I have moderate/severe anxiety. Herbal tea doesn't do much for me. I used to take some prescription meds but nothing really worked so I don't take anything now.
If you use any caffeine, consider taking it with L-theanine supplements to blunt the "jittery" effect it produces.
Even in LEO, satellite internet has enough added complications that it can't really compete with terrestrial options at any level of density. Starlink's edge will be in underserved rural options (incl. against existing satellite providers) and areas where existing levels competition has proven ineffective.
First of all, I'm not sure direct air capture qualifies as technocratic. It's technological, but random people with enough money can do it in their backyard. It's not imposing anything on nonconsenting people or demanding legibility or anything like that.
That having been said, I support it. I'm hopeful it will have the same order-of-magnitude cost reduction as solar, and that eventually governments that want to fight global warming will be able to just pay for it directly. I also think we'll need something like that to start reversing climate change even if we actually manage to reduce new emissions. I'm also excited about Project Vesta, which if it works (big if) might give us the next ten years of cost reduction in one go. Their team seems a bit weird/inexperienced, so I'm interested in hearing if people here think they're legit.
In terms of geoengineering, I have the very boring take that it's an obvious combination of good and so dangerous I'd be nervous about doing it while there are any other options available. The exception is seeding iron to cause algal blooms. That seems like something you can do on a small scale, then scale up, without long-term changing the levels of any important atmospheric gas. I don't know why more people aren't looking into it.
I don't know anything about suphur dioxide injection and would be interested in learning more.
What would be a good introductory resource to read on biochar? I'm currently embarrassingly confused on two points.
1. My current mental model of charcoal creation is "chop down tree, heat up while deprived of oxygen, the end" and my instinctive response is "wait, why are you chopping down the tree if you want to reduce atmospheric CO2". (I think the answer might be "you replace the tree with a new tree, this is figuring out how to stop the carbon that's in the used-up tree from becoming CO2 again which is why you aren't, say, feeding it to cows." Also, should I be thinking of grass instead of tree?) On which note, does it matter what you do to the biochar afterwards? Traditionally charcoal would be used for burning, but doing that would seem to defeat the purpose; does using it as a soil amendment also somehow end up defeating the purpose?
2. At one point I was trying to understand why composting was touted as being greener than landfills for the things that can be composted, and that argument boiled down to "composting involves aerobic decomposition, landfills will have anaerobic, you get worse greenhouse gases from anaerobic" -- which seems conceivable to me as a non-biochemist, but then why is the pointedly-anaerobic charring process better?
"I think the answer might be "you replace the tree with a new tree, this is figuring out how to stop the carbon that's in the used-up tree from becoming CO2 again which is why you aren't, say, feeding it to cows"
Right. A forest in its natural state is a steady-state carbon sink - it holds X tons of carbon that would otherwise become atmospheric CO2, but it doesn't *remove* X (or even X/100) tons per year. For every ten trees that pull one ton of carbon out of the atmosphere, one dies and decays and puts ten tons back in the atmosphere. But if you can convert dead trees into something that doesn't decay, then the forest becomes a constant carbon-removal machine.
Using biochar as charcoal would obviously defeat that purpose, but if you bury it, great. There's probably a limit to how much you can "bury" in the cheap easy sense of just plowing it into the soil (and incidentally increasing the fertility of same), and how long the biochar will endure if it is left in the upper layers of the spol, but at the margin at least it seems useful.
I feel like it doesn't make economic sense to bury carbon fuel when we're also still digging up carbon fuel. Like, instead of burying X tons of charcoal, why not reduce coal mining by that amount?
There are reasons involving transport and crop yields that burying biochar may make economic sense relative to burning coal and obviously after fossil fuels are phased out then it will make more sense. As for present day economics, my understanding is that most burned wood is either used for fuel (ie EU biomass regulations deforesting Georgia, local fuel use etc.) Or burned to clear farm land (ie rainforest slash and burn). The later would be more carbon friendly if done to produce biochar.
I admit I'm not certain, but it seems unlikely that direct air capture will be more efficient than a method like Project Vesta proposes, simply because the CO2 concentration in air is about 400ppm, and it's so much greater in the ocean.
FWIW I have it on good authority that Project Vesta may not have properly worked through the potential side effects of their proposal on the chemical composition of the oceans. If I understand it correctly, the cautionary argument is: olivine rock like all rock has a bunch of impurities in it, some of those (e.g. heavy metals) have bad ecological effects if you get enough of them in ocean water, and enhanced weathering at the scale they propose might cause those effects.
There are also unresolved questions about the emissions required to transport that much rock by sea to all those beaches, but those seem more straightforward both to calculate and if needed to work around (since we will want to lower shipping emissions anyway).
We (Beeminder) are funding carbon capture via https://stripe.com/climate which includes Project Vesta (plus Climeworks, CarbonCure, and Charm Industrial).
(I would say that Stripe thinking they're legit means they're legit.)
For sulphur dioxide injection, I recommend the book "Climate Shock" for why that would be something of a desperate hail mary. It's a cheap way to quickly cool the planet but would have bad cascading consequences.
I think we ought to have a flat carbon tax that goes in both directions. So if you release a tonne of CO2 you pay $x but if you suck out a tonne and turn it into magnesite or Paulownia biochar, the government gives you $x.
Good to keep in mind, but if they charged money every time you crate a cobra (as proposed for CO2), that would seem to nullify the perverse incentive, no?
Like the Northern Ireland "cash for ash" mini-scandal. Subsidies for renewable energy usage - in this case, burning wood pellets for heating - meant that canny operators found they could make a small but tidy profit wasting heat (e.g. on empty milking parlours or cow byres) and claim the subsidy from the government agency, as the subsidy was actually more than the cost of the fuel. The only time I ever felt sorry for Arlene Forster because she underestimated the amount of cute-hoorism out there 😁 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_Heat_Incentive_scandal
The carbon tax already assumed global surveillance and enforcement. That won't be perfect but let's say you don't get the subsidy unless your whole supply chain is legible. Unlike with cash for ash, we're subsidising something that's actually good rather than merely less bad than fossil fuel heating.
That would be a more persuasive proposal if anyone had any accurate idea of the net externality from producing CO2, hence the appropriate tax. In my view we don't even know its sign, although many people claim to.
Increasing CO2 has a bunch of effects, some positive and some negative, of uncertain size. It's easy to pretend you know the answer — just give high estimates for the negative effects, give low estimates for the positive or don't mention them. Thus everyone talks about excess mortality from hot summers, which is surely real. Almost nobody talks about reduced mortality from milder winters, also almost surely real and probably larger. Everyone worries about loss of useful coastal land due to sea level rise, almost nobody talks about increase in habitable land as temperature contours shift towards the poles. At multa caetera.
Direct air capture of some kind is a necessity, even if all human CO2 release halted tomorrow there is already more in the atmosphere than is a good idea.
Reducing incident solar radiation is an excellent idea, and is in fact one of my personal pet crazy ideas(tm). But I have always been wary of the potential unforeseen consequences of things like atmospheric particulate injection. The right way to reduce global temperatures is with a sunshade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade), many fewer unknowns in the effects and easy to reverse if something unexpected does happen since it can just be boosted to a holding orbit where it no longer blocks any sunlight.
I recently read that perhaps the most promising technology for sequestering carbon is something called "Enhanced Weathering". How it works: (1) Pulverize volcanic rock. (2) Deposit in on world beaches.
Because volcanic rock is newly formed, it has no carbonates yet. The pulverized rock will weather very quickly because of its large surface area, taking carbon from the ocean and air, and converting it to carbonates on the rock. Eventually, the carbon ends up as rock at the bottom of the ocean. Another benefit is that it de-acidifies the ocean, which is increasingly acidic as it absorbs atmospheric carbon.
I've read that at scale this technology could capture one ton of CO2 for much less than what would be a "reasonable" cost per ton of carbon emiited, say $15 or $20.
I think the economics of carbon capture here are important to keep in mind. As an approximation, oil costs about 55$ per barrel (but this price varies a lot), and a barrel of oil produces about 750 kg of CO2 (taking the entire supply chain into account). Total global CO2 emissions are about 33 gigatons.
So if we could get carbon capture costs down to 20$ or so per ton of CO2, it wouldn't be too punishing compared to the oil price and the economy as we know it can survive a CO2 tax. Then we could solve global warming merely by creating a new trillion dollar carbon capture industry, e.g. toughly twice the size of Wall-Mart.
Personally I would like to see a system where oil producers are taxed based on production, starting with a low value but rapidly increasing it to about $20 per barrel. Saudi Arabia et al won't like this, so diplomacy is needed, but I hope western nations could be quite firm and not promise too much in return. This money should be earmarked to emission reduction and carbon capture projects with efficient CO2 removed per dollar spent ratios. The public procurement process needs to be updated to avoid bad projects, this is a hard problem but low-picking fruits can hopefully be taken easily. (We should stop consumer carbon taxes and inefficient emission reduction strategies.)
I read that as "miffed hot take reacting against percieved misrepresentation of my community" followed by "the other side actually cares and were having a real conversation now"
William Poundstone's Big Secrets, Bigger Secrets, and Biggest Secrets might be a good place to start, though they're a few decades old. One of them (don't recall which) discusses Freemason codes and rituals, for example.
All the world's initiatic secrets might be a bit over ambitious. There's lots of very obscure initiatic groups - e.g. not many know about the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.
I suspect a lot of "secrets" are the same. There's only so many profound seeming statements about the universe available, just wrapped up in different ritual trappings.
Not quite what you're talking about, but my fraternity and another organization I won't name have identical secret handshakes.
This may be a particularly difficult secret to invent, because of the constraints: the secret element must be clear to the other participant if they know the trick, but invisible to the other participant if they don't, and also invisible to observers who don't know the trick.
What do you believe: that the author of Unsong got a very important anagram wrong by two whole letters? Or that SSC is anagram for something other than Scott Alexander?
I've seen a lot of complaints about Substack's comment handling, so I went and created an extension that helps with some of the issues. Features include options to load all comments, highlight new comments, jump to the parent comment when collapsing a thread, and use the old SSC styling. You can find it at https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks.
Works great so far! One small issue/question: the Permalink can't be opened in a new tab by middle clicking (nor from the context menu), nor can I copy the link address, as it doesn't seem to be a regular link.
However, the permalink is always the same as what the date links to, isn't it? If so, it's not an issue (and then the permalink is also somewhat superfluous).
Yeah... the permalink was actually faked with CSS so I didn't have to manually add an element to every comment, so it doesn't act like a real link. Though given I'm already doing that with some other stuff now, I may update it to behave normally. In the meantime, it is indeed the same as what you get by clicking on the date.
To answer your other question, altering the new indicator text in comments isn't a big priority, it's unlikely to appear anywhere else outside of this thread.
It's weird that we don't talk more about age. I'm in my mid thirties and a lot of what I used to see as something like "deep flaws and inadequacies in humanity and society" are actually more parsimoniously explained by "there are a lot of young people who have not yet experienced the world yet nonetheless have opinions and the capability to act in the world". Young people, of course, have a right to exist, but I wish that I could filter (or sort) Internet comments sections for poster age, or, even better, for how many books the poster has read.
I do that a lot, actually. I was as dumb as humanly possible. I suspect I feel something similar about my current self in 30 years. But I'm pretty confident I'm headed in the right direction. We'll see, I guess.
Dumb is curable! And kids – everyone really – usually have at least a few great insights about something. They're easier to (find and) appreciate IRL tho.
I got super interested in politics after Bush/Gore and the Iraq War runup. I was tech-savvy, and I loved going on message boards and talking about politics. I was also eleven years old. I have often wondered if any of the people talking to me realized they were talking to a pre-pubescent child (I had a pretty advanced vocabulary for my age), and if not, if they would have modified their tactics since many of my undoubtedly weird positions were on account of....I was eleven.
I also try to keep in mind, when someone online is making no sense to me, that they could be a child.
3) The people who really need to talk, need to do so outside of an argument.
Arguments are really bad at changing people's minds. They're even less effective if everybody is bad at arguing/reasoning. Like, on the margin some improvement can exist, but others really need Jew Lasers.
The simplest problem is that it's not policy, but is wrapped up in tribal identity, and the tribes are in existential war. Much of the heat would go poof if the tribes could know they can live how they like to, but both are very intent on telling the other tribe how to live.
Would it? I mean, if the tribes were isolated from each other, sort of like how the US is geographically & socially separated from Saudi Arabia, then I could see that. However, a lot of the conflict is really about attitudes, valuation, and status.
If it was "living how they like to", then the problem would actually be policy. But maybe I misunderstand your point.
Partly that. They're two tribes stuck in the same box, and to some degree or another both view the other existing as an affront. The woke especially, but neither's really happy. If they had their own boxes, it might be easier. They are very geographically separated already.
Same here! If I go looking, I can even find my posts from that era. I sort of wonder whether the fact that my then-opinions are out there under my name makes me more likely to endorse them still - I find that the things I've changed my mind about aren't things that I took a public stand on.
Thankfully (since my parents were cognizant enough to teach me to be anonymous), none of what I said was under my real name or traceable back to me, but it is something I wonder. I know I'm much less willing to change an opinion--even about something stupid, like a guess about an upcoming plot twist in a TV show--if I've publicly defended it, and I get resentful when I'm wrong.
I don't support "de-anonymizing" the internet, or whatever people call it when they want to force accounts to use real names, but I have wondered what effect requiring the verification of age might have. Like, if there was a little flag next to an account that said "this person is 15", how would that change people's interactions? "Kid gloves" are a thing in real life, but I'm not certain they would translate when you're not face-to-face. But it could be an interesting experiment!
On a complete tangent, the expression 'handling with kid gloves' isn't actually about children at all. 'Kid' gloves are gloves made of leather from a baby goat (a 'kid'.) Such leather is very supple and fragile, and the gloves were used as high end fashion-wear. They were notoriously easy to tear though, so someone wearing them might handle things rather gingerly.
The glove leather is (or I should say was, it's probably illegal nowadays) actually made from a fetal goat, believe it or not. Once the kid was born its skin would already be too thick and pelted for glove purposes, so they would... extract... the kid goat before its term.
> Like, if there was a little flag next to an account that said "this person is 15", how would that change people's interactions?
15-year-old me would have fought this tooth and nail, and I suspect a lot of the stealth-teens-among-us of today would probably be in agreement. Some things don't really change.
I think some people really and honestly forget how they truly saw the world when they were kids, and adopt a weird sort of "adult-self speaking on behalf of kid-self while trying to coddle kid-self" perspective in lieu of the real deal.
When you're a t(w)een - *especially* when you're the sort of t(w)een who gravitates towards nerdy/geeky things - pretty much the grossest thing imaginable is being condescended to by adults. Teen years are all about that drive to usurp the sheltering and protective illusion and experience "the 'real', un-phony world". See Catcher in the Rye. Of course, as we age, some of us would certainly jump at the chance to go back to that cocoon :)
This. I experienced the most incredible liberation finding the forums on Prodigy when I was twelve (this was all the way back in the Bush Sr. administration, before I even discovered Usenet) and realizing that people would talk to me as just another person and I didn't have to worry about the condescension they'd apply to a kid. Even when, in retrospect, my opinions would've deserved some condescension.
Oh yeah, I definitely would've attempted to find some workaround. I was rather precocious, and gravitated toward adult company as I struggled to relate to my peers. I adored getting attention and compliments from people who I knew were far older than me online.
That said...I still do wonder. I was also exposed to some pretty vitriolic rage (repeated private messages of graphic images of war crimes committed by Saddam Hussein) that I like to think people wouldn't have sent if they realized they were harassing an eleven-year-old. Public ages would be an interesting experiment, at least.
What effect do you suppose having a mandatory but unverified age tag would have? Personally, I'm not terribly experienced with the comments section but I think I'd place more trust in ACX readers than the general population to use it responsibly.
> I also try to keep in mind, when someone online is making no sense to me, that they could be a child.
I've had that uncomfortable experience a few times on twitter where I follow someone, and then they make some comment that makes me realise they are 10 years younger than me, and it feels creepy in some indefinable way to be following them.
I'm reading another blog, which has a commenter everyone else seems to think is a nutcase. I think he's actually a high school kid trying to sound profound.
I feel this about the recent gme stuff. Ten years ago I probably would have been fully on board with the mainstream reddit take. I actually think my current way of thinking is better on the meta level, not just object-level right, but this makes me suspect that the only real solution for "people are dumb about stuff" is to wait a few years for them to wise up.
(This also makes me wonder what percentage of boomer politics I'll eventually age into. I'm pretty sure I'm right about my main disagreement points of cars and housing, and that I understand where they went wrong, but there's probably a bunch of unknown unknowns).
For what it's worth, you helped me (mid 20s) temper my thoughts on it a bit? I don't know exactly what views you changed, but you definitely made me more hesitant about laughing at it and caused me to wonder more about long-term impacts.
It's really hard to say? Older individuals are also frequently "dumb about stuff". Maybe fewer actually bet on GME, but they likely also have less to gain from high-risk moves now anyway.
I think some people naturally gravitate towards self-improvement, and I think many people learn from specific mistakes. But learning from specific mistakes, and learning not to screw up their own lives, doesn't prevent them from being "dumb about stuff".
I think most humans are probably not great humans, but a lot of people go from being bad to good as they get older, via the process of making mistakes, accruing regrets, and allowing guilt to correct their behavior going forward. Some people are immune to guilt, so it's not reliable, but a good directional rule of thumb.
"Adolescents, after all, are capable of being first-class reasoners, but they can never have the context that comes with life experience. That’s why you get child prodigy mathematicians and chess-players—disciplines where you can start from a small, easily taught group of precepts and use your reason to build up towering edifices upon their foundations—but not child prodigy lawyers or historians or doctors (Doogie Howser is science fiction: fight me!). No matter how smart you are at 11 or 14 or 17, you just haven’t had enough time to do the reading to practice law."
That stuff is mostly frontal lobe - executive function stuff. Impulse control, emotion management, ability to defer gratification, ability to shift focus from self to other and back again, as well as the usual planning/decision making/organizing skills. Some of this is probably pushed by life experience, some just takes time to develop.
We know that frontal lobe development doesn't reach usual 'adult' levels until, on average, age 25-ish. It also seems that the less responsibility/fewer real-world consequences someone experiences, the slower the frontal lobe develops. So the extended adolescence of today's teens/young adults may actually be slowing that down. (Not forgetting that WE, the adult world, are the ones encouraging young people to extend their adolescence, by continuing their educations. This leads to reduced work/financial responsibilities in this age range compared to their parents' and grandparents' generations, later marriage/child-bearing etc. So it's not because they are slackers!)
Knowledge doesn't equal wisdom. Although it's probably a pre-req.
Disappointingly, I actually don't think it matters that much.
A lot of the variance I see in behavior depends on raw capabilities and expressed traits, but not age in a direct manner. I think experience matters, but I suspect that a lot of people have experiences they are not able to analogically apply, or get experience that isn't that helpful.
Or to put it another way: I've met many very smart and sophisticated high school students and undergraduates, and many inadequate elders and retirees. I suspect the sophisticated high school students will age into even more sophisticated adults, but that "speaks intelligently on complex topics" is multi-variate enough to not be reducible to age or even # of books.
Age is probably a useful attribute in combination with other information. The nerdy types at a younger age seem like less physically attractive and less charismatic cut-outs of the Les Mis crew, while as they age they tend to get somewhat more less willing to construct barricades at the drop of a hat. Seems to play a different role with normies.
Making a somewhat out-of-left-field analogy, stars along different sequences evolve very differently as they age, but the age of a star alone does not tell you whether you are looking at a black hole or a white dwarf.
I will say that the older folk DO have experience that generalizes and is easy to parrot. Phrases like:
-A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush
-The days go slow and the years go fast
-There's nothing more valuable than time
-Youth is wasted on the young
This is great life advice. Great stuff. Young people probably won't get it. But it doesn't really tell you a damn thing about the optimal deficit when the national debt burden is already 140% but unemployment is 15%.
Might need to get a bit more....dare I say...technocratic for those kinds of questions.
However, the problem is that if our targeted metric is "deserving discussion participant", then we don't have a strong sign that age is a great metric. Or to put it another way: there are some very unwise old people, and some very grounded young people.
To give a sign of my age: this bothered me a lot during my 20s. Ironically, I wanted for my elders to clearly be better equipped to keep up. I had many intellectual sins(& I knew it!!), but most of the time other people really couldn't police them. The issue that I identified from seeing people of all sorts of ages, is that age isn't a strong predictor. There are very ideological older people, balanced younger people, many people who start intellectual journeys later and others who are highly prodigious while young.
(To be clear: I don't expect a 17 year to be a PhD sociologist, but most conversations I see online are between dilettantes)
I definitely feel like I've gotten more insights as I've aged, but very few of them are things I could write down in a way my younger self would understand. Its very different to read the sentence "systems are often complex and counter intuitive" and understand it on a surface level, vs understanding that on a more intuitive level from having dealt with systems.
I agree the internet makes that hard to filter for. I've found conversations with friends of my age cohort more useful. People much older than me tend to be sufficiently mentally different I don't get that much from conversations with them even if intellectually I realise they are probably smart and have a lot of experience.
This reminds me of a Community episode. Annie (a 23 year old over-achiever go-getter) asks Buzz (a near-elderly retired private detective and current community college teacher) to get a bulletin board posted in the cafeteria.
Buzz tries for about a minute, intuitively understands that the custodial staff will not do its job, and gives up.
The episode's plot is Annie refusing to give up and going to department after department, brokering deal after deal, to get her bulletin board installed. The plot is based on Annie not having Buzz's intuitive understanding. Annie can't get it. She's never experienced this before.
The difficulty comes in situation-specific learning though. I would agree that a 23 year old fresh out of college is more likely to struggle in a CEO position than a Senior Manager or Director. They have less domain-specific knowledge. But many adults don't have the right domain-specific knowledge in many areas either.
I mean, there is a trickiness here in that many people actually never understand "systems are often complex and counter-intuitive" despite having the right IQ level to do so. There are young people who find dynamic systems relatively intuitive.
Then again, I don't have quite the same problems with age. I like unconventional people more than I like younger or older more specifically people. There can be a certain rigidness with older people, and there can be a flightiness with younger people, but a lot of that is just a personality variance.
It's been said that humans think by talking. It's useful to talk to people your own age because you're socially licensed to say the dumb, half-formed things that are kicking around in your head, air them out, see if they hold up. See if even *you* still believe them after they've left your mouth. Talking to older people is different because the social license isn't quite the same.
This (social license among young people) probably used to be the case. I am not sure that it still is the case in an age of permanent social media records and intense moralistic judgment-fests about everything under the sun, and I worry that that will have bad effects on the intellectual development of digital natives.
I think a lot of this comes down to the nebulous "lived experience," and there's more to it than just age. I've never had to worry about putting food on the table or figuring out how to make rent. My opinions on the lifestyle of people on WIC should be appropriately discounted.
I agree. It's close to the question, "how hard have you been tested by life?" You're more likely to get tested more and harder, the older you are, but it's only a correlation. I don't know *many* elderly idiots, but some for sure.
Age may correlate with experience or wisdom, but I definitely would not take it as a strong indicator. “Books read” sounds like it would correlate stronger
As long as among those books there are a lot of novels! Not quite like living many lives, having many different experiences, or getting into the heads of many others, but probably as close as we can get.
I like thinking about changing disposition with age as natural selection's response to the explore-exploit problem for a population. This ezra klein podcast was really interesting to me in that regard: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/115722613
I agree if by young people you're referring to minors. Late teenagers are often quite smart and compromising/flexible (not all, obviously, but I would think a larger share than of previous generations, thanks in-part to the internet).
Hey Scott, I loved the taxometrics post! I'm excited to go through the Paul Meehl papers that Beauchaine summarizes. I have a question about something you wrote:
> a few [psychiatric disorders] may be objective distinct categories, especially schizophrenia, narcissistic personality, and endogenous depression
Can you elaborate on why you think NPD belongs on this list?
I am not 100% sure if the etiquette here but here is a link to a podcast I did talking to Kyle Harper about the Fate of Rome. You may be amazed to learn how many Romans died in the plague of Justinian (spoiler alert) ie 50% or more. And then climate change. As Kyle says ‘they couldn’t catch a break’. Anyway hope it’s ok to promote it here.
My understanding was that the 50% figure is not well accepted and that commentators at the time would just use large numbers to signify "a lot of people.". There was an In Our Time podcast recently on the Plague of Justinian where some academics discussed this point.
Ah! This was indeed a shameless piece of click bait on my part and Kyle Harper was much more nuanced in our discussion. That said it does now seem to be clear that it was the same disease as the Black Death where the mortality rates are much better established. As for numbers we do have eyewitnesses who were actually there though of course the ancients weren’t always totally reliable on numbers! Interested to hear it was discussed in IOT. My podcast is even better if only because it is twice as long and the presenter comes from even further to the north (Edinburgh!) than Melvyn does. All joking aside I’d be thrilled if you found time to listen and more so for any feedback. I’m relatively new to this so keen to learn what I am doing right/wrong.
I assume this shouldn't be possible, so what's the trick? Did they have hundreds of stock-picking services and only advertise the one that worked (seems unlikely, both of the analysts involved beat the market individually while also working together, which should make this harder to pull off)? Are they lying outright? Something else?
Two guesses: (1) they made a couple good picks early that keep on giving (say, Amazon and NetFlix); (2) they measure their success as "buy when we said to buy and sell when that thing reaches the top."
> It closed its Running with the Market Portfolio after it lost over 60 percent of its value. It also discontinued its Retiree Portfolios, Boring Portfolio (which gained 7.7 percent during the tenure of its portfolio manager, versus 63.6 percent for the S&P 500), Harry Jones portfolio, Foolish Four Portfolio (after it ran tests of the Dow-dividend strategies which turned out to be “not encouraging”), and Workshop Portfolio (due to a dispute with Value Line).
Motley Fool has a very unique way of investing that is analogous of 'closing the losers' without actually closing the losers.
The 'David Gartner' way of investing is to place a multitude of small bets on a wide variety companies in nascent industries (for today, think cannabis, sports betting, cybersecurity, gene editing, etc.) The key to this style of investing is to **never** sell. Place your bet and let it ride. Even if most bets go to zero, they were small and don't hurt overall. By investing early and continuing to ride winners, you capture the vast majority of the gains.
As a mathematician, I'm embarrassed to be confused by this, but I'm confused by this. My understanding of "the market" (as in "beat the market") is that it's the perfect implementation of "buy everything and never sell", so what does Motley Fool do to beat the market? I thought the forgetful-investor argument was a good proxy for why you should just invest in an index fund and be done with it.
I think the idea here is decide "weed is a growth industry", so you just buy a bit of every weed stock you can find. Hopefully 20 years down the road when it's gone from a $2 billion industry to a $100 billion, you capture that upside even though many of your individual investments went bust. So it's more like picking winning and losing categories of stocks, rather than specific winners and losers.
Since the majority of gains are capture by a small handful of stocks, one of the 'easiest' ways to beat the market is to invest in those winners (often called "100 baggers" (see book by Chris Mayer)) and hold.
However, this isn't easy. Many people don't identify them early enough or they do and invest, but sell too early. For example, Amazon has had multiple >50% or greater drawdowns over it's incredible run. Many people cannot psychologically hold through that and even if they do, once the stock remakes new highs, they'll sell then. And even if they don't, they'll probably sell at the next 50% drawdown.
This is why a certain type of article ("You'd have $X if you invested $1,000 in [insert company] IPO") aren't very realistic, because the vast majority of people cannot handle the ups and downs of a true meteoric stock.
Many early bets + small bets + never selling = alpha. The never selling part is extremely difficult.
For a more recent example, see Tesla. For *years* long time bulls like Cathie Wood and Ron Baron were ridiculed. In both 2019 and 2020, it had a 50% drawdown. I'm sure many people sold during either one of those time periods and subsequently missed the massive run it has had over the last ~10 months.
Disclaimer: I do not own either Amazon or Tesla stock (except through index funds).
"Many early bets + small bets + never selling = alpha. The never selling part is extremely difficult."
Many early bets + small bets is just another way to say portfolio diversification. "Never selling" is just another way of saying "don't look at your portfolio", which isn't that hard to do. With a maximally diversified portfolio, you get an alpha of precisely 0, because at that point you're just following the market. That is actually a valid (and very good) investment strategy: put all your money into a target date retirement fund that follows total stock and bond indicies (i.e. VFIFX), automatically add money every month, and never look at your portfolio until the day you retire.
"My understanding of "the market" (as in "beat the market") is that it's the perfect implementation of "buy everything and never sell", so what does Motley Fool do to beat the market?"
1. If you have a dice-throwing tournament with ten thousand competitors, someone is going to end up rolling sixes five times in a row. I.e. these guys are just the luckiest guys on the market.
2. Motley Fool has secret access to insider info or other unfair advantages.
I have a friend who’s had a very successful ~20 year career as a hedge fund manager, and attributes most of it to luck.
Not all of it - he says you need a base level of competence and certain personal qualities that allow you to keep the job before you’ve fully proven yourself as well as manage other people etc. (and he doesn’t count possessing those qualities those as luck, for whatever reason). But he used the dice-throwing example as well.
(He also thinks inheritance tax should be 100%. I’m not sure he’s a totally typical hedge fund manager tbh.)
Just about the only person to consistently beat the market long term has been Warren Buffet. If you look at his strategy, it's actually remarkably simple - research stuff reeeeealy well, buy good long term bets and wait.
There are actually a few more than just Buffett out there - here's a post on the most successful money manager records. Just for reference - the underlying index is usually estimated to return 9-11% percent over a long time frame.
I wonder how much Buffet benefits from soft insider information. I don't mean illegal insider information, but the fact that he can talk one on one with the CEO of any company he wants to invest in. He's not just sitting in on quarterly investment calls like everyone else. Obviously he's also a smart investor and businessman but I'd imagine he gains additional advantage by knowing the people involved as well as the network around them.
Yes, his reputation is definitely a factor to his success. Not only does it grant him more information and opportunities, but Buffett has a "halo effect" around him as well. If he invests, everyone assumes it must be a good investment, and so its price goes up, making it a good investment!
Of course, he didn't start off in this position. He still had to climb to the top through some combination of skill and luck.
I've subscribed to their Stock Advisor service for 8-9 years and have been pleased with the results. My two biggest recent wins with them were Shopify and Appian.
The company was founded by two brothers and they each share one new pick per month. One brother has a better record of past performance, so I mostly just buy his stocks. They have several other products too, but I only have experience with Stock Advisor.
Their business is acquiring users. They absolutely close the losers and promote the winners. The way they do it is legal but probably shouldn’t be. The asset management industry has done a decent job self-enforcing standards around marketing, but there has always been a massive loophole for newsletters.
CFA GIPS is the gold standard for investment marketing standards. It is voluntary, however.
Motley Fool had a big internet fight years ago insisting their "dogs of the dow" stock-picking method beat the market, and their fans keep on insisting that back-testing was the ultimate test and kept on coming up with weird tricks to perfectly tune it to old data. The experts said this was nonsense but their fans hated the experts, using the same attacks populists always lose.
One Weird Trick people like this can use to "beat" the market is to just take a ton of risk, in a not immediately obvious way. If you have a 5x leveraged position in the market, you should get 5x the market in return without any violation of the EMH to explain. Over a long enough time period though, you'd expect to see some enormous losses in down years. Based on this paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321057021_Evaluating_the_performance_of_the_Motley_Fool's_Stock_Advisor it looks like that might be part of what's happening. Against a matched portfolio in terms of industry, market cap, etc, (which should theoretically be similar in risk) they overperform by 0.2% in monthly return. That's nothing to sneeze at over 14 years (almost 1.4X over that term), but maybe easier to attribute to luck than a factor of 5X!
At the end of the comment from Anna Stansbury, she says she would be open to doing a guest piece on your blog. Is it possible to reach out to her about that? Wage stagnation is an especially fascinating topic to me and I've been curious about it since you posted the initial piece.
I'm nervous about asking famous people for things (especially two years after they offered) and lots of famous economists have already written discussions of wage stagnation in lots of places, so I'm not going to push this. If she sees this and still wants to write something, she can email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com.
Has there been a thread yet about not-coincidental anagrams of Astral Codex Ten? (It's not an anagram of Slate Star Codex, so old threads from there don't count.)
During the first few months of COVID I got back into researching old blues music via YouTube and Spotify. I read Ted Gioia’s Delta Blues which I highly recommend. His book inspired me to write up my journey into appreciating old country blues music, the deep blues, in hopes that it might help someone else learn to appreciate them too. Part one is about the greatness of Son House.
How likely is it that the far future will be terrible, and what do you all think are the most plausible S-risks, i.e. risks of extreme suffering being created in the far future? Also, what do you all think of Brian Tomasik's list of his top donation recommendations?
There is lots of suffering in the world right now, mostly due to either poor economic systems (too much capitalism (as opposed to last century's too much communism)) or some states being too large (and therefore too insulated from the masses) and/or not optimised to match actual geographic and demographic zones (and therefore seeding conflict).
It seems too much focused on very niche issues like AI, focusing on world peace and eliminating poverty would both be more beneficial, sooner, and assist in the AI problem once solved.
The phrase "very niche issues like AI" is odd in the context of catstrophic/s/x-risk. It may be very niche in terms of who is paying attention to it, but it is not at all niche in its consequences.
As for assisting with AI problem once other problems are solved, this seems to imply that AI will not be a problem for some time, and does not need very much in the way of advance action. I'm interested in arguments for why it is a long ways off or why it is better to put off action on it, if you want to share.
Very niche in that the potential for an AI catastrophe is very low and at the earliest case is still pretty far off. There's plenty of time to do world peace and global poverty first, both are simple problems to solve and could be done in 20 to 30 years.
I think a rogue general AI would not be a problem in that time frame because of the energy costs such a "brain" would require to feed itself would make it an easy target. Technology still has a really long way to go to match the power efficiency of a human brain.
Also, everyone who has some issue they are really concerned about figures out some way to make it sound like it will be the end of civilisation if their pet issue isn't put into top priority *right now*. It looks a bit ridiculous to an outsider.
"Very niche in that the potential for an AI catastrophe is very low and at the earliest case is still pretty far off. There's plenty of time to do world peace and global poverty first, both are simple problems to solve and could be done in 20 to 30 years."
What confidence do you have in this position? Many experts disagree with you. If today's suffering is X, what do you think the potential suffering could be from super-AGI? What if you do a "net-utility calculation"? Do you think present-day human life is net-suffering and what do you think the net might be in an s-risk worst case scenario?
I've been dipping into Brett Weinstein's podcast. One thing he harps on pretty frequently is making distinctions between the word "theory" and "hypothesis." His line is that "theory" should be used for things like "the theory of evolution" and not for "string theory."
This is an argument I might have made against creationists in 2009, but it strikes me as a little obtuse these days. It would certainly be nice if everybody agreed to use common terminology, but I don't think you can really prevent meanings from drifting.
Furthermore, I don't think Weinstein's definition matches scientific usage. "Theory" in many fields seems to mean something like "model" or "framework," rather than hypothesis. Or, more verbosely, "a thing that explains existing data and can be manipulated to generate predictions."
I generally enjoy it, but there's an occasional WTF moment that makes me ask "why am I listening to this guy?" (I say guy, because these moments usually come from Weinstein and not Heying)
One example: his Unity campaign was embarrassing. No comment on the worthiness of the effort, but did he really think he could make this happen in 2020? Incredible naivete!
I've also seen him say some silly things re:tech censorship. For example, he tried to post a URL on Twitter, but missed the https or www (I forget which). Then when the link didn't work, he insinuated that this was the tech companies trying to censor him.
My general thought about Brett is that he's very committed to proving he's intelligent-- sometimes he picks up on something valuable, and sometimes he's just nitpicking.
The Unity campaign was nonsense as a political project, there just wasn't enough time. I don't think it has good odds for doing much as a longterm organization, but we'll see.
I think Brett and Heather don't make sense about gender. They are usually careful to explain what they mean, but so far as gender is concerned, they just seem to make assertions.
Is anyone else subscribed on gmail getting the weird issue where half the substack updates go to the regular inbox and half go to "promotions"? I'm trying to get them all in the regular inbox but not sure how.
I wonder how heavily Google weights "one user moves a message to Promotions." I manually put all my Substack and Patreon notifications into Promotions, since I don't want them mixing with billing statements and such in my Updates tab.
(If they weight it heavily, then maybe it's my fault)
I've only just read for the first time the "Against Steelmanning" article linked from the bottom point. It's old so I'll just post my thoughts on it here.
The idea of "steelmanning" probably is misused and badly-done pretty frequently, but I think there are a few steelman-ish techniques that are more-clearly helpful and can be implemented even if you're not a rhetorical genius:
- If you notice your conversation partner make a deductive error but it's really tangential to their main point, or you know of a different thing they *could* have said that would work better, don't bother attacking it. If they continue to bring it up, make the point that it's just not relevant and try to get back to the main topic. This effectively lets you contend with a more parsimonious version of their argument.
- If they provide outlandish hypotheticals or assumptions as bases for their argument, see if you can offer up equivalent bases that at least *sound* less absurd. This will make it clear (to them and yourself) that you're not winning via personal humiliation or anything like that. This doesn't have to be a condescending thing where you're telling them their argument is silling; it's to help you think through what they're saying, too.
- Sometimes the person you're arguing will misconstrue your argument for a more common, similar-sounding, but different argument. In this case, enthusiastically concede that if that *were* your argument, they would indeed be correct to attack it and you understand why, before explaining what you were *really* saying.
No disagreements. The problem with all of this is that it's a matter of finding the right balance. For example: I'm probably not going to try to develop a steelman of QAnon. It is absurd. I can probably restate it more intelligently, however, it wouldn't lead to better conversation, only an elaborate way of signalling that I'm intelligent. However, with relatively intelligent interlocutors, there's an obligation to seek the best interpretations, and try to steelman.
A major issue is in the difference between the apologetics for the absurd vs the exploration of ideas with people of different perspectives.
The way you deal with steelmanning things that you find fractally absurd is realize you're coming from wildly different assumptions. The election fraud story is fundamentally based on mistrust of mainstream sources. I've had great success convincing people election fraud didn't happen by "what do you think - do you think that the GOP and several Trump appointees refused to invalidate the election because they're secretly democrats? After this campaign?" type logic.
Most people try to argue against people they disagree with from assumptions they presume they share with their interlocutor, but actually don't. You could come up with nine thousand CBO reports of there being "no election fraud" - and someone who believes in QAnon type election fraud stories wouldn't even care. He assumes that the people who measure election fraud are either A) extremely bad at their jobs, or B) deliberately in on the act.
