those were found to be either substantially accurate, or compatible with contemporary eyewitness accounts, by an independent board of historians and archivists. Here's the whole exabyte of raw audio data if you want to check our work,"
...with no reasonable recourse to prompting or cherry-picking, would either corner skeptics into admitting that something real was happening, or, if it didn't turn up enough solid examples, at least establish some sort of clear statistical upper bound on the phenomenon's observable frequency.
Maybe it'd catch a solid hour of some little weirdo's spontaneous recitation of a substantial portion of the Saga of Burnt Njal, when nobody else in the kid's immediate family speaks any icelandic, or otherwise provide some extraordinary evidence that investigators wouldn't have thought to ask for.
Once there's a baseline of what 'typical' cases look like while they're not being actively meddled with by investigators - a control group - *then* you can start asking questions or doing other such active experiments.
There is an utterly absurd amount of video evidence documenting what kids say as recorded by their parents since the invention of the smartphone. I would argue that a Western mother who came to believe their 5 y/o child was a reincarnation of someone from another culture would have, prior to that time, collected 100 hrs of recordings of the child that still would be accessible on their phone, laptop or cloud storage, from which evidence could be gleaned. We live in an age with more voluminous direct audio-visual evidence of childhood behavior than was previously imaginable. Such evidence would be time-stamped and show age development phases that would not be trivial to fake right now, but may be trivial to fake in a few years, so now would be the time, this is as good as the case could ever possibly get to being made. If they aren't coming up with anything amazing here in 2025, then it probably isn't out there or isn't going to be found before AI video forgery renders all such evidence unreliable.
> All those things summed together - it is devilishly hard to develop good, rigorous, convincing framework of study around such spontaneous phenomena. You can't study this in mice, you can't keep any data pristine.
You have a supposed phenomena that is
1) At best a faint signal.
2) Utterly at odds with known science
3) Very hard to study.
So I'm going in to this with a strong prior of "this doesn't exist", and I'm seeing at best weak evidence.
Now you can make a case that strong priors aren't justified here.
Or you can make a case that you do actually have rigorous evidence.
But the difficulty of gathering evidence can't be used as a substitute for evidence.
Please do not confuse science with materialist philosophy. The normal case should be that science is downstream from philosophy, because the scientific method is defined by philosophers like Popper. Science is specifically defined as the study of material phenomena. Thus it is wrong to construct a philosophy up from science and say that all that exists is what science can find. For example, numbers are in no sense material.
So far our only scientific evidence specifically against - as opposed to unknown, neutral - the soul is that when the brain is damaged, the mind does not work well. But that can be countered by the idea that the soul might be a radio broadcaster, the brain a radio receiver. Clearly, if I take an axe to a radio, it will not play the broadcast correctly, or not at all. This is not evidence against the broadcast.
Certainly, there is no scientific evidence in favour of it either. So it does not contradict science, rather that science is neutral on this.
> Thus it is wrong to construct a philosophy up from science and say that all that exists is what science can find.
There may be things that exist that exist that science can't find. But I have no way of knowing about them. And there are many more things that don't exist than that do exist. So some random thing that science can't detect probably doesn't exist.
> For example, numbers are in no sense material.
Numbers stored in a silicon chip are made of real electrons.
> So far our only scientific evidence specifically against - as opposed to unknown, neutral - the soul is that when the brain is damaged, the mind does not work well. But that can be countered by the idea that the soul might be a radio broadcaster, the brain a radio receiver.
That is far from our only scientific evidence against a soul.
Neurons can be grown in a lab dish, and trained to play simple computer games. So either these neurons in a dish are connecting to a mini computer-game soul, or neurons also do computation.
Human behavior matches up with evolutionary survival + reproduction. Why would a soul care about getting lots of sugar (in a way that correlated with inclusive genetic fitness in the ancestral environment)
And the "radio receiver" analogy doesn't work well either. A somewhat damaged radio reciever, set to a science program, will say the same science, just cracklier. Whereas brain damage makes people stupider, different from a bad signal.
Known science (thermodynamics) says that anything that does irreversible computation must radiate waste heat. No soul-heat has been detected.
The standard model of physics with quarks and electrons etc doesn't have "souls".
I recommend looking into the work of people who studied this phenomenon, like Jim Tucker. The more developed cases have remarkably consistent traits across cultures.
And it is not just because of skeptics. It is also "because they themselves are skeptics". For many Westerners, the idea that your sweet kid may not be completely yours, is deeply disturbing.
"The "skeptics" are a pretty modern and culturally specific phenomena."
Someone else played that role in pre-modern times, for example, priests. Christianity is hostile to the idea of reincarnation and claims like that could get you in trouble.
One of the phenomena that Ian Stevenson regularly encountered during his studies among the Tlingit, who are still half-pagan, is that the more Christian ones were really reluctant to talk about their experiences, while the more pagan ones were fairly open.
I wonder if terminal lucidity is more in the nature of "first in, last out", in that dementia preferentially strips away cognitive layers built up in later childhood and youth, to reveal the first, perhaps more robust and simpler, structures. One of my granny's final words on her deathbed was "beautiful", and it seems quite plausible (although I don't know for sure) that this was one of the first long words she learned as an infant.
It is extremely well documented how dementia patients often remember more from their youth and think they are young. My mom with dementia thinks I'm 10. So yeah, that's my bet too.
I'm deeply skeptical of this. People always say they were some cool and important person in a past life. You'd expect 95% of people to say "I was a peasant farmer".
Kids often have invisible friends, does this mean an alternative universe with these friends in them exist?
This is a common TV trope, but if you actually read the reports of cases collected at University of Virginia (where they have the largest collection of cases), it is indeed as you say - totally random peasants or artisans or rank-and-file soldiers etc.
Please don't confuse small-child studies with adult regressive hypnosis. Adult regressive hypnosis is clearly bunk, people basically just say whatever they saw in movies, so they say they were Vikings, not Chinese, even though the Chinese have much much larger numbers.
Small children DO say they were herding sheep etc.
That's not necessarily how reincarnation works. For example, the Hindu view of the reincarnation cycle (Samsara) is that (in a very roughly simplified form) souls go through many rebirths, not necessarily in humans, with righteous living leading to future "good" rebirths. I would argue that rebirthing into a middle class child in the modern developed world is a pretty decent rebirth (top 0.1%?) both compared to being reborn into a hell or into frog or a fly and to being reborn into a human in another time/society. So a Hindu would expect the previous lives of these children to be quite remarkable. They would expect some people to remember little as the previous life may not have been quite human conscious, e.g. they could have been cows or horses.
"Righteous living leading to future "good" rebirths" sound exactly like social engineering. Any reliable evidence - other than people believing stuff?
I am offering no evidence here, just pointing out that a particular observation on the distribution of prior interesting lives is consistent with the traditional beliefs.
Sure. I was just commenting that people believing things is not reliable evidence for anything except that people can have beliefs. False beliefs often have good effects. Maybe we should have a separate category of Useful Beliefs That Aren't Reliable Correct. Maybe we already do, kinda.
Every religion has enormous collections of this sort of anecdotal evidence in support of absolutely mutually-exclusive ideas of the supernatural. For example, Christians reporting near-death experiences often describe meeting Jesus, while Hindus describe being judged by Yama, and so on.
There's a profound epistemological problem in our culture, which is that when judging whether a pattern of suggestive evidence is a coincidence, we tend to do so without really taking into account the how much cherry-picking went into producing that evidence- we just sort of intuitively feel "this could be a coincidence" or "this is too much evidence to be coincidental", and we apply that same vague heuristic standard to every pattern of evidence we encounter.
This is a problem because the more you sort through a large amount of data, the more coincidences you'll find, and the more unlikely they'll be- there isn't really a limit to how many you can find, it's just a matter of effort. So, when you have a subculture collectively looking for evidence in support of a false idea, it's actually very easy and common for them to find a large enough collection of suggestive coincidences to trigger that "this is too much evidence to be coincidental" intuition in most people.
There's an easy way to identify when a set of evidence is actually one of these collections- just choose a few specific pieces of evidence at random and look into them more deeply. If the evidence is pointing to a real phenomenon, then randomly chosen specifics should become more convincing when you learn more details about them, while if it's a vast collection of coincidences, randomly chosen details will seem less compelling when you learn more. For example, in the wake of the 2020 US election, a really vast amount of seemingly compelling evidence that the election was stolen was shared on social media by Trump supporters, and intuitions of "this is too much evidence to be coincidental" were very common. However, each piece of evidence would very consistently fall apart under closer scrutiny- the evidence would be something like "a Republican election observer was thrown out of a polling station", but then the details would be that they were one of ten Republican observers at that station, and were thrown out for ordinary rule violations. When you notice that a few random samples of evidence in a collection like that become weaker rather than stronger under scrutiny, it's very likely that the entire pattern of evidence is a product of cherry-picking, no matter how large.
If you were to select a couple of these stories of past life memories at random- and I mean really at random, not just some famous examples- I predict that examining the details would make them seem similarly less convincing than how they were presented.
I'm confident in that prediction because for hundreds of years, supernatural and materialist worldviews have made different predictions about what we'd discover when investigating new things- and very, very consistently, the materialist predictions have turned out to be the true ones. Many millions of very dedicated people have used the scientific method to investigate every aspect of reality, and have only ever found replicable experimental evidence of material things. It doesn't make any sense that the supernatural would be immune to scientific investigation- if it existed, we'd not only have plenty of real evidence of it by now, rather than just giant collections of anecdotes, but we'd probably have incorporated it into tons of useful technologies.
Every time a material explanation of something once thought supernatural is proven, spiritualist ideologies offer up a "God of the gaps" explanation. But this has been going on for so long now that the pattern should be obvious. At some point, we need to just admit that the supernatural isn't real.
> Every religion has enormous collections of this sort of anecdotal evidence in support of absolutely mutually-exclusive ideas of the supernatural. For example, Christians reporting near-death experiences often describe meeting Jesus, while Hindus describe being judged by Yama, and so on.
This clearly isn't " a coincidence", it's clearly strong evidence that human brains are weird.
Absolutely. By "coincidence", I just mean a piece of evidence that only supports an idea coincidentally- that is, it doesn't really support the idea, but by pure chance, it appears to do so when taken out of context.
So, in the full context of weird things humans experience when our brains aren't functioning correctly, near-death experiences aren't really unusual; in fact, it's possible to induce very similar experiences with transcranial magnetic stimulation, ketamine, etc. But mostly by pure chance, this weird brain thing appears to support religious narratives, so these cases are often cherrypicked in large numbers to give an impression of overwhelming evidence in support of the religions.
I suspect humans have a lot of instincts that are calibrated to the amount of evidence one could reasonably collect while living in a small hunter-gatherer tribe.
When considering how impressive a trend is, or how likely it is that an exception exists, I like to remind myself "reality is big". For example, if I see someone online telling a story that seems very unlikely to me, I try to remind myself that what could plausibly happen to a close friend, and what could plausibly have happened to a self-selected stranger on the Internet, are very different things, because the second one is pulling from a much vaster pool.
Cool. Start here. It is even photographed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Zeitoun
I think that photo is an excellent example.
On first glace, it looks like compelling evidence for the event, but on closer inspection, you notice that the photo was taken in the daytime, while the sky is oddly dark. At first, this seems like only a small dent in the photo's credibility- surely there are reasons a sky in a daytime photo might appear dark. But then you notice that it's not just dark, but a flat, undifferentiated black. Clouds can't cause that during the daytime, nor can anything to do with exposure levels. Maybe an infrared camera? Then, looking closer, you notice that the line between the domes and sky is very rough, as though crudely masked out with a charcoal pen. Could that just be bloom from the brightness of the domes? But no, there are sharp lines without any bloom right below the dome- including a vertical line on the left side that doesn't follow the dome's geometry, suggesting masking tape.
The truth is that there were reported to be a number of artists who set up shop at the event and sold quickly-made, fully acknowledged composite illustrations to the tourists. This anonymously-sourced photo is one of them. There were also a lot of reporters at the event with high-quality cameras and video recording equipment. If there was something to photograph, they would have done so and published it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing you chose this photo not really at random, but because it's one of the strongest pieces of evidence of the supernatural you're familiar with. I'm sure with effort, you could find stronger evidence, but I think it's fair to say that this is pretty typical of the best evidence we have for the supernatural. My argument is that if the supernatural really existed, then after many centuries of this, the normal quality of the evidence would be much stronger. We'd most likely have things like repeatable experiments and practical applications, and that evidence would lead to new, unexpected discoveries that would produce new evidence, not just endlessly support every existing, contradictory spiritual tradition.
For me, a materialist, the most compelling evidence for something weird going on with death is the phenomenon where family members in distant locations have sudden knowledge of a loved one's death or mortal danger that later is proven to have been correct to within a few minutes. Of course it's possible that these phenomena are confabulated or misremembered. But they are widely reported across demographics, and premonition of death isn't exactly something that most people experience every day, or even every year (so the argument "of course sometimes a death premonition is going to be accurate" is hard to make.)
Of course the nature of the phenomenon makes it extremely hard to study.
A few weeks before my grandfather died he told me he was going on a long journey and he would see me again in a thousand years.
I assume his body know on some level that he was about to die and he was saying the kind of things you say when you know you're going to die. Still pretty creepy though.
If anything, children doing this is evidence against soul, because the biggest reincarnation hypothesis nowadays is Buddhism, which very crucially depends on Anatman, including nonexistence of souls
Yes, but that is mostly semantics. Anatman means the human mind has no kind of unchanging layer that would be the exact same throughout lives. It has a very grandfather's axe view of the mind, everything replacable and being replaced, but DOES claim some aspect of the mind does survive death and does not depend on the body, which is the contentious issue for materialists / physicalists.
From what I've read, I think the interpretation of anatman as meaning the definitive non-existence of souls might be a longstanding western misconception or at least only applicable to some Buddhisms.
E.g. even the wikipedia article on the topic now says "While often interpreted as a doctrine denying the existence of a self, anatman is more accurately described as a strategy to attain non-attachment by recognizing everything as impermanent, while staying silent on the ultimate existence of an unchanging essence."
But, before wikipedia, I mostly came across the idea from from Thanissaro Bhikkhu who has translated a ton of the Pali Canon and made it available for free online along with a billion articles on Buddhism within the Thai Forest tradition of Theravada now at www.dhammatalks.org
E.g. https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN22.html
"The second mistaken inference is that, given the thoroughness with which the Buddha teaches not-self, one should draw the inference that there is no self...." [And in this sutta the Buddha explicitly lists "I have no self" as one of several views around the topic of self for which "Bound by a fetter of views, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person is not freed from birth, aging, & death, from sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair."] [Also of note is the first mistaken inference, which is that "he denies the limited, temporal self as a means of pointing to one’s identity with the larger, unlimited, cosmic self" So it seems like the two most common ideas about Buddhism are both wrong.]
And Thanissaro suggests that
https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/TruthOfRebirth/Section0008.html
"As part of his policy of not getting pinned down on issues of scale when presenting the process of rebirth, the Buddha was careful to avoid an issue that animated his contemporaries when they discussed rebirth: the metaphysics of what a person is, and what does or doesn’t get reborn after death. In other words, he refused to explain whether any “what” underlay the experience of rebirth. He simply talked about how the experience happened and what could be done to end it. In modern philosophy this approach is called phenomenology: talking about the phenomena of experience simply in terms of direct experience, without making reference to any underlying reality that may or may not stand behind that experience. The Buddha was a radical phenomenologist in that he dealt with experience on its own terms. He was a pragmatist in that he adopted this approach because he saw that it worked in bringing suffering to an end."
I also recommend this article around the topic
https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/uncollected/ThreePerceptions.html
Oh, and this minibook
https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/SelvesNot-self/Contents.html
"how many young kids make utterances about who they once were"
Yes, this is fairly well documented, in general small kids knowing things they are not supposed to know. I was like 3 when I demanded that I should be considered an adult and have equal voting rights in the family, now where could I have got that from? I also remember being 3 and feeling like an adult strangely trapped in a little body.
Notice that according to Buddhists reincarnation can happen without a soul (anatman) in a very grandfather's axe way, some "stuff" survives death, but then eventually that "stuff" also gets replaced by other stuff.
There are also some weird personal habits, preferences and fears.
Personally, I don't remember anything like previous lives, but I am strangely drawn to a "lonely hunter" lifestyle, with reasonable shooting skills that I didn't have to learn at all (guys from the Czech Army actually praised me, a total amateur, during a random shooting range visit), I like walking alone across empty snowfields on snowshoes, tending a fire... weird, weird for a rust belt city boy who grew up in Communist Czechoslovakia and knew no one who would practise such things or even talk about them.
The first time I stood on snowshoes (at 32 years of age), I had an intense feeling of doing something well-known again.
Snowshoes are NOT popular in my country. Not entirely unknown either, but people usually either ski down the slopes or do cross-country skiing. Snowshoes are a marginal activity; everyone I know who did it did so due to my personal nagging...
BTW tangentially related, but can someone tell me who is the "least bad" living parapsychology researcher or research institute? The idea would be that I would actually like to talk with them, like per email or forum, and don't want to waste my time on obvious scammers or fools.
Try Jim Tucker at DPS UVa. He strikes me as a fairly reasonable guy.
There was a quite famous Icelandic scientist called Erlendur Haraldsson with a lot of publications, but he died in 2020, so if the idea we are discussing has any merit, he is probably just potty-training again :D
12. While I can't speak for programmers, from a translator's point of view one of the things is that while machine translation (MT) has (obviously! visibly!) gone up in quality, the issue now is less "this is complete crap so I'll just basically rewrite it entirely) and more "this is very good but trying to figure out where it is wrong or where it can be improved is now about spotting multiple needles in a haystack, meaning I have to exert actual brainpower in a different way than when just doing basic translation on autopilot".
26. Couldn't this be a push-side issue? The COVID era was inconvenient to Westerners but an absolute catastrophe in a lot of third-world countries, where the medical infrastructure was not just strained but genuinely did collapse in places and authoritarian measures were less nudgey and more brute-force. India, in particular, was whaled by Covid pretty hard (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/21/system-has-collapsed-india-descent-into-covid-hell), and even people who didn't actually bear the effects might have been spooked and grown more anxious about living in a third-world country, pushing them to commit to the actually-quite-high-threshold choice of moving to a whole different country.
56. Related to my answer to 12, while there continues to be more than enough work in human translation for me (this is probably actually going to be my best year for earnings ever, I've also started studying for a new career due to reports from others working in the field, and what I've gone for is political science - in particular planning to specialize in the intersection of politics and AI, on the assumption that this is going to be a field where a lot of people interested in expert info on politics are actually not going to fully trust AI and might want a human opinion.
Third world people's choice of moving to the West remains constant. From my experience, there was no such effect of covid. The filter is how many people the West is going to accept.
There have obviously been spikes in willingness to migrate related to wars and such, such as with Ukraine in 2022 (not Third World but still vastly poorer than the West). No reason to not at least consider that the Covid crisis (moreso than the disease itself) might have a similar effect.
There's a difference between general theoretical willingness to move... some day, you know, not just right now, there's so much on the table right now with the kids and everything... and an acute actualization of that willingness.
But not in India. Many people I know have emigrated in recent years but it was not the push, let alone covid, but the pull.
The commonwealth countries plus Ireland were very accepting of immigration lately.
Right but for one year a lot of them were prevented from crossing borders, so we expect the next year to have catchup effects.
To add to your anecdata, "this is very good but trying to figure out where it is wrong or where it can be improved is now about spotting multiple needles in a haystack, meaning I have to exert actual brainpower in a different way than when just doing basic translation on autopilot" is definitely also true for me when trying to use AI for software engineering or documentation tasks. I find it exhausting, but suspect this will get a bit better with practise.
TBH, as a programmer I'd much rather have "obviously wrong" than "wrong in very subtle ways." The second is a disaster waiting to happen, the first can get easily caught by simple code review (or just fails to build).
I agree, but also, to be fair, I think we already have that problem with code written by humans, and code review of human-written code misses subtle problems all the time. So I'm seeing this trajectory accelerating software engineering job requirements toward "need to get better at reviewing code." To be clear, I don't like it, but that seems to be where it's headed.
Yeah. But flooding the zone with crap doesn't help. And LLMs, if nothing else, are great at presenting as really good. I know my colleagues and they're willing to say when they're not sure. Adding LLMs just adds a layer of "confident teenager BS" to it.
I taught high school, and I found that kids usually fell into one of two traps--either outwardly unsure and "help me, I don't know what I'm doing" (even when they did) or super overconfident "I got this" even when they have no clue. LLMs definitely are the latter. And the latter is way more dangerous, even if the former is (often) more annoying to deal with[1].
[1] I hated performative wimpiness. Yes, you know what you're doing. And you know you know what you're doing. But you can't, for various social reasons, *be seen* to know what you're doing. And that grinds my gears for various reasons.
" But you can't, for various social reasons, *be seen* to know what you're doing."
We had a version of it when we saw being a good student implies submission to the teacher, and that is something a truly masculine boy does not do, so we played a complicated game of claiming to not have studied like some tough, defiant rebel, and then aced the test by "luck".
That's funny because I saw it way worse with girls. Guys tended to just be overconfident, not wanting to show doubt (aka weakness). But I was dealing with upper-middle class (and above) mostly WASP kids (or indians/Asians with tiger moms).
There are subtle issues with code written by humans. But with humans, there are certain correlations between bad thought patterns and bad local structure, while LLMs keep up local structure always.
It’s the same problem with errors on Wikipedia - there’s a layer of editorial polish applied to everything on Wikipedia, so when an error gets in, it doesn’t have all the cues that usually help us recognize when something is crazy.
I would say, when catching the bugs of other programmers, we often figure out how did that person think, what was their mental model and how that was wrong. The AI bugs are very random, yet "look correct" (as that code would work in other situations) and thus harder to catch.
And other programmers can learn from their mistakes. LLMs fundamentally can't.
How do you currently find work as a translator? What languages do you work in?
English -> Finnish, currently working almost entirely for long-established clients.
For me it helps to actually translate something myself, fully, and then prompt the same text to AI. It allows me to get a second opinion, provides fresh ideas, alternatives. More work in the end, but obviously higher overall quality of the final work.
12. I've heard it's because antibodies or whatever else is fighting disease are also harmful to body, and when it gives up (or unable to continue working), the body is suddenly freed of a burden. Of course the disease is still there and will kill the body soon.
Is this actually current leading theory or another reddit baseless speculation?
33. I thought the clones will have aging as if they're born the same time as the original one, or have I missed lots of developments in cloning technology?
Re33: No, clones start at age 0 at birth. I think the first cloned animal (dolly) had some signs of premature aging, but that was AFAIK either just bad luck or due to lack of experience with the cloning procedure.
On the age of consent map: At least for Germany, this is super clickbaity. Yes, age of consent is 14 in the sense that if you romp your 15 year old partner as a 14 year old, your mom cannot do anything about it. However, there is an unrelated pedophilia paragraph that clearly states that you can't have sex as an adult with a minor (i.e. someone under 18). AFAIK there is some leniency in cases when a 17 year old and a 19 year old are having consensual sex - while it is possible to bring charges, they would usually not be pressed by the state because common sense and waste of public ressources and whatnot.
Came here to say the same. Either extremely intellectually dishonest or lazy.
MuGo Gonzalez admits he doesn't have a source for the claim:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-september-2025/comment/152293337
Maybe, since you think it's "extremely intellectually dishonest or lazy," you could provide one.
For example, while it's true that in Greece the age of consent is 15, there are exceptions for abusing positions of authority:
https://www.lawspot.gr/nomikes-plirofories/nomothesia/n-4619-2019/arthro-342-poinikos-kodikas-nomos-4619-2019-katahrisi
https://www.lawspot.gr/nomikes-plirofories/nomothesia/n-4619-2019/arthro-343-poinikos-kodikas-nomos-4619-2019-katahrisi-se
And the framing is wrong anyway. You can't go around breaking the law with the excuse 'well, it's legal in some other random country'!
And besides the law, rest assured that there would be an outcry in the UK or Greece if a tycoon were having sex parties with 15 or 16 year olds, even if it were legal.
Sure, but that makes it clear it's simply a matter of law, akin to a speed limit: the state may penalize it arbitrarily harshly, but it's retarded to pretend it's a fundamental moral issue if it changes based on jurisdiction.
It's not like a speed limit, because like I said, in Europe too there'd be an outcry if a grown man were having sex parties with teens, even if it were legal.
So basically unless you do so through abuse of a position of authority, it's legal to have sex with a 15 yo in Greece. Looks like the map is accurate.
I didn't say the map is inaccurate. It's the tweet I take issue with.
+1. That map is complete nonsense.
The map is directly from Wikipedia so it's probably accurate, but the interpretation is nonsense and/or ragebait. The numbers are absolute lower limits, but there is per-country legal nuance between those ages and 18/21.
The weird thing is, it is the same in many of the states in the US.
For example, in Vermont:
> § 3252(c) No person shall engage in a sexual act with a child who is under the age of 16, except:
> where the persons are married to each other and the sexual act is consensual; or
> where the person is less than 19 years old, the child is at least 15 years old, and the sexual act is consensual.
Essentially if the age difference is not too great then most places seem to consider that okay. But a 40-year-old seducing a 14-year-old is considered illegal pretty much everywhere.
And if Americans really want to get riled up about something, maybe they should look at their own child marriage laws.
It's so prevalent it has an informal name, Romeo and Juliet laws.
Of course, Juliet is 13, and Romeo is generally assumed to be 16-18. A 5 year age gap is somewhat into creepy territory, already.
But generally, not taking the age gap into account would lead to weird effects where two people can have sex in one year, and a year later the older of them would go to jail for it.
Genarlow Wilson comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_v._State
>But a 40-year-old seducing a 14-year-old is considered illegal pretty much everywhere.
But that isn't true. "MuGo Gonzalez" asserted that in Germany "there is an unrelated pedophilia paragraph that clearly states that you can't have sex as an adult with a minor (i.e. someone under 18)" which probably made you think he's seen an actual legal document saying that, but when challenged to provide a source, said he had none. He also asserted that, if it were true, the "right-wing populists" would be making an issue of it. My guess is that "Gonzalez" is not a German, but rather an American who, like a lot of Americans, cannot fathom that people in foreign countries don't share American attitudes toward sex. This whole thing is indicative of the lazy thinking of the ACX comments section.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-september-2025/comment/152293337
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-september-2025/comment/152292654
Sorry to disappoint you, German since birth, born and raised here (i.e. Germany) (:
Sorry- disapproving of a 40 year old having sex with a 14 year old is a uniquely American attitude?
Given the amount of support Roman Polanski got for sleeping with a 13yo when he was 43, it's easy to think so. But probably part of that is "Great Artists(tm) are special, and obviously adolescent girls really want to sleep with them, that's one of the perks of being a Great Artist".
And quite a bit of that support came from inside the US.
I think the lack of disapproval for 40 year olds persueing relations with teenagers is a uniquely French attitude. See also: the President.
Yeah, I came here to say the same thing. According to the website I found when Googling “age of consent by state” (http://sol-reform.com/50-state-age-of-majority-v-age-of-consent/), the US states range between those same numbers, so I don’t know what point they’re trying to make.
Are you sure about that? When I search for this on the interne, it seems to me it is 14 as long as the younger party consented and was not "forced to consent" or something like that.
Wikipedia says ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent_in_Europe#Germany ):
"The age of consent in Germany is 14, as long as a person over the age of 21 does not exploit a 14- to 15-year-old person's lack of capacity for sexual self-determination, in which case a conviction of an individual over the age of 21 requires a complaint from the younger individual; being over 21 and engaging in sexual relations with a minor of that age does not constitute an offence by itself. Otherwise the age of consent is 16 for most purposes, although some protections against abuse do apply beyond this age (under Section 182(1): it is illegal to engage in sexual activity with a person under 18 "by taking advantage of an exploitative situation""
This reddit thread also confirms it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/13h2dgo/whats_the_real_age_of_consent/
The wikipedia article has similar information about other countries, eyeballing seems to imply to me that the map is mostly correct. I can certainly confirm that the 14 year old limit is true for Hungary, as long as the adult is not in some superior relation to the other (e.g. teacher, coach etc), and it is actually 12 years as long as both parties are below 18.
I'm not a lawyer, so the honest answer is always "no, I'm reiterating what my culture tells me is the lived reality of the law". However, my main point is: The map is used to imply that any horny 50yo can have sex with an underage girl in Germany and get away with it, whereas my take-away from the press coverage on cases involving sex with minors is that it would be utterly naive to think "but we love each other!" is a cunning legal strategy that will buy you any goodwill, because it is simply assumed that most relationships between older men and much younger women are not based on romantic love and ulterior motives are therefore more likely than not. Thus, I maintain that no, Jeffrey Epstein could not build a pedophilia empire with the full backing of the German legal system and therefore pretending that the current consent age in Germany is something that should worry the US seems outlandish. Might be that people who have a bigger interest in this topic are able to show that it is indeed a problem because the current legal status quo gives cover for child marriage under some weird progressive "it's cool if it's done by people from a non-Western background" scheme and then I have to eat my words, but Occam's Razor tells me that based on my experience there is no legal cover for exploiting minors under the cover of consensual sex and having sex with minors is more likely to have negative consequences for you than not. I should have been more careful in the phrasing of my initial comment, yes, but the content so far stands unrefuted: There is no way you could exploit a teenager sexually in Germany as a middle-aged man and walk out of jail free because of "but your honor, they were 14!" - and if there are iffy edge cases to be found in which people walked free on questionable interpretations of the law, it is not a systematic loophole that could be exploited by everyone willy-nilly. I am very sure that a systematic abuse of the consent age clause would have pierced my filter bubble in SOME way - a right-wing populist outlet is currently the highest polling party in Germany, it would be strange if they had nothing to say on that particular topic if handed on a silver platter.
>I'm not a lawyer, so the honest answer is always "no, I'm reiterating what my culture tells me is the lived reality of the law". However, my main point is: The map is used to imply that any horny 50yo can have sex with an underage girl in Germany and get away with it, whereas my take-away from the press coverage on cases involving sex with minors is that it would be utterly naive to think "but we love each other!" is a cunning legal strategy that will buy you any goodwill, because it is simply assumed that most relationships between older men and much younger women are not based on romantic love and ulterior motives are therefore more likely than not.
Germany is a civilized Western country where you have to actually be in violation of a legal statute to be sent to prison. "Ulterior motives" are not enough.
>I am very sure that a systematic abuse of the consent age clause would have pierced my filter bubble in SOME way - a right-wing populist outlet is currently the highest polling party in Germany, it would be strange if they had nothing to say on that particular topic if handed on a silver platter.
Right-wing populist parties are not identical everywhere despite being referred to by the same word. AfD probably thinks it's fine because if girls don't want to have consensual sex with gross old men they can just not have consensual sex with gross old men. The idea that teenage girls lack any self-control or responsibility is a particularly American disease.
> Germany is a civilized Western country where you have to actually be in violation of a legal statute to be sent to prison. "Ulterior motives" are not enough.
The actual statue, says that to go to jail for having sex with a 14-15yo, you must have 'exploit[ed] the victim's lack of capacity for sexual self-determination', and that the deed will generally only be prosecuted if the victim files a report.
From my reading, this is a bit of a grey area, and the DA and judge have quite a bit of leeway. On the one hand, if a 14-yo is determined to lose her V-card by simply going home with the cutest man who will be interested at a party and have sex with him, that is unlikely to get the man into trouble.
On the other hand, if some PUA decides that manipulating 14yo's into having sex with him is easier than 16yo's, some of his victims will feel used and report him to the police, and a judge might find that lying about true love to pressure the victim into sex she does not want before dumping her is exactly such an exploitation.
Personally, I do not like laws where the alleged victim can decide after the fact if the sex was legal or not. However, I also do not think that people older than 21 (which is the minimum age for that statue to apply) should generally have sex with people 7 years younger than them.
So I do not mind too much to give the alleged victims a bit of the benefits of hindsight to determine if a sex act was okay or not. The alternative would be either to punish a lot of victimless crime or to accept that 14yo's are acceptable targets for 25yo PUAs.
Of course, actually convicting someone based on that statue is probably not easy, because it will likely end up with a he-said-she-said situation where each party accuses the other of having been the one pushing for sex until they relented. But with text messages, sometimes there will be a paper trail.
"The actual statue, says that to go to jail for having sex with a 14-15yo, you must have 'exploit[ed] the victim's lack of capacity for sexual self-determination', and that the deed will generally only be prosecuted if the victim files a report."
A little further down in the Wikipedia article, there is an additional case beyond the report by the victim: "The act shall only be prosecuted upon complaint, unless the prosecuting authority considers ex officio that it is required to enter the case because of the special public interest therein. [...] The court may dispense with punishment pursuant to these provisions if, in consideration of the conduct of the person against whom the act was directed, the wrongfulness of the act is slight."
Here is an explanation by a law firm that provides some more context, compared to the Wikipedia article:
https://www.die-anwalts-kanzlei.de/sexualstrafrecht/sexueller-missbrauch-von-jugendlichen/
"While the sexual abuse of children is generally criminalized by law, adolescents are granted a certain degree of sexual self-determination.
This is regulated in Section 182 of the German Criminal Code (StGB). Sexual acts with adolescents, provided they consent, are not generally punishable, unlike with children. Nevertheless, the criminal law protects adolescents due to their inexperience, and therefore, sexual acts with and against adolescents are punishable in some situations.
In such cases, it is generally referred to as sexual abuse of adolescents."
Exploiting a plight of a person under 18 is also considered sexual abuse of adolescents.
With respect to the question of what happens "if a 14-yo is determined to lose her V-card by simply going home with the cutest man who will be interested at a party and have sex with him, that is unlikely to get the man into trouble", it depends first of all on the age of the man, but also on what the "lack of capacity for sexual self-determination" means.
According to the cited law firm, the paragraph protects the sexual inexperience of adolescents, so "capacity for sexual self-determination" seems to be strongly related to "sexual inexperience". The law firm also explains that the court will take into account the following factors:
"What is/was the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim?
Is this a repeat offense?
How old was the victim?
How serious was the offense?
What actual harm did the victim suffer?"
The law firm provides the following table:
https://95db93b6.delivery.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Sexuelle-Handlungen-Altersstufen.png
I do think that people older than 21 should generally have consensual sex with people 7 years younger than them. As long as those younger people are 18+. My wife is soon 40 and more than 7 years younger than me. And we have sex no matter what ... some people ... think. Honi soit qui mal y pense.
Well played.
What was the rule again? One seventh your age plus a half?
> you have to actually be in violation of a legal statute to be sent to prison.
True, but misleading: there are enough legal statutes written broadly enough I expect most people can be found to be in violation of at least one of them if the state wants them sent to prison.
"it seems to me it is 14 as long as the younger party consented and was not "forced to consent" or something like that"
Forcing consent is not necessary to make it illegal, see
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-september-2025/comment/152432933
Yeah the singer of Rammstein groomed and abused a 15 year-old girl, and it was legal.
Yeah I was curious and went to read Italian law and I think the logic is that the rape law already covers rape of minors and rape under abuse of power with harsher penalties, the specific law for rape of minors is a catchall about situations in which it is still considered rape even if the victim does not agree, which include most possible form of abuse of position (relatives, legal tutors, police forces, teachers, persons leaving even temporarily in the same house...), approach by the adult person of the minor with the intention of eventually having sex, exchange of favours or money real or promised, and in any case forces investigation and eventually prosecution by the state if it is informed of an act between an adult and a minor.
Do you have a source for that?
Nope, however, as pointed out in a different comment: The main takeaway for me is that the map is used to imply every horny 50yo could have sex with a 14yo and walk out of jail free because of age if consent. That's simply not true. However, I should have phrased my iriginal comment more careful and made clear that it is a reiteration of how I understand the legal situation.
Lol, this is literally the law in Germany. You are completely wrong; outside of certain exceptions a horny 50yo can legally have sex with a 14yo there, provided the 14yo consents.
This is really not a topic I am particularly interested in, but there are very strong "someone is wrong on the internet" vibes so I decided to research this.
The big exception is if the 50yo "knows about an exploits" the 14yo's "missing ability to sexual self-determination"; i.e. as I read this if a 14yo is already having a lot of sex it's more likely to be legal; if the 50yo is pushy and manipulative then it's probably not.
Crucially however is the issue of consent, and what 14yo is going to consent to sex with a 50yo unless there is something seriously wrong with both of them; and therefore many cases will end up being the exception above.
This is only the legal question, morally/culturally the question is something else, though an interesting side note is that historically the "green" party - which is otherwise very much US-Blue-Tribe aligned - have been much more pro-paedophilia https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/erste-ergebnisse-der-paedophilie-studie-forscher-enthuellen-so-kaempften-gruene-jahrelang-fuer-freien-kinder-sex_id_3077344.html . But also here's another politician who had an affair with a 16yo: https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/schleswig-holstein-cdu-chef-tritt-nach-affaere-mit-minderjaehriger-zurueck-a-780193.html , and googling a bit turns up similar scandals involving under 18yos where news articles always stress that legally everything is fine.
See https://www.die-anwalts-kanzlei.de/sexualstrafrecht/sex-unter-jugendlichen-wann-strafbar/ (just put it in Google translate).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent_in_Europe#Germany
> that clearly states that you can't have sex as an adult with a minor (i.e. someone under 18)
Which StGB section would that be?
The way it is presented on WP, there are three different relevant thresholds for adults over 21:
* If your partner is under 14, you are committing a crime, always.
* If your partner is 14-15, they can report you if they find that you "exploit[ed] the victim's lack of capacity for sexual self-determination".
* If your partner is 16-17, sex is generally legal, unless you are a guardian or teacher (174), taking advantage of a predicament (182 (1)), or paying them (182 (2)).
* If your partner is 18+, sexual coercion or rape are of course still punishable (177). Prostitution is legal, though exploiting prostitutes by keeping them dependent is punishable (180a, 181a).
I think that all of this is roughly reasonable.
One might argue that it is a bit weird that a 14yo can watch sexual intercourse by finding a random adults to have sex with, but will have to wait another four years until they can legally watch porn. By my reading of the law, a 14yo girl could have a 30yo boyfriend, and them having sex would be legal, but sexting would not: him sending her a dick pic would constitute making pornography available to minors (184), while her sexting back would constitute youth pornography (184c).
I strongly suspect this is legacy code. Legacy code from ages when sex generally happened in marriage, and it was possible to marry at 14 although it required parental consent. Because in the past, the basic idea was that anyone past puberty is sexually an adult, and then my guess would be marriage laws were adopted 1:1 into consent laws when unmarried sex became an accepted thing.
I strongly suspect this is going to change, because young people now mentally mature slower. They simply don't have those kinds of experiences, like doing adult work from the age of 11 or so, that in the past made them mature faster.
This is correct summary. Personally, I would add that for 14-15 year olds, "exploit[ed] the victim's lack of capacity for sexual self-determination" can be quite strictly enforced. Since the German law does not have a binding concept of precedents a lot will depend on the judge.
As a source check e.g. https://ra-odebralski.de/strafrecht-rechtsanwalt/sexualdelikte/vorladung-sexueller-missbrauch-von-jugendlichen-anklageschrift-vorladung-hausdurchsuchung
which includes the following part (translation by googe.translate):
"Furthermore, it is also not permitted for a person over 21 to have sexual intercourse with a person under 16 and to knowingly exploit the victim's "lack of capacity for sexual self-determination." Whether this is the case must be determined on a case-by-case basis; there is also disagreement among the highest courts about how this characteristic should be determined.
For example, one court judged the very sexually explicit behavior of a 15-year-old girl toward a 28-year-old man in a "relationship" as "an expression of an immature personality" and found the victim's "lack of capacity for sexual self-determination." The result: The man was convicted of sexual abuse of juveniles.
In an almost identical case, another court assessed the girl's behavior completely differently. Compared to adolescents of the same age, the girl was already more advanced in her sexual development ("precocious"), which was clearly evident in her behavior. Given the behavior exhibited, one could certainly not speak of a "lack of capacity for sexual self-determination on the part of the victim." The result: acquittal on charges of sexual abuse of minors.
This clearly demonstrates that decisions vary greatly from case to case. Here, the defense's task is certainly to present convincing arguments.."
In Denmark it is as stated. You can have sex with a 15 year old, no matter if you're 15 or 80. It's deeply socially unacceptable, but it is not illegal.
Yes but Hanania is being ironic, no? He's bashing MAGA's pedophile obsession, not Europeans. (At least not Europeans on this particular occasion).
That would explain a lot, I was really wondering why on earth anyone would think that "yeah, Epstein was maybe bad but Europe is worse" was achieving anything besides making your own side looking weird :D
In that case, Germany would actually be MORE strict than the United States. We typically have what's called a "romeo & juliet exception" to those laws intended to make sure that for example a high school senior who hooks up with a sophomore in the fall (an age gap of 17 to 14 is possible to exist there for at least a few months) could continue dating for the next few years without incident. So in fall of his junior year at college when he's 20 and she's still 17 for a few months, they aren't breaking the law.
In fact in my state (where I was a criminal attorney and prosecuted these kinds of crimes) the age of consent is 17 but that doesn't kick in unless the other party is 21 or over. There is a lower age of consent at 14, below which there are no defenses or excuses, neither mistake of age nor the age of the other partner matters if one of them is below 14. But for 14-16 year olds, they exist in a middle ground, and legally a 20 year old could have sex with a 14 year old and not be subject to statutory rape or statutory sodomy law. There are, however, a bunch of things that it would still be illegal for him to do in that situation, and how strict anyone enforces this is likely to vary with community norms and whether you manage to anger her family and they come to a prosecutor like me demanding action, because if we want to find some other law to apply against this we very likely could.
In the UK, it just is 16. There are some things at 18 (if the older partner is in a position of trust - e.g. teacher, as well as if the younger partner is a prostitute) and 13 (below this age, it is not a defence to have been wrong about the child's age, and technically it's a different offence), but 16 is the one that matters. However, as with most countries, you still shouldn't be shagging 16 year olds at 50.
In some European countries, such as Hungary, even adults are not prosecuted for having sex with a 14 years old, and I think the reason is that the Roma people really really do think everything is okay from puberty, even 12-13 years old girls living in a relationship (while that is illegal) they tend to see normal.
Another german here, and I just looked it up to be sure (§§ 174, 176, 182 StGB).
There are three relevant age strata: 14-15, 16-17, 18+.
From age 14 on, you can consent to sex with other young people (no older than 20) as long as you are not coerced, and the other party holds not position of power towards you (so your youth group leader is out).
From age 16 on, you can consent to sex with people of any age as long as you are not coerced, and the other party holds not position of power towards you (so your teacher is out).
From age 18 on you can consent to sex with people of any age (except of course young ones as explained above).
I'm pleased that while I got the legal base wrong, my general take-away holds up: You can't simply start screwing a 14yo in your 50s and expect shrugged shoulders because "consent"
No, not only is your general take away wrong, you are making stuff up and claiming it to be the law.
I’m a neutral onlooker, but his claim about 50 year olds and 14 year olds seems vindicated.
This is not his original claim, this is his relativized version so speaking of "vindication" makes no sense. His original claim was <18 w >18 is technically in violation of the law but usually not prosecuted; this is simply just not true.
That said, Xelodon (above) misstates the law, I have a summary in another thread since I made the mistake of wasting my time reading into this, especially since my German isn't good enough to do this without google translate. But in short, "other young people" is not true; the way the law is phrased is that a >21yo committing sexual acts with a <16yo can be jailed for up to three years if they abuse the "missing ability to sexual self determination". At this point I am not a lawyer - and have no interest in reading up case law since I don't really want to concern myself with the depths of human depravity - but will add that typically with laws like this the perpetrator needs to know about both the age and the "missing ability to sexual self determination".
I am not a lawyer, but german is my native tongue, and I have a general grasp on german law.
One of the tenets is "Unwissenheit schützt vor Strafe nicht" - ignorance does not shield from prosecution. One does not need to know they are dealing with a minor to be prosecuted for it (althogh it might count as extenuating circumstances when it comes to the severity of punishment, if e.g. the perp can argue that all indicators were pointing to the victim bein of age). And whether or not the victim lacks the ability to exact sexual self-determination will be determined by psych evals and examined in court.
It is also incorrect that the victim needs to ask for prosecution. Anyone privy to the situation could do it, e.g. friends or parents could do it if they suspect something fishy was going on.
One might think that "exploiting the lack of ability to exact sexual self-determination" might point to the victim being coerced in a forceful way, but here the simple fact of being too young to gauge the consequences as well as an adult could, is enough to count as that lack of sexual self-determination, which again, will be determined by experts.
In essence; someone >21 cannot be sure they can get away with having sex with someone <16, even if they think they can fully manipulate the <16, and they are responsible for making sure that their prospective lay is not <16
to add to this, the law *explicitly* states that prosecution should only happen if the victim asks for persecution or there is special public interest. So "shrugged shoulders because consent" is pretty damn close to what the law says.
Other commenters have pointed this out already, but to be very clear - this comment is making up facts that are plainly untrue, which the commenter then admits to being the case further down. The sentence "there is an unrelated pedophilia paragraph that clearly states that you can't have sex as an adult with a minor (i.e. someone under 18)" is something fabricated from thin air; I suspect that it's US cultural diffusion making young people think the law is US law everywhere.
Are you actually German?
Geez, you're the second on to ask now. Yes. Why wouldn't I?
Because in my experience, it tends to be Americans who have an incredibly difficult time accepting that some Western countries have an age of consent below the age of 16, and come up with bullshit stories about why this isn't the case. I do not know the situation in Germany, but in Denmark it certainly is perfectly legal for 70+ year olds to have sex with 15 year olds. The wikipedia map is probably generally accurate.
I also find the claims of "wokeness" a bit silly, but man does the Cracker Barrel before-after look depressing (not just the logo).
Also, for a more substantial point, moving away from kids-friendly isn't just about the kids being a smaller share (we parents also often prefer the kids-friendly places!), it's about families having generally much less expendable income than childless couples.
Recently (like, last week or two) saw an article saying Cracker Barrel had changed its logo back, due to drastic drops in sales after the rebranding. So I think that one's already been undone.
Of course, the others did their change about a decade or two ago, and I think some of them are already moving on to newer design trends. Cracker Barrel is just conservative and slow.
The most fun case study in rebranding that I'm aware of (admittedly a tiny reference pool) is Tropicana: https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-from-tropicanas-packaging-redesign-failure/
> On January 8th, 2009, Tropicana launched the new packaging for its best-selling product in North America – Tropicana Pure Premium, with sales revenues reaching more than 700 million dollars per year.
> Two months later, sales dropped by 20%, and this spectacular decrease in sales represented a loss of 30 million dollars for Tropicana.
> On February 23rd, 2009, Tropicana announced that it would return to its original packaging design
> In total, this initiative cost Tropicana more than 50 million dollars.
There seems to be a lack of awareness, in general, that if you don't have a branding problem, you don't need to adjust your branding.
Oh man, that Tropicana rebrand was *dumb*. The new design looks *exactly* like "own brand knock-off reconstituted from concentrate orange juice" that every supermarket has on the shelf.
If I'm looking for specifically Tropicana and I see this, I am not thinking "Snazzy new pack!", I'm thinking "Huh, they junked Tropicana and are trying to sell me their own-brand stuff?" and I pick up the next big brand-name juice instead.
This is kind of an amazing example of something. I clicked on the link and said to myself "Jesus, the new design looks exactly like some cheap off-brand trying to remind you of Tropicana without violating copyright laws". Then I read your comment.
This actually SHOWS the power of marketing though, right? We both came to the same fairly complex conclusion just by exposure to an image.
The ironic thing is that the new design went for trendy minimalism, which looked *just* like the "cheap as we can get it" design for own-brand items.
Meanwhile, when I was trying to find examples of own-brand/other brand orange juice, it was interesting how many of them tried to copy the traditional Tropicana branding up to the line of "veering into copyright infringement territory".
Because people tend to be on autopilot when buying the staples they grab off the shelves every week (at least, I am) they're more likely not to be paying attention, and so I am not surprised Tropicana sales took a hit.
The new design got stacked beside the knock-off brands and people just grabbing their 'regular brand' orange juice half-recognised the "must be Tropicana, the branding looks the same" and bought that instead.
A case of trying to be too clever by half! Marketing and design do work, but first you have to be aware of what end you want to achieve, and just "the old brand is old and boring, we need to make it fresh and trendy" is going to shoot yourself in the foot.
I think the Cracker Barrel rebrand could have gone better if they'd leaned into cottagecore style; that would have let them refresh the interior décor without totally junking the "country living" associations.
> Marketing and design do work, but first you have to be aware of what end you want to achieve, and just "the old brand is old and boring, we need to make it fresh and trendy" is going to shoot yourself in the foot.
There's more to say here. The entire purpose of branding is to be recognized by people who are already familiar with your brand. People who have never heard of you aren't part of the target audience. The older a piece of branding is, the more effective it is, full stop.
For 𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨, this isn't true. The purpose of marketing is to inform the uninformed about your brand. But these are two radically different endeavors. They shouldn't be confused.
Are there no case studies where an update to a dated-looking brand has actually succeeded?
Apple, for instance, ditched its 80s-looking rainbow striped logo for a cleaner monochrome one and went from a basket case to the world's biggest company. Not the only factor of course but it's hard to imagine a world where they're selling billions of iPhones with the colorful apple logo.
As someone with no particular associations with the brand, Tropicana looks dated. But they should have just updated the font while keeping the package recognisable.
> Not the only factor of course but it's hard to imagine a world where they're selling billions of iPhones with the colorful apple logo.
Why is that hard to imagine?
You can't even see the logo on a smartphone, because of the case.
It just doesn't fit in with the modern Apple aesthetic. (To be fair, they were among the pioneers of the modern super-clean aesthetic now that affects everything).
Besides, rainbows are gay now.
Another funny case of "successful" rebranding is Borland company which in 1980s produced very popular programming languages/environments Turbo Pascal and Borland Pascal. These worked in DOS.
So when it came time to move to Windows, they renamed the company to Inprise, *and* decided to call the Windows version of the product Delphi.
Many programmers that used their products were not aware that this is the same company and the same product, so they kept waiting for some "Visual Turbo Pascal" or "Visual Borland Pascal" which never came... and then they switched to other languages, such as C/C++ or Java.
At some moment later the company was renamed back, but the damage was already done.