I agree with your point about how arguments diverge. I also agree that one should go after the weak points of any argument to test out how that argument works.
However, I don't think "GOP & Trump appointees" is the steelman here (if we define steelman as "most defensible" argument, rather than "argument that is most reasonable") For QAnon it's something more like "God's plan has been thwarted by Satan's wide-ranging demonic conspiracy to keep Trump out of office, which is why we need to support Trump's prophet Rudy Giuliani" (partly joking of course). And the problem with this is that while this is an absurd claim (from most premises I consider reasonable) counter-arguments tend to either fall off, or get too complicated. (Ockham's razor + grand theory of society + X,000 grounded fact claims).
To that point, it's sort of a question of what is the point? There's nothing wrong with doing an audit of "trust of mainstream media". However, rationality is about improving one's own reasoning, not strange puzzles.(even if the latter happen to use reason)
One problem I sometimes hit is that if I point out a (perhaps non-fatal) error in my opponent's argument in order to improve it, they will still feel attacked and argue the point even though their central point is not under attack. And not we're arguing about some irrelevant detail, me failing to convince them that they can concede it without it threatening their conclusion.
As a result, people in the 'arguments as soldiers' mindset often don't want to be steelmanned. In fact, the more minor the point you're correcting them on, the more they think you must be out to get them.
It's a really frustrating problem and I feel like I need to spend potentially years guiding someone out of the 'arguments as soldiers' mindset before steelmanning or anything like it makes any sense to try.
At a sort of tangent to your point about people defending their work ... . I concluded long ago that a good way of forcing me to be self-critical of my writing was to have a word limit. If someone else tells me "that point isn't really relevant to your argument," I defend it, because it's mine. If someone tells me "write it as you like, but you only have a thousand words," I now start looking for shorter ways of doing things and inessential arguments that can be cut out.
I'd always interpreted steelmanning as making an effort to bridge inferential distance - attempting to fill in the unspoken assumptions and logical steps in another's argument. This is really hard, and such attempts will, as Ozy points out, often look indistinguishable from condescension or plain old strawmanning.
The issue I have with the article is on the meta-level. I feel that putting the concept of steelmanning itself on an ideological bingo card is just about the dirtiest, most commons-destroying move possible, burning one of the few bridges though which honest discourse can be conducted. It's not even done for the sake of gaining argumentational ammo against some scary and harmful society-spanning idea like patriarchy. As far as I know, nobody but rationalists even uses the term "steelmanning", so this just looks like evil for evil's sake.
I see it more this way too. I think of it as saying that our natural tendency in arguments is to nitpick something we disagree with to death. But rather than doing that and calling it a day, instead let's be charitable and try to see whether we can read the argument in a way that doesn't die so easily.
In real life, conversations and arguments don't fill in every gap and certain audiences will be inclined to fill in those gaps in ways that the author didn't intend. Trying to fill in the gaps in a way that simultaneously 1) fits the author's original intent and 2) makes a strong argument seems like a very positive thing. Obviously if you just entirely ignore 1, you're not engaging with their argument, but as long as you're trying to do 1 and 2 it seems laudable.
Try this technique instead. Restate their position as you understand it, in your own words and with what steelmanning you think is accurate and the better form of their argument, and ask them if that's their argument. People often respond very well to genuine attempts at understanding their position. If you form it as a question, they can reply positively or they can correct your misunderstanding of their position. If you have their position correct, but in a stronger version, they are far less likely to feel attacked and may be more open to further discussion and counterpoints.
I'm not sure that 'steelmanning' really qualifies as honest discourse.
What I mean by that is that when you 'steelman a position,' you're converting a dialogue or a potential dialogue into a monologue. If you don't understand why someone finds a particular argument convincing then that's the time to get them talking and see the underlying logic or at least the emotional resonance. But the idea that you can build a better argument for them sidesteps that opportunity to learn and maybe even change your mind: you begin having firmly established your intellectual superiority, and by the end once you (inevitably) defeat the 'steelman' of their argument you've constructed you've given yourself license to ignore anything further that they have to say. It's a profoundly intellectually arrogant and dishonest way of arguing.
That's not meant to insult Scott, after all I wouldn't be paying him if I doubted his good intentions. But in terms of humility he's grown quite a bit and I'm not sure that if he were starting his blogging career today that the idea would be something that would occur to him. It seems like yet more questionable legacy software from the Rationalist community/
Something I have trouble putting into words: Flying Spaghetti Monster, Flat Earth Society, The Pirate Parties - quite different movements - but there is a rejection of seriousness in them. I have been in a Pirate Party - and they actually try to be serious with just a funny name (like: there isn't any law that a party needs to be entirely serious, we have a funny name, but we are serious about ***) - so maybe this is not an extreme case of it. There were other parties with funny names - in Poland we had a famous Beer Friends Party just after the end of Communism. Flat Earthers seem to pretend to be serious, because this is funny, but I don't think anyone of them actually believes in flat Earth (as in they would really base their actions on that belief if there was no audience).
I think that, with enough exposure, the name just stops being funny in the slightest and people forget that it was supposed to be funny in the first place.
Yeah, "Flying Spaghetti Monster" has become sort of a lame cliche and a negative stereotype of Internet atheists. Similarly with a lot of pirate memes (e.g. ninjas vs. pirates, Talk Like a Pirate Day). For me they evoke an era of Internet culture which is generally considered a bit embarrassing and "cringe" and "randumb."
As for Flat Earth Society, there are real Flat Earth believers out there, but it's hard to distinguish them from the ironic jokers.
Well yeah - I became tired reading stuff with "We pirates" every second sentence. It was stuff I believe - but 'we pirates' ... I just couldn't stand that.
So I guess you couldn't get accustomed to it? I guess it differs per Pirate Party, but what I mean is, when a group with a silly name does serious things, their silly name starts to sound normal to the group members, just from its use in a serious context. "We pirates" starts to sound as normal as "we Tories".
I suppose it wouldn't happen as quickly if you double down on referring to yourself as 'pirates' at every opportunity but I bet it happens nonetheless. Even an animal rights group called the Itty Bitty Kitty Committee could announce the opening of its one hundredth weekly meeting with every member keeping a straight face.
I have a lot more doubt than you about the Flat Earthers. I know some in real life, and they seriously believe in it. Perhaps they're not really putting their beliefs to the test, but they definitely aren't just joking about it.
That's true. However, if you are willing to hold the act to the point that you lose friends and ostracize family, then I'm not sure you're allowed to say that it's just pretending.
The legibility vs. fidelity axis is something which can purposefully be selected for based on political needs.
My favorite example is in carbon dioxide emissions reductions. The "cap-and-trade" model is widely promoted by the elites. It's even possible that it's the most [economically] efficient way to perform this task. In contrast, a carbon tax is much more legible. Everybody knows how much everybody else is going to be paying.
Cap-and-trade might be subtly modified by the implementation to benefit preferred groups. The number of credits issued every year becomes a political issue which might have financial implications which can be leveraged by the elites, regardless of whether they provide the benefits to the public they are supposed to.
Cap-and-trade is also popular because it hides the pain from the consumer/voter. If your cost of fuel goes up at the pump from carbon taxes, you notice. And that makes the rabble mad. Instead, if costs become really diffuse via cap-and-trade, it becomes a lot harder for the public to notice or reason about. It's also easier to argue that "you" aren't paying the costs, but some "rich company" is, while ignoring network effects.
This means that the illegible option is preferred because it allows the type of policy desired to be enacted with hopefully less political backlash, and possibly more options for insider dealing by elites.
I mean, you're not wrong, but I think it also has to do with having a (relatively) recent successful example. If memory serves, we got rid of lead in gas by using cap and trade, rather than a lead tax. This is in the same domain, so it makes since to reach back for a similar policy.
Of course, maybe the reason we did cap and trade with lead instead of a lead tax was to hide the costs from consumers, so maybe you're right coming and going.
There are a lot more successful examples more recently than that in pollution control maintenance for ozone depleating chemicals and acid rain precursors.
I think cap and trade programs are conceptually easily understood by the public making them partially legible. Their association with increased costs is much harder to parse because they intentionally sacrifice something like a linear cost increase to minimize the overall cost of a phase out.
That said the distribution of credits etc. is a political mess for a lot of these programs and they seem to be most legible in situations with a limited number of large producers in a fixed number of industries.
For green house gas emissions this last bit would translate into cap and trade for the fossil fuel industries rather than for end (industrial) users which then raises the question of why not just have a carbon tax.
I was thinking about the same thing about pedophilia. There evidently aren't any reliable statistics about how common ephebophilia and hebephilia are, but it's probably pretty common among men, and blends into pedophilia.
I never thought about it that way, but that's a good point. Another thing to consider is that there are exclusive and non exclusive pedophiles. (Exclusive pedophiles are only attracted to children while non-exclusive pedophiles are attracted to children and adults). There might be slightly more non-exclusive pedophiles than exclusive ones, they are just less likely to be offenders. This would support that pedophilia as a continuum, too. I wish it was easier to do research in this area.
Interesting, I've never looked into it, but my intuitive model is pretty strongly opposite to that.
That is, it just seems sort of obvious to me that the onset of sexual maturity (in the object of attraction) would be the main driver in defining the range of "normal" physical arousal. The reasons for seeing adult attraction to immediately post-pubertal teens as dysfunctional are essentially sociocultural, and don't exist in many societies. It could be that you also have some window around puberty where a certain subset of adults get especially aroused by incipient signs of sexual maturation as opposed to the full-blown thing, but that's still a kind of by-road connected to the main highway.
Arousal that's *completely unconnected* to physical signs of pubertal sexual development just seems like a fundamentally different kind of process. Again, I'm not asserting any of this definitively, just describing what's a pretty strong prior for me in the opposite direction.
Throughout many societies, until just recently, child marriage was not seen as too aberrant.
(I tried to supplement this comment by quoting the instructions Mohammad gave (or received?) WRT how to have sex with young children. I couldn't find it, and didn't want to pursue the search too long, for obvious reasons. But maybe you already know what I'm thinking of.)
In the historical societies I'm familiar with that practiced child marriage, it had nothing to do with subjective sexual attraction on the part of the older betrothed. We're very deep into the context of marriage as a form of inter-familial diplomacy, very far from the modern notion of marriage as institutionalizing romantic infatuation.
I haven't ever read the hadiths regarding Muhammad's marriage to Aisha, and wouldn't have any confidence in my ability to interpret them contextually if I did. I would be wary in general of treating any document whose explicit intention is to describe its subject as transcendently pure and above the plane of normal human existence as a guide to typical historical practice.
It was hardly "transcendently pure." Something about squeezing the penis between the girls thighs without full penetration. And then there was also the instance of Mohammad expressing sexual attraction towards a 3 yr old, and promising to marry her as soon as she was old enough. Again, I'm warry of doing a sufficient search online, and if you've never heard of these things, then I'll leave it at that.
But there are plenty of other examples. Homosexual pedophilia in the ancient world was widespread. The age of consent for much of the world had long been around 12 (normally prepubescent in the past). Erotic literature in Victorian England that often focused on prepubescent girls. Etc.
And 'lolicon' comics in Japan are *presently* rather popular.
I agree with you that the general level of unbotheredness in many historical societies about the sexual abuse of young children is -- not to put it more harshly -- quite extraordinary from a modern perspective. One of those things that really does make the past another country.
That said, I'm not altogether certain where the argument is going. Nobody disputes that pedophilia exists. If certain past cultures permitted it, then that would obviously show up as people with pedophilic inclinations acting upon them without inhibition, or at least under a quite different set of strictures than today's categorical ban.
But that wouldn't prove anything one way or the other about whether pedophilia was mostly taxonic or "more of a continuum."
Yeah, I suppose that statistics on how many many girls were married at what age would do. Having a low age of consent might indicate that it was just a matter of "unbotheredness." But if eg. 5% of marriages at one time were between 12-14 yr old girls and far older men, that would be evidence that pedophilia is (or at least was) dimensional.
Has anyone figured out how to do a memex for art creation yet?
Since RoamResearch and Obsidian have been gaining momentum as personal knowledge management, I've found it invigorating to take notes in such a connected way. I'm trying to figure out how to move my creative pursuits to those kinds of programs that might let me use association and connections as a building block.
I'm struggling to do things that aren't just text and images. I want to find connections form wonderful fonts with palettes I find striking to write new poetry. I want to connect snippets of songs I love to the sounds and timbre of intruments in my DAW. There seems to be a lot of value there and I'm excited to see if it materializes, but I'm still putting my feet on the ground.
If you're into the whole Unix/Linux thing, I think you could start with VimWiki or emacs Org Mode (or one of the clones of these things) and hack on support for other things using typical Unix hacky methods. For example, a vim keyboard shortcut that opens up a file manager to select a song on your hard drive, and if you've got an open source DAW like Ardour or another extensible one like REAPER you can probably add keybindings to scripts the other way.
I had a great-uncle that was a little bit like this. He wasn't constantly announcing his internal states to the world (or telling people true-but-rude things about themselves), but he was every day of sixty-five before he realized that "Hey, how are you?" was usually social wheel-greasing and did not require a comprehensive response, and he did not DO small talk. I mean, he was deeply interested in other people and wanted to hear about their families and pets and things, but he'd never be like, "How're your kids?" He'd be like, "How is your son Bob, whom I believe just turned eight, and last time we spoke he was struggling with some bullies at school? How did that work out?"
He had no kids of his own, but he was an absolute Pied Piper to the children of the family. Have you ever been four, or eight, or ten, and had someone take everything you said absolutely seriously and ask you questions to understand your thoughts and answer all your questions as honestly and completely as possible? It. Is. Awesome. Children are such little learning machines and it's almost impossible to be a parent or caregiver and never brush anything off. I mean, I feel like I take children more seriously than a lot of people do, because I LOVE watching how they think and I always have, but I must brush my own children off a dozen times a day (especially in quarantine), because it would not be possible to function as an adult caregiver if I didn't. You have to kind-of pick and choose your moments for deep engagement, and your moments for "Please stop asking questions for ten minutes so I can ensure you have food and clean clothes."
My great-uncle never did that, with anyone. This was fantastically amazing for children, who all worshipped him. In our teenaged years, it alternated between being wildly awkward and embarrassing, and this enormous refuge where even your self-obsession with your own minor and fleeting problems was interesting to him -- although he was highly likely to point out more than a few awkward truths you were trying very hard to avoid. By the time I was in college, I learned what all the other adults in our family knew, which was that you could not toss of throwaway lines around him or bring up a topic you didn't want to spend an hour discussing. (And I think this is one of the lovely functions of having a large extended family, where everyone loves you and is used to accommodating your foibles, and might roll their eyes but don't really mind.) I learned later that he was seen as kind-of a local gadfly, because he'd go to every town council meeting and school board meeting and ask a ton of questions, just because he wanted to know. And he'd been an engineer in the war (one of the last engineers who came up without even a high school diploma, just with learning on the job; he got his GED after he retired), and he used to stop at construction sites on his walks after he retired and strike up conversations with the foremen and grill them about everything going on. Every time he went by. He deeply did not understand why city council members or construction site foremen might not want to have in-depth conversations about everything, all the time.
He was married -- his wife was by nature just pretty chill about everything, and also deeply interested in other people and in deep discussions. (Although she knew how to small talk and grease social wheels.) He built their house himself (and it was some Frank Lloyd Wright-ass shit, which I did not appreciate until much later on, it was fucking gorgeous), and it was like this magical wonderland, they had AN ENTIRE TWENTY-FOOT WALL of bookcases twelve feet high, stuffed full, and every book on them was fascinating and every book on them was well-thumbed and annotated and most of them were stuffed full of news clippings and magazine articles that related to the topic of the book. And we were allowed to read any of them, whenever we wanted (anything inappropriate for kids was probably up high), and if we asked questions, he'd answer. They had an extensive theological library -- they were very serious Presbyterians who were constantly writing letters to their Session and the Presbytery and the Synod and sometimes even the General Assembly, and various scholars, with quotes to applicable theologians, and receiving them back with the same -- and that is 100% one of the reasons I ended up studying theology. I mean, when you let a 10-year-old loose in a library full of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, with news clippings and annotations and letters from eminent theologians, and answer all their questions, and explain that Bonhoeffer got killed for trying to kill Hitler, SHIT HAPPENS AND PEOPLE GO TO SEMINARY.
Anyway, I got a little distracted. Having someone who takes everything seriously and honestly, and is always honest in return, is both an amazing gift AND more than a little exhausting and infuriating. Small talk is important, and being able to dodge questions in social situations is REALLY important! It is legitimately difficult to spend time with someone who just DOESN'T ever lie or elide or smooth over or dodge, because there's a lot of stuff in human interactions that's just better of ignored. Most people don't want to be laid bare ALL THE TIME about ALL THE THINGS.
But it was also legitimately amazing, especially when I was a child, and it changed the course of my life -- and honestly not just mine. Almost everyone on that side of the family had their lives changed by him, because if you said you were interested in photography, he'd talk to you about photography unless and until you said it didn't interest you anymore, and read books about it so he could discuss it with you, and (because he didn't have his own children and so had more disposable income than his siblings and in-laws) buy you your first camera, so you could grow up to be an award-winning photographer for a major American newspaper. Or a lawyer. Or a musician. Or the first Ph.D. in your family, and he'd read your dissertation, and go to the library and interlibrary loan all the books in your bibliography, and read them until he understood what you were talking about. And then ask you about it. At length.
(He was 90-something when he died, and his wife had died 20 years earlier, and I have literally never been at a funeral so large for someone in their 90s, it was not just generations of family but like the whole town council and school board and a bunch of local union guys and every Presbyterian for 50 miles around and he took up dulcimer in his 80s and cut a record and dulcimer nerds came from all over the US and it was CRAZY.)
That was a very interesting article, thank you for sharing. The description of the parents sounded rather similar to how I am trying to parent my children. I want to be able to answer all their questions honestly, especially the ones about taboo topics. I also want to be honest with them about how I'm feeling, especially the bad feelings. I don't know how helpful/harmful this will be, but it feels like the right thing to be doind.
I don't know whether you read the discussion at metafilter, but there are a bunch of subtleties. One is leaving room for both people to be in the conversation rather than just one doing all the expressing.
Another is figuring out how to live with people who don't have truth as a primary value.
For sure, I'm definitely not going to teach them that radical honesty is the only way to communicate. Mostly, I want them to know that they can talk to me about anything they want and I'll answer their questions as truthfully as I can. I especially want to plant seeds of trust while they're young so that when they're older and facing real problems they're comfortable coming to me for advice and help.
Very interesting story! That man sounds a little bit like my maternal grandfather, especially concerning his interest in other people's interests-- mention offhand that you're getting into seashells or photography or religious studies or whatever, and he'd recommend every single book or media or associated item he could think of. He had a huge and eclectic library, too, where I spent a lot of time.
Looking at the article — I didn't read all of it — it seems to mix two different principles. One is not lying. The other is telling the truth, where the option is not telling it. I was brought up in a household where it was taken for granted that you should not lie, but not that you should say whatever you thought was true without considering whether it should be said. I have tried to bring up my children with the same approach.
It did mean that when I first realized that people I otherwise thought well of were willing to be deliberately dishonest I found it shocking, but I didn't see any reason why I should imitate them and still don't.
In my house lying is just about the worst thing that one of my kids can do, and my wife and I hold ourselves to the same standard (because kids are smart and would see right through us). We also teach our kids to be kind, to not share everything that might pop into our heads, and we do keep secrets when applicable.
In other words, I agree with your take. You don't have to completely remove your filter in order to stop lying. I have a job that requires keeping confidential information. I don't lie to people about what I know, I tell them the truth - that I cannot speak on a certain subject.
I don't want to open up the entire can of worms from https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5247#comment-1873899 but I have been curious about one specific point: did President Trump himself ever claim to be holding secret evidence about the alleged electoral fraud, or did that idea originate elsewhere?
I haven't seen his specific claims, but just a quick look at the numbers makes me think this can't possibly be true. The closest states (that the Democrats won) have a difference of about 10k votes: Arizona at 10,457 and Georgia at 11,779. After that you get Wisconsin at 20,682, then Nevada at 33,596. Even if you think that all of these are votes switched from Republican to Democrat, halving the amount of fraud needed, that's a minimum of 38,257 bad votes necessary.
And then you have to consider that even switching all four of those states wouldn't be enough to change the election, having a combined total of 33 electoral votes, while Biden won with a margin of 36. The closest thing there is to a chance is if Pennsylvania is also switched, but that had a difference of 80,555 votes.
Trump made lots of claims of fraud in several different ways, so I can't say authoritatively, but I don't recall anything along the lines of "We have secret evidence of fraud and you'll be seeing indictments Real Soon Now" - that was just QAnon fantasy. (Presumably to explain how Trump could win even though all the visible claims of fraud had failed to go anywhere.)
His call with Raffensperger gave me the impression that Trump was taking his cues from social media rather than the other way around - everything he brought up in the call was something that had already come up in the news elsewhere.
What new therapeutic modalities are going to be a big deal in the next 10 years?
So, mRNA vaccines, immunotherapies, oncolytic viruses, antibody drug conjugates, cell therapies, gene therapies and of course CRISPR enabling all of these. Lots of very impressive medicine that is having a real impact on the standard of care from what it was even just a few years ago. The Moderna vaccine (an mRNA vaccine, natch) is maybe the most well known example and I believe it still has the best results against COVID compared to all the other vaccines available now or soon to be.
These are just the ones I know about, that are working their way through trials now and at least some will probably make it to clinics by the end of the decade. I’m curious what’s beyond that, what kind of new types of therapy might be waiting for us after 2030ish. Personally I hold out a lot of hope for a revolution in psychiatric care, maybe the BRAIN initiative will start to pay off by then. Maybe via direct stimulation of discrete neural circuits, something beyond just blasting the basal ganglia for Parkinsons.
This. Microbiome management. Add the close interaction of gut flora and intestines, and inflammation as co-factor in psychiatric diseases (depression, possibly schizophrenia) we might well see stool transplant plus diet as causal treatment for some severe psychiatric cases.
mRNA is promising for much more than vaccinations. Moderna alone has an impressive list of applications,* the others will not be too far behind. mRNA is a whole new continent!
David Friedman's question has got me thinking. Is microfluidics going to get big? Is it the sort of field that a mech eng grad with an interest in normal-sized fluids ought to be going into?
(1) Re: Vyvanse, I'm perfectly happy to think it's good reception is based on "uppers plus hype" but that linked study doesn't perfectly convince me because the gap in administration is "one hour later" for the pure amphetamine. The whole point of Vyvanse is that they are making it as non-abusable as possible: you can't grind it, snort it, inject it, etc. for the high, you have to take it by oral administration and you don't get that high.
It comes on slower, (probably) fades away more gradually and doesn't seem to have the same 'quick high then crash' profile, and that is probably a big part of why users like it (even if the lysine has nothing to do with helping anti-anxiety affects). So I don't think the reason is quite as simple as "the secret ingredient is hype" for its popularity.
There's also this little nugget which makes me go "ah, fudge off!" about the methodology:
"To induce greater subjective drug liking and mimic misuse, the selected dose of lisdexamfetamine was relatively high and above the upper recommended daily dose of 70 mg."
So they deliberately gave the participants a much higher dose than people on a prescription would get, with all the attendant effects of a stimulant that entails, then have the bare-faced cheek to go "nah, we didn't see any difference between this and speed"? I'm pretty ding-dong-dang sure if I rounded up a study group and poured a naggin of poteen into them, we'd see "there is little to no difference between this and drinking methylated spirits" but it's not the method you would undertake for the effects of "what about drinking 170 grams of pure alcohol per week" in order to set safe drinking limits (on a tangent, please look up the difference between Irish and British levels - I think Scotland is slightly different and more towards the Irish level, while the USA is more towards the English level):
"In Ireland a standard drink has about 10 grams of pure alcohol. In the UK a standard drink, also called a unit of alcohol, has about 8 grams of pure alcohol.
Some examples of a standard drink in Ireland are:
a pub measure of spirits (35.5ml)
a small glass of wine (12.5% volume)
a half pint of normal beer
an alcopop (275ml bottle)
A bottle of 12.5% alcohol wine has about seven standard drinks."
(2) Re: the technocracy posts, I have to say nostalgebraist is presenting much better what I've been trying to say, at least for this part (even if they don't find the entire argument very convincing even after steelmanning it):
"3. Mechanisms designed by this elite tend to leave out important factors in a way that matters practically. This happens for general “all models are wrong” reasons, but is exacerbated by the elite’s lack of communication with most people.
Even when communication happens, it is delayed by the need to “translate” the opinions of the masses into the language of the elite before the elite can respond to those opinions. And it occurs unreliably, depending on whether someone’s around and willing to do this “translation.”
I have seen this in action, where the Revenue Commissioners went around giving roadshows and seminars on the occasion of bringing in a huge updating and changes to how income tax is reported and deducted in Ireland. For my sins, as part of my job I deal with payroll which is why I got signed up to a couple of these seminars. And there was ONE thing EVERYBODY participating brought up as a potential problem, and it got completely stonewalled by the Revenue representatives. They didn't want to hear about it. The Plan was in place, it was going to be rolled out, and like it or lump it everyone had to adopt it. They didn't want to hear about problems implementing it (this was a human-level problem) and the very strong impression they gave, parroting the party line that "there would be no problems!", was "Man was made for The Plan, not The Plan for Man".
And that's my main problem with "let the technocrats run everything".
Nostalgebraist's interpretation seems to be over-emphasizing opensource-style end-user modification as the primary benefit of legibility, whereas (as I understood) Weil's original post was concerned with a broader range of potential benefits of legibility. For instance Weil said that legible approaches were more easily critiqued by a broader communtiy, which all-else-equal presumably encourages the democratic political process to settle on better solutions (i.e. with more feedback and less room for biases/errors to sneak in via obfuscation). Note these benefits have little to do with the local customization concerns Nostralgebraist emphasizes e.g.: "Weyl seems to want mechanisms that are easy to customize for different local circumstances"
Also you might think from Nostalgebraist's interpretation that Weyl was just making a suggeston that technocrats should voluntarily put more emphasis on legibility and perhaps sacrifice some fidelity in the process, which would be a reasonable suggestion, or at least worth considering. But in fact Weyl is pretty clearly suggesting that technocrats should be given much less authority, which seems like a terrible idea (e.g. transitioning control of monetary policy from the fed to congress, would reduce technocratic authority and would surely be a change for the worse).
Less authority to technocrats is a good idea, both as a rule, and in your specific example. Taking monetary policy away from the fed would be a welcome change, not because congress would necessarily do better, but because it would both do away with the notion that the decisions are objective and impartial and make the policymakers accountable (to the extent that representative democracy allows it). (What it wouldn't do is make non-experts craft the policy. Except, one hopes, in the extreme, yet unfortunately common in e.g. macroeconomics, cases where the "experts" are ostensibly failing.)
The US has already tried your suggestion with fiscal policy (congress controls it rather than Fed technocrats), and the results are far worse and more politicized than Fed monetary policy. Politicians benefit from cutting taxes and raising spending and from short-term economic boosts from deficits (even when there is no recession), so unlike the Fed, mainstream economic prescriptions are largely ignored; also, politicians are not held accountable for this, because the public does not understand economic theory, but they do feel the short-term benefits from this populist policy approach (as do various special interests).
Also, contra Weyl there is little sense in which congressional fiscal policy is more legible than Fed monetary policy, and in fact probably the opposite is true, since Fed policy is broadly comprehensible based on an intro macro text.
1 You're So Vain, you probably think this song is about you - um, the song IS about him, in fact it's addressed to him. Am I missing something or are these lyrics really dumb?
2 We Built This City on rock and roll - why does it get so much hate? Not saying it's a good song - on a scale of 1-10 (with 10 = Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone and 1 = Sonny & Cher's I Got You Babe) I'd give it a 3. And the lyrics are pretty dumb. But there's plenty of worse songs that don't seem to draw as much criticism.
Re: 2 - I think it's down to its popularity. It was #1 on several charts, and people got sick of it. Maybe you liked it the first few dozen times, but eventually it was "overplayed' and you came to despise it.
The song is before my time, but in 2013 a strange set of circumstances found me at a private party where Starship was playing. When *We Built This City* everybody looked at their neighbor, groaned, and then sang along.
On 1, I think the correct reading isn't "you're so vain that you think songs that aren't about you are about you", the reading is "you'll know this song is about you without being told because you're that much of a vain, self-centered jackass".
(Which might be correct, as one of the lead suspects for who the song is about did indeed announce it was about him)
(1) I took that as a back-handed swipe - "you're so vain, you think anything and everything is about you so even if this song *wasn't* about you, you would still think it was" and "even if this song is pointing out your flaws, you are so vain you will only take the good parts - e.g. I can get any chick I want! - and be smug about it".
(2) It's an okay song, but it's very of its time and wow, did Starship (formerly Jefferson Airplane then Jefferson Starship) go down the commercial pop-hit route from the days of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WANNqr-vcx0
I never heard any particular criticism of it, so I don't know about that, but maybe it's because it's very of its time (80s RAWK), the lyrics take themselves just that bit *too* seriously (singing about corporation games and selling out when you've just, um, sold out?) and the reputation haunting it of the ghosts of Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship trailing behind the new glossy incarnation.
I recall once reading a Rolling Stone (or something similar) list of Worst Songs, and being struck by how closely "badness" was equated with "false authenticity" -- as opposed to having an especially annoying hook or whatever. "We Built This City" was either #1 or #2 on the list. Basically, claiming the mantle of rock-n-roll purism while simultaneously defecting was the ultimate case of stolen valor for a certain kind of music journalist. Plus, the lyrics aren't "dumb" in an endearingly goofy sense, they have a sort of pretentious pseudo-sophistication that's actually just nonsense.
Yeah, I think the problem is that (1) it's a Bernie Taupin plus three others song, so it's a hit factory production (like Stock, Aiken and Waterman) - something professionally extruded to be a hit, which makes the 'sincerity' of the vocals particularly fake and (2) the co-lead lyrics and the way they're mixed - Mickey Thomas is not as good as Grace Slick and maybe her voice wasn't what it had been in the past, but he overshadows her.
Criticising it is breaking a butterfly on a wheel because it's standard 80s AOR fare but yeah, it's not like the glory days of this:
1) The song was about three different people, yet, the one person who Carly Simon revealed that one verse was about, thinks the whole song was about him. So she was right.
Re: 1, I always took it as a kind of emotive Liar's Paradox: "I am SO NOT thinking about you right now!" It's meant to be wryly self-deprecating -- she'd rather not still be fixated on him, but she can't help doing it anyway, but at least she has the self-awareness to recognize that objectively he isn't really worth it.
She's declaring superiority on the meta-level: she's still invested emotionally in the idealized image of him that got her into bed to begin with, but now sees through it as a sham, whereas he thoroughly believes that charismatic persona is who he really is.
I think "We Built This City" was a victim of 2000s-era VH1's nostalgia TV shows (and stuff in that same genre) inadvertently creating a ton of things Everybody Knew about the 80s. A surprising number of opinions that became commonplaces over the last 20 years came from people watching Hal Sparks or Godfrey or somebody basically just say something to be funny off the top of their heads on "I Love The 80s."
There's an explanation that it seems to me the article is getting at, but never directly says:
If your true score is high, you're probably going to guess a lower score because most possible scores are lower. And if your true score is low, you're probably going to guess higher for the same reason.
I skimmed the link, but from what I've seen, it makes a good point, in that part of what people attribute to DK, is indeed a statistical mirage, but DK is more than that.
To explain the argument imagine two scenarios.
1- Imagine that everyone understands how good they are. We are measuring a very legible trait, and everybody not only understands how well they score, but also how well others score. For instance, we just did a test, we gave you your results, and everybody else's results as well. How would the graph score vs expectation of score look like? It would look like the line y=x.
2- Imagine no one has any clue about how good they are. We are measuring a trait that is completely ineligible such as how cute you look to inhabitants of alpha centauri. How would the graph score vs expectation of score look like? It would look like the line y= 50%. How cute are you to alpha centauris? I don't know probably about as average as any other human. Maybe they have a fetish for my body, or maybe they would find me disgusting, but my best guess is about average.
...
Notice that both answers are unbiased. Everyone is taking their best guess with the information they have. Notice also that in the second case the bottom half overestimates their cuteness and the top half underestimates it, both think they are average.
Ok, so how would normal traits look like for unbiased participants? That is, traits in which you know a bit about how well you do, but not perfectly. Well it would look like something in between those lines y=.5 and y=x. That is below average people would overestimate somewhat their score and above average they would underestimate somewhat their score. For some reason this is the lesson people take from DK and this is entirely a statistical effect.
...
But that's not what DK is about. What they show is that almost everyone overestimates their ability and just the very top underestimates it. In other words that people are biased towards believing they are better than they currently are. The average person overestimates their ability, the average person could not do that if they were unbiased. The very top are not wrong because they underestimates their ability, that would be just natural effect given lack of information. They are wrong because they don't underestimate enough. See for instance the graphs the author himself exibits.
Se e for instance that where the lines meet is about the top quartile. These people are right by accident, because if they were unbiased they would be underestimating their ability.
Metaculus is a prediction site, where you earn fake internet points for predicting real-world events accurately. Unlike other prediction sites, no money is involved, and this is both a pro and a con when it comes to prediction accuracy. Honestly, at the moment it seems like mostly a pro - predictions there seem just as accurate as anything else, and it's very low-friction since there's no financial regulation involved. It's a lot of fun if you're that way inclined.
However, its userbase and hence breadth of questions, is currently quite limited due to most users being US-based.
For example, it seems that very few users of Metaculus are from Australia. In fact, I think almost all are in the bay area (google trends says 100% of search traffic is from California). When the bay area is asleep, Metaculus is dead, and when they're awake, there is still not much happening on the site pertaining to Australia or other-country-related questions.
I'd like to see this change. So, this is a plug for non-US people interested in prediction markets (though Metaculus isn't strictly a prediction market) to please check out Metaculus.
What's the incentive to use it? It seems to mostly be about getting points and therefore social status in the metaculus community, which is of no value to me if I'm not already involved. Vs if I want to discuss australian politics and bet on it there are more specific places I can do that and make money on it
a) it's fun, tautologically, if that's the sort of thing you find fun
b) the shifts in probabilities often follow new information being discussed by intelligent people, and is superior to the discussion elsewhere.
Australian politics polling just came out with 50:50 preference for the two major parties and yet SportsBet's odds have one party as a strong favourite - why? Should I just assume other betters are wrong and place a bet, or am I missing something? Metaculus is the kind of place for intelligent discussion of this, except for the fact that nobody there cares about Australian politics.
The fact that there's no money involved on metaculus means criteria can be specified a little less precisely with admins making a judgement call, and it's less important to anticipate all corner-cases in advance. This lowers the barrier to new questions, meaning metaculus has a lot of questions on a lot of topics.
Metaculus doesn't just have yes-or-no questions, it has "when will X occur" and "what will the value of variable X be on such-and-such a date" type questions too. This is just broader than other places.
So basically the places you could make money often don't have the same questions.
National polling in Aus is potentially misleading for the same reason that national polling in most democracies is misleading - what matters is the electoral maths, you need to win votes in the swing seats.
Personally, my crude odds would be very highly skewed towards incumbents of either party, because we got through Covid much better than the rest of the world and everyone is profoundly grateful for than. On the other hand, the next elections are still a long way away and it's entirely possible for major developments to occur in the mean time.
What artists out there are like Leonard Cohen? Bob Dylan and other folk names are normally suggested, but I feel few have the profundity of lyrics Cohen has. And he doesn't seem to neatly fit into the genre
You might laugh, but I'd suggest They Might Be Giants - they tend to have metaphor-rich lyrics that lend themselves to interpretation. Here's one that Leonard Cohen fans might like.
I don't actually know much Cohen besides the ones everyone knows, so I'm not sure how similar these are. But The Mountain Goats have great lyrics and a folky vibe. Silver Jews / Purple Mountains (both David Berman projects) also are gems in my limited experience, I always feel I should listen to more of them.
Ever listened to Townes van Zandt? He's got lyrical profundity if I ever heard it, though most of his really good songs are about depression and/or suicide:
It is well supported that exercise is beneficial for mental health, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence on what type of exercise is the most beneficial and why. E.g. should one do cardiovascular or strength based exercise, or short and intense vs longer periods. Anyone have any resources or personal experience on this?
Personal and possibly unrepresentative experience: I switched from doing weights and a small amount of cardio at the gym every 2 days to running every 2 days after the pandemic closed the gyms. I find that I need to exercise at about that rate to keep my anxiety at a manageable level. I think the switch to running may be marginally better, but there doesn't seem to be much difference, which is surprising given how different the exercises are. Also as I've gotten better at running over the past 9 months the amount I need to do to get the anti anxiety effects seems to have increased. Which implies that the anti-anxiety effects are tied to the level of exertion to some degree, not the actual amount of exercise done, or calories expended. But obviously there are confounders.
1) anything is better than nothing, first and foremost make sure your exercise plan is one you can stick to
2) exercise every day, even if it means less exercise per session
3) in addition to long-term improvements there are significant mental benefits that are noticeable immediately after exercising, so try to plan your exercise time to take advantage of this
4) high intensity cardio is the most time-efficient way to get a given level of mental benefit, though if you have the time and energy doing both this and strength training is ideal
If I personally was going to dig into this more I'd start by re-reading SPARK and actually looking up the references, then go from there.
I suspect there's going to be enough individual variation here that "try it and see how you feel" is the best approach. My personal experience mostly accords with your own, though: different modes of exercise work, and it's the effort that seems to be the main factor. Some of my observations:
* Moderate cardio seems to be the best tradeoff for improving mood without causing excessive fatigue. Doesn't matter if it's LISS (low-intensity steady state) or HIIT (high intensity interval training), though you may have other reasons to prefer one or the other (e.g. enjoyment or athletic goals)
* Intense cardio can be good for the mood, but the fatigue can affect your productivity
* Maintenance strength training (i.e. not trying to get stronger, just sustain your current fitness) doesn't quite seem enough by itself
* Intense strength training (i.e. training to get stronger) can be great for the mood, but causes a lot of fatigue and will likely affect your productivity: not only are you tired, you need to spend a lot of extra time eating and sleeping
* Be aware of injury risk: being injured is the worst thing for mood. Contact sports are fun, but you'll get an injury sooner or later. Lifting and low-impact cardio are super safe if practiced correctly.