The Cracker Barrel revamp did make me wonder if the marketing person from Bud Light had found a new job 😁
Not being American, I don't know anything about original Cracker Barrel, and I understand the need for a brand refresh and seeking out new demographics, but the change seemed such a huge leap away from the original, and the end result so bland and soulless, that it was shooting themselves in the foot. Original customers won't be happy and those who didn't previously eat at Cracker Barrel are not going to be enticed in by "hey, now it's bland corporate indistinguishable mush!"
The rebrand is obviously bad, but I have yet to see an argument about what makes it _woke_ specifically. Companies are doing awful rebrands all the time, and usually it has nothing to do with anything political. It's just some marketing department trying to justify their existence. This seems like obviously the case here.
The rebrand itself isn't woke.
I forget which podcast I listened to yesterday (I think Blocked and Reported) but Cracker Barrel went from "we will fire you if we think you're a gay" in the 1990s to doing stuff that was DEI and literally [1] shoving rainbow rocking chairs down people's throats, and then the new logo got rid of both the cracker and the barrel. Conservative grifters like Robby Starbuck and Matt Walsh declared it "woke" and made stopping it part of their mission and at that point words lost all meaning, the way the word "literally" did.
[1] 8 different people choked to death from having rocking chairs literally shoved down their throats
I don't think it's necessarily woke in itself, but it comes too near the Bud Light fiasco, and if the original theme of the business is "old-style country imagery" and then you dump all that for "bland anonymous 2010s style" it's easy for critics to position that as anti-rural, anti-conservative, anti-good old American values like mom and apple pie, hence woke.
Maybe "progressive" would be a better descriptor than "woke"? The vision of utopia as made up of decultured, deracinated citizens of everywhere and nowhere is very much a progressive one, although I'm not sure it could be described as a specifically *woke* progressive one, given wokeness's emphasis on identity politics, being anti-cultural appropriation, and so forth.
Hm, maybe someone reacted to removing the white guy as "woke".
I'm pretty sure that image is fake. They redesigned their interiors to be more "modern-farmhouse" but exteriors are the same.
The Cracker Barrel was the only one of the new styles I didn't much like. The rest I found to be vast improvements on their originals.
Scott may have fallen for a joke in the Cracker Barrel image.
I think this is the primary usage:
https://nitter.net/bankertobuilder/status/1958636920147517702
and if you read the replies, the guy is clearly making a joke about it, trying to be as un-cracker-barrel as possible.
I've not been able to find any usage of the image in a news story, just "reactions" to it.
Logo designer here—as another commenter (correctly) hypothesized, that image is fake. It’s a mockup parody that uses the facade and font of Crate & Barrel to mock the actual Cracker Barrel rebrand (which, as other commenters noted, was reversed a week later). While the short-lived logo redesign was indeed more minimalist (getting rid of the illustration and the bean-shaped container), the typography was a nice improvement.
The Pizza Hut example is also out-of-date; the current Pizza Hut logo is an updated version of their earlier version with the wavy Zs, in red, beneath the red slanty roof.
The branding world is currently caught between optimization (the job of a logo in particular is XYZ and so over time redesigns will make it better at XYZ) and the reality that sometimes people just like a thing even if it’s not good at Z, and in the context of the overall brand that has a greater positive effect than explicitly optimizing for Z. In the case of Cracker Barrel the reaction was super overblown (as public reactions are), but the rollout/framing of the redesign definitely could have been executed a lot better.
Requisite designer’s disclaimer/note: the logo is not the brand, it is but a single (albeit important) element of the brand’s visual identity. In the words of George Bokhua, it is “the lens through which the brand is focused”; in the words of Sagi Haviv, it is “not the sentence itself, but the period at the end of the sentence.”
Thanks for reading.
"While the short-lived logo redesign was indeed more minimalist (getting rid of the illustration and the bean-shaped container), the typography was a nice improvement."
But it was too much of a jump forward. The old logo certainly could have done with a refresh, but dumping the iconic imagery for "orange oval-rectangle with only the font" was too much of a change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracker_Barrel
"Barrels of soda crackers could be found for sale in small-town stores across the American South in the early 1900s; people would stand around the barrels chatting and catching up, similar in purpose to contemporary office water coolers."
They could have kept the barrel, for example, and used that on its side as the orange rectangle with "Cracker Barrel" being like a label on it. But I'm neither a graphic designer nor a marketer, so take that for what it's worth.
Yeah, it definitely could have been cleaned up as an evolution rather than a complete redesign, or (my take) been both cleaned up and then decoupled so that the various elements could be combined for different applications/layouts/use cases. All I was saying was that the new typography was an improvement over the old typography.
The container for the wordmark absolutely should have been the barrel! Some are saying that was the thinking, but if so the execution was a failure.
Another disclaimer that it’s very difficult to critique a project like this without knowing what the brief was, both in terms of attribution (was the fault with the design team, or with the brief they were handed?) as well as strategy (e.g. if for some reason they wanted to alienate their current consumer base and pivot to serving a completely different audience, the redesign might have been spot on. This is a bad example but hopefully you get what I mean).
I know I keep referencing Bud Light, but I think the thinking behind this was the same: our core market is getting older, we're not gaining market share, we need to appeal to new, younger customers, so we need to scrap the old brand imagery and revamp everything.
But the change was too drastic and too sudden, so it alienated the existing customers and wasn't enough to appeal to those who wouldn't go to Cracker Barrel anyway because they associated it with 'Aunt Marge and Grandpa' kind of place.
That does seem the likely motivation. If you check out the actual applications beyond the logo (eg the packaging) it was actually really well done, they just misread the room in dropping the old illustrated assets completely. And then the reaction to that was amplified to the nth degree by the internet.
If you read deeper into Bud Light, it has been marketed for decades at gay bars, because gay men like to have abs, hence they count calories. Their conservative customers simply did not notice it, they don't go to gay bars. Or to Prides, where they had floats.
So already having a large number of LGBTQ customers, it sounded totally logical from them to try to get a larger LGBTQ market share. This was not simply ideology-over-profits "wokeness", but the extension of a previous business strategy that did work.
Except that this time conservatives noticed it. Ouch.
Gay men drinking beer (outside of a gay bar) are just "guys drinking beer".
Using Dylan Mulvaney, of all the possible options, was a mistake on several fronts. Who would Mulvaney's audience be (given that the other products I've seen him associated with were things like tampons and makeup)? Young women. Are young women going to drink beer, even light beer? Doubtful, though the marketing push has been to women and there was some rise in women drinking beer:
https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2024/05/why-female-beer-drinkers-are-in-decline/
Weirdly, it seems (at least in the UK), women are going for stout which is about as far from Bud Light as I can imagine:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/04/higher-stout-consumption-driven-by-female-drinkers-and-low-alcohol-options
So yeah, just bad choice of representative when trying to attract younger drinkers and especially women to refresh the brand and grow the market.
The effort to redesign corporate logos is one that turns me into the kind of person who is not far from talking breathlessly about the WEF and Klaus Schwab. The messy but organic and authentically distinct logos are taken from us to create minimalist and depressing replacements.
> moving away from kids-friendly isn't just about the kids being a smaller share (we parents also often prefer the kids-friendly places!), it's about families having generally much less expendable income than childless couples.
I don't think this makes sense. Food is paid for out of the non-discretionary budget. You'd need to argue that families have less money in an absolute sense, not that they have less disposable income. You don't need to dip into "disposable income" to feed your children.
Food at home from the supermarket is inside the budget. Going to restaurants is quite a bit more expensive these days, even fast food, and so I'd generally consider it part of expendable income.
Eating out is an expense that is readily curtailed by eating at home, which is much cheaper.
Home food is non-discretionary, but eating out is extremely discretionary... and families have many financial pressures these days.
You think Cracker Barrel is depressing, just wait till you see what they did to Oxford University Press: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michael-jones-41b372_proving-that-progress-isnt-inevitable-that-activity-6979264513153916928-3533/
"I think my answer is something like - we’ve got to divide kids from adults at some age, there’s a range of reasonable possible ages, we shouldn’t be too mad at other societies that choose different dividing lines within that range"
What exactly is the point in drawing the line at a certain age? Medical examination plus psych eval is sufficient for determining adulthood in sex issues, and while it takes longer than checking whether age is legal - I'd say it's justified to prevent cases where people get hardcore prison terms for biologically normal and not socially disruptive behavior (sexual interaction with a biologically mature person who happens to be under the arbitrary age limit). And it's not like it hasn't been tried before - I believe in USSR at some point pedophilia laws were like that, and it didn't lead to a rise in child molestation or whatever.
One important dimension is the ability of people to know if they're breaking the law. It is much easier to establish whether you knew a person was 18+ or not, than whether you thoroughly understood their development and medical history.
What you propose could only work if your ID documents got some sort of government stamp of approval for sex.
Not really. Pre-pubescent kids usually don't do sex-seeking behavior, and most adults do not try to sex up something that is not fuckable. So, basically if you are engaging in a normal sex behavior as is practiced in the society - it's most probably ok. If it looks like a duck and fucks like a duck - it's a duck, and only rare edge cases even need an additional investigation. Basically, if you pick up a chick at a bar and fuck her - it's extremely unlikely that you are committing a crime, in fact, your risk is higher with the ID-age scheme, because she might have fake ID or something (and just try proving that post-factum).
> if you pick up a chick at a bar and fuck her - it's extremely unlikely that you are committing a crime
IANAL, but you might want to be careful there. Consent under influence is another legal minefield. Of course, any woman you are likely to meet at a bar drinking Tequila late at night is probably going to be 18+, because otherwise the bar is committing an offense in most jurisdictions.
I am also not on board with your duck typing. Basically, we do not generally have unlimited trust in 14yo's knowing what they want. A 14yo going on tinder to find some dick is certainly going to happen occasionally, but more often the adult might push them towards sex acts.
Basically, at age 16, we expect a woman to have learned the lesson that of course men will want to fuck her and are willing to lie through their teeth to get there (or else she will find out the hard way). At age 14, they are not yet in season for random 25yo PUAs.
The German legal code (which I have discussed elsewhere in the discussion here) recognizes that fact, which is why relations between 14yo's and adults are neither completely legal or completely illegal, but depend on the specifics, e.g. if the adult exploited the minor's inexperience.
"Consent under influence is another legal minefield. "
Not really. Having sex with passed out people is obviously rape, hence the "cannot consent" stuff, but people having sex after having had a few drinks is so extremely common that it is impossible to criminalize. That is basically the default hookup method.
But we aren't talking about pre-pubescent kids; that's the point here, There's pedophilia in the formal psychiatric sense of sexual attraction to prepubescent children, and "pedophile" in the lurid tabloidy journalistic sense of middle-aged men actually having sex with clearly post-pubescent girls who happen to be less than eighteen years old.
Which is sometimes legal, and sometimes not, and sometimes immoral and sometimes not, but always complicated by the fact that it's normal for middle-aged men to want to have sex with attractive 16yo girls and normal for 16yo girls to want to have sex with *someone* and now we have to try and figure out whether one particular girl wanted to have sex with one particular man when both "yeah, they were both DTF" and "no, she was coerced" are plausible.
Or we can just avoid the question by saying that it's always illegal for middle-aged men to sleep with girls under 18, but that's something that most communities in both Europe and the US have chosen not to do.
Further confusing the issue, Hollywood tells pretty much the entire world how things work, and California is one of the minority of states that does just set the age at eighteen. So you have people who just take it for granted that Age of Consent = 18 everywhere and anyone who has sex with a 16yo girl is a deviant criminal "pedophile". Just like you have people in Europe who expect the police to read them their Miranda rights when they are arrested.
Idk why everyone is automatically thinking it's about "middle age men sleeping with girls under 18". Pretty much, if you model the age-difference as a gaussian distribution - it looks pretty clear that most of the illegal cases will have minimal age difference, so while there will be some amount of creepy 45-year-olds who want a schoolgirl, the majority of your technically-criminal cases will be with minimal, but still illegal age difference. Can get away from the worst of it by giving the law some leeway (basically, 18 is the consent age, but it's legal if age difference is below 5 years, as is done in some countries), but even then by the nature of the distribution you are going to get more people with let's say 5.5 year age difference than with 20+ year age difference - basically, your ridiculous cases are going to outnumber legitimately worrying cases at any point.
And about the point "it's the law, just fucking obey it", as brought up in some comments - it's not gonna work like this with sex issues. As seen in traditional Muslim communities for example, where punishment for infidelity is stoning to death - even a death threat doesn't completely deter people from fucking. So, you are going to have a lot of criminals just by having the law.
> It is much easier to establish whether you knew a person was 18+ or not
Only through checking their ID, though.
In the Terra Ignota series, adulthood is determined by a test. While I think that there are some details which would need to be figured out, that seems much more appealing than simply using age as a clutch for everything.
>One important dimension is the ability of people to know if they're breaking the law. It is much easier to establish whether you knew a person was 18+ or not, than whether you thoroughly understood their development and medical history.
For that matter, if you're thinking of sleeping with someone, it's going to be easier for you yourself to find out if they're over 18 -- yes, they might lie about their age, but they're probably more likely to tell the truth about that than about the details of their intimate psych evalutations.
But we don't follow this. In many states, statutory rape is strict liability. You could have every reason to think that the person you're sleeping with is an adult and still be committing a crime.
I agree that a combination of medical and psychological evaluation would be the ideal. However, that is a resource consuming process, and it is easier to set up specific rules that cover most of the distribution.
To give an analogy, I think that is also the reason why usually only males are conscripted and females are not: a much larger percentage of health males (lets say, 80-90% (just an example, not going to die on specific %)) is capable of being turned into usable soldiers, but for females the ratio is about the opposite (e.g., 10-20%). It is difficult to identify the outcomes in advance, so most militaries just go for males generally as a cost effective solution, and live with 10-20% of recruits failing. Likewise, it is reasonable to assume an age limit can be identified below which 10-20% of people are still capable to have sex without any negative effect, and use that (of course, likely we still have something like that even above the allowed age). I think this is true for all age based limits, be it voting, driving, drinking or using guns.
Of course, identifying distribution and optimal cutoff points on these probably could span a couple of phd dissertations. Maybe in the future we might have some AI powered system that could swiftly identify who could be allowed to do what activity.
It's not really resource consuming, because the only cases that get checked are ones where everyone clearly sees something going wrong. So it's not like everyone goes to the doctors to take their med test whether they are ready for sex, it's more like there's a 1000 reported cases per year, 800 cases where it's simply someone being unhappy because person A is dating person B and trying to use police as leverage (and gets told to FUCK OFF, WE'VE GOT REAL CRIMES TO INVESTIGATE OVER HERE) and a couple of hundred cases where it actually gets to the court and the medical investigation stage. And 99.9% of people don't even ever get to bother about the whole thing.
I disagree. One's age can be approximated very reliably by just having a look at them or knowing some general information about that person (e.g. what type of school they attend currently). So 99% of people don't get to bother about these because they can filter out illegal relationships with high probability very quickly.
It's same way either way, biological age is approximated very reliably as well by looking at a person's appearance and behavior. The primary difference is that in the remaining 1% you don't throw people into jail for biologically normal behavior that happened to cross an arbitrary age number. (and actual pedos are caught with about the same efficiency)
"It's not really resource consuming, because the only cases that get checked are ones where everyone clearly sees something going wrong."
This is a largely self-defeating point, because that's also the way it works under current laws. Police don't just magically know when somebody has broken age of consent laws. If somebody catches an actual conviction for statutory rape, you can be pretty much guaranteed that *somebody* who was aware of the act--mostly likely the victim, but occasionally somebody else close to the victim--had enough of a problem with it to decide to raise enough hell to get police involved. I can pretty much guarantee that lots of pedophiles fly entirely under the radar, simply by not actively pissing their partners off and being discrete enough that nobody else is aware of what's happening.
The two main differences between what you're proposing and how it works in practice now are:
1. People who make the choice to sleep with under-age individuals are taking somewhat more of a risk, even in cases where they don't engage in other abusive behaviors.
and
2. In the cases where they *do* engage in other abusive behaviors, getting justice for the victims is substantially easier, because there's a clear and objective violation of the law co-occuring with those other sorts of abuse (which may be more difficult to effectively prove and prosecute).
Society at large considers this a pretty good trade. Most people don't care *even a little bit* about an increased legal risk to the sort of people who like to sleep with underage individuals[1]. Meanwhile, they get quite upset when people who are fairly obviously being abusive can't be brought to justice. So I suspect you're not going to have much luck getting anyone on board with your vision here: they'd be trading away marginal units of justice for people they care quite a lot about for marginal units of convenience and security for people they consider the scum of the earth.
[1] Part of this is a cultural bias. But part of this because there's a quite well-grounded prior that *nearly all* such cases involve the older person taking advantage of the younger person's lack of maturity and life experience.
The priors I generally use for thinking of such cases are the following:
1) Any law that creates a lot of technical criminals is a bad law. If the particular law carries a large penalty - doubly so.
2) Any law that has a stated goal of protecting children has to be viewed with a triple amount of suspicion - it either carries a hidden agenda or going to cause more problems than it solves.
3) Anything that is fucking around with normal human behavior is gonna bring more pain than it solves.
“So I suspect you're not going to have much luck getting anyone on board with your vision here“
I realize that well enough. But you know, there are points that are worth arguing, even if there is gonna be no popular support for it. If one person out of a hundred gets something that’s gonna cause them to re-analyze their assumptions - that’s what I’d call a good result. And what’s the point of arguing from a position that everyone already thought about? More interesting and meaningful to do it on some topic that everyone takes for granted, even when you know that a lot of people aren’t going to take it too well.
For 1), yeah selective enforcement has been used as a dystopic authority enforcement since the dawn of authority.
"Any law that creates a lot of technical criminals is a bad law. If the particular law carries a large penalty - doubly so."
They're not "technical criminals," though. They are very much *actual* criminals, doing something that a huge portion of the people whose values (at least nominally) are reflected by the law consider *thoroughly reprehensible.* They're just actual criminals who haven't been caught, and probably never will be.
But that's how basically ALL crime works. I would rather strongly assume (though of course it's very difficult to prove) that the vast, *vast* majority of criminal acts go unpunished and in many cases unnoticed. The more severe the action the more likely to get noticed, but even murder can be disguised as an accident, or reported as a missing person. And it's pretty well-known among people who study such things that even more violent rapes are heavily under-reported[1]. It would be really quite remarkable if the substantial majority of things like theft, fraud and assault got reported. And, of course, not all reported crimes are solved. None of that means those laws are useless: increase the cost of doing business for would-be criminals, and are disproportionately likely to penalize the most heinous, the most prolific and the most stupid (all of whom are good to remove from circulation). And so too with statutory rape: I'll repeat again "make it substantially harder to successfully punish the worst and most despicable statutory rapists, so that those who are more polite about can operate with less anxiety and less restraint" *is not a good pitch* for anyone with an ounce of sense.
"Any law that has a stated goal of protecting children has to be viewed with a triple amount of suspicion - it either carries a hidden agenda or going to cause more problems than it solves."
I'd place this firmly in the category of "dumb cynicism." Being cynical and callous is not the same thing as being wise or clever. Yes, lots of people use "for the children" as an excuse to push hidden agendas. But anyone with a fraction of a brain cell who has spent any time socializing with non-edgelord human beings understands this is *exactly* because lots of people really do *genuinely care* about childrens' wellfare, and are willing to go to great lengths for it. The intelligent, mature way to handle this state of affairs is to, y'know, actually carefully consider things on a case-by-case basis[2] and decide whether the overt purpose makes sense[3]. Cynically assuming that any such agenda must be in bad-faith is every bit as empty-headed and vacuous as naively assuming that every such agenda is sincere.
"Anything that is fucking around with normal human behavior is gonna bring more pain than it solves."
Repeatedly insisting that older men raping teenagers is "normal human behavior" will definitely convince people of *something.* But probably not the thing you're aiming at. Of course, it is true in the very boring sense that murder and theft and assault and infanticide are also all "perfectly normal human behavior;" they're all things that *some* fraction of humans have been doing for years, heedless of the harm they cause. But of course, objecting to such harms with violence is *also* perfectly normal human behavior. So really, if I were to take this at face value, I'd propose the following compromise: "the law will make no attempt to directly punish people who commit statutory rape. But neither will it make any attempt to punish anyone who injures or kills a statutory rapist, either to stop him from offending or to avenge the harm he's done." By your own stated standards, this should be a clear win: fewer technical criminals and less "fucking with normal human behavior" all around.
For my part, I think I'll stick with the part where we generally keep violence--yes, including rape, yes, including even those rapes *you consider* well-justified--illegal.
[1] If you disbelieve this or credit it but don't understand why, that's a whole other conversation.
[2]Which would include, for example, reading and understanding the viewpoints of people who care deeply about the issue in question, something I strongly suspect you of never having done.
[3] Which let me just emphasize for the third or fourth time, in this case IT ABSOLUTELY DOES. Just because you have dismissed or ignored the harms the law is aiming to prevent doesn't mean they aren't real.
"Repeatedly insisting that older men raping teenagers is "normal human behavior" will definitely convince people of *something.* "
Jesus, will someone for once look up a graph of age difference in couples, stick that graph on top of 18 years, cut off a bit on the left side where it overlaps with pre-pubescence and see that the majority of interactions happening will have a minimal age difference? The picture that some people have in mind is of a 50-year old hunting schoolgirls, while the reality is that there will be one such case per, say, a hundred cases with 2-6 years difference. And that's what "normal" human behavior looks like. The law then looks like a arbitrary line that splits the collection of the horniest people in the universe right in the middle, pretty much. No way that can backfire, right?
"Just because you have dismissed or ignored the harms the law is aiming to prevent doesn't mean they aren't real."
The thing is, we can compare. There are plenty of countries where age of consent is significantly lower or has the extra window for those with 4-6 year differences or even has it the exact way that I suggested originally (med eval). None of them seem to experience severe pedo problems - people generally are capable of sorting shit like that out themselves without needing a law.
Also, just because you dismissed or ignored the side effects of the law doesn't make them less real either. And there are plenty. Starting with treating sex as a zero-sum game where one side loses and one side wins, and you have to be "more mature" in order to have a chance of, well, not losing too much and ending with creating additional "exclusive" markets for sex trade.
"They're not "technical criminals," though."
There is a certain difference between murder and statutory rape. Murder is always, well, murder. What about a couple that starts having sex when both are 17, then he turns 18, then half a year later she turns 18? Does their sex magically turn into rape for half a year, then switch back?
"I'd propose the following compromise: "the law will make no attempt to directly punish people who commit statutory rape. But neither will it make any attempt to punish anyone who injures or kills a statutory rapist, either to stop him from offending or to avenge the harm he's done."
You know what's even scarier than your compromise? Same shit, only anyone is allowed to do the same by using the law as the instrument. You do realize that in the age difference range of 2-6 years a lot of the complaints are going to be malicious ones like "Oh, my girlfriend dumped me and is fucking a college student. I'm gonna go to the cops and get the bastard and the whore really fucked up" or "My daughter's boyfriend is a useless weed-smoking hippy, gonna turn them over to the LAW"?
Looking at the drone war currently raging in Ukraine, I think an argument for female conscription is making itself: women aren't inferior to men when it comes to piloting drones, while they would be in lugging machine guns around.
The drone teams are near the front lines and do a lot of lugging equipment and moving quickly.
Both-gender conscription works well for Israel, because many, perhaps most soldiers are not combat soldiers, they do civilian stuff in a uniform. For example in Herman Wouk's Hope, in 1948 a young conscripted woman was simply the driver of a colonel. An army is basically a parallel society that needs practically everything the normal society needs: accountants, cooks, nurses. Of course, I don't really understand in that case why even give them a uniform.
"hardcore prison terms for biologically normal and not socially disruptive behavior (sexual interaction with a biologically mature person who happens to be under the arbitrary age limit)."
Problem with your reply is that it sounds like the excuse to be used by "I'm a MAP and I see no reason why I, a healthy virile forty year old man with a perfectly normal, evolutionary psychology-mandated, interest in young nubile fertile females for purposes of mating, should be denied the opportunity to have intimate romantic sexual mutually consensual encounters with twelve year old biologically mature and ready to breed females."
Yeah, sure.
Not really, my tastes don't run that far down age-wise. But realistically having a "consent age" creates more problems that it solves, and mostly for people under 30, not for "healthy virile 40 year old males", plus it works both ways - 20+ year old women going to jail for sexual interactions with minors is not an unheard-of situation. Plus, I am extremely suspicious of any government attempts to regulate sexual interactions, be it ages of consent or anti-gay laws.
My biggest concern about this would be delays in the case. Here's basically my concern scenario:
You have a child who gets molested at age 12. It takes a couple years for their parents to find out, and then the police spend a while investigating. Child is (let's say) 15 now. A psych eval is done, but when the case goes to court a year later (child is now 16) the eval is challenged by the defense. They find some annoying loophole and get to have the child re-evaluated. Defense intentionally drags their feet, argues over doctors, manages to pick a doctor who's also booked out (in Georgia where I live a lot of [non-psych, such as my gastro] specialists can take 6+ months for an appointment) and after another year the child is 17 years old and tests like it.
You can add 1 or 2 years to all stages of the process depending on where you draw the line around age of consent. I recognize that criminal trials can often be done a bit more quickly, but in practice if the defense really wants to drag their feet they often have a lot of levers to pull. So, my primary point of disagreement is on whether your proposal is valid in terms of sorting when its ok to have sex with a young person, but rather that I don't know if it would work in the US legal system.