As for frequency, 2 days a week seems like the minimum for me to maintain my mood, but 3 days is better. I will go even higher than 3 if I'm using short sessions; I usually total 5-6 hours/week.
I recommend at least 2 days a week of strength training, otherwise your muscles decondition and you get sore every time you work out. Depending how much strength training you do, add cardio to get up to the equivalent of 3 cardio sessions/week (you might not need any extra cardio if you lift hard).
I never found that exercise helped my mental health (on the contrary; "going for walks in the fresh air and sunshine" *triggered* my suicidal thoughts rather than repressed them) but I am presuming the effect depends not on the type of exercise so much as the endorphins produced by it. Make-brain-feel-good chemicals get released into the bloodstream so your choice of exercise doesn't matter and indeed if hitting your foot with a hammer produced the same results, you should do that.
It's been interesting watching the common discourse on the whole GME thing. It feels to me like common discourse has leaned so far into the "revenge against Wall Street" and the "💎🙌🚀" angles that it's gotten very difficult to sort out who has sound financial motives behind their actions and who's just... for lack of a better term... a "zealot".
Like so much of reddit is going hard in on "I'm buying and holding forever, I don't want to make money, I just want to make billionaires lose" and I'm wondering what percentage of people saying that sincerely believe that, while the more cynical part of me wonders how many people are deliberately saying that to try to get other people to "buy and hold" so that they can be the one who sells.
It's very classic "prisoner's dilemma" if I'm understanding the situation right (and it's quite possible that I'm not). It's going to be interesting to see if this keeps the "poor against the rich" dynamic or if it devolves into backbiting if there is eventually a mass-sellout. (As opposed to a more gradual decline)
Politics post. Curious to see what others think about this view on the COVID relief bill:
I think it much more important for President Biden to work with senate Republicans to produce a COVID relief bill less than the $1.9 trillion bill he wants.
Long term, I think showing bipartisanship is possible is much more important than getting exactly the policy you want through congress. It will also give some power and clout to moderate Republicans at a time where they are trying to divorce from Trump.
I agree and I'm anxious to see what will happen. Apparently 10 Republican senators sent Biden a letter offering to compromise. Hopefully Biden takes them up on it.
I can see several reasons for a person skeptical of Republican motives generally to be skeptical of this specifically.
1. The compromise offer may itself not pan out-- the 10 Senators may be planning to pull a Lucy-with-the-football, or may even sincerely intend to compromise but then feel they "have to" pull back due to pressure from the Trumpist base.
2. The longer term strategy may be to pass an ineffective small relief package and then blame Biden in 2022 for not effectively delivering relief.
3. The strategy may also be to set themselves up as reasonable people in the public mind so that they can then more convincingly oppose the Democrats on the arguably higher-stakes wedge issue of voting rights legislation, i.e. forcing Republicans to actually appeal to the median voter in order to win elections rather than clinging to power with a rural-skewed minority base via gerrymandering and voter suppression.
It's still possible that taking them up on the offer is the best course, especially if one has already prepared mitigations for these contingencies, but these are reasons I would expect some Dems to oppose the compromise beyond just disagreements on the merits of various relief package sizes.
I think everything you said makes sense. At the same time it is so cynical that it makes me think we'll never have another functioning Democracy. (And I'm a very cynical person :)
Politics is politics, of course. Even leaders that want to do the best for the country also spend time thinking about their political future. In that sense, cynicism is warranted.
But at some point, if you want to have compromise in the government, you have to be able to take people at their word. The senators have been around for a while. They'll be around for a while longer. They do have *some* incentive to work with others.
I've seen so many comments on the internet about how McConnell killed so many bills. Do you think he used the same reasoning you gave -- as justification?
Those are good points in the context of Democratic Party political strategy.
Maybe I'm naive, but if (2) comes to pass, I would hope that the Biden administration could argue that they worked a bipartisan deal with Republicans and should be commended!
I guess I'm becoming more concerned about our country's government being able to function at all. We've already arrived at a point where every 4 years, there is a scramble to undo the other party's work. The only way to avoid this is to compromise with the other party while in power.
I think there is an assumption here that compromising while you have power will lead to compromises while the other side has power. I don't think that assumption has held up for the past few decades. I think this is mostly the result of structural issues with the voting system resulting in two party rule and primaries penalizing moderates. I think there is also some influence with the current Republican party being in a demographic crunch and fighting an existential battle. I think there will be a Republican party but it will have to change (Trump is one example of how it might change)
Apparently congresscritters are basically unwhippable so long as they keep winning primaries. There's a Russian word that refers to an organisation having enough coherence to honour quid-pro-quoes and I suspect that the congressional parties lack that property. I.e. there's no punishment for individual rs or ds who defect against compromises.
They've already talked of throwing half the country into deprogramming camps and are talking about domestic war on 'terror'. As far as I can tell, news is just a neverending stream of hyperventilation about made-up nonsense.
I am concerned from interactions with people on both the far left and far right that the nonsense, fear, and demonization of the other that various need outlets promote is now embedded and leading to reactions based on made up realities (most recent notable example being the capital riots). Eventually that self reinforces: i.e. riots lead to gun control lead to more riots lead to preventative incarceration lead to Real Problems.
I don't know. Obama pushed pretty hard for bipartisanship and consensus seems to be somewhere between "it cost the Democrats Congress" and "Democrats' losses in Congress were more likely tied to return-to-the-mean after wave elections in swing states, but it certainly didn't *help*".
Either way, considering how the past ten years have played out I think it's hard to claim with a straight face that Obama's bipartisanship did much to advance the notion of moderate compromise. If Biden truly already has the 50 votes necessary for passing the COVID relief through reconciliation and he then proceeds to water it down to chase the Collins / Murkowski / Portman votes, I can't imagine it going over well or doing anything to diffuse the notion that both "teams" are playing for the same side.
I think that at the least, Biden needs to secure promises from the 10 Senators in exchange. Things like forcing prompt consideration and votes on all executive and judicial nominations for the entirety of Biden's term, regardless of which party has control of the Senate at any particular time. Absent that, the fiasco with Garland and Barrett has burned any bipartisan bridge for a very long time, as the effects from that will be felt for decades.
This! So much this. Those people don't deserve to say a damn word after what they pulled while they were in power.
But . . . losing all the close senate races means that Biden has to get Manchin on board, and Manchin has to make the rest of the party howl to get re-elected. So while I hate giving McConnell veto power over what the dems want to do, that's what's going to happen, over and over again, until we lose the house in 2022 over not keeping any promises despite having the trifecta.
I guess negotiations and bipartisanship would be better, but I can't imagine them really being on offer. McConnell knows what he's doing. He's not going to be giving Biden anything.
Basically, give in to despair and take up day drinking.
I haven't seen specific polling on this bill, but I think "massive COVID relief for people, cities, and states" is generally popular. It also seems like the obviously correct policy, given the state of the economy, unemployment, and interest rates. Unless you think signally bipartisanship is more important electorally or for the future of Democracy than passing popular and effective legislation, I'm not sure why Biden should be bothered.
I mean, take the meeting, sure, but "Please, $1,400 is far too much to give people. $1,000 is more reasonable, at at a 1% interest rate, surely we can't afford the difference!" isn't a convincing argument.
So, speaking as a right-of-center person for whom the GOP is the logical electoral vehicle, but who's begun to despair of even grasping what the current leadership is thinking:
I don't really get why the dominant strategy for Republicans isn't just to help Democrats do some ginormous COVID relief bill. Here's my thinking:
1) COVID relief is popular, in the same way defense spending is popular;
2) The circumstances of COVID relief are such that you don't have to betray any theoretical deficit-hawk orthodoxies -- it's just a weird exogenous shock to demand; and
3) However big the COVID bill you do with the Dems is, that's how big your megaphone is *subsequently* to say "we're running up against our fiscal capacity here!"
In other words, you have this golden opportunity to pork it up right now, in a way that neither your base nor anybody else will punish you for. And the further you lean into that (which your opponents will only encourage), the harder the rhetorical hammer you can hit them with down the line.
Is the answer to your last question perhaps "because politics is now so polarized any attempt to work with the other tribe invites accusations of betrayal"?
With regards to the technocracy discussion, I originally intended to mention Singapore's Covid 19 response as a shining example of a technocratic response. As is customary in Singapore, without much public discussion, public health experts quickly implemented strict quarantine and excellent contact tracing rules, with heavy fines for violation. It worked, until it failed spectacularly.
Namely, the public health experts somehow managed to ignore the substantial population of migrant workers living in overcrowded dorms, an obvious and excellent infection ground. Instead of screening them proactively, once infections there became known, they had already spread through the whole migrant population in April. This oversight is not just obvious in hindsight, as activists had been calling for better protection of migrant workers prior to that.
This story illustrates a failure mode that Weyl highlighted (I think), namely that technocrats (and in my opinion elites in general) seem surprisingly blind or indifferent to people different than themselves. This includes the aftermath of the infection surge: after isolating basically all migrant workers for months, they will be allowed to go to places other than their work ONCE A MONTH.
I do not think that Weyl's proposed solutions would have worked so well in this case, as they would have undermined the parts of Singapore's response that did work, but there must be some institutionalised way of making sure both information about and the interest of underrepresented groups is included in these kinds of technocratic decisions, whether those groups are LGBT or unemployed truck drivers.
It has worked out pretty well in terms of deaths, if the numbers can be believed: only 29 people died in a country of 5.7 million, with a case fatality rate of 0.05%.
And this article also finally explains the low fatality rate: almost all infections happened in the dormitories, and the migrant workers living there, mostly physical workers, are relatively young and healthy.
I have long wondered about the low fatality rate in Singapore. In many developed countries, 0.1+% of the entire population has died of COVID, making 0.05% suspiciously low even if they've caught every infection. Singapore is somewhat authoritarian, and it could be that they faked the data — however, it is also quite well-run, and they can't really do that if they fool themselves (and governments that fake statistics usually end up fooling themselves too). Most of the infections involving healthy workers may be much of the explanation.
Sure, overall their strategy worked. But, I argue that a) the first fuck-up could have easily been avoided or mitigated if other sources of information were included (activists were calling for it!), and b) the policy is definitely currently disregarding the welfare of a particular population that is not-represented in technocratic circles.
I am saying that this is a typical case for the benefits and drawbacks of technocratic decision making, and that the drawbacks should be recognized and addressed to keep the benefits.
Hmm, I'm not sure they could have done much about the dense living conditions on a short notice. Perhaps recommend non-essential immigrant workers to leave for their countries of origin for the duration of the pandemic – but even then, they have no job in their home countries, and they need to make a living.
Singapore is a contradiction. It does not like foreigners, but it is super dependent on them. It depends on being a nice place for multinationals to set up regional offices with well paid foreigners on employment passes, and it depends on a whole bunch of "migrant workers" on work passes to do roles like maids and construction workers.
The non domestic based "migrant workers" live in dorms constructed by their employers and the employment law is essentially like the gulf states but the Singapore courts are actually honest so it's a better deal.
Anyway, the ruling party, the PAP, is terrified of doing anything that makes it seem like foreigners are getting something for free.
Early on in the pandemic, they announced that Singaporeans/Permanent residents could get free covid tests.
I was working in Singapore as a foreigner in a health related field and said that this shows how Singapore was just pretending about public health. Any actual epidemiologist would tell you to make testing free to everyone in the country to increase uptake because the virus doesn't care about Visa status. (Singapore had closed the borders anyway so it wasn't like tourists were going to get free tests)
But that's not what happened.
The political consideration of not wanting to be seen as spending Singapore's hard earned cash on foreigners overruled the technocrats and cases in the migrant worker dorms exploded in an entirely foreseeable way.
I've co-written an rpg I'm proud of, which I'm publishing with Cloven Pine Games for Zinequest. In case folks are interested, Back Again from the Broken Land is Tolkien- and LeGuin-inspired and you play small adventurers walking home from a big war. The core of the game is naming and reckoning with the burdens you picked up in your adventures: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/clovenpinegames/back-again-from-the-broken-landzinequest
Does anyone have any idea where one might ask questions to people knowledgeable about psychiatry about “weird mental stuff” that doesn’t rise to the level of meriting therapy?
I have an occasional odd mental experience that only occurs for a couple minutes at a time, months or years apart, and isn’t a particularly big deal when it does happen. But I have never been able to find any explanation for it, or even descriptions that even match it very closely.
Basically, very rarely and for no trigger or reason I have been able to discern, I experience a sort of sudden shift in the quality of all my sensations, where everything becomes somehow harsher - all noise has an edge to it, everything seems suddenly intense and angry. I am completely aware when this occurs that it isn’t ‘really’ happening - it’s like being consciously aware that some kind of a switch got flipped on all my sensations, and that they are not reporting accurately.
And then it goes away again within a couple minutes and doesn’t happen again for months/years.
I’ve looked at likely culprits, but it doesn’t seem to fit most of them. No shortness of breath or sped up heart rate, no sense of panic or anger or anything like that. Just an odd temporary experience of sensations seeming weirdly ‘on edge’ in a way I still find hard describe.
And since it happens so rarely and doesn’t have much affect when it does happen, it always seemed a bit wasteful to go to a therapist and pay to try to diagnose it, but darn if I’m not curious about what the heck it is.
This certainly seems to have a lot of commonalities, although it doesn’t line up exactly. I kind of wonder how many examples of low-grade weirdnesses like this are common, but just don’t get written about because it’s not actually enough of a problem to seek treatment for (either medical or psychological).
I have two causes of rapid onset of nervous intensity. One is sinusitis where a couple of times, within 5 minutes, my ears have started to ring, fingers tremble and I become irritable as if my nervous system's sensitivity has been turned up to 11. It goes away quickly if I take a paracetamol. The other is when I chase the kids around doing fun sort of growling "I'M GONNA GET YOU" - they love it but it gets me feeling super stressed and tense afterwards.
Strangely, I've also had the opposite where I have a buzzing in my head/nerves that is getting progressively more intense until something like a nervous reset or degauss button is depressed and the crescendo of nervous intensity instantly disappears. Both are pretty rare occurrences.
Have you considered something neurological/hormonal? Sensations getting 'dialled up' and then falling back sounds like a temporary burst of *something* going wrong with the nerves, so I'd recommend a doctor first before therapy.
This is not a bad idea, and I suppose is the kind of thing you can just ask about when getting treatment/an appointment for something else already, so it can’t hurt.
I would say that this description fits nicely with my experiences. I used to try to explain to people in terms of time seeming to pass different, like watching a movie in fast forward or a feeling of rush, but your description that everything seems intense and angry is even more close.
In case you want to compare: it started during early teenage years, and up to age 20 or so I used to have almost daily episodes for months, and then months of nothing. As you said, it typically lasts minutes. At some point I started a table of duration, my lowest time is 3 minutes, the longest 15. After age 20 I stopped having it for years, and now I have one or two episodes each year.
In addition to what you report, sometimes during an episode I have weird body sensations, most commonly it feels like my fingers and teeth are enlarged, as if I had "fat fingers" and my teeth barely fitted in my mouth.
I had therapy for unrelated depression and mentioned it to both my psychologist and psychiatrist, and none had heard of it before, nor the colleagues they asked about. At first they told me it looked like a anxiety attack, but I bought a pressure monitor and the episodes never made a difference in blood pressure or heart rate. So they ruled out anxiety, and since it was not affecting my life they were unsure if we should investigate, since the only idea was to start scanning my brain, which is quite expensive.
Since it's only happening rarely, I doubt this is your problem, but I'm basically obliged to ask: Have you ruled out vitamin B12 problems? "Every sense is harsher" was very much my experience with vitamin B12 deficiency, but it *was* a gradual erosion for me and not a sudden switch. (That said, one of the symptoms did switch back to normal with a startling abruptness a few days after I started supplementing B12, so abruptness is at least possible.)
Has Scott blogged about Wake Therapy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_therapy) for depression? I wanted to read his opinion of it. From my reading it sounds pretty great and even better than most first-line drugs prescribed.
Read the first line of it and went "Oooookay" which is probably the reaction patients have at the suggestion.
"We're going to force you to stay awake and this will cure your depression, trust us!" brings up "(1) I have often been awake involuntarily due to insomnia or other problems associated with my depression and trust ME, it has NOT helped (2) this sounds like those 19th century asylums which used to force patients into waterbaths and the like which were quack cures and (3) we all remember lobotomies don't we? so in summary, thanks but no thanks" from the uninformed potential subject of such treatment.
Now, it's a tiny bit more sophisticated than forcing people to stay awake, but this much didn't do much to reassure me, and I don't think it's unreasonable if someone decides "if reducing remission depends on taking drugs as well, why not skip the disturbed sleep and just gimme the drugs?"
"One meta-analysis of over 1700 unmedicated depressed patients who had undergone sleep deprivation found that 83% relapsed in their symptoms after one night of recovery sleep. Only 5-10 % of patients who initially respond to sleep deprivation show sustained remission. However, when sleep deprivation is combined with pharmacological treatments, the number of patients who show sustained remission is much higher, with rates as high as half of patients experiencing sustained remission. Compared to a relapse rate of 83% for unmedicated patients, patients who simultaneously took antidepressants only experienced a relapse rate of 59% after a night of recovery sleep."
I have to wonder about the success population: how many of them are in the category of "I will claim not to be depressed any more if you promise not to force me to go through that again".
True! "I have had five nights of you lot waking me up just when the dream was getting good, I am prepared to swear on a stack of Bibles I feel so much better if you just let me out of here!" 😁
Yeah, that last part is horrible. If there was a separate subject line for likes versus comments, I could just delete them easily without reading them, or even write an inbox filter to auto-delete them. But now there is every time that little dopamine rush from thinking someone responded to my comment, followed by disappointment as it turns out to be just another like.
Workaround: The sender of like notifications is reaction@mg1.substack.com, for comment notifications it's forum@mg1.substack.com. Set up an e-mail filter to delete e-mails from the former.
I need help with SEIR epidemiological modelling of the impacts of the UK Covid-19 stain. I am looking to show my current results to someone with experience in SIR/SEIR modelling of some real disease. This project was inspired by the excellent TheZvi post with his own model [1].
My plan is to do my own modelling for my country (not US). In case it confirms that the new stain might cause millions of infected around summer months, I will make a publication of it, and take it to the media. Basically, I want to warn my country, because everyone seems to be in the "Covid is done for, we just need to wait a bit!" mentality.
Currently, I am trying to fit a SEIR model to the historical data. I need a model that approximates the old data well, so that I can extrapolate using it. I am getting some confusing results currently. I need to show the current results to someone with experience in SIR/SEIR modelling of a disease, so they could maybe tell me if I am making some obvious mistake.
I've been studying at a German technical university for a few years, and have been steadily confronting myself with the question: why wouldn't more American students follow a similar path?
I have to say, my confusion here has been pretty large, and I can't tell if it's due to:
-A unique situation that made it easy for me compared to the average American student.
-An American education (recommendation) system with a massive blind spot.
-A German visa system with a lack of interest in Americans.
The long and short of the steps that I took to get into this position is:
1. Learned German during an exchange year (not necessary, my university as well as perhaps 200 more German universities have Bachelors as well as Masters in English)
2. Applied for German universities (with a decent GPA/ACT/SAT [specific numbers on request], not much work is required. In fact, I found the 4 American universities I applied to much more difficult than the 10 or so German unis)
3. Was accepted to German universities.
4. Demonstrated a relatively reasonable level of financial stability (8,000€ in a bank account or a German family willing to vouch for you.)
5. Began attending the German university of my choice.
Current monthly costs, living in one of the 5 largest German cities, include:
*300-500€ (for me, just over 300€) rent in a shared flat, also studio apts (WiFi, electricity, heating, and water included).
*100€ food, relatively decadent with fresh vegetables, fruits, cheeses, and occasional meat.
*100€ stunningly inclusive health insurance.
*(You may be wondering, where's the university costs?)
*50€ University costs (this includes texts, computer labs, multiple student workshops, legal insurance, email, cloud service, and most of all, public transportation in the entire state + parts of other states)
*Around 10-50€ for a cell-phone plan. Figure this isn't too different from the states.
So if we're looking for the high-end of what I could pay, I come out with 800€ and 9600€ per month and per year, respectively. Throw one or two international flights home in there, for an extra 500-1500€, and I bump into 11k€. For my entire costs, from year one to year eight if I wanted to spend more time here.
Now, my comparisons to the US are based on anecdotes from friends, as well as a few websites with average cost estimations. Take this with a few grains of salt, but I seem to find $20k a year as a pretty common amount for in-state tuition and associated living costs, and $40k a year with a medium out-of-state tuition (plus living). This is either 100% more than what I'm paying, or 300% more. Not only that, the bachelor at my university (as well as all German universities) is a 3 year program, since GERs (general education requirements? Don't know my American university terms very well) aren't a part of the curriculum. So to get my bachelor, I'm spending 33k€ (to be fair, this is about $40k right now), whereas in-state public is spending $80k and out of state is spending $160k plus an extra year?
I'll assume most of you know someone, either around college age, raising children who will reach college age, or you're planning on having college graduates of your own some day. Reach out to them, let them know it's an option, and maybe save a year of their life and $100,000.
Or critique my comment and let me know exactly how I'm wrong. I welcome both.
As a German, I was always confused why more people don't do this. Especially people from the US. My university (RWTH Aachen) had a bunch of Chinese expats who were perfectly happy to travel halfway across the world and learn some English to get an excellent and prestigious STEM degree for a comparatively low monetary cost.
But somehow, no people from the US. Or at least I never met any.
One of the Professors at my new university in Dublin recently remarked that he sees the same phenomenon with Irish students. Somehow, they prefer paying tens of thousands extra in tuition and studying at TCD in Ireland to moving to Germany for a few years. Even though they're part of the EU! Getting accepted should be easy for them.
Germany has basically opened itself up to the whole world taking advantage of their tax money to fund their university educations. But somehow, as far as I can tell, very few people seem to be taking the offer, compared to what I would've expected.
Why is the state of Germany willing to pay for the education of any foreigners who go there? Is the theory that enough of them will stick around afterwards to make it a worthwhile investment?
The theory is that imposing fees for (non-eu) foreigners is discrimantory. Also some handwaiving at soft power. At least that is what causes the pushback to proposals to implement such a fee (although it exists in parts of Germany). The whole system is not consistent and paradoxical, as it is quite hard for foreigners with a German degree who want to stay to be able to do so (the situation has however improved compared to say 10 years ago). This is caused by different sets of people determining migration and education laws.
Establishing people with ties to Germany all over the world brings a bit of soft power in the economic, cultural, political spheres, mainly. Hard to measure, though.
Contrary to Argos and Obiter, this release by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) quotes a net economic gain for Germany if 30% or more students stick around after they graduate. The release goes on to list surveys in which ca. 30% are positive they will remain in Germany after graduating, with up to 50-60% saying probably. A reverse brain-drain seems pretty plausible here.
The desire to stay is higher than I thought. A quick google found this (in German only, but "Abbildung 1" is easy to grok, shows univ. graduates' intentions to stay):
Note that since this study Germany went through developments that could have made it more, or less, attractive, eg the 2015 refugee turmoil, the AfD rise and (partial) decline, the pandemic.
"quotes a net economic gain for Germany if 30% or more"
What does that mean?
Suppose you attract someone and spend $50,000 schooling him. He ends up living in Germany and, over his lifetime, earns $100,000. Is that a net gain of $50,000? It isn't a gain of that amount to the other inhabitants, because his income goes to him to be spent by him, not to them.
Suppose I decide to become a German citizen, continue living my life in California, paying my taxes to the U.S. Does my income then count as a net gain to Germany?
"Die Studie kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass sich die Ausgaben der öffentlichen Hand (z.B. die Finanzierung von Studienplätzen) durch Erträge (z.B. Konsumausgaben, Steuern und Abgaben) bei einem Verbleib in Deutschland von 30% der ausländischen Studierenden in 5 Jahren amortisieren."
Which translates to:
"The study finds that public expenditures (e.g. financial support of studies) are amortized through earnings (e.g. consumption, taxes, fees) within 5 years with 30% of foreign students remaining in Germany."
To summarize (and translate) the quoted study (from 2013), they claim about 14,000€ yearly cost per student. This is covered to the tune of 16% by non-governmental funds, leaving 84% or ca. 11,760€ for the government to cover. Due to the consumption of the student, yearly, they estimate around 2,500€ of tax revenue from that alone. That brings the public cost down to 9,260€ per student per year (pspy). They then, through direct and indirect effects (again, consumption, taxes, fees) estimate around 28,000€ of revenue per student who remains. To find the break-even point, take the cost/revenue and I end up with around 33%, that is to say, 1 remaining student pays for themselves and 2 other students. However, since this is a per-year deal, if the student remains in Germany for more than the length of their studies, it's then profit for the German state. So to go back to the first study, if 30% remain for a long period of time (> than length of study) and an extra 20-40% remain for a shorter period of time (= length of study), you can see how the economic effect would be quite powerful.
I'm not sure about your "consumption, taxes, fees." If I am paying a fee that reflects a cost, say a gas tax to pay for wear and tear on the roads and congestion, that fee isn't a net gain for Germany. I don't know what "consumption" means in this context. If I consume $100 of groceries that isn't a $100 gain for Germany. Are these just taxes on consumption?
Presumably, taxes to some degree are funding services which people consume. If, to take an extreme example, I pay Social Security taxes and then collect Social Security, the taxes are not a net gain.
"Somehow, they prefer paying tens of thousands extra in tuition and studying at TCD in Ireland to moving to Germany for a few years."
(1) Not fluent in German or indeed having any German at all, and not feeling confident they can pick up fluency fast enough to be able to follow lectures/exam in German. Drop back far enough in your studies and you fail the course which is a waste of time and effort.
(2) If you have a degree from Trinity, Irish employers know what that is. If you have a certificate from a German college, what the heck is that? Is it comparable? Is it the equivalent of a cheap diploma mill or a reputable recognised university? Many employers sorting through applications won't bother with the extra effort of looking that up, they will stick with "I know what a Trinners grad is like" (government and semi-state bodies and public service will, I've had to check job applications that came in with "I have qualification from overseas" to see "what is that equivalent to in Irish terms?", there's a website for it: https://qsearch.qqi.ie/WebPart/Search?searchtype=recognitions)
(1) Master courses in STEM are typically in English by default these days. Most regular people in the country are likewise pretty fluent in English. Many of the Chinese/Norwegian/I-forgot-what-else expats I knew didn't even bother to learn German.
(2) That might explain some of it. Case in point, Germany does not have "colleges". You study at university from the very start, where you typically only hear lectures directly relevant to your chosen field of study. On the other hand, our universities do seem to have pretty high prestige on the international scene, judging by stuff like university rankings.
First of all, the (vast) majority of English courses are master level, not Bachelor level. For example, there is not one Pure Math, Computer Science or Physics Bachelor degree in the list of English degrees offered in Germany by a public university (private universities charge a lot). (you can search the DAAD website, link is too long to post here).
In addition, I think you cannot actually take out student loans as a foreigner in Germany, so you need to tap into your parents' savings. If you do not know German, finding a job to support you is pretty difficult, and seems uncertain. Add to that some uncertainty about the value of a German degree back in your homecountry, and it is not quite a slam dunk case anymore.
Also factor in social isolation due to not knowing the language. This is less a factor if you are coming from say China, where you will find sizeable communities on every campus, but might be more difficult for e.g. Americans and Britons.
I agree to most of what you write, but almost all German university students are fluent in English, due to the internet, English speaking media and English being mandatory for at least 6 grades in German schools. Also, thanks so the cultural soft power of the Anglosphere, American or English exchange students will be very popular.
I see your points, especially the majority of English courses being master level. That being said, generally, the English courses offered are very open-ended (an example at my university is General Engineering Sciences, which specializes in the engineering of your choice after the first year.)
You can't take out loans from the German government, but American student loans are still an option, and most Americans have to plan for a hefty university bill anyways. Most students at my university, if they work, work at my university as tutors. This option is very open for native-English speakers, again due to 1/3 of my university being foreigners. I agree with the unknown value of a German degree, but feel that the interest factor of being one of the rare Americans to study abroad can help balance that out.
And to the social isolation, I only have anecdotes, but both of my arrivals in Germany were very social, even with 0 language experience at the beginning. Getting people to stop speaking English to me was the harder step.
It means that there will be some point where a large number of your friends/family are in a far away country (either when you leave, if you settle in Germany, or after you graduate, if you return). But given the difference I perceived (pre-Brexit) in numbers of EU students at British unis and vice versa (the former seems much higher), I think the language barrier is probably a bigger issue. Even if universities/the government don't mandate some level of German before you start, a lot of people would not like living in a society where they don't speak the language.
People go to college to party, not to learn. They don't want to spend one less year there and they don't want to be annoyed at weird cultural quirks and people talking in a foreign language around them that they can't understand, etc. Also this requires uncommon knowledge and jumping through hoops which most people can't be bothered with. Furthermore you have to be far away from your family and friends, and the cost difference may not be so great especially if you can get low cost loans and/or scholarships.
If they are really there to party why are they not going to a country where the drinking age is 16 and Helles is dirt cheap? (never understood the obsession with creme de menthe though. But I suppose that's probably how they feel about anglophone students drinking Jägermeister.)
Hi everyone, I wrote a long post on on Reddit about using pregnenolone to deal with social isolation. I thought it might align with the interests of SSC readers.
Whats this forms view on the election being stolen? I think it's pretty obviously stolen but I'm also a Trumpist. I just don't get how you can explain out all the discrepancies
My basic view is, it was not stolen. To change my confidence, I would first need to see evidence of widespread fraud in court. Then I would need to see how such fraud could actually overturn election results in enough states to matter. It seems to me that the Trump campaign had every incentive to find such evidence for two months, yet none was presented in court. So we haven't even passed the first bar.
For context, I have spent several months talking with Trump supporting friends of mine about what they view as election irregularities. I've looked into perhaps a dozen over that time, and in each case that the claims do not withstand scrutiny. Generally it seems to be a case of people ascribing nefarious motives to actions that have ordinary explanations, and no actual evidence for the claims.
I spent a lot of time reading the court rulings as well. The first point to note is that, most don't actually allege any fraud at all. In the handful that do, there's really no evidence presented. You might find some of them interesting.
We don't "explain out all the discrepancies", because *all* the discrepancies add up to a classic Gish Gallop and it is never rational to engage in a full Gish Gallop. We have looked in depth at some of the discrepancies most prominently cited as evidence of fraud, and found that there are compelling alternate explanations for those. But at this point, if you want me to look at *more* discrepancies and try to explain them for you, you'll have to pay me twice my normal consulting rate because that's really annoying work.
We do note that the General Argument Against Conspiracy Theories applies here. The US electoral system is too decentralized and redundant to be plausibly "stolen" by subverting one insider and getting him to flip a few bits in one Master Vote-Counting Computer; you'd need hundreds of active conspirators, minimum. "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead" is an exaggeration, but by the time you're past fifty conspirators, it's likely some of them will have blown your security to the point where the general existence and nature of the conspiracy is revealed.
And, the burden of the proof is on the positive. "Here are some discrepancies that I can't explain", is not proof and is barely even evidence. That sort of thing should be your pointer to where you go looking for better evidence and assemble it into proof. But that takes work, and it's easier to just invent another low-effort argument and demand that your opponents disprove that one. Also note that there are things that Trump's lawyers and/or the GOP, with more time and resources than a bunch of internet commenters, could have done to try and find such evidence, that they have conspicuously not done.
At this point, I don't think that anyone who wasn't pretty clearly a Trumpist before the election, believes it is likely to have been stolen. And this is a pretty eclectic community, with far more than just Trumpists and rabid anti-Trumpists.
To avoid the Gish Gallop, I propose the OP states what he thinks are the 3 strongest examples of the election being stolen, and we strictly limit to those.
"Stolen" is the wrong term. There probably was some fraud but there is going to be some fraud in every election, and it's an all-party thing. The real problem was the mess of different ways voting-by-mail was handled and the decisions as to how those ballots would be treated. If state A is counting ballots that arrive in without even a postmark and state B is counting only those received on or one day after the polling day and state C is letting ballots received up to three weeks later count, then you're going to get discrepancies between 'what was the vote count here in the last election' and this time around, never mind the problem for those doing the counting as to 'should I or shouldn't I count this ballot?' when they're faced with a huge volume of mailed-in votes that they never had to handle before.
The way it ended up, with the later-arriving mail-in ballots forecast to be for Biden and indeed turning out like that, turning "lead for Trump" into "huge lead for Biden" didn't look great - it did look as if 'oh my we had a search around and look we found this entire basket of votes for Biden' which is otherwise something that would indeed be indicative of fraud, but this time round because of the exceptional circumstances wasn't such.
The hysteria leading up to the election about "everybody vote! we have to get Trump out! End fascist dictatorship now by any means necessary!" and some officials bragging about how they were going to make that happen certainly didn't help. I was also amused that the Bush-era concerns over voting machines and the companies operating them and the donations their owners made to which candidate were being trotted out again, only reversed: this time round the Democrats were the ones pooh-poohing any hint of instability or possibility of rigging the count by interested parties.
I think this election was probably as honest as you are going to get in the circumstances, which does not mean 100% shining pure honesty but also does not mean grand conspiracy to 'steal' it.
>The real problem was the mess of different ways voting-by-mail was handled and the decisions as to how those ballots would be treated. If state A is counting ballots that arrive in without even a postmark and state B is counting only those received on or one day after the polling day and state C is letting ballots received up to three weeks later count, then you're going to get discrepancies between 'what was the vote count here in the last election' and this time around
The between-state differences don't matter when you're comparing results in the same state in different years. Colorado has offered universal vote-by-mail for years, and nobody has complained that this makes it impossible to compare Colorado's results to Ohio's.
Many states did change their criteria for accepting mail-in ballots due to COVID, but that got hammered out in the courts *before* election night. Pennsylvania ended up setting aside a very small number of mail-in ballots as a result - the only court case that Trump won.
(Also, "These people are legally allowed to vote but they normally don't because the rules make it too hard for them to do so" is not a claim of fraud, it's just saying that the rules are less favorable for Republicans than they used to be.)
>The way it ended up, with the later-arriving mail-in ballots forecast to be for Biden and indeed turning out like that, turning "lead for Trump" into "huge lead for Biden" didn't look great - it did look as if 'oh my we had a search around and look we found this entire basket of votes for Biden' which is otherwise something that would indeed be indicative of fraud, but this time round because of the exceptional circumstances wasn't such.
One change I do support as a result of this election - every state should allow pre-processing of mail-in ballots so they're ready to count on election night. Ohio and Florida do that, and the results were called by that night and nobody had to bite their nails over a "red mirage."
(In fact, it was the opposite - those states started out blue and then slowly turned red as the in-person ballots got reported. If you were as motivated to dunk on Republicans as you are Democrats then you'd probably find that equally suspicious.)
If Colorado has been doing it for years and this time round there wasn't a huge up-tick in the numbers doing vote-by-mail, then you can compare 'last election and this one' and be reasonably sure the figures you are getting are plausible.
If State E hasn't been doing this or only in very limited circumstances, and now the scare means most of the electorate who are bothering to vote are now mailing in their votes, then you don't have the data to compare "okay we have a Z% increase in Democratic votes via vote-by-mail, is that in line with previous voting patterns or not?"
And *that* is where accusations of fraud or skulduggery or moustache-twirling returning officers creep in.
The change in voting patterns was partially *caused* by Republicans saying that vote-by-mail was full of fraud - in previous years, it was much more balanced (the logic is vote-by-mail = old people = lean Republican).
It takes a lot of chutzpah to deliberately encourage people to vote differently, then argue that people voting differently from previous years is evidence of fraud.
"If you were as motivated to dunk on Republicans as you are Democrats then you'd probably find that equally suspicious"
The only dunking I'm doing is on the Blueshirts, and since Our Guy is currently in the hot seat as Taoiseach and I wince every time I remember that, I'm not pro or anti anybody very much in American politics.
I'm quite happy to have a hair-pulling row over Biden's religiosity as per this but I don't think that's quite what you mean!
"Mr. Biden, perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century, regularly attends Mass and speaks of how his Catholic faith grounds his life and his policies. And with Mr. Biden, a different, more liberal Christianity is ascendant: less focused on sexual politics and more on combating poverty, climate change and racial inequality."
Very religiously observant Mass-goer who defies the bishops and the Pope on dogma about abortion. But if you're in line with NYT liberal values, this makes you a good Christian, unlike these others here:
"His arrival comes after four years in which conservative Christianity has reigned in America’s highest halls of power, embodied in white evangelicals laser-focused on ending abortion and guarding against what they saw as encroachments on their freedoms. Their devotion to former President Donald J. Trump was so fervent that many showed up in Washington on Jan. 6 to protest the election results."
You see? Those are the Bad Christians. And here's this conclusion drawn by the NYT from the distinction between Good and Bad Christians:
"Mr. Biden’s leadership is a repudiation of the claim by many conservative leaders that Democrats are inherently anti-Christian."
Ask the Democrat pro-lifers about how they were received, versus Biden who falls into line with the Democratic Party policies on abortion, LGBT rights, and so forth.
For a long time I said that natively, had I emigrated to America like so many of my countrymen, I'd vote Democrat. But the Democratic party dropped economics in favour of chasing the college-educated vote and moved towards social liberalisation, often very fast. And now I'm stuck with some of the policies I would support being best represented in an American context by the Dems but that I'd be unwelcome there since I'm not the Biden/Pelosi type of Catholic.
And the American context has spilled over here into Europe to a frankly ridiculous extent. Why should there be marches in Dublin protesting Trump's election? Or pro-Black Lives Matter?
So your Culture Wars affect my life here in ways I don't particularly like or want. Therefore yes, I'm going to argue about, protest, and laugh at "liberal hysteria" when I see it (as well as any other kind of hysteria). That includes remembering when Mitt Romney, who is not someone I'm greatly sympathetic towards, was excoriated as a sexist plutocrat theocrat who was going to bring about the Handmaid's Tale for real if he was elected, and then he was The Only Honourable Republican when Trump came along and Mitt didn't like Donald, by the same people who were now flinging roses who had previously been flinging dung. (That's one thing about being over the age of thirty: the oul' memory may be shaky but it still manages to haul up out of the depths "hang on, this is a turn up for the book!" when necessary).
I didn't think Obama was going to be a Saviour, I thought he was going to be a middle of the road politician. I didn't think Trump was going to be the antiChrist, I thought he'd be a mediocre president. I don't think I was much mistaken in either assessment, and I'm not expecting Biden/Harris to be either the avatars of progressivism or the end of the world.
I don't know, I view the decentralization and variation in voting mechanisms -- including in vote-by-mail -- from state to state as a valuable characteristic that makes it hard to engage in widespread corruption and fraud.