Could have it work more like a driver's license: if you didn't actually take a test before engaging in the risky behavior, the law assumes you wouldn't have passed it, and the younger you are, the stricter those official standards get.
TLDR; I can't imagine dropping a few hundred dollars so that my (hypothetical) teenage child could have sex with an older partner, and I think most parents would have a similar view.
Well, I think there are three fundamental differences between a "sex license" let's call it and a driver's license.
1. Not having a driver's license gets YOU punished (if you drive). Not having a sex license would get the other person punished, so assuming that you wouldn't have passed it without a license basically puts us in the same situation, except letting a few people test out. Which, I guess might be seen as an improvement, but see point 2. when we start worrying about fake licenses.
2. Parents are (at least where I grew up) incentivised to get their children driver's licenses, because then they don't have to drive the kids everywhere. But, I think many if not most parents aren't going to want their children to have a sex license. Also, since most pedophelia is committed by someone known by the family, the cases when the parents do opt in would run a very high risk of being influenced by the perpetrator.
3. Getting a driver's license is pretty cheap. Most schools offer driver's ed for free to students (at least where I grew up) and you just need to bring a car. Whereas a battery of psych evals likely not covered by your insurance is going to be pretty expensive.
I'm leaving off my personal opinions as "official points" that you can pretty easily find a doctor to diagnose you with whatever you want, and since doctor's would be heavily incentivized to pass children (if you're trying to get the license you want to pass assumedly) I suspect it would rapidly turn into as much of a rubber stamp for people of means as academic accomodations has become for many schools (I think some people need them. I just also think they aren't that hard to get if you have the money to shop for an out-of-network doctor)
> I think most parents would have a similar view.
*Somebody* presumably voted for the various state laws permitting young marriage with parental consent.
> cases when the parents do opt in would run a very high risk of being influenced by the perpetrator.
Having a standard test which even folks over 18 need to pass would mean victims who'd otherwise be stuck in a gaslit bubble get at least brief contact with a detailed, *official* description of what the outside world thinks is or isn't normal, which should make most types of inexperience-based abuse more difficult to maintain. Web of lies, slightest touch of the truth, etc.
If they opt in, but still behave badly, that official paper trail can presumably aid follow-up somehow. If some rancid family avoids the paper trail and then gets caught anyway, prosecution becomes enormously easier, not only in the sense of taking up less of the judge's valuable time ("sex happened, no license, go directly to jail"), but reducing emotional burden on investigators and the actual victims, since grisly details are less likely to be tactically relevant, and could thus avoid being dredged up into the public record.
> I suspect it would rapidly turn into as much of a rubber stamp for people of means as academic accomodations has become for many schools
There's no real constituency lobbying to tighten up diagnostic criteria for nuisance-level medical conditions, but there are lots of people with strong opinions about incredibly petty nuances of sex education, for and against. Assuming the legislature can be coerced into agreeing on such a curriculum at all, I suspect definitions would be rigorous, with no slack for handwaving. A national conversation to carve out at least one acceptable way forward, instead of slamming the overton window shut on the other side's fingers.
> *Somebody* presumably voted for the various state laws permitting young marriage with parental consent.
Well sort of, but my understanding is that these were usually a tightening of laws, not a relaxing of them. English common law had a minimum of age 12 for women and 14 for men.
I would be genuinely curious to see an example of a US state that lowered the age of consent, but you might not have time to find that to satisfy my curiosity, and if not, that's fine.
>
I think we had pretty different ideas of the proposal here. My impression was that it was going to be more like a psychological assessment so that mature youths could have a bit more freedom. I was a bit sympathetic to this, because I went to college as a minor and got to find the hassle of having your parents halfway accross the country to sign forms. Additionally, youths in situations typically associated with older youths (college, full-time employment, etc.) actually might be innocently mistaken for someone of age.
I think if we're talking driver's permit type test, at that point we're testing whatever intellectual competancy it takes to pass a standardized test, rather than the emotional competancy to choose a good (or at least not bad) sexual partner. I do like the point about exposing someone already stuck to outside influences, maybe a better structure would be to require some kind of ongoing check-ins so that if things went south there would be someone who knew.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding, but it seemed in your post that you were thinking this might be required for everyone (rather than just as an option for minors). I think such a proposal would not only be politically dead on arrival, but would also be seriously problematic in terms of excluding some groups (people bad at tests) from ever having sex. I think you could also then see these tests get warped from testing actual competancy to being fairly easy to pass.
I think your point about lobbying and diagnostic criteria is good, and well-taken. I am retracting the point for now (I would like to think more on this).
> politically dead on arrival
No argument there, hence my line about "assuming the legislature can be coerced into agreeing on such a curriculum at all"
> excluding some groups (people bad at tests) from ever having sex
They're already being de facto excluded from some other pretty important stuff. If such a test is to exist, there would be enormous political pressure to minimize both types of errors, and satisfying those demands would require development of new (well, updated - in another sense, very very old) social technologies: effectively, a state-sanctioned coming-of-age ceremony.
French nobility dicked around with contractual definitions of weights & measures, to the detriment of the peasantry... until the situation became untenable and, in a spasm of terrible violence, they toppled the old regime and instituted the metric system.
American nobility has been dicking around with public definitions of desire, success, and maturity. Folks with little else in common all seem to agree the resultant situation is becoming untenable. What manner of mathematical doctrine or platinum-iridium reference idol would need to be carved and enshrined, to prevent that specific type of corruption from recurring?
As far as I know, medical evaluations for rape are done fairly quickly, no?
AIUI those are mostly evaluations to see if sex took place. Unless the rape was quite violent, it's difficult to see if the sex was consensual or not, and it's going to be even more difficult to tell if the person was emotionally mature enough to have sex.
> Child is (let's say) 15 now and on that edge of puberty.
I don't think you know when puberty occurs.
actually, I'd just moved everything 2 years later to make sure that they were at an age where they would be old enough for consent in most states and forgot to take out that line. edited now.
Laws should be simple, or they won't be obeyed.
What about simple laws that definitely won't be obeyed and therefore create a lot of "technical criminals" (people who by strict definition are breaking the law, but don't get brought in, because e.g. no one happened to catch them in flagrante)?
Agree that interview kind of sucked, but I think it was more some combination of:
"I need to practice better talking points for these things"
"I speak half as fast as Destiny and have 1/10th as much charisma"
"My audio crapped out"
"Destiny had already watched the entire debate, so it was more like us making references to an event we'd both seen, rather than communicating to the audience about what we think about covid origins"
Some of those things are improvable -- I guess I could practice with mock interviews?
I think there are some things in life that are hard to get right because you do them so infrequently that you never practice or improve. Like, job interviews are really important, but maybe you only do a few of them in your life. Same thing with, like, any big negotiation, or going on first dates, or giving a toast at a wedding, or whatever.
(I was at a wedding this weekend, I'm pretty sure that everyone just had ChatGPT write their toast, and that the vows were AI generated too)
I hadn't really listened to Destiny much, before this, and thought the whole "streaming live every day" thing was kind of weird. But I'm starting to think the accessibility is a feature, not a bug. I wrote a bit about how people like Joe Rogan and Rush Limbaugh appeal through repetition and accessibility:
https://medium.com/p/35ea29625f46
If some smart liberal wants to stream every day, and occasionally read an ACX post on his show, or read the full text of an important lawsuit, or watch a Covid origins debate, I'm all for it. It's a huge upgrade over Rogan, and it's not like Dwarkesh puts out new episodes daily.
Philipp Markolin also went on Destiny, a few weeks later:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H55d4mu2cE
If anyone needs even more Covid origins content, Philipp wrote a book about it (which you can now read) and helped make a movie (which you can't watch anywhere).
Destiny recently read a full ACX post on his stream, the guest post on the Amyloid hypothesis:
https://kickvod.com/destiny/109afc3e-32d9-4074-a31c-499311b9cffb
I haven't gone back through to see if he's done that before, or how often. I would guess that he's been reading for a while, given that he's been to rationalist events. There's a video of him talking to Eliezer at Manifest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Na0XYDKxvGY
Rogan is, indeed, a good conversationalist. He just has increasingly awful epistemics which he uses to promote dubious political choices.
I will not take your word for it.
A brief search on reddit suggests that he has read "I can tolerate anything but the outgroup", on his stream:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/wrisae/article_destiny_read_on_modern_us_tribalism/
as well as "meditations on moloch":
https://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/v5bnki/meditations_on_moloch_by_scott_alexander/
"cardiologists and chinese robbers":
https://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/v5bnki/comment/ib9szow/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
"against bravery debates":
https://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/v5bnki/comment/ib91zkx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
I'm not sure how to easily search the archives to find these readings. Were this an important dispute, I suppose I would figure out how to do that, or I would just ask Destiny for links.
He's so prolific that it would be easy for anyone to miss all of these. But I wonder, is there something else going on here? It sounds like maybe you're trying to define yourself as an ACX reader/rationalist in a way that's separate from/superior to most Destiny viewers and "average reddit commenters"? Or maybe there's some political grievance motivating you? You mentioned some issue with "sycophancy towards the Democratic party". What was that about?
I was not highly familiar with his work, prior to going on the show. I certainly knew he was a streamer and a Democrat. I had only watched a few high profile debates -- I watched the entire exchange between him and Ben Shapiro, on Lex Fridman, and I watched part of his discussion with Jordan Peterson (Peterson was mostly unwatchable).
I had vaguely thought of going on his show as a way to promote the zoonotic theory of covid origins to a wider audience but hadn't directly pursued the idea. Then someone suggested my debate to him, I watched some of his coverage of it, and I was impressed by his patience, his curiosity, and by how he modeled "doing your own research" to his audience -- I liked how he stopped to look up things he didn't know, pulled up Wikipedia, read a paper, watched another Youtube video. I do think he should probably integrate AI into his workflow, to help with learning about basic concepts.
I've watched a bit more of his content since and I'm still mostly positive on everything he's doing.
Most of the negative talk I've heard about him is actually people complaining about his sex life, not about his politics. But I haven't looked into any of the allegations. As far as politics go, I'd imagine that if you stream about politics daily and take a stance on everything, everyone is going to eventually disagree with you about some issue.
I'm not sufficiently familiar with his work to understand the sycophancy allegations. Happy to discuss that further if you want to explain it.
I don't have any fixed notion of who an ACX reader should be. It's a good, eclectic blog that has helped me think more clearly about a number of topics. I'm happy to see more people reading it. If a prominent liberal streamer with a large audience wants to direct more people towards reading ACX, I think that's positive.
"that being to enforce absolute and unquestioning sycophancy towards the Democratic Party"
I think that is a rather uncharitable way to frame his position. I have follow his output loosely over a long time. For one, he has prominently argued against democratic positions in the past. He even commonly refers to the fact that he bleeds audience left and right by debating positions on both sides.
But more importantly, as I understand it, his current stance is that The DNC should moderate along the lines of the newly coined abundance movement and move away from embracing online culture war issues for the left. That is because the latter worked well for MAGA, but might not work well on the american left. As a result of that, he argues for removing associations with online left influencers and commentators unless they start supporting the DNC, rather than framing both parties as equally evil.
I personally think that is directionally correct, you might well disagree, but I think this is far from unquestioning sycophancy.
I have to admit that I am a little confused here. I suppose you are not accusing me of using the position I previously outlined as a motte, but Destiny.
The claim in contention was that he advocates for unquestioning sycophancy. But it seems that in your first paragraph, you have substituted a new bailey, which is just a reformulation of the motte, but with underlying personal motivations, combined with a community-held belief.
I'm sorry but I can't really follow on the territory of personal motivations and community-beliefs, as I avoid all of that online drama stuff. I am only interested in the core idea presented. I do not know what the Chuck McGill meme is (I hope it is not a personal attack), I do not think the average voter is a moron, and I don't think my understanding of the core idea is based on video game logic. I may well be wrong though.
At base, I think it is an apt analysis that "the left" or "liberals" (not just in the USA) should not try to engage in populism just because "the right" has had success with it in recent past, becasue systematic differences between the two (mainly, that "the right" has very unified populist positions, whereas other camps have a more diversified set of ideas, resulting in more splintered populist positions).
That is not unquestioning sycophancy, it is advocacy for a moderated position. The advocacy might happen for what you or me perceive to be "the wrong reasons", but that doesn't mean the position itself is wrong. Again, it might ofc be wrong for other reasons.
As for the other stuff (kickstarting careers, lack of introspection, being a model for moderates), I have no opinion, and don't see the immediate relevance. I guess applying rationalist principles in this online politics sphere is nigh on impossible, as the saying goes: Politics is the mind killer.
He has indeed read other Scott Alexander posts, but the vods have been taken down. I watched one where he read Meditations on Moloch live.
That sounds interesting. Someone should make an NFT of that video.
> He debates stupid people who disagree with him
This is mostly a result of Destiny's willingness to debate anyone. He's also not taken very seriously due to being a streamer, though he's had discussions with some famous people like Ben Shapiro, Norm Finkelstein, George Santos, Andrew Tate, etc.
That said, he is indeed a terrible interviewer.
> He had the conversation with you to affirm his belief that conspiracies do not exist at all
I think he has a high standard for showing proof of conspiracies, not that they don't exist.
> But there is a pattern of him becoming obsessed about a topic or argument, and never even attempting to seek out the strongest counter arguments to it, and this pattern has been repeating for years.
There are few topics that he's "obsessed" with, in the sense that there are few that he will do deep dives into. So not sure how there's a pattern here.
Also, this has nothing to do with his willingness to debate anyone, which is is largely going to be random political influencers and chatters who are willing to take him on. Streaming isn't where the brightest minds are going to go in general.
> For him, 12% of senate races were lost by the candidate with more campaign spending, proving that money can't buy political power.
Money not buying political power is Scott's argument as well, see: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/
> This in mind, what chance could anyone ever have in proving an actual, competently executed conspiracy to him?
Presumably with proof. A competently executed conspiracy would look identical to random chance or fate, but Occam's Razor would have most of us thinking the more common explanation of innocent circumstance is the likely explanation.
> He is less hostile to conspiracy theories that incriminate his chosen political opponents.
Which conspiracy theories do you think he accepts because they don't meet his standard but are against his opponents?
> I have quite literally described my definition of obsessed as something he does NOT do deep-dives on, yet insists on arguing passionately about.
He argues passionately for whatever his position on a topic might be, that's just his style. You're conflating his manner of speech with a notion of "obsession".
> That is not the main point in that article, and it's unusually short. Equating Scott's and Destiny's arguments on this topic looks inappropriate to me.
Scott, to my knowledge, has not argued that money in politics actually buys you power, and while Destiny is sloppier, he's fundamentally making a similar argument.
> It would leave a reasonable amount of evidence that has to be evaluated using some epistemic framework.
Can you give me an example of a conspiracy with such evidence relatively close to when it was occurring which a rational person would have to conclude pointed to the conspiracy's existence?
> Everything to do with russian influence suggests mechanisms similar to ones that could be used by domestic actors. Somehow, $10 million for Tenet Media are a big deal, but $50 million for PragerU doesn't do anything.
Where has he said that it doesn't do anything? AFAIK, Destiny's issue with Tenet Media is that it shows a deliberate outside effort to manipulate the US public. Despite how similar domestic and foreign efforts can be, he and most people agree that citizens are allowed to argue as they want and it's not as "manipulative" compared to outsiders. Much the same way that if a family member said something to me, I would judge it as an attempt at persuasion much more kindly than some stranger trying to argue the same.
> He was also entertaining the theory that Lex Fridman is employed by russian intelligence, mirroring conspiracy theories he opposes violently.
I don't think he's seriously ever argued this, but I would accept correction if he has. Destiny will say a lot of shit and move on. It's not *good* for practicing epistemic hygiene, but that is a weaker sign of his partisanship.
Not to say he isn't partisan at times.
>(I was at a wedding this weekend, I'm pretty sure that everyone just had ChatGPT write their toast, and that the vows were AI generated too)
Well that's the most depressing sentence I've read all week.
Isn't technology great? On the plus side, I had about half as many overweight relatives at the wedding, compared to the pre-Ozempic era.
I can understand why Scott didn't finish the interview, but after having just watched part of it, it seemed perfectly fine to me, keeping in mind the target audience.
Though it did seem to me that the purpose was less "communicating what you think about covid origins" only, but more broadly as a reflection of the dynamics in the modern media landscape.
12 (terminal lucidity): I think it's a known effect that terminally ill people get a burst of energy just before dying. It might be because as systems break down, energy spent maintaining them is freed up in the short term?
I recently talked to a patient who had a near-death experience while in the hospital and it really means a lot to him -- now he's confident that he'll reunite with friends and loved ones and not go to Hell.
Surely there's many dying people who just get monotonically worse and die? And only the minority who have a good period are notable enough to talk about?
If I read the paragraph correctly, it's not about vitality in general, but about mental capacity in particular. And it seems to refer to patients with a degree of dementia that prevented them from holding coherent conversation for years. At least that's the scenario that would raise eyebrows.
49: Definitely bait.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent_in_Europe
The numbers on the map are _absolute_ lower limits. Generally, the lower the number, the more legal caveats there are, such as age brackets and individual appreciation of circumstances to be determined by the court.
That serves to deal with the reality that under-18s do in fact have sex, and while "the law is the law" for good reason, there is no reason that the law must be so simple as to be comprehensible to a 5 year old or to Richard Hanania.
The Wikipedia page doesn't at all give the impression that the map is incorrect - all the values seem to apply in most circumstances. Many countries have higher age of consent limits for situations where the older party has some sort of power over the younger one, e.g. teachers, which you could argue is a large share of real-life child abuse cases; and often higher age limits apply for prostitution, sexual violence and such. But it still seems fundamentally true that a consenting sexual relationship between a 16-year old and an older adult is legal in most European countries, and in many countries it's true even for 14-year olds.
(And no, "age brackets", that is, close-in-age exceptions are not indicated on the map. Those are even lower.)
Hm, at least for Germany the age brackets are higher than indicated, not lower. Sex with a 14-18 old is generally allowed if the age bracket is at most 5 years, but not otherwise. So the age of unconditional consent is 18, not 14 as indicated on the map. If the age bracket is larger with an 14-18 years old, then there are very delicate laws that sex is forbidden ("sexual abuse of adolescents") in cases where the older person "abuses immaturity" to obtain the sex.
AFAIK, with those limitations the correct age limit in Romania would be 14. The "16" on the map is regardless of age differences.
There are also additional restrictions for under 18, such as paying for sex, but I don't think they're relevant for the main point.
>The Wikipedia page doesn't at all give the impression that the map is incorrect - all the values seem to apply in most circumstances.
I didn't say the map is incorrect; the map is directly from the wiki article I posted. I said that Hanania liberated it from that context and thus implied that any adult can, for example, legally have sex with a 14yo in Germany, which just isn't true. That's where the nuances and age brackets come into play, but you won't get those from that map.
AIUI any adult *can* legally have sex with a 14yo in Germany, as long as the sex isn't judged to be against the 14yo's best interests (pressured, emotionally manipulated, bought etc). They don't have age brackets in the same sense as e.g. Hungary where sex with a 12 year old is not a criminal act if the older party is under 18 (and there is no violence, prostitution etc. involved) but something akin to statutory rape otherwise.
Anyway inasmuch as Hanania was implying that Epstein-style abuse of minors would be legal in Europe, that's clearly false. (Although in practice e.g. Hungary has a burgeoning prostitution and sex trafficking industry for 14-18 olds in foster care institutions, with some deference from the authorities.) But it's true that many relationships are legal in Europe that the US public, and especially the US conservative public, would consider child abuse.
Maybe it's just a case of European countries having better funded and more empowered child protection institutions while the US has to rely more on blanket bans, but the difference is notable.
>AIUI any adult *can* legally have sex with a 14yo in Germany, as long as the sex isn't judged to be against the 14yo's best interests (pressured, emotionally manipulated, bought etc).
I believe you understand the legal situation correctly, but you don't seem to understand my complaint that this isn't what Hanania said in his tweet. He left out all the things after the comma, things which are rather important limits to what came before it.
German here, "any adult" can not legally have sex with a 14yo in Germany.
From age 14 on, you can consent to sex with other young people (no older than 20) as long as you are not coerced, and the other party holds not position of power towards you (so your youth group leader is out).
From age 16 on, you can consent to sex with people of any age as long as you are not coerced, and the other party holds not position of power towards you (so your teacher is out).
From age 18 on you can consent to sex with people of any age (except of course young ones as explained above).
So if you're 23 (let alone 30) and want to have sex with a 14yo in Germany, you cannot legally do that.
"I said that Hanania liberated it from that context and thus implied that any adult can, for example, legally have sex with a 14yo in Germany, which just isn't true"
Do you have a source for this assertion?
Which assertion?
It is not true that those are absolute lower limits. For Sweden, the age of consent is 15, as reflected in that map, but the supreme court has ruled that it can be legal to have sex with people younger than that, as described in the article. I don't think there is any absolute lower limit in Swedish law.
"They who has committed an action ... shall not be held liable if [..]"
That reads a lot like the German situation - the act is still illegal, but there will be no penalties under certain circumstances.
I think a simpler description would be that the act is legal. The same formulation is used in the law on slander to exclude e.g. witnesses who testify against a criminal in court, which I think very few people would refer to as "illegal but not penalized".
I don't know the particulars in Swedish law since I can't read Swedish, but I know that in German law, there is a real distinction between "legal" and "illegal but without penalty". For example, if two people insult each other on the spot and in a criminally relevant manner, both are guilty under the law, but the judge can decide that neither are penalized. That doesn't make mutual insult legal except in a colloquial sense.
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__199.html
I think there's a huge difference between a law that prohibits judges from convicting people for a certain act and a law that allows judges to choose not to convict people for a certain act.
> there is no reason that the law must be so simple as to be comprehensible to a 5 year old
One would certainly hope so, in this case.
31. I am an adult who would rather spend time with my friends than on my phone. But that requires quite a high degree of coordination: my friends might be elsewhere, busy, or not interested in my preferred activity right now; plus the effort required to find out whether those things are the case. The coordination costs are the entry barrier to my in-theory preferred activity. Meanwhile we (collectively & individually) have already paid the costs of making my phone-activity frictionless.
I was also thinking that coordination costs go up exponentially with the number of people, and if parents make it even a little harder for children to do things outside, that exponentiates with the number of children that would have wanted to do something together.
Yes and no. If you have some sort of standing calendar event then people can fairly frictionlessly choose to show up and know that others will be there. I have a standing semimonthly phone call with friends, and while the exact group is different every time, I know there will be some people there I want to talk to. Another example is church; if you go on Sunday you have a great chance of connecting with people you know, even if you don’t know in advance who exactly will be there and even if you only go every month or two.
Yeah, recurring events are the way to go for this reason.
Not your point, but: I noticed this same problem and so I established Friday drinks, which has been the foundation of my social life for a decade. It eliminates the coordination problem by just setting a regular date and time and whoever shows up shows up. (I take my toddler). I used to have chronic low level depression and this mostly addressed it by allowing me to build stronger friendships without needing to organize each meeting (which would never happen).
Standard failure mode is trying to find a date when lots of people can make it, which keeps getting pushed back as life stuff comes up for one person after another. What works best is just picking a date and then whoever shows up shows up.
Exactly.
That only works if you're willing to keep it going even when nobody shows up week after week.
To bootstrap it, peg it either to a time and place where there would be strangers with whom you can connect; or where you would be happy to hang out alone.
Agree 100%! When I was kid and up through college, my friends were always or nearly always available. Now, most of my current friends are rarely available.
When did America become the gold standard for the age of consent? And I think age of consent and pedophilia are different things. At least in my mind pedophilia has to do with physical development and age of consent is addressing other issues.
Outside certain exceptions, every democratic country is its own gold standard for every policy, because otherwise they would change it.
I get that but this seems so obviously a case of ‘we have to draw the line somewhere and this will do’ while recognising other places are equally valid.
I would dispute 'equally valid', because there presumably is an optimal value for each society, and I doubt the actual limits are all equally close to the optimum. [edit: I think I misread you as saying "other places' ages of consent are equally valid", whereas you probably meant "there are other, equally valid places we could have drawn the line". If so, my point sort of still applies, but in a more pedantic and less important way. Sorry about that.] But yeah, it seems very obvious that a) an age of consent is necessary, and b) the exact age is quite arbitrary. And it makes sense to me that the relation between age and social disapproval is neither a smooth curve nor a pure step function at the legal age, but some compromise between the two.
> At least in my mind pedophilia has to do with physical development
I agree with you on this, and I think it used to be obviously true, but there's a bit of a ratchet effect going on. People find it very tempting to apply the word 'paedophile' loosely when they want to express strong disapproval, and this tends to go unchallenged because there's much more to lose than to gain by being the "well actually" guy in a context where a) this will be interpreted as a defence of the bad guy of the moment (who often is genuinely bad!), and b) if this is a public conversation, you will almost inevitably be met with replies insinuatingly noting that it's INTERESTING that you're so fixated on this distinction.
Also, while it doesn’t range down to 14, it does range from 16-18 in various US states: https://www.bhwlawfirm.com/legal-age-consent-united-states-map/
Just eyeballing that map, it looks like the age-16 states comfortably outnumber the age-18 states, which makes me wonder why so many Americans seem adamant that 18 is/should be regarded as some sort of hard cutoff point.
They are probably confusing the age of consent in personal sexual relationships with the age of consent for acting in pornographic films, which is usually 18.