I think there were illegal actions and irregularities that could have possibly flipped the state of Pennsylvania. I would estimate a 20% chance that the state of PA was stolen from Trump. But Trump didn't just lose by PA. In all the other states I am 99% sure the levels of Fraud were too low to have flipped the state. Any conspiracy across state lines is extremely unlikely, and the polls beforehand indicated it was likely Biden would win. In that environment, I don't think it was any more likely this election was stolen by Biden than Russia stole the election in 2016.
If it is relevant, I am a registered Republican that has voted down party lines in every election, except, for Presidents. In retrospect, I think he did a better job in his presidency than I believe Clinton would have, but he was too high variance for me to vote anything but 3rd party in 2016.
Off the top of my head, the State courts opened mail in voting to ballots that arrived after election day. I'm of the opinion that that power was reserved to only the legislature. That alone wasn't enough to flip PA, but it does raise my prior that something might have happened.
I wrote that, and then looked up how many votes that covers. It seems to be less than a 5th of the margin of Biden's victory. I will reduce my chance of something significant enough to flip the state to 10%, and that would require quite a bit of corruption of the Philadelphia.
Thanks for the reply, and for telling me how your certainty changes in real time.
I understand and I agree with your view about the PA courts overruling the legislature to add three days to the deadline for receipt of mail-in ballots. I guess the US Supreme Court plans to eventually rule on that case. Suppose we stipulate that was indeed incorrect, and those votes should not have been counted.
I understand you think it's unlikely, but what illegal actions, irregularities, or corruption do you think may have possibly occurred in Philadelphia?
When someone repeatedly and loudly states that the only way that they will not win an upcoming election is if said election is rigged/stolen, and that they won the previous razor-thin election in a "landslide", and tells his supporters to vote in person while demanding that votes cast by mail not be counted, etc., etc. - then when said person claims that the election actually was stolen it does not add much signal.
I think it is much more likely (orders of magnitude) that irregularities in previous elections caused a different outcome.
A lot of the discrepancies were people just not knowing the normal weird things that happen when votes are being counted, because this is the first time they were interested in how votes were being counted.
Trump's legal team claimed they had a lot of evidence, but when asked in court if they were alleging fraud, they said no. Then they would go out in public and say something like 'we have lots of evidence, we're bringing a new case next week, please give money'.
Next week would come, and it would be the same. No case brought with evidence, yet an insistence in public they had it, would be filing 'soon', and they needed money. They raised something like $250 million doing this.
Try to put yourself in their shoes. What would you do if you had a mountain of evidence? I would present it in court ass fast as possible. What would you do if you had no evidence, but wanted to raise money? I would string people along with 'coming soon' as long as possible.
Look, I'm very anti-Trump, so you and I have different worldviews. That said, I think "the steal" was a very successful con that made Trump and his peeps a lot of money. I basically think Donald Trump has a lot of contempt for his supporters, and I think this was one last chance to milk them for money and attention.
I don't think it was stolen in the conventional sense.
On the other hand, the decision not to unblind the vaccine data until election day might have cost Trump the election, since if it had been unblinded a few days earlier it would have shown that his claim that we would have a vaccine by the election was true, and people feeling more optimistic is likely to benefit the incumbent. Given when they chose to unblind it, that has to have been a political decision, although the motive might have been wanting Trump to lose but might also have been believing that if the information came out just before the election people, especially anti-Trump people, would not have trusted it.
[begin rant]
On the other hand, while I don't think there is any justification for the belief that Trump really won, I think there is justification for the attitude — distrust of elite sources of information — that leads to people believing it. Fauci has now twice publicly admitted that what he tells people is based not on his scientific opinion but on what he wants them to believe and think they will believe (once when he pretended masks were useless in order to keep them for healthcare workers, more recently when he admitted changing his public estimate of the requirement for herd immunity in response to polling results on people's willingness to be vaccinated). Obama badly exaggerated the result of the 97% agree about climate change article, itself a badly misstated presentation of its results, and nobody in the major media called him on it. Nuclear Winter was a PR campaign masquerading as science. The population hysteria way back in the sixties was widely supported as scientific truth, and when none of the predicted results happened nobody that I noticed made a public apology for getting it confidently wrong. Lots of other examples available.
Noble lies to the plebs are tempting but they poison the well, and one result is that people feel free to disbelieve the elite sources of information if that lets them believe what they want to even if, as in this case, it isn't true.
I have a lot of sympathy for your view that on balance lies to the plebs poison the well.
I've heard many people claim that one reason public health officials did not recommend mask use was in order to save them for health care workers. Is this actually true? Other people, such as Zeynep Tufecki seem to say that the CDC and WHO legitimately misunderstood previous studies on mask effectiveness on the flu, were slow to see new data coming in regarding Sars-CoV-2. They were then slow in correcting the message because of groupthink and institutional inertia.
Is there evidence that officials knew masks were effective yet recommended against them to conserve supply?
I don't think the election was stolen. In some cases there appear to have been decisions made that were not legal, which were probably justifiable in the context of COVID, but still not permitted. Because Biden received far more mail in votes than Trump, anything that permitted more counting of those votes (removing signature verification, for instance) would increase the number of votes for Biden. I think this happened in large enough numbers to potentially swing some states, but not from fraudulent votes, but instead counting additional votes that would have thrown out for discrepancies. If you look back to the spring and summer primaries, there were a ton of irregularities in the votes, and many discarded votes (NPR reports 550,000 discarded mail in votes in the primaries - https://www.npr.org/2020/08/22/904693468/more-than-550-000-primary-absentee-ballots-rejected-in-2020-far-outpacing-2016). The Democrats had a huge incentive to ensure more votes were counted.
It's hard to justify not counting those votes based on what we know (or don't know - that they were frauds) of their origin. That said, I think it's possible that with relaxed rules some actual fraudulent votes could have entered the stream. That possibility is certainly not clear enough to justify extraordinary measures to overturn the election results.
In the latest issue of Scientific American, it is claimed that "changes to the environment are forcing animals out of remote habitats and into closer contact with humans, and people, driven by population and economic pressure, are moving closer to wild animals. Aggressive global surveillance for dangerous pathogens that live in these animals is one way to prevent the catastrophes of 2020 from repeating in coming years."
Anyone care to steelman this for me? It seems obviously bogus, like the exact opposite is true, and the average human being has never had less contact with wild animals.
It can be simultaneously true that the average human have little contact with wild animals, and that the number of people living in close contact with wild animals is bigger than ever. Human population and footprint has grown a lot. The claim is about the absolute number of humans, not the average human.
If you're living in somewhere like the British Isles, where the most dangerous animal in Great Britain is probably the adder and in Ireland is probably wasps or something, then the nearest you'll get to "animals coming into closer contact with people" are urban foxes and the like.
Canada you'll get bears and moose. Other countries the problem is more real: cutting down rainforest for farmland and so forth. Those are the countries where wild animals and people are going to come into close contact and where the reservoir of dangerous pathogens in those animals can now get transferred. Bush meat is not confined to Africa, it is also part of the diet in Indonesia etc. Remember all the fuss about Covid-19 coming from a wet market in Wuhan (before the shift to 'it was a bioweapon that escaped/was deliberately released')?
Around here, deer hunting is popular. Is this not bushmeat too? Is there a reason I don't hear about the dangers of zoonotic pathogens from the hunting of wild turkeys, grouse, deer?
Turkeys: top concern seems to be salmonella (aka why you never do a rare chicken breast) and variations on cholera. These are best picked up by eating/drinking which makes sense given turkey as a farm animal.
Deer: main one you've likely heard of that is a direct transmission is tuberculosis. There are a pile of others and indirect transmission ones like Lyme.
Is there a way to comment without subscribing to email notifications on that comment? I don't mind getting email updates from Substack, but getting an email for every reply is a bit much.
You have to go to your general substack settings, rather than the ACX specific ones (https://substack.com/account/settings) and uncheck "Send emails for Likes and Replies to my comments".
It's kind of weird/bad ui design, as it's not really apparent that the "My Account" menu item goes to your substack specific settings without indicating that there is a more general settings menu somewhere.
I noticed that the first public open thread and the first hidden open thread have approximately the same number of comments in them (508 vs 510 as of time of writing), which is not at all what I was expecting, especially not with the first public open thread being the first ever ACX open thread and it having a (fairly busy) comment thread devoted to complaining about substacks comment system. I had anticipated the hidden threads in general to be much quieter than the public ones, was that a weird prediction to make?
Also, if any of the paying subscribers could enlighten us scrubs over here, I'd be interested to hear what the general feel of the hidden thread was, relative to the public one.
Pretty much the same exact as the non-hidden open threads. The biggest discussion chain was about GME, which likely would be true of any open thread posted last wednesday. Then there's some other random posts, a few asking advice on things like gaining weight or learning statistics, etc. Nothing I wouldn't expect from a normal open thread.
My guess is that the most active commenters highly correlate with the subscribers, particularly at the beginning of ACX's life. I would predict that as time goes on and ACX gains readers who didn't come from SSC, there will be more non-subscribers relative to subscribers and consequently the public open threads will become more active.
About two and a half months ago I was feeling depressed. My wife suggested that it was just “my time of the month”. I’m a man, but my wife has often expressed the idea that men have hormonal cycles as well. And I had read a similar idea in a pop science book years ago. I got curious: if my black mood was cyclical in nature that would be a good thing to know. For one thing, if it's not cyclical then I need to figure out what my problem is so I can feel better, while if it is cyclical I can take hope in the fact that I'll probably feel better in a few days at most.
So I created a Google Sheet and laid out a simple five point scale: Depressed, Sad, Neutral, Fine, and Happy (you might think Neutral and Fine are synonyms but from my perspective there’s significant difference between feelin' Fine and not really feeling happy or sad, and since I’m the only one using the measure, well, there you go). Every day I marked which one I was feeling in general. After I had a couple weeks I assigned each mood a score from 1 to 5, and allowed myself to mark two boxes to indicate a halfway mood (Sad and Neutral indicating a 2.5 score, for when I'm feeling kind of Sad but not Sad Sad, you know?). Then I graphed the results.
The results were pretty spikey, so I overlaid a centered average on the graph. After two months it seemed to show a roughly 33 day cycle from sad to happy. Still, I need several more months of data before I come to any conclusions.
I talked to my father in law about the project and he suggested seeing if my cycle is linked to the moon. That kind of threw me: we all have heard the legend that the full moon makes men mad, but I never put any stock in it. I did some research and it looks like the studies are a bit mixed, in both results and quality. Apparently not that many people are interested in studying the effects of the moon on mood, and the ones that are don't aren't always the best at making good studies. But I thought, what the heck, I’ll throw the phase of the moon over my graph. And son of a gun, it matched closely. The nadir of my average mood seemed to line up perfectly with new moons, and the apex of my mood with full moons. Naturally this doesn’t demonstrate a casual relationship, but I was surprised it fit so well.
I plan on continuing the study for at least a year to get more data. Unfortunately I’m afraid this moon phase connection may already have fouled my data collection. Mood is so subjective, and my own judgment of my mood is even more so. Might I find myself erring on the side of happiness when I know the moon is getting fuller? Or become sadder as the moon dims simply because I expect to? I already feel tempted to modify my data to fit the curve: if I'm feeling really crummy on a day when the curve was on an upward trajectory previously I find myself second guessing my judgment: am I really feeling Sad? Might I actually be Neutral, or Sad-Neutral at worse? Whereas if the data matches my expectation I don't think twice about it. It’s a real problem.
Does anyone here know of any fairly easy to use psychological instruments that measure mood more accurately than my simple five point measure? I'd like to make things a bit more objective and scientific (if that's even possible) going forward.
Um. Definitely in my experience, my menstrual cycle tended to sync up with the phase of the moon (to the point where I tended to look up "when is the next full moon?" in order to Be Prepared). I don't know if this is applicable to all women, and I have no idea if it's any way applicable to men, but that men too have waxing and waning hormonal cycles doesn't seem that far from plausibility.
For a pop-sci take on the whole notion, you could do worse than this BBC article (I've helpfully left out all the astrology results when you Google "men and the moon cycles"):
How light-proof is your bedroom window cover (curtains, etc) --that would be my first line of inquiry. Expand for the time before/after bed. Because there are such things as SAD and a sleep deprivation therapy for depression. Full moon > more light at night > less/lighter sleep > milder depression.
And of course you could experiment with different curtains, artificial low-light lamps through the night etc., you get the idea.
Eliminating a placebo/context effect will be impossible, I guess, unless you have someone changing curtains while you are already asleep. Or use a technical solution: curtain randomly picked from a range of differing translucencies, mechanically drawn by some microprocessor? Hack one of the lamps Scott recommends on the Lorien page (a Philips HF3520 or similar). Then log the curtain, or light color and intensity, and look for correlations with your self-assessment.
I really am skeptical that it's light exposure, because my bedroom has two layers of blackout curtains and in the winter I never open them. This time of year on a full moon it comes out right as I'm leaving work, I have a 15 minute drive home, then I'm inside for the rest of the night. I mean it could be, but that must be some strong effect from only a small extra exposure to light.
That info makes a light effect unlikely. But you need to find another way to measure it, self-assessment here is likely to create a self-amplifying placebo effect.
There are apps out there for tracking your mood in a way where you can't see your previous days results, which helps a bit with bias. I found some searching for "happiness tracker"
Okay, this blog is good (or at least interesting). Stumbled upon it while looking up something about Swinburne. Come for the Decadent poetry, stay for the Scholastic philosophy! 😁 https://philosophymajor.wordpress.com/tag/thomas-aquinas/
Oh, and on the vexed question of angels and pins, from Diarmaid MacCullouch's "Reformation" about 15th/16th century humanists:
"Humanist scholars could therefore easily portray themselves as practically minded men of ideas closely involved with ordinary life and the business of government, rather than isolated ivory-tower academics, who wasted their time arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (this famous caricature of scholasticism was invented by humanists)."
So can we please stick a pin in this "everybody know that..." factoid?
Do my homework for me. Chesterton said that how many angels can dance on the head of a pin wasn't a real theological question, it was just something some wiseass asked Aquinas, who said that angels aren't material enough to have locations in the usual sense. Instead, angels could be said to be located where they put their attention, so an infinite number can pay attention to the head of a pin. Is this correct?
I suppose they can't dance. The nearest they could come would be moving their attention rhythmically, which could be pretty cool, especially in a large group.
It also occurs to me that asking that question is more word-fame than the vast majority of people get.
When I first started looking into "did they really do that?" the suggestion was that Isaac Disraeli (father of the prime minister) had used this as a joking example of mediaeval nonsense. Then the "some wiseass asked Aquinas" version. Now MacCulloch is back to the "humanists invented it".
It's a question that *could* be asked, because the standard idea is that angels have location but not mass (I think, putting it in physics terms) so something like electrons (my theology is just slightly better than my physics so if I've inadvertently wandered into either heresy or bad atomic structure, please forgive me!) This is probably the relevant part of the Summa:
The military orchestrated a coup in Myanmar, returning to power 10 years after nominally allowing a civilian government to take power. Civilian leaders, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, were detained. The military claims that the November 2020 election, which the military's party lost overwhelming, was fraudulent. Myanmar has been mired in ethnic insurgencies since the year it gained independence in 1948, and the government closed polling stations in many ethnic minority areas, citing violence. However, I don't know if the military is any more popular there than Aung San Suu Kyi.
Was the election actually fraudulent? What does the future hold for Myanmar?
Regarding pedophilia, this strikes me as almost obvious. Marrying children was a common occurrence in the ancient world. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, if you can impregnate them, you should be at least partially attracted to them. Assuming 12 year old girls can often get pregnant, but are probably prone to serious fertility/birthing problems, it makes sense this would be a spectrum according to different reproductive strategies. Sorry everyone, I didn't invent evolution. We might even take this further and say fans of MILF porn represent the other end of that reproductive strategy spectrum maybe?
If you're talking about the subset of 12 year old girls who can get pregnant, then you're not talking about pedophilia. Pedophilia is sexual attraction to *prepubescent* children, not sexual attraction to people below what will in the 21st century be the usual age of consent in developed nations. And if there's a taxonic element to pedophilia, it's based on "that girl has hips and breasts and looks like she could bear children" or similar signaling, not the number of planetary rotations since birth.
"Marrying children was a common occurrence in the ancient world."
Not as common as you might think. Ancient Roman law set the minimum age of marriage at 12 for girls, 15 for boys. Roman women typically married in their late teens or early twenties--not that different from today. Among nobles and royalty, early bethrothal/marriage was more common, but marriage in the upper classes had more to do with politics than with sexual attraction.
What are the constraints on expanding output of vaccines?
I have been saying for a while that it took a week to create the vaccines we are now using, eleven months to get them approved by the FDA and equivalents abroad. A month of challenge trials would have demonstrated effectiveness and at least a minimal level of safety, after which the companies should have been free to sell them to anyone who wanted to buy, which would have save something like a million lives.
But this assumes that the reason the companies were not in a position to provide all the doses we wanted when they did get approved was that they were not willing to make the necessary massive investments in productive ability until they knew they could sell the vaccines. The Russian vaccine, which apparently now turns out to be better than 90% effective, was approved early, but I don't believe all that much of the population has been vaccinated yet, which suggests that there may be constraints to mass production and mass vaccination that I'm missing.
Can anyone fill this in? If a vaccine had been approved after a month of testing, is there any reason why the producer couldn't have provided it by now to everyone who wanted it and was willing to pay for it?
For the RNA vaccines, the hard part seems to be the fragility of RNA molecules. Making RNA is easy. We're all doing it all the time and you can get engineered E. coli to make the sequence you want, or synthesise it in vitro.
The problem is that RNA degrades naturally and also everything is contaminated with RNA-degrading enzymes. Pfizer/BioNTech have managed to make some sort of nano-scale bubble from fatty acids or something that can keep the RNA safe and deliver it to our cells. The -80°C ultra-cold chain is also needed to kep the RNA intact.
mRNA-vaccines are fairly complicated and rather new biochemical products, so scaling up the production is harder than scaling up production for the AstraZeneca vaccine, which uses a modified common-cold-virus as a vector. However, it is easier to modify the mRNA-vaccine that is in production than modifying the AstraZeneca vaccine.
The rollout of the mRNA-vaccine could have been accelerated quite a bit by disregarding testing. The reason is that the development of the RNA vaccine is so fast. But I'm not sure this would have had any strategic effect, since while you are waiting for the production to scale up, you can also wait to see whether the vaccine does what you want.
So in the short term, it is easier to scale up the AstraZeneca vaccine or other vaccines that are technologically "easy". However, the EU made a gigantic strategic blunder concerning the Biontech vaccine. The EU tried to buy vaccines as cheaply as possible, giving Biontech/Pfizer no economical reason so try to find additional partners, and start building up the vaccine production in additional factories. It takes about half a year to make those factories ready, but if they would have started in August, they would be done right now. In the last weeks, the EU has started to notice that they should infest in more vaccine production, but now it is a little too late.
Tl;Dr: The microfluidics technology needed to encapsulate the RNA in a lipid nanoparticle is still mostly in the realm of things that academics put together on lab benchtops.
Either you run into the bottleneck of the machines being so fiddly to set up and run that you run out people who happen to have phd-level experience involving the relevant technologies or you run out of machines that are capable of making the machines.
Does anyone have any good examples of when throwing money at a problem have made the problem worse? I would like to find a as clear-cut example of this as possible, where it is as obvious as possible to see that it was the extra money/resources/headcount that made the problem worse and not external factors.
The example that comes to mind is education. It appears that college loans have led directly to college becoming more expensive, and therefore requiring loans. Many others have articulated this far more completely than I can.
Also, I have heard of more isolated cases in education where a failing system got more state and federal money, which was siphoned off through corruption. The system was failing not because of a lack of money, but because of bad leadership (which in turn may have been because of a lack of money to hire or retain good leaders, but that's no longer relevant). Once you give the bad leaders that replaced good leaders the money, you're not going to get the better leaders. Instead, you've just increased the likelihood of that money being wasted or embezzled. https://www.governing.com/archive/tns-detroit-schools-kickback-scheme.html
This isn't the first time this blog has cited sources that say bad things about Brasilia, so I wanted to say, as someone who spent a few years living there, that Brasilia is an incredibly awesome city.
I remember Scott's review of Seeing Like a State claiming that Brasilia's roads were arranged as a grid (true), so it was full of street corners (false). In fact, Brasilia is famous for using these weird half-roundabouts ("tesourinhas") for almost all street interceptions, which helps to improve traffic. The city has a strict "no buildings higher than 4 stores" policy, which, combined with wide streets and sidewalks, helps generate a "I'm in a really, really open space" feeling when you're walking around. There are plenty of big, empty grass fields -- which keep the scenery constantly green, and where kids have ample space to play. Plenty of trees to keep the breeze cool and, most noticeably, A LOT of flowers. The city has a terrible system of public transportation, I'll admit that, but the fact that it's tiny and the way it's organized makes it extremely easy to just walk to wherever you're going. It's actually a common feat to walk from one end of the city to the other. Every Sunday, the main road that crosses the city is interdicted so people can take walks and bike and skate...
What about the cold, soulless concrete buildings? I don't know, maybe it's not for everybody, but I always thought Brasilian architecture was beautiful. It's not all right angles, Oscar Niemeyer was actually a big fan of wide curves, and it shows.
This is not to say that Brasilia became a technocratic utopia -- I highly doubt that was it's goal. It's a city built for the middle class and rich, and you're kind of screwed if you're less than that and live there. But I think the critiques made about it's urban planning, it's architecture, it's way of doing things through deliberate design instead of natural growth are actually talking about Brasilia's strengths. After living there, I moved to another Brazilian city, one most outsiders see as a charming example of natural and organic growth, full of history, warmth, chance. It sucked.
Phrase that got an eye-roll - “the morality of administrative law.” I like this critical paragraph -
"In fact, technocratic predictions about human behavior have been notoriously unable to make good on their epistemic claims. One of the most comprehensive studies assessing expert ability to predict human behavior — Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment — found that social scientists were unable to outperform moderately informed colleagues from other fields in predicting futures in their own areas of expertise. As Tetlock put it: “People who devoted years of arduous study to a topic were as hard-pressed as colleagues casually dropping in from other fields to affix realistic probabilities to possible futures.”"
A typical "party game" type question one might be asked is "What would you do if you had a billion dollars?" I've never been quite able to answer in a satisfactory way. That is to say, in an interesting and indulgent way. My real answer is "Invest a great deal of it sensibly to generate at least a steady 10-15% rate of return, spend the vast majority of it on charities, live the lifestyle of someone with 2 million in the bank." But of course that is not the point of the question: the real point is what personally indulgent thing would you do if money was no object. I've always struggled with that question because my desires are cheap. I like good food, but like a ribeye steak good, not fine dining. I like video games. I like books. These things are not hard to acquire.
But I think I finally have one. If I was a billionaire and I had to do something wildly wasteful and indulgent then I would start a special fund. This fund would offer to cover 10-20% of the costs of construction of all new buildings in my city (or another city of my choosing) and to cover up to 50% of the cost of all renovations with only one requirement: that the design of the building is one that I like. Something art deco, or gothic revival, or beaux arts. Anything but the sleek and boring buildings I see built everywhere today. I want decoration, ornamentation, statuary, stained glass, and if I have so much money I'd be happy to foot the bill myself. Maybe I'd take it further: I'd approach whole streets of stores and offer to pay to renovate every building to fit my architectural fancy. Remake entire neighborhoods and boroughs into little architectural theme parks. Remake the city to a piece of art that fits my taste.
Does anyone see any practical obstacles to this plan? The main one is that I think I'd need to be a billionaire several times over to make it work.
Yeah, you have to be super rich depending on what kind of buildings you're looking to construct.
One Bennet Park in Chicago, recently constructed skyscraper, was supposed to cost $400 million. If you want to make a bunch of skyscrapers, you're going to front up a lot of money.
What you could do is pick a suburb you like near a transit area, demolish the transit center, and rebuild the homes and a small downtown area according to your liking (say, all Crafstman Bungalows with a high-density downtown area). You can sell at a loss and have a neighborhood to your liking. If I had literally a billion dollars of liquid wealth, I could definitely imagine dropping $500 million building my own personal community.
However, if the local school system sucks...you're still not going to convince me to move there. At least in Illinois,high school districts are servicing communities of tens or hundreds of thousands, which dramatically raises the costs.
Re: cost disease, I saw an interesting but unverified comment on reddit by user "Lortekonto" (https://www.reddit.com/r/UpliftingNews/comments/l5vv6m/billionaire_mark_cuban_just_launched_a_drug/gkx4imk/ ). As I understand it, they translate a letter by a CEO of Novo Nordisk which claims that a practice called "bulk companies" is partly responsible for inflated drug prizes (i.e. when a drug supposedly costs 4000$ but your insurance only pays a fraction for it).
See the comment for the full argument, but roughly, there used to be a legitimate service model of a "bulk company" hired by company A to negotiate discounts on product B by buying in bulk, and these bulk companies got a fraction of the discount as profit.
And so:
> So let us say that Novo-nordic sells a drug for $30. The bulkcompany comes in and say that they can get it cheaper but want 20% of the discount. Over the next decade they demand a greater and greater discount, the manufacture agrees to the discount, but raises the listed price. The listed price of the drug is now $300, but the bulkcompany gets a 90% discount, so the pharmacy can still buy the druge for $30 from the manufacture, but the bulkcompany get 20% of the now $270 discount, which is $54. A cost that is then pushed to the consumer.
I don't buy it. Drug makers go through tremendous efforts to develop or otherwise purchase patented medication, and they have the earnings to show it. Negotiations over blockbuster drugs are high-profile and often result in restrictive, exclusive formulary arrangements. You've got me-too drugs, barely innovated drugs, patent thickets, blah blah blah.
This indicates that drug makers have a lot of market power. Even outside patented drugs specifically, insulin is provided by a relatively small number of suppliers, who would also have market power, and probably exercise it.
The market is incredibly opaque which makes it impossible to even determine true prices, let alone true costs. I worked in pharmacy for a while, and I've never seen such an incredibly restrictive environment, and I am not including the HIPPA requirements. I never saw a contract, even when I was in the middle of contract disputes: I just winged it. I had no idea what drugs actually cost. I saw adjudicated drug prices, but even those weren't REAL drug prices, because the actual drug prices were calculated by a DIFFERENT group, and there would typically be extensive negotiations over who actually owed what.
I suspect the people who even thought they knew the "real" drug costs did not actually know the real drug costs, because there would be a separate volume discount adjustment calculated by a separate group. The people actually assembling the P+L, I imagine, would only deal with summary data and would also not be able to determine actual costs. I suspect with all this going on, even the CEO wouldn't know what a drug actually cost and what it actually earned in revenue and what the actual margin was, outside of a few key drugs.
My access to data was substantially limited as well with Business Intelligence queries defaulted to only gather a certain amount of information at any single time.
To me this seems like a lot of rent-seeking by powerful interest in a relationship-driven market, and if you don't have a lot of the existing relationships, you don't even table stakes. Bezos and Buffet couldn't compete in this market space, so this to make suggests a heavily manipulated market.
I might also just be super cynical, YMMV.
Regarding wholesale companies as a whole getting more powerful, not surprising, but I wouldn't draw analogies from health care or pharmacy (and they aren't the same market) to other markets. They aren't the same.
I have a question about options and short squeezes. Why don't options have an alternative satisfaction to limit potential losses.
Why does the short contract require that the shorter return the stock as the only option? Why not have the shorter able to either return the stock or thrice the current market value (or some other number)? This would limit potential losses, and protect the person loaning stock to some degree.
This would provide some insurance. It would also come up so rarely that it would have miniscule changes in the price of short contracts..
If someone wants to limit their losses, they usually just hedge their position by buying options that will have the same effect. e.g. they could buy an option to purchase the stock at a later date for 3x the current price. The option would be relatively cheap since it's relatively unlikely, so it's effectively what you are describing.
Among the several things I enjoy are when people do a good rant about something or someone who is WRONG. And here is a great one, from a blog I've newly discovered - the Renaissance Mathematicus. It covers a couple of my favourites: history, religion (Catholicism) and tearing the paper off the wall to fit in all the ways this hapless individual is getting it wrong 😁
First, we have the name of the poor wretch what wrote the book: one Professor Timon Screech. And you thought Charles Dickens was extravagant with his naming schemes! The gentleman in question is a Brummie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brummagem) so that makes it even more delicious. Contemplating whether he is addressed formally as "Professor Screech" or informally as "Timon" by those who must interact with him is a tiny moment of joy.
Secondly, he is an art professor at SOAS (which for those of you like myself who had no idea what this acronym means, is the School of Oriental and African Studies, the older name by which I *had* heard of it) at the University of London. He specialises in Japanese art and culture of the Early Modern Period, which covers roughly the period from the beginning of the 16th century to the early 19th century. He may indeed be the divil an' all when it comes to Japanese art, but when it comes to science and history...
And that leads us on, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, to our third point: the matter in hand, the book what he wrote, " The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art and Money in the English Quest for Japan, 1600–1625" and the said Renaissance Mathematicus' review of it.
Which is not very gruntled, let me tell you. I urge you to go and read it for yourself, preferably with the beverage and nibbles of your choice, to savour the entire thing. It's always a pleasantly ecumenical experience to read an atheist hauling someone over the coals for getting it WRONG about Catholics/Catholicism, especially when it involves our old pal Galileo. If you need some coaxing to read this, let me whet your appetite:
"I have looked at the phrase, as telescopes became a central battleground between Rome and the Protestant churches numerous times, from various standpoints and different angles and all that occurs to me is, what the fuck is that supposed to mean? It is simply put baloney, balderdash, poppycock, gibberish, hogwash, drivel, palaver, mumbo jumbo, rubbish, or even more simply, total and utter crap! I’m not even going to waste time, space and effort in trying to analyse and refute it, it doesn’t deserve it. Somebody please flush it down the toilet into the sewers, where it belongs."
Now, I'm not recommending this on polemical grounds, though it is a happy accident. Rather I wish to share the enjoyment of real history/science going up against pop-culture history/science. Good luck to all!
Dumb people who think they are smarter than everyone else can refute well researched ideas easily with comments such as "it's all bullshit" and then go on posting wacko ideas on "how it really works" misunderstanding just about everything they just read and feel like they're smarter than everyone else.
I have moderate/severe anxiety. Herbal tea doesn't do much for me. I used to take some prescription meds but nothing really worked so I don't take anything now.
If you use any caffeine, consider taking it with L-theanine supplements to blunt the "jittery" effect it produces.
Breathing exercises can help. I like this one:
https://www.drweil.com/videos-features/videos/breathing-exercises-4-7-8-breath/
You might want to look at Scott's recommendations: https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/03/general-notes-on-supplements/ (search for "best supplements")
Global extortion schemes would no longer be far-out scifi.
I'm not sure if you're referring to this, but Starlink is already a thing.
And when they have slurped up the market, and no fallback option has even close capacity, Kessler syndrom strikes.
Even in LEO, satellite internet has enough added complications that it can't really compete with terrestrial options at any level of density. Starlink's edge will be in underserved rural options (incl. against existing satellite providers) and areas where existing levels competition has proven ineffective.
First of all, I'm not sure direct air capture qualifies as technocratic. It's technological, but random people with enough money can do it in their backyard. It's not imposing anything on nonconsenting people or demanding legibility or anything like that.
That having been said, I support it. I'm hopeful it will have the same order-of-magnitude cost reduction as solar, and that eventually governments that want to fight global warming will be able to just pay for it directly. I also think we'll need something like that to start reversing climate change even if we actually manage to reduce new emissions. I'm also excited about Project Vesta, which if it works (big if) might give us the next ten years of cost reduction in one go. Their team seems a bit weird/inexperienced, so I'm interested in hearing if people here think they're legit.
In terms of geoengineering, I have the very boring take that it's an obvious combination of good and so dangerous I'd be nervous about doing it while there are any other options available. The exception is seeding iron to cause algal blooms. That seems like something you can do on a small scale, then scale up, without long-term changing the levels of any important atmospheric gas. I don't know why more people aren't looking into it.
I don't know anything about suphur dioxide injection and would be interested in learning more.
What would be a good introductory resource to read on biochar? I'm currently embarrassingly confused on two points.
1. My current mental model of charcoal creation is "chop down tree, heat up while deprived of oxygen, the end" and my instinctive response is "wait, why are you chopping down the tree if you want to reduce atmospheric CO2". (I think the answer might be "you replace the tree with a new tree, this is figuring out how to stop the carbon that's in the used-up tree from becoming CO2 again which is why you aren't, say, feeding it to cows." Also, should I be thinking of grass instead of tree?) On which note, does it matter what you do to the biochar afterwards? Traditionally charcoal would be used for burning, but doing that would seem to defeat the purpose; does using it as a soil amendment also somehow end up defeating the purpose?
2. At one point I was trying to understand why composting was touted as being greener than landfills for the things that can be composted, and that argument boiled down to "composting involves aerobic decomposition, landfills will have anaerobic, you get worse greenhouse gases from anaerobic" -- which seems conceivable to me as a non-biochemist, but then why is the pointedly-anaerobic charring process better?
"I think the answer might be "you replace the tree with a new tree, this is figuring out how to stop the carbon that's in the used-up tree from becoming CO2 again which is why you aren't, say, feeding it to cows"
Right. A forest in its natural state is a steady-state carbon sink - it holds X tons of carbon that would otherwise become atmospheric CO2, but it doesn't *remove* X (or even X/100) tons per year. For every ten trees that pull one ton of carbon out of the atmosphere, one dies and decays and puts ten tons back in the atmosphere. But if you can convert dead trees into something that doesn't decay, then the forest becomes a constant carbon-removal machine.
Using biochar as charcoal would obviously defeat that purpose, but if you bury it, great. There's probably a limit to how much you can "bury" in the cheap easy sense of just plowing it into the soil (and incidentally increasing the fertility of same), and how long the biochar will endure if it is left in the upper layers of the spol, but at the margin at least it seems useful.
I feel like it doesn't make economic sense to bury carbon fuel when we're also still digging up carbon fuel. Like, instead of burying X tons of charcoal, why not reduce coal mining by that amount?
There are reasons involving transport and crop yields that burying biochar may make economic sense relative to burning coal and obviously after fossil fuels are phased out then it will make more sense. As for present day economics, my understanding is that most burned wood is either used for fuel (ie EU biomass regulations deforesting Georgia, local fuel use etc.) Or burned to clear farm land (ie rainforest slash and burn). The later would be more carbon friendly if done to produce biochar.
I admit I'm not certain, but it seems unlikely that direct air capture will be more efficient than a method like Project Vesta proposes, simply because the CO2 concentration in air is about 400ppm, and it's so much greater in the ocean.
FWIW I have it on good authority that Project Vesta may not have properly worked through the potential side effects of their proposal on the chemical composition of the oceans. If I understand it correctly, the cautionary argument is: olivine rock like all rock has a bunch of impurities in it, some of those (e.g. heavy metals) have bad ecological effects if you get enough of them in ocean water, and enhanced weathering at the scale they propose might cause those effects.
There are also unresolved questions about the emissions required to transport that much rock by sea to all those beaches, but those seem more straightforward both to calculate and if needed to work around (since we will want to lower shipping emissions anyway).
We (Beeminder) are funding carbon capture via https://stripe.com/climate which includes Project Vesta (plus Climeworks, CarbonCure, and Charm Industrial).
(I would say that Stripe thinking they're legit means they're legit.)
For sulphur dioxide injection, I recommend the book "Climate Shock" for why that would be something of a desperate hail mary. It's a cheap way to quickly cool the planet but would have bad cascading consequences.
I think we ought to have a flat carbon tax that goes in both directions. So if you release a tonne of CO2 you pay $x but if you suck out a tonne and turn it into magnesite or Paulownia biochar, the government gives you $x.
Beware the Cobra Effect! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect?wprov=sfti1
Thank you for posting this, I hadn't heard of the effect.
Good to keep in mind, but if they charged money every time you crate a cobra (as proposed for CO2), that would seem to nullify the perverse incentive, no?
Well sure, but that presumes perfect global surveillance and enforcement.
I think these are good policies worth doing, but they need to be realistic about how messy and complex the realities will be.
Like the Northern Ireland "cash for ash" mini-scandal. Subsidies for renewable energy usage - in this case, burning wood pellets for heating - meant that canny operators found they could make a small but tidy profit wasting heat (e.g. on empty milking parlours or cow byres) and claim the subsidy from the government agency, as the subsidy was actually more than the cost of the fuel. The only time I ever felt sorry for Arlene Forster because she underestimated the amount of cute-hoorism out there 😁 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_Heat_Incentive_scandal
The carbon tax already assumed global surveillance and enforcement. That won't be perfect but let's say you don't get the subsidy unless your whole supply chain is legible. Unlike with cash for ash, we're subsidising something that's actually good rather than merely less bad than fossil fuel heating.
That would be a more persuasive proposal if anyone had any accurate idea of the net externality from producing CO2, hence the appropriate tax. In my view we don't even know its sign, although many people claim to.
Increasing CO2 has a bunch of effects, some positive and some negative, of uncertain size. It's easy to pretend you know the answer — just give high estimates for the negative effects, give low estimates for the positive or don't mention them. Thus everyone talks about excess mortality from hot summers, which is surely real. Almost nobody talks about reduced mortality from milder winters, also almost surely real and probably larger. Everyone worries about loss of useful coastal land due to sea level rise, almost nobody talks about increase in habitable land as temperature contours shift towards the poles. At multa caetera.
Direct air capture of some kind is a necessity, even if all human CO2 release halted tomorrow there is already more in the atmosphere than is a good idea.
Reducing incident solar radiation is an excellent idea, and is in fact one of my personal pet crazy ideas(tm). But I have always been wary of the potential unforeseen consequences of things like atmospheric particulate injection. The right way to reduce global temperatures is with a sunshade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade), many fewer unknowns in the effects and easy to reverse if something unexpected does happen since it can just be boosted to a holding orbit where it no longer blocks any sunlight.
I recently read that perhaps the most promising technology for sequestering carbon is something called "Enhanced Weathering". How it works: (1) Pulverize volcanic rock. (2) Deposit in on world beaches.
Because volcanic rock is newly formed, it has no carbonates yet. The pulverized rock will weather very quickly because of its large surface area, taking carbon from the ocean and air, and converting it to carbonates on the rock. Eventually, the carbon ends up as rock at the bottom of the ocean. Another benefit is that it de-acidifies the ocean, which is increasingly acidic as it absorbs atmospheric carbon.
I've read that at scale this technology could capture one ton of CO2 for much less than what would be a "reasonable" cost per ton of carbon emiited, say $15 or $20.
I think the economics of carbon capture here are important to keep in mind. As an approximation, oil costs about 55$ per barrel (but this price varies a lot), and a barrel of oil produces about 750 kg of CO2 (taking the entire supply chain into account). Total global CO2 emissions are about 33 gigatons.
So if we could get carbon capture costs down to 20$ or so per ton of CO2, it wouldn't be too punishing compared to the oil price and the economy as we know it can survive a CO2 tax. Then we could solve global warming merely by creating a new trillion dollar carbon capture industry, e.g. toughly twice the size of Wall-Mart.
Personally I would like to see a system where oil producers are taxed based on production, starting with a low value but rapidly increasing it to about $20 per barrel. Saudi Arabia et al won't like this, so diplomacy is needed, but I hope western nations could be quite firm and not promise too much in return. This money should be earmarked to emission reduction and carbon capture projects with efficient CO2 removed per dollar spent ratios. The public procurement process needs to be updated to avoid bad projects, this is a hard problem but low-picking fruits can hopefully be taken easily. (We should stop consumer carbon taxes and inefficient emission reduction strategies.)
I read that as "miffed hot take reacting against percieved misrepresentation of my community" followed by "the other side actually cares and were having a real conversation now"
Yeah the lack of edit button is problematic. Apologies if the prior comment is worded in such a way as to be insulting.
One day I will make the greatest video game series ever made and put all the world's initiatic secrets into it for public consumption.
Agreed. It's excellent and very academically rigorous with real experts.
This is basically what Stetson Kennedy did to the Ku Klux Klan - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stetson_Kennedy#Infiltrating_the_Ku_Klux_Klan
Yes but I can't infiltrate every occult group, so I will have to find some other way to gather all the initiatic secrets.
William Poundstone's Big Secrets, Bigger Secrets, and Biggest Secrets might be a good place to start, though they're a few decades old. One of them (don't recall which) discusses Freemason codes and rituals, for example.
Thanks. I had the complete Golden Dawn rituals at one point (with forward by Israel Regardie) but it got lost in a move. Lots of ground to cover.
You can just buy the secret rituals of the OTO, fwiw. The book is called Secret Rituals of the OTO.
All the world's initiatic secrets might be a bit over ambitious. There's lots of very obscure initiatic groups - e.g. not many know about the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.
I suspect a lot of "secrets" are the same. There's only so many profound seeming statements about the universe available, just wrapped up in different ritual trappings.
Not quite what you're talking about, but my fraternity and another organization I won't name have identical secret handshakes.
This may be a particularly difficult secret to invent, because of the constraints: the secret element must be clear to the other participant if they know the trick, but invisible to the other participant if they don't, and also invisible to observers who don't know the trick.
I recently had a coworker who was married to a Mason. Her take was, "Sure there are secrets, but the secrets are boring."
South Park did this for Scientology.
Why did you rename the blog?
Slate Star Codex had two letters 's'. Astral Codex Ten has one.
And an 'n'
Astral Codex Ten is an anagram of Scott Alexander. I don't know where Slate Star Codex came from.
It was also an anagram, just not quite right
What do you believe: that the author of Unsong got a very important anagram wrong by two whole letters? Or that SSC is anagram for something other than Scott Alexander?
I've seen a lot of complaints about Substack's comment handling, so I went and created an extension that helps with some of the issues. Features include options to load all comments, highlight new comments, jump to the parent comment when collapsing a thread, and use the old SSC styling. You can find it at https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks.
It's only compatible with Firefox/Chrome, but if you're a Safari user, you can find some of the pure CSS fixes at https://gist.github.com/Pycea/73eeee25ff4f697b76c0d3d36035c749 and load them yourself.
What was your motivation for making extensions for two specific browsers rather than a single universal userscript?
and would you be open to a PR making a third build/release target for that?
Yes, if you can add support, go for it.
It's the exact same code for each. The problem is that the distribution has to be different for each.
Ah, I think I see what you're saying. Tbh I'm not a web dev, and this is what I'm familiar with. There's definitely room for improvement.
Any idea how to make the "top" sorting a direct sorting of comments by number of votes, not whatever its doing now
No idea what it's doing. And trying to fix it is a bit difficult because if it detects a change in the comment structure, it rebuilds them. Sigh.
This is glorious, and you are a wizard
Works great so far! One small issue/question: the Permalink can't be opened in a new tab by middle clicking (nor from the context menu), nor can I copy the link address, as it doesn't seem to be a regular link.
However, the permalink is always the same as what the date links to, isn't it? If so, it's not an issue (and then the permalink is also somewhat superfluous).
Yeah... the permalink was actually faked with CSS so I didn't have to manually add an element to every comment, so it doesn't act like a real link. Though given I'm already doing that with some other stuff now, I may update it to behave normally. In the meantime, it is indeed the same as what you get by clicking on the date.
Can you make it so the "~new~" indicator is running text? Right now it appears to be treated like a bullet point so I can't search for new messages.
Currently (0.6) searching for it works in Firefox, but not in Chromium.
The ~new~ text is now searchable in all browsers. (You have to manually update.)
Can you add something to auto-alter the string "~ n e w ~" (without spaces) inside of comments to something else? ;)
(There are tilde variants in unicode: ∾ or the combining glyphs 0x1dc9 0x360 .)
This supercedes the Stylebot fix, right? Get rid of that and install yours?
Yes.
To answer your other question, altering the new indicator text in comments isn't a big priority, it's unlikely to appear anywhere else outside of this thread.
It's weird that we don't talk more about age. I'm in my mid thirties and a lot of what I used to see as something like "deep flaws and inadequacies in humanity and society" are actually more parsimoniously explained by "there are a lot of young people who have not yet experienced the world yet nonetheless have opinions and the capability to act in the world". Young people, of course, have a right to exist, but I wish that I could filter (or sort) Internet comments sections for poster age, or, even better, for how many books the poster has read.
I do that a lot, actually. I was as dumb as humanly possible. I suspect I feel something similar about my current self in 30 years. But I'm pretty confident I'm headed in the right direction. We'll see, I guess.
Dumb is curable! And kids – everyone really – usually have at least a few great insights about something. They're easier to (find and) appreciate IRL tho.
I got super interested in politics after Bush/Gore and the Iraq War runup. I was tech-savvy, and I loved going on message boards and talking about politics. I was also eleven years old. I have often wondered if any of the people talking to me realized they were talking to a pre-pubescent child (I had a pretty advanced vocabulary for my age), and if not, if they would have modified their tactics since many of my undoubtedly weird positions were on account of....I was eleven.
I also try to keep in mind, when someone online is making no sense to me, that they could be a child.
It's hard to say. CW suffers from a few problems:
1) Arguments as soldiers
2) People often legitimately don't want to change
3) The people who really need to talk, need to do so outside of an argument.
Arguments are really bad at changing people's minds. They're even less effective if everybody is bad at arguing/reasoning. Like, on the margin some improvement can exist, but others really need Jew Lasers.
The simplest problem is that it's not policy, but is wrapped up in tribal identity, and the tribes are in existential war. Much of the heat would go poof if the tribes could know they can live how they like to, but both are very intent on telling the other tribe how to live.
Would it? I mean, if the tribes were isolated from each other, sort of like how the US is geographically & socially separated from Saudi Arabia, then I could see that. However, a lot of the conflict is really about attitudes, valuation, and status.
If it was "living how they like to", then the problem would actually be policy. But maybe I misunderstand your point.
Partly that. They're two tribes stuck in the same box, and to some degree or another both view the other existing as an affront. The woke especially, but neither's really happy. If they had their own boxes, it might be easier. They are very geographically separated already.
Same here! If I go looking, I can even find my posts from that era. I sort of wonder whether the fact that my then-opinions are out there under my name makes me more likely to endorse them still - I find that the things I've changed my mind about aren't things that I took a public stand on.
Thankfully (since my parents were cognizant enough to teach me to be anonymous), none of what I said was under my real name or traceable back to me, but it is something I wonder. I know I'm much less willing to change an opinion--even about something stupid, like a guess about an upcoming plot twist in a TV show--if I've publicly defended it, and I get resentful when I'm wrong.
I don't support "de-anonymizing" the internet, or whatever people call it when they want to force accounts to use real names, but I have wondered what effect requiring the verification of age might have. Like, if there was a little flag next to an account that said "this person is 15", how would that change people's interactions? "Kid gloves" are a thing in real life, but I'm not certain they would translate when you're not face-to-face. But it could be an interesting experiment!
On a complete tangent, the expression 'handling with kid gloves' isn't actually about children at all. 'Kid' gloves are gloves made of leather from a baby goat (a 'kid'.) Such leather is very supple and fragile, and the gloves were used as high end fashion-wear. They were notoriously easy to tear though, so someone wearing them might handle things rather gingerly.
The glove leather is (or I should say was, it's probably illegal nowadays) actually made from a fetal goat, believe it or not. Once the kid was born its skin would already be too thick and pelted for glove purposes, so they would... extract... the kid goat before its term.
> Like, if there was a little flag next to an account that said "this person is 15", how would that change people's interactions?
15-year-old me would have fought this tooth and nail, and I suspect a lot of the stealth-teens-among-us of today would probably be in agreement. Some things don't really change.
I think some people really and honestly forget how they truly saw the world when they were kids, and adopt a weird sort of "adult-self speaking on behalf of kid-self while trying to coddle kid-self" perspective in lieu of the real deal.
When you're a t(w)een - *especially* when you're the sort of t(w)een who gravitates towards nerdy/geeky things - pretty much the grossest thing imaginable is being condescended to by adults. Teen years are all about that drive to usurp the sheltering and protective illusion and experience "the 'real', un-phony world". See Catcher in the Rye. Of course, as we age, some of us would certainly jump at the chance to go back to that cocoon :)
This. I experienced the most incredible liberation finding the forums on Prodigy when I was twelve (this was all the way back in the Bush Sr. administration, before I even discovered Usenet) and realizing that people would talk to me as just another person and I didn't have to worry about the condescension they'd apply to a kid. Even when, in retrospect, my opinions would've deserved some condescension.
Oh yeah, I definitely would've attempted to find some workaround. I was rather precocious, and gravitated toward adult company as I struggled to relate to my peers. I adored getting attention and compliments from people who I knew were far older than me online.
That said...I still do wonder. I was also exposed to some pretty vitriolic rage (repeated private messages of graphic images of war crimes committed by Saddam Hussein) that I like to think people wouldn't have sent if they realized they were harassing an eleven-year-old. Public ages would be an interesting experiment, at least.
What effect do you suppose having a mandatory but unverified age tag would have? Personally, I'm not terribly experienced with the comments section but I think I'd place more trust in ACX readers than the general population to use it responsibly.
> I also try to keep in mind, when someone online is making no sense to me, that they could be a child.
I've had that uncomfortable experience a few times on twitter where I follow someone, and then they make some comment that makes me realise they are 10 years younger than me, and it feels creepy in some indefinable way to be following them.
I'm reading another blog, which has a commenter everyone else seems to think is a nutcase. I think he's actually a high school kid trying to sound profound.
I feel this about the recent gme stuff. Ten years ago I probably would have been fully on board with the mainstream reddit take. I actually think my current way of thinking is better on the meta level, not just object-level right, but this makes me suspect that the only real solution for "people are dumb about stuff" is to wait a few years for them to wise up.
(This also makes me wonder what percentage of boomer politics I'll eventually age into. I'm pretty sure I'm right about my main disagreement points of cars and housing, and that I understand where they went wrong, but there's probably a bunch of unknown unknowns).
For what it's worth, you helped me (mid 20s) temper my thoughts on it a bit? I don't know exactly what views you changed, but you definitely made me more hesitant about laughing at it and caused me to wonder more about long-term impacts.
It's really hard to say? Older individuals are also frequently "dumb about stuff". Maybe fewer actually bet on GME, but they likely also have less to gain from high-risk moves now anyway.
I think some people naturally gravitate towards self-improvement, and I think many people learn from specific mistakes. But learning from specific mistakes, and learning not to screw up their own lives, doesn't prevent them from being "dumb about stuff".
Came to this thought about three weeks ago (and about 15 years ahead of you.) Young people are not very good humans.
I think most humans are probably not great humans, but a lot of people go from being bad to good as they get older, via the process of making mistakes, accruing regrets, and allowing guilt to correct their behavior going forward. Some people are immune to guilt, so it's not reliable, but a good directional rule of thumb.
They are less experienced, not less good.
https://lithub.com/cory-doctorow-kids-use-reason-adults-rationalize/ :
"Adolescents, after all, are capable of being first-class reasoners, but they can never have the context that comes with life experience. That’s why you get child prodigy mathematicians and chess-players—disciplines where you can start from a small, easily taught group of precepts and use your reason to build up towering edifices upon their foundations—but not child prodigy lawyers or historians or doctors (Doogie Howser is science fiction: fight me!). No matter how smart you are at 11 or 14 or 17, you just haven’t had enough time to do the reading to practice law."
No, I meant what I said. Less patient, less considerate, less wise, less selfless- in aggregate, and on the whole.
I'd put that in the category of developing competence but not a moral judgment.
That stuff is mostly frontal lobe - executive function stuff. Impulse control, emotion management, ability to defer gratification, ability to shift focus from self to other and back again, as well as the usual planning/decision making/organizing skills. Some of this is probably pushed by life experience, some just takes time to develop.
We know that frontal lobe development doesn't reach usual 'adult' levels until, on average, age 25-ish. It also seems that the less responsibility/fewer real-world consequences someone experiences, the slower the frontal lobe develops. So the extended adolescence of today's teens/young adults may actually be slowing that down. (Not forgetting that WE, the adult world, are the ones encouraging young people to extend their adolescence, by continuing their educations. This leads to reduced work/financial responsibilities in this age range compared to their parents' and grandparents' generations, later marriage/child-bearing etc. So it's not because they are slackers!)
Knowledge doesn't equal wisdom. Although it's probably a pre-req.
Disappointingly, I actually don't think it matters that much.
A lot of the variance I see in behavior depends on raw capabilities and expressed traits, but not age in a direct manner. I think experience matters, but I suspect that a lot of people have experiences they are not able to analogically apply, or get experience that isn't that helpful.
Or to put it another way: I've met many very smart and sophisticated high school students and undergraduates, and many inadequate elders and retirees. I suspect the sophisticated high school students will age into even more sophisticated adults, but that "speaks intelligently on complex topics" is multi-variate enough to not be reducible to age or even # of books.
Age is probably a useful attribute in combination with other information. The nerdy types at a younger age seem like less physically attractive and less charismatic cut-outs of the Les Mis crew, while as they age they tend to get somewhat more less willing to construct barricades at the drop of a hat. Seems to play a different role with normies.
Making a somewhat out-of-left-field analogy, stars along different sequences evolve very differently as they age, but the age of a star alone does not tell you whether you are looking at a black hole or a white dwarf.
I will say that the older folk DO have experience that generalizes and is easy to parrot. Phrases like:
-A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush
-The days go slow and the years go fast
-There's nothing more valuable than time
-Youth is wasted on the young
This is great life advice. Great stuff. Young people probably won't get it. But it doesn't really tell you a damn thing about the optimal deficit when the national debt burden is already 140% but unemployment is 15%.
Might need to get a bit more....dare I say...technocratic for those kinds of questions.
If you mean "age can predict certain things if we have certain other known facts" then yes, that's likely true. ( https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200313-how-your-personality-changes-as-you-age ) Scott has his own list here (as mentioned by savegameimporting: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/does-age-bring-wisdom/ )
However, the problem is that if our targeted metric is "deserving discussion participant", then we don't have a strong sign that age is a great metric. Or to put it another way: there are some very unwise old people, and some very grounded young people.
To give a sign of my age: this bothered me a lot during my 20s. Ironically, I wanted for my elders to clearly be better equipped to keep up. I had many intellectual sins(& I knew it!!), but most of the time other people really couldn't police them. The issue that I identified from seeing people of all sorts of ages, is that age isn't a strong predictor. There are very ideological older people, balanced younger people, many people who start intellectual journeys later and others who are highly prodigious while young.
(To be clear: I don't expect a 17 year to be a PhD sociologist, but most conversations I see online are between dilettantes)
See Scott's thoughts on this, if you haven't already: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/does-age-bring-wisdom/
I definitely feel like I've gotten more insights as I've aged, but very few of them are things I could write down in a way my younger self would understand. Its very different to read the sentence "systems are often complex and counter intuitive" and understand it on a surface level, vs understanding that on a more intuitive level from having dealt with systems.
I agree the internet makes that hard to filter for. I've found conversations with friends of my age cohort more useful. People much older than me tend to be sufficiently mentally different I don't get that much from conversations with them even if intellectually I realise they are probably smart and have a lot of experience.
This reminds me of a Community episode. Annie (a 23 year old over-achiever go-getter) asks Buzz (a near-elderly retired private detective and current community college teacher) to get a bulletin board posted in the cafeteria.
Buzz tries for about a minute, intuitively understands that the custodial staff will not do its job, and gives up.
The episode's plot is Annie refusing to give up and going to department after department, brokering deal after deal, to get her bulletin board installed. The plot is based on Annie not having Buzz's intuitive understanding. Annie can't get it. She's never experienced this before.
Buzz eventually just does it himself.
Some things you just learn from experience.
The difficulty comes in situation-specific learning though. I would agree that a 23 year old fresh out of college is more likely to struggle in a CEO position than a Senior Manager or Director. They have less domain-specific knowledge. But many adults don't have the right domain-specific knowledge in many areas either.
I mean, there is a trickiness here in that many people actually never understand "systems are often complex and counter-intuitive" despite having the right IQ level to do so. There are young people who find dynamic systems relatively intuitive.
Then again, I don't have quite the same problems with age. I like unconventional people more than I like younger or older more specifically people. There can be a certain rigidness with older people, and there can be a flightiness with younger people, but a lot of that is just a personality variance.
It's been said that humans think by talking. It's useful to talk to people your own age because you're socially licensed to say the dumb, half-formed things that are kicking around in your head, air them out, see if they hold up. See if even *you* still believe them after they've left your mouth. Talking to older people is different because the social license isn't quite the same.
This (social license among young people) probably used to be the case. I am not sure that it still is the case in an age of permanent social media records and intense moralistic judgment-fests about everything under the sun, and I worry that that will have bad effects on the intellectual development of digital natives.
https://welldotdotdot.wordpress.com/2019/06/24/we-cant-expect-adult-behavior-from-unsupervised-children/
I think a lot of this comes down to the nebulous "lived experience," and there's more to it than just age. I've never had to worry about putting food on the table or figuring out how to make rent. My opinions on the lifestyle of people on WIC should be appropriately discounted.
I agree. It's close to the question, "how hard have you been tested by life?" You're more likely to get tested more and harder, the older you are, but it's only a correlation. I don't know *many* elderly idiots, but some for sure.
Age may correlate with experience or wisdom, but I definitely would not take it as a strong indicator. “Books read” sounds like it would correlate stronger
As long as among those books there are a lot of novels! Not quite like living many lives, having many different experiences, or getting into the heads of many others, but probably as close as we can get.
I like thinking about changing disposition with age as natural selection's response to the explore-exploit problem for a population. This ezra klein podcast was really interesting to me in that regard: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/115722613
I agree if by young people you're referring to minors. Late teenagers are often quite smart and compromising/flexible (not all, obviously, but I would think a larger share than of previous generations, thanks in-part to the internet).
I would like to see a biopic about Glenn Gould staring Christian Bale. Can someone please get this request to the relevant parties? Much appreciated.
All I have to say is that this would be amazing
I presume you've seen _Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Two_Short_Films_About_Glenn_Gould)? Colm Feore may not be Christian Bale, but it's well worth a watch.
James Franco looks the part more.
He sounds like an interesting guy, but what's the story exactly?
I would like to plug the podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/astral-codex-ten-podcast/id1295289140
Hey Scott, I loved the taxometrics post! I'm excited to go through the Paul Meehl papers that Beauchaine summarizes. I have a question about something you wrote:
> a few [psychiatric disorders] may be objective distinct categories, especially schizophrenia, narcissistic personality, and endogenous depression
Can you elaborate on why you think NPD belongs on this list?
No, I copied that from Beauchaine. I agree I would have put endogenous depression and schizophrenia on the list but not NPD.
Also, I hope you'll write up / alert me of anything interesting you find.
I am not 100% sure if the etiquette here but here is a link to a podcast I did talking to Kyle Harper about the Fate of Rome. You may be amazed to learn how many Romans died in the plague of Justinian (spoiler alert) ie 50% or more. And then climate change. As Kyle says ‘they couldn’t catch a break’. Anyway hope it’s ok to promote it here.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/7554679-the-fate-of-rome-with-kyle-harper
My understanding was that the 50% figure is not well accepted and that commentators at the time would just use large numbers to signify "a lot of people.". There was an In Our Time podcast recently on the Plague of Justinian where some academics discussed this point.
Ah! This was indeed a shameless piece of click bait on my part and Kyle Harper was much more nuanced in our discussion. That said it does now seem to be clear that it was the same disease as the Black Death where the mortality rates are much better established. As for numbers we do have eyewitnesses who were actually there though of course the ancients weren’t always totally reliable on numbers! Interested to hear it was discussed in IOT. My podcast is even better if only because it is twice as long and the presenter comes from even further to the north (Edinburgh!) than Melvyn does. All joking aside I’d be thrilled if you found time to listen and more so for any feedback. I’m relatively new to this so keen to learn what I am doing right/wrong.
I recently came across this advertisement ( https://traderhq.com/motley-fool-stock-advisor-best-investment-recommendation-service/ ) from Motley Fool which claims that their stock-picking service beat the market by a factor of 5x over almost twenty years.
I assume this shouldn't be possible, so what's the trick? Did they have hundreds of stock-picking services and only advertise the one that worked (seems unlikely, both of the analysts involved beat the market individually while also working together, which should make this harder to pull off)? Are they lying outright? Something else?
Two guesses: (1) they made a couple good picks early that keep on giving (say, Amazon and NetFlix); (2) they measure their success as "buy when we said to buy and sell when that thing reaches the top."
This piece (maybe out of date) suggests there's a "run multiple services and close the losers" aspect as well:
https://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/on-retirement/2012/10/04/motley-fools-foolish-advice
> It closed its Running with the Market Portfolio after it lost over 60 percent of its value. It also discontinued its Retiree Portfolios, Boring Portfolio (which gained 7.7 percent during the tenure of its portfolio manager, versus 63.6 percent for the S&P 500), Harry Jones portfolio, Foolish Four Portfolio (after it ran tests of the Dow-dividend strategies which turned out to be “not encouraging”), and Workshop Portfolio (due to a dispute with Value Line).
Motley Fool has a very unique way of investing that is analogous of 'closing the losers' without actually closing the losers.
The 'David Gartner' way of investing is to place a multitude of small bets on a wide variety companies in nascent industries (for today, think cannabis, sports betting, cybersecurity, gene editing, etc.) The key to this style of investing is to **never** sell. Place your bet and let it ride. Even if most bets go to zero, they were small and don't hurt overall. By investing early and continuing to ride winners, you capture the vast majority of the gains.
The majority of returns come from a minority of stocks: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stock-market-gains-come-from-few-top-performers/
The Fidelity accounts with the highest returns were those investors who died:
https://www.businessinsider.com/forgetful-investors-performed-best-2014-9
Many early bets + small bets + never selling = alpha
As a mathematician, I'm embarrassed to be confused by this, but I'm confused by this. My understanding of "the market" (as in "beat the market") is that it's the perfect implementation of "buy everything and never sell", so what does Motley Fool do to beat the market? I thought the forgetful-investor argument was a good proxy for why you should just invest in an index fund and be done with it.
I think the idea here is decide "weed is a growth industry", so you just buy a bit of every weed stock you can find. Hopefully 20 years down the road when it's gone from a $2 billion industry to a $100 billion, you capture that upside even though many of your individual investments went bust. So it's more like picking winning and losing categories of stocks, rather than specific winners and losers.
Since the majority of gains are capture by a small handful of stocks, one of the 'easiest' ways to beat the market is to invest in those winners (often called "100 baggers" (see book by Chris Mayer)) and hold.
However, this isn't easy. Many people don't identify them early enough or they do and invest, but sell too early. For example, Amazon has had multiple >50% or greater drawdowns over it's incredible run. Many people cannot psychologically hold through that and even if they do, once the stock remakes new highs, they'll sell then. And even if they don't, they'll probably sell at the next 50% drawdown.
This is why a certain type of article ("You'd have $X if you invested $1,000 in [insert company] IPO") aren't very realistic, because the vast majority of people cannot handle the ups and downs of a true meteoric stock.
Many early bets + small bets + never selling = alpha. The never selling part is extremely difficult.
For a more recent example, see Tesla. For *years* long time bulls like Cathie Wood and Ron Baron were ridiculed. In both 2019 and 2020, it had a 50% drawdown. I'm sure many people sold during either one of those time periods and subsequently missed the massive run it has had over the last ~10 months.
Disclaimer: I do not own either Amazon or Tesla stock (except through index funds).
"Many early bets + small bets + never selling = alpha. The never selling part is extremely difficult."
Many early bets + small bets is just another way to say portfolio diversification. "Never selling" is just another way of saying "don't look at your portfolio", which isn't that hard to do. With a maximally diversified portfolio, you get an alpha of precisely 0, because at that point you're just following the market. That is actually a valid (and very good) investment strategy: put all your money into a target date retirement fund that follows total stock and bond indicies (i.e. VFIFX), automatically add money every month, and never look at your portfolio until the day you retire.
If I never sell, how do I get my money out?
"My understanding of "the market" (as in "beat the market") is that it's the perfect implementation of "buy everything and never sell", so what does Motley Fool do to beat the market?"
1. You don't buy everything, just some things
2. You sell
Default explanations:
1. If you have a dice-throwing tournament with ten thousand competitors, someone is going to end up rolling sixes five times in a row. I.e. these guys are just the luckiest guys on the market.
2. Motley Fool has secret access to insider info or other unfair advantages.
I have a friend who’s had a very successful ~20 year career as a hedge fund manager, and attributes most of it to luck.
Not all of it - he says you need a base level of competence and certain personal qualities that allow you to keep the job before you’ve fully proven yourself as well as manage other people etc. (and he doesn’t count possessing those qualities those as luck, for whatever reason). But he used the dice-throwing example as well.
(He also thinks inheritance tax should be 100%. I’m not sure he’s a totally typical hedge fund manager tbh.)
Just about the only person to consistently beat the market long term has been Warren Buffet. If you look at his strategy, it's actually remarkably simple - research stuff reeeeealy well, buy good long term bets and wait.
There are actually a few more than just Buffett out there - here's a post on the most successful money manager records. Just for reference - the underlying index is usually estimated to return 9-11% percent over a long time frame.
https://twitter.com/DividendGrowth/status/1354095162079719425?s=20
Yea, the idea that Buffet can handily beat the market and no one else can is not how talent distributions work. But it is rare.
I wonder how much Buffet benefits from soft insider information. I don't mean illegal insider information, but the fact that he can talk one on one with the CEO of any company he wants to invest in. He's not just sitting in on quarterly investment calls like everyone else. Obviously he's also a smart investor and businessman but I'd imagine he gains additional advantage by knowing the people involved as well as the network around them.
Yes, his reputation is definitely a factor to his success. Not only does it grant him more information and opportunities, but Buffett has a "halo effect" around him as well. If he invests, everyone assumes it must be a good investment, and so its price goes up, making it a good investment!
Of course, he didn't start off in this position. He still had to climb to the top through some combination of skill and luck.
I've subscribed to their Stock Advisor service for 8-9 years and have been pleased with the results. My two biggest recent wins with them were Shopify and Appian.
The company was founded by two brothers and they each share one new pick per month. One brother has a better record of past performance, so I mostly just buy his stocks. They have several other products too, but I only have experience with Stock Advisor.
Who is the brother with the better record?
David Gardner
I just realized that the link Scott shared also names the brothers and their performance.
Their business is acquiring users. They absolutely close the losers and promote the winners. The way they do it is legal but probably shouldn’t be. The asset management industry has done a decent job self-enforcing standards around marketing, but there has always been a massive loophole for newsletters.
CFA GIPS is the gold standard for investment marketing standards. It is voluntary, however.
Motley Fool had a big internet fight years ago insisting their "dogs of the dow" stock-picking method beat the market, and their fans keep on insisting that back-testing was the ultimate test and kept on coming up with weird tricks to perfectly tune it to old data. The experts said this was nonsense but their fans hated the experts, using the same attacks populists always lose.
The recent GME thing reminded me of them.
One Weird Trick people like this can use to "beat" the market is to just take a ton of risk, in a not immediately obvious way. If you have a 5x leveraged position in the market, you should get 5x the market in return without any violation of the EMH to explain. Over a long enough time period though, you'd expect to see some enormous losses in down years. Based on this paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321057021_Evaluating_the_performance_of_the_Motley_Fool's_Stock_Advisor it looks like that might be part of what's happening. Against a matched portfolio in terms of industry, market cap, etc, (which should theoretically be similar in risk) they overperform by 0.2% in monthly return. That's nothing to sneeze at over 14 years (almost 1.4X over that term), but maybe easier to attribute to luck than a factor of 5X!
At the end of the comment from Anna Stansbury, she says she would be open to doing a guest piece on your blog. Is it possible to reach out to her about that? Wage stagnation is an especially fascinating topic to me and I've been curious about it since you posted the initial piece.
I'm nervous about asking famous people for things (especially two years after they offered) and lots of famous economists have already written discussions of wage stagnation in lots of places, so I'm not going to push this. If she sees this and still wants to write something, she can email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com.
Drifting from the point, but as a crude metric of fame:
https://twitter.com/annastansbury 8.45k followers, rather active
https://twitter.com/slatestarcodex 63.9k followers, barely active
You may be more famous than her
Has there been a thread yet about not-coincidental anagrams of Astral Codex Ten? (It's not an anagram of Slate Star Codex, so old threads from there don't count.)
There has, on the subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/l4qs0j/titles_passed_over/
Thanks!
During the first few months of COVID I got back into researching old blues music via YouTube and Spotify. I read Ted Gioia’s Delta Blues which I highly recommend. His book inspired me to write up my journey into appreciating old country blues music, the deep blues, in hopes that it might help someone else learn to appreciate them too. Part one is about the greatness of Son House.
https://stonewatercontext.com/2021/01/25/deep-blues-son-house-hollers-slide-guitar/
I've read several of Ted Gioia’s books and recommend them all.
How likely is it that the far future will be terrible, and what do you all think are the most plausible S-risks, i.e. risks of extreme suffering being created in the far future? Also, what do you all think of Brian Tomasik's list of his top donation recommendations?
https://reducing-suffering.org/donation-recommendations/
Also relevant:
https://s-risks.org/
https://reducing-suffering.org/near-miss/
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N4AvpwNs7mZdQESzG/the-dilemma-of-worse-than-death-scenarios
There is lots of suffering in the world right now, mostly due to either poor economic systems (too much capitalism (as opposed to last century's too much communism)) or some states being too large (and therefore too insulated from the masses) and/or not optimised to match actual geographic and demographic zones (and therefore seeding conflict).
It seems too much focused on very niche issues like AI, focusing on world peace and eliminating poverty would both be more beneficial, sooner, and assist in the AI problem once solved.
The phrase "very niche issues like AI" is odd in the context of catstrophic/s/x-risk. It may be very niche in terms of who is paying attention to it, but it is not at all niche in its consequences.
As for assisting with AI problem once other problems are solved, this seems to imply that AI will not be a problem for some time, and does not need very much in the way of advance action. I'm interested in arguments for why it is a long ways off or why it is better to put off action on it, if you want to share.
Very niche in that the potential for an AI catastrophe is very low and at the earliest case is still pretty far off. There's plenty of time to do world peace and global poverty first, both are simple problems to solve and could be done in 20 to 30 years.
I think a rogue general AI would not be a problem in that time frame because of the energy costs such a "brain" would require to feed itself would make it an easy target. Technology still has a really long way to go to match the power efficiency of a human brain.
Also, everyone who has some issue they are really concerned about figures out some way to make it sound like it will be the end of civilisation if their pet issue isn't put into top priority *right now*. It looks a bit ridiculous to an outsider.
"Very niche in that the potential for an AI catastrophe is very low and at the earliest case is still pretty far off. There's plenty of time to do world peace and global poverty first, both are simple problems to solve and could be done in 20 to 30 years."
What confidence do you have in this position? Many experts disagree with you. If today's suffering is X, what do you think the potential suffering could be from super-AGI? What if you do a "net-utility calculation"? Do you think present-day human life is net-suffering and what do you think the net might be in an s-risk worst case scenario?
On the topic of world peace, here are some articles Robin Hanson wrote on the likelihood of big war returning in the distant future.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/07/will-war-return.html
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/07/big-war-remains-possible.html
The fact that the potential for an AI catastrophe is very low is balanced by its extreme disutility.
Also relevant:
https://centerforreducingsuffering.org/on-fat-tailed-distributions-and-s-risks/
http://s-risks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Is_most_expected_suffering_due_to_worst_case_scenarios_.pdf
I've been dipping into Brett Weinstein's podcast. One thing he harps on pretty frequently is making distinctions between the word "theory" and "hypothesis." His line is that "theory" should be used for things like "the theory of evolution" and not for "string theory."
This is an argument I might have made against creationists in 2009, but it strikes me as a little obtuse these days. It would certainly be nice if everybody agreed to use common terminology, but I don't think you can really prevent meanings from drifting.
Furthermore, I don't think Weinstein's definition matches scientific usage. "Theory" in many fields seems to mean something like "model" or "framework," rather than hypothesis. Or, more verbosely, "a thing that explains existing data and can be manipulated to generate predictions."
What are your general thoughts on the podcast?
I find something about it somewhat off-putting, although I can't really articulate why.
I generally enjoy it, but there's an occasional WTF moment that makes me ask "why am I listening to this guy?" (I say guy, because these moments usually come from Weinstein and not Heying)
One example: his Unity campaign was embarrassing. No comment on the worthiness of the effort, but did he really think he could make this happen in 2020? Incredible naivete!
I've also seen him say some silly things re:tech censorship. For example, he tried to post a URL on Twitter, but missed the https or www (I forget which). Then when the link didn't work, he insinuated that this was the tech companies trying to censor him.
My general thought about Brett is that he's very committed to proving he's intelligent-- sometimes he picks up on something valuable, and sometimes he's just nitpicking.
The Unity campaign was nonsense as a political project, there just wasn't enough time. I don't think it has good odds for doing much as a longterm organization, but we'll see.
I think Brett and Heather don't make sense about gender. They are usually careful to explain what they mean, but so far as gender is concerned, they just seem to make assertions.
Is anyone else subscribed on gmail getting the weird issue where half the substack updates go to the regular inbox and half go to "promotions"? I'm trying to get them all in the regular inbox but not sure how.
I wonder how heavily Google weights "one user moves a message to Promotions." I manually put all my Substack and Patreon notifications into Promotions, since I don't want them mixing with billing statements and such in my Updates tab.
(If they weight it heavily, then maybe it's my fault)
As a last resort, you can always create a filter that categorizes them as Primary.
Yeah I did this and haven't had trouble since
I've only just read for the first time the "Against Steelmanning" article linked from the bottom point. It's old so I'll just post my thoughts on it here.
The idea of "steelmanning" probably is misused and badly-done pretty frequently, but I think there are a few steelman-ish techniques that are more-clearly helpful and can be implemented even if you're not a rhetorical genius:
- If you notice your conversation partner make a deductive error but it's really tangential to their main point, or you know of a different thing they *could* have said that would work better, don't bother attacking it. If they continue to bring it up, make the point that it's just not relevant and try to get back to the main topic. This effectively lets you contend with a more parsimonious version of their argument.
- If they provide outlandish hypotheticals or assumptions as bases for their argument, see if you can offer up equivalent bases that at least *sound* less absurd. This will make it clear (to them and yourself) that you're not winning via personal humiliation or anything like that. This doesn't have to be a condescending thing where you're telling them their argument is silling; it's to help you think through what they're saying, too.
- Sometimes the person you're arguing will misconstrue your argument for a more common, similar-sounding, but different argument. In this case, enthusiastically concede that if that *were* your argument, they would indeed be correct to attack it and you understand why, before explaining what you were *really* saying.
and others.
No disagreements. The problem with all of this is that it's a matter of finding the right balance. For example: I'm probably not going to try to develop a steelman of QAnon. It is absurd. I can probably restate it more intelligently, however, it wouldn't lead to better conversation, only an elaborate way of signalling that I'm intelligent. However, with relatively intelligent interlocutors, there's an obligation to seek the best interpretations, and try to steelman.
A major issue is in the difference between the apologetics for the absurd vs the exploration of ideas with people of different perspectives.
The way you deal with steelmanning things that you find fractally absurd is realize you're coming from wildly different assumptions. The election fraud story is fundamentally based on mistrust of mainstream sources. I've had great success convincing people election fraud didn't happen by "what do you think - do you think that the GOP and several Trump appointees refused to invalidate the election because they're secretly democrats? After this campaign?" type logic.
Most people try to argue against people they disagree with from assumptions they presume they share with their interlocutor, but actually don't. You could come up with nine thousand CBO reports of there being "no election fraud" - and someone who believes in QAnon type election fraud stories wouldn't even care. He assumes that the people who measure election fraud are either A) extremely bad at their jobs, or B) deliberately in on the act.
I agree with your point about how arguments diverge. I also agree that one should go after the weak points of any argument to test out how that argument works.
However, I don't think "GOP & Trump appointees" is the steelman here (if we define steelman as "most defensible" argument, rather than "argument that is most reasonable") For QAnon it's something more like "God's plan has been thwarted by Satan's wide-ranging demonic conspiracy to keep Trump out of office, which is why we need to support Trump's prophet Rudy Giuliani" (partly joking of course). And the problem with this is that while this is an absurd claim (from most premises I consider reasonable) counter-arguments tend to either fall off, or get too complicated. (Ockham's razor + grand theory of society + X,000 grounded fact claims).
To that point, it's sort of a question of what is the point? There's nothing wrong with doing an audit of "trust of mainstream media". However, rationality is about improving one's own reasoning, not strange puzzles.(even if the latter happen to use reason)
One problem I sometimes hit is that if I point out a (perhaps non-fatal) error in my opponent's argument in order to improve it, they will still feel attacked and argue the point even though their central point is not under attack. And not we're arguing about some irrelevant detail, me failing to convince them that they can concede it without it threatening their conclusion.