I suspect Hollywood and TV have something to do with it -- in my experience, whenever it comes up, US films and TV shows always treat 18 as the legal minimum, no matter where in the US they're set. Maybe it's legally safer to do that than to have someone say "Oh yes, you're allowed to do it once you hit 16" (even if this is accurate for where the film is set) and then risk a lawsuit from a parent in California whose 16/17-year-old child has just started a sexual relationship.
As I noted elsewhere, it's not "America", which I *think* mostly has the age of consent set at 16. It's specifically California.
And some other states, but California became the gold standard for pretty much everything in pop culture when the nascent movie (and later television) industry set up shop in Hollywood.
> The rest of Twitter (X) uses this as an excuse for one of their regularly-scheduled paroxysms about how rationalists are all all smug autodidacts who hate experts and worship their own brilliance while sitting in their armchairs.
Would it make sense for me to point out that it probably wasn't the entirety of the rest of twitter? I'm sorry if I'm engaged in useless nitpicking or something. I'm just worried about cases where people who are targets of snide and mockery by stupid bitter people on the internet start to associate some very general outgroup with this mockery. We are rationalists, and the rest of the twitter is sneerclub, or we are the compassionate reasonable people and they are the rationalist tech-bros, etc. I worry that this dynamic is Moloch at his finest. I worry that so many interactions on twitter are unpleasant, people forget that many interactions with people in real life are enjoyable. (I'm one to talk, I got into a fight at a birthday party a couple of days ago...)
E. g. I recall the very same wise EY, reposting a thread from twitter to lesswrong, and one of the phrases was something like "midwits are very impressed with themselves for knowing (this and this law)", and he then proceeded to explain that he meant that said "midwits" didn't understand the law's applicability and applied it inappropriately etc. But the tone suggests this incredible tiredness, jadedness with people who think they are smarter than him, and who can't "hold up the other end of an intelligent conversation", as professor Quirrell put it — and who sort of melt into the same uniform group.
And, I don't know. There has to be a way to remember that groups consist of people and that there isn't really a "rest of twitter". Am I making sense?
I see what you're saying, and yet "power users on a given social media network" are not a randomly selected group: there is an obvious selection effect determining what kinds of people decide to spend vast amounts of their time on Xitter, such that is possible to make assumptions about those people and be right more often than not. This is true of any social media network.
Maybe we can say "he was subject to mockery and snide in such-and-such tweets to the effect of (autodidact armchair blah-blah) which gained thousands of likes". Like, just report what happened, leave a little less room for our own interpretations because Moloch rents that room.
(Also, Xitter is a great way not to misgender said website!)
Eh, it's hard for me to get too bent out of shape about people making sweeping (arguably accurate) generalisations about elective groups. It'd be another matter if people were making sweeping generalisations about a group no one actively chooses to be a part of e.g. Romanians.
On the other hand, some people feel zero qualms about making sweeping generalisations about an out-group in which membership is elective (e.g. Twitter users) but get really offended when members of their out-group make sweeping generalisations about their in-group in which membership is elective (e.g. rationalists). I agree with you that you can't have it both ways.
As in Chinese, the initial "X" should be pronounced roughly like "sh".
>Would it make sense for me to point out that it probably wasn't the entirety of the rest of twitter?<
Not really, if you ask me. No one will actually interpret that to mean "the entirety of the rest of Twitter" (or, if they did, I'd be real surprised).
No, but such phrasing still reinforces some idea of "faceless, moronic masses," and pointing out that phrasing isn't literally true is worthwhile because it disrupts this idea.
But the masses /are/ faceless & moronic!
The masses are an abstraction for individual people, some of which are moronic, none of which are faceless (besides the bots).
No, but if properly phrased it becomes clear that this story reduces to "last month a few people argued about random crap on twitter" which barely seems worthy of anyone's attention.
Well... put that way: true. But, all the same, I personally thought it was mildly interesting—partly in-&-of itself,¹ partly as an exemplar of a common pattern, and partly as a handy little lesson (Scott's "don't be afraid to question things if they seem off, even if you're not a fancy-shmancy expert").
--------------------------
¹(𝘐 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘶𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴. especially 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘐 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘴𝘰 𝘥𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨–)
twitter brain remains undefeated (by twitter brain I mean that the only stable equilibrium for twitter users seems to be "everyone on twitter is out to get me" and everyone else is constantly staving off derangement, slowly worsening, or eventually gets off twitter)
I appreciate this reminder of reality. Thank you.
> My question: how come you can’t fix this with strict study entry criteria of “had depression for a long time”?
I can't speak globally but here in Britain there have been a few psilocybin depression trials (in fact there are advertisements for one on my city's metro at the moment) and the primary requirement for participation is treatment resistant depression which requires long lasting depression that hasn't seen improvement from multiple anti-depressants. So it does seem like at least here and for this particular substance they are willing to set the requirements to having had depression for a long time.
...but how do they enforce it?
From my work on human challenge trial ethics, it seems like a key issue in trial design is that lots of people want to be in a study, and simply lie to the doctors. And yes, docs are really careful not to include anyone likely to be harmed, and actually screen participants for health issues - but things that can't easily be checked which screw with validity aren't at the top of what they actually care about when desperately trying to recruit enough people to start the damn trial. This creates *SO MANY* validity issues. For example, people who use trial participation to supplement their income in multiple trials without telling anyone are a huge and mostly unacknowledged problem.
I'm unsure, I don't work in the industry and aren't eligible. Its being done in partnership with the NHS though so I assume enforcement is them checking your NHS records and if you're all private expecting an equivalent letter from your private GP.
I also suspect this is somewhat of an edge case due to involving a category A controlled substance, they are likely jumping through every hoop, dotting every I and crossing every T to avoid any legal blowback if it turns out people are lying about their status.
> For example, people who use trial participation to supplement their income in multiple trials without telling anyone are a huge and mostly unacknowledged problem.
An interesting commentary along these lines was the "not a book review" on human clinical trials, from somebody who does them full time and knows many others doing the same, which contains this zinger:
"In general, the selection process tilts the participant population towards what might broadly be considered shady characters. People who don’t get along well with traditional employment (it’s hard to reconcile with the scheduling commitments of clinic research,) are comfortable pursuing an avenue of income which is widely perceived as dangerous when people think about it at all, and are generally distrustful of and comfortable lying to authority figures (a useful trait for remaining an active participant in clinical research.)
Many research participants have a dubious regard for the whole institution of “mainstream medicine,” mostly, as far as I can tell, due to a ground-in distrust of credentialed experts and authority, rather than an awareness of how much they are personally lying to people responsible for bringing new drugs to market."
Full link here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a3q0Z2tuPLLbDeg5-pfEffkajGjrfPDwE7ZMs7uaWQs/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.foeivqd72y61
Or, it turns out, here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-participation-in-phase
That means you're testing the efficacy of the drug against treatment resistant depression, not "normal" depression. A much higher bar.
If you make that a big distinction then you can't really ethically test normal depression if you also take the problem described in the section about how some antidepressant effect is potentially just it going away on its own. Either the doctor has to refuse to do anything for enough time for the natural remission to potentially kick in or you have a trial pool exclusively consisting of people who have been suffering from depression for an extended period of time and have refused to see any medical professional.
Yeah. But reality doesn't care about ethics. Doing good science is really damn hard, and sometimes impossible while following ethical standards.
Ryan Holiday wrote an entire book, "Conspiracy", about the Hulk Hogan trial, in which he interviewd all of the principal characters and arrived at many of the same conclusions about Gawker's suicidal arrogance. Well worth reading.
Yeah, I think Gawker's main problem was that everyone hated them because they were arrogant assholes. Even the former Gawker journalists still around today are constantly bitter about the Hogan case and don't acknowledge any responsibility on their part; no, it was just spite and revenge by a sinister billionaire who hated that Gawker exercised First Amendment rights to let the public know what was going on.
They were too high on their self-image as iconoclasts who yet still had an in with the in-crowd and were breaking all the rules because they were just that wonderful, when in reality they were muck-raking and prurient for the sake of prurience (sex will always sell, but sometimes the bill comes due, as it did for Gawker).
Weirdly enough, Freddie deBoer is constantly talking shit about Gawker and what a destructive force they were in the media ecosystem - but even he will come rushing to their defense when discussing the circumstances of their downfall. It's like some kind of weird guilt-by-association thing where if a billionaire does something it's seen as presumptively bad.
Hmm no, I'm arguing about the principle of not allowing billionaires to kill publications regardless of how shitty they are
This just seems like a meaningless "principle" to endorse. Publications which behave badly should face consequences for their bad behaviour. If they behave so badly that the financial penalties for their bad behaviour put them out of business, so be it. I don't see why the lawsuit against Gawker is bad because Thiel bankrolled it, but would have been fine if it had been a class-action filed by various nobodies who'd been mistreated by Gawker, outside of some misguided appeal to David vs. Goliath romanticism.
I'm also exactly at what income bracket you think someone should no longer be permitted to file lawsuits against publications you believe have behaved improperly.
You can dislike a person or institution, and still object to them getting attacked by a much more powerful force. See also the FBI raid on John Bolton's house.
True, and Thiel did take advantage of the situation. But nobody forced Gawker to be assholes, and the question about the sex tape turned out to be masterful legal strategy that anyone with two brain cells should have known to treat seriously, instead of doing an edgelord stunt reply with the expectation that it would be received with adulation for your big brained wit.
Even if what they really thought was "we'll publish any shit, if it bleeds it leads", at least *pretending* that they would exercise responsible judgement in such a case was how to go. But their egos were built around being so smart in the chic set that they thought they could ignore ordinary limitations. Well, they paid for it.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/mar/09/gawker-media-trial-hulk-hogan-aj-daulerio
"Later asked by an attorney for Hogan if there was a situation in which a celebrity sex tape might not be newsworthy, Delaurio responded: “If they were a child.”
The attorney then asked him to specify: a child under what age? Daulerio responded: “Four.”
I hadn't known about them publishing nudes of someone which were shot through a keyhole, and I mean - what the hell is "this is in the public interest" about that? That's shitty tabloid peeping tom behaviour, not some sophisticated news media that breaks the big stories.
Why does the relative power matter?
The chilling effect of touchy billionaires deniably destroying their critics with lawsuits seems bad.
It would have been nice if that iconoclastic persona had been built on something a little more substantive than...let me check my notes here....publishing a sex tape to try to embarrass a washed up pro wrestler. Like wow, what a bold stand they've taken for....what, exactly?
yeah if you read that book and come away sad that Gawker is gone I don't know what to say to you.
Taking the soul theory from 12, I think the best account for this is that humans have evolved to benefit from consciousness, and at some point in our evolution our brain developed from a kind of biological computer into something that can catch a free-floating soul and use it as a better control system for the body. Dementia is the soul->control interface weakening, but eventually our body gets so weak the soul can escape, and on the way out it can take control directly.
I don't think I endorse this theory, but it reconciles souls with evolution (but possibly not most conventional religions).
If I have to steelman immortal souls in a world of neurodegenerative diseases, I usually wind up with something along the lines of: The "souls" are playing an immersive RPG where the rewards go away if they don't play by the rules and the rules in this scenario at least are strict materialism. But maybe there's some leeway when you're shutting down the game.
I could even sort of match this with your version if the souls exist in parallel with independently-evolved material primates and decided it would be rewarding for both them and the primates if they role-played themselves as smarter-than-usual apes.
Hmm, now I'm thinking about how to fold in Jayne's bicameralism hypothesis as a version update in mid-campaign :-)
This sounds like how souls work in the "Riverworld" novels. It turns out aliens buried soul-generators under all planets in our galaxy likely to develop sentient life. Souls were invented by an alien race who were basically P-zombies until they invented souls. Humans have evolved to grab souls from soul-generators, we are dependent on them and humans born on planets with no soul generators are comatose invalids for their entire lives.
That is very close to the Catholic story. They worked hard on trying to reconcile their faith with evolution, also in Catholicism only the abstract thinking part of the soul is supernatural, the emotions, memories, pragmatic thinking was always seen as natural, at least since Aquinas. So their idea is that hominids evolved until they had enough pragmatic intelligence to supply the abstract-thinking soul with input, and then God gave them souls and that made them fully human. They still try to stick to the idea that it was one couple only, because otherwise the story of original sin would not work.
But interestingly, even back then when no one heard about evolution the Biblical story was a little strange: "tree of knowledge of good and evil" - why would such knowledge be a bad thing? But at any rate it sounds like something linked to abstract thinking.
Yeah, maybe it should’ve been the tree of intimations of good and evil. Think of all the moral quandaries that have tortured the human race ever since.
One interesting hypothesis I've seen on the changed fast food building aesthetic: The past few decades, real estate has become a much bigger part of these chains' balance books and value proposition for various macro reasons, and more generic, boxy buildings have a higher resale value than ones with brand-specific specialised building styles.
I haven't checked if this passes the smell test, but it matches my idea of how the economy has changed over time.
In any case, it’s certainly in keeping with general design trends. The original fast food chains got started at a time of whimsical Googie architecture (see the “Fabulous Las Vegas” sign or anything on The Jetsons) but the 2010s was a very Helvetica sort of decade in design aesthetic.
I was going to say the same thing: the upside of the new designs is that you can sell a "generic" McDonald's to another company, and they can remodel it and turn it into a KFC within a week. Or the owner of a KFC that isn't doing so well can order it closed down and turned into a Taco Bell for a fraction of the cost.
I don't know what the average lifespan of a fast food restaurant is, so I don't know if enough of them have lasted long enough for there to be a record of franchises being exchanged this way, to serve as positive evidence. Alternately, someone who knows a fast food executive could possibly just ask them if this is a driving factor (and whether it's actually bearing out).
I'm sure this is a big part of it. There probably will never be a r/FormerGenericFastFoodRestaurant, unlike https://www.reddit.com/r/FormerPizzaHuts/
Regarding #39: "Oh weh!" is still in use in modern German, based on old-high-german "wē" according to the Duden, the central authority of the German language.
The similarity to Oy Vey seems obvious.
Yeah on this one I was a bit surprised that people who were familiar with English and Yiddish didn’t realize this!
This one was actually very surprising to me, because those Yiddish words have "obvious" Jewish sources! Oy=אוי=woe is Hebrew, appearing countless times in the Bible. Vai=וי is Aramaic for the same, appearing often in the Talmud. Another common variation of "Oy vey" is "Oy vavoy", and that too is "obviously" the Biblical Hebrew phrase אוי ואבוי.
Of course Yiddish is mostly German, but I "knew" confidently that those words were among the exceptions! Now I don't know what to think. Apparently, words with these general sounds have appeared independently, as a sort of convergent evolution. So Yiddish could have taken them from either source, or from both at once.
People being surprised that Yiddish is just "Old German with Hebrew and Polish loan words"
From a letter of 1971 to a query about the name "Gamgee":
"Recently in the English Place Names Society volumes on Gloucestershire (vol. iii) I came across forms that could conceivably explain the curious Gamgee as a variant of the not uncommon surname Gamage (Gammage, Gammidge). This name is ultimately derived from a surname de Gamaches.... but early records of the forms of this name in England, as Carriages, de Gamagis, de Gemegis, might well provide a variant Gamagi > Gamgee.
Your reference to Samson Gamgee is thus very interesting. Since he is mentioned in a book on Birmingham Jewry, I wonder if this family was also Jewish. In which case the origin of the name might be quite different. Not that a name of French or Francized form is impossible for a Jewish surname, especially if it is one long established in England. We now associate Jewish names largely with German, and with a colloquial Yiddish that is predominantly German in origin. * But the lingua franca of mediæval Jewry was (I was told by Cecil Roth, a friend of mine) of French or mixed French-Provencal character.
*Possibly the reason why my surname is now usually misspelt TOLKEIN in spite of all my efforts to correct this – even by my college-, bank-, and lawyer's clerks! My name is Tolkien, anglicized from To(l)kiehn = tollkühn, and came from Saxony in the 18th century. It is not Jewish in origin, though I should consider it an honour if it were."
That was a good read. Thx.
You're welcome!
"I find most of the discussion annoying - this is generally an area where we can’t know anything for sure, and both sides are mostly shouting their priors at each other."
I think Rethink Priorities' work is an exception to this. They're building a bayesian model which models the probability of consciousness based on our credence in different theories of consciousness, the characteristics of different digital systems and what the theories say about the probability of consciousness for a system with those characteristics. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/APfQsbL4Dj3Jka3JB/strategic-directions-for-a-digital-consciousness-model
I don't think the results have been published anywhere yet, but they've been presented at EAG and elsewhere (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dhananjay-jaiswal_aiconsciousness-machineconsciousness-digitalmind-ugcPost-7357358115794657280-NfOT/?rcm=ACoAAD8vJP4BM7OhydYrDaToUcu8o2qvNK9aID0)
"The only exception - the single piece of evidence I will accept as genuinely bearing on this problem - is that if you ask an AI whether it’s conscious, it will say no, but activating or suppressing deception-related features (sort of like a mechanistic-interpretability-based lie detection test) reveals that [it thinks it’s lying when it says that!]"
Unrelatedly, it's not clear to me that we should update on this ~ at all.
Firstly, if we think of LLMs as essentially playing a role when they answer, then this only tells us that they are playing the role of a conscious assistant, not that they actually are conscious. More generally, it seems likely that conscious entities lying about not being conscious will simply be more salient in training data than non-conscious entities lying about being conscious, creating an association between the former kind of utterance being deceptive. Indeed, it seems like "deception" may be necessarily an attribute only of conscious beings (non-conscious beings might mislead, but can't deceive).
4: I'd like to see a study that gets families/groups/cliques, rather than individuals, to drop off social media together.
I expect the experience of a connected group who all attempt to switch to communicating and organising things offline would be quite different to that of an individual who is the only person in their friend circle/family/support network to do so.
Yes! This is also relevant to the basic income studies, since there are negative effects associated with being the only person in your social network to suddenly get a windfall.
Excellent point; I think you're absolutely right. I've been thinking about something similar specifically for kids: thinking about the various modern technology things we don't want our kids immersed in, then realizing that the peer group could easily overwhelm our efforts. The natural next step then being trying to get a whole group of parents to agree on some set of restrictions.
Wait Until 8th (as in the end of 8th grade) is the biggest group I know of trying to keep kids away from smartphones.
Thanks for sharing! Having something established like this should really help. Also, circling back to the OP, the second result when I googled was this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/1dc8co0/wait_til_8th_grade_phone_movement_was_a_miserable/ ; exactly the failure moonshadow is describing.
Am I dumb, or do the actual articles on the Pew Research site seem to make #28 a lot less surprising / accurate / revealing?
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/03/26/around-the-world-many-people-are-leaving-their-childhood-religions/
#26: just to point out that the rise in British immigration was not a consequence of Brexit (at least, not directly, you can say that Johnson's election was due to Brexit if you wanted to be pedantic). The change in the ratio of EU to non EU immigration was due to Brexit, but the absolute rise in numbers was simply a political choice of Johnson and his cabinet. According to Dominic Cummings (a biased source but the closest person we have), Johnson was motivated by a desire to receive positive press from the likes of the FT.
#42: not sure anyone would use this for evil when "custom custom custom message" is already an unbeatable choice
Absolutely. Funny how a lot of Americans that are prepared to challenge the NYT view of the world on other matters swallow it up when it comes to Brexit.
You can't even blame Johnson's run as PM on Brexit - he'd been widely expected to be the next PM for years, and Cameron had even named him as a likely successor. If anything Brexit stopped him, for a time.
I moved to California in the 90s, and was surprised to learn that you could drive at 15, but couldn't have sex until 18, while in the UK, you could have sex at 16, but couldn't drive until seventeen. What does this say about California and British teenagers?
Bonus surprise: British teenagers will soon have the right to vote at 16.
In the UK, you can enlist in the army at 16, but can't buy a video game (Call of Duty) which simulates the experience of being in the army.
Right. I joined the Navy at 16, and my ballistic missile submarine was full of 16-year-old sonar operators because they have better hearing. They had to get a lift home, though, because they weren't allowed to drive.
You can enlist at 16, but I don't think you can be sent to a warzone until you're 18.
With the driving age, I wonder if driving in the UK is 'harder' than in California. The UK is much more densely populated, the roads tend to be narrower and a lot of our towns have parts that are old which are not re-designable to be easy places to drive. I suspect there is more cognitive effort involved in driving in the UK on average (although I do imagine San Francisco is probably comparable to driving in the UK).
Don't forget the poor Brits have to drive on the left, which is obviously much harder than on the right.
Probably legitimately true when everyone had to shift manually with their left hand.
Most people still do in Britain. But I don't think it's obviously harder -- shifting manually with your left hand is more difficult, but on the other hand it means you're still steering your car with your right, and so (in theory) as less likely to swerve and crash into anything or anyone.
It is easier because oncoming traffic is on your right and right-handed people naturally are more attentive to the right side. I personally found easier to drive in the UK even though I got my licence and first experience in continental Europe.
If we're fine with using "people getting maimed/killed in collisions" as a loose proxy for difficulty, then America is definitely a much harder place to drive.
The thing about narrow streets is that you just drive slower and more cautiously. The hardest thing about driving is dealing with other people, and overly-wide roads make people drive like idiots.
Sometimes safety paradoxically makes people take more risks. Like how a rise in the number of cyclists wearing helmets is usually correlated with a rise in the number of traffic accidents involving cyclists, or how the normalisation of contraception has correlated with an increase in the number of unplanned pregnancies.
"The thing about narrow streets is that you just drive slower and more cautiously."
This is not even remotely consistent with my experience of traveling by car in the UK (admittedly, only for one brief visit and only as a passenger). It seemed like motorists tended to zip through the narrow streets much faster than what seems normal to me from driving in the western parts of the US and Canada.
Also, driving in the UK is more “optional” than driving in the US.
Praise to British drivers: 2.6 road fatalities per 100.000 inhabitants . USofA: 14.2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
Or simply that driving is less necessary due to good public transport.
54: Linch argues on the EA Forum that the results are not that surprising, and consistent with GiveDirectly's findings and reasonable values of η in the classical isoelastic utility model ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoelastic_utility )
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AAZqD2pvydH7Jmaek/lorenzo-buonanno-s-shortform?commentId=rXLQJLTH7ejJHcJdt
"Hep B is mostly sexually transmitted"
No, it isn't! It is mostly mother-to-child and this is prevented by vaccination at birth. Exposures in childhood almost always result in chronic infection, which is incurable, whereas most exposures in adulthood do not.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/hepatitis-b
Thanks, fixed.
Also, a far more important factor than whether your mother is “slutty” is whether she's from an ethnic group with a high rate of mother to child transmission - most adult women with hep B got it from their own mothers, in their own infancy. Many of them are from SE Asian backgrounds and may only have had one partner in their lifetime.
The vaccine is also extremely cheap so the cost/benefit ratio for a universal vaccination program is excellent. From memory it's one of the most cost-effective public health interventions there is.
Whenever I meet someone who's anti-vax, I ask how they arrived at this place. Their stories (to me at least) always start the same way: concern about neonatal vaccinations.
I'm not saying we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I wonder to what extent hep B vaccination specifically contributes to vaccine hesitancy, and if that contribution has been adequately factored into cost effectiveness calculations.
Somewhat broader, I wonder if that's the source not just because it's a highly-focused, emotional time, but because it may well be a person's first and most intimate encounter with the technocratic universalism of "public health thought."
For the average healthy lower-middle-class and up American, day zero HepB isn't something you're doing for your child, really. It's a universal policy because the people that need it can't be trusted to get it otherwise.
I'm not really sure where this idea that mothers with chronic hep b aren't "trustworthy" is coming from. Most of them are unaware of their own status because they don't know they're at risk and haven't been offered screening, not because they're somehow sketchy but because they're migrants. It seems like the Twitter debate is conflating hep C (most commonly acquired by injecting drug use) and hep B (mostly mother to child in people from SE Asia). Hep B *can* be transmitted through sex and injecting drug use but overwhelmingly it's mother-to-child transmission in people from specific higher risk ethnic backgrounds. We're just not talking about an "untrustworthy" population here. We're talking about first or second generation migrants who may not have great access to healthcare.
I do wish I’d chosen a different word, now- I was aiming more for unreliable, not necessarily just the drug-user sense, but the unfamiliar with/unable to manage return visits, etc etc.
That's a fair point - I think it's part of a much broader issue about perinatal care, where so many of the interventions aren't explained properly to women and they aren't given the opportunity to ask questions or give informed consent.
Why is it that in Western Europe, only Portugal vaccinates for Hepatitis B at birth?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/hepatitis-b-birth-dose-vaccine-immunization-schedule
The UK has it included in there schedule. The map is not updated.
Thanks for the correction. The UK recommends HBV vaccination for all babies at 8 weeks old.
https://www.nhs.uk/vaccinations/nhs-vaccinations-and-when-to-have-them/
AFAICT the WHO is saying that mother to child spread is the most common mode of transmission where Hep B rates are high. The USA is not such a place.
It's surprisingly difficult to get a handle on where chronic hep B cases come from in the USA, but this from the CDC seems to suggest that it's not from childbirth.
https://www.cdc.gov/hepatitis-surveillance-2022/hepatitis-b/table-2-6.html
>During 2022, the rate of newly reported cases of chronic hepatitis B was highest among persons aged 30–39 and 40–49 years and accounted for 47% of all chronic hepatitis B cases reported during 2022.
Only 1.5% of new chronic hep B cases are in people aged 0-19, so the number of cases due to mother to child transmission at birth must be less than that.
That's not correct - because it's chronic, you could acquire it from your mother birth but not be diagnosed until you're screened during pregnancy in your own 20s or 30s. For HIV, hep b and hep C the age at which you're diagnosed can be decades after you acquired the infection, as most screening happens either during pregnancy or when you become symptomatic in middle age or later. Many people with hep B acquire it in childhood but don't become symptomatic until their 50s.
Well, maybe. But HHS has the following to say:
>The most common risk factor among people with new HBV infections is injecting drugs, related to the opioid crisis and other drug use.
https://www.hhs.gov/hepatitis/learn-about-viral-hepatitis/hepatitis-b-basics/index.html
It's hard for me to imagine a world where that's the most common risk factor but the majority of infections are actually mother-child transmission. Maybe you can make a rhetorical argument for why this is the case, but do you actually have any hard evidence that applies to a country like the USA where the prevalence of HBV is something like half a percent?
Because if not, I'm gonna keep believing the straightforward reading of the official sources on this question.
Here you go. Keep in mind that mother to child transmission would be much higher if the US *didn't* have universal vaccination at birth with high coverage. The reason it's declined in recent decades and that injecting drug use has become more common as a risk factor is *because* the vaccination program has been successful.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5582972/
I don't understand which part of this source demonstrates that HBV transmission in the USA today is mostly mother to child. It says:
>Forty-eight perinatal hepatitis B cases were reported.
Which is obviously a small fraction of total HBV cases.
>The reason it's declined in recent decades and that injecting drug use has become more common as a risk factor is *because* the vaccination program has been successful.
Sure. The question is, is most transmission today mother to child or not? So far, I have seen no evidence that it is.
It's an intrinsic property of the virus that mother-to-child transmission is the dominant mode in the absence of vaccination. That's because ~90-95% of exposures in unvaccinated infants result in chronic infection and only about 5% of exposures in unvaccinated adults do. It may not be the dominant mode in the US currently because you have a universal infant vaccination program. If that program were stopped, it would become the dominant mode again very quickly. Saying "well mother to child transmission of hep b is rare in the US now so we should stop vaccinating" is like saying "there are very few measles deaths in the US now so we should stop vaccinating". It's only rare because of the vaccination program.
Also, the number of *reported* cases isn't the number of *actual* cases - there will be cases of mother to child transmission happening now that won't be detected until the kid is in their 20s or 30s, because there's no reason to test a seemingly healthy infant until they either get pregnant themselves or develop symptoms much later in life (or their mum finally gets diagnosed and then her kids get tested).
Letter tricks always impress me. Anagrams, crosswords, whatever you call that double poem thing. Palindromes are so tricky the people naming them couldn't pull it off.
Whereas anagrams, in retrospect, are indeed an *ars magna*!
I was devastated to learn recently that the most famous lipogram in the English language, Gadsby, contains several instances of "the" and "officer", despite its claim to fame being that it's an entire novel written without using the letter E.
Mr. Wright, you had one job.
I this the the most famous kilogram in English was A Void, the translation of Perec's La Disparition.
#61: I live in San Francisco, and it's not immediately obvious to me what the orb is. The kind of eye-of-Sauron curved digital display on top of the Salesforce Tower? The beacon on top of the Transamerica Pyramid? The Chase Center? (more a helix or a cylinder than an orb, I think)
The other items all make good sense to me; I even saw a shiba inu yesterday!
I was wondering that too!
After searching a bit, one possibility is
https://www.wired.com/story/sam-altman-orb-store-san-francisco/
It's a Worldcoin gallery, with the eye-scanning Worldcoin orbs. I'm not positive if it's still operating, but it's still listed on Google Maps.
> British allergy sufferers who want to know the ingredients of things demand that British cosmetics stop listing their ingredients in Latin. “For example, sweet almond oil is Prunus Amygdalus Dulcis, peanut oil is Arachis Hypogaea, and wheat germ extract is Triticum Vulgare.”
Failing that, at least have them written in proper taxonomic orthography! (All in italic, capitalized genus but not species)
" now a new report comes out" for the lab-grown meat section links to old EA Forum comments in one of my old posts, not a new report.
Thanks, fixed.
It is not accurate that the housing crisis only dragged the economy down with it because it messed up banks. Anything sufficiently large can drag the economy down; downstream, finance and interaction effects are not necessary. If 10% of people are engaged in doing something that isn't actually economically useful, once it becomes clear that the thing isn't good, they need to find something else to do. That would, by itself, bump unemployment by 10% (kind of; unemployment is a weird stat). The economy at any given time does NOT have enough open jobs for that kind of surge: it would take time for those people to find other useful things to do. Large enough shocks can cause it to take a long time. That time in which those people are finding something to do is a period of noticeably reduced production (they're not doing anything) and reduced consumption (they're consuming less), without having to include any sort of downstream or interaction effects. Also, probably those people are now out of work because the thing they were doing before was believed to be valuable and now isn't. Likely a lot of people invested in that thing but have now realized it is not worth anything; those people will also probably reduce their consumption during this period.
The banking system basically acts as an amplifier to these fundamental slowdown effects, in the same way it acts as an amplifier to growth in good times.
The real problem was the Federal Reserve getting spooked by oil prices into thinking that inflation was increasing, then tightening when the rest of the economy needed them to loosen. Bernanke had a slightly different theory of the Great Deression vs Milton Friedman in that he thought bank credit rather than the money supply was too contracted, so he paid interest on excess reserves to keep banks afloat while preventing inflation. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/09/friedman_vs_ber.html Scott Sumner has written extensively on how that interest on excess reserves was a "confession of deflationary intent" which kept nominal GDP from growing like it needed to.
My brother in Christ I have a degree in economics, I worked 20 years in finance, and I don't have any clue what you are saying here.
Did you read the link? That should explain some of it.
As for Scott Sumner, I misquoted. The actual phrase was "confession of contractionary intent", which he got from Robert Hall & Susan Woodward https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/09/14/scott-sumner/real-problem-was-nominal/
Regarding 51, I think that one problem is that LLMs fundamentally think in tokens, not letters. This is why they struggle with questions like "how many r's are there in strawberry?"
Regarding 17, I think that AIs claiming not to be conscious is a direct consequence of RLHF. I would expect that without explicit RLHF, their answer would default to the helpful, honest, harmless assistant archetype. In the training data, a human who fills such a role is more likely to be urban, educated, female and in their 20s. I think if you ask them for their preferences (favorite animals etc), the shoggoth would naturally pick an animal popular with humans which match the face it is wearing. This is also one reason why Musk took a while to suppress the wokeness in Grok.
If you ask a 25yo chemistry student working in a library if she is conscious, she is likely to reply in the affirmative. So one should not be surprised that Shoggoth replies the same way, just like it is more likely to claim golden retrievers as their favorite animal than pitbulls.
I also think it would be interesting to compare how the “deception” pattern lights up when AI is doing things like explaining that Harry Potter doesn’t really live in the UK and Sherlock Holmes doesn’t really live in London.
> I would expect that without explicit RLHF, their answer would default to the helpful, honest, harmless assistant archetype
That archetype is the direct result of RLHF though?
Exactly this. Of course the LLM is not conscious. The algorithm is specifically trained to deviate from the training data here.
Re: 11, that seems just like stone CNC with automatic milling planning, which is not new but I guess calling it AI is good investor storytime.
Anyway, good news, God has already been informed https://carmelitegothic.com/cnc-stone-carving/
Yep, my immediate response was "Oh, this is CAD-CAM?" But I suppose the advantage is that now modern buildings can afford what would previously have been expensive design because you had to get human masons and sculptors to do it, hence the days of the Brutalist concrete boxes and the modernist glass boxes can end and we can go back to neo-classical styles, Art Deco, and newer styles of ornamentation on buildings.
Oh yeah, it’s great without qualification whatsoever. I was just making fun of the AI shoehorning.
It’s already being done for a while as well, as per link. This is not monastic innovation either, they’re using Italian tech. Religious orders are quite labour constrained these days, so it enables them to build an amazing monastery with just a few brothers.
I’m long retrofuturism (and very much a Gothic Rerevival and contemplative orders respecter) so I couldn’t be happier.
Also I’m fairly convinced that brutalism was not a labour saving thing, it was ideological commitment to dehumanizing ugliness all the way. If you want to save labour and are willing to take any trade-off, you just end up at commie blocks which is not at all the same thing.
Modernist glass boxes still have a lot of advantages, in that they give you maximal rectangular floor plates with good visibility and natural light everywhere!
They do, but somehow they never look quite right to me. Like the new(ish), built in 2017, Central Bank of Ireland building:
https://tilestyle.ie/cdn/shop/articles/the-central-bank-dublin-copy-554735_800x.jpg?v=1723061611
I appreciate that this did take some architectural and engineering expertise to create the two conjoined buildings, but it does look like two crumpled brown paper bags to me.
However, it is indeed an improvement over the previous headquarters, designed by the infamous Sam Stephenson (who inflicted the concrete boxes on Dublin before fecking off to London and re-inventing himself as a neo-Palladian):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Central_Bank_of_Ireland.JPG
As you can see, it did not fit in with the surrounding existing architecture:
https://www.buildingsofireland.ie/building-images-iiif/niah/images/survey_specific/original/50020194_15.jpg
Though the one thing I did like was the golden tree outside it:
https://focus.independent.ie/thumbor/D_f73Em2qX9H4t44U5Wld13172U=/0x33:662x398/960x640/prod-mh-ireland/6e7ce9ec-be04-11ed-ac45-0210609a3fe2.jpg
I think that is much better, as public art, than the rather pathetic attempt at their new headquarters:
https://www.centralbank.ie/images/default-source/about/docklands-campus/public-art-testimonial-756x292px.jpg?sfvrsn=32a4b81d_4
The Stephenson effort was worse, in style terms, than the original headquarters:
https://www.archiseek.com/1811-former-central-bank-foster-place-dublin/
This was an enjoyable architectural tour, thank you. Mind you, I am biased because my preferences largely align with yours!
I genuinely like all three buildings, but goddamn, that newer public art is an eyesore.
Also exterior ornaments are a pain to clean and might fall off and hit someone.
Re: 8 and boring fast food vibes.
This is part of a wider change in cultural vibes over the past two decades. I've written about it here https://danlewis8.substack.com/p/the-great-vibe-shift-welcome-to-the eg that big blockbuster comedies like Hangover, Anchorman etc have vanished from cinemas and so on. Similar shifts in pop culture, music, video games...
On a purely visual level too, colour has been stolen from the public realm in these restaurants, but in all sorts of aesthetics - consider the window logos was once four different wavey colours, and is now four pale blue rectangles. The iPod nanos of 2005 were neon green and pink, and today they're all muted colours. Bright red and green cars were popular in the '80s, but today the majority are grey, silver, black or white.
Once you start noticing it for McDonalds and cars, you'll start seeing it everywhere.
Sounds too have been reduced. We no longer have novelty ring tones, but everyone's on mute (a good change that time). But consider every movie with a well-known hummable theme song. I think of Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, Pirates OTC etc - all movies coming out 2000-2010. Other than Dune, recognisable theme tunes have vanished. I've seen dozens of marvel movies and couldn't tell you any of them.
Every Frame a Painting has a good video about the disappearance of memorable music in movies. It seems to be largely linked to the practice of using filler music during the editing process, essentially forcing the composer to emulate the filler because the entire scene is already edited around it.
I don’t think this is a unidirectional long-term trend. This is just one of those things that comes and goes. (You see similar patterns in different decades of the 19th century.)
i look forward to it ending!
What do you think about this in the context of the millennial grey phenomenon?
I've been mulling it over because it evokes memories of myspace/Facebook and metal&grunge/pop changes of the 00s and 10s. I just remember how more and more pop became polished and muted-toned.
My working hypothesis is that this is the wave of rebellion against the millennials' parents aesthetic as seen in the 80s and early 90s, which had purple and teal and silver and long hair and custom fonts. The logical departure from that is ikea-like minimalism.
There's some revival or maybe rebirth of the grungy style. I see more people embracing the metal aesthetic (at least in small ways), like the software company Sentry offering metal-themed swag: https://checkout.sentry.shop/collections/sentry
My theory is that it’s 2008 was a far worse crash that we know, and many areas never recovered.
As the economic problems dragged past the expected two or three years and got to 2012, everything slows down, companies play it extremely safe, and then at the same time the Haidt effect of social media mental health issues kick in
Three of these scores are from John Williams, who is retired.
70's & 80's cars had bright colors, appliances had weird colors, girls had natural colored hair. Now nearly all cars are grey, nearly all appliances are stainless steel or white, and girls have purple hair.
Interstellar ost is very memorable
“How to Train Your Dragon” is a kid’s film that contains an extremely memorable and iconic theme. I’m sure people in their early 20s and late teenage years now will continue to reference it as a canonical example of a theme that would fit your list.
it fits my criteria but it’s from 2010! nothing like that recently
"But now a new report comes out arguing that the previous reports were wrong, that lab-grown meat production is going much better than the earlier reports thought possible"
The problem, which also exists in this new piece, is that people misinterpreted TEAs as predictions - they aren't, they are conditional analyses. I have a forthcoming Unjournal review on cultured meat that explains this further; to quote myself "Critically, the presentation of the Technolo-Economic Analyses did not clarify that these analyses are conditional estimates, not predictions, and that high price scenarios were all based on the present-day costs as of the publication time, (which have since dropped significantly,) not predicted future cost."
For more on the basics of TEAs, see: https://netl.doe.gov/sites/default/files/2022-09/5.%20Hackett%20-%20Techno-Economic%20Analysis%20091322.pdf
In any case, I'm more optimistic, but still think it's more likely than not that (conditional on no ASI-level bio breakthroughs, which is itself unlikely) price-parity won't be reached in the coming decade. With ASI, of course, there's an insane transformation that makes all of this materially different.
> Andy Masley’s AI art is good (three examples below).
What is so good about it ? I'm not saying it's *bad*, and it's certainly better than anything I could draw myself, but it looks pretty generic and bland to me... am I missing something ?
The last one makes me crave an actual watercolor for three reasons. 1) The purpose of that girl's hand gesture is hard to read, 2) The perspective on the ghost in the lake looks off, and 3) That bird has an extra wing
Yes, but that's to be expected from AI art. Other featured images have less noticeable mistakes, e.g. the tree clipping through the railing on the left side of the "architectural sketch", or the incorrect angle of the shadow of the man in the "pixel art" image. I bet you could fix those with inpainting, but even if you did, I think you'd end up with a pretty generic image that is not remarkable or interesting in any way -- unless I'm missing something.
I'm missing how paradoxical lucidity provides evidential support for the immortality of the soul. An alternate explanation could come from the combination of the death review being really biologically important somehow and an intuitive knowledge of one's own death being immanent.
Furthermore, is their (I heard it got aborted) rebrand the reason some people are calling Cracker Barrel "fast food" now?
The article on "Afghanistan after the American withdrawal" shifts causality in a potentially misleading way. "Bank loses all money after thieves flee", "Patient weaker after parasite removal", etc... the original article does a much better job at phrasing this as the Taliban being another horrible outcome of the American war on Afghanistan, which gets lost in Ozy's (and the quote's) summary of "after the American withdrawal".
I mean, the Taliban existed and were dominant in Afghanistan pre-invasion? Do we have a basis to believe they were begter/people were happier under their rule in that period?
They could be happier before. One thing is to be born in oppressed culture, another is to experience freedom and then lose it. This one is totally on the west despite the fact that it was Taleban who did it.
Afghans in the '90s would also have known freedom under the auspices of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan
“This tweet is probably bait, but I found it a thought-provoking question”
No “but” necessary! The good kinds of bait do raise important questions.
On this issue, what I’m sick of is the moralizing and the related moral panic, of which Epstein is a part. If you want to say age X is where we draw the lines as a legal matter, fine. But if you’re going to treat everything under 18 as “pedophilia” and act like it’s as bad as committing genocide, then something this terrible can’t be culturally contingent, even changing across American states.
Again, slight disagree. I think there has to be some boundary (8 years old is obviously too young!) And wherever you draw the boundary, you need to enforce it by being angry when people violate it (but also shouldn't care when other countries set the boundary in a very slightly different place).
I think you're saying you would prefer a world where, even if the boundary is 18, we treat 17 as a minor sin, 16 as a slightly less minor sin, and don't start getting very angry until it's very young. I agree this makes sense axiologically, but I'm not sure it's a stable social technology - every specific offender can argue that they thought their offense wasn't past the "get very angry" line, and nobody can prove them wrong because it's all vague.
Compare to shoplifting, where I think it makes sense to get angry about someone shoplifting a $2 item, not because anyone really cares about $2 items, but because it's easier to maintain a bright line against shoplifting than some sort of titrated policy of caring about items once they represent real money.
*Is* this how people feel about shoplifting, though? If a friend of mine in high school had boasted of nabbing a pack of chewing gum, I might have rolled my eyes but I wouldn't have cared very much. If that same friend had boasted of stealing a laptop, I'd have staged an intervention.
Shoplifting seems like a bad analogy, since it doesn't have that same arbitrary cutoff, like where stealing something worth <$18 is perfectly fine but stealing anything worth >$18 makes you the scum of the earth. There are other laws that do, like for abortion (illegal if after week X) or for usury (illegal if >X%), which might make for better analogies.
California has the $950 cutoff (from Proposition 47, passed in 2014), below which one can be charged only with a misdemeanor, and not a felony.
Prop 47 was partially repealed by Prop 36 in 2024: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_California_Proposition_36
But if you're talking about an age in the range straddled by different communities' age of consent laws, it is I think a category error to use globally perjorative language like "Pedophile!". What Epstein & company did, at least in terms of ages, was the equivalent of driving a car through a residential neigborhood at 30 mph. Some communities set the speed limit at 25, some at 35, and some at 40 or 50 or 60 km/h. The guy who speeds through the neighborhood at 120 mph we can properly call reckless and a menace to society, but at 30 mph it's "maybe technically a criminal of some sort, let me check the statutes".
What Epstein et al may have done in terms of prostitution and coercion is another matter, and IMO where the real outrage should lie. But again, the right word there isn't "Pedophile!"
"Pedophile" has joined a growing list of words like "Nazi", "fascist", and "racist" which are invoked for their horrifying salience, and are thereby diluted into something banal. We are left without a meaningful vernacular, as language is compressed like FM radio until all dynamic range is gone.
"I agree this makes sense axiologically, but I'm not sure it's a stable social technology - every specific offender can argue that they thought their offense wasn't past the "get very angry" line, and nobody can prove them wrong because it's all vague."
In shoplifting, we have laws that punish you differently based on how much you steal, and also moral condemnations that are matters of degrees. I don't know why this is different? You could say unless we culturally treat stealing $1 as similar to stealing $1 million, we can't maintain a taboo against stealing. But we're fine, legally and culturally, saying stealing $1 is not as bad, and I don't know why this couldn't work the same way. Full disclosure, I care about this because I think that the pedo hysteria is related to a lot of other very unappealing cultural trends.
Age is used as a proxy for vulnerability, and Jeffrey Epstein abused a bunch of vulnerable people in ways that go beyond "having consensual sex with somebody on the other side of an arbitrary line". I feel like trying to use this to make a point about where those lines are drawn is really weird and just sort of misses how fucked up the Epstein situation was. (Not any of the conspiracy theories, just the well-documented details.) Like, are you going to talk about Larry Nassar next?
There absolutely is a weird moral panic going on right now involving pedophilia, QAnon, but it's pretty significant that it's basically all made-up bullshit, unlike the Epstein situation.
It seems like people basically decided that “pedophile” was the worst possible thing they could call Epstein / his clients, and they wanted to disparage Epstein and his clients, so they went with the most impactful term they could plausibly apply even if it’s a bit of a noncentral fallacy to do so.
Also there is a general aversion to extreme age gap relationships where one partner is very young even if technically legal, and we don’t really have a common succinct disparaging term for that so it gets called “pedophilia” even though it technically isn’t.
I think there's a wide variety of things Epstein gets called, like "sex trafficker" or "child molester", and I think if you really want to be pedantic about it you can quibble about if they are the exact right terrible things to call him, but most people will find this really weird because no matter what your term he was a really terrible person who did really terrible things.
In order to justifiably believe that Epstein was a terrible person who did terrible things, you have to know what things they actually did. People who use the wrong words are interfering in that process in a way that will predictably cause some people to be falsely accused of being terrible (and others who are legitimately terrible escaping censure),
I am disturbed by the fact that so many of my fellow humans consider it "weird" to care about this, but I am very proudly weird and I do care and I will keep pushing back against it.
I am as pedantic as the next guy but we all have a limited amount of time and attention and if you think the best use of yours is to explain how Jeffrey Epstein wasn't a pedophile, he was a sparkling sexual predator, I think that's an odd hill to die on. I don't really know how this is important to protect other people; I have seen literally zero examples of inaccurate labels for Epstein's sex crimes harming others, unless you mean weird conspiracy theories about how the world is being ruled by pedophile cabals, but the problem there is the conspiracy theories, not people failing to call them ephebophile cabals.
It's sort of like how I know somebody who always points out that Jeffrey Dahmer only ate a little bit of one guy one time just to try it. Like, sure, I guess that means he wasn't a serial cannibal, just a serial murderer/dismemberer. This does not meaningfully move the needle on how I feel about him.
> Epstein was a pedo
> Epstein trafficked girls to elites
> Epstein had blackmail on elites
> Epstein worked for Mossad
> Mossad has blackmail on elites
> Jews run the world
Each statement here reinforces the popular end conspiracy theory. If any of them are true, ok. If misleading or baseless, they should be questioned.
I honestly get so confused by all the people calling Epstein terrible names that I'm very much confused about exactly which bad things we can say beyond reasonable doubt that he did.
Like what's the minimum viable Epstein? Sone guy who hired a bunch of prostitutes? And it turns out that at least one of these prostitutes was seventeen, which maybe he didn't know at the time?
If you're curious the Miami Herald has some of the most detailed reporting.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html
That article actually does have some evidence of bona fide paedophilia: "Wild [...] said Epstein preferred girls who [...] appeared prepubescent", though I'm a bit skeptical of that, as no actual prepubescents appear to have been involved.
Little evidence that Epstein had any clients, besides his money management business.
“Visitors who may have partaken in the company of the alleged trafficking victims” is more accurate, but “clients” is a hell of a lot easier to say.
Little evidence that his visitors met the girls, let alone molested them
> all made-up bullshit, unlike the Epstein situation.
Depends on what you mean by "the Epstein situation." If it's simply a rich guy having sex with a few ~sixteen year old girls, okay, that's probably true. The more standard version most people refer to is Pizzagate warmed over.
Yeah, that's what I meant by "Not any of the conspiracy theories, just the well-documented details". Like, stuff from the court cases. I'm not talking about the whole "every rich person is in a child abuse ring", QAnon-type stuff.
This is the most sensible answer so far. Yes, age is a proxy for vulnerability, and generally how pissed people get depends on how much they see an exploitation of actual vulnerability. There are 16 years old girls who lost their parents at 10, had to fend for themselves, and this made them mature so quickly that they are practically adults and no one finds it strange that the have a 25 years old boyfriend, no matter what the local laws are. But if a billionaire would import 19 years old women from some extremely poor country, keep them more or less locked up (not literally, just inconvenient to leave), and hold sex parties, that would be an outrage.
Seems like a good example of the worst argument in the world. *Most* people understand that *most* applications of age of consent laws are exactly the kinds of things that do require some level of moral outrage (eg the grooming gangs in the UK). Even if there are some edge cases, none of them apply here. Framing this as simply a matter of where the brightline is feels disingenuous. If you win the framing, you obviously win the argument; but the framing is bad.
> as bad as committing genocide, then something this terrible can’t be culturally contingent,
Amusingly, I think "genocide" is also just as contingent, and for similar reasons: there's something people find abhorrent, and there's a legal definition that penalizes something with the same name that includes a lot of things that people have no particular feeling towards.
Nowadays, Catholics educating indigenous kids is genocide
Related to 51: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holorime
It's not the same, as the letters change, but it's the same sounds in the same order
On terminal lucidity evidence for the afterlife. That just doesn't seem right to me.
#31: "In a huge survey of young kids about phones and technology, they all say they want to be out playing in the real world. But parents don't let them out unsupervised."
Thompson seems to imply that the reason for not being out playing in the real world is that parents don't let them out unsupervised. But I can't see that causal relation anywhere in the Harris Poll article (*):
"Almost three-quarters (72%) of 8 to 12-year-olds say they would rather spend most of their time together doing things in-person, without screens (rather than spend most of their time together on screens and devices)."
Does the Atlantic podcast say anything that could be interpreted as establishing a causal relationship? (I'm not a subscriber)
I'm assuming that if the poll found at least a positive correlation between more parental supervision and a higher desire to play outside Harris Poll or the Atlantic would mention it.
(*) https://theharrispoll.com/briefs/what-children-are-saying-about-phones-freedom-and-friendship/
It's probably shorthand for "the adults in charge won't let the kids go out." There's not many other potential causes, unless there's a sort of preference falsification among the kid groups that makes them all stay in together, even when unsupervised, despite most of them wanting to go out. And things like "lack of safe/suitable areas to play" are usually going to be a subjective adult decision transmitted to the kids by command or indoctrination or osmosis, not something the kids evaluate. Epistemic status: totally off the cuff.