As a result, people in the 'arguments as soldiers' mindset often don't want to be steelmanned. In fact, the more minor the point you're correcting them on, the more they think you must be out to get them.
It's a really frustrating problem and I feel like I need to spend potentially years guiding someone out of the 'arguments as soldiers' mindset before steelmanning or anything like it makes any sense to try.
At a sort of tangent to your point about people defending their work ... . I concluded long ago that a good way of forcing me to be self-critical of my writing was to have a word limit. If someone else tells me "that point isn't really relevant to your argument," I defend it, because it's mine. If someone tells me "write it as you like, but you only have a thousand words," I now start looking for shorter ways of doing things and inessential arguments that can be cut out.
I'd always interpreted steelmanning as making an effort to bridge inferential distance - attempting to fill in the unspoken assumptions and logical steps in another's argument. This is really hard, and such attempts will, as Ozy points out, often look indistinguishable from condescension or plain old strawmanning.
The issue I have with the article is on the meta-level. I feel that putting the concept of steelmanning itself on an ideological bingo card is just about the dirtiest, most commons-destroying move possible, burning one of the few bridges though which honest discourse can be conducted. It's not even done for the sake of gaining argumentational ammo against some scary and harmful society-spanning idea like patriarchy. As far as I know, nobody but rationalists even uses the term "steelmanning", so this just looks like evil for evil's sake.
I see it more this way too. I think of it as saying that our natural tendency in arguments is to nitpick something we disagree with to death. But rather than doing that and calling it a day, instead let's be charitable and try to see whether we can read the argument in a way that doesn't die so easily.
In real life, conversations and arguments don't fill in every gap and certain audiences will be inclined to fill in those gaps in ways that the author didn't intend. Trying to fill in the gaps in a way that simultaneously 1) fits the author's original intent and 2) makes a strong argument seems like a very positive thing. Obviously if you just entirely ignore 1, you're not engaging with their argument, but as long as you're trying to do 1 and 2 it seems laudable.
Try this technique instead. Restate their position as you understand it, in your own words and with what steelmanning you think is accurate and the better form of their argument, and ask them if that's their argument. People often respond very well to genuine attempts at understanding their position. If you form it as a question, they can reply positively or they can correct your misunderstanding of their position. If you have their position correct, but in a stronger version, they are far less likely to feel attacked and may be more open to further discussion and counterpoints.
I'm not sure that 'steelmanning' really qualifies as honest discourse.
What I mean by that is that when you 'steelman a position,' you're converting a dialogue or a potential dialogue into a monologue. If you don't understand why someone finds a particular argument convincing then that's the time to get them talking and see the underlying logic or at least the emotional resonance. But the idea that you can build a better argument for them sidesteps that opportunity to learn and maybe even change your mind: you begin having firmly established your intellectual superiority, and by the end once you (inevitably) defeat the 'steelman' of their argument you've constructed you've given yourself license to ignore anything further that they have to say. It's a profoundly intellectually arrogant and dishonest way of arguing.
That's not meant to insult Scott, after all I wouldn't be paying him if I doubted his good intentions. But in terms of humility he's grown quite a bit and I'm not sure that if he were starting his blogging career today that the idea would be something that would occur to him. It seems like yet more questionable legacy software from the Rationalist community/
Something I have trouble putting into words: Flying Spaghetti Monster, Flat Earth Society, The Pirate Parties - quite different movements - but there is a rejection of seriousness in them. I have been in a Pirate Party - and they actually try to be serious with just a funny name (like: there isn't any law that a party needs to be entirely serious, we have a funny name, but we are serious about ***) - so maybe this is not an extreme case of it. There were other parties with funny names - in Poland we had a famous Beer Friends Party just after the end of Communism. Flat Earthers seem to pretend to be serious, because this is funny, but I don't think anyone of them actually believes in flat Earth (as in they would really base their actions on that belief if there was no audience).
I think that, with enough exposure, the name just stops being funny in the slightest and people forget that it was supposed to be funny in the first place.
Yeah, "Flying Spaghetti Monster" has become sort of a lame cliche and a negative stereotype of Internet atheists. Similarly with a lot of pirate memes (e.g. ninjas vs. pirates, Talk Like a Pirate Day). For me they evoke an era of Internet culture which is generally considered a bit embarrassing and "cringe" and "randumb."
As for Flat Earth Society, there are real Flat Earth believers out there, but it's hard to distinguish them from the ironic jokers.
Well yeah - I became tired reading stuff with "We pirates" every second sentence. It was stuff I believe - but 'we pirates' ... I just couldn't stand that.
So I guess you couldn't get accustomed to it? I guess it differs per Pirate Party, but what I mean is, when a group with a silly name does serious things, their silly name starts to sound normal to the group members, just from its use in a serious context. "We pirates" starts to sound as normal as "we Tories".
I suppose it wouldn't happen as quickly if you double down on referring to yourself as 'pirates' at every opportunity but I bet it happens nonetheless. Even an animal rights group called the Itty Bitty Kitty Committee could announce the opening of its one hundredth weekly meeting with every member keeping a straight face.
Hmm - yes. Others seemed to cope with it much better - but for me it did not work.
The name "Anonymous" was a joke based on the fact that everybody on *chan boards is redundantly given the handle "Anonymous" when you post.
I have a lot more doubt than you about the Flat Earthers. I know some in real life, and they seriously believe in it. Perhaps they're not really putting their beliefs to the test, but they definitely aren't just joking about it.
There are definitely pretend "Flat Earthers" as well as serious ones, likewise for just about every fringe theory you could name. Poe's Law in action!
You know - it would not be as funny if others could tell that they are just pretending.
That's true. However, if you are willing to hold the act to the point that you lose friends and ostracize family, then I'm not sure you're allowed to say that it's just pretending.
there are a fair number of actual Flat Earthers in the United States. it’s not good.
my explanation is just that some people believe in every conspiracy, and now Flat Earth is among the conspiracies that YouTube will show to you.
Regarding the nostalgebraist post:
The legibility vs. fidelity axis is something which can purposefully be selected for based on political needs.
My favorite example is in carbon dioxide emissions reductions. The "cap-and-trade" model is widely promoted by the elites. It's even possible that it's the most [economically] efficient way to perform this task. In contrast, a carbon tax is much more legible. Everybody knows how much everybody else is going to be paying.
Cap-and-trade might be subtly modified by the implementation to benefit preferred groups. The number of credits issued every year becomes a political issue which might have financial implications which can be leveraged by the elites, regardless of whether they provide the benefits to the public they are supposed to.
Cap-and-trade is also popular because it hides the pain from the consumer/voter. If your cost of fuel goes up at the pump from carbon taxes, you notice. And that makes the rabble mad. Instead, if costs become really diffuse via cap-and-trade, it becomes a lot harder for the public to notice or reason about. It's also easier to argue that "you" aren't paying the costs, but some "rich company" is, while ignoring network effects.
This means that the illegible option is preferred because it allows the type of policy desired to be enacted with hopefully less political backlash, and possibly more options for insider dealing by elites.
I mean, you're not wrong, but I think it also has to do with having a (relatively) recent successful example. If memory serves, we got rid of lead in gas by using cap and trade, rather than a lead tax. This is in the same domain, so it makes since to reach back for a similar policy.
Of course, maybe the reason we did cap and trade with lead instead of a lead tax was to hide the costs from consumers, so maybe you're right coming and going.
There are a lot more successful examples more recently than that in pollution control maintenance for ozone depleating chemicals and acid rain precursors.
I think cap and trade programs are conceptually easily understood by the public making them partially legible. Their association with increased costs is much harder to parse because they intentionally sacrifice something like a linear cost increase to minimize the overall cost of a phase out.
That said the distribution of credits etc. is a political mess for a lot of these programs and they seem to be most legible in situations with a limited number of large producers in a fixed number of industries.
For green house gas emissions this last bit would translate into cap and trade for the fossil fuel industries rather than for end (industrial) users which then raises the question of why not just have a carbon tax.
I was thinking about the same thing about pedophilia. There evidently aren't any reliable statistics about how common ephebophilia and hebephilia are, but it's probably pretty common among men, and blends into pedophilia.
Do people think of these conditions as separate things, or are those just the age groups that Ancient Greek happens to have words for?
Yeah, it seems pretty clear to me that it's a continuum.
I never thought about it that way, but that's a good point. Another thing to consider is that there are exclusive and non exclusive pedophiles. (Exclusive pedophiles are only attracted to children while non-exclusive pedophiles are attracted to children and adults). There might be slightly more non-exclusive pedophiles than exclusive ones, they are just less likely to be offenders. This would support that pedophilia as a continuum, too. I wish it was easier to do research in this area.
Interesting, I've never looked into it, but my intuitive model is pretty strongly opposite to that.
That is, it just seems sort of obvious to me that the onset of sexual maturity (in the object of attraction) would be the main driver in defining the range of "normal" physical arousal. The reasons for seeing adult attraction to immediately post-pubertal teens as dysfunctional are essentially sociocultural, and don't exist in many societies. It could be that you also have some window around puberty where a certain subset of adults get especially aroused by incipient signs of sexual maturation as opposed to the full-blown thing, but that's still a kind of by-road connected to the main highway.
Arousal that's *completely unconnected* to physical signs of pubertal sexual development just seems like a fundamentally different kind of process. Again, I'm not asserting any of this definitively, just describing what's a pretty strong prior for me in the opposite direction.
"...and don't exist in many societies."
Throughout many societies, until just recently, child marriage was not seen as too aberrant.
(I tried to supplement this comment by quoting the instructions Mohammad gave (or received?) WRT how to have sex with young children. I couldn't find it, and didn't want to pursue the search too long, for obvious reasons. But maybe you already know what I'm thinking of.)
In the historical societies I'm familiar with that practiced child marriage, it had nothing to do with subjective sexual attraction on the part of the older betrothed. We're very deep into the context of marriage as a form of inter-familial diplomacy, very far from the modern notion of marriage as institutionalizing romantic infatuation.
I haven't ever read the hadiths regarding Muhammad's marriage to Aisha, and wouldn't have any confidence in my ability to interpret them contextually if I did. I would be wary in general of treating any document whose explicit intention is to describe its subject as transcendently pure and above the plane of normal human existence as a guide to typical historical practice.
It was hardly "transcendently pure." Something about squeezing the penis between the girls thighs without full penetration. And then there was also the instance of Mohammad expressing sexual attraction towards a 3 yr old, and promising to marry her as soon as she was old enough. Again, I'm warry of doing a sufficient search online, and if you've never heard of these things, then I'll leave it at that.
But there are plenty of other examples. Homosexual pedophilia in the ancient world was widespread. The age of consent for much of the world had long been around 12 (normally prepubescent in the past). Erotic literature in Victorian England that often focused on prepubescent girls. Etc.
And 'lolicon' comics in Japan are *presently* rather popular.
I agree with you that the general level of unbotheredness in many historical societies about the sexual abuse of young children is -- not to put it more harshly -- quite extraordinary from a modern perspective. One of those things that really does make the past another country.
That said, I'm not altogether certain where the argument is going. Nobody disputes that pedophilia exists. If certain past cultures permitted it, then that would obviously show up as people with pedophilic inclinations acting upon them without inhibition, or at least under a quite different set of strictures than today's categorical ban.
But that wouldn't prove anything one way or the other about whether pedophilia was mostly taxonic or "more of a continuum."
Yeah, I suppose that statistics on how many many girls were married at what age would do. Having a low age of consent might indicate that it was just a matter of "unbotheredness." But if eg. 5% of marriages at one time were between 12-14 yr old girls and far older men, that would be evidence that pedophilia is (or at least was) dimensional.
Has anyone figured out how to do a memex for art creation yet?
Since RoamResearch and Obsidian have been gaining momentum as personal knowledge management, I've found it invigorating to take notes in such a connected way. I'm trying to figure out how to move my creative pursuits to those kinds of programs that might let me use association and connections as a building block.
I'm struggling to do things that aren't just text and images. I want to find connections form wonderful fonts with palettes I find striking to write new poetry. I want to connect snippets of songs I love to the sounds and timbre of intruments in my DAW. There seems to be a lot of value there and I'm excited to see if it materializes, but I'm still putting my feet on the ground.
They seem to be ways of organising documents with links between them. That sounds an awful lot like hypertext.
If you're into the whole Unix/Linux thing, I think you could start with VimWiki or emacs Org Mode (or one of the clones of these things) and hack on support for other things using typical Unix hacky methods. For example, a vim keyboard shortcut that opens up a file manager to select a song on your hard drive, and if you've got an open source DAW like Ardour or another extensible one like REAPER you can probably add keybindings to scripts the other way.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/01/what-its-like-growing-family-never-lies/617773/
A man was raised in a family where honesty was the default, eventually learned the value of social lying, and has made some compromises.
Very good discussion of the article:
https://www.metafilter.com/190233/Off-puttingly-truthful-growing-up-in-a-family-with-no-filters#8058010
A wonderful memoir from that discussion:
*****
I had a great-uncle that was a little bit like this. He wasn't constantly announcing his internal states to the world (or telling people true-but-rude things about themselves), but he was every day of sixty-five before he realized that "Hey, how are you?" was usually social wheel-greasing and did not require a comprehensive response, and he did not DO small talk. I mean, he was deeply interested in other people and wanted to hear about their families and pets and things, but he'd never be like, "How're your kids?" He'd be like, "How is your son Bob, whom I believe just turned eight, and last time we spoke he was struggling with some bullies at school? How did that work out?"
He had no kids of his own, but he was an absolute Pied Piper to the children of the family. Have you ever been four, or eight, or ten, and had someone take everything you said absolutely seriously and ask you questions to understand your thoughts and answer all your questions as honestly and completely as possible? It. Is. Awesome. Children are such little learning machines and it's almost impossible to be a parent or caregiver and never brush anything off. I mean, I feel like I take children more seriously than a lot of people do, because I LOVE watching how they think and I always have, but I must brush my own children off a dozen times a day (especially in quarantine), because it would not be possible to function as an adult caregiver if I didn't. You have to kind-of pick and choose your moments for deep engagement, and your moments for "Please stop asking questions for ten minutes so I can ensure you have food and clean clothes."
My great-uncle never did that, with anyone. This was fantastically amazing for children, who all worshipped him. In our teenaged years, it alternated between being wildly awkward and embarrassing, and this enormous refuge where even your self-obsession with your own minor and fleeting problems was interesting to him -- although he was highly likely to point out more than a few awkward truths you were trying very hard to avoid. By the time I was in college, I learned what all the other adults in our family knew, which was that you could not toss of throwaway lines around him or bring up a topic you didn't want to spend an hour discussing. (And I think this is one of the lovely functions of having a large extended family, where everyone loves you and is used to accommodating your foibles, and might roll their eyes but don't really mind.) I learned later that he was seen as kind-of a local gadfly, because he'd go to every town council meeting and school board meeting and ask a ton of questions, just because he wanted to know. And he'd been an engineer in the war (one of the last engineers who came up without even a high school diploma, just with learning on the job; he got his GED after he retired), and he used to stop at construction sites on his walks after he retired and strike up conversations with the foremen and grill them about everything going on. Every time he went by. He deeply did not understand why city council members or construction site foremen might not want to have in-depth conversations about everything, all the time.
He was married -- his wife was by nature just pretty chill about everything, and also deeply interested in other people and in deep discussions. (Although she knew how to small talk and grease social wheels.) He built their house himself (and it was some Frank Lloyd Wright-ass shit, which I did not appreciate until much later on, it was fucking gorgeous), and it was like this magical wonderland, they had AN ENTIRE TWENTY-FOOT WALL of bookcases twelve feet high, stuffed full, and every book on them was fascinating and every book on them was well-thumbed and annotated and most of them were stuffed full of news clippings and magazine articles that related to the topic of the book. And we were allowed to read any of them, whenever we wanted (anything inappropriate for kids was probably up high), and if we asked questions, he'd answer. They had an extensive theological library -- they were very serious Presbyterians who were constantly writing letters to their Session and the Presbytery and the Synod and sometimes even the General Assembly, and various scholars, with quotes to applicable theologians, and receiving them back with the same -- and that is 100% one of the reasons I ended up studying theology. I mean, when you let a 10-year-old loose in a library full of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, with news clippings and annotations and letters from eminent theologians, and answer all their questions, and explain that Bonhoeffer got killed for trying to kill Hitler, SHIT HAPPENS AND PEOPLE GO TO SEMINARY.
Anyway, I got a little distracted. Having someone who takes everything seriously and honestly, and is always honest in return, is both an amazing gift AND more than a little exhausting and infuriating. Small talk is important, and being able to dodge questions in social situations is REALLY important! It is legitimately difficult to spend time with someone who just DOESN'T ever lie or elide or smooth over or dodge, because there's a lot of stuff in human interactions that's just better of ignored. Most people don't want to be laid bare ALL THE TIME about ALL THE THINGS.
But it was also legitimately amazing, especially when I was a child, and it changed the course of my life -- and honestly not just mine. Almost everyone on that side of the family had their lives changed by him, because if you said you were interested in photography, he'd talk to you about photography unless and until you said it didn't interest you anymore, and read books about it so he could discuss it with you, and (because he didn't have his own children and so had more disposable income than his siblings and in-laws) buy you your first camera, so you could grow up to be an award-winning photographer for a major American newspaper. Or a lawyer. Or a musician. Or the first Ph.D. in your family, and he'd read your dissertation, and go to the library and interlibrary loan all the books in your bibliography, and read them until he understood what you were talking about. And then ask you about it. At length.
(He was 90-something when he died, and his wife had died 20 years earlier, and I have literally never been at a funeral so large for someone in their 90s, it was not just generations of family but like the whole town council and school board and a bunch of local union guys and every Presbyterian for 50 miles around and he took up dulcimer in his 80s and cut a record and dulcimer nerds came from all over the US and it was CRAZY.)
The interesting thing about the great-uncle is that his goodness and his difficultness are extremely entangled-- you can't have one without the other.
And thanks for the welcome. I'm afraid I don't recognize your name. Were you using a different name before?
No problem. Your secret is safe with me, at least-- I'm not very good at identifying people from their prose.
That was a very interesting article, thank you for sharing. The description of the parents sounded rather similar to how I am trying to parent my children. I want to be able to answer all their questions honestly, especially the ones about taboo topics. I also want to be honest with them about how I'm feeling, especially the bad feelings. I don't know how helpful/harmful this will be, but it feels like the right thing to be doind.
I don't know whether you read the discussion at metafilter, but there are a bunch of subtleties. One is leaving room for both people to be in the conversation rather than just one doing all the expressing.
Another is figuring out how to live with people who don't have truth as a primary value.
For sure, I'm definitely not going to teach them that radical honesty is the only way to communicate. Mostly, I want them to know that they can talk to me about anything they want and I'll answer their questions as truthfully as I can. I especially want to plant seeds of trust while they're young so that when they're older and facing real problems they're comfortable coming to me for advice and help.
Very interesting story! That man sounds a little bit like my maternal grandfather, especially concerning his interest in other people's interests-- mention offhand that you're getting into seashells or photography or religious studies or whatever, and he'd recommend every single book or media or associated item he could think of. He had a huge and eclectic library, too, where I spent a lot of time.
Looking at the article — I didn't read all of it — it seems to mix two different principles. One is not lying. The other is telling the truth, where the option is not telling it. I was brought up in a household where it was taken for granted that you should not lie, but not that you should say whatever you thought was true without considering whether it should be said. I have tried to bring up my children with the same approach.
It did mean that when I first realized that people I otherwise thought well of were willing to be deliberately dishonest I found it shocking, but I didn't see any reason why I should imitate them and still don't.
In my house lying is just about the worst thing that one of my kids can do, and my wife and I hold ourselves to the same standard (because kids are smart and would see right through us). We also teach our kids to be kind, to not share everything that might pop into our heads, and we do keep secrets when applicable.
In other words, I agree with your take. You don't have to completely remove your filter in order to stop lying. I have a job that requires keeping confidential information. I don't lie to people about what I know, I tell them the truth - that I cannot speak on a certain subject.
I don't want to open up the entire can of worms from https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5247#comment-1873899 but I have been curious about one specific point: did President Trump himself ever claim to be holding secret evidence about the alleged electoral fraud, or did that idea originate elsewhere?
I haven't seen his specific claims, but just a quick look at the numbers makes me think this can't possibly be true. The closest states (that the Democrats won) have a difference of about 10k votes: Arizona at 10,457 and Georgia at 11,779. After that you get Wisconsin at 20,682, then Nevada at 33,596. Even if you think that all of these are votes switched from Republican to Democrat, halving the amount of fraud needed, that's a minimum of 38,257 bad votes necessary.
And then you have to consider that even switching all four of those states wouldn't be enough to change the election, having a combined total of 33 electoral votes, while Biden won with a margin of 36. The closest thing there is to a chance is if Pennsylvania is also switched, but that had a difference of 80,555 votes.
Trump made lots of claims of fraud in several different ways, so I can't say authoritatively, but I don't recall anything along the lines of "We have secret evidence of fraud and you'll be seeing indictments Real Soon Now" - that was just QAnon fantasy. (Presumably to explain how Trump could win even though all the visible claims of fraud had failed to go anywhere.)
His call with Raffensperger gave me the impression that Trump was taking his cues from social media rather than the other way around - everything he brought up in the call was something that had already come up in the news elsewhere.
Reminds me of the second strip down here: https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2021/01/08
:-)
What new therapeutic modalities are going to be a big deal in the next 10 years?
So, mRNA vaccines, immunotherapies, oncolytic viruses, antibody drug conjugates, cell therapies, gene therapies and of course CRISPR enabling all of these. Lots of very impressive medicine that is having a real impact on the standard of care from what it was even just a few years ago. The Moderna vaccine (an mRNA vaccine, natch) is maybe the most well known example and I believe it still has the best results against COVID compared to all the other vaccines available now or soon to be.
These are just the ones I know about, that are working their way through trials now and at least some will probably make it to clinics by the end of the decade. I’m curious what’s beyond that, what kind of new types of therapy might be waiting for us after 2030ish. Personally I hold out a lot of hope for a revolution in psychiatric care, maybe the BRAIN initiative will start to pay off by then. Maybe via direct stimulation of discrete neural circuits, something beyond just blasting the basal ganglia for Parkinsons.
What else you got?
This. Microbiome management. Add the close interaction of gut flora and intestines, and inflammation as co-factor in psychiatric diseases (depression, possibly schizophrenia) we might well see stool transplant plus diet as causal treatment for some severe psychiatric cases.
mRNA is promising for much more than vaccinations. Moderna alone has an impressive list of applications,* the others will not be too far behind. mRNA is a whole new continent!
* https://www.modernatx.com/pipeline
Not specific, but I'm hoping that research into reversing the effects of long covid will turn up important medical knowledge.
I thought this was interesting: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/pills-could-replace-covid-jabs-with-biotech-breakthrough/ZD3SHG43BNVOJVSQE2QAA6QF5Q/
David Friedman's question has got me thinking. Is microfluidics going to get big? Is it the sort of field that a mech eng grad with an interest in normal-sized fluids ought to be going into?
(1) Re: Vyvanse, I'm perfectly happy to think it's good reception is based on "uppers plus hype" but that linked study doesn't perfectly convince me because the gap in administration is "one hour later" for the pure amphetamine. The whole point of Vyvanse is that they are making it as non-abusable as possible: you can't grind it, snort it, inject it, etc. for the high, you have to take it by oral administration and you don't get that high.
It comes on slower, (probably) fades away more gradually and doesn't seem to have the same 'quick high then crash' profile, and that is probably a big part of why users like it (even if the lysine has nothing to do with helping anti-anxiety affects). So I don't think the reason is quite as simple as "the secret ingredient is hype" for its popularity.
There's also this little nugget which makes me go "ah, fudge off!" about the methodology:
"To induce greater subjective drug liking and mimic misuse, the selected dose of lisdexamfetamine was relatively high and above the upper recommended daily dose of 70 mg."
So they deliberately gave the participants a much higher dose than people on a prescription would get, with all the attendant effects of a stimulant that entails, then have the bare-faced cheek to go "nah, we didn't see any difference between this and speed"? I'm pretty ding-dong-dang sure if I rounded up a study group and poured a naggin of poteen into them, we'd see "there is little to no difference between this and drinking methylated spirits" but it's not the method you would undertake for the effects of "what about drinking 170 grams of pure alcohol per week" in order to set safe drinking limits (on a tangent, please look up the difference between Irish and British levels - I think Scotland is slightly different and more towards the Irish level, while the USA is more towards the English level):
"In Ireland a standard drink has about 10 grams of pure alcohol. In the UK a standard drink, also called a unit of alcohol, has about 8 grams of pure alcohol.
Some examples of a standard drink in Ireland are:
a pub measure of spirits (35.5ml)
a small glass of wine (12.5% volume)
a half pint of normal beer
an alcopop (275ml bottle)
A bottle of 12.5% alcohol wine has about seven standard drinks."
(2) Re: the technocracy posts, I have to say nostalgebraist is presenting much better what I've been trying to say, at least for this part (even if they don't find the entire argument very convincing even after steelmanning it):
"3. Mechanisms designed by this elite tend to leave out important factors in a way that matters practically. This happens for general “all models are wrong” reasons, but is exacerbated by the elite’s lack of communication with most people.
Even when communication happens, it is delayed by the need to “translate” the opinions of the masses into the language of the elite before the elite can respond to those opinions. And it occurs unreliably, depending on whether someone’s around and willing to do this “translation.”
I have seen this in action, where the Revenue Commissioners went around giving roadshows and seminars on the occasion of bringing in a huge updating and changes to how income tax is reported and deducted in Ireland. For my sins, as part of my job I deal with payroll which is why I got signed up to a couple of these seminars. And there was ONE thing EVERYBODY participating brought up as a potential problem, and it got completely stonewalled by the Revenue representatives. They didn't want to hear about it. The Plan was in place, it was going to be rolled out, and like it or lump it everyone had to adopt it. They didn't want to hear about problems implementing it (this was a human-level problem) and the very strong impression they gave, parroting the party line that "there would be no problems!", was "Man was made for The Plan, not The Plan for Man".
And that's my main problem with "let the technocrats run everything".
Nostalgebraist's interpretation seems to be over-emphasizing opensource-style end-user modification as the primary benefit of legibility, whereas (as I understood) Weil's original post was concerned with a broader range of potential benefits of legibility. For instance Weil said that legible approaches were more easily critiqued by a broader communtiy, which all-else-equal presumably encourages the democratic political process to settle on better solutions (i.e. with more feedback and less room for biases/errors to sneak in via obfuscation). Note these benefits have little to do with the local customization concerns Nostralgebraist emphasizes e.g.: "Weyl seems to want mechanisms that are easy to customize for different local circumstances"
Also you might think from Nostalgebraist's interpretation that Weyl was just making a suggeston that technocrats should voluntarily put more emphasis on legibility and perhaps sacrifice some fidelity in the process, which would be a reasonable suggestion, or at least worth considering. But in fact Weyl is pretty clearly suggesting that technocrats should be given much less authority, which seems like a terrible idea (e.g. transitioning control of monetary policy from the fed to congress, would reduce technocratic authority and would surely be a change for the worse).
Less authority to technocrats is a good idea, both as a rule, and in your specific example. Taking monetary policy away from the fed would be a welcome change, not because congress would necessarily do better, but because it would both do away with the notion that the decisions are objective and impartial and make the policymakers accountable (to the extent that representative democracy allows it). (What it wouldn't do is make non-experts craft the policy. Except, one hopes, in the extreme, yet unfortunately common in e.g. macroeconomics, cases where the "experts" are ostensibly failing.)
The US has already tried your suggestion with fiscal policy (congress controls it rather than Fed technocrats), and the results are far worse and more politicized than Fed monetary policy. Politicians benefit from cutting taxes and raising spending and from short-term economic boosts from deficits (even when there is no recession), so unlike the Fed, mainstream economic prescriptions are largely ignored; also, politicians are not held accountable for this, because the public does not understand economic theory, but they do feel the short-term benefits from this populist policy approach (as do various special interests).
Also, contra Weyl there is little sense in which congressional fiscal policy is more legible than Fed monetary policy, and in fact probably the opposite is true, since Fed policy is broadly comprehensible based on an intro macro text.
Couple of pop music questions -
1 You're So Vain, you probably think this song is about you - um, the song IS about him, in fact it's addressed to him. Am I missing something or are these lyrics really dumb?
2 We Built This City on rock and roll - why does it get so much hate? Not saying it's a good song - on a scale of 1-10 (with 10 = Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone and 1 = Sonny & Cher's I Got You Babe) I'd give it a 3. And the lyrics are pretty dumb. But there's plenty of worse songs that don't seem to draw as much criticism.
Re: 2 - I think it's down to its popularity. It was #1 on several charts, and people got sick of it. Maybe you liked it the first few dozen times, but eventually it was "overplayed' and you came to despise it.
The song is before my time, but in 2013 a strange set of circumstances found me at a private party where Starship was playing. When *We Built This City* everybody looked at their neighbor, groaned, and then sang along.
I suppose vanity isn't necessarily false.
On 1, I think the correct reading isn't "you're so vain that you think songs that aren't about you are about you", the reading is "you'll know this song is about you without being told because you're that much of a vain, self-centered jackass".
(Which might be correct, as one of the lead suspects for who the song is about did indeed announce it was about him)
(1) I took that as a back-handed swipe - "you're so vain, you think anything and everything is about you so even if this song *wasn't* about you, you would still think it was" and "even if this song is pointing out your flaws, you are so vain you will only take the good parts - e.g. I can get any chick I want! - and be smug about it".
(2) It's an okay song, but it's very of its time and wow, did Starship (formerly Jefferson Airplane then Jefferson Starship) go down the commercial pop-hit route from the days of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WANNqr-vcx0
I never heard any particular criticism of it, so I don't know about that, but maybe it's because it's very of its time (80s RAWK), the lyrics take themselves just that bit *too* seriously (singing about corporation games and selling out when you've just, um, sold out?) and the reputation haunting it of the ghosts of Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship trailing behind the new glossy incarnation.
I recall once reading a Rolling Stone (or something similar) list of Worst Songs, and being struck by how closely "badness" was equated with "false authenticity" -- as opposed to having an especially annoying hook or whatever. "We Built This City" was either #1 or #2 on the list. Basically, claiming the mantle of rock-n-roll purism while simultaneously defecting was the ultimate case of stolen valor for a certain kind of music journalist. Plus, the lyrics aren't "dumb" in an endearingly goofy sense, they have a sort of pretentious pseudo-sophistication that's actually just nonsense.
In other words, pretty much what you said.
Yeah, I think the problem is that (1) it's a Bernie Taupin plus three others song, so it's a hit factory production (like Stock, Aiken and Waterman) - something professionally extruded to be a hit, which makes the 'sincerity' of the vocals particularly fake and (2) the co-lead lyrics and the way they're mixed - Mickey Thomas is not as good as Grace Slick and maybe her voice wasn't what it had been in the past, but he overshadows her.
Criticising it is breaking a butterfly on a wheel because it's standard 80s AOR fare but yeah, it's not like the glory days of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrGSt5eDt9o
Argh, I meant "vocals" not "lyrics", Substack Y no edit function?
1) The song is about her.
Bingo. I never got this until my wife pointed it out. Now it's super obvious to me.
What I like about Your so Vain, is if you play it with a group of people, you can usually tell who is vain enough to relate to the song
1) The song was about three different people, yet, the one person who Carly Simon revealed that one verse was about, thinks the whole song was about him. So she was right.
Re: 1, I always took it as a kind of emotive Liar's Paradox: "I am SO NOT thinking about you right now!" It's meant to be wryly self-deprecating -- she'd rather not still be fixated on him, but she can't help doing it anyway, but at least she has the self-awareness to recognize that objectively he isn't really worth it.
She's declaring superiority on the meta-level: she's still invested emotionally in the idealized image of him that got her into bed to begin with, but now sees through it as a sham, whereas he thoroughly believes that charismatic persona is who he really is.
This is my reading of it also.
I think "We Built This City" was a victim of 2000s-era VH1's nostalgia TV shows (and stuff in that same genre) inadvertently creating a ton of things Everybody Knew about the 80s. A surprising number of opinions that became commonplaces over the last 20 years came from people watching Hal Sparks or Godfrey or somebody basically just say something to be funny off the top of their heads on "I Love The 80s."
I don't know if that's what tanked "We Built This City," but fully endorse the general hypothesis.
The Dunning-Kruger effect may be wrong, or at least that’s what this article posits. Curious what others think about this https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-kruger-effect-probably-not-real
There's an explanation that it seems to me the article is getting at, but never directly says:
If your true score is high, you're probably going to guess a lower score because most possible scores are lower. And if your true score is low, you're probably going to guess higher for the same reason.
I skimmed the link, but from what I've seen, it makes a good point, in that part of what people attribute to DK, is indeed a statistical mirage, but DK is more than that.
To explain the argument imagine two scenarios.
1- Imagine that everyone understands how good they are. We are measuring a very legible trait, and everybody not only understands how well they score, but also how well others score. For instance, we just did a test, we gave you your results, and everybody else's results as well. How would the graph score vs expectation of score look like? It would look like the line y=x.
2- Imagine no one has any clue about how good they are. We are measuring a trait that is completely ineligible such as how cute you look to inhabitants of alpha centauri. How would the graph score vs expectation of score look like? It would look like the line y= 50%. How cute are you to alpha centauris? I don't know probably about as average as any other human. Maybe they have a fetish for my body, or maybe they would find me disgusting, but my best guess is about average.
...
Notice that both answers are unbiased. Everyone is taking their best guess with the information they have. Notice also that in the second case the bottom half overestimates their cuteness and the top half underestimates it, both think they are average.
Ok, so how would normal traits look like for unbiased participants? That is, traits in which you know a bit about how well you do, but not perfectly. Well it would look like something in between those lines y=.5 and y=x. That is below average people would overestimate somewhat their score and above average they would underestimate somewhat their score. For some reason this is the lesson people take from DK and this is entirely a statistical effect.
...
But that's not what DK is about. What they show is that almost everyone overestimates their ability and just the very top underestimates it. In other words that people are biased towards believing they are better than they currently are. The average person overestimates their ability, the average person could not do that if they were unbiased. The very top are not wrong because they underestimates their ability, that would be just natural effect given lack of information. They are wrong because they don't underestimate enough. See for instance the graphs the author himself exibits.
Unbiased bots: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/files/oss/figure_2_1.png
Biased humans: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/files/oss/figure_1_3.png
Se e for instance that where the lines meet is about the top quartile. These people are right by accident, because if they were unbiased they would be underestimating their ability.
TL;DR: I want more non-US people to use Metaculus
Metaculus is a prediction site, where you earn fake internet points for predicting real-world events accurately. Unlike other prediction sites, no money is involved, and this is both a pro and a con when it comes to prediction accuracy. Honestly, at the moment it seems like mostly a pro - predictions there seem just as accurate as anything else, and it's very low-friction since there's no financial regulation involved. It's a lot of fun if you're that way inclined.
However, its userbase and hence breadth of questions, is currently quite limited due to most users being US-based.
For example, it seems that very few users of Metaculus are from Australia. In fact, I think almost all are in the bay area (google trends says 100% of search traffic is from California). When the bay area is asleep, Metaculus is dead, and when they're awake, there is still not much happening on the site pertaining to Australia or other-country-related questions.
I'd like to see this change. So, this is a plug for non-US people interested in prediction markets (though Metaculus isn't strictly a prediction market) to please check out Metaculus.
What's the incentive to use it? It seems to mostly be about getting points and therefore social status in the metaculus community, which is of no value to me if I'm not already involved. Vs if I want to discuss australian politics and bet on it there are more specific places I can do that and make money on it
a) it's fun, tautologically, if that's the sort of thing you find fun
b) the shifts in probabilities often follow new information being discussed by intelligent people, and is superior to the discussion elsewhere.
Australian politics polling just came out with 50:50 preference for the two major parties and yet SportsBet's odds have one party as a strong favourite - why? Should I just assume other betters are wrong and place a bet, or am I missing something? Metaculus is the kind of place for intelligent discussion of this, except for the fact that nobody there cares about Australian politics.
The fact that there's no money involved on metaculus means criteria can be specified a little less precisely with admins making a judgement call, and it's less important to anticipate all corner-cases in advance. This lowers the barrier to new questions, meaning metaculus has a lot of questions on a lot of topics.
Metaculus doesn't just have yes-or-no questions, it has "when will X occur" and "what will the value of variable X be on such-and-such a date" type questions too. This is just broader than other places.
So basically the places you could make money often don't have the same questions.
National polling in Aus is potentially misleading for the same reason that national polling in most democracies is misleading - what matters is the electoral maths, you need to win votes in the swing seats.
Personally, my crude odds would be very highly skewed towards incumbents of either party, because we got through Covid much better than the rest of the world and everyone is profoundly grateful for than. On the other hand, the next elections are still a long way away and it's entirely possible for major developments to occur in the mean time.
What artists out there are like Leonard Cohen? Bob Dylan and other folk names are normally suggested, but I feel few have the profundity of lyrics Cohen has. And he doesn't seem to neatly fit into the genre
You might laugh, but I'd suggest They Might Be Giants - they tend to have metaphor-rich lyrics that lend themselves to interpretation. Here's one that Leonard Cohen fans might like.
https://youtu.be/oTxpNmUjKUg
I don't actually know much Cohen besides the ones everyone knows, so I'm not sure how similar these are. But The Mountain Goats have great lyrics and a folky vibe. Silver Jews / Purple Mountains (both David Berman projects) also are gems in my limited experience, I always feel I should listen to more of them.
Maybe Mike Mangione and the Union?
Old Man Luedecke - http://oldmanluedecke.ca/
Ever listened to Townes van Zandt? He's got lyrical profundity if I ever heard it, though most of his really good songs are about depression and/or suicide:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIi4cAK1vik
This one reminds me of a sweetheart I once had who subsequently ghosted me. Anyone who's had the feel will know it.
It is well supported that exercise is beneficial for mental health, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence on what type of exercise is the most beneficial and why. E.g. should one do cardiovascular or strength based exercise, or short and intense vs longer periods. Anyone have any resources or personal experience on this?
Personal and possibly unrepresentative experience: I switched from doing weights and a small amount of cardio at the gym every 2 days to running every 2 days after the pandemic closed the gyms. I find that I need to exercise at about that rate to keep my anxiety at a manageable level. I think the switch to running may be marginally better, but there doesn't seem to be much difference, which is surprising given how different the exercises are. Also as I've gotten better at running over the past 9 months the amount I need to do to get the anti anxiety effects seems to have increased. Which implies that the anti-anxiety effects are tied to the level of exertion to some degree, not the actual amount of exercise done, or calories expended. But obviously there are confounders.
My knowledge of this mostly comes from one book (https://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-Brain/dp/0316113514/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=spark&qid=1612139966&sr=8-4) and I have never taken the time to dig into the primary sources, but from what I remember if mental health is your primary goal from exercising then these are the guidelines to follow:
1) anything is better than nothing, first and foremost make sure your exercise plan is one you can stick to
2) exercise every day, even if it means less exercise per session
3) in addition to long-term improvements there are significant mental benefits that are noticeable immediately after exercising, so try to plan your exercise time to take advantage of this
4) high intensity cardio is the most time-efficient way to get a given level of mental benefit, though if you have the time and energy doing both this and strength training is ideal
If I personally was going to dig into this more I'd start by re-reading SPARK and actually looking up the references, then go from there.
I suspect there's going to be enough individual variation here that "try it and see how you feel" is the best approach. My personal experience mostly accords with your own, though: different modes of exercise work, and it's the effort that seems to be the main factor. Some of my observations:
* Moderate cardio seems to be the best tradeoff for improving mood without causing excessive fatigue. Doesn't matter if it's LISS (low-intensity steady state) or HIIT (high intensity interval training), though you may have other reasons to prefer one or the other (e.g. enjoyment or athletic goals)
* Intense cardio can be good for the mood, but the fatigue can affect your productivity
* Maintenance strength training (i.e. not trying to get stronger, just sustain your current fitness) doesn't quite seem enough by itself
* Intense strength training (i.e. training to get stronger) can be great for the mood, but causes a lot of fatigue and will likely affect your productivity: not only are you tired, you need to spend a lot of extra time eating and sleeping
* Be aware of injury risk: being injured is the worst thing for mood. Contact sports are fun, but you'll get an injury sooner or later. Lifting and low-impact cardio are super safe if practiced correctly.
As for frequency, 2 days a week seems like the minimum for me to maintain my mood, but 3 days is better. I will go even higher than 3 if I'm using short sessions; I usually total 5-6 hours/week.
I recommend at least 2 days a week of strength training, otherwise your muscles decondition and you get sore every time you work out. Depending how much strength training you do, add cardio to get up to the equivalent of 3 cardio sessions/week (you might not need any extra cardio if you lift hard).
I never found that exercise helped my mental health (on the contrary; "going for walks in the fresh air and sunshine" *triggered* my suicidal thoughts rather than repressed them) but I am presuming the effect depends not on the type of exercise so much as the endorphins produced by it. Make-brain-feel-good chemicals get released into the bloodstream so your choice of exercise doesn't matter and indeed if hitting your foot with a hammer produced the same results, you should do that.
It's been interesting watching the common discourse on the whole GME thing. It feels to me like common discourse has leaned so far into the "revenge against Wall Street" and the "💎🙌🚀" angles that it's gotten very difficult to sort out who has sound financial motives behind their actions and who's just... for lack of a better term... a "zealot".
Like so much of reddit is going hard in on "I'm buying and holding forever, I don't want to make money, I just want to make billionaires lose" and I'm wondering what percentage of people saying that sincerely believe that, while the more cynical part of me wonders how many people are deliberately saying that to try to get other people to "buy and hold" so that they can be the one who sells.
It's very classic "prisoner's dilemma" if I'm understanding the situation right (and it's quite possible that I'm not). It's going to be interesting to see if this keeps the "poor against the rich" dynamic or if it devolves into backbiting if there is eventually a mass-sellout. (As opposed to a more gradual decline)
Politics post. Curious to see what others think about this view on the COVID relief bill:
I think it much more important for President Biden to work with senate Republicans to produce a COVID relief bill less than the $1.9 trillion bill he wants.
Long term, I think showing bipartisanship is possible is much more important than getting exactly the policy you want through congress. It will also give some power and clout to moderate Republicans at a time where they are trying to divorce from Trump.
I agree and I'm anxious to see what will happen. Apparently 10 Republican senators sent Biden a letter offering to compromise. Hopefully Biden takes them up on it.
I can see several reasons for a person skeptical of Republican motives generally to be skeptical of this specifically.
1. The compromise offer may itself not pan out-- the 10 Senators may be planning to pull a Lucy-with-the-football, or may even sincerely intend to compromise but then feel they "have to" pull back due to pressure from the Trumpist base.
2. The longer term strategy may be to pass an ineffective small relief package and then blame Biden in 2022 for not effectively delivering relief.
3. The strategy may also be to set themselves up as reasonable people in the public mind so that they can then more convincingly oppose the Democrats on the arguably higher-stakes wedge issue of voting rights legislation, i.e. forcing Republicans to actually appeal to the median voter in order to win elections rather than clinging to power with a rural-skewed minority base via gerrymandering and voter suppression.
It's still possible that taking them up on the offer is the best course, especially if one has already prepared mitigations for these contingencies, but these are reasons I would expect some Dems to oppose the compromise beyond just disagreements on the merits of various relief package sizes.
I think everything you said makes sense. At the same time it is so cynical that it makes me think we'll never have another functioning Democracy. (And I'm a very cynical person :)
Politics is politics, of course. Even leaders that want to do the best for the country also spend time thinking about their political future. In that sense, cynicism is warranted.
But at some point, if you want to have compromise in the government, you have to be able to take people at their word. The senators have been around for a while. They'll be around for a while longer. They do have *some* incentive to work with others.
I've seen so many comments on the internet about how McConnell killed so many bills. Do you think he used the same reasoning you gave -- as justification?
Those are good points in the context of Democratic Party political strategy.
Maybe I'm naive, but if (2) comes to pass, I would hope that the Biden administration could argue that they worked a bipartisan deal with Republicans and should be commended!
I guess I'm becoming more concerned about our country's government being able to function at all. We've already arrived at a point where every 4 years, there is a scramble to undo the other party's work. The only way to avoid this is to compromise with the other party while in power.
I think there is an assumption here that compromising while you have power will lead to compromises while the other side has power. I don't think that assumption has held up for the past few decades. I think this is mostly the result of structural issues with the voting system resulting in two party rule and primaries penalizing moderates. I think there is also some influence with the current Republican party being in a demographic crunch and fighting an existential battle. I think there will be a Republican party but it will have to change (Trump is one example of how it might change)
Apparently congresscritters are basically unwhippable so long as they keep winning primaries. There's a Russian word that refers to an organisation having enough coherence to honour quid-pro-quoes and I suspect that the congressional parties lack that property. I.e. there's no punishment for individual rs or ds who defect against compromises.
They've already talked of throwing half the country into deprogramming camps and are talking about domestic war on 'terror'. As far as I can tell, news is just a neverending stream of hyperventilation about made-up nonsense.
There is definitely some truth to that.
I am concerned from interactions with people on both the far left and far right that the nonsense, fear, and demonization of the other that various need outlets promote is now embedded and leading to reactions based on made up realities (most recent notable example being the capital riots). Eventually that self reinforces: i.e. riots lead to gun control lead to more riots lead to preventative incarceration lead to Real Problems.
I don't know. Obama pushed pretty hard for bipartisanship and consensus seems to be somewhere between "it cost the Democrats Congress" and "Democrats' losses in Congress were more likely tied to return-to-the-mean after wave elections in swing states, but it certainly didn't *help*".
Either way, considering how the past ten years have played out I think it's hard to claim with a straight face that Obama's bipartisanship did much to advance the notion of moderate compromise. If Biden truly already has the 50 votes necessary for passing the COVID relief through reconciliation and he then proceeds to water it down to chase the Collins / Murkowski / Portman votes, I can't imagine it going over well or doing anything to diffuse the notion that both "teams" are playing for the same side.
I hate this one. I hate all the previous ones. The government should not be doing this at all. And I'm getting screwed over. Again. As-usual.
I think that at the least, Biden needs to secure promises from the 10 Senators in exchange. Things like forcing prompt consideration and votes on all executive and judicial nominations for the entirety of Biden's term, regardless of which party has control of the Senate at any particular time. Absent that, the fiasco with Garland and Barrett has burned any bipartisan bridge for a very long time, as the effects from that will be felt for decades.
This! So much this. Those people don't deserve to say a damn word after what they pulled while they were in power.
But . . . losing all the close senate races means that Biden has to get Manchin on board, and Manchin has to make the rest of the party howl to get re-elected. So while I hate giving McConnell veto power over what the dems want to do, that's what's going to happen, over and over again, until we lose the house in 2022 over not keeping any promises despite having the trifecta.
I guess negotiations and bipartisanship would be better, but I can't imagine them really being on offer. McConnell knows what he's doing. He's not going to be giving Biden anything.
Basically, give in to despair and take up day drinking.
I haven't seen specific polling on this bill, but I think "massive COVID relief for people, cities, and states" is generally popular. It also seems like the obviously correct policy, given the state of the economy, unemployment, and interest rates. Unless you think signally bipartisanship is more important electorally or for the future of Democracy than passing popular and effective legislation, I'm not sure why Biden should be bothered.
I mean, take the meeting, sure, but "Please, $1,400 is far too much to give people. $1,000 is more reasonable, at at a 1% interest rate, surely we can't afford the difference!" isn't a convincing argument.
So, speaking as a right-of-center person for whom the GOP is the logical electoral vehicle, but who's begun to despair of even grasping what the current leadership is thinking:
I don't really get why the dominant strategy for Republicans isn't just to help Democrats do some ginormous COVID relief bill. Here's my thinking:
1) COVID relief is popular, in the same way defense spending is popular;
2) The circumstances of COVID relief are such that you don't have to betray any theoretical deficit-hawk orthodoxies -- it's just a weird exogenous shock to demand; and
3) However big the COVID bill you do with the Dems is, that's how big your megaphone is *subsequently* to say "we're running up against our fiscal capacity here!"
In other words, you have this golden opportunity to pork it up right now, in a way that neither your base nor anybody else will punish you for. And the further you lean into that (which your opponents will only encourage), the harder the rhetorical hammer you can hit them with down the line.
So why don't Republicans just do this?
Good points.
Is the answer to your last question perhaps "because politics is now so polarized any attempt to work with the other tribe invites accusations of betrayal"?
The deep political art that I fear has been lost is that of enabling the other guy to declare victory while quietly getting everything you want.
With regards to the technocracy discussion, I originally intended to mention Singapore's Covid 19 response as a shining example of a technocratic response. As is customary in Singapore, without much public discussion, public health experts quickly implemented strict quarantine and excellent contact tracing rules, with heavy fines for violation. It worked, until it failed spectacularly.
Namely, the public health experts somehow managed to ignore the substantial population of migrant workers living in overcrowded dorms, an obvious and excellent infection ground. Instead of screening them proactively, once infections there became known, they had already spread through the whole migrant population in April. This oversight is not just obvious in hindsight, as activists had been calling for better protection of migrant workers prior to that.
This story illustrates a failure mode that Weyl highlighted (I think), namely that technocrats (and in my opinion elites in general) seem surprisingly blind or indifferent to people different than themselves. This includes the aftermath of the infection surge: after isolating basically all migrant workers for months, they will be allowed to go to places other than their work ONCE A MONTH.
I do not think that Weyl's proposed solutions would have worked so well in this case, as they would have undermined the parts of Singapore's response that did work, but there must be some institutionalised way of making sure both information about and the interest of underrepresented groups is included in these kinds of technocratic decisions, whether those groups are LGBT or unemployed truck drivers.
I am basing this mostly on: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-54082861
It has worked out pretty well in terms of deaths, if the numbers can be believed: only 29 people died in a country of 5.7 million, with a case fatality rate of 0.05%.
And this article also finally explains the low fatality rate: almost all infections happened in the dormitories, and the migrant workers living there, mostly physical workers, are relatively young and healthy.
I have long wondered about the low fatality rate in Singapore. In many developed countries, 0.1+% of the entire population has died of COVID, making 0.05% suspiciously low even if they've caught every infection. Singapore is somewhat authoritarian, and it could be that they faked the data — however, it is also quite well-run, and they can't really do that if they fool themselves (and governments that fake statistics usually end up fooling themselves too). Most of the infections involving healthy workers may be much of the explanation.
Sure, overall their strategy worked. But, I argue that a) the first fuck-up could have easily been avoided or mitigated if other sources of information were included (activists were calling for it!), and b) the policy is definitely currently disregarding the welfare of a particular population that is not-represented in technocratic circles.
I am saying that this is a typical case for the benefits and drawbacks of technocratic decision making, and that the drawbacks should be recognized and addressed to keep the benefits.
Hmm, I'm not sure they could have done much about the dense living conditions on a short notice. Perhaps recommend non-essential immigrant workers to leave for their countries of origin for the duration of the pandemic – but even then, they have no job in their home countries, and they need to make a living.
This was an oversight but not a technocratic one.
Singapore is a contradiction. It does not like foreigners, but it is super dependent on them. It depends on being a nice place for multinationals to set up regional offices with well paid foreigners on employment passes, and it depends on a whole bunch of "migrant workers" on work passes to do roles like maids and construction workers.
The non domestic based "migrant workers" live in dorms constructed by their employers and the employment law is essentially like the gulf states but the Singapore courts are actually honest so it's a better deal.
Anyway, the ruling party, the PAP, is terrified of doing anything that makes it seem like foreigners are getting something for free.
Early on in the pandemic, they announced that Singaporeans/Permanent residents could get free covid tests.
I was working in Singapore as a foreigner in a health related field and said that this shows how Singapore was just pretending about public health. Any actual epidemiologist would tell you to make testing free to everyone in the country to increase uptake because the virus doesn't care about Visa status. (Singapore had closed the borders anyway so it wasn't like tourists were going to get free tests)
But that's not what happened.
The political consideration of not wanting to be seen as spending Singapore's hard earned cash on foreigners overruled the technocrats and cases in the migrant worker dorms exploded in an entirely foreseeable way.
That makes a lot of sense, thanks!
I've co-written an rpg I'm proud of, which I'm publishing with Cloven Pine Games for Zinequest. In case folks are interested, Back Again from the Broken Land is Tolkien- and LeGuin-inspired and you play small adventurers walking home from a big war. The core of the game is naming and reckoning with the burdens you picked up in your adventures: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/clovenpinegames/back-again-from-the-broken-landzinequest
Does anyone have any idea where one might ask questions to people knowledgeable about psychiatry about “weird mental stuff” that doesn’t rise to the level of meriting therapy?
I have an occasional odd mental experience that only occurs for a couple minutes at a time, months or years apart, and isn’t a particularly big deal when it does happen. But I have never been able to find any explanation for it, or even descriptions that even match it very closely.
Basically, very rarely and for no trigger or reason I have been able to discern, I experience a sort of sudden shift in the quality of all my sensations, where everything becomes somehow harsher - all noise has an edge to it, everything seems suddenly intense and angry. I am completely aware when this occurs that it isn’t ‘really’ happening - it’s like being consciously aware that some kind of a switch got flipped on all my sensations, and that they are not reporting accurately.
And then it goes away again within a couple minutes and doesn’t happen again for months/years.
I’ve looked at likely culprits, but it doesn’t seem to fit most of them. No shortness of breath or sped up heart rate, no sense of panic or anger or anything like that. Just an odd temporary experience of sensations seeming weirdly ‘on edge’ in a way I still find hard describe.
And since it happens so rarely and doesn’t have much affect when it does happen, it always seemed a bit wasteful to go to a therapist and pay to try to diagnose it, but darn if I’m not curious about what the heck it is.
This certainly seems to have a lot of commonalities, although it doesn’t line up exactly. I kind of wonder how many examples of low-grade weirdnesses like this are common, but just don’t get written about because it’s not actually enough of a problem to seek treatment for (either medical or psychological).
No idea where you'd ask about that, but it sounds almost like a seizure. Maybe ask your primary doctor about it.
I have two causes of rapid onset of nervous intensity. One is sinusitis where a couple of times, within 5 minutes, my ears have started to ring, fingers tremble and I become irritable as if my nervous system's sensitivity has been turned up to 11. It goes away quickly if I take a paracetamol. The other is when I chase the kids around doing fun sort of growling "I'M GONNA GET YOU" - they love it but it gets me feeling super stressed and tense afterwards.
Strangely, I've also had the opposite where I have a buzzing in my head/nerves that is getting progressively more intense until something like a nervous reset or degauss button is depressed and the crescendo of nervous intensity instantly disappears. Both are pretty rare occurrences.
Have you considered something neurological/hormonal? Sensations getting 'dialled up' and then falling back sounds like a temporary burst of *something* going wrong with the nerves, so I'd recommend a doctor first before therapy.
This is not a bad idea, and I suppose is the kind of thing you can just ask about when getting treatment/an appointment for something else already, so it can’t hurt.
I would say that this description fits nicely with my experiences. I used to try to explain to people in terms of time seeming to pass different, like watching a movie in fast forward or a feeling of rush, but your description that everything seems intense and angry is even more close.
In case you want to compare: it started during early teenage years, and up to age 20 or so I used to have almost daily episodes for months, and then months of nothing. As you said, it typically lasts minutes. At some point I started a table of duration, my lowest time is 3 minutes, the longest 15. After age 20 I stopped having it for years, and now I have one or two episodes each year.
In addition to what you report, sometimes during an episode I have weird body sensations, most commonly it feels like my fingers and teeth are enlarged, as if I had "fat fingers" and my teeth barely fitted in my mouth.
I had therapy for unrelated depression and mentioned it to both my psychologist and psychiatrist, and none had heard of it before, nor the colleagues they asked about. At first they told me it looked like a anxiety attack, but I bought a pressure monitor and the episodes never made a difference in blood pressure or heart rate. So they ruled out anxiety, and since it was not affecting my life they were unsure if we should investigate, since the only idea was to start scanning my brain, which is quite expensive.
Since it's only happening rarely, I doubt this is your problem, but I'm basically obliged to ask: Have you ruled out vitamin B12 problems? "Every sense is harsher" was very much my experience with vitamin B12 deficiency, but it *was* a gradual erosion for me and not a sudden switch. (That said, one of the symptoms did switch back to normal with a startling abruptness a few days after I started supplementing B12, so abruptness is at least possible.)
Huh, interesting. Never heard of this but I’ll read more, thanks.
Has Scott blogged about Wake Therapy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_therapy) for depression? I wanted to read his opinion of it. From my reading it sounds pretty great and even better than most first-line drugs prescribed.
No, but I'm pretty interested in it and will write something up for Lorien Psych eventually.
Patients seem really reluctant to try it, which I wouldn't have predicted.
Read the first line of it and went "Oooookay" which is probably the reaction patients have at the suggestion.
"We're going to force you to stay awake and this will cure your depression, trust us!" brings up "(1) I have often been awake involuntarily due to insomnia or other problems associated with my depression and trust ME, it has NOT helped (2) this sounds like those 19th century asylums which used to force patients into waterbaths and the like which were quack cures and (3) we all remember lobotomies don't we? so in summary, thanks but no thanks" from the uninformed potential subject of such treatment.
Now, it's a tiny bit more sophisticated than forcing people to stay awake, but this much didn't do much to reassure me, and I don't think it's unreasonable if someone decides "if reducing remission depends on taking drugs as well, why not skip the disturbed sleep and just gimme the drugs?"
"One meta-analysis of over 1700 unmedicated depressed patients who had undergone sleep deprivation found that 83% relapsed in their symptoms after one night of recovery sleep. Only 5-10 % of patients who initially respond to sleep deprivation show sustained remission. However, when sleep deprivation is combined with pharmacological treatments, the number of patients who show sustained remission is much higher, with rates as high as half of patients experiencing sustained remission. Compared to a relapse rate of 83% for unmedicated patients, patients who simultaneously took antidepressants only experienced a relapse rate of 59% after a night of recovery sleep."
I have to wonder about the success population: how many of them are in the category of "I will claim not to be depressed any more if you promise not to force me to go through that again".
True! "I have had five nights of you lot waking me up just when the dream was getting good, I am prepared to swear on a stack of Bibles I feel so much better if you just let me out of here!" 😁
Anecdotally, I often notice being a lot more motivated and happy on days when I slept less *than usual* the night before.
Substack feature request: don't notify me every time someone "hearts" my comment!
The worst part about it is that the subject line for a 'like' says "Comment on [Post]", which is identical to the subject line for replies!
Yeah, that last part is horrible. If there was a separate subject line for likes versus comments, I could just delete them easily without reading them, or even write an inbox filter to auto-delete them. But now there is every time that little dopamine rush from thinking someone responded to my comment, followed by disappointment as it turns out to be just another like.
liked your comment
Workaround: The sender of like notifications is reaction@mg1.substack.com, for comment notifications it's forum@mg1.substack.com. Set up an e-mail filter to delete e-mails from the former.
I need help with SEIR epidemiological modelling of the impacts of the UK Covid-19 stain. I am looking to show my current results to someone with experience in SIR/SEIR modelling of some real disease. This project was inspired by the excellent TheZvi post with his own model [1].
My plan is to do my own modelling for my country (not US). In case it confirms that the new stain might cause millions of infected around summer months, I will make a publication of it, and take it to the media. Basically, I want to warn my country, because everyone seems to be in the "Covid is done for, we just need to wait a bit!" mentality.
Currently, I am trying to fit a SEIR model to the historical data. I need a model that approximates the old data well, so that I can extrapolate using it. I am getting some confusing results currently. I need to show the current results to someone with experience in SIR/SEIR modelling of a disease, so they could maybe tell me if I am making some obvious mistake.
[1] https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/01/06/fourth-wave-covid-toy-modeling/
Update to my Covid-19 modelling help request:
Forgot to include my contacts: b.tseytlin@lambda-it.ru.
Reach me out if you want to help, or if you just want to chat on the topic.
P.S.
Unfortunate that substack doesn't have an "Edit comment" button.
I've been studying at a German technical university for a few years, and have been steadily confronting myself with the question: why wouldn't more American students follow a similar path?
I have to say, my confusion here has been pretty large, and I can't tell if it's due to:
-A unique situation that made it easy for me compared to the average American student.
-An American education (recommendation) system with a massive blind spot.
-A German visa system with a lack of interest in Americans.
The long and short of the steps that I took to get into this position is:
1. Learned German during an exchange year (not necessary, my university as well as perhaps 200 more German universities have Bachelors as well as Masters in English)
2. Applied for German universities (with a decent GPA/ACT/SAT [specific numbers on request], not much work is required. In fact, I found the 4 American universities I applied to much more difficult than the 10 or so German unis)
3. Was accepted to German universities.
4. Demonstrated a relatively reasonable level of financial stability (8,000€ in a bank account or a German family willing to vouch for you.)
5. Began attending the German university of my choice.
Current monthly costs, living in one of the 5 largest German cities, include:
*300-500€ (for me, just over 300€) rent in a shared flat, also studio apts (WiFi, electricity, heating, and water included).
*100€ food, relatively decadent with fresh vegetables, fruits, cheeses, and occasional meat.
*100€ stunningly inclusive health insurance.
*(You may be wondering, where's the university costs?)
*50€ University costs (this includes texts, computer labs, multiple student workshops, legal insurance, email, cloud service, and most of all, public transportation in the entire state + parts of other states)
*Around 10-50€ for a cell-phone plan. Figure this isn't too different from the states.
So if we're looking for the high-end of what I could pay, I come out with 800€ and 9600€ per month and per year, respectively. Throw one or two international flights home in there, for an extra 500-1500€, and I bump into 11k€. For my entire costs, from year one to year eight if I wanted to spend more time here.
Now, my comparisons to the US are based on anecdotes from friends, as well as a few websites with average cost estimations. Take this with a few grains of salt, but I seem to find $20k a year as a pretty common amount for in-state tuition and associated living costs, and $40k a year with a medium out-of-state tuition (plus living). This is either 100% more than what I'm paying, or 300% more. Not only that, the bachelor at my university (as well as all German universities) is a 3 year program, since GERs (general education requirements? Don't know my American university terms very well) aren't a part of the curriculum. So to get my bachelor, I'm spending 33k€ (to be fair, this is about $40k right now), whereas in-state public is spending $80k and out of state is spending $160k plus an extra year?
I'll assume most of you know someone, either around college age, raising children who will reach college age, or you're planning on having college graduates of your own some day. Reach out to them, let them know it's an option, and maybe save a year of their life and $100,000.
Or critique my comment and let me know exactly how I'm wrong. I welcome both.
As a German, I was always confused why more people don't do this. Especially people from the US. My university (RWTH Aachen) had a bunch of Chinese expats who were perfectly happy to travel halfway across the world and learn some English to get an excellent and prestigious STEM degree for a comparatively low monetary cost.
But somehow, no people from the US. Or at least I never met any.
One of the Professors at my new university in Dublin recently remarked that he sees the same phenomenon with Irish students. Somehow, they prefer paying tens of thousands extra in tuition and studying at TCD in Ireland to moving to Germany for a few years. Even though they're part of the EU! Getting accepted should be easy for them.
Germany has basically opened itself up to the whole world taking advantage of their tax money to fund their university educations. But somehow, as far as I can tell, very few people seem to be taking the offer, compared to what I would've expected.
Why is the state of Germany willing to pay for the education of any foreigners who go there? Is the theory that enough of them will stick around afterwards to make it a worthwhile investment?
The theory is that imposing fees for (non-eu) foreigners is discrimantory. Also some handwaiving at soft power. At least that is what causes the pushback to proposals to implement such a fee (although it exists in parts of Germany). The whole system is not consistent and paradoxical, as it is quite hard for foreigners with a German degree who want to stay to be able to do so (the situation has however improved compared to say 10 years ago). This is caused by different sets of people determining migration and education laws.
Establishing people with ties to Germany all over the world brings a bit of soft power in the economic, cultural, political spheres, mainly. Hard to measure, though.
Contrary to Argos and Obiter, this release by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) quotes a net economic gain for Germany if 30% or more students stick around after they graduate. The release goes on to list surveys in which ca. 30% are positive they will remain in Germany after graduating, with up to 50-60% saying probably. A reverse brain-drain seems pretty plausible here.
Oops: https://static.daad.de/media/daad_de/pdfs_nicht_barrierefrei/der-daad/analysen-studien/verbleib_ausl%C3%A4ndischer_studierender_und_absolventen_in_deutschland_blickpunkt.pdf
The desire to stay is higher than I thought. A quick google found this (in German only, but "Abbildung 1" is easy to grok, shows univ. graduates' intentions to stay):
https://www.bamf.de/SharedDocs/Anlagen/DE/Forschung/Forschungsberichte/Kurzberichte/artikel-auswertung-zu-absolventenstudiefb23.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=12
Note that since this study Germany went through developments that could have made it more, or less, attractive, eg the 2015 refugee turmoil, the AfD rise and (partial) decline, the pandemic.
"quotes a net economic gain for Germany if 30% or more"
What does that mean?
Suppose you attract someone and spend $50,000 schooling him. He ends up living in Germany and, over his lifetime, earns $100,000. Is that a net gain of $50,000? It isn't a gain of that amount to the other inhabitants, because his income goes to him to be spent by him, not to them.
Suppose I decide to become a German citizen, continue living my life in California, paying my taxes to the U.S. Does my income then count as a net gain to Germany?
@David, the paper says:
"Die Studie kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass sich die Ausgaben der öffentlichen Hand (z.B. die Finanzierung von Studienplätzen) durch Erträge (z.B. Konsumausgaben, Steuern und Abgaben) bei einem Verbleib in Deutschland von 30% der ausländischen Studierenden in 5 Jahren amortisieren."
Which translates to:
"The study finds that public expenditures (e.g. financial support of studies) are amortized through earnings (e.g. consumption, taxes, fees) within 5 years with 30% of foreign students remaining in Germany."
To summarize (and translate) the quoted study (from 2013), they claim about 14,000€ yearly cost per student. This is covered to the tune of 16% by non-governmental funds, leaving 84% or ca. 11,760€ for the government to cover. Due to the consumption of the student, yearly, they estimate around 2,500€ of tax revenue from that alone. That brings the public cost down to 9,260€ per student per year (pspy). They then, through direct and indirect effects (again, consumption, taxes, fees) estimate around 28,000€ of revenue per student who remains. To find the break-even point, take the cost/revenue and I end up with around 33%, that is to say, 1 remaining student pays for themselves and 2 other students. However, since this is a per-year deal, if the student remains in Germany for more than the length of their studies, it's then profit for the German state. So to go back to the first study, if 30% remain for a long period of time (> than length of study) and an extra 20-40% remain for a shorter period of time (= length of study), you can see how the economic effect would be quite powerful.
I'm not sure about your "consumption, taxes, fees." If I am paying a fee that reflects a cost, say a gas tax to pay for wear and tear on the roads and congestion, that fee isn't a net gain for Germany. I don't know what "consumption" means in this context. If I consume $100 of groceries that isn't a $100 gain for Germany. Are these just taxes on consumption?
Presumably, taxes to some degree are funding services which people consume. If, to take an extreme example, I pay Social Security taxes and then collect Social Security, the taxes are not a net gain.
"Somehow, they prefer paying tens of thousands extra in tuition and studying at TCD in Ireland to moving to Germany for a few years."
(1) Not fluent in German or indeed having any German at all, and not feeling confident they can pick up fluency fast enough to be able to follow lectures/exam in German. Drop back far enough in your studies and you fail the course which is a waste of time and effort.
(2) If you have a degree from Trinity, Irish employers know what that is. If you have a certificate from a German college, what the heck is that? Is it comparable? Is it the equivalent of a cheap diploma mill or a reputable recognised university? Many employers sorting through applications won't bother with the extra effort of looking that up, they will stick with "I know what a Trinners grad is like" (government and semi-state bodies and public service will, I've had to check job applications that came in with "I have qualification from overseas" to see "what is that equivalent to in Irish terms?", there's a website for it: https://qsearch.qqi.ie/WebPart/Search?searchtype=recognitions)
(1) Master courses in STEM are typically in English by default these days. Most regular people in the country are likewise pretty fluent in English. Many of the Chinese/Norwegian/I-forgot-what-else expats I knew didn't even bother to learn German.
(2) That might explain some of it. Case in point, Germany does not have "colleges". You study at university from the very start, where you typically only hear lectures directly relevant to your chosen field of study. On the other hand, our universities do seem to have pretty high prestige on the international scene, judging by stuff like university rankings.
First of all, the (vast) majority of English courses are master level, not Bachelor level. For example, there is not one Pure Math, Computer Science or Physics Bachelor degree in the list of English degrees offered in Germany by a public university (private universities charge a lot). (you can search the DAAD website, link is too long to post here).
In addition, I think you cannot actually take out student loans as a foreigner in Germany, so you need to tap into your parents' savings. If you do not know German, finding a job to support you is pretty difficult, and seems uncertain. Add to that some uncertainty about the value of a German degree back in your homecountry, and it is not quite a slam dunk case anymore.
Also factor in social isolation due to not knowing the language. This is less a factor if you are coming from say China, where you will find sizeable communities on every campus, but might be more difficult for e.g. Americans and Britons.
I agree to most of what you write, but almost all German university students are fluent in English, due to the internet, English speaking media and English being mandatory for at least 6 grades in German schools. Also, thanks so the cultural soft power of the Anglosphere, American or English exchange students will be very popular.
I see your points, especially the majority of English courses being master level. That being said, generally, the English courses offered are very open-ended (an example at my university is General Engineering Sciences, which specializes in the engineering of your choice after the first year.)
You can't take out loans from the German government, but American student loans are still an option, and most Americans have to plan for a hefty university bill anyways. Most students at my university, if they work, work at my university as tutors. This option is very open for native-English speakers, again due to 1/3 of my university being foreigners. I agree with the unknown value of a German degree, but feel that the interest factor of being one of the rare Americans to study abroad can help balance that out.
And to the social isolation, I only have anecdotes, but both of my arrivals in Germany were very social, even with 0 language experience at the beginning. Getting people to stop speaking English to me was the harder step.
It means that there will be some point where a large number of your friends/family are in a far away country (either when you leave, if you settle in Germany, or after you graduate, if you return). But given the difference I perceived (pre-Brexit) in numbers of EU students at British unis and vice versa (the former seems much higher), I think the language barrier is probably a bigger issue. Even if universities/the government don't mandate some level of German before you start, a lot of people would not like living in a society where they don't speak the language.
People go to college to party, not to learn. They don't want to spend one less year there and they don't want to be annoyed at weird cultural quirks and people talking in a foreign language around them that they can't understand, etc. Also this requires uncommon knowledge and jumping through hoops which most people can't be bothered with. Furthermore you have to be far away from your family and friends, and the cost difference may not be so great especially if you can get low cost loans and/or scholarships.
If they are really there to party why are they not going to a country where the drinking age is 16 and Helles is dirt cheap? (never understood the obsession with creme de menthe though. But I suppose that's probably how they feel about anglophone students drinking Jägermeister.)
It seems unreasonable to expect people to drop out of high school and move to another country to party?
I'd go to Germany just to avoid American college.
I definitely understood that sentiment. Be glad to give advice if you're looking into it seriously!
Not an American, I'm safe.
Hi everyone, I wrote a long post on on Reddit about using pregnenolone to deal with social isolation. I thought it might align with the interests of SSC readers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Supplements/comments/l9ypsc/pregnenolone_for_social_isolation/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Whats this forms view on the election being stolen? I think it's pretty obviously stolen but I'm also a Trumpist. I just don't get how you can explain out all the discrepancies
Hi there.
My basic view is, it was not stolen. To change my confidence, I would first need to see evidence of widespread fraud in court. Then I would need to see how such fraud could actually overturn election results in enough states to matter. It seems to me that the Trump campaign had every incentive to find such evidence for two months, yet none was presented in court. So we haven't even passed the first bar.
For context, I have spent several months talking with Trump supporting friends of mine about what they view as election irregularities. I've looked into perhaps a dozen over that time, and in each case that the claims do not withstand scrutiny. Generally it seems to be a case of people ascribing nefarious motives to actions that have ordinary explanations, and no actual evidence for the claims.
I spent a lot of time reading the court rulings as well. The first point to note is that, most don't actually allege any fraud at all. In the handful that do, there's really no evidence presented. You might find some of them interesting.
Detroit, MI: https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/2020/11/Scanned-from-a-Xerox-Multifunction-Printer.pdf
https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/2020/11/Preview_7405F132-B4F1-4A0A-9BB1-28CB11C48E21.pdf Key quote, in the context of lack of evidence that votes were altered: "[a] belief is not evidence."
Another good ruling to read is from the US 3rd Circuit, written by Trump appointee Judge Bibas: http://www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/203371np.pdf
We have discussed this at great length on the companion forum DSL, most notably here:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,1400.0.html
We don't "explain out all the discrepancies", because *all* the discrepancies add up to a classic Gish Gallop and it is never rational to engage in a full Gish Gallop. We have looked in depth at some of the discrepancies most prominently cited as evidence of fraud, and found that there are compelling alternate explanations for those. But at this point, if you want me to look at *more* discrepancies and try to explain them for you, you'll have to pay me twice my normal consulting rate because that's really annoying work.
We do note that the General Argument Against Conspiracy Theories applies here. The US electoral system is too decentralized and redundant to be plausibly "stolen" by subverting one insider and getting him to flip a few bits in one Master Vote-Counting Computer; you'd need hundreds of active conspirators, minimum. "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead" is an exaggeration, but by the time you're past fifty conspirators, it's likely some of them will have blown your security to the point where the general existence and nature of the conspiracy is revealed.
And, the burden of the proof is on the positive. "Here are some discrepancies that I can't explain", is not proof and is barely even evidence. That sort of thing should be your pointer to where you go looking for better evidence and assemble it into proof. But that takes work, and it's easier to just invent another low-effort argument and demand that your opponents disprove that one. Also note that there are things that Trump's lawyers and/or the GOP, with more time and resources than a bunch of internet commenters, could have done to try and find such evidence, that they have conspicuously not done.
At this point, I don't think that anyone who wasn't pretty clearly a Trumpist before the election, believes it is likely to have been stolen. And this is a pretty eclectic community, with far more than just Trumpists and rabid anti-Trumpists.
To avoid the Gish Gallop, I propose the OP states what he thinks are the 3 strongest examples of the election being stolen, and we strictly limit to those.
"Stolen" is the wrong term. There probably was some fraud but there is going to be some fraud in every election, and it's an all-party thing. The real problem was the mess of different ways voting-by-mail was handled and the decisions as to how those ballots would be treated. If state A is counting ballots that arrive in without even a postmark and state B is counting only those received on or one day after the polling day and state C is letting ballots received up to three weeks later count, then you're going to get discrepancies between 'what was the vote count here in the last election' and this time around, never mind the problem for those doing the counting as to 'should I or shouldn't I count this ballot?' when they're faced with a huge volume of mailed-in votes that they never had to handle before.
The way it ended up, with the later-arriving mail-in ballots forecast to be for Biden and indeed turning out like that, turning "lead for Trump" into "huge lead for Biden" didn't look great - it did look as if 'oh my we had a search around and look we found this entire basket of votes for Biden' which is otherwise something that would indeed be indicative of fraud, but this time round because of the exceptional circumstances wasn't such.
The hysteria leading up to the election about "everybody vote! we have to get Trump out! End fascist dictatorship now by any means necessary!" and some officials bragging about how they were going to make that happen certainly didn't help. I was also amused that the Bush-era concerns over voting machines and the companies operating them and the donations their owners made to which candidate were being trotted out again, only reversed: this time round the Democrats were the ones pooh-poohing any hint of instability or possibility of rigging the count by interested parties.
I think this election was probably as honest as you are going to get in the circumstances, which does not mean 100% shining pure honesty but also does not mean grand conspiracy to 'steal' it.
>The real problem was the mess of different ways voting-by-mail was handled and the decisions as to how those ballots would be treated. If state A is counting ballots that arrive in without even a postmark and state B is counting only those received on or one day after the polling day and state C is letting ballots received up to three weeks later count, then you're going to get discrepancies between 'what was the vote count here in the last election' and this time around
The between-state differences don't matter when you're comparing results in the same state in different years. Colorado has offered universal vote-by-mail for years, and nobody has complained that this makes it impossible to compare Colorado's results to Ohio's.
Many states did change their criteria for accepting mail-in ballots due to COVID, but that got hammered out in the courts *before* election night. Pennsylvania ended up setting aside a very small number of mail-in ballots as a result - the only court case that Trump won.
(Also, "These people are legally allowed to vote but they normally don't because the rules make it too hard for them to do so" is not a claim of fraud, it's just saying that the rules are less favorable for Republicans than they used to be.)