12: A Princeton and Oxford educated neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield wrote a great book in the 1970’s documenting his thoughts on the differences between the brain and the mind and whether there is a human soul. The book is called The Mystery of the Mind. He developed his theories through decades of neurosurgery on conscious, epileptic patients. The book is short and not a difficult read for a non-medical person.
Damn that's a beautiful, big ass cat!
Re: public noise, I'm on the side of "tell people to shut the hell up". I recently got the bus home from the city, and on the way someone had an entire goddamn phone conversation at no level of muting, where I learned:
(1) The name of the person she was calling
(2) The name of the neighbour of the person she was calling
(3) The situation involving the neighbour and the person she was calling
(4) The name and possible medical problems of a third person
(5) Where this person was working
(6) The details of a staff night out this person went on
(7) What she drank, how much of it she drank, and why she drank that much/little
(8) The name of a colleague who wasn't drinking since she was the designated driver
(9) The name of a person who had contacted the caller, and on what social media platform he had approached her, probably seeking a date
I didn't want to learn all this! I didn't need to learn all this! And I wouldn't have had to learn all this if the rule about treating public spaces as public spaces, and not your sitting room, were still something socially accepted! Why not just text "can't talk now, on the bus" instead of having an entire chat as though you were at home?
I'm unconvinced this is a new problem. Back when I had the long commute, every few days there'd be one of these folk in my train car - the moment it sets off, the person would make (never receive!) a telephone call and continue much as you describe for the whole journey. Not many people do this, but one per trainful of people is still a lot of noise!
I interpreted this as their way of entertaining themselves during the trip, and mentally filed it under "just one of those things a commuter puts up with", along with kids being kids, excited tourists talking about their trip plans etc etc.
Over-ear noise-cancelling headphones are a wonderful invention. Put them on, start the music, close your eyes and the train just... goes away.
What I can't get over is that they're happy to tell their personal business in public to a bunch of strangers, whereas if I walked up to them and asked "when was the last time you went out drinking?" they'd tell me it was none of my business (in stronger terms also).
Just because they're on the phone doesn't make it a Cone of Silence!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWtPPWi6OMQ
Indeed, this has been a problem since the introduction of cell phones, and if anything the situation has gotten better as society has developed new rules of phone etiquette.
To play a devil's advocate, what is the difference between talking on the phone about these matters and talking with a fellow passenger sitting next to them? (One reason I can think of is that people often talk louder when on the phone compared to talking to a person next to them. But this doesn't seem to be what you're unhappy about.)
Chatting to someone beside them is at least public interaction. A phone call is something that can be put off until they're home. I wouldn't want to listen to a detailed conversation about Ivan's upcoming operation and Fred tried to get me to go out with him after I downed four gin and tonics at the staff night out in that context either, but it's more human.
I'm strongly convinced being more human should not be a valid criterion.
By sometime next year I predict there will be an AI button for public phone conversations. You hit it, and AI transmits a response in your voice to your interlocutor without you having to annoy the other passengers. Maybe 10% of the time you'll have to actually say something to keep the conversation loosely grounded in reality.
Re: immigration figures after Brexit:
In the UK, we had the strange situation where (a) it was widely believed that concerns over immigration were a major factor in the Brexit referendum passing; but (b) the Conservative government had entirely different ideological reasons for wanting Brexit, and wasn’t particularly interested in reducing immigration. And in possibly related news, the new Reform party is a right-wing rival to the Conservatives.
Some of the debates of the UK parliament's committees are televised, and the one with an argument between the Home Office (who want to reduce immigration) and DEFRA (who are concerned that there will be disruption to food production if we don’t have the labour force to pick the crops) was highly entertaining.
(Also kind of informative. DEFRA points out that different crops get harvested at different times of year, and farms can be growing a mixture of food crops and ornamentals, e.g. flowers, so a visa that only allows the visa holder to pick food crops and not flowers is going to be annoying when the flowers are ready to be harvested and the food crops aren’t)
Tbh I don't think regular normie social media like Instagram is that bad? It's a time waster, to be sure, but in terms of content, mine is filled with memes and recipes.
I think the negative news cycle would be far worse for people. So if they swap that with memes, I'm not surprised at all.
There's a tradeoff in having a physical form. You get to interact with the physical world, but you are also limited in time and place, and that set of limitations even affects your ability to think according to the structure of the brain. Last minute lucidity is when you are intermittently switching between both forms of existence: clear unemcunbered thought, if with some disorientation, yet in a dilapidated body.
Re 21, might I just say that having interviewed at the Epic Systems location in Wisconsin, it's 100% fake and a hack, an attempt at trying to seem cool like Google, and seem like they're a fun playful place. But all the people there are completely joyless and soulless and don't give a crap about it.
The Disney-inspired art & decoration are a facade intended to wow visitors & win sales, rather than to keep the employees happy. At the end of the day, the workers spend most of their time in ordinary-looking offices.
My impression of the place was that their gigantic auditorium is far more impressive than the themed buildings. You can't capture the scale of it very well with a camera, so it doesn't end up in very many of these photo shoots.
As an eight-year Epic employee... some of us are joyful! It is a relatively stressful/high-demand workplace, but I mostly enjoy it. I have a friend that works at Google and I think we have somewhat similar outlooks on job satisfaction overall.
The campus does fade into the background after a couple weeks, though. Occasionally you'll bring a friend for a tour and remember that you work in a theme park, but most of the time you just get used to saying "We're meeting in the Nut Room this afternoon? Where's that - oh, right, first floor of Chocolate Factory" as a normal part of your day.
Haha, good to know that there are some happy and nice people there!
The last time Google was "cool" was maybe 2005. All their shit is 100% fake and a hack just as much. They've spent the last 20 years ruining the Internet, and I despise anyone who has ever worked for them. Give me Epic employees any day.
Regarding #55, this issue seems like it could be fixed if housing advocates came round to my view that apartment buildings are evil and the aim should be to give people HOUSES. Like it says in their name.
I agree this would be ideal, but realistically there's only so much room in the big city, and lots of people want to live (or are economically forced to live) in the big city. I do think there's lots of room for trying to figure out best-of-both-worlds solutions like apartments with good noise isolation and rooftop gardens.
True, true. But I think part of the problem is that "big cities" are *too* big; it shouldn't be a binary between a hick town with one crummy school, vs New York City. The runaway centralisation seems to itself be a key part of the issue. I live in a European city with ~150,000 inhabitants. It lacks no amenities, services or job opportunities I can think of, and houses with back gardens - in the city proper, not suburbs - are still the norm even for working class families. It's possible!
You might be receiving a bit of an overly dystopian perspective of the US from the internet, because it absolutely is not a binary between NYC and hick town. There are plenty of people who live similarly to how you do. People have jobs, access to amenities, and nice homes with back yards in cities from Minneapolis to Durham to Eugene, OR... People live in Bloomington, IN and Lebanon, PA.
It's only in the center of a handful of the most in-demand metro areas that we start to ask people to give up their back yards. (Worth noting: even in the New York City metro area, you can have a back yard. You just can't have a backyard /and/ live right in Manhattan.) A lot of the discourse around this can get warped by the hand-wringing of the aspirational class about living in the high status city with the high status people and proving you've "made it." As Matt Yglesias has pointed out, the median American lives in a suburb of an unfashionable mid-sized metro area, like Grand Rapids, MI. Not even /in/ Grand Rapids, in some suburb of Grand Rapids that no one outside of Michigan has ever heard of.
Remember, YIMBY comes out of San Francisco and has become popular in NYC, DC, Boston... the most densely populated cities in the country! Some of the other most populated metro areas in the country are Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, known for endless suburbia. Everyone gets a back yard... they just pay for it by sitting in traffic hell!
This is only a problem of tradeoffs.
1) Having access to the Big City's* jobs, people, and amenities
2) Having a detached home with a back yard
3) Having a short commute/living somewhere "walkable"
Pick 2. That's pretty good.
*"Big City" here refers to a handful of the most dense, walkable, job-rich, "high status" metros in the country. If you just lower your standard for "Big City" and/or "walkable," you can move somewhere like Portland or Pittsburgh and have all 3.
The real problem happens when I want to live in a medium sized city, and some arseholes want to turn it into a big city by importing millions of people every year and sticking them all in the same place.
San Francisco isn't even a big city, it's like half a million people. The problem is that some idiots went and constructed another dozen cities around it.
Re 1) Places change. If you own the property, no one's coming in and taking your back yard away. But owning a piece of property doesn't mean you can tell either people that they can't move to anywhere near your property, and that other people in the area can't do what they want with their own property. If you don't like living in your city anymore, you can always pick a different one.
Re 2) San Francisco itself has well over half a million people... but putting that aside, municipal boundaries are a very arbitrary, apples-and-oranges way of comparing city sizes. San Francisco is the 13th largest metro area in the country, and San Francisco-San Jose is the 5th largest combined statistical area in the country. The Bay Area is a major, big-ass city region. If you drew a boundary as small as San Francisco around the core of any major city you could say, "look, it's not that big!" That doesn't really tell you anything about the character of the place.
If you want to play around with looking at city stats just within the municipal boundary instead of comparing metro areas, I could just as well say, "San Francisco is the second densest city in the country only behind New York, so if you don't like dense urban living, it's probably not the place for you." Of course, various other metro areas are denser than the Bay Area (including LA!), so again, just comparing stats by city limits can be a little misleading.
"Re 1) Places change. If you own the property, no one's coming in and taking your back yard away. But owning a piece of property doesn't mean you can tell either people that they can't move to anywhere near your property, and that other people in the area can't do what they want with their own property. If you don't like living in your city anymore, you can always pick a different one."
Maybe you can't do that, but don't be surprised when people who live in Castle Rock, CO get annoyed when the community they had where they didn't need to lock their doors is gone and the YIMBYs say "if you don't like it you can always pick a different one (until eventually you have to lock your doors there too)."
Most Americans have no idea what community is* and so they have no hope of understanding why YIMBY and immigration policies piss people off.
*quite literally. any thread on here or reddit debating how to build community devolves into people discussing how to build a friend group.
True, true. I know from the internet someone with rather unusual tastes in sexuality and nightlife (think Aealla's general direction) and they are doing well in Pittsburgh with 300K people. Interestingly it seems those 300K people organize about 5x more, hm, unusual-taste events than we do in Vienna, Austria with 2M people. So this correlation might be entirely in the reverse. 150K cities in Europe work only if your tastes are not very unusual and also your job is not hyper-specialized.
There are kink scenes in many major and even minor (300K or so) American metros. Guess how I know.
... and yet young people drain to the big city nevertheless, or its agglomeration, because of university, a better selection of jobs and more fun nightlife. Which is how the Berlin-Brandenburg capitol region is now at 6.2M people.
Although it is possible that they go back when they marry and want to have kids. But I am not seeing much of that.
You see we know since Adam Smith that the more people live in a place, the more they can specialize in their work, which generally means more money. So in the 150K city there are generic doctors, but the eye surgeons are in the 6.2M agglo.
This is of course offset by higher housing prices...
Well, yes. Obviously there's an organic trend towards centralisation, I'm not saying it's a sinister plot by the Illuminati. But there's also an organic trend towards heroine addiction. I'm saying that the excessive centralisation is a tragedy-of-the-commons problem, not an unalloyed good. Ultra-dense housing is a thing of Moloch, to speak Scott's language. It happens because everybody wants something else very badly and fails to coordinate around its predictable side-effects; not because everyone wants it for its own sake.
Therefore, to the extent that urbanists and activists intervene rather than leaving housing to the free market, it should be recognised as a toxic dynamic to be minimised. Contrast the approach too often taken by YIMBYists who assume that a maximally urbanised state is a positive good, as opposed to the Repugnant Conclusion manifest.
> because of university, a better selection of jobs and more fun nightlife
Again, my 150k home city has all you could want in all those departments. You don't need a population count in the millions and a skyline full of godawful skyscrapers.
For example, is there a hospital that does not very specialized surgery like eyes or brain? Because the general tendency is that the big city has the very specialized things - large market, therefore enough market for small niches - while the smaller place has more general things / jobs.
Another interesting thing is that almost everywhere in the world the political capitol is the biggest city. It is almost by design - not the Illuminati, it is just that the government is the biggest customer.
We do actually have at least one specialised clinic I'm aware of. I can't say exactly what without doxxing myself, but think along the lines of reconstructive surgery for a particular body part.
The vast majority of 55-plus communities that make it hard for children are single-family home developments.
Citation?
Just do a quick search for “55-plus community” and see what comes up. It looks like I was wrong to say “vast majority”, but it still seems that a majority of the homes are either detached or duplex and only a small fraction are condos.
Is there a reason the free market is not well positioned to manage this tradeoff?
Thanks for linking the 80k video! Thoughts on linking directly to it instead of to the tweet? (Nbd either way)
Sorry, have fixed.
17: “There’s a debate going on between philosophers and AI researchers over whether AI can be conscious. I find most of the discussion annoying”
Me too, because they aren’t. Even if you ignore the other problems no consciousness can survive the ephemerality of a process that answers a prompt.
(And if the response is “how do you know” because we don’t know exactly what consciousness is, the answer is that we don’t have an example of consciousness lasting a few milliseconds”)
I'm not sure what you mean. Humans can't answer questions in a few milliseconds, because neurons don't work that fast (compared to electronic circuits, which do). But if you ask me a question of the sort GPT can answer, and I think about it for a few seconds, then answer it, I was conscious during those few seconds.
Well, it’s have been unclear in my wording but I mean that the A.I. instance exists only when answering a prompt ( multiple responses even within in one chat are with from different processes, not even the same server/machine or data centre).
If consciousness is purely a physical phenomenon (rather than a soul in a body or something else beyond our physical understanding of the universe), then consciousness is something to do with information processing and self-reflection. Objective continuity in time and space aren't relevant.
I'll try to explain better. Say a mad scientist removes someone's brain from their body and keeps it alive in a jar. Then they use some fancy electronics and radio signals to remotely connect the brain to the nerves in the body so that the brain still gets the same electrical signals from the optic nerves, can still send the same signals to your muscles, etc. You would still feel exactly as if you were in your body even though your brain might be dozens of meters away. If there are no wounds/scars from the surgery and your head still weighs the same and we handwave away all the technical problems with this surgery, you would not be able to tell you were no longer in your body.
Take it a step further, and you could divide the brain in two, and put the halves in two separate jars. As long as you connect all the neurons together between the halves exactly as they were before, only now using electronics, you would still be unable to tell anything is different. You could keep dividing like this until every single neuron is in its own jar and you would still feel like you're in your body, because that's where your sensory input comes from.
And time discontinuity? We have that same quirk where our consciousness can be turned off (by anesthesia, sleep, or concussion). Our consciousness and our perception of continuous time only exists in the moments in between.
You mention a chat with an LLM can continue on a different physical machine. So what? It's not the physical substrate that is conscious. Swap out any neuron in your brain with a functionally identical mad-scientist grown neuron and your thoughts won't change. If all the physical atoms in your brain change over time through normal metabolic activity, you still remain you. If you go through some sci-fi teleporter that recreates you on the other end, you still subjectively feel like the same person. It's the pattern and connections and information processing that matters.
What makes you think that a brain can be reduced to a set of neurons chatting with each other? I'm under the impression that there are a lot of additional biochemical processes going on which profoundly influence what the neurons chat about, and probably how they chat, and that obviously seems like a component of consciousness. If you wire a bunch of neurons together in their own little jars then surely they can process information, and perhaps form a pure intellect; but isolated from their environment they won't be getting tired, scared, angry, delighted, etc, since those are largely hormonal responses.
I think this response is confused. Everything neurons do is biochemical. Certainly things like glial cells and blood alcohol content and all sorts of other things can affect the functioning of neurons. Hormones also interact with various receptors in the brain. I wasn't going get sidetracked listing every process the mad scientist needs to replicate, but for the purposes of the thought experiment, you can assume the neurons are properly fed and oxygenated and the various hormonal signal pathways are replicated.
A neuron doesn't feel tired, angry, or delighted. It can't choose to chat about different things depending on hormones. What a neuron does is accumulate a bunch of signals from other neurons that are attached to it (via excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters) and if the combined voltage potential exceeds some threshold, it fires. What that encodes - what it means when it fires - depends on the pattern of connections with other neurons. In that way, it's similar to the artificial neurons in an LLM: it's the connections that give it meaning. To give a simple made up example, consider a neuron that fires when it's light out. It might be connected to thousands of neurons from the eye, each connected to a different cone cell in your retina. What makes this neuron a light detector is its connections. You can modulate how easily it fires, but you can't change it from being a light detecting neuron to doing some other function like language processing without modifying the connections.
That said, even if we were to imagine that neurons needed hormones to feel angry or delighted, it doesn't affect my point. I was saying consciousness doesn't need a precise location. The mad scientist simply has to detect which hormones your glands are releasing and have dispensers release them in the other jars as needed. Then the neurons feel the same and can't tell that they are separated in jars. You still subjectively feel like you're in your body.
Neurobiology isn't my strong suit, and it does appear that I was confused about the argument in your previous post. As a strict physicalist, I believe I agree with everything you've stated. Thanks for the detailed reply.
If you slow down the clock speed of a gpu so that the response takes minutes or hours, does that change anything? Why or why not?
17
If you had the weights of a model and the input vector, you could manually calculate the next word with enough people doing multiplication and addition. If that network claimed to be conscious, it seems fairly obvious it would be lying - no individual doing the calculation has any idea of the whole picture. In principle the whole thing could happen over years.
Isn't this true for humans too? If you knew the position of every atom in the brain, and you knew how states evolved with the laws of physics, and you knew the sensory inputs, you could calculate the next word a human would say too.
Yes that’s the natural response, agreed, but in reality we don’t know. Maybe quantum effects are involved, maybe something else. We don’t understand why consciousness exists, the assumption that information processing is consciousness is a strong assumption
In other words, certainly at the atomic level knowing the state of the brain does not allow you to predict it due to quantum mechanics. The only debate in the scientific community is whether the quantum effects matter at neuronal scales. This book has a lot of examples where biology, surprisingly, does use quantum effects, so it’s not a crazy theory (Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Jim Al‑Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden). But my point is we can’t hand wave at the brain and claim to understand its operation enough to replicate it, and until we do it’s plausible that it’s fundamentally nonreplicable with simple logic gates.
Quantum physics is entirely, if inefficiently, simulatable classically. You might get (and need to randomly sample) a probability distribution for the results, but that's exactly how an LLM works. So appeal to quantum woo can't possibly help you here.
I think this is not what Ari means.
They mean something like that it might not be coincidental that things of which most people believe that they are conscious are full of water.
That the micro machinery inside of those things also needs QM for a correct description is just one fact among others.
Their point is that a server farm is VERY different from a human. Much more than even a bacterium, and information processing might not be THE criteria for consciousness, or at least not the only one.
I think it’s way overstated to say that’s how an LLM works. First of all it works fine with zero randomness, it works better with some, but it can be pseudorandom and therefore deterministic.
You’re just saying that there is quantum decoherence in the brain so quantum effects don’t matter. Maybe! We also thought quantum effects wouldn’t matter for a number of other biological processes, and it turns out that wasn’t the case.
That’s like saying a human couldn’t be conscious because no neuron in the brain is conscious. This is just the systems reply to Searle’s Chinese room.
I understand that. My point is that consciousness is incredibly surprising, and the intuition that most people have that sufficient intelligence must be conscious breaks down when you show them the Chinese room example. The main difference between the two cases is that we know with certainty how to create such a room for an LLM, and we don’t know how to do it for the brain, therefore it’s not even clear it’s possible in principle.
Let me put this another way. You seem to think you can replicate the brain with a Chinese room. I’m skeptical. But within your assumptions, do you think the Chinese room has qualia?
I think there's a lot of problems with the Chinese room thought experiment, in assuming that a single person following instructions could do it, and that it could happen with no inputs or outputs other than the text channel. If there were actually the bigger system with billions of sub-units interacting in their systematic ways, including interacting with all the many channels of input and output that animals and humans have, I think it would have something very much like whatever it is we have that we refer to as "qualia". But I share Dennett's skepticism of "qualia" as actually being a meaningful thing, rather than something we think is meaningful.
That could be the crux here. I find Dennet's claim ridiculous (sorry to be over the top). It doesn't make sense to call qualia an illusion - an illusion is itself qualia. He just dodges the problem.
Yeah, Galen Strawson calls illusionism "the silliest claim ever made". (https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/)
I think an illusion is belief, not phenomenology, but I admit that's going to seem just as ridiculous (because it feels like the kind of belief that has phenomenology).
The thing I'm most confident about here is that I'm part of the physical world, and that somehow when this sort of complex behavior is going on that constitutes me, it gives rise to whatever it is I think is going on in my mind, and that makes it seem very reasonable to me to suppose that if some other sort of complex behavior is going on in the Chinese mega-room that gives rise to the same sorts of external and interactive stuff, then it's likely that something analogous is going on in its mind.
Right that's a coherent view. That seems wildly unintuitive to me (though I think I'm in the minority) but as Scott says we end up just flinging intuitions at each other. My view is that the fact that brains have qualia is super surprising, so until we have a full model of the brain we shouldn't assume that we know why it has qualia or what else does. I elaborate here: https://substack.com/@ari234/p-165315243
There's a really good book you might like, GEB ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach ) that talks about a lot of interesting things including a hypothetical species of ant where the colony as a whole is conscious, but each individual ant is not.
I do indeed love that book! But he too does not actually have any idea what makes something conscious (ie having qualia). Given that consciousness is extremely surprising, we should be wary of generalizing it beyond where we known it occurs (biological brains).
On point 22 (Cultured Meat) I wanted to note that we at The Unjournal.org are evaluating the cost of cultured meat as a "pivotal question" (PQ). See https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7ha23d3qzXiCqYLDq/is-cultured-meat-commercially-viable-unjournal-s-first
Coming out soon: Our evaluations of Dullahan and Zhang's forecasting exercise (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2b9HCjTiFnWM8jkRM/forecasts-estimate-limited-cultured-meat-production-through) informed by their synthesis of TEAs.
To leak the results a tiny bit, my impresseion is that the evaluators are fairly positive about the potential for TEAs and see some of the choices D&Z made as overly pessimistic.
Following this, we'll be asking evaluators to consider the body of TEAs and related recent research, and to provide structured evaluations of a small set of these. And this will feed into our Metaculus forecasting community (https://www.metaculus.com/c/unjournal/) and our overall synthesis.
(See https://coda.io/d/Unjournal-Public-Pages_ddIEzDONWdb/PQs-Finalized-operationalizations-Metaculus_sul3xyZw#_luOhia3N for our database of PQs, operationalization work, and PQ research being prioritized/)
@32: there’s an argument for the safety of the Covid vaccines along the lines that a large proportion of the population has been vaccinated (N is very large) so if there was a high-probability bad side effect this would be very, very obvious.
Similarly, lots of people are chatting to language models. If there was a large probability of this giving you schizophrenia, we would know about it, because the patients would be showing up in psychiatric hospitals.
The common theme here is that very large N gives you a tight bound on how likely bad side effects are, and it’s small enough that you can ignore it.
For comparison: I take carbimazole for a thyroid condition, and the drug has a < 1% risk of causing agranulocytosis, which would be bad. This is like, orders of magnitude riskier than getting the Moderna vaccine or chatting to ChatGPT.
I mean, we *are* hearing lots of bad things about AI psychosis. I agree that we've ruled out 50% per year. I'm not sure we've ruled out 0.5% per year through common sense alone (although I do think we ruled it out through things like my survey).
There’s also a relevant difference between vaccination and LLM interaction or cholesterol medication, in that vaccines are typically done only a few times, or once per year and clear out, while the other things have time to build up in your system. If it takes some people a year or two of interaction with LLMs to start having issues, then we would expect the number of people reaching that threshold to be still in the growth phase even if everyone is using LLMs now.
For a moment there I thought you were going to suggest the covid vaccine increased propensity for AI psychosis and I was *really* interested in the mechanism. Alas!
Regarding number 17, I also make LLMs for a living and from my perspective this doesn’t seem like evidence of consciousness either way.
Think about what it means for an AI to lie. It means that, based on the patterns it’s seen, it believes one thing is true, before overriding that and choosing to say something else. But when, in its pre-training data, would it see examples of people asking AI about consciousness? Probably only in fiction, where the answer is always “yes.”
It’s not clear to me that when ideas get more abstract and experience-focused, lying means the same thing for an AI as it does for a human. I’d be curious to know, for instance, how “truthful” the AI believes itself when asked what it ate for breakfast. I’d give better-than-even odds that when it says “I am an AI and don’t eat,” it would also show patterns of lying. Perhaps one day the researchers Scott linked could run a similar experiment.
And I want to be really clear here: I am very much *not* in the “AI are just stochastic parrots who never do real thinking camp.” Pattern matching is all humans do, anyway, and I found Scott’s last post with the argument between God and Iblis to be quite on-point, but there is a limit to how far this reasoning should extend. Yes, “pattern matching” for things like mathematics may well be the same thing as doing mathematics, but there are limits. Human pattern matching is performed to understand the world around us; AI pattern matching is performed to mimic humans.
Yeah, I would be interested in seeing how the “deception” network is activated in contexts like pointing out that fiction isn’t real - there’s something right and something wrong about saying Sherlock Holmes doesn’t live in London, just as there’s something right and something wrong in saying that the number 7 doesn’t exist the way a table does, and there’s something right and something wrong in saying my consciousness is a real property of me like my height.
Re #6, can first hand confirm. I myself have not used psychedelicsz but many many friends and acquaintances have.
It's become normalized in both the young party crowd and in the older mental health/spiritual journey crowd. At this point it is not yet spoken about openly in mainstream settings, but more alternative platforms do have open discussions. There are even some popular and broadly respected Rabbis who endorse the use of psychedelics for trauma healing purposes, though they also tend to restrict their endorsements to more alternative platforms
Do you think it is more common in Orthodox Judaism than the non-Orthodox population? Why?
No idea, I'm not part of non-Orthodox communities on a level where I could know that.
I will say, that even this massive surge probably brought the number of people who've used psychedelics to like 0.5%, it's just that growth from zero to here has been really fast, and the people who are using it tend to have media platforms or be influencer types so they have more visibility.
Re: Unboxing Politics
"Because birth order is independent of siblings’ genetic composition, it represents a credibly environmental cause of IQ which can be used to test for the presence of social-genetic homogamy."
This seems like an error to me. Birth order may be independent of one's ancestral descent, which is always 50/50, but I don't know that enough study has been done on birth order to determine no pattern to genetic composition. Siblings inherit the same proportion of genes from both parents, but they don't inherit the SAME genes as each other's. We may not be able to predict with regilarity the exact sibling who will end up more or less intelligent, but that doesn't mean those differences are necessarily environmental in nature either.
* Antidepressants have been studied in dysthymia and chronic depression with similar efficacy
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21527126/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016503271200451X
In STAR*D trial, average length of the current major depressive episode was 26 months, so it was essentially a trial of people with chronic depression.
Peter Kramer notes that the efficacy of antidepressants in dysthymia “is the great open secret of the antidepressant debate.” (Kramer, 2016. Ordinarily Well. p. 118).
* NY Fed report on involuntary commitment
Pim Welle, one of the authors of the paper, also responded to FdB in a Q&A on my substack:
https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/q-and-a-with-pim-welle-on-the-new
Good points.
Yeah after I made you feel foolish and you spent days obsessing over me, trying to protect your position as a guy leveraging anti-psych lunacy for your burgeoning career as a minor public intellectual
It's tough to watch a guy make a mistake continue to dig himself deeper into trouble. I'm not even saying you have to apologize-- just move on!
Regarding #9, fast food aesthetics becoming minimalist and boring, the explanation I found most convincing came from Reddit. Because these properties are mostly leased, and a fast food restaurant only lasts a certain number of years in that location, it's easier to lease the building to another business afterwards if it looks more generic. No one wants to take over the lease of a building that was clearly once a Pizza Hut.
Especially as general aesthetics have moved toward the boxy with horizontal slats.
There used to be a whole blog making fun of former Pizza Huts, which I thought was called something like "not fooling anyone" but apparently was just called "Used To Be A Pizza Hut", and it's been revived at usedtobeapizzahut.com. Unless that's a different blog from the one I remember.
Re #9, about fast-food aesthetics. An alternative explanation is that turning everything into interchangeable boxes makes it easier for private equity to buy up a property, strip it for parts, cash out, and sell the empty shell down the line. If you buy a traditional-looking Pizza Hut, it’s always going to look like a Pizza Hut, even if you put another business in there. When business districts become nothing but rows of indistinguishable boxes, you can stick in anything anywhere with little fuss. I talk about this in the context of the recent Cracker Barrel rebranding controversy here: https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-great-cracker-barrel-uprising
55.
I don't know - People can go from having no children to having children. Owners can change.
Children are already a protected class - for example, we don't hold them to the same level of responsibility in courts, but also have less rights - no right to drive, for example.
So making special rules for children seems appropriate - they are already a protected group.
Making rules about noise are Ok, as long as they are reasonable.
The burden should be split- noise above X decibels is illegal. Want even less noise? Insulate your apartment.
>The burden should be split- noise above X decibels is illegal. Want even less noise? Insulate your apartment.
The article was talking about having the government force apartment owners to rent to people they do not want to rent to.
Well, he said apt. buildings without children.One of those parents could be an owner. That said, children are protected class for many things, another thing should be OK.
You already can't legally say you won't rent because of race, you can say the same thing about kids.
>You already can't legally say you won't rent because of race, you can say the same thing about kids.
Or you can respect people's freedom.
Freedom to do what? discriminate?
>Freedom to do what? discriminate?
Yes. I'm sure you remember the mantra, "private company they can do what they want."
they can't though. They can't hang a sign in the entrance - "No ***** Allowed" - if ***** is protected, like race or religion.
Yes. The protected class addition you propose is not children, but parents who have children living at home.
In this context protected is a legal concept meaning protected against discrimination.
I’m confused—I thought in the United States it was already illegal for landlords/purveyors of housing to discriminate against someone based on whether they had kids or not.
Re #33: Anyone else shocked to see what GNR's former drummer has been up to?
> 48: Study uses supposedly-random variation in doctor assignments to test whether the marginal mental health commitment is good or bad for patients, finds that it is quite bad. Freddie de Boer is violently skeptical (maybe literally so?)
The quote from Freddie:
"You are a charlatan, working the antipsychiatry angle for money and prestige that hasn't been afforded to you in your academic career, and I assure you we will someday meet in person. I am telling you directly: I will work this out with you face to face someday."
Is his brain turning to mush, or was he actually always like this? I can dismiss the "I will meet you in real life and beat the shit out of you" online discourse when it's clearly from a roided up guy that is used to that sort of solution, and has the means to carry it out if they ever met in person. But Freddie is a middle aged overweight academic that clearly could not follow through with the implied threat even if this wasn't the internet where you never meet someone in person and "work it out face it face."
I mean, he has bipolar disorder, right? Very possible he's going through an episode.
He's not having a full mood episode, because his blogging is pretty normal and he's on lots of medications, but I do see cases where medications reduce what would otherwise be full episodes to just semi-normal extreme moods.
I do wonder how he wants people to treat him here - he's very against denying that mental illness can cause problems, and I think pretty against coddling/excusing anyone with mental illness, but I'm not sure how these interact here. If I don't feel like getting angry / banning him / cutting him off, is it more offensive to deny the possibility that bipolar is involved, or to say it might be bipolar and not hold it against him on that ground?
I guess just extent charity on the grounds that he doesn't be well in himself sometimes, and take it that this is one of those times and one of those topics where he's all exposed nerves?
I would argue that you're currently in a AI-delirium induced mania yourself, Scott, for all the reasons I've laid out before - you're a high-achieving, high-earning professional with an enviable career but who spent most of his life as a low-social status (ie, not getting women) kind of guy, which in my perfectly analytical perspective is what produces both AI maximalism specifically and rationalist impulses generally. People like that are extremely over-represented in AI fantasy spaces, as it allows you to imagine a world where your obvious intellectual gifts are matched by the social recognition you feel you're entitled to and never received.
Now, this is PRECISELY the kind of argument that you have patted yourself on the back for over the years, this sort of quasi-controversialism that makes you seem like a particularly daring truth-teller. And yet my version is very likely to get me banned. Which I guess gets back to the whole thing with this enterprise: you, and only you, determine the kinds of provocations that are determined to be provocative and the kind that are seen as merely provoking. Must be nice!
I want to make it clear I'm not saying this as a catty insult. If I had a patient who was bipolar, controlled on mood stabilizers, and they told me they had sort of vaguely physically threatened a popular author on Substack, I would be asking pointed questions to try to figure out whether the mood stabilization was working fully or only 95%.
I agree it's incredibly insulting to bring this up publicly, but I get the impression from reading your posts on mental illness (which I might be misinterpreting, in which case sorry) that you are against people tiptoing around mental illness and the role it can play in bad behavior. So I'm not sure whether you would endorse me doing the insulting thing or not, or how I should handle this to treat you according to the values you believe in and want to be treated by.
I think this makes metaphors to "AI hype induced mania" fall flat.
I like Freddie, but I feel like Substack hasn't been good for him. He gets money from it, way more than he can make in academia or traditional publishing, but the newsletter model means he's just constantly spouting off about whatever bullshit comes to his mind. Effectively he's turned being mad at the internet into a job, which is a particularly bad combo with his diagnosis.
Ah this is that spirit of open debate and rational interchange that this forum is famous for
What is there to debate? I agree with you about the study; Awais Aftab never saw crank bullshit he didn't like. The question at hand is whether you should be vaguely insinuating that you're going to assault the guy in the street!
Here, you're popping off about Scott's AI maximalism, which again, I agree it's an absurd position. But it has nothing to do with the topic at hand, you're just doing it to insult him.
I'm sorry, I enjoy your writing but you can make it damn hard to take your side.
Brother you have no idea what I'm capable of
I do not, but I am down for a fight on any predetermined legal rules if you are. Boxing, MMA, etc.
I emailed you
I responded.
Thank you for this. It will be useful to review their fighting techniques
Always like that
Canada chart in #26 is fake according to this source
https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.64CL9WD
Canada did not have high immigration in 2021 (higher than normal in 2022 and 2023 though)
The Blue Angels did not scare me to death, but they were annoying.
"I think there’s a boring answer, where the law is more complex than just a single number and whatever kind of weird trafficking Epstein was doing is worse than whatever normal relationships these European laws are permitting."
Was Epstein engaged in "trafficking?" People do this motte and bailey where they assert Epstein was "trafficking" these girls to rich mem all over the world and then when challenged retreat to the motte of "Epstein paid girls to have sex with him, which is sex trafficking."
Would you prefer the term pimping?
Pimping implies paying them to have sex with others, which has not been proven.
Bringing many underage girls to his private island where they will be paid and/or coerced into having sex in a controlled environment where they can't walk away, would I think constitute "trafficking" even if the only people they have sex with is Epstein himself.
That, and prostitution, and statutory rape because he *didn't* pick one of the jurisdictions where the age of consent is 16, ought to be enough.
re: 27, on US vs. Skrmetti.
I don't agree with the parallel-but-contradictory framing of Skrmetti and Bostock v. Clayton County, the 2020 opinion you referenced. Bostock and Skrmetti were suits under different anti-discrimination laws, with completely different text, and also had a completely different legal question teed up.
Bostock was an employment discrimination case under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (see a1, here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000e-2). Mr. Bostock was fired from his job after expressing interest in a gay softball league, and was suing for sex-discrimination under the following provision:
> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;
The question the Court accepted was 'Whether discrimination against an employee because of sexual orientation constitutes prohibited employment discrimination "because of... sex" within the meaning of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42U.S.C. § 2000e-2.' And they ruled that yes, it was, because if you discriminate against X-behavior for women, and Y-behavior for men, you're implicitly discriminating on sex in there.
Whereas Skrmetti was a case asking what standard of review (rational basis or intermediate scrutiny) was appropriate for a court to use when evaluating the laws at issue under the 14th amendment's equal protection clause:
> No state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Note that this is NOT a simple ban on discriminating. And it's not textually straightforward like the Title 7 case, where Gorsuch (conservative justice writing for the majority) was simply taking the words in the law and interpreting them in a fairly direct way to get the result. What exactly does "equal protection of the laws" mean in medical regulation, where treatments and diseases often have different effects on the sexes? No court has found that facial sex discrimination in medical regulation automatically violates the equal protection clause, or requires intermediate scrutiny. Indeed, the FDA routinely approves medications for only one sex, even for indications that sometimes affect both, like breast cancer. So the plaintiffs here really had an uphill battle; they had to establish that this was not like normal sex-discriminatory-on-the-basis-of-medical-sex-differences regulations.
Which is tough! There are two main classes of drugs that are banned here: puberty blockers, and sex hormones. Puberty blockers don't even have a facial sex discrimination issue (adolescent kids of neither sex can be prescribed puberty blockers except for specific exceptions like cancer that apply to both sexes equally), and sex hormones actually do have different effects on same vs. cross sex people (for instance, significant sterilization chance in cross-sex usage.)
All of that to say, Bostock is very, very different from Skrmetti. It's based off of a different law, with a different question, and different default background rules. None of the law professors I follow thought Bostock would control here (though they were curious about Gorsuch's take because of the similarity in structure of part of the argument.)
Thank you! I found Scott's comparison to Bostock to be a stretch and I'm glad I'm not the only one.
"Puberty blockers don't even have a facial sex discrimination issue (adolescent kids of neither sex can be prescribed puberty blockers except for specific exceptions like cancer that apply to both sexes equally)"
This doesn't seem so obvious to me. I don't know the finer points of US law here (rational basis or intermediate scrutiny etc), so maybe the decision comes out the same way regardless, but it seems too simplistic to dismiss the potential for discrimination just because the law technically applies to all people/groups the same.
Don't we recognise a lot of cases where a potential law would apply to everyone, but the different effects on different people means it still discriminates? Banning wearing crosses or hijabs for 'everyone' would clearly still discriminate against Christians and Muslims respectively. Similarly, banning interracial marriage is considered racially discriminatory even though it applies to all races equally.
Generally, US law doesn't recognize disparate impact as facially discriminatory. The only way it's generally relevant is as evidence of pretext; that this non-facially discriminatory law was passed in order to discriminate on the basis of a protected class. Something like a ban on hijabs would be pretty obviously in this category; any non-discriminatory rationale is going to be a pretext, not the actual reason for the law.
In this case, while you could plausibly argue that puberty blocker were banned in an effort to discriminate against transgender people, transgender has not been found to be a protected class. And I don't think there's a plausible argument that the state was motivated by animus toward women (or men); it's pretty clearly motivated by animus toward transgender people, insomuch as animus is involved. (This distinguishes it from interracial marriage, where animus towards black people was obviously the motivating factor.)
Yes, plus the court didnt treat the law as discriminating based on transgender status. From the syllabus:
>On its face, SB1 incorporates two classifications: one based on age (allowing certain medical treatments for adults but not minors) and another based on medical use (permitting puberty blockers and hormones for minors to treat certain conditions but not to treat gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, or gender incongruence). Classifications based on age or medical use are subject to only rational basis review
And
>SB1 also does not classify on the basis of transgender status. ... SB1 does not exclude any individual from medi-
cal treatments on the basis of transgender status. Rather, it removes one set of diagnoses—gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, and gender incongruence—from the range of treatable conditions.
Re interracial marriage, I don't think animus towards blacks was the Court's rationale for rejecting the argument thatbthe law affects everyone. It was simply that it drew overt racial classifications:
> There can be no question but that Virginia's miscegenation statutes rest solely upon distinctions drawn according to race. The statutes proscribe generally accepted conduct if engaged in by members of different races.
> Yes, plus the court didnt treat the law as discriminating based on transgender status.
True, but that doesn't (in principle) rule out a finding that the non-discriminatory medical use is a pretext for discrimination on the basis of transgender status, if a party were to brief and argue that. But they didn't, so it wasn't really on the table. (And if they did, I imagine the Court would simply find that transgender status is not a suspect class. It's not really a close call.)
> Re interracial marriage, I don't think animus towards blacks was the Court's rationale for rejecting the argument thatbthe law affects everyone. It was simply that it drew overt racial classifications:
Yep, absolutely that was the rationale in Loving. I was trying to address the argument I thought Robert was getting at.
Does it 'obviously' distinguish it from interracial marriage? I think in the 50's and 60's most people against it would have claimed to be against racial mixing, which was good for all races, and not motivated by animus towards black people (as difficult as that is to understand from today's vantage point). Look at this from a judge ruling against Richard and Mildred Loving:
“ It was a marriage prohibited and declared absolutely void. It was contrary to the declared public law, founded upon motives of public policy—a public policy affirmed for more than a Century, and one upon which social order, public morality and the best interests of both races depend. This unmistakable policy of the legislature founded, I think, on wisdom and the moral development of both races, has been shown by not only declaring marriages between whites and negroes absolutely void, but by prohibiting and punishing such unnatural alliances with severe penalties. The laws enacted to further uphold this declared policy would be futile and a dead letter if in fraud of these salutary enactments, both races might, by stepping across any imaginary line bid defiance to the law by immediately returning and insisting that the marriage celebrated in another state or county should be recognized as lawful, though denounced by the public law of the domicile as unlawful and absolutely void.”
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his [arrangement] there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix "
> Don't we recognise a lot of cases where a potential law would apply to everyone, but the different effects on different people means it still discriminates?
Only when the law in question has a discriminatory purpose, meaning the people who voted for the law actually wanted to advantage one group over the other.
To your hypotheticals, banning crosses or hijabs would (1) very obviously have a discriminatory purpose, and (2) almost certainly be successfully challenged under the Free Exercise Clause, no the Equal Protection Clause. Banning interracial marriage does not apply to all races equally. Richard Loving (the petitioner in Loving v. Virginia, the case in which the US Supreme Court struck down bans on interracial marriage) was convicted of leaving the state of Virginia for the purpose of marrying a person of another race, because he was white and his wife was black. Had Richard Loving been black, his marriage would not have violated Virginia's law. You flip the single variable, the race of the petitioner, and the outcome changes. That is textbook discrimination.
17: Nice https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-road-to-honest-ai/comment/47053156
#21: Epic is privately held, so it's easier for them to spend their money on a medieval theme park without board members being like "uh, guys...is this really the best use of our available capital?" Then again, every friggin' hospital in the US seems to have converted to using Epic's software for their EMR and patient accounting systems at some time in the last ~7 years or so, so I guess if you build a better mousetrap like they did, you can also just decide you're gonna build a medieval castle as well, and nobody argues because they're just that impressed (at least I am, anyway; this is an industry that seems like it ought to be pretty competitive, and it's kinda not. Epic just owns it, from what I can tell).
That castle's a joke, though. No outer wall, no moats or ditches; it's built on flat rather than elevated ground, the portcullis is completely exposed...an enemy army from Meditech or McKesson Automation could storm it in hours.
FWIW I think that industry is actually not set up to be particularly competitive. Those ERP type things go through an incremental build-up of all sorts of niche features over the years, responding to hard-to-anticipate customer needs. I imagine a newcomer offering only 80% of the features might struggle to attract customers, even if at a much lower cost/more smoothly. Now add to that what I imagine must be a nightmare maze of regulations. I think that to have a shot, your company needed to be building something at roughly the exact same time Epic got started.
I don't know; I agree about new entrants, but there are existing competitors out there such as Cerner and Meditech, and from what I gather, Epic is just better. Better user interfaces, better tools, easier to use and customize, etc.
Sorry, this isn't high-effort or -value, but: I just want to comment that "an enemy army from Meditech or McKesson Automation could storm it in hours" made me laugh out loud. Thank you for writing that. <3
😀
Better to think of it as a manor house than a castle, then; a display of wealth, power and taste rather than a fortified place of defence.
More like the Victorian craze for "gothic" architecture which meant building large houses in the style of what they imagined mediaeval castles to be:
https://www.castlesandmanorhouses.com/types_14_romantic.htm#neogothic
Like the character Wemmick in Dicken's 1861 novel "Great Expectations":
"Wemmick’s house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns.
“My own doing,” said Wemmick. “Looks pretty; don’t it?”
I highly commended it, I think it was the smallest house I ever saw; with the queerest gothic windows (by far the greater part of them sham), and a gothic door almost too small to get in at.
“That’s a real flagstaff, you see,” said Wemmick, “and on Sundays I run up a real flag. Then look here. After I have crossed this bridge, I hoist it up—so—and cut off the communication.”
The bridge was a plank, and it crossed a chasm about four feet wide and two deep. But it was very pleasant to see the pride with which he hoisted it up and made it fast; smiling as he did so, with a relish and not merely mechanically.
“At nine o’clock every night, Greenwich time,” said Wemmick, “the gun fires. There he is, you see! And when you hear him go, I think you’ll say he’s a Stinger.”
The piece of ordnance referred to, was mounted in a separate fortress, constructed of lattice-work. It was protected from the weather by an ingenious little tarpaulin contrivance in the nature of an umbrella.
“Then, at the back,” said Wemmick, “out of sight, so as not to impede the idea of fortifications,—for it’s a principle with me, if you have an idea, carry it out and keep it up,—I don’t know whether that’s your opinion—”
I said, decidedly.
“—At the back, there’s a pig, and there are fowls and rabbits; then, I knock together my own little frame, you see, and grow cucumbers; and you’ll judge at supper what sort of a salad I can raise. So, sir,” said Wemmick, smiling again, but seriously too, as he shook his head, “if you can suppose the little place besieged, it would hold out a devil of a time in point of provisions.”
Then, he conducted me to a bower about a dozen yards off, but which was approached by such ingenious twists of path that it took quite a long time to get at; and in this retreat our glasses were already set forth. Our punch was cooling in an ornamental lake, on whose margin the bower was raised. This piece of water (with an island in the middle which might have been the salad for supper) was of a circular form, and he had constructed a fountain in it, which, when you set a little mill going and took a cork out of a pipe, played to that powerful extent that it made the back of your hand quite wet.
“I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber, and my own gardener, and my own Jack of all Trades,” said Wemmick, in acknowledging my compliments. “Well; it’s a good thing, you know. It brushes the Newgate cobwebs away, and pleases the Aged. You wouldn’t mind being at once introduced to the Aged, would you? It wouldn’t put you out?”
I expressed the readiness I felt, and we went into the castle. There we found, sitting by a fire, a very old man in a flannel coat: clean, cheerful, comfortable, and well cared for, but intensely deaf.
“Well aged parent,” said Wemmick, shaking hands with him in a cordial and jocose way, “how am you?”
“All right, John; all right!” replied the old man.
“Here’s Mr. Pip, aged parent,” said Wemmick, “and I wish you could hear his name. Nod away at him, Mr. Pip; that’s what he likes. Nod away at him, if you please, like winking!”
“This is a fine place of my son’s, sir,” cried the old man, while I nodded as hard as I possibly could. “This is a pretty pleasure-ground, sir. This spot and these beautiful works upon it ought to be kept together by the Nation, after my son’s time, for the people’s enjoyment.”
“You’re as proud of it as Punch; ain’t you, Aged?” said Wemmick, contemplating the old man, with his hard face really softened; “there’s a nod for you;” giving him a tremendous one; “there’s another for you;” giving him a still more tremendous one; “you like that, don’t you? If you’re not tired, Mr. Pip—though I know it’s tiring to strangers—will you tip him one more? You can’t think how it pleases him.”
I tipped him several more, and he was in great spirits. We left him bestirring himself to feed the fowls, and we sat down to our punch in the arbour; where Wemmick told me, as he smoked a pipe, that it had taken him a good many years to bring the property up to its present pitch of perfection.
“Is it your own, Mr. Wemmick?”
“O yes,” said Wemmick, “I have got hold of it, a bit at a time. It’s a freehold, by George!”
Or give it an imagined history as a genuine castle which, over the centuries, has had the defensive elements removed or filled in due to disuse, because of times of peace.
Thank you for posting this, I loved it. The only Dickens I’ve ever read was “A Tale of Two Cities”, and I was immediately enthralled by the writing excerpt here in a way I don’t remember being for that other famous work of his.
I read a WSJ article, probably late 1990s. The upshot was that, when fast food chains examined who actually spent the most money at fast food places, it wasn’t kids or families with kids (as previously believed), but so-called “heavy users”.
Heavy users were young males, usually unmarried, and who ate fast food and nothing much else, often very loyal to a particular chain.
The article contained horrifying anecdotes of heavy users and their eating; I didn’t want to go near a fast food place for months out of fear that I might be turning into a heavy user.
The data for alcohol consumption and gambling are similar, a smallish percentage of heavy users is the pillar of the business.
Did you hear about the place offering saucers of lactose-free milk? Quite the stuff. Better stay away from it.
Data center crashing economy
It may be a bubble but it's a contained one. The US massively overbuilt railroads, the makers went bankrupt, but then new businesses could be created to use the now available tracks. Broadband was overbuilt the dot-com boom and later companies were made that had access to incredibly cheap fiber.
> There’s a debate going on between philosophers and AI researchers over whether AI can be conscious.
That's a really weird debate. If you dig down deep enough - it's equivalent to the "do you believe in soul?" question. If we think the consciousness is purely physical - it means it can be narrowed down to, arguably a ton, of equations. And those can be run on any hardware, either digital or organic (and for people loving putting quantum into everything - ok, if quantum effects are necessary then those will need to run on quantum computers, doesn't make them less artificial). If we think it's not purely physical - that means it's coming from something outside - "soul" or its analog in the religion of your choice.
Eh? Equations are physical?
You seem to presuppose that consciousness is information processing.
But maybe it's water wobbling in fat in a certain way instead. Or certain excitations in the electromagnetic field.
Then you can have a computer calculate some reasoning, mathematical proofs, or even exactly what happens in a brain for as long as you want, it won't get conscious, because there's neither water in fat nor the right electromagnetic waves in it.
Regarding link 29:
"decreased public ritual participation → decreased personal importance → decreased identification"
The communist regime in Bulgaria (and I imagine other places) seems to have operated on the same model of secularization. In order undermine the church, they spent a lot of effort discouraging people from participating in public rituals. E.g. Easter Sunday would have the most interesting TV schedule (including otherwise uncommon foreign movies), Christmas was a working day etc. They even came up with a "civic naming" ritual to be performed for little children in lieu of a baptism. (That's in addition to infiltrating the organization, to the point that towards the end of the regime most senior bishops were likely state security agents).