>The way it ended up, with the later-arriving mail-in ballots forecast to be for Biden and indeed turning out like that, turning "lead for Trump" into "huge lead for Biden" didn't look great - it did look as if 'oh my we had a search around and look we found this entire basket of votes for Biden' which is otherwise something that would indeed be indicative of fraud, but this time round because of the exceptional circumstances wasn't such.
One change I do support as a result of this election - every state should allow pre-processing of mail-in ballots so they're ready to count on election night. Ohio and Florida do that, and the results were called by that night and nobody had to bite their nails over a "red mirage."
(In fact, it was the opposite - those states started out blue and then slowly turned red as the in-person ballots got reported. If you were as motivated to dunk on Republicans as you are Democrats then you'd probably find that equally suspicious.)
If Colorado has been doing it for years and this time round there wasn't a huge up-tick in the numbers doing vote-by-mail, then you can compare 'last election and this one' and be reasonably sure the figures you are getting are plausible.
If State E hasn't been doing this or only in very limited circumstances, and now the scare means most of the electorate who are bothering to vote are now mailing in their votes, then you don't have the data to compare "okay we have a Z% increase in Democratic votes via vote-by-mail, is that in line with previous voting patterns or not?"
And *that* is where accusations of fraud or skulduggery or moustache-twirling returning officers creep in.
The change in voting patterns was partially *caused* by Republicans saying that vote-by-mail was full of fraud - in previous years, it was much more balanced (the logic is vote-by-mail = old people = lean Republican).
It takes a lot of chutzpah to deliberately encourage people to vote differently, then argue that people voting differently from previous years is evidence of fraud.
"If you were as motivated to dunk on Republicans as you are Democrats then you'd probably find that equally suspicious"
The only dunking I'm doing is on the Blueshirts, and since Our Guy is currently in the hot seat as Taoiseach and I wince every time I remember that, I'm not pro or anti anybody very much in American politics.
I'm quite happy to have a hair-pulling row over Biden's religiosity as per this but I don't think that's quite what you mean!
https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2021/1/25/watch-what-biden-does-not-what-he-say-executive-orders-reveal-bidens-rift-with-bishops
Part of the NYT article discussed in that piece:
"Mr. Biden, perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century, regularly attends Mass and speaks of how his Catholic faith grounds his life and his policies. And with Mr. Biden, a different, more liberal Christianity is ascendant: less focused on sexual politics and more on combating poverty, climate change and racial inequality."
Very religiously observant Mass-goer who defies the bishops and the Pope on dogma about abortion. But if you're in line with NYT liberal values, this makes you a good Christian, unlike these others here:
"His arrival comes after four years in which conservative Christianity has reigned in America’s highest halls of power, embodied in white evangelicals laser-focused on ending abortion and guarding against what they saw as encroachments on their freedoms. Their devotion to former President Donald J. Trump was so fervent that many showed up in Washington on Jan. 6 to protest the election results."
You see? Those are the Bad Christians. And here's this conclusion drawn by the NYT from the distinction between Good and Bad Christians:
"Mr. Biden’s leadership is a repudiation of the claim by many conservative leaders that Democrats are inherently anti-Christian."
Ask the Democrat pro-lifers about how they were received, versus Biden who falls into line with the Democratic Party policies on abortion, LGBT rights, and so forth.
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-future-of-the-pro-life-democrat
"I'm not pro or anti anybody very much in American politics."
For someone who's not pro-or-anti anybody, you sure spent a lot of time on SSC making fun of "liberal hysteria" any time Trump did something bad.
For a long time I said that natively, had I emigrated to America like so many of my countrymen, I'd vote Democrat. But the Democratic party dropped economics in favour of chasing the college-educated vote and moved towards social liberalisation, often very fast. And now I'm stuck with some of the policies I would support being best represented in an American context by the Dems but that I'd be unwelcome there since I'm not the Biden/Pelosi type of Catholic.
And the American context has spilled over here into Europe to a frankly ridiculous extent. Why should there be marches in Dublin protesting Trump's election? Or pro-Black Lives Matter?
So your Culture Wars affect my life here in ways I don't particularly like or want. Therefore yes, I'm going to argue about, protest, and laugh at "liberal hysteria" when I see it (as well as any other kind of hysteria). That includes remembering when Mitt Romney, who is not someone I'm greatly sympathetic towards, was excoriated as a sexist plutocrat theocrat who was going to bring about the Handmaid's Tale for real if he was elected, and then he was The Only Honourable Republican when Trump came along and Mitt didn't like Donald, by the same people who were now flinging roses who had previously been flinging dung. (That's one thing about being over the age of thirty: the oul' memory may be shaky but it still manages to haul up out of the depths "hang on, this is a turn up for the book!" when necessary).
I didn't think Obama was going to be a Saviour, I thought he was going to be a middle of the road politician. I didn't think Trump was going to be the antiChrist, I thought he'd be a mediocre president. I don't think I was much mistaken in either assessment, and I'm not expecting Biden/Harris to be either the avatars of progressivism or the end of the world.
I don't know, I view the decentralization and variation in voting mechanisms -- including in vote-by-mail -- from state to state as a valuable characteristic that makes it hard to engage in widespread corruption and fraud.
I think there were illegal actions and irregularities that could have possibly flipped the state of Pennsylvania. I would estimate a 20% chance that the state of PA was stolen from Trump. But Trump didn't just lose by PA. In all the other states I am 99% sure the levels of Fraud were too low to have flipped the state. Any conspiracy across state lines is extremely unlikely, and the polls beforehand indicated it was likely Biden would win. In that environment, I don't think it was any more likely this election was stolen by Biden than Russia stole the election in 2016.
If it is relevant, I am a registered Republican that has voted down party lines in every election, except, for Presidents. In retrospect, I think he did a better job in his presidency than I believe Clinton would have, but he was too high variance for me to vote anything but 3rd party in 2016.
May I ask what illegal actions and irregularities you think might have flipped PA?
Off the top of my head, the State courts opened mail in voting to ballots that arrived after election day. I'm of the opinion that that power was reserved to only the legislature. That alone wasn't enough to flip PA, but it does raise my prior that something might have happened.
I wrote that, and then looked up how many votes that covers. It seems to be less than a 5th of the margin of Biden's victory. I will reduce my chance of something significant enough to flip the state to 10%, and that would require quite a bit of corruption of the Philadelphia.
Thanks for the reply, and for telling me how your certainty changes in real time.
I understand and I agree with your view about the PA courts overruling the legislature to add three days to the deadline for receipt of mail-in ballots. I guess the US Supreme Court plans to eventually rule on that case. Suppose we stipulate that was indeed incorrect, and those votes should not have been counted.
I understand you think it's unlikely, but what illegal actions, irregularities, or corruption do you think may have possibly occurred in Philadelphia?
What are the discrepancies you feel need explaining?
When someone repeatedly and loudly states that the only way that they will not win an upcoming election is if said election is rigged/stolen, and that they won the previous razor-thin election in a "landslide", and tells his supporters to vote in person while demanding that votes cast by mail not be counted, etc., etc. - then when said person claims that the election actually was stolen it does not add much signal.
I think it is much more likely (orders of magnitude) that irregularities in previous elections caused a different outcome.
A lot of the discrepancies were people just not knowing the normal weird things that happen when votes are being counted, because this is the first time they were interested in how votes were being counted.
Trump's legal team claimed they had a lot of evidence, but when asked in court if they were alleging fraud, they said no. Then they would go out in public and say something like 'we have lots of evidence, we're bringing a new case next week, please give money'.
Next week would come, and it would be the same. No case brought with evidence, yet an insistence in public they had it, would be filing 'soon', and they needed money. They raised something like $250 million doing this.
Try to put yourself in their shoes. What would you do if you had a mountain of evidence? I would present it in court ass fast as possible. What would you do if you had no evidence, but wanted to raise money? I would string people along with 'coming soon' as long as possible.
Look, I'm very anti-Trump, so you and I have different worldviews. That said, I think "the steal" was a very successful con that made Trump and his peeps a lot of money. I basically think Donald Trump has a lot of contempt for his supporters, and I think this was one last chance to milk them for money and attention.
I don't think it was stolen in the conventional sense.
On the other hand, the decision not to unblind the vaccine data until election day might have cost Trump the election, since if it had been unblinded a few days earlier it would have shown that his claim that we would have a vaccine by the election was true, and people feeling more optimistic is likely to benefit the incumbent. Given when they chose to unblind it, that has to have been a political decision, although the motive might have been wanting Trump to lose but might also have been believing that if the information came out just before the election people, especially anti-Trump people, would not have trusted it.
[begin rant]
On the other hand, while I don't think there is any justification for the belief that Trump really won, I think there is justification for the attitude — distrust of elite sources of information — that leads to people believing it. Fauci has now twice publicly admitted that what he tells people is based not on his scientific opinion but on what he wants them to believe and think they will believe (once when he pretended masks were useless in order to keep them for healthcare workers, more recently when he admitted changing his public estimate of the requirement for herd immunity in response to polling results on people's willingness to be vaccinated). Obama badly exaggerated the result of the 97% agree about climate change article, itself a badly misstated presentation of its results, and nobody in the major media called him on it. Nuclear Winter was a PR campaign masquerading as science. The population hysteria way back in the sixties was widely supported as scientific truth, and when none of the predicted results happened nobody that I noticed made a public apology for getting it confidently wrong. Lots of other examples available.
Noble lies to the plebs are tempting but they poison the well, and one result is that people feel free to disbelieve the elite sources of information if that lets them believe what they want to even if, as in this case, it isn't true.
[end rant]
Do you consider the RNC, the President, state AGs, Senators, and House Representatives elite sources of information?
I have a lot of sympathy for your view that on balance lies to the plebs poison the well.
I've heard many people claim that one reason public health officials did not recommend mask use was in order to save them for health care workers. Is this actually true? Other people, such as Zeynep Tufecki seem to say that the CDC and WHO legitimately misunderstood previous studies on mask effectiveness on the flu, were slow to see new data coming in regarding Sars-CoV-2. They were then slow in correcting the message because of groupthink and institutional inertia.
Is there evidence that officials knew masks were effective yet recommended against them to conserve supply?
I don't think the election was stolen. In some cases there appear to have been decisions made that were not legal, which were probably justifiable in the context of COVID, but still not permitted. Because Biden received far more mail in votes than Trump, anything that permitted more counting of those votes (removing signature verification, for instance) would increase the number of votes for Biden. I think this happened in large enough numbers to potentially swing some states, but not from fraudulent votes, but instead counting additional votes that would have thrown out for discrepancies. If you look back to the spring and summer primaries, there were a ton of irregularities in the votes, and many discarded votes (NPR reports 550,000 discarded mail in votes in the primaries - https://www.npr.org/2020/08/22/904693468/more-than-550-000-primary-absentee-ballots-rejected-in-2020-far-outpacing-2016). The Democrats had a huge incentive to ensure more votes were counted.
It's hard to justify not counting those votes based on what we know (or don't know - that they were frauds) of their origin. That said, I think it's possible that with relaxed rules some actual fraudulent votes could have entered the stream. That possibility is certainly not clear enough to justify extraordinary measures to overturn the election results.
In the latest issue of Scientific American, it is claimed that "changes to the environment are forcing animals out of remote habitats and into closer contact with humans, and people, driven by population and economic pressure, are moving closer to wild animals. Aggressive global surveillance for dangerous pathogens that live in these animals is one way to prevent the catastrophes of 2020 from repeating in coming years."
Anyone care to steelman this for me? It seems obviously bogus, like the exact opposite is true, and the average human being has never had less contact with wild animals.
It can be simultaneously true that the average human have little contact with wild animals, and that the number of people living in close contact with wild animals is bigger than ever. Human population and footprint has grown a lot. The claim is about the absolute number of humans, not the average human.
This makes sense, thanks. The average wild animal probably comes into contact with a greater number of humans now than in the past.
If you're living in somewhere like the British Isles, where the most dangerous animal in Great Britain is probably the adder and in Ireland is probably wasps or something, then the nearest you'll get to "animals coming into closer contact with people" are urban foxes and the like.
Canada you'll get bears and moose. Other countries the problem is more real: cutting down rainforest for farmland and so forth. Those are the countries where wild animals and people are going to come into close contact and where the reservoir of dangerous pathogens in those animals can now get transferred. Bush meat is not confined to Africa, it is also part of the diet in Indonesia etc. Remember all the fuss about Covid-19 coming from a wet market in Wuhan (before the shift to 'it was a bioweapon that escaped/was deliberately released')?
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reference/bushmeat-explained/
Around here, deer hunting is popular. Is this not bushmeat too? Is there a reason I don't hear about the dangers of zoonotic pathogens from the hunting of wild turkeys, grouse, deer?
You do. One of them is Lyme Disease.
Tldr: cook your meat.
https://www.avma.org/resources/public-health/disease-precautions-hunters
https://www.infectiousdiseaseadvisor.com/home/topics/emerging-diseases/report-lists-top-infectious-diseases-spread-from-animals-to-humans/
Lists cdc top concerns from ~2017.
US: main grouse concern is West Nile virus. So non native but now endemic.
Most fun global grouse concern is a word virus from UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louping_ill?wprov=sfla1
Turkeys: top concern seems to be salmonella (aka why you never do a rare chicken breast) and variations on cholera. These are best picked up by eating/drinking which makes sense given turkey as a farm animal.
Deer: main one you've likely heard of that is a direct transmission is tuberculosis. There are a pile of others and indirect transmission ones like Lyme.
The long list of scary things:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis
Is there a way to comment without subscribing to email notifications on that comment? I don't mind getting email updates from Substack, but getting an email for every reply is a bit much.
You have to go to your general substack settings, rather than the ACX specific ones (https://substack.com/account/settings) and uncheck "Send emails for Likes and Replies to my comments".
It's kind of weird/bad ui design, as it's not really apparent that the "My Account" menu item goes to your substack specific settings without indicating that there is a more general settings menu somewhere.
Thanks. I have just done that.
Is there any way to get notifications of replies, but not likes?
I noticed that the first public open thread and the first hidden open thread have approximately the same number of comments in them (508 vs 510 as of time of writing), which is not at all what I was expecting, especially not with the first public open thread being the first ever ACX open thread and it having a (fairly busy) comment thread devoted to complaining about substacks comment system. I had anticipated the hidden threads in general to be much quieter than the public ones, was that a weird prediction to make?
Also, if any of the paying subscribers could enlighten us scrubs over here, I'd be interested to hear what the general feel of the hidden thread was, relative to the public one.
Pretty much the same exact as the non-hidden open threads. The biggest discussion chain was about GME, which likely would be true of any open thread posted last wednesday. Then there's some other random posts, a few asking advice on things like gaining weight or learning statistics, etc. Nothing I wouldn't expect from a normal open thread.
My guess is that the most active commenters highly correlate with the subscribers, particularly at the beginning of ACX's life. I would predict that as time goes on and ACX gains readers who didn't come from SSC, there will be more non-subscribers relative to subscribers and consequently the public open threads will become more active.
Sorry if someone has already asked but I didn't see it in the comments: will there be a SSC Survey this year? (ACX Survey, maby).
About two and a half months ago I was feeling depressed. My wife suggested that it was just “my time of the month”. I’m a man, but my wife has often expressed the idea that men have hormonal cycles as well. And I had read a similar idea in a pop science book years ago. I got curious: if my black mood was cyclical in nature that would be a good thing to know. For one thing, if it's not cyclical then I need to figure out what my problem is so I can feel better, while if it is cyclical I can take hope in the fact that I'll probably feel better in a few days at most.
So I created a Google Sheet and laid out a simple five point scale: Depressed, Sad, Neutral, Fine, and Happy (you might think Neutral and Fine are synonyms but from my perspective there’s significant difference between feelin' Fine and not really feeling happy or sad, and since I’m the only one using the measure, well, there you go). Every day I marked which one I was feeling in general. After I had a couple weeks I assigned each mood a score from 1 to 5, and allowed myself to mark two boxes to indicate a halfway mood (Sad and Neutral indicating a 2.5 score, for when I'm feeling kind of Sad but not Sad Sad, you know?). Then I graphed the results.
The results were pretty spikey, so I overlaid a centered average on the graph. After two months it seemed to show a roughly 33 day cycle from sad to happy. Still, I need several more months of data before I come to any conclusions.
I talked to my father in law about the project and he suggested seeing if my cycle is linked to the moon. That kind of threw me: we all have heard the legend that the full moon makes men mad, but I never put any stock in it. I did some research and it looks like the studies are a bit mixed, in both results and quality. Apparently not that many people are interested in studying the effects of the moon on mood, and the ones that are don't aren't always the best at making good studies. But I thought, what the heck, I’ll throw the phase of the moon over my graph. And son of a gun, it matched closely. The nadir of my average mood seemed to line up perfectly with new moons, and the apex of my mood with full moons. Naturally this doesn’t demonstrate a casual relationship, but I was surprised it fit so well.
I plan on continuing the study for at least a year to get more data. Unfortunately I’m afraid this moon phase connection may already have fouled my data collection. Mood is so subjective, and my own judgment of my mood is even more so. Might I find myself erring on the side of happiness when I know the moon is getting fuller? Or become sadder as the moon dims simply because I expect to? I already feel tempted to modify my data to fit the curve: if I'm feeling really crummy on a day when the curve was on an upward trajectory previously I find myself second guessing my judgment: am I really feeling Sad? Might I actually be Neutral, or Sad-Neutral at worse? Whereas if the data matches my expectation I don't think twice about it. It’s a real problem.
Does anyone here know of any fairly easy to use psychological instruments that measure mood more accurately than my simple five point measure? I'd like to make things a bit more objective and scientific (if that's even possible) going forward.
Um. Definitely in my experience, my menstrual cycle tended to sync up with the phase of the moon (to the point where I tended to look up "when is the next full moon?" in order to Be Prepared). I don't know if this is applicable to all women, and I have no idea if it's any way applicable to men, but that men too have waxing and waning hormonal cycles doesn't seem that far from plausibility.
For a pop-sci take on the whole notion, you could do worse than this BBC article (I've helpfully left out all the astrology results when you Google "men and the moon cycles"):
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190731-is-the-moon-impacting-your-mood-and-wellbeing
How light-proof is your bedroom window cover (curtains, etc) --that would be my first line of inquiry. Expand for the time before/after bed. Because there are such things as SAD and a sleep deprivation therapy for depression. Full moon > more light at night > less/lighter sleep > milder depression.
And of course you could experiment with different curtains, artificial low-light lamps through the night etc., you get the idea.
Eliminating a placebo/context effect will be impossible, I guess, unless you have someone changing curtains while you are already asleep. Or use a technical solution: curtain randomly picked from a range of differing translucencies, mechanically drawn by some microprocessor? Hack one of the lamps Scott recommends on the Lorien page (a Philips HF3520 or similar). Then log the curtain, or light color and intensity, and look for correlations with your self-assessment.
I really am skeptical that it's light exposure, because my bedroom has two layers of blackout curtains and in the winter I never open them. This time of year on a full moon it comes out right as I'm leaving work, I have a 15 minute drive home, then I'm inside for the rest of the night. I mean it could be, but that must be some strong effect from only a small extra exposure to light.
That info makes a light effect unlikely. But you need to find another way to measure it, self-assessment here is likely to create a self-amplifying placebo effect.
There are apps out there for tracking your mood in a way where you can't see your previous days results, which helps a bit with bias. I found some searching for "happiness tracker"
Okay, this blog is good (or at least interesting). Stumbled upon it while looking up something about Swinburne. Come for the Decadent poetry, stay for the Scholastic philosophy! 😁 https://philosophymajor.wordpress.com/tag/thomas-aquinas/
Oh, and on the vexed question of angels and pins, from Diarmaid MacCullouch's "Reformation" about 15th/16th century humanists:
"Humanist scholars could therefore easily portray themselves as practically minded men of ideas closely involved with ordinary life and the business of government, rather than isolated ivory-tower academics, who wasted their time arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (this famous caricature of scholasticism was invented by humanists)."
So can we please stick a pin in this "everybody know that..." factoid?
Do my homework for me. Chesterton said that how many angels can dance on the head of a pin wasn't a real theological question, it was just something some wiseass asked Aquinas, who said that angels aren't material enough to have locations in the usual sense. Instead, angels could be said to be located where they put their attention, so an infinite number can pay attention to the head of a pin. Is this correct?
I suppose they can't dance. The nearest they could come would be moving their attention rhythmically, which could be pretty cool, especially in a large group.
It also occurs to me that asking that question is more word-fame than the vast majority of people get.
When I first started looking into "did they really do that?" the suggestion was that Isaac Disraeli (father of the prime minister) had used this as a joking example of mediaeval nonsense. Then the "some wiseass asked Aquinas" version. Now MacCulloch is back to the "humanists invented it".
It's a question that *could* be asked, because the standard idea is that angels have location but not mass (I think, putting it in physics terms) so something like electrons (my theology is just slightly better than my physics so if I've inadvertently wandered into either heresy or bad atomic structure, please forgive me!) This is probably the relevant part of the Summa:
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1052.htm
But generally, this was the Humanists - as MacCulloch says - arrogating to themselves the "I solve practical problems" mantle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNgNBsCI4EA
Unlike angels, it might be said that electrons have mass but no location! ;)
Do angels have integer or half-integer spin?
Did I miss the comment FAQ? Is it not possible to show only new replies?
Data Secrets Lox, the forum set up after SSC shut down, has a monthly efforpost contest to encourage long-form writing. The latest, for January, is up at https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,2499.0.html, while the archives can be found at https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,662.0.html.
Thanks for sharing, this is awesome.
The military orchestrated a coup in Myanmar, returning to power 10 years after nominally allowing a civilian government to take power. Civilian leaders, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, were detained. The military claims that the November 2020 election, which the military's party lost overwhelming, was fraudulent. Myanmar has been mired in ethnic insurgencies since the year it gained independence in 1948, and the government closed polling stations in many ethnic minority areas, citing violence. However, I don't know if the military is any more popular there than Aung San Suu Kyi.
Was the election actually fraudulent? What does the future hold for Myanmar?
Regarding pedophilia, this strikes me as almost obvious. Marrying children was a common occurrence in the ancient world. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, if you can impregnate them, you should be at least partially attracted to them. Assuming 12 year old girls can often get pregnant, but are probably prone to serious fertility/birthing problems, it makes sense this would be a spectrum according to different reproductive strategies. Sorry everyone, I didn't invent evolution. We might even take this further and say fans of MILF porn represent the other end of that reproductive strategy spectrum maybe?
If you're talking about the subset of 12 year old girls who can get pregnant, then you're not talking about pedophilia. Pedophilia is sexual attraction to *prepubescent* children, not sexual attraction to people below what will in the 21st century be the usual age of consent in developed nations. And if there's a taxonic element to pedophilia, it's based on "that girl has hips and breasts and looks like she could bear children" or similar signaling, not the number of planetary rotations since birth.
"Marrying children was a common occurrence in the ancient world."
Not as common as you might think. Ancient Roman law set the minimum age of marriage at 12 for girls, 15 for boys. Roman women typically married in their late teens or early twenties--not that different from today. Among nobles and royalty, early bethrothal/marriage was more common, but marriage in the upper classes had more to do with politics than with sexual attraction.
What are the constraints on expanding output of vaccines?
I have been saying for a while that it took a week to create the vaccines we are now using, eleven months to get them approved by the FDA and equivalents abroad. A month of challenge trials would have demonstrated effectiveness and at least a minimal level of safety, after which the companies should have been free to sell them to anyone who wanted to buy, which would have save something like a million lives.
But this assumes that the reason the companies were not in a position to provide all the doses we wanted when they did get approved was that they were not willing to make the necessary massive investments in productive ability until they knew they could sell the vaccines. The Russian vaccine, which apparently now turns out to be better than 90% effective, was approved early, but I don't believe all that much of the population has been vaccinated yet, which suggests that there may be constraints to mass production and mass vaccination that I'm missing.
Can anyone fill this in? If a vaccine had been approved after a month of testing, is there any reason why the producer couldn't have provided it by now to everyone who wanted it and was willing to pay for it?
For the RNA vaccines, the hard part seems to be the fragility of RNA molecules. Making RNA is easy. We're all doing it all the time and you can get engineered E. coli to make the sequence you want, or synthesise it in vitro.
The problem is that RNA degrades naturally and also everything is contaminated with RNA-degrading enzymes. Pfizer/BioNTech have managed to make some sort of nano-scale bubble from fatty acids or something that can keep the RNA safe and deliver it to our cells. The -80°C ultra-cold chain is also needed to kep the RNA intact.
If they can do it once, why can't they do it a thousand times? What's the constraint on expanding the output?
mRNA-vaccines are fairly complicated and rather new biochemical products, so scaling up the production is harder than scaling up production for the AstraZeneca vaccine, which uses a modified common-cold-virus as a vector. However, it is easier to modify the mRNA-vaccine that is in production than modifying the AstraZeneca vaccine.
The rollout of the mRNA-vaccine could have been accelerated quite a bit by disregarding testing. The reason is that the development of the RNA vaccine is so fast. But I'm not sure this would have had any strategic effect, since while you are waiting for the production to scale up, you can also wait to see whether the vaccine does what you want.
So in the short term, it is easier to scale up the AstraZeneca vaccine or other vaccines that are technologically "easy". However, the EU made a gigantic strategic blunder concerning the Biontech vaccine. The EU tried to buy vaccines as cheaply as possible, giving Biontech/Pfizer no economical reason so try to find additional partners, and start building up the vaccine production in additional factories. It takes about half a year to make those factories ready, but if they would have started in August, they would be done right now. In the last weeks, the EU has started to notice that they should infest in more vaccine production, but now it is a little too late.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/myths-of-vaccine-manufacturing
Tl;Dr: The microfluidics technology needed to encapsulate the RNA in a lipid nanoparticle is still mostly in the realm of things that academics put together on lab benchtops.
Either you run into the bottleneck of the machines being so fiddly to set up and run that you run out people who happen to have phd-level experience involving the relevant technologies or you run out of machines that are capable of making the machines.
Does anyone have any good examples of when throwing money at a problem have made the problem worse? I would like to find a as clear-cut example of this as possible, where it is as obvious as possible to see that it was the extra money/resources/headcount that made the problem worse and not external factors.
The example that comes to mind is education. It appears that college loans have led directly to college becoming more expensive, and therefore requiring loans. Many others have articulated this far more completely than I can.
Also, I have heard of more isolated cases in education where a failing system got more state and federal money, which was siphoned off through corruption. The system was failing not because of a lack of money, but because of bad leadership (which in turn may have been because of a lack of money to hire or retain good leaders, but that's no longer relevant). Once you give the bad leaders that replaced good leaders the money, you're not going to get the better leaders. Instead, you've just increased the likelihood of that money being wasted or embezzled. https://www.governing.com/archive/tns-detroit-schools-kickback-scheme.html
Google "the mythical man month".
Adding people to a late software project makes it even later.
Any topic of activism that's not a clear, proper, reasonable project: Once a problem is your job, you're invested in that problem staying a problem.
This isn't the first time this blog has cited sources that say bad things about Brasilia, so I wanted to say, as someone who spent a few years living there, that Brasilia is an incredibly awesome city.
I remember Scott's review of Seeing Like a State claiming that Brasilia's roads were arranged as a grid (true), so it was full of street corners (false). In fact, Brasilia is famous for using these weird half-roundabouts ("tesourinhas") for almost all street interceptions, which helps to improve traffic. The city has a strict "no buildings higher than 4 stores" policy, which, combined with wide streets and sidewalks, helps generate a "I'm in a really, really open space" feeling when you're walking around. There are plenty of big, empty grass fields -- which keep the scenery constantly green, and where kids have ample space to play. Plenty of trees to keep the breeze cool and, most noticeably, A LOT of flowers. The city has a terrible system of public transportation, I'll admit that, but the fact that it's tiny and the way it's organized makes it extremely easy to just walk to wherever you're going. It's actually a common feat to walk from one end of the city to the other. Every Sunday, the main road that crosses the city is interdicted so people can take walks and bike and skate...
What about the cold, soulless concrete buildings? I don't know, maybe it's not for everybody, but I always thought Brasilian architecture was beautiful. It's not all right angles, Oscar Niemeyer was actually a big fan of wide curves, and it shows.
This is not to say that Brasilia became a technocratic utopia -- I highly doubt that was it's goal. It's a city built for the middle class and rich, and you're kind of screwed if you're less than that and live there. But I think the critiques made about it's urban planning, it's architecture, it's way of doing things through deliberate design instead of natural growth are actually talking about Brasilia's strengths. After living there, I moved to another Brazilian city, one most outsiders see as a charming example of natural and organic growth, full of history, warmth, chance. It sucked.
Timely article on technocracy - https://www.chronicle.com/article/cass-sunstein-and-adrian-vermeules-technocratic-despotism
Phrase that got an eye-roll - “the morality of administrative law.” I like this critical paragraph -
"In fact, technocratic predictions about human behavior have been notoriously unable to make good on their epistemic claims. One of the most comprehensive studies assessing expert ability to predict human behavior — Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment — found that social scientists were unable to outperform moderately informed colleagues from other fields in predicting futures in their own areas of expertise. As Tetlock put it: “People who devoted years of arduous study to a topic were as hard-pressed as colleagues casually dropping in from other fields to affix realistic probabilities to possible futures.”"
A typical "party game" type question one might be asked is "What would you do if you had a billion dollars?" I've never been quite able to answer in a satisfactory way. That is to say, in an interesting and indulgent way. My real answer is "Invest a great deal of it sensibly to generate at least a steady 10-15% rate of return, spend the vast majority of it on charities, live the lifestyle of someone with 2 million in the bank." But of course that is not the point of the question: the real point is what personally indulgent thing would you do if money was no object. I've always struggled with that question because my desires are cheap. I like good food, but like a ribeye steak good, not fine dining. I like video games. I like books. These things are not hard to acquire.
But I think I finally have one. If I was a billionaire and I had to do something wildly wasteful and indulgent then I would start a special fund. This fund would offer to cover 10-20% of the costs of construction of all new buildings in my city (or another city of my choosing) and to cover up to 50% of the cost of all renovations with only one requirement: that the design of the building is one that I like. Something art deco, or gothic revival, or beaux arts. Anything but the sleek and boring buildings I see built everywhere today. I want decoration, ornamentation, statuary, stained glass, and if I have so much money I'd be happy to foot the bill myself. Maybe I'd take it further: I'd approach whole streets of stores and offer to pay to renovate every building to fit my architectural fancy. Remake entire neighborhoods and boroughs into little architectural theme parks. Remake the city to a piece of art that fits my taste.
Does anyone see any practical obstacles to this plan? The main one is that I think I'd need to be a billionaire several times over to make it work.
Good looking buildings might take more maintenance, so you'd need to set aside some money for that. Other than that, I don't see a bad problem.
You might get over-fitting to what you seem to like, so you may need a way to shake things up a little.
Yeah, you have to be super rich depending on what kind of buildings you're looking to construct.
One Bennet Park in Chicago, recently constructed skyscraper, was supposed to cost $400 million. If you want to make a bunch of skyscrapers, you're going to front up a lot of money.
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20161201/CRED03/161139968/related-midwest-secures-240-million-loan-for-one-bennett-park-in-streeterville
What you could do is pick a suburb you like near a transit area, demolish the transit center, and rebuild the homes and a small downtown area according to your liking (say, all Crafstman Bungalows with a high-density downtown area). You can sell at a loss and have a neighborhood to your liking. If I had literally a billion dollars of liquid wealth, I could definitely imagine dropping $500 million building my own personal community.
However, if the local school system sucks...you're still not going to convince me to move there. At least in Illinois,high school districts are servicing communities of tens or hundreds of thousands, which dramatically raises the costs.
The schools here may not be great....but they look amazing!
Re: cost disease, I saw an interesting but unverified comment on reddit by user "Lortekonto" (https://www.reddit.com/r/UpliftingNews/comments/l5vv6m/billionaire_mark_cuban_just_launched_a_drug/gkx4imk/ ). As I understand it, they translate a letter by a CEO of Novo Nordisk which claims that a practice called "bulk companies" is partly responsible for inflated drug prizes (i.e. when a drug supposedly costs 4000$ but your insurance only pays a fraction for it).
See the comment for the full argument, but roughly, there used to be a legitimate service model of a "bulk company" hired by company A to negotiate discounts on product B by buying in bulk, and these bulk companies got a fraction of the discount as profit.
And so:
> So let us say that Novo-nordic sells a drug for $30. The bulkcompany comes in and say that they can get it cheaper but want 20% of the discount. Over the next decade they demand a greater and greater discount, the manufacture agrees to the discount, but raises the listed price. The listed price of the drug is now $300, but the bulkcompany gets a 90% discount, so the pharmacy can still buy the druge for $30 from the manufacture, but the bulkcompany get 20% of the now $270 discount, which is $54. A cost that is then pushed to the consumer.
I don't buy it. Drug makers go through tremendous efforts to develop or otherwise purchase patented medication, and they have the earnings to show it. Negotiations over blockbuster drugs are high-profile and often result in restrictive, exclusive formulary arrangements. You've got me-too drugs, barely innovated drugs, patent thickets, blah blah blah.
This indicates that drug makers have a lot of market power. Even outside patented drugs specifically, insulin is provided by a relatively small number of suppliers, who would also have market power, and probably exercise it.
The market is incredibly opaque which makes it impossible to even determine true prices, let alone true costs. I worked in pharmacy for a while, and I've never seen such an incredibly restrictive environment, and I am not including the HIPPA requirements. I never saw a contract, even when I was in the middle of contract disputes: I just winged it. I had no idea what drugs actually cost. I saw adjudicated drug prices, but even those weren't REAL drug prices, because the actual drug prices were calculated by a DIFFERENT group, and there would typically be extensive negotiations over who actually owed what.
I suspect the people who even thought they knew the "real" drug costs did not actually know the real drug costs, because there would be a separate volume discount adjustment calculated by a separate group. The people actually assembling the P+L, I imagine, would only deal with summary data and would also not be able to determine actual costs. I suspect with all this going on, even the CEO wouldn't know what a drug actually cost and what it actually earned in revenue and what the actual margin was, outside of a few key drugs.
My access to data was substantially limited as well with Business Intelligence queries defaulted to only gather a certain amount of information at any single time.
To me this seems like a lot of rent-seeking by powerful interest in a relationship-driven market, and if you don't have a lot of the existing relationships, you don't even table stakes. Bezos and Buffet couldn't compete in this market space, so this to make suggests a heavily manipulated market.
I might also just be super cynical, YMMV.
Regarding wholesale companies as a whole getting more powerful, not surprising, but I wouldn't draw analogies from health care or pharmacy (and they aren't the same market) to other markets. They aren't the same.
I have a question about options and short squeezes. Why don't options have an alternative satisfaction to limit potential losses.
Why does the short contract require that the shorter return the stock as the only option? Why not have the shorter able to either return the stock or thrice the current market value (or some other number)? This would limit potential losses, and protect the person loaning stock to some degree.
This would provide some insurance. It would also come up so rarely that it would have miniscule changes in the price of short contracts..
If someone wants to limit their losses, they usually just hedge their position by buying options that will have the same effect. e.g. they could buy an option to purchase the stock at a later date for 3x the current price. The option would be relatively cheap since it's relatively unlikely, so it's effectively what you are describing.
Nice to see that neither the Swiss nor Irish police have anything pressing occupying their time these days 😀
First the Zuger Polizei did this dance challenge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92WKbtocEA0
Then, in response to another tweet, they challenged https://twitter.com/fedpolCH/status/1350072210833207296
the Garda Síochána who stepped up to them https://twitter.com/gardainfo/status/1356554527806259200
And the Swiss were gracious in appreciation https://twitter.com/fedpolCH/status/1356876411181621248
Maybe we all need something silly and harmless for these times!
Among the several things I enjoy are when people do a good rant about something or someone who is WRONG. And here is a great one, from a blog I've newly discovered - the Renaissance Mathematicus. It covers a couple of my favourites: history, religion (Catholicism) and tearing the paper off the wall to fit in all the ways this hapless individual is getting it wrong 😁
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2021/02/03/review-of-a-book-i-have-not-read-and-have-absolutely-no-intention-of-wasting-money-on/
First, we have the name of the poor wretch what wrote the book: one Professor Timon Screech. And you thought Charles Dickens was extravagant with his naming schemes! The gentleman in question is a Brummie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brummagem) so that makes it even more delicious. Contemplating whether he is addressed formally as "Professor Screech" or informally as "Timon" by those who must interact with him is a tiny moment of joy.
Secondly, he is an art professor at SOAS (which for those of you like myself who had no idea what this acronym means, is the School of Oriental and African Studies, the older name by which I *had* heard of it) at the University of London. He specialises in Japanese art and culture of the Early Modern Period, which covers roughly the period from the beginning of the 16th century to the early 19th century. He may indeed be the divil an' all when it comes to Japanese art, but when it comes to science and history...
And that leads us on, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, to our third point: the matter in hand, the book what he wrote, " The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art and Money in the English Quest for Japan, 1600–1625" and the said Renaissance Mathematicus' review of it.
Which is not very gruntled, let me tell you. I urge you to go and read it for yourself, preferably with the beverage and nibbles of your choice, to savour the entire thing. It's always a pleasantly ecumenical experience to read an atheist hauling someone over the coals for getting it WRONG about Catholics/Catholicism, especially when it involves our old pal Galileo. If you need some coaxing to read this, let me whet your appetite:
"I have looked at the phrase, as telescopes became a central battleground between Rome and the Protestant churches numerous times, from various standpoints and different angles and all that occurs to me is, what the fuck is that supposed to mean? It is simply put baloney, balderdash, poppycock, gibberish, hogwash, drivel, palaver, mumbo jumbo, rubbish, or even more simply, total and utter crap! I’m not even going to waste time, space and effort in trying to analyse and refute it, it doesn’t deserve it. Somebody please flush it down the toilet into the sewers, where it belongs."
Now, I'm not recommending this on polemical grounds, though it is a happy accident. Rather I wish to share the enjoyment of real history/science going up against pop-culture history/science. Good luck to all!
Refreshing! Thanks!
Conspiracy to save the election integrity.
Tl;dr: it was not trivial that USA survived 2020 election without a disaster.
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
"save the election integrity."
Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
Re: 2 -- a place to figure that out is Afghanistan (tragically)
Now I see what the fuss is about.
Dumb people who think they are smarter than everyone else can refute well researched ideas easily with comments such as "it's all bullshit" and then go on posting wacko ideas on "how it really works" misunderstanding just about everything they just read and feel like they're smarter than everyone else.
Moving on